Where the fights are happening
And how we can support them
Welcome to a Sunday edition of Progress Report.
Liverpool is now six points — or two wins — away from winning the Premier League title. I promise you that this is a very big deal, and as I work to integrate more cultural coverage into this newsletter, it’s the sort of thing you’ll hear about from time to time.
But tonight, we’re talking about a very different kind of coverage expansion, and one that will be far richer if you get involved. I dream of making Progress Report less of a one-way flow of information than a platform for progressive grassroots, and this is going to be part of it. Time is of the essence.
Oh, and after that, we’ll also look at some important news stories from around the country. That’s always going to be at the core of this project.
Note: Unlike many progressive advocacy journalists, I’ve gone fully independent, with no special advertising deals or close relationships with powerful politicians to temper what I write. My only loyalty is to you, the reader, and to the cause of progress — economic justice, democracy, human rights, and standing up to oligarchs.
A new study revealed that right-wing influencers dominate the online media space, so it’s never been more imperative to create an alternative progressive media network that can compete with the massive amounts of misinformation flowing every single day. You can help keep Progress Report afloat and build that network for just $5 a month — every subscription helps!
Elevating the grassroots campaigns
I spent a lot of time during the spring of 2020 wandering around a haunted Manhattan. Streets were devoid of cars beyond wailing ambulances and groaning delivery trucks. People hurried out of grocery stores, past police who were as defenseless as the rest of us. Things were grim.
Friends who worked in hospitals posted selfies with garbage bags over their scrubs, braving the unknown to care for the elderly neighbors we’d never see again. Nearly 20,000 New Yorkers died from March through May. We lived in a war zone with an invisible enemy; morgue trucks in Central Park confirmed the toll.
Yet elsewhere in the country, conspiracy theories were taking root, selling the idea that the pandemic was a hoax, a mild flu exaggerated to control us. Stoked by right-wing sociopaths and opportunists, the lies spread almost as rapidly as the virus itself.
If you weren’t in New York, maybe it was easier to blame it on a conspiracy. The US has always been a confederation of regions, cities with their own centers of gravity ringed by metro areas and rural counties that receive little attention. Empathy requires awareness, and the fracturing of the media makes it impossible to keep up.
I began to think that the country is just too big, and the incentives for perversion too strong, for cohesive solidarity or a national politics shaped by reality. People wouldn’t believe that Covid was real because there weren’t people dropping like flies on their own block, just as they refused to believe police committed disproportionate violence against people of color because it wasn’t happening before their very eyes. Others simply didn’t trust the national media to tell them the truth, so they’d ignore the evidence laid out for them.
It’s only gotten worse over the past five years. The far-right, exploiting economic decline and attendant public malaise, has used both its media apparatus and social media platforms to flood national conversation with wave after wave of panic and cheap bullshit, drowning out the real stories that are happening on the ground in communities across the country.
Complaining that the media misses the mark or criticizing publications for missing the forest for the trees can provide some satisfaction— I’ve done it plenty! — but the catharsis is only temporarily, and after more nearly a decade and a half of working in this industry, I can tell you that newsrooms don’t suddenly change their process or priorities in response to liberal outcry.
What’s more important is to focus on the fact that there are uprisings happening around the country. There are people protesting, fighting powerful corporate and political interests on behalf of their communities, their co-workers, their families, and themselves. It’s happening in big cities and small towns, fighting landlords and state legislatures. These fights are too often happening in isolation, and the rich and powerful win by dividing and conquering.
This newsletter has always sought to highlight and uplift some of those stories, but now it’s time to double and triple down. But the only way this is going to work is if we do it together. I cover a lot of territory, but it’s a drop in the bucket in the scheme of things. We need platforms and communities, not one-way outlets.
So going forward, I want to hear from you. Tell me what’s happening in your communities. Are people fighting for clean water in small towns (read this great piece about one such instance)? Parents trying to save their schools from lunatics? Tenants organizing against bad corporate real estate companies or slumlords? Are workers on strike against an exploitative employer? Is there a push to pass crucial legislation somewhere? Stop bad legislation?
Let me know. Let us know.
I’m opening up our chat threads for your submissions. Start a new thread or respond to a prompt. Send a local news story or just tell me us what you know. I’m going to use the live stream and print newsletter to highlight these fights, and we’re going to funnel attention and support to the people in the grassroots.
In essence, I’m trying to create a platform and foster a big, powerful community that can make a real difference to people. It’s going to give me more work to do — far more work — but we can do it together.
Here are some fights — ongoing and new ones — worth our attention right now
Pennsylvania: One of the nation’s largest public transit services is facing “doomsday” cuts that could cripple Philadelphia and its suburbs in three states.
SEPTA has proposed an austere new budget that could hike prices by up to 20% and cut its service by 45%, including all transportation in and out of Delaware. The regional bus, train, and light rail authority, is funded by a mix of federal, state, and local dollars, and while the feds bailed it out of a major shortfall last year, the Trump administration is not going to be nearly as forthcoming with money.
Philadelphia lawmakers, commuters, public transit advocates, and workers rallied on Friday in protest of the proposed cuts, while Gov. Josh Shapiro tried to cajole Republicans in the state Senate to step up with funding. The GOP runs the upper chamber and has sworn to protect taxpayers, even if it means cutting off transit to tens of thousands of them every single day.
Utah: The state’s labor movement is all-in on the effort to qualify the ballot initiative to overturn the new ban on public sector collective bargaining. Last week, Progress Report highlighted the drive to collect the huge number of signatures required to overcome Utah’s ridiculously onerous requirements — see below — and the first phase is almost complete.
The Protect Utah Workers coalition plans on collecting signatures through Tuesday. Organizers tell me that they’re confident that they’ll have more than enough to both surpass the 140,000 valid signature threshold and reach the required number in each district. Then it’s on to the 45-day challenge period, during which opponents — ie Americans for Prosperity — will spend ungodly sums to challenge as many as they can and try to convince voters to retract their signatures.
An organizer sent me this:
We need volunteers tomorrow and Tuesday to help sort all the packets for turning them in to the clerks, which we have to do by Wednesday.
You can sign up at the website or just show up at UEA headquarters between 8am and 7pm: 887 E Pontiac Dr. in Murray, Utah.
Colorado: The pressure continues to build on Democratic Gov. Jared Polis to act like a Democrat and finally embrace — or at least not handicap — organized labor.
Former FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, who was just illegally fired by Donald Trump, has been agitating for Polis to agree to sign the Worker Protection Act, which would repeal the state’s absurd quasi-“right to work” law after 82 years of suppressing union density. Bedoya testified to the Colorado legislature and sent around the below video, which I produced and released on Friday:
There are three weeks left in the legislative session, which means that Democrats have maybe two weeks to get this thing introduced and passed. The fight is not over.
Housing: The fights happening over new construction in small-to-midsized cities in blue states aren’t always so simple as NIMBY vs. YIMBY, but you’ll generally find the same objections to increased housing density and individual developments, no matter how unique communities may perceive their character. It’s happening right now in Duluth, MN, where more than a thousand locals are fighting the construction of 30 condos, and the suburbs of Denver, where residents are organizing serious political opposition to state density requirements.
A genuinely unique fight is happening in Maui, where the mayor is campaigning to turn some vacation rental units into residential condos. It would create 6,000 units of housing for locals, but the tourism industry is doing its best to prevent what it says would be a major hit to the island’s top industry.
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Thank you JZ. You do great service for your fellow countrymen. We are in a crisis. There is no doubt of that. Now, we all must respond. Time to get to work!
Thanks for all you do, Jordan.