They put themselves in this mess
They put themselves in this mess
Who needs power, anyway?
Welcome to the big Monday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
We have reached a series of inflection points, where a few decisions and conversations could shape the course of the next ten years. Though it feels inevitable in hindsight, things didn’t have to go this way. In tonight’s edition of the newsletter, I’ll discuss the latest developments in our tragicomic crawl toward what will either be toward oblivion or a modestly better future. Then, it’s on to some other important news updates!
But first, thank you to our latest crowd-funding donors: Marie, Jayme, Simone, and Norman!
Joe Manchin went on Fox News yesterday and said he could not support the Build Back Better Act, capping off a week of unprecedented disappointments. Manchin, on TV and then in a longer statement, trotted out the same old discredited talking points about inflation, doubled down on misnomers about the economic impact of public investment, and floated bizarre excuses centered on imagined impending conflicts with Russia and China.
After months of whittling away at the bill to meet his supposed demands, Manchin’s statements dealt a potential death blow to the Democratic Party's entire domestic agenda. At the same time, focusing ire on Manchin alone is like getting angry at a bull for wrecking a china shop and ignoring the person that opened the door to let the beast inside.
Joe Biden and a cadre of disingenuous and self-serving Democratic legislators — with help from a media obsessed with parlor games — spent late October relentlessly pressuring progressives into voting to pass the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, a relatively useless series of corporate giveaways and financial shell games. In exchange, Biden promised that he’d deliver Manchin’s vote on Build Back Better, the social spending bill that contained most of his administration’s priorities, from affordable health care to paid leave to green energy investments. It was already clear then that Manchin did not support any of these things, and once his precious infrastructure scam was passed, he had zero incentive to ever agree on any version of BBB.
The inherent problem Democrats face is that it is not profitable for lawmakers to support the policies that the party purports to support.
Biden won the Democratic nomination largely thanks to a cynical misunderstanding of “electable” drilled into voters’ heads by out-of-touch pundits and consultants over the past three decades. Still, one of his main selling points was his years in the Senate and insistence that he could magically bring peace to a venerable institution that had become a partisan war zone; somehow, Biden would slap some backs and poof, Republicans and Democrats would come together to pass legislation just like the good old days. Today, it became clear that he can’t even sway holdouts in his own party, let alone Republicans.
Biden only left the vice presidency in 2017, but it seems as if his understanding of American politics, public opinion, and power is rooted in the more genteel and conservative 1980s, 1990s, and even some aspects of the Obama administration. Those years might as well be ancient history at this point, as the speed of multimedia news cycles, depths of public outrage, the pervasiveness of corruption, and new rules of engagement have all conspired to fully reconfigure our politics.
A New Normal
The antics of Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, while utterly deplorable from top to bottom, redefined the tactics that even the most powerful politicians can pursue to achieve their desired outcomes.
McConnell twisted arms and used every parliamentary procedure in the book — even rewriting them when required — to block Democratic nominees, install a generation of conservative judges, and cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy to the bone. Trump used social media and a shameless love of the spotlight to whip his base into a frenzy, openly recruited and supported primary challenges, and flew all over the country to bully and cow Republicans. Most of those Republicans openly loathed him in 2016 and even during the early days of his presidency, but they ultimately not only supported his initiatives, they now virtually grovel at his feet.
The relentlessness of Trump’s shamelessness and the outrageousness of his proclamations represented a radical departure from most of two centuries of presidential conduct, and his act was especially jarring after eight years of President Obama’s usual cool detachment. But Trump’s showmanship also whipped up an unparalleled loyalty amongst tens of millions of Americans, and had it not been for the spiral of Covid, he probably would have won re-election.
In seeking to restore “normalcy,” Biden has returned an air of dignity to the White House and alleviated the concern that the president could initiate a nuclear war via Twitter. But in doing so, he has also unilaterally disarmed, surrendering new opportunities to wield power and disappointing the vast majority of Americans who support the policies that were presented as the Democratic agenda.
He came into office with a mess to clean up and certain structure disadvantages — there is no dominant left-wing media ecosystem, for one — but Biden also inherited a rare opportunity to harness a country ready for fundamental change.
The country’s already perverse and pervasive economic inequality has become a flashpoint, with record numbers of workers quitting their jobs and support for strikes and union organizing enjoying mass populist support not seen since the 1940s.
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other cartoonishly evil billionaire titans of industry have spent lavishly — literally taking joyrides into space — as their own workers suffered and tens of millions of Americans had their consolation unemployment benefits stripped away. Millions of workers were called “essential” by their bosses, who forced them into risking their lives in punishing conditions at the height of the pandemic and then tossed them away this year. People are pissed.
Harnessing this energy and using it to pass his agenda should have been an obvious move for a president whose identity is wrapped up in his working-class childhood and supposed connection with blue-collar Americans. And while Biden cut a spot supporting the right to fair union elections in April that was ostensibly aimed at the organizing workers at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, he never named the company, and it took until this month for him to even issue a written statement that shamed corporate villains (in this case, Kellogs’s) for their treatment of striking workers. Here is a taste of how his statement was received; just imagine what the reaction would have been had he ever gone to a single picket line.
Identification with the management class is a party-wide plague. Hardly any Democratic officeholders have visited a picket line this year, despite the fact that support for striking workers is far higher than support for politicians of either party. Outside of Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey and Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (who is running to join Casey in the Senate) and former Iowa Rep. Abby Finkenauer (also a Senate candidate), I can’t name a single Democratic politician in a swing state that has put in sustained time rallying behind these aggrieved workers.
Build Back Blunder
Sen. Bernie Sanders went to Battle Creek, Michigan to back the Kellogg’s workers on Friday and was greeted like a hero in a city that has become a Republican mainstay. But instead of harnessing this energy, Democrats have spent the past six months wrestling over an amorphous set of policies in a pair of bills that have largely remained mysterious to the public at large.
The media undoubtedly deserves blame for focusing on cost and the gossip around politicians’ horse-trading instead of the contents of those bills, but it’s not exactly a surprise that a beltway journalism scene now dominated by dishy, personality-driven newsletters like Axios, Politico, and Punchbowl wouldn’t be all that interested in wonky projections on how the bill might impact health care actuarial tables, the average income of Medicaid recipients, or the national carbon footprint.
All we’ve heard out of Washington over the past few weeks is a relentless chorus of Democratic in-fighting and weekly concessions made to corporate lobbyists and the party’s most cynical and corrupt lawmakers. Biden has not used his bully pulpit to whip up a frenzy around any particular aspect of the bill. He has not rallied the country against the vast corporate interests that have been deploying millions of dollars lobbying and running ads against the bill. Democrats have not framed BBB as a needed corrective against the too-powerful corporations and wealthy donors that have assumed overwhelming control over the lives of 98% of Americans.
Instead, Biden met with the CEOs of Walmart, Kroger, and other exploitative mega-chain retailers for a photo op and assurances that their greed wouldn’t ruin everyone’s Christmas. Conservative and corporate interest groups have stepped into that messaging void, blanketing the airwaves with these kinds of cynical ads:
Instead of embracing their base’s priorities, Democrats have consistently demanded the left shut up and accept a quarter-loaf. We’re stuck experiencing disappointment after disappointment from a White House that refuses to budge on student loans, mocks the very idea of sending people free Covid tests (its insurance-reimbursement scheme is neoliberal Kafka-esque), and won’t come out strong for voting rights.
Manchin and fellow troll Kyrsten Sinema deserve all kinds of blame for the failures of the Democratic Party’s agenda, but they were empowered to act this way by a party leadership that refused to put pressure on them or mount sustained public campaigns that might make it harder to act so cavalierly and corrupt. They coddled Manchin and Sinema to a remarkable degree, hoping that they’d be able to convince them to act like humans behind closed doors.
No one leaked Manchin’s utterly disgraceful and laughably disconnected speculation about poor families using the Child Tax Credit to buy drugs until after he tossed the bill’s body in the river. There are no consequences for their actions; today, Manchin has been on a press tour telling people that he never wanted to vote for the bill anyway and that some White House staffers made him angry in some unspecified way. That’s what happens when you coddle someone; they become even more entitled.
It would probably have been helpful for Democrats to draw attention to the 50 billionaires that have donated to Joe Manchin over the past five years, especially in the current political climate, but that would have endangered other Democrats’ chances of raising money from those same people.
Missing the Moment
This failure isn’t limited to Build Back Better, either. It’s a painful but useful exercise to look at current events and compare how Democrats and allies are handling them to how the right-wing media might approach them.
The world watched Republicans encourage a violent mass uprising at the US Capitol, an event that we now know that some GOP representatives actually helped to coordinate. The long-delayed investigation into that attack has uncovered incontrovertible evidence of top Republican officials working to launch a coup and overturn the presidential election. Biden has barely said a word about any of Trump’s outrageous and dangerous stunts — he actually said he “doesn’t think about the former president” — and outside of some blaring MSNBC chyrons, these many instances of clear treason have gone largely ignored by the Democratic side. Republicans spent years fixating on Benghazi, turning a bungled incident at a Middle Eastern embassy into the most consequential scandal since at least Iran Contra.
In the months that followed the insurrection, it was somehow Republicans that were able to weaponize the 2020 election results. They used false examples of “voter fraud” as a rallying cry to enact historic voter suppression laws in states across the country, while there has been hardly any effort at all from the White House to turn the terrifying attack on democracy into a campaign to secure voting rights and the electoral process.
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, is about to use its ill-gotten conservative majority to overturn Roe v. Wade, which will deny millions of women the ability to get an abortion and undoubtedly cost many, many lives. At the same time, the White House’s compromised Supreme Court study committee just delivered a report that essentially suggested doing nothing at all about the terror to come, just as it was designed to do. If there were ever a time for Democrats to move on expanding the court and taking the majority they deserve, it’s right now. But they just don’t want to use power.
Now it’s time for the performative outrage and promises to continue to find a way to pass bills and overcome filibusters despite the obviousness of their doom. The White House put out a statement and a Chuck Schumer wrote a sternly-worded letter promising action next year — after the Senate takes its three-week vacation. Word is that Manchin and Biden are talking again, but it’s more likely that the pissed off coal miners’ union could nudge him toward accepting a deal.
Most people were not following the BBB negotiations, especially not after they wore on and became something like incredibly dull soap operas. The country will not blame Manchin and Sinema for these failures. There will be no mulligan given to the Democrats because they couldn’t get two assholes on board with their agenda. There has been no obvious attempt to pass this thing; it won’t even be a valiant failure. Instead, it’ll be another two years of broken promises by the Democratic Party.
Ballot Initiatives
State legislatures have wrapped for the year and most of the swamp creatures have cleared out of Washington, but the ballot initiative process never rests. Here are some new updates on some of the most interesting (for better or worse!) policies being pushed by activists for inclusion on the ballot next year.
Los Angeles: Home prices and rents have skyrocketed this year, which, combined with the resumption of mass evictions, has created serious housing crises in cities and suburbs alike. Nowhere is it worse than in California, where homelessness has been endemic for years. Homeless encampments are everywhere in Southern California and all too often, police clear them with the brutality of angry souls who know they can get away with it. The issue will play a big role in LA’s upcoming mayoral election, while a new ballot initiative will seek to alleviate some of the problem by leveraging the area’s massive income inequality.
Organizers say the United to House LA initiative would raise roughly $800 million a year to create 26,000 units of affordable and supportive housing. If passed, the initiative would also establish a new rental assistance program aimed at helping 475,000 people struggling to stay housed.
The money would come from a new 4% fee on real estate sales of properties worth over $5 million, rising to 5.5% on properties sold for $10 million or more.
I would expect this to become a very expensive battle.
Michigan: It’s time for take two on a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage in the Wolverine State. The last time activists tried to do it via ballot initiative, the state’s GOP gerrymander basically doomed them from the start. The Republican legislature used the quirks of Michigan ballot initiative system to enact the skeleton of the proposal only to gut it in committee:
Under the changes, instead of raising the minimum wage to $12 per hour by 2022, wages would not reach that level until 2030. And tipped workers such as bartenders and wait staff, who also were supposed to see a $12-hour wage more gradually, will see their pay rise to only $4 per hour by 2030.
Paid sick time, which was supposed to accrue at a rate of one hour for every 30 hours worked, or 72 hours per year, was cut to one hour for every 40 hours worked, or 36 hours per year.
Litigation is still ongoing over that sabotage, but One Fair Wage, an organization that advocates for service workers being paid sub-minimum wage rates, isn’t content to wait on the court cases. I’ve worked with One Fair Wage on a story over at More Perfect Union (we’re still waiting for Gov. Hochul to sign an executive action to end the sub-minimum wage) and they are very good organizers.
Idaho: A bunch of conservative weirdos in Idaho are trying to expand the state’s border to encompass much of rural, eastern Oregon, where other conservative weirdos are so sick of the libs that they want to run away without having to go anywhere. Making this happen would require a complicated process that includes creating county boards to negotiate with the state government, which in turn require winning local ballot initiatives. The number of counties where activists are seeking to get that question on the ballot continues to grow.
Utah: Just a few years ago, in 2012, Republicans in the Republican-dominated state voted to enact all-mail elections. It increased voter access, especially for the elderly and people living in rural parts of the state. Now that Republicans have to abide by the Big Lie and fuss about election security, however, Ron Paul-type ghouls are trying to qualify a ballot initiative that would end the mail-in voting process and mandate in-person elections. It would also make it more difficult to register to vote.
If passed, it would become much more difficult to register to vote. Currently, the deadline for registering to vote is 11 days before the election, but voters can register to vote on Election Day by casting a provisional ballot at an in-person polling place. The initiative eliminates all of that, imposing a strict deadline to register 30 days prior to an election. If a voter changes their address less than 30 days before an election, they will not be permitted to register to vote at the new address, and they can’t cast a ballot at the previous location.
I always love when they try to enact stricter, “more secure” elections via the supposedly fraud-laden election system as it exists.
Policy and Wonkery
Oregon: State Rep. Lisa Reynolds will introduce a bill that would make Oregon the first state to allow people incarcerated for felonies to vote while serving their sentences. It would re-enfranchise 12,000-15,000 people, a disproportionate number of whom are people of color. Black people make up just 2% of the state’s population but 9% of its prison population.
Florida: Housing prices have gone through the roof in Florida, with figures hitting 30% above what they were at the start of the year. State Rep. Carlos Smith, a friend of this newsletter, is calling on Ron DeSantis to declare a State of Emergency and ask the attorney general to cap rent increases at 10% (which is still a ton!).
A Palm Beach County social services official, who had no official comment the letter, laid out the severity of the situation:
He said his agency has distributed around $48.4 million in assistance over the last eight months, serving around 16,000 households during that time.
“When you look at that compared to previous dollars that we’ve expended for housing assistance, it is just tremendous and it is very well needed based of the number of requests that we’ve seen.
"We’re seeing rent increases upwards to $500 to $1,000 per month for individuals. It is really, really a challenging time out there for a lot of people. People’s wages are just not keeping up with the housing market demands, especially with what some of the property owners are requesting and it is causing a lot of anxiety and turmoil and stress for tenants who are going through this process."
DeSantis immediately rebuffed Smith’s request — he’s too busy trying to create a Texas-style bounty hunter scheme for teachers spreading the dirty gospel of… US history.
Iowa: Republicans in Iowa are mulling eliminating the state’s income tax altogether, something that’s also being discussed by far-right candidates in Georgia and was just about accomplished in Arizona. Never mind that they already slashed taxes and ended the state’s inheritance tax; Iowa Republicans are just impatient to give away the surplus provided by the American Rescue Plan to their richest constituents.
Covid-19
As I mentioned, I’m headed back to New York from Nashville today, re-entering the eye of the new Omicron variant outbreak from a place that continues to help fuel this ceaseless nightmare. Wearing a mask in parts of Nashville feels like walking around in a Hillary Clinton t-shirt and a boom box playing Obama speeches on a loop. The pandemic is now fully enmeshed in our interminable culture wars, and it should never be forgotten that it was Donald Trump that created the divide that has claimed the lives of over 800,000 Americans.
Republican lawmakers continue to sacrifice the lives of their constituents in pursuit of power, with seemingly no limit to the number of people they’re willing to kill to win their ideological battle against government with any power to enforce regulations or help people.
Any semblance of pre-Covid normalcy is quickly slipping away as the unvaccinated continue to get wiped out and breakthrough cases begin to rise exponentially. The virus’s ability to mutate has been perpetuated by ongoing infections, which in turn are driven mainly by pharmaceutical companies refusing to share the vaccine recipe with poor countries and relatively wealthy Americans refusing to vaccinate. It’s almost too on-the-nose.
We’re in the midst of a mass slaughter, a genocide of glib indifference. No one wants to call it a genocide perpetrated by Republicans, the right-wing media, and drug companies, but there’s no other way to honestly describe it.
Between this injustice and the Democratic Party’s near-complete collapse, my goals for Progressives Everywhere this coming year are becoming clear: Make sure everyone knows who is responsible for this ongoing Covid genocide and lift up the grassroots organizations and primary candidates working to build power for the vast majority of disenfranchised Americans. I’ve always focused on elevating progressives and winning progressive policies, and that won’t change, but simply changing who holds power in legislatures and the national government is no longer a satisfying result. We have to change who holds power and how they use it.
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