A teacher is taking on an ICE lobbyist in a race for the future
And on that labor shortage...
Welcome to the big Sunday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
In today’s edition of the newsletter, we have:
An interview with the first candidate we’ve endorsed this year;
A bit of news;
Thoughts on the “labor shortage” employers are facing.
Happy Mother’s Day!
And now, thank you to our latest crowdfunding donors: Matthew and Sandy!
If we’ve learned one political lesson thus far in 2021, it’s that while a government controlled by Democrats is infinitely safer than any version of Republican governance, simply having a Democratic majority only gets us so far. Instead, as the Senate’s excruciating gridlock has made clear, if we want to realize any significant and lasting progress in this country, we need to elect progressive Democrats who proactively pursue those policies.
Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have earned a lion’s share of activists’ grief for their obstinate refusal to budge on the filibuster and the infuriatingly bad faith arguments they use to justify their inaction. And yet, they aren’t the only Democrats presenting obstacles to essential legislation. For example, Manchin has actually signed on as a co-sponsor of organized labor’s number one priority, the PRO Act. That leaves three Democratic holdouts: Sinema, fellow Arizonan Mark Kelly, and Virginia’s Mark Warner.
Considering Virginia’s rapid shift left over the last decade, Warner’s hesitancy has been met with considerable pushback from both labor and the activist community. Last weekend, waves of May Day demonstrators protested at Warner’s Alexandria mansion, waving signs and beseeching the richest man in Congress to sign on to the most substantial pro-union bill in half a century. It was during those protests that I noticed several Twitter posts by Karishma Mehta, an activist who seemed to be at the center of the protests.
It turns out that Mehta is running for the Virginia House of Delegates (the state’s version of the House of Representatives), but her presence at the protest was no obligatory campaign drop-in. A 29-year-old Pre-K teacher who lives in South Arlington, Mehta has been an activist and community organizer for the last half-decade, galvanized by the struggles she’s fought through in her own life and the inequities that have plagued her classrooms. The daughter of working-class immigrant parents, Mehta grew up between Pittsburgh and Tennessee before moving to Washington, DC to attend George Washington University.
“I struggled a lot through college with food insecurity and not being able to pay my tuition and get the classes that I needed,” Mehta told me. “My university withheld my diploma, so I was working low-wage jobs just to get my diploma and become a teacher.”
It took an additional four years for Mehta to pay off what she owed the school and actually be awarded her diploma, which didn’t even factor in federal student loans. And when she was finally able to run a classroom of her own, Mehta discovered the extent of the inequality that plagued Arlington and Northern Virginia more generally; a region best known for being home to the Pentagon, gleaming office parks, and expensive houses belonging to members of Congress and high-powered lobbyists also has huge pockets of low-income residents.
Extreme wealth lives side by side with pervasive poverty in the region, sometimes with just a block or two in between them. In some neighborhoods, like Bailey’s Crossroads in Fairfax County, more than half of residents are uninsured and many spend more than half of their incomes on rent. The ongoing development is making the district increasingly unlivable for poor residents, including many memes of the Hispanic and Asian communities.
“As a teacher, I was funding my own classroom supplies and making sure the kids had food if they were hungry,” she said. “I do everything I can in the classroom to provide for them, working with the families and really make it a community. But there's only so much a teacher can do within the classroom.”
District 49 is represented in the House of Delegates by Alfonso Lopez, who also serves as the Democratic caucus’s majority whip. His voting record isn’t horrible, but roll call only tells a small part of the story. Because serving in the Virginia legislature is a part-time job, Lopez works the rest of the year as a registered lobbyist, a career that has seen him work on behalf of interests that are hardly in line with the interests of his working and middle-class constituents.
For much of the past decade, Lopez worked for firms that dealt directly with ICE, helping to win them deals to perform work that played central roles in the agency’s persecution and detainment of immigrant families. His financial disclosure forms show at least three years of working for Immigration Centers of America, which owns and operates a large ICE detention center in Virginia.
It took extreme pressure from the district’s Hispanic and activist communities for Lopez to give up those contracts; he largely got away with lobbying on behalf of Maximus Inc., one of the largest middle-man administrators of privatized social safety net programs. Maximus sucks up hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money to develop maze-like bureaucracies in order to deny the working poor the minimal benefits they were promised.
In 2019, Lopez joined a lobbying firm called Becker & Poliakoff, where he currently works. On Lopez’s LinkedIn page, he notes that Becker & Poliakoff’s DC office “provides clients with specialized, discreet and proactive lobbying, corporate advocacy and outreach, and interstate/regional organization advocacy.” His latest client is the Port Authority of Virginia, which has extensive land use and tax interests.
For Mehta, learning about Lopez’s business interests proved transformative. If you’re spending 11/12ths of your time being paid by and advocating for corporations that steamroll your constituents, it hardly matters that you’re voting with the Democratic caucus during the legislature’s 30-day session. The combination of Lopez’s conflicts of interests and his failure to fight hard for progressive policies were enough to vault Mehta into the primary race.
Lopez dispatched a primary opponent in 2019, but Mehta has been running a strong campaign, backed by progressive groups like the Sunrise Movement. And with Amazon now building its HQ2 in Arlington, having a corporate lobbyist representing the district is even less ideal.
“For generations, they've been pushing black and brown and working-class people farther and farther away from our community, and this is not just working people with homes, it's also small businesses that can't afford to be here anymore,” Mehta says. “So he's taking thousands of dollars from ICE, from real estate developers, from the health insurance industry, when my students and even myself, we can't go to the doctor during a pandemic because we don't have insurance or we're under-insured.”
Mehta imagines a state government that repeals old laws like “right to work” and provides useful programs to its residents, such as universal childcare and community health centers. Her experience as a teacher also factors heavily into her policy platform, including rebuilding crumbling school infrastructure with green technology, providing school lunches, and enacting universal Pre-K.
Taken together, Mehta’s focus is clearly on working families and their children in particular. As a teacher, she’ll be spending her entire year in the community, assessing its needs and finding solutions to problems that most lawmakers hardly know exist. If a general election pitted a Democratic teacher who doesn’t take corporate donations against a Republican lobbyist, it would be emblematic of the parties’ contrasting values. That this race is a Democratic primary should make the right choice no less obvious, especially because it’s as safe a blue seat as possible.
The Virginia Democratic primary is on June 8th.
Reminder: I cover lots more news, keep up on these stories, and publish interviews throughout the week in the issues sent out to premium members!
Voting Rights
Texas: After a point of order nearly killed their voter suppression mega-bill at one point during a loooong floor debate that stretched from 5 pm Thursday evening to about 4 am on Friday morning, House Republicans, worn down by external opposition and a mountain of Democratic amendments, agreed to a fair number of changes that made the bill a bit less racist and repressive.
Some of the harshest provisions imported from the State Senate’s voter suppression bill have were excised, including a ban on drive-thru voting and restrictive early voting hours. They also nixed a very racist reapportionment of polling places. Here are some other changes, via Texas Tribune:
Republicans amended the bill in the early hours of Friday to nix a provision that would’ve required people assisting voters to disclose the reason a voter might need help — even if for medical reasons. That measure raised concerns among advocates for people with disabilities that it could violate the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. Lawmakers also amended the bill to slim down provisions that broadly enhanced protections for partisan poll watchers and provisions that boosted penalties for voting-related offenses.
It’s not exactly a win, especially in a state that already had such repressive voting laws, but it also represents a solid effort at damage control by the Democratic caucus. Whether the hours they put into fighting for those changes will ultimately matter is still up in the air, however, as the conference committee negotiating the changes between the House and Senate versions of the bill could just add the worst provisions right back in before final passage.
Florida: Clown shoes Gov. Ron DeSantis, a man who is so odious that even his own staff members formed a support group to cope with the experience of having been in his presence, signed a new voter suppression bill into law last week. Only cameras from Fox News were allowed at the signing ceremony, which took place in a public building, because DeSantis is working hard to be the noxious hard-right candidate in 2024 should Trump not run again.
The bill made it through the GOP-dominated legislature largely intact, with provisions that will make it harder to vote by mail and reduce access to drop boxes for minority communities, among others.
Republicans with brains fear that the attack on mail-in voting could also hurt the GOP in the state given the political leanings of Florida’s gigantic senior citizen population.
Pennsylvania: Republicans are trying to push harsh new voter ID rules in Pennsylvania, but Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf shut that down right out of the gate. To say Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial election next year is going to be expensive and bruising is very much an understatement.
Ballot Initiatives
Florida: Not content to just gut individual ballot initiatives, Republicans are now aiming to end the process altogether. The aforementioned sleaze king of Florida also signed into law that limits individual donations to ballot initiative campaigns to just $3,000, a number that pales in comparison to the limit placed on politicians’ political action committees, which can accept unlimited cash.
Even as they increasingly vote Republican over the last half-decade, Floridians have eagerly approved a medical marijuana program (2016), the re-enfranchisement of 1.4 million formerly incarcerated citizens (2018), and a $15 minimum wage (2020). The GOP legislature would later place severe limits on marijuana and all but render the re-enfranchisement initiative all but useless.
This is the second major blow to Florida progressives focused on direct democracy. John Morgan, an Orlando area lawyer who has bankrolled a number of successful progressive ballot initiatives over the past half-decade, announced in November that he was closing up the vault.
Workers’ Rights
National: After a year spent risking their lives on the frontlines as most of us sat at home in quarantine, nurses across the country are rising up and demanding better pay, protection, and protocols to guarantee patient safety.
Nearly 2000 nurses at New England’s biggest hospital system just ran a successful union drive despite a dirty and desperate attempt by their employers to scare them away from organizers, while nurses at St. Vincent’s hospital in Wooster, Massachusetts are about to enter their tenth week on strike after failing to come to terms with Tenet, one of the biggest hospital corporations in the country. Those are just the tip of the iceberg, too. Remarkable that corporate hospital owners are unwilling to meet their demands after last year.
Lazy journalism: There is a growing narrative that there is a mass labor shortage in the country and that the slightly expanded unemployment benefits provided by the American Rescue Plan are to blame.
New stories that repeat this trope are being published every day, each of them featuring frustrated business owners and spokespeople for local chambers of commerce moaning about how hard it’s been to lure people back to the low-pay jobs that tossed them overboard last year. What almost none of these stories offer, however, is a single quote from an actual worker. Every single journalist is simply taking business owners and their lobbyists at their word, resulting in bad-faith psychoanalysis to stand in for the voices of the workers who should be at the center of the story.
Unsurprisingly, the data makes it clear that the labor shortage is a bogus trope based on anecdotes and narratives pushed by interest groups. Top government officials say so, too. But because it’s been allowed to fester and take root in the national conversation, it has provided Republican lawmakers to begin to strip their constituents of the unemployment benefits provided to them by the federal government. Montana was the first state to pull the plug and earlier this evening, South Carolina announced that it was taking the benefits away from people.
In fact, after the Department of Labor released much weaker than expected jobs numbers on Friday, the national Chamber of Commerce turned the whisper campaign into a screaming hissyfit, demanding that all Americans be stripped of the $300/week bonus people are receiving right now.
“The disappointing jobs report makes it clear that paying people not to work is dampening what should be a stronger jobs market,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said in the hours after the Labor Department released its April 2021 employment report.
“One step policymakers should take now is ending the $300 weekly supplemental unemployment benefit,” the lobbying group added. “Based on the Chamber’s analysis, the $300 benefit results in approximately one in four recipients taking home more in unemployment than they earned working.”
First, that is not at all a flattering statistic! They’re not doing themselves any favors by outwardly admitting they pay people poverty wages and that they need the government to help them coax people into line.
For devotees of the free market, this sure seems like market manipulation to me. If there is some shortage, and it’s because people don’t want to take low-pay jobs, the rules of capitalism dictate that employers should start offering higher wages in order to better attract employees. And that’s exactly what’s happening in many places, like this amusement park in Minnesota and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
On the other hand, plenty of corporations and other employers are complaining while openly refusing to provide incentives:
Like other businesses, 7-Eleven franchises say they are having trouble recruiting workers and are squeezed by price and costs.
While they could raise wages and increase prices, "that creates a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace, which can adversely affect sales and profits," the letter said.
At this point, employers are simply asking the state to force people back into poverty-wage jobs, with no willingness to look at what’s actually causing a so-called labor shortage (if there even is one). Other more obvious reasons include:
States are still dealing with Covid and half the country isn’t vaccinated.
Childcare is hard to access right now
Many small businesses have closed permanently
Covid has long-tail impacts from which many people are still suffering
Again, the jobs on offer suck
These businesses had no problems taking PPP loans and years of tax breaks, so even if the unemployment benefits are a contributing factor, it should be considered a minor market correction. In too many places, those benefits are going to be taken from people anyway, forcing people back into subsistence labor. And Republicans in Congress are already going on the warpath, though they’re more trying to turn it into a larger referendum on Democrats’ economic policies going into the midterm elections.
I don’t think the journalists writing these stories want to see people stripped of benefits and stuck back in shitty jobs, but reporters often have a subconscious bias towards those with power, as if proximity and access equate to equality. The destruction of the news industry via consolidation and hedge funds makes it clear that those in power don’t care about reporters and see them as disposable as anyone else.
For a far more nuanced take on the situation, check out this story in the Washington Post, which features a number of workers who have toiled in dead-end jobs for years. Here’s one instructive excerpt:
Tim and Sara Wojtala are a young couple completely rethinking their careers due to the pandemic. Tim worked for years as a manager at major retailer. Last year, he was frustrated by what he felt were lax safety conditions at work and having to deal with irate customers who didn’t want to wear masks. He quit in the fall as the virus surged again. Now he’s going to school to become a wind turbine technician through a program backed by the government. Sara also spent many years in retail and wants to do something more meaningful now.
“The problem is we are not making enough money to make it worth it to go back to these jobs that are difficult and dirty and usually thankless. You’re getting yelled at and disrespected all day. It’s hell,” said Sara, who is 31. She added that with two young kids, finding child care has also been a huge issue lately.
And as much as fast-food chains want to pretend they’re offering incentives, a limp sausage patty on a biscuit isn’t it.
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