The Progressive Wing

Today, I am formally ending my bid for Congress after the court’s undemocratic map removed me and my community from #NY12.
I want to thank our team, our volunteers, our donors, my mom and dad, and our movement allies. This is not the end. See you soon NYC.
Full statement below pic.twitter.com/uBXXQ2Gd33
— Rana Abdelhamid (@RanaForCongress) May 31, 2022

The statement embedded in the tweet is worth a look. It explains some of the changes in the redistricting map–and who was behind it.

Torabs

They did it in my city as well. Establishment Democrats are just as against democracy as Republicans.

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/05/31/chris-hedges-how-to-defeat-the-billionaire-class/

Who says unions can't win in the South?
BREAKING–Workers at the Starbucks (I-85 & Clemson) in Anderson in intensely anti-union South Carolina vote 18 to 0 in favor of unionizing.
It's @SBWorkersUnited 's 1st UNANIMOUS victory in the South & it shows the union's huge momentum
— Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) May 31, 2022

la58

Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and the Socialist Alternative (SA) party have, for nearly a decade, waged one of the most effective battles against the city’s moneyed elites. She and the SA have adopted a series of unorthodox methods to fight the ruling oligarchs and, in that confrontation, exposed the Democratic Party leadership as craven tools of the billionaire class. Her success is one that should be closely studied and replicated in city after city if we are to dismantle corporate tyranny.
Sawant, who lives on $40,000 of her $140,000 salary and places the rest into a political fund that she uses for social justice campaigns, helped lead the fight in 2014 that made Seattle the first major American city to mandate a $15 an hour minimum wage.
Following a three-year struggle against Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, she and her allies pushed through a tax on big business that increased city revenues by an estimated $231 million a year.
She was part of the movement that led to Seattle’s successful ban on school-year evictions of school children, their families and school employees. She was one of the sponsors of a bill that protects tenants from being evicted at the end of their term leases, requiring landlords to provide tenants with the right to renew their leases and a bill that prohibits landlords from evicting tenants for nonpayment of rent if the rent was due during the Covid emergency and the renter could not pay due to financial hardship.
The billionaire class has targeted her since she assumed office in January 2014. It has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a corporate PAC called “A Better Seattle” and saturated television and digital platforms with negative advertising. She and the SA have been denied ads by Google, YouTube and Hulu.</blockquoteWary of Labor Leaders Allied with Democratic Party
Sawant warns that most labor leaders, along with social activists such as Al Sharpton, who are allied with the Democratic Party exist for photo-ops and to “co-opt our movements.”
“We should be wary of them,” she says. Our best hope lies in the mobilization of rank-and-file workers. She points out that the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) succeeded at the JFK warehouse “because they did not use what I would call the business unionism, basically the conventional ideas that have existed in the labor movement, in the Democratic Party, and even among social movement and NGO leaders, that the way to organize for change and even to win a union election or to win a good contract is to think about the margins, this sort of mythical idea of a few labor leaders at the bargaining table, and then not mobilizing the rank and file.”

It is no secret that there’s a lot of corruption in the top tiers of the traditional unions like the Teamsters. Big reason why I’m always ranting about guys/gals like Chris Smalls keeping level/uncorrupted heads. I am a YUGE pro-union fan cos I have been through the employer abuse trip my whole working life! Man, could I write a horror story! 🙁

Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death

She’s very impressive. “May her tribe increase.”

Let us all stand together in strong solidarity with over 1,000 UAW workers in Racine, Wisconsin and Burlington, Iowa who are on strike for better wages & benefits & standing up against greed at Case and New Holland – a company that makes billions in profits each and every year.
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) May 31, 2022

Raising both fists in solidarity!!!!

Yuck, yuck, yuck. 🙂 Wait ’til it goes down in Floridumb. You’ll really see some crooked FRight, X-tian heads explode!

LieparDestin

Took a trip to middle of the woods Tenessee to visit my sister, have missed all things political. Admittedly dont even know the status of what went down with Cisneros, but will read through the past posts.

It’s not known yet about @Texas28, so you haven’t missed anything. Cisneros is waiting for last minute mail-in ballots from overseas and vets. She needs at least 200 ballots to put her over the top – decisively.

Also provisionals, but most of those don’t get counted.

Tennessee might be full of a lot of redneck political stupidity, but it is one gorgeous state. I have been through it a bunch of times. Love your pics. LD/JD, glad you all missed the Uvalde shoot-’em-up. It was absolutely beyond stupid, hideous, and disgusting! 🙁

The famous Princeton study from ‘14 showing the people’s will has near zero effect on what government does & that outcomes r almost entirely driven by big $ & private interest groups is the skeleton key that explains EVERYTHING going on in America right now.
— Adam McKay (@GhostPanther) May 27, 2022

And knowing that, it’s stunning to watch how little our news covers money in government. It should be close to all they do. But it’s what they pretty much never do.
— Adam McKay (@GhostPanther) May 27, 2022

That’s been the game long before Citizens United. That ruling was just icing on a poisonous cake!

T and R, Ms. Benny!! 🙂 Hope your Holiday was healthy and peaceful. I went ahead and deleted my post. 🙂

A second Palestinian journalist murdered, shot in the heart and killed on her first day of work. https://t.co/V4J11B0NZS
— Daniel Boguslaw (@DRBoguslaw) June 1, 2022

FRightwingnut Israelis are way out of control now just like here.

Torabs

Nothing new to see here. Just a state engaged in apartheid and ethnic cleansing, in broad daylight.

Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death

And our taxpayer dollars are paying for it.

Happy Pride month! Your friendly reminder that pride event sponsors including Toyota, AT&T, and Comcast, have donated over $1.5 million to anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns.
Learn more — and help hold them accountable — on @DataProgress' site: https://t.co/PMvc0t7aGW https://t.co/ztLEkoIXQ0
— McKenzie Wilson (@McKenzieAWilson) June 1, 2022

Supreme Court blocks state’s [Texas]’de-platforming’ law

A Texas law forbidding social media giants from regulating certain forms of online speech has been blocked by the US Supreme Court.
The legislation would have prevented larger tech companies from banning or censoring Texas users for their views.
Republicans in the state said it was necessary to combat what they claimed was social media’s liberal bias.
But tech groups argued that the law was a violation of the private companies’ freedom of speech rights.
In a rare 5-4 ruling, the US’s top court agreed on Tuesday to a request supported by tech giants to temporarily block the law from coming into force.
Industry groups suing against the legislation argued that it violated the right to free speech, which included the freedom of private companies to decide what content to publish on their platforms.
Without the ability to moderate their platforms, Silicon Valley campaigners claimed that the state legislation would have turned Facebook, Twitter and YouTube into “havens of the vilest expression imaginable”

Ohio Senate race in virtual deadlock: poll https://t.co/di5wZf0uw4
— TomWells 🌹 (@TomP__TomJWells) June 1, 2022

I don’t bet but my money’s on Ryan. Vance is a opportunistic joke. And yeah, I read ‘Hillbilly Elegy.’ Plus, tRump is turning into a kiss of death to a lot of voters especially conservatives.

bernin

Hey, it’s TomP from TOP.

I actually think Tim Ryan has a chance in this race, and that Ohio isn’t really +8 R, and there’s still enough swing voters left in Ohio. Sherrod Brown pulled it off in 2018. I guess we’ll see how Ryan runs and if Ohio hasn’t turned completely to the dark side yet.

TomP hasn’t returned to TOP in quite sometime. He’s happier on twitter.

wi64

More power to him, i used to read some of the comments until the pop up to register stopped me, A lot of vitriol there.

From the American Prospect e-mail newsletter:

Deflating Larry Summers

Once again, he doesn’t check his facts and gets inflation wrong.
Larry Summers is at it again, misstating the connection between wage growth and price inflation. In an extended interview quoted in Tuesday’s Washington Post, Summers said, “I don’t think there’s a durable reduction in inflation without a meaningful reduction in wage growth.”
But Summers evidently failed to check the actual numbers. The estimable Josh Bivens of EPI did. As Bivens reported in a recent piece, wages have been lagging well behind inflation, not driving it. Bivens is worth quoting in detail:
To date, the rise of inflation has unambiguously not been driven by tight labor markets pushing up wages.
Nominal wage growth has … lagged far behind inflation, meaning that labor costs are dampening—not amplifying—price pressures. Last week’s jobs report showed that average hourly earnings growth over the last quarter was 4.4% (at an annualized rate), with wage growth actually slowing in the last three months to under 4%.
If the only change in the economy over the past year had been the acceleration of nominal wage growth relative to the recent past, then inflation would be roughly 2.5–4.5% today, instead of the 8.6% pace it ran through March. In short, nonwage factors are clearly the main drivers of inflation. (emphasis added)
Summers, in the same interview, flagrantly misstated the actual numbers. He said, “We now have wage inflation running at a close to 6 percent rate.” In fact, it was 3.7 percent in the last quarter, down substantially from 5.4 percent in 2021.
Just to rub it in, Summers added, “I don’t see how we can get inflation to substantially decelerate without wage inflation falling substantially, and I don’t see any reason to think wage inflation will fall substantially unless there’s a substantial loosening in labor markets, which would mean higher unemployment.”
In reality, labor markets are already looser than they were at the peak of the recovery. Other economists, notably those at the Fed and the Congressional Budget Office, expect inflation to start subsiding later in 2022 and to keep moderating in 2023.
In its May 25 update, CBO projected inflation to fall to just 3.1 percent next year, and then 2.3 percent in the year’s fourth quarter. Summers, having bashed CBO’s forecast, helpfully said in his Post interview, “I think the CBO has been a bastion of credibility over time.”
Summers keeps getting things wrong—not just the interpretation but the easily available data. Why is he taken seriously? Maybe because he tells corporate elites what they want to hear. Want to fix the economy? Cut workers’ wages!

wi64

Cant have the worker bees getting to much of a wage increase so they have to price gouge to get their quarterly profits back and beyond normal

Summers is an over-rated, RW hick just like $hrill. International price gauging and the fact that the US no longer manufactures squat leading to, you guessed it, supply chain problems are the inflation boogeymen. The MICC hijinks with the Russkies and Ukraine neo-Nazis are another factor. 💩

The Rs have blocked the SEC from deeming crypto securities, which makes it harder to bring security laws to bear on their internal knife fighting. https://t.co/XIvcbsLhq7
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) June 1, 2022

If only we can think and pray harder from now till the next one https://t.co/jXrklwN8MA
— Jordan (@JordanChariton) June 1, 2022

No comment from the disgusted-beyond-belief gallery.💩

I decided to see what Fox News was saying about this Tulsa shooting at a hospital.
The comment section was 75% speculating that Dems are carrying out these mass shootings in order to "force us to give up our gunz!"
They see the problem, and are grasping for anything to avoid it
— Jayar Jackson (@JayarJackson) June 2, 2022

NEW: Amazon workers have launched a new union drive in North Carolina.
Workers say they face 10+ hour shifts with vindictive managers in an unbearably hot warehouse. Amazon pays so little that some sleep in their cars.
They’re organizing for justice with @CarolinasEmpow1. pic.twitter.com/UFn1OwhD4k
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) June 1, 2022

Levi got me to donate again.

hiiiii Brian hiiiii
is me, Levi Fetterman aka official state dog of PA
omd, i just got some chicken + it is motherfluffling delicious.
isn’t my human Jawn the best?
john’s generous + kind + never fur-gets about any person (or dog)
bestie don’t we deserve a Senator like that?
if u agree pls will u pls send $5 our way: https://johnfetterman.afy.ai/i1a24
snoozles ilu
🐾 Levi Fetterman