Progressives Every Day: June 12, 2020
Max effort, minimum wage.
Welcome to a new era at Progressives Everywhere. Now, we’re blogging!
With so much happening in the country, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by it all and miss the little stories that have an outsized impact on our lives. I spend all week collecting those headlines, analyzing under-reported news, and connecting with activists and candidates, then use them in the big Sunday newsletter (and midweek edition for paid subscribers).
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4:56 PM: Inside the Georgia election disaster
I just got off the phone with Sara Tindall Ghazal, the Democratic candidate for Georgia State House District 108. Before she declared her candidacy late last year, Ghazal was the Georgia Democratic Party’s Voter Protection Director, which pit her against the GOP voter suppression machine run by Gov. Brian Kemp. As you might imagine, much of our conversation focused on the disaster that occurred at polling places across the state on Tuesday — she was very fired up about the catastrophe, in large part because she saw it coming from miles away.
The interview will be featured in this Sunday’s big edition of Progressives Everywhere, but I wanted to pull out a few points she made about the broken election system in Georgia. She blamed Tuesday’s disaster on several interlocking problems:
The state spent over $100 million on untested and very flawed voting machines, despite public warnings and outcry.
Many of those voting machines did not arrive until the morning of the election, when they should have been there the night before. The counties deserve some of the blame for this, as it was on them to schedule deliveries. Still, the state put them in this difficult situation.
The Secretary of State’s office totally abdicated its role in providing training on the new machines to poll workers. This was exacerbated by the fact that there weren’t enough experienced election workers at the polls this week due to COVID-19 concerns.
Tens of thousands of people didn’t get their absentee ballots in time (or at all), so they showed up at their poll places. This confused inexperienced poll workers, who weren’t sure how to handle it. Again, the Secretary of State’s office totally botched the process.
Many people have moved around during the coronavirus pandemic, which creates problems with their assigned polling places.
We touched on a number of other issues, as well — hit the subscribe button above to have the newsletter with the full interview delivered right to your inbox on Sunday!
3:31 PM: Well, this is breathtaking:
I’m not amazed by the nastiness of a stunt like this — Republicans exist to troll the libs, the grander and more despicable gesture the better. What blows me away here is the practical stupidity of this plan; the only people who are going to show up at this bonfire are Republicans, so all they’re really accomplishing is destroying their own votes and hamstringing their party. Yes, these are absentee ballot applications, but they’re fundamentally taking a stand against mail-in voting altogether, which will only hurt them come November.
Not that I’m complaining.
2:42 PM: Well, this is bad:
1:34 PM: Florida Democrats move to shore up vote by mail:
If there’s one thing everyone knows about Florida Republicans, it’s that they love to cheat and disenfranchise people. It’s a truly proud tradition that goes back nearly a century, highlighted by the fiasco in 2000 and the Jim Crow law that was passed after Floridians overwhelmingly voted to approve Amendment 4 in 2018. Now, the problems we saw in Georgia’s primary election on Tuesday has Democrats in Florida proactively working to shore up the state’s vote by mail system in order to avoid a similar catastrophe.
Normally, Republicans encourage voting by mail in the state; Donald Trump has used it repeatedly, even committing voter fraud to do so. But given his rants against voting by mail and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s militant bootlicking, there’s every chance that the system could be sabotaged this year. Florida Democrats estimate that up to 50% of the state’s vote could be done by mail in November, especially given its large senior citizen population — which just so happens to be turning quickly against Trump and Republicans after their disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
You can read the whole letter here.
12:24 PM: Texas lawmen being reined in:
While Donald Trump was in Dallas yesterday, momentum continuing building for police reforms in the city.
In Dallas, 10 of 15 City Council members sent City Manager T.C. Broadnax identical letters dated Tuesday and Wednesday asking him to prepare options for spending less on public safety and more on other initiatives that they can discuss at a meeting next week.
Mayor Eric Johnson indicated a willingness to have a “robust conversation” about reforms and budget priorities in an interview with local news station Fox 4 News.
Yesterday, I spoke with Joanna Cattanach, the Democratic candidate running for State Senate District 104, which is located in the more tony parts of the city. She ran an underdog race in 2018, coming within 220 votes in a district where Democrats hadn’t even run in 2016 and lost by a whopping 30% in 2014. She told me that she’s seen protests against police and on behalf of Black Lives Matter even in the richest parts of town, including outside country clubs, which is incredible. That interview should be out next Sunday.
In Austin, the city council just passed some police reforms and budget cuts, though they fall far short of anything resembling what protestors are requesting.
10:30 AM: The next mayor of New York?:
The last few weeks have been devastating, but they’ve helped put in stark relief which politicians will actually fight for progressive causes and which politicians just shrink under pressure. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has proven to be a coward of the highest order (most New Yorkers that I follow on Twitter respond to each of his tweets with “resign, bitch”), while recently elected Public Advocate Jumaane Williams has proven himself to be an electrifying champion of the public good.
Williams has been a rising star in NY politics for a while now; backed by the Working Families Party, he ran for Lt. Governor in 2018, with Cynthia Nixon at the top of the ticket, and nearly pulled off a major upset even as Nixon got stomped by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. He won a crowded race for NYC Public Advocate soon after that and throughout the protests, he’s used the pulpit, which comes with no official power, to put pressure on the mayor and police unions in a way that few NYC politicians would ever dare to do. This NY Times story (also linked above) outlines his last few weeks and mentions him as a potential mayoral candidate next year.
Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York director of the Working Families Party, said that the protests are leading activists to cast about for alternatives to the existing field, and Mr. Williams’s name is one of several that have been floated to the party. She declined to name the others.
“Allies, W.F.P. activists, community leaders have been actively thinking about who in this moment can step up and lead, recognizing that there’s a leadership vacuum and there’s an absence of accountable leadership, especially on the issues that matter most to us — invest in our communities, divesting from the police, etc.,” Ms. Nnaemeka said.
Minimum wage battles:
With the federal government controlled by people desperate to keep up monuments to slave owners, cities and states across the country have been enacting their own minimum wage increases over the last few years. Unfortunately, due to the economic havoc wrought by the coronavirus, some places have paused the wage hike; Virginia, which had just passed its own increase earlier this year after finally flipping the legislature blue in 2019, is the most notable example, while a bill in Illinois seeks to do the same.
In Florida, activists energized by the success of ballot initiatives in 2018 and unbowed by the state GOP’s subsequent efforts to sabotage the initiative process, got a minimum wage increase on the ballot in November. Now, the business community there is on a full-out assault on the proposal, saying that the outbreak has made it untenable for businesses. Of course, they also demanded the state re-open far earlier than it should have to save businesses, and the Republican Party destroyed the unemployment system so hundreds of thousands of people haven’t gotten anything over the last few months, so we know their priorities and values.
The business community is doing the same in Maryland, appealing to GOP Gov. Larry Hogan, but the law already passed there and Democrats have can override any move he makes — in fact, they already overrode his veto of the minimum wage increase.
This all comes as big corporations wind down the $2 or so increase in “hazard pay” for the essential minimum wage workers who kept putting themselves in danger so that we could buy toilet paper during the height of the pandemic (which may be coming back around). The wildcat strikes around some of those big businesses were inspiring to watch and my hope is that they continue as workers continue to be put in danger.
Situations like this make it hard to really grasp who is winning in this battle, but undoubtedly, if you see the way journalists are sharing their salaries and companies are at least publicly committing to better and more diverse hiring practices, employers are feeling some kind of heat.
Zuckerberg is feeling the pressure: After he went on Fox News to defend President Trump’s right to post hate speech and lies on the internet, Mark Zuckerberg has been hearing it from just about everyone: Joe Biden, advertisers, and scientists who work for his and wife Priscilla Chan’s institute on misinformation, which must be a hoot to work for. I wrote about it at Observer this morning, highlighting this weaksauce response that was leaked out last night:
Oversight: There is a lot to be desired from national Democratic leadership, especially in Congress, and this piece by David Dayen at The American Prospect provides the perfect example of how they’re falling short. In short, Nancy Pelosi is seemingly refusing to push for any oversight of the $4.5 trillion being handed out to big corporations via the CARES Act. Key paragraphs:
Pelosi and McConnell began “talks” on the chair on April 10 according to Politico. That was over two months ago. The silence is finally starting to be broken here. Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) wrote Pelosi and McConnell yesterday requesting an update to the selection process. “Until the commission has a chairperson, taxpayers are funding a bailout without the mandated accountability,” they wrote. There’s been no public response.
Porter continued to amp up the pressure in a Congressional Progressive Caucus hearing yesterday, calling the delay “unacceptable.” After 76 days, you have to conclude it’s completely acceptable to Nancy Pelosi and the House leadership. They designed a process that relied on cooperation from Mitch McConnell after an entire term in Congress marked by his lack of cooperation. The oversight provisions were a talking point, a useless chimera attached to a giveaway to the capital class and the largest corporations in America. It’s hard not to conclude that there was no desire to scrutinize the bailout, that it was easier and preferred for the Treasury and the Fed to accomplish their handouts in the dark.
This is interesting: I generally think the popular post-2016 practice of interviewing racist white people at diners is a harmful, useless exercise (and I’m a white guy who loves diners and as about as economically progressive as it gets). But this piece, about the evolution of a young, Korean-American libertarian-Republican who joined the Black Lives Matter protests in DC, is interesting in so much as that it shows a generational change in politics and core beliefs.
To be continued…
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