Trump has lost his fuckin' mind and we're in hell
At least everyone's trying to tax the rich
Welcome to a Sunday edition of Progress Report.
Happy Easter and Passover to all who celebrate. Tonight’s newsletter will be a bit tighter, part of my effort to produce more frequent and slightly shorter newsletters to get the news to you more quickly.
Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.
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Last week, I received an email from a political comms firm with the news that George Allen, a former governor and senator from Virginia, was challenging current Gov. Abigail Spanberger to a debate over the redistricting amendment currently on the ballot. I ignored the email because challenging people to a debate is annoying and George Allen is irrelevant, now two full decades removed from exiting the Senate.
Back in 2006, Allen’s re-election to the Senate seemed inevitable, just a formality before he launched a highly anticipated presidential campaign. But it all fell apart for Allen that summer, when he was caught on camera calling a tracker for his Democratic opponent Jim Webb “macaca” during a routine event. The term, it turned out, is an obscure old racial slur, and when the video surfaced, it created a firestorm that ultimately played a big role in his stunning loss. A comeback attempt in 2012 was spent mostly trying to convince people that he was tolerant of racial and religious diversity — a proto-woke — and he got smoked by six points by Tim Kaine.
So while Allen is fully irrelevant, I do think about his downfall quite often these days, as a point of comparison to measure the degradation of politics and accountability. Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s largely lame to complain about the lack of civility in today’s discourse, and almost useless to wring one’s hands over most of Donald Trump’s obscene lunatic rants. I’m actually all for trash talk in politics. Yet it’s still hard to reckon with the fact that there are zero consequences when the president explicitly threatens to commit mass war crimes on civilians and mocks a global religion, as Trump did on Sunday.
It’d be easy to shrug this kind of thing off as all in a day’s work for the president, and matter-of-fact media reports don’t come close to capturing the magnitude of the situation. But in any sane world, the grammatical ineptitude of writing “reign down” instead “rain down,” as Trump did on Saturday, would be enough to draw mockery and questions about the president’s mental competence. So would the fact that he actually posted the word “Fuckin’,” and not just because it’s incredibly lame, pseudo-tough guy stuff to include the apostrophe at the end. But in our nightmare dimension, the president has what is essentially impunity to threaten and carry out war crimes.
It’s the same tired routine: liberals and foreign policy experts are horrified, conservatives are silent, and we have to continue financing an illegal war being prosecuted by a madman at the expense of what remains of the American social contract.
GOP Exits
Like rats fleeing a sinking ship, Republican elected officials are scurrying away from re-election campaigns.
The pace of retirements on Capitol Hill has been relentless: so far, 36 members of the House and seven senators have decided to call it quits. And at the state level, there have already been 14 Republican leaders who have retired, including the two top legislators in Wisconsin. North Carolina Republicans lost Senate Pro Tempore Phil Berger in a massive primary upset, their second GOP leader to make their exit in the last year, while Iowa’s Senate Majority Leader is also retiring (though he’s dealing with health issues and I wish him all the best).
Last month, when I launched FlipSeats.org (which is being regularly updated and will grow in scope soon!), the goal was to highlight the most important races in the legislatures that could realistically either flip from red to blue or see Democrats break a GOP supermajority. Not all of the leaders represent flippable seats, but many of their exits are notable in that they clearly telegraph the belief that they would be losing their power come November.
Progressive ballot initiatives
Unions are leading the way in the fight to close the vast inequality gap in California.
The 5% net worth tax on the state’s 200 billionaires, slated for the ballot in November, has gotten most of the attention; that initiative, backed by California’s biggest healthcare workers union, has drawn the ire and bottomless spending of big tech barons, along with countless headlines as the avatar of big electoral class war. The attention is warranted: a groundbreaking proposal, it would represent a new horizon in how America deals with outsized wealth. But there are several other initiatives, each sponsored by unions, that would also make history.
The Healthcare Executive Compensation Act, also sponsored by SEIU-UHW, the healthcare union, would limit the pay of executives at medical groups and privately run hospitals to $450,000 per year (pegged to the President’s salary). It’s a pay package that would still put recipients in the upper echelon of American earners, yet represent a massive pay cut for many executives: the state’s average hospital CEO pay is $920,000, while many make far more than that. The CEO of the nonprofit Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, for example, took home $5.7 million.
Studies have found no correlation between executive compensation and hospital performance, and the dual pressures of slashed federal funding for healthcare and rising costs make it almost impossible to justify sky-high salaries. Last week, the union delivered than a million petition signatures to qualify it for the ballot, indicating solid support for the initiative.
The third wealth-related tax will be on the ballot in San Francisco this summer, as voters will once again weigh in on an adjustment to the excessive CEO pay tax. The Overpaid CEO Act would increase the tax charge against companies that pay their CEOs more than 100 times more than the median employee.
This being San Francisco, the tax pretty specifically targets tech companies, but because it targets large companies that have operations in San Francisco and not simply those headquartered in the city, the business lobby writ large is spending millions of dollars to stop it. Small businesses are exempt from the tax: to qualify, companies need to have at least 1000 employees and produce $1 billion in revenue. Proponents estimate that it would raise $200 million a year for the city, which currently has a $1 billion budget deficit.
And in Ohio, grassroots activists got the go-ahead on Thursday to start collecting signatures for a proposed ballot initiative that would ban the development of all new large-scale data centers. The campaign is product of a backlash against Gov. Mike DeWine’s courting of these facilities, which have proliferated around the state thanks to generous tax credits. There are now more than 200 data centers in Ohio, fifth most in the country, and they each are financial boons to the energy companies who quite literally own the state government.
It’ll be a challenge for activists to qualify this initiative: with the language approved last week, they have until July 1st to collect at least 413,000 valid signatures. That it’s an all-volunteer operation makes it more difficult, but also guarantees that everyone involved will be pouring themselves into collecting those signatures.
Voting rights: Nearly half of the states have sued the Trump administration over the president’s new whacked out executive order targeting mail-in voting. You can read all about the order, how it would work, and its dubious constitutionality in a feature I published last week.
Redistricting: The Virginia redistricting referendum will be very close, and early vote totals have been stronger for Republican-leaning districts, but a new poll suggests that Virginians narrowly support the temporary new map. If it passes, Democrats will likely win 10 of Virginia’s 11 Congressional seats.
Maine: Gov. Janet Mills pulled out of an upcoming debate with progressive populist oyster farmer Graham Platner on Sunday. Mills is flailing in her attempt to take down the upstart Democratic candidate, who has thus far survived all the bad headlines and a barrage of negative ads to hold a commanding lead against the 78-year-old political stalwart.
The governor has already been pushed left in this race, flipping to support a proposed millionaires’ tax that she previously vetoed. Included in a recent budget passed by a key legislative committee, the proposal would add a 2% surtax to incomes over $1 million for single filers and $1.5 million for married couples. Incredible what competitive primaries can do to establishment politicians.
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