https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2023/09/28/more-perfect-union-biden-picket-faiz-shakir/

Journalists from around the world flocked to a General Motors plant in Michigan on Tuesday to document President Biden’s unprecedented visit to the striking autoworkers’ picket line.

Among them were staffers with a small nonprofit labor-advocacy publication called More Perfect Union. But More Perfect Union wasn’t just covering Biden on the picket line — it helped get him there.

Ahead of the announcement that Biden would join the striking workers. More Perfect Union’s executive director, Faiz Shakir, helped connect the White House and United Auto Workers leaders, smoothing the way for Biden to address a crowd of striking workers.

“We had a number of conversations with the White House,” Shakir, a former campaign manager for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said of the planning for the Biden trip. “We’re also on the ground covering UAW and building relationships there. So that’s where we gave a little bit of help on the sidelines.”

With a tone that is often serious but always conversational, More Perfect Union highlights the struggles of workers from disparate sectors; one post on social media might be about striking railway workers, while the next might be about exploitation women face in the modeling industry. It also dabbles in memes, jokes and commentary familiar to anyone who spends time online.

“Maybe I’m a dirty commie,” one post on Instagram read, “but I don’t think people should work every second of their waking life just to survive.”

Across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, the company’s video-first approach has drawn millions of subscribers and counting, racking up hundreds of millions of views. The 28-person organization, whose annual budget of $5.5 million comes mostly from donations from Democrat-aligned philanthropies, said this growth is accelerating; in the first six months of 2023, followers, views and engagement outpaced 2022 and 2021, a feat for any news organization in the current fractured media environment.

Ben Smith — a journalist who has written about media coverage of labor and is also the co-founder of a new media company, Semafor — said More Perfect Union is doing “something actually interesting and new.”

“Labor coverage is so often about unions,” Smith said. But “they’re covering workers, telling really compelling stories that people on TikTok like.”

More Perfect Union also stresses that its audience is “uniquely cross-partisan.” According to a donor pitch deck shared with The Washington Post, its audience includes regular viewers of Fox News and Fox Business as well as MSNBC — but also fans of the popular liberal YouTube pundit Brian Tyler Cohen.

Still, More Perfect Union makes no apologies about having a decidedly pro-labor stance — and politics that strongly align with the left.

“We’re media with a mission,” Shakir said. “I proudly own the label of advocacy journalism.”

From the beginning, More Perfect Union’s advocacy found listeners in the Biden White House, he said. In early 2021, its staff urged Ron Klain, then White House chief of staff, in a phone call that the president should speak out on behalf of the Amazon union drive, The Post reported at the time — and he did.

Yet on some issues it has split from the Biden White House — last year chiding the administration for not speaking out more about the Amazon campaigns.

“All this administration has to do is say it sees these workers and applauds them — and they’re not doing it,” Shakir told The Post at the time, suggesting that the White House should invite union organizers as often as it does CEOs of major corporations. (Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Interim CEO Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.)

While the administration rejected the idea that Biden had not embraced labor advocates, weeks later it invited union organizers to the White House.

In an interview, former Obama labor secretary Seth Harris called More Perfect Union’s advocacy “aggressive, smart, effective.”

“Its purpose is to lift up the voices of working people and to help people in the policy sphere, including in Washington, understand workers’ struggle better,” Harris said. “That is an extremely valuable role. And it’s a role that is not played by the mainstream media.”

In July, More Perfect Union had exclusive access to a meeting between Biden, Sanders and union organizers — including Lexi Rizzo, the 25-year-old founder of Starbucks Workers United, who was fired this year from her Buffalo store in what a judge described as part of Starbucks’s “egregious misconduct.”

In her statement, Dunn said that collaborating with More Perfect Union means “we know the people who count — the workers of this nation — will hear the president’s message.”

Jasmine Crockett also was on fire at the impeachment hearings.

She stayed way too long and was way too conservative for California. I wonder who Newsom will pick. He think he said he would pick a black woman.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/us/politics/dianne-feinstein-dead-senate.html

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the trailblazing Democratic power broker who served in the Senate for 30 years, died on Thursday night, according to a family member.

In recent years, Ms. Feinstein, 90, had suffered from frail health and memory issues that made it difficult for her to function alone and prompted calls for her to step down, which she consistently rejected.

Her condition had grown more acute over the past several months, after a bout with shingles that caused serious complications, including a case of encephalitis, and prompted her to begin using a wheelchair in the halls of the Capitol.

Ms. Feinstein’s long and very public decline shone a spotlight on the advanced age of members of Congress and particularly the Senate, where many continue to serve long after retirement age.

https://x.com/ryangrim/status/1707746748662181930?s=20

Kushner pushed the US to back a Saudi blockade of Qatar, against the policy of the State Dept, after Qatar refused to bail out his underwater property at 666 Fifth Avenue, which threatened to destroy his family’s wealth.

There is a U.S. base in Qatar and Saudi very nearly invaded. Then Kushner got $2 billion from Saudi.

The comparison to Hunter, even if every single claim about Hunter is true, is laughable.

James Surowiecki
@JamesSurowiecki

It’s true that there is no equivalence. Hunter was a small-time grifter who had no impact on US policy. Jared was a govt official who shaped U.S. policy with an eye toward his personal long-term interests, and cashed in and raised $2 billion after he left the White House.

House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸 @JudiciaryGOP

Jared Kushner waived his salary, did no business, and made historic peace deals while serving the American people for four years.

Hunter Biden made millions off his father’s position.

There is no equivalency.

https://x.com/matthewstoller/status/1707747543088587141?s=20No

My memory of Dianne Feinstein will always be when she was on the floor of the Senate during the financial crisis, and the Brown-Vitter amendment to break up the big banks came up. “This is America, isn’t it?” she said, and gave a thumbs down.

Some Saturday evening music. I just bought tickets to Kiki and Herb’s Christmas show in December.

Here!s Kiki and Herb’s wonderful version of Kate Bush’s “Running up that Hill”. The song is much bigger now after it went “1 around the world because it was featured in Stranger Things.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MmCsvyY6zC

https://x.com/AOC/status/1708512403078467635?s=20

The idea that Republicans would expel Gaetz over creating political headaches for themselves but not Santos over indictment on 13 Federal charges, including 7 counts of wire fraud and 2 counts of lying to Congress, seems wild.

They’d be setting themselves up for the entire cycle

Jacqui Heinrich@JacquiHeinrich
3h
House GOP members are seeking to quickly expel Gaetz if the ethics report comes back with findings of guilt.

Following threats to vacate McCarthy, one tells me “No one can stand him at this point. A smart guy without morals.”

Some more weekend music.

Watching a 1948 film noir.movie (Whiplash) starring Alexis Smith. Alexis waited until 1972 to win her only major acting (EGOT) award for her role as Phyllis in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies.

Smith appeared on the cover of the May 3, 1971 issue of Time as the result of the critical acclaim for her singing and dancing role in Hal Prince’s Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, which marked her long-awaited Broadway debut. In 1972, she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her performance.