Still thankful, still fighting for the people

Reflecting and gearing up for the battles to come

Welcome to a Thursday evening edition of Progress Report.

I hope that everyone who celebrated Thanksgiving had a good one, and that people who didn’t observe the holiday enjoyed a good day off from work. If you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving and had to go to work, here’s hoping you got paid overtime and had a slow day at the office.

This is going to be a shorter newsletter, with a bit of timely political news and then a detailed look at how we’re covering the news and what’s to come here at Progress Report.

First, though, a bit of cool personal and professional news: A short documentary that I reported and produced with a colleague at More Perfect Union just won an award at the Workers Unite Film Festival in NYC. The doc, made during the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, investigates how unregulated artificial intelligence could transform every element of TV/film production, from the writing and acting to makeup and union crew — stuff that impacts a massive middle and working class population. You can watch it right here:

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Thursday was a mercifully light news day in the United States, save perhaps for the ironically iconic images that came out of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Still, there are few things worth reporting. A quick run-through, then:

🪧✊ Workers across the country will be staging walkouts on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There strikes planned at an assortment of Amazon warehouses, organized by both established labor unions and upstart worker organizing centers. I’m not going to give away locations out of respect to those organizers, who want to surprise management, but I’ll be able to report more once they hit the picket lines.

Up to 400 employees of at least three different Macy’s locations in the Seattle area kicked off a weekend-long strike with 3 am walkout. They’re protesting over several Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges as well as low pay and overwork.

There will also be smaller strikes at local stores and coffee shops, so try to keep an eye out and not cross the picket line if and when you go shopping this weekend.

🗳 😮‍💨 Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer will call special elections to fill two empty legislative seats in April. The two seats, in firmly blue territory, were just vacated by Democratic members of the state House who had to resign after winning their respective mayoral elections.

Losing those two representatives will temporarily cost Democrats their majority in the chamber and significantly slow down the breakneck pace with which they’ve been passing progressive legislation.

Pushback from local election clerks who complained about more days of early voting led to speculation that the general elections would not take place until this summer. Whitmer put the kibosh on that shirt-sighted, anti-democratic idea. Everybody deserves representation as soon as possible.

📋✅ More initiatives and amendments are moving closer to qualification for the 2024 ballot.

In Massachusetts, campaigns were required to hand in signed petitions for inspection and consideration by Wednesday. Among the campaigns that did so seek to:

• Permit Uber and Lyft drivers to unionize;

• Classify Uber and Lyft drivers as independent contractors, a proposal that already failed with voters in 2022;

• End the significantly lower minimum wage for tipped workers and bring their wage floor in line with the statewide minimum by 2029;

• Legalize and regulate access to psychedelic substances like psilocybin.

If the signatures are valid, legislators can consider the proposals for direct passage as laws. If they decline to do so, organizers are asked to collect another round of signatures to get the proposals on the general election ballot.

Abortion rights amendments figure to be on the ballot in a number of states, including Arizona and Missouri, though activists in the latter state need to figure out which of the several competing initiatives they want to all get behind.

The Montana Supreme Court overturned a decision by the state Attorney General and blessed a proposed constitutional amendment that would create a non-partisan top-four general election system. The amendment contains several related clauses, which the AG cited in his original decision to toss the proposal, but now activists have the green light to build support for a system that would ideally advantage far less reactionary politicians.

Steering the future of Progress Report

Having spent most of Thursday chasing around our 14-month-old toddler and talking with my wife’s family (often about our 14-month-old toddler), there wasn’t a huge window of opportunity for reflection this Thanksgiving. I’m not great at that anyway, but in the moments that I was able to think about it, high up on the gratitude list was the ongoing opportunity to write this newsletter and the support that I receive from subscribers and donors.

In the six years that I’ve written the newsletter, we’ve done a ton of good and a ton of straight-up work; Progress Report has already developed into a second full-time job (check out the send times on most of the newsletters!), yet as always, I want to go bigger, do more, and have a larger impact. This would shock my high school teachers, but it’s true.

Plans are still formulating, but there’s already a lot to do and a lot to focus on over the course of the next year.

Public policy that impacts millions of real people’s lives will continue to get made for the next seven months at every level of government, from federal to local, even as most media focus gets concentrated on the presidential election and maybe a few Senate races. Our job is to monitor, report, and help advocates in the spaces where far-right ghouls, conservative Democrats, and corporatists quietly shape much of people’s day-to-day lives.

We are consistently ahead of the game. Over the past few years, among other things, we:

• Sounded the alarm on the coming eviction crisis and collapse of affordable housing as a preeminent moral and electoral issue;

• Led the way in covering the impact and increase in fascistic state preemption laws that prevent communities from passing progressive laws on health, housing, workers rights, and education;

• Were the first to regularly cover the Medicaid unwinding disaster and dig into the pernicious ways conservatives strip poor people of health care;

• Broke news about mendacious book bans that tormented kids and wound up motivating school board organizing and election flips nationwide;

• Unearthed ballot initiatives that got little attention;

• Provided inside reporting and insight into the nation’s biggest labor battles.

In each case, we’ve made sure to highlight and when possible interview and fundraise for the experts, lawmakers, and advocates working hard to pushback against conservative power and do right by people.

Uplifting and sending resources to the organizers, legislators, and citizens doing that critical and often thankless work is something I want to seriously expand this year. The sheer size of the country and depth of right-wing money means that progressives are always the underdog, and often go ignored because there’s just so much focus on the celebrity and horse race of Washington politics.

I also want to file more Freedom of Information Act requests to unearth corruption, commission freelance writers in cities across the country to bring us news and insight in ways that I just can’t provide, and launch more special projects that help bring down awful politicians, like the site tracking Ron DeSantis’s relationships with Nazis.

All of this is very expensive, in monetary outlay and time consumed and other paid opportunities passed over. So this Black Friday, as much as I feel bashful, I’m asking you to support Progress Report by buying a paid subscription or donating. I’m offering 15% off a monthly or annual subscription for an entire year, an offer good for the next five days.

You can now also send subscriptions as gifts or donate a subscription to help cover when I very happily and proudly give them away to readers who can’t afford them.

I haven’t explored paid advertisements because I want full freedom to tell the truth, and advertisers almost always limit what you say. I don’t get grants or dark money from the massive far-right foundations that fund conservative media and often keep those crappy, hateful outlets afloat. I don’t get any programmatic funding from anywhere at all. I want this newsletter to be driven only by the truth, the public interest, and its readers.

With that in mind, I’m going to send a survey to paid subscribers in a few weeks, asking which issues and types of coverage they want to see more of in this newsletter. I’ll also be in communication with them a lot more this coming year, looking and listening for issues and candidates that have caught their eye, especially in their local area. I would love for you to be a part of that process, and hope that we can together make this newsletter better, more effective, and more sustainable.

I’m thankful already for all that you do, and I’m looking forward to the huge year to come.

- Jordan