Workers' big week, far-right freaks, and DeSantis gets dumped

We're in for a populist reckoning one day

Welcome to a Thursday edition of Progress Report.

Well, I won’t sugarcoat things: It’s been heartbreaking and infuriating to watch the conflict in Israel and Gaza descend into an inhuman carnage with no apparent endgame, and as it veers toward a broader regional war, it feels as if the entire world is spinning off its axis while extremists, nihilists, and profiteers grasp for power.

The horrors happening in the Middle East are compounded by the war happening here in the US. Lately, it’s too often felt as if our collective fate is being written by religious extremists and bureaucrats who answer only to billionaires with god complexes. Worse, our leaders are letting it happen: Yet another Clarence Thomas bribery scandal has been unearthed, but Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin remains uninterested in doing his job.

Well, I’m not here to tell you that things are actually great right now, because this newsletter does contain coverage of some truly despicable people with far more power than they deserve. But there’s also a number of positive stories to share tonight, and I’m going to kick off the newsletter with them to bring up the mood a little bit.

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📚 Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s latest attempt to establish a robust school voucher system in the state is not going according to plan.

Once again, Abbott is meeting resistance from the state House, which has long been skeptical of the education savings accounts that have been sweeping through other Republican-run states over the past few years. The program, designed to siphon money from public education to charters and private schools, has met particular resistance from Republicans in rural Texas, where public schools are often a community’s biggest employer and social focal point.

“I think there is still significant opposition to any school finance bill that includes an ESA,” Rep. Drew Darby, R-San Angelo said. “I’m comfortable we have enough like-minded rural Republicans, and urban Republicans, to stand against that in numbers sufficient to defeat it.”

The House sent Abbott a bill last Friday that called for a limited voucher scheme along with major investments in Texas’s public school systems, including much-needed raises for teachers. Abbott isn’t all that interested in boosting the public school budget and wants to condition any boost on a clean vouchers bill. I would not trust the guy!

💪 The UAW reached a tentative agreement on a collective bargaining agreement with Ford, marking the first contract to come out of the union’s unprecedented triple strike of the Big Three automakers.

The contract calls for an 11% raise in the first year and 25% over the life of the four-and-a-half-year deal. Workers will reach top pay within three years, and the lowest-wage employees will wind up with a 150% pay increase. All unit members will also receive a $5K signing bonus upon ratification. The concessions of the 2007 contract that kept the automaker is business have finally been erased.

Under president Shawn Fain, the union originally called for a 40% raise to match the pay bumps handed out to the automakers’ top executives. It was a savvy PR move more than a line in the sand, drawing attention to the exorbitant salaries in the C-Suite and setting a very public expectation of what might be fair. Getting to 25% represented a hard-nosed victory, as Ford was reluctant in the final days to go past 23%.

The workers who went on strike will now head back to work while the union’s national Ford council meets to discuss the deal. If they recommend the agreement, it’ll go to the entire unit for a vote.

🔨 In another huge win for organized labor, the NLRB finalized a revision of its joint-employer rule. The rule now dictates that companies are equally responsible for workers who are only technically employed by a third party.

Employers will fight this tooth and nail, because it could be a real game-changer for organizing, worker safety, and compensation. Amazon, for example, does not technically employ any delivery drivers, but instead subcontracts all of the work out to smaller companies. FedEx ground does the exact same thing. This has made their drivers essentially impossible to organize, and it was only in anticipation of this rule change that the Teamsters started to organize Amazon drivers.

The change will also make a huge difference for workers at fast food franchisees, who have also been unable to organize or hold the parent company responsible for labor violations or miserable conditions.

🗺️ A federal judge threw out Georgia’s Congressional and state legislative maps on Thursday, ruling that they represented illegal racial gerrymanders. Judge Steve C. Jones ordered the state to draw and submit new maps with additional Black-majority districts by December 8th.

The order calls for a new Black-majority Congressional district in the metro-Atlanta area, which could result in Democrats retaking the seat they lost in the 2022 election. The legislature must also create four new Black-majority districts in the state Assembly and two such districts in the state Senate. Gov. Brian Kemp has already called a special session to begin the process.

👺 Republicans’ new Speaker of the House is an actual agent of hate. Nearly the entire GOP caucus has become a cesspool of bigotry, corruption, and anti-democratic, and it’s Johnson’s work that has helped pave the way for the sewage (and insurrectionists) to take over Congress.

Johnson spent nearly a decade working as a lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christofascist legal organization that I have covered here multiple times. This summer I produced a piece on the Koch-funded hate group’s attacks on public education, which are making their way to a Supreme Court filled with ADF allies, including Amy Coney-Barrett, who has given five paid speeches at ADF events.

Their goal is to eradicate public education as we know it by making school vouchers legal nationwide and forcing the state to pay for religious private schools. More on that later in the newsletter.

Much of Johnson’s work at both the ADF and in elected office has focused on discriminating against LGBTQ+ people. At the ADF, he wrote newspaper editorials that called same-sex marriage “inherently unnatural” and “selfish”; wrote in support of a ban on sodomy, saying that gay men were not a protected class because they are “capable of changing their abnormal lifestyles”; led a campaign to encourage kids to express homophobia in schools; sued to strike the clause in Obamacare that required insurers to cover contraceptives; and even fought for the rights of bigots to display their hatred on their license plates.

His time in the state House was short but equally disgraceful, highlighted by his pushing of a bill to allow people to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people without any possible repercussions from the state. Here’s a video from his campaign to pass that law:

A Supreme Court decision earlier this year essentially codified his proposed law into a national standard, which should help explain just how deeply embedded Johnson is with the far-right Christian nationalist cabal that has seized control of much of the country. As Speaker, he will be able to promote bills that carry the Christofascist agenda, putting them in the spotlight and mainstreaming them so that the next GOP trifecta can get push them into law.

Johnson also led the legal fight to overturn the 2020 election, which further suggests that while he may be less blustery than Jim Jordan, he’s much more of a snake, and a serious concern ahead of the 2024 election. Though, given the way that President Biden is polling, maybe this one concern will be proven immaterial.

👺 On the subject of the Alliance Defending Freedom and the destruction of public education, there’s been an interesting twist in the fight over Oklahoma’s attempt to establish the first publicly-funded religious charter school.

Attorney General Gentner Drummond petitioned the Oklahoma Supreme Court to block a state contract with the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, which agreed this week to sponsor St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Charter School. Drummond had already decided that he would not provide resources to defend the school in court, and in his petition told the court that it was unconstitutional for the state to directly fund religious education.

He also said doing so would defy the will of the people of Oklahoma, who voted down a 2016 ballot amendment that would have allowed public funds for religious education.

St. Isadore is being represented in various lawsuits by none other than the Alliance Defending Freedom, which sees this case as a vehicle for its ultimate endgame: a Supreme Court ruling that finds secular-only public education is unconstitutional because it discriminates against religious people. Such a ruling would pave the way for direct public funding of religious education across the country.

👺 Florida state Rep. Randy Fine rescinded his endorsement of Ron DeSantis and handed it to Donald Trump yesterday. Fine, one of the more obnoxious people in the Sunbelt, pulled the switcheroo in an epic online posting spree that included a Twitter thread, an op-ed in the Washington Times, interviews with newspapers, and then another Twitter thread in response to the haters, a group that now includes DeSantis himself.

Normally, I wouldn’t care much about a soap opera starring the three gassiest egomaniacs in Florida, and this is a special case. Fine, the one Jewish person in the Florida House of Representatives, pulled his endorsement of DeSantis due to the petulant governor’s refusal to properly condemn antisemitism and the Nazis that have been marching through Florida over the past few years.

Fine had plenty of ammunition to back his claims, much of which can be found on the website NazisForDeSantis.net. I’ve mentioned it before, but that’s a website I set up a year ago and have been updating every time a bunch of Nazis goose-step outside Disney World or project swastikas on buildings (I actually have to add another update, they happen too frequently these days).

Some friends and I have made sure to spread the word about the site and got it in front of Fine’s eyes whenever he tweeted about DeSantis or Israel, ensuring that he didn’t miss a single incident.

You can’t oversell how shocking it is that Fine broke with DeSantis, especially over this issue at this point in time. Fine has been DeSantis’s errand boy for years now — he sponsored the Don’t Say Gay law and Stop WOKE Act — and unbelievably offensive in his own right; to listen to him speak during a hearing is to be jealous of the deaf.

Fine this week called for mass expulsion for college students that have protested Israel while managing to make the Hamas terrorist attacks about his own pain. He’s obsessively dehumanized Palestinians in some of the most nakedly racist language I’ve heard since the Hamas attacks, and just in case you weren’t sure whether he doesn’t fully grasp his hypocrisy, he compared gender-affirming care to the wicked experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi butcher-scientist.

He’s also an idiot for thinking Trump cares one bit about Jewish people — this is the “very fine people on both sides” president who is worshipped by skinheads and recently called Hezbollah “very smart,” after all.

And yet, Fine has injected DeSantis’s disgraceful record on Nazism into the public eye, with coverage national newspapers such as the Washington Post over the past couple of days. That’s exactly what we hoped to accomplish with the Nazis For DeSantis website, and while the fact that this lumpen bigot helped our message dominate political discourse is pretty damning of the media. Fine’s endorsement of Trump is utterly meaningless, while it absolutely spoils DeSantis’s cloying attempts at seeming heroic after the Hamas attacks and hangs the Nazi question around his neck for the foreseeable future.

This is the sort of difference we can make with creativity, a bit of obsessiveness, and a willingness to juggle four or five projects at once. Nothing we do at Progress Report is aimed at short-term results, and so the fact that this work exactly as planned just fuels the dedication to find ways around the dense insider media to leave a mark.

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