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Democratic political organizer and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams spoke to an audience of several hundred inside Milwaukees Pabst Theater Wednesday evening, discussing her Wisconsin roots and vision for the future of progressive organizing.

The 2020 election cycle saw Democrats take both the presidency and Senate, as well as retain a slim majority in the House of Representatives. Abrams vision for continuing to build on those successes in 2022 revolves around one central tenet: persistence.

A record number of Americans flocked to the polls in last years election that seemed largely to be a referendum on former President Donald Trump. The result, a victory for now-President Joe Biden, was widely celebrated by Democrats. Padding Bidens victory were Georgias 16 Electoral College votes, which hadnt gone to a Democrat since 1996. Abrams went on to help Democrats Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock win US Senate seats a few months later, giving Democrats control of the chamber.

Wisconsins political status as a swing state will again have it in the crosshairs of both parties come next years fall election as Republicans hope to unseat Gov. Tony Evers and Democrats hope to oust GOP Sen. Ron Johnson from his seat and expand their Senate majority.

Milwaukee will be particularly important in those battles. Lack of turnout among the citys Black population during the 2016 election is one of many factors that some have said cost Hillary Clinton the presidency in 2016. Clinton also failed to visit Wisconsin during the general election.

Democrats seem eager to avoid that mistake in the future, having poured immense resources into the state. The Democratic National Committee attempted to host its 2020 convention in Milwaukee until the coronavirus pandemic ultimately forced the party to hold a virtual gathering.

Visits by high-profile progressives like Abrams have indicated a commitment to keep fighting for the Badger State.

Only prolonged social movements, Abrams argued, stand the test of time.

She used the example of health insurance reform. Democrats had worked for decades to pass something on that front before President Barack Obama finally signed the Affordable Care Act into law. According to Abrams, it was the inertia behind the policy that helped it weather multiple attempts at repeal by Republicans.

Voting is not magic, she said, its medicine. She continued the metaphor by reminding those in the audience that when people stop taking medicine, the disease can come back.

Abrams cautioned that while Trump may be out of office, he wasin her minda symptom of a larger problem that needs to be defeated at the polls with consistent turnout from progressives like in 2018 and 2020.

Attempts to curtail voting rights in states around the country have given the organizer cause for concern. Each time elected officials restrict access to the polls, we squander what we could be, Abrams said.

She diagnosed many of the fears on the right as based on Americas changing demographics. Abrams urged progressives to lean into the nations changing identity and to push back on conservative framing of issues.

She castigated President Ronald Reagan for having weakened civic faith. Government is people working together to achieve something larger than themselves, she said.

Abrams was joined on stage by Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes who acted as interviewer and moderator for the night. Barnes is also running to unseat Johnson.

Abrams referenced her personal Wisconsin connection, having been born in Madison while her mother attended and worked at UW-Madison. According to Abrams, her mother made less than a janitor due to her race and gender.

Abrams said money being tight left an impact on her growing up, due in large part to how her parents used their lack of means as a lesson. No matter how little we have, there is someone with less, she quoted her mother and father as having told her. Your job is to serve that person.

While Abrams and her family eventually moved to Gulfport, Mississippi, the drumbeat on the importance of service from her parents never stopped.

Her decision to run for governor of Georgia in 2018the first Black woman to do sowas based on her desire to provide good governance, she said. Abrams ultimately lost the race to Brian Kemp, a Republican who the year before the election used his position as secretary of state to purge hundreds of thousands of names from the states voter rolls.

Being first aint fun, Abrams said. Sometimes you are the first to lose. She went on to say that she is not focused on achieving The First title while running for certain offices, and is instead committed to making sure she is not the last.

That desire is reflected in her work: a commitment to training people of color in political organizing. Abrams said a communitys support of a political goal is predicated on members of that community helping lead the movement.

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In Milwaukee Visit, Stacey Abrams Talks the Future of Progressive Organizing - UpNorthNews

Progressives lawmakers, including Representatives Jamaal Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have urged President Joe Biden to revive the federal pandemic-related unemployment benefits that will expire Monday for millions of jobless American workers amid the ongoing pandemic.

About 7.5 million unemployed workers will lose all their unemployment benefits and an additional 3 million will no longer receive a $300 weekly boost provided by their state when three federally funded jobless aid programs lapse Monday, according to estimates from the Century Foundation.

"We need to extend the expanded UI for millions of unemployed workers because this crisis isn't over. People are not only dealing with COVID surges; they're dealing with impacts of climate change, from extreme flooding in my district to heat waves and fires in the West," Bowman, a New York Democrat, said in a statement to Newsweek.

A spokesperson for Representative Ayanna Pressley told Newsweek that she has been "pressing to extend unemployment benefits and has been in active conversation with both the White House and Congressional leadership for months about an extension and the need for additional layers of protection for workers and families impacted by the pandemic."

The benefits have previously been renewed after lapsing, but the Biden administration said it will allow them to expire on Labor Day.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said that it's "appropriate" to let the expanded $300 weekly unemployment boost expire on September 6 as scheduled in a letter sent to lawmakers in August. And while the Biden administration has encouraged states to reallocate existing federal funds to continue aid to the jobless, none have moved to do so.

Representatives Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Cori Bush, three members of the "Squad," have already called for extending the benefits. Ocasio-Cortez told Insider the benefits expiration is a "major concern," Omar said a revival of the benefits was "necessary," and a spokesperson for Bush confirmed she supports an extension.

But other prominent progressive lawmakersincluding Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and Representatives Maxine Waters and Pramila Jayapalwho are otherwise outspoken on wealth inequality have remained noticeably quiet on the expiration of the federal jobless aid. According to Insider, the 96-member Congressional Progressives Caucus are still in discussion on whether to press Biden for a revival of the benefits.

Any push to revive benefits will hit a roadblock in the Senate. With a slim majority, all 50 Senate Democrats must vote to pass an extension and moderate Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has said he won't support it. House leaders have also shifted focus to advancing a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill to push Biden's infrastructure plan through Congress.

In renewing the benefits in March, the Biden administration and policymakers had expected that the economy would largely recover from the pandemic by September with an aggressive vaccine rollout. But the unforeseen surge of the highly contagious Delta variant, which now accounts for nearly 95 percent of U.S. coronavirus cases, has impeded the plan.

According to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday, 235,000 jobs were created in August, a drastic decline from the 1.1 million jobs created in July and well below economists' projections of 733,000 jobs.

"We're still in a pandemic, and the latest jobs numbers prove that. Doing our part to support Americans right now includes extending expanded [unemployment insurance benefits] and passing the $3.5 trillion infrastructure package to invest in our people and economy," said Bowman.

Newsweek has reached out to representatives for Maxine Waters, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Pramila Jayapal, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for comment. This story will be updated with any response.

This story has been updated with comment from Ayanna Pressley.

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'Crisis Isn't Over': Progressives Push Biden to Revive Unemployment Benefits Amid Pandemic - Newsweek

Why do we have building codes if we arent going to enforce them? Mayor de Blasio styles himself a progressive. But a century ago, the original progressiveswanted everyone to have a safe place to live, regardless of income. In turning a blind eye to tens of thousands of people living in illegal and dangerous apartments, Hizzoner ironically subscribes to a type of pre-progressive caveat-emptor philosophy.

In 1890, muckraker Jacob Riis How the Other Half Lives chronicledthe shocking fate of tens of thousands of New Yorkers, mostly poor immigrants and their children, crammed into the inhuman dens of disease-ridden tenements. Even back then, though, New York had a law against this, enacted in 1867, giving people a legal claim to air and sunlight, as Riis wrote. The city just didnt enforce it.

Similarly, 146 people died at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory downtown in 1911 not because New York didnt have laws against locking exit doors, but because the owners didnt follow them.

Both the laws and their enforcement improved, part of New Yorks century-long public-health triumph. Now, were going backward. Eleven people, including 2-year-old Lobsang Lama, drowned in their basement apartments during last weeksflash floods.

Five of the six apartments in which they drowned were illegal. The city had complaints about at least three of these illegal apartments and didnt do much to investigate them.

Most basement apartments are illegal for a good reason: You cant easily escape from them. But Gotham has long ignored illegal dwellings: Last year, three people died in fires in illegal units.

DAs should prosecute owners who endanger their tenants; the owners of these buildings should face manslaughter charges.

But what about the citys culpability? Last week, de Blasio acknowledged that at least 100,000 people, mostly illegal immigrants,live in illegal apartments.

Illegal crowding has helped spread COVID, too, just as it spread infection disease in Riis day. Its a reason why the citys death toll from coronavirus is 403 per 100,000, by far the highest in the country.

But the mayor doesnt plan to do anything about it.

Sure, he made an empty gestures, saying that next time we have a flash flood, the city will tell people to evacuate such apartments temporarily. How? A flash flood, by definition, comes quickly.

One answer to this humanitarian crisis is to build more housing.

Yet property owners already have the option of upgrading their basement apartments. They dont do it, because such upgrades would make the apartments too expensive for their tenants. Trying to make an illegal basement apartment up to code is very difficult physically, very costly, the mayor said last week.

Why cant the tenants afford legal, safe housing? Because they supply New Yorks illegally cheap labor. Black-market workers earn below the minimum wage, and often toil in unsafe working conditions.

These are the people who die in preventable construction disasters, paid by the day, with no workplace-safety protections, as well as the people who struggle through floodwaters to bring restaurant customers their hot food in a historic storm, for cheap.

Legalizing long-term immigrants they arent going anywhere, after all would give them some leverage over exploitative landlords and employers.

Except it wouldnt solve the problem. We would quickly import a new cohort of undocumented immigrants, unprotected from wage, housing and workplace laws, because the city depends on cheap labor.

De Blasio loves to be virtuous about the citys $15 minimum wage, as well as mandated sick leave, but the only reason any of this works is that hundreds of thousands of people toil in the second-tier, basement-dwelling economy.

New York City is full of failure to enforce the law. Vending licenses, for example, enable lawful workers to earn a decent living, but they dont work if the city has tens of thousands of illegal street vendors competing against them.

New Yorks progressives want their apartments cleaned and renovated, their children watched and their food delivered hot and fast, and they love to romanticize the churro lady but they dont want to think about the people drowning in the basement.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor of City Journal.

Twitter: @NicoleGelinas

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Flooding of illegal units belies NYC progressives' self-righteous claims - New York Post

Sep 7, 20216:17 AMEDT

Labor Day didn't go by without progressives renewing calls for the Senate to pass the PRO Act.

By Kaitlyn Kennedy

Washington DC Squad members and other progressive politicians rang in Labor Day by urging the Senate to do away with the filibuster and pass the PRO Act.

The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act was passed in the House in March along mostly party lines, but it has since stalled in the Senate.

Advocates have called the legislation the most consequential revamping of labor laws since the New Deal in the 1930s.

The bill outlines a host of provisions intended to provide workers greater security when organizing for better wages, benefits, and safety in the workplace.

Concretely, the bill would end mandatory anti-union meetings. As things stand now, employers can require workers to attend sessions that detail all the alleged disadvantages of unions, as occurred during the high-profile unionization vote at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama earlier this year.

The bill would also end "right to work" laws currently in place in 27 states, which allow people who don't pay union dues to receive union benefits. This weakens unions by depriving them of funds and membership, stripping them of their bargaining power.

Employers would be required to negotiate with unions until a first contract is reached and would not be able to delay union elections, fixing two of the biggest obstacles to organizing.

Workers would also receive additional protections, including a ban on employers permanently replacing striking employees.

Secondary strike limitations would also be removed, allowing unions to encourage workers in connected jobs to participate in boycotts and so amplify the strikers' negotiating power.

The PRO Act would prevent employers from misclassifying employees as "independent contractors" as a means of limiting access to full workers' rights and restricting unionization efforts.

Members of the Squad and other progressive politicians used Labor Day as an opportunity to remind fellow lawmakers about the importance of passing the PRO Act.

"So much of what we take for granted in this country is due to the tireless work of the labor movement. We need to protect and grow the power of working people everywhere. To start: let's turn the PRO Act into law," said New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman.

Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar agreed: "The Senate must pass the PRO Act to put power back in the hands of workers."

New York Rep. Mondaire Jones simply tweeted, "Happy Labor Day.Abolish the filibuster and pass the PRO Act."

Passing the PRO Act is the best way Congress can honor and strengthen the labor movement, they argue.

But doing so seems to require some big structural changes within the legislative branch.

The PRO Act is currently experiencing a similar fate as much of the most consequential Democratic-sponsored legislation aimed at expanding political and economic enfranchisement.

Senate Democrats with their narrow majority are unable to get the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster, and even within their own camp, there is a familiar holdout Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema.

Unless the filibuster is removed or significantly reformed, or Sinema and 10 Republican colleagues suddenly see the light, the PRO Act doesn't stand much of a chance of passing.

That's why some Democrats and labor advocates are working to get parts of PRO Act included in $3.5-trillion Democratic reconciliation bill, including empowering the NLRB to penalize employers if they violate workers' rights.

Still, the usual suspects Sinema and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin have expressed doubts over passing the reconciliation bill with its current price tag, making it unclear whether Democrats will be able to advance many of their boldest reforms.

Nevertheless, the brain behind the budget, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, remains confident he can get the 50 votes necessary to send the reconciliation bill to Biden's desk.

Cover photo: IMAGO / ZUMA Wire

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"Power to the workers": Progressives commemorate Labor Day by renewing calls to pass the PRO Act - TAG24 NEWS

Progressives should love cryptocurrency, the latest innovation that brings power to the people. Turns out, they dont.

Perhaps surprisingly, it is precisely because crypto circumvents the corporate, permissioned, speech-controlled online world that angers progressives. Crypto threatens to nix not just the corporation but also the bureaucrat, which puts it at odds with the progressive ethos that demands government experts ensure a just and common good.

Progressive politicians want to make this industry heel to Washington or, even better, replace it wholesale with a government version. In a recent hearing, progressive Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) assailed crypto as run by shadowy super coders and phony populists. Senator Brown wants government-run central bank digital currency as an alternative.

The current top-down internet, where oversight boards, safety councils, and terms of service legalese control access, fits the progressive vision. Progressives have increasingly demanded and mostly received a compliant tech industry where contrary voices are nonvoiced, whatever the validity of their arguments.

In theory, a crypto-centered web would change the paradigm. Permissionless decentralized applications run over blockchains have no dictators. Blockchain changes arrive through consensus, those that disagree with a software update, or fork, remain on the un-forked blockchain or fork themselves. Forks lacking developer support wither and die.

But the crypto worlds ideal of a rapidly innovative, individual-centered internet that ends top-down control and allows people to buy, share, borrow, speak, trade, rent, and collaborate outside government or Big Techs purview is a better match for the conservative/libertarian worldview.

President Donald Trump, for all his bluster, nominated the two most pro-crypto people to ever work in the executive branch, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce (aka Crypto Mom) and Brian Brooks, former acting Comptroller of the Currency.

The infrastructure debate saw passionate crypto defenses from Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) among many others. House conservatives like Representative Patrick McHenry (R-NC) tirelessly support crypto, while progressive bellwether Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs (D-NY) support for unlimited public spending via Modern Monetary Theory starkly contrasts cryptos penchant for sound money.

Ideally, the coders, programmers, foundations, policy wonks, and others creating the crypto-economy could ignore politics. They could be left alone to produce a common good decided by individuals making choices and not by protective regulators. Hardly anyone receiving the benefits of their labors would think twice about the political or ideological motivations of the people creating the tokenized economy. What matters is if peoples lives become easier or more prosperous.

But any upstart industry needs friends in Washington. The crypto industry should choose wisely. If cryptos main players, as well the sectors emerging entrepreneurs and investors, want the best for the approaching internet phase known loosely as Web 3.0, they should diverge from the progressive movement and its Big Tech allies, which will never be their friends.

Paul H. Jossey is an adjunct fellow and crypto policy expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and founder of http://www.thecrowdfundinglawyers.com. Follow him on Twitter @thecrowdfundlaw

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Perspective: Crypto Should Divorce From the Progressive Movement - Crowdfund Insider