But his clogged toilet...
How to make a story stick. Plus, housing and voting news
Welcome to a premium Thursday evening edition of Progressives Everywhere!
There’s a lot to tackle tonight, including a number of major stories in the realm of voting rights and redistricting.
Spoiler alert: They’re not all great news.
On the other hand, there are some interesting policy proposals to discuss, as well as some better news on the ballot initiative front, so don’t get too bummed or discouraged.
Before we get to those stories, however, some thoughts an ongoing story that I think epitomizes the structural and media balances that we face right now.
Over the past few days, it’s become clear that Donald Trump treated laws around government record preservation just like he treated every other law and regulation: By blatantly disregarding them at every turn and violating them in ways that border on parodic.
Today, we learned that Trump went so far as to flush classified documents down the toilet while president (which explains his frequent complaints about water pressure in the White House). His administration more generally flouted all transparency laws, using encrypted message systems that circumvented the required record-keeping, and now it’s emerging that there are holes in Trump’s communications timeline on January 6th, 2021.
Given the years-long furor around Hillary Clinton’s emails, which were simply sent on a private server and not literally eaten, one would expect that this series of revelations would garner wall-to-wall coverage and Democrats lining up to demand that investigators and law enforcement move heaven and earth to get answers and hold Trump accountable. Instead, it’s largely been crickets, as they’ve repeatedly deferred to the Jan. 6 committee and its quiet, fastidious detective work. No extra hearings scheduled, no major announcements, no fuss. It’s up to Merrick Garland, who has shown no stomach for holding any high-profile crooks accountable.
Part of this is simply a result of Democratic leaders’ hopelessly outdated understanding of populist politics and their resultant hesitancy to do anything about anything. Worse, there’s no outside force really pushing them to throw in and make a big deal out of this or any other issue that might produce significant partisan advantage.
Think back to Benghazi and Hillary’s emails. It wasn’t Republican lawmakers that originally jumped on those “scandals,” it was Fox News and the constellation of shitty right-wing “news” sites that are all funded by the foundations of conservative billionaires and sustained by Facebook’s crooked algorithm.
The same goes for the neo-Confederate fury over Critical Race Theory, which began as a Tucker Carlson obsession, fueled Glenn Youngkin’s upset win in Virginia, and led to base-rallying hate laws in a rash of GOP-held states that have all but authorized book burning. The right-wing media basically poll-tested the idea, hyped it up, and handed it to the GOP to run wild.
Unfortunately, the left does not have anything approaching the media ecosystem that the right-wing uses to manufacture national controversies, reorient entire societal debates, and create actual political and legal outcomes. They are hamstrung by corporate media monopolies, which are owned by parent companies that have no incentive to finance or carry a channel that actively advocates for policies that would hurt their bottom line. Sure, MSNBC had some ex-Republicans freaking out about Bob Mueller and Russia, and Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow are solid, but they also host conversations like this one:
Alert me when they start freaking out about wage theft like they do about some hungry guy shoplifting from Trader Joe’s. No network that features Joe Scarborough and former George W. Bush mouthpieces is ever going to be the basis for a progressive media ecosystem.
Democrats, with their old school leadership, tend to focus on the “mainstream” press, hoping to get outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico to carry their messaging, as if the rest of the country is hungrily reading Playbook every morning. The Times will never be consistent or even interested in any kind of policy rigor; tonight, long-time right-wing apologist Blake Hounsell published a glowing interview with Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik positioning the GOP as savvy beneficiaries of above average inflation without once mentioning the record corporate profits and lax regulation that are driving the problem.
We’re working hard at More Perfect Union to inject that reality into the mainstream consciousness and force media to acknowledge the gross profiteering. It’s not easy — it’s a huge problem that almost all media operates from the assumption that maximum corporate profit is the ideal outcome. It inherently frames all measures to grow shareholder profit as justified, no matter how much they hurt people. Everything has to accommodate profit.
Covering a company’s profit margin has superseded any sort of worker welfare or even consumer interest as the prime objective of almost all media. I know news media caters to wealthy audiences for the purposes of ad sales and subscriptions, but that heavy lean has wound up reorienting society towards thinking maximized profit is paramount. Unfortunately again, Congress often seems to think the same thing.
Watch how the “trucker convoy” is covered this weekend, as it makes its way down from Canada into California and perhaps across the country to Washington, DC. The truckers are mostly white men who look like they’d eat at Midwestern diners, and so even though they express extremist views and have done real damage to people’s lives already, no one calls them what they are. A true left media ecosystem would properly label them terrorists. DC. It would create a demand for the Biden admin to take action. It would rally people against these lunatics. It’d make it a liability for the GOP and force the mainstream media to cover it in a more honest way.
That dynamic is a big part of why I continue to push on policies and harp on issues like student debt, gerrymandering, and voting rights. We don’t have that giant platform right now, so we need to keep building as best we can, support the organizers who can push their representatives, and create enough noise and grassroots support that priorities can’t be ignored.
Policy Updates
Some interesting housing stuff tonight! I’m becoming increasingly interested in the issue (and not just because we need to find a new apartment in a few months), which I think will be one of the biggest factors in the November elections.
Housing prices are generally seen as the responsibility of whoever is in the White House, but progressives could mitigate that by offering proactive solutions and turning affordable housing into a major campaign issue. Save for their inflation obsession, I don’t anticipate Republicans going big on this.
National: Artificial intelligence often reflects the unconscious bias of its programmers and users, so it’s no surprise that the AI employed to evaluate mortgage and employment applications tends to produce racist outcomes. A new bill in the Senate, the Algorithm Accountability Act, seeks to (sort of) curb those bad results.
Companies using algorithmic technology to make “critical decisions” that have significant effects on people’s lives relating to education, employment, financial planning, essential utilities, housing or legal services would be required to conduct impact assessments.
The legislation calls on companies using this tech to conduct algorithmic impact assessments of those systems. In particular, companies using automated systems would be on the hook if they make more than $50 million in annual revenue or are worth more than $250 million in equity and have identifiable data on more than one million people, households or devices used in automated decisions.
That would mean a large number of companies in the health care, recruitment and human resources, real estate and financial lending industries would be required to conduct assessments of AI they use.
Applying for jobs is a nightmare and it sucks to know that people are being eliminated by a biased computer before anyone even looks at their resume.
Texas: Voters in San Antonio voted last year to approve an amendment that allows the city to sell bonds in order to finance affordable housing. In May, they’ll vote on a $1.2 billion bond that is likely to include about $150 million in funding for housing.
One-sixth of the $150 million purse — $25 million — would go toward funding permanent supportive housing for people experiencing homelessness, the largest amount the city has ever directly allocated to address the problem. Other funds would go to affordable housing construction and preservation at different levels. The measure comes on the heels of another $20 million that San Antonio received through the federal American Rescue Plan, the engine behind the White House agenda on homelessness.
This is the first I’ve even read about the White House agenda on homelessness. The death of the Build Back Better Act killed a large portion of the administration’s affordable housing funding plan, but with municipalities and states so flush with cash from stimulus and infrastructure bills, they should be pushing hard for some of that cash to go to housing. The article above has a lot of good info on the various initiatives San Antonio is taking to take care of its unhoused and is definitely worth reading.
San Francisco: Voters in San Francisco, meanwhile, may have the opportunity to vote on a ballot initiative that would create a tax on homes that are left vacant in the nation’s most expensive city.
"These are folks who are buying and selling housing in San Francisco as if they're buying and selling stocks on the stock market. They couldn't care less about providing homes for anyone, and we are going to put an end to it with the empty homes tax," Supervisor Preston said.
He estimates the tax could bring in about $38 million dollars a year. He proposes that the money go toward preventing homelessness and affordable housing.Preston says the city of Vancouver implemented a similar tax and saw vacancies decrease by 20%.
Private equity has been buying up single family homes en masse over the past few years, and I imagine there are plenty of investors and tech execs who are doing so in San Francisco.
Georgia: As I mentioned Tuesday, Democrats should be rushing to expand Medicaid nationwide. In the absence of that sweeping (and super popular!) policy, it seems like the most that’s going to happen in some states is a temporary expansion of the health care program for new mothers. Texas passed a six month expansion last year, while the Georgia State Senate just passed a bill that would expand it from six months to a year.
South Dakota: Here’s a funny little twist. In 2020, when voters approved legalizing marijuaa in South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem blocked its implementation until the State Supreme Court threw out the election result altogether. The GOP legislature in the state seems far less hostile, however, to the upcoming ballot initiative vote on Medicaid expansion, as it just OK’d a special budget fund for it in the event that it passes.
Last summer, Republicans in the state made it much harder to pass ballot initiatives, raising the vote threshold to 60%, but that doesn’t seem to be a high enough hurdle to stop Medicaid.
Florida: We’ll talk more about this on Sunday, but the odious “Don’t Say Gay” bill that would ban any conversation about sexual orientation in schools just made it through a State Senate committee.
Voting Rights and Redistricting
National: Now that Democrats have given up on passing any major voting rights protections, the GOP’s vicious voter suppression campaign is shifting into overdrive.
The efforts to restrict voting have continued into this year. As of January 14, legislators in at least 27 states have introduced, pre-filed, or carried over 250 bills with restrictive provisions, compared to 75 such bills in 24 states on January 14, 2021.
Last year’s bills are having a big impact already, too. I don’t think Democrats quite understand how much of a generational disaster they’re facing (or maybe they just don’t care).
Florida: Gov. Ron DeSantis has been trying to force his legislature to enact a Congressional gerrymander that would set a new precedent for racism by eliminating a specially drawn Black-majority district. He’d hoped that the very conservative State Supreme Court would give him the high sign, but they did what the US Supreme Court wouldn’t and decided that there was a limit to just how much racism they’d expedite.
What’s interesting about this case is that it’s DeSantis that’s trying to claim the protected Black-majority district constitutes an unconstitutional gerrymander. I’d love to see how SCOTUS would reconcile that with what it sanctioned in Alabama earlier this week.
Kansas: It required pulling in a deathly ill anti-vax legislator, but Republicans officially overrode Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of their gerrymandered Congressional map earlier this week. Now, Democrats are promising to file a lawsuit over voter dilution, and they’re filing it in state court so that the majority-blue State Supreme Court has a chance to hear the case.
New Mexico: Meanwhile, in a Democratic state, an expansion of voting rights is on the march… kind of. The State Senate Judiciary Committee advanced a new voting rights bill that is, unfortunately, far less ambitious than what was initially proposed — important provisions like automatic voter registration have been stripped out, because Democrats can never just go for gold without just making things worse in ways that will inevitably hurt them down the line.
Still, it will help many formerly disenfranchised people register, so that’s a positive.
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