Washington D.C. to eliminate bus fares starting this summer

Public mass transit is the beating heart of pretty much every major city. It makes commuting affordable, cuts down on traffic and pollution, and allows visitors to navigate cities without the stress and danger of driving. It provides freedom of movement in a very immediate and concrete way, with none of the “access to x (for a price) bullshit. Well, except, that it does generally have a price, doesn’t it? It’s usually not hugely expensive, but if you’re really in a bad situation, any price may be more than you have. It is my view that mass transit should be free at the point of service, by default. I also think that should include the cross-country high speed rail that I would like everyone to start building now. Still, I accept that that may be a year or two off, so for now, I’ll take this wonderful news from Washington, D.C.:

Other cities, including Los Angeles and Kansas City, Missouri, suspended fare collection during the height of the pandemic to minimize human contact and ensure that residents with no other travel options could reach jobs and services at hospitals, grocery stores and offices.

But D.C.‘s permanent free fare plan will be by far the biggest, coming at a time when major cities including Boston and Denver and states such as Connecticut are considering broader zero-fare policies to improve equity and help regain ridership that was lost with the rise of remote and hybrid work. Los Angeles instituted free fares in 2020 before recently resuming charging riders. Lately LA Metro has been testing a fare-capping plan under which transit riders pay for trips until they hit a fixed dollar amount and then ride free after that, though new Mayor Karen Bass has suggested support for permanently abolishing the fares.

Analysts say D.C.’s free fare system offers a good test case on how public transit can be reshaped for a post-pandemic future.

If D.C. demonstrates that it increases ridership, it reduces the cost burden for people who are lower income and it improves the quality of transit service in terms of speed of bus service, and reduces cars on the road, this could be a roaring success,” said Yonah Freemark, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute. “We just don’t know yet whether that would happen.”

The $2 fares will be waived for riders boarding Metrobuses within the city limits beginning around July 1. In unanimously approving the plan last week, the D.C. Council also agreed to expand bus service to 24 hours on 12 major routes downtown, benefiting nightlife and service workers who typically had to rely on costly ride-share to get home after the Metro subway and bus system closed at night.

A new $10 million fund devoted to annual investments in D.C. bus lanes, shelters and other improvements was also approved to make rides faster and more reliable.

I’m a fan of this trend, and even more pleased to see that the DC city council seems to be allocating money for improving things, on top of turning the busses into a genuine public service. I don’t see how it could possibly not reduce the burden on poorer people. I don’t know whether it will increase ridership a whole lot – sometimes you just cut costs elsewhere to make sure you can get to work – but I suspect there will be a measurable increase.

Unfortunately, some people who drive cars do so specifically because they have money, and because they want to avoid mixing with the common folk. I don’t know what proportion of DC traffic is made up of those people, but it wouldn’t shock me to learn that it’s pretty high. The article I’m quoting is from Fortune, so of course they had to get the opinion of an extremist neoliberal think tank:

Peter Van Doren, a senior fellow at the D.C.-based Cato Institute, said the plan risks high costs and mixed results, noting that the opportunity to improve ridership may be limited because bus passengers have been quicker to return to near pre-pandemic levels. He said government subsidies to help lower-income people buy cars would go farther because not everyone has easy access to public transit, which operates on fixed routes.

“The beauty of automobiles is they can go anywhere and everywhere in a way that transit does not,” he said. “We don’t know the subset of low-income people in D.C. where transit is a wonderful option as opposed to not such a wonderful option.”

The Cato Institute advocates for the privatization of public services, has worked hard to protect tobacco industry profits, opposes climate action, opposes civil rights, opposes women’s rights – so, you know, they’re mainstream U.S. conservatives, and because they have money backing them, we apparently have to take them seriously. Thankfully, they’re not getting their way on this. They might try to get Congress to interfere, but it seems like there’s actual momentum in the right direction. The most predictable hurdle to clear will be the question of paying for it.

Still, free fares can be a tough choice for cities. “If the consequence of a zero-fare program is you have less funds to invest in frequent service, then you’re going backwards,” Guzzetti said.

In Kansas City, which began offering zero-fares for its buses in March 2020 and has no planned end date, officials said the program has helped boost ridership, which has risen by 13% in 2022 so far compared with the previous year. The free fares amount to an $8 million revenue loss, with the city paying for more than half of that and federal COVID aid covering the rest through 2023, said Cindy Baker, interim vice president for the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, who describes the program as a success.

The program has eliminated altercations between passengers and bus drivers over fares, although there have been more instances of passenger disputes due to an increase in homeless riders, according to the agency. Baker said the transit agency has been adding security in response to some rider complaints.

To me, revenue is not a complicated problem – impose a tax that increases with wealth/income. Ideally, it should be considerably more than the expected cost of running things, so that the system can be improved, more people hired for cleaning and maintenance, and maybe they can even pay to make sure nonviolent conflict resolution is a big part of the training for all that added security.

Seems like that would create jobs, increase consumer spending, and generally make life better for everyone, not to mention nobody would be late to work because they couldn’t afford the bus. Still, conservatives like the folks at the Cato Institute seem to think that making life better for people – especially via public spending- is evil. We’ve got a long way to go before the capitalists served by organizations like that don’t have the power to interfere in governance, but every step we take that makes life a little easier for the general public gives us a little more power as individuals. That doesn’t mean we will use that slack to rise up and change the world, but it gives more room for the possibility.

I expect that the D.C. experiment will be a huge success in all the ways I care about, and that no amount of success will persuade those ideologically opposed to public services. Fortunately, we don’t need to persuade them, we just need to beat them.

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Atlanta land defenders charged with “domestic terrorism”

Back in May, I wrote a little about the movement to defend the Atlanta Forest. This is a grassroots effort to stop a section of forest to make a fake city for police training. From what I can tell, a facility like that is generally used for tactical training – group exercises that amount to training to wage war on everyday people. In my view, this would be a bad use of even a reclaimed landfill, let alone land that is currently a forest.

The struggle is ongoing, and of course it’s one-sided. Fighting back against the police would allow them to escalate through their bloated armory, so all the people can do is put their bodies in the gears of the machine, to try to stop it from rolling over the forest. They’re camping out in the trees, because that makes it less likely for the trees to be cut down. For this, they have been called terrorists:

Five people arrested at the planned site of Atlanta’s new public safety training center have been charged with domestic terrorism, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced Wednesday.

What’s happening: State and local law enforcement clashed Tuesday with protesters occupying the DeKalb County forest where Atlanta wants to build a public safety training center.

Why it matters: The confrontation is the latest in the long-running occupation aimed at blocking the Atlanta Police Foundation’s proposed complex, which activists have dubbed “Cop City.”

Details: Accounts differ as to what took place in the deep woods off Key Road in unincorporated DeKalb County. Sean Wolters, a media contact for the resistance effort, told Axios that as of 10:30am activists camping in trees were being hit with tear gas and pepper balls.

  • The Atlanta Community Press Collective, a news outlet supportive of the resistance effort, posted a video apparently shot by one of the activists and reported police firing “chemical irritants” in their direction.

An Atlanta police spokesperson said officers and “local, state, and task force members removed barricades blocking some of the entrances to the training center.” He provided no additional information.

  • Alison Clark, a local resident who leads a group advising the center’s development, told the AJC the activists shot fireworks at first responders and then law enforcement entered the property.
  • Wolters denied this account to Axios, saying an apparent operation by APD to remove people from the trees sparked the clash.

As the Axios article notes, this situation is unlikely to be resolved any time soon. I write often about how ecosystem health is key to our survival, and we’re still very much in a system that doesn’t even see it as a factor to consider. If someone with money and power wants to clear-cut an area for pointless, or even harmful reasons, the question asked is whether they have ownership of that bit of land. The only time there’s a delay on it is if there’s a protected species there (which became protected because of political activism), or there are people there, standing in the way.

I support the effort to stop “cop city”, but I fear that there will be more violence from the police; at the end of the day, violence is their main point. Even so, these confrontations are necessary if we want real change, and I think this highlights how the priorities of our society must be changed, or we’ll be carried to destruction by the momentum of the systems we currently have.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

The BBC has warned you – the giant water lilies have no mercy.

My recent fictional escapades have had me studying freshwater wildlife, which has led to my social media recommending me more such material. That’s how I came across this absurdly dramatic clip from BBC. It’s shot and scored like a horror movie, and narrated with the sort of bloodthirsty glee that’s usually reserved for predator/prey interaction. You may see a pond covered with giant lily pads, but to the BBC, it’s the post-apocalyptic aftermath of a monstrous, spike-filled alien invasion. You may or may not have pre-existing opinions about the giant water lily, but if David Attenborough has one message for you, it’s that you should be more afraid of them.

Caturday come on Wednesday this week.

I find Irish winters to be an interesting and novel experience. I’m further north here than pretty much the entire United States, but thanks to oceanic currents, it never gets as cold as the winters of my homeland. That said, the cold is still very much a problem. To begin with, the housing is designed for the average climate. That means that there’s basically no insulation. Worse, because these apartments were built with gas boilers, there are vents to the outside in every room. Add in the apparently lazy installation of the windows, and the result is a very drafty apartment that does not hold heat for long. Its natural resting temperature seems to be around 50°F/10°C, when the outdoor temperature is around freezing, and it gets there quite quickly. More than that, it’s always very humid here, and that really makes a difference. Recently, we got about half an inch of snow, and it’s been just cold enough to keep most of it around. At the same time, the humidity has been hovering around 100%. That means that it’s been feeling about ten degrees colder than it actually is.

I took the cat out into the snow when it was falling, to see his reaction. Initially, he just hid in the bushes, but when I actually carried him to a salad station, he was willing to eat some grass. He was, however, not happy about the snowflakes falling on his delicate fur.

His holiness was not thrilled about the cold, wet stuff on his toebeans. He also did not appreciate things falling on his back. The salad was good, though. The image, for those who can’t see, is of a chubby British shorthair cat, partially hidden by a tree trunk. His fur is mostly dark, but he’s got white on his face, neck, and paws that’s as pure as the falling snow. He’s sitting on snowy grass, watching flakes fall.

After that, he actually was willing to play a little. I tried, and failed to get a video of him chasing snowballs, but it was extremely cute. Then, he chased one into a more brightly lit area, and his tiny brain was short-circuited by the combination of big flakes falling, and big shadows falling with them. He started randomly chasing everything at once until he reached a car, and retreated into the blessed darkness underneath it.

In this somewhat blurry photo, you can see His Holiness huddled under my neighbor’s car. His dark fur blends in with the background, but you can see the white on his muzzle, forehead, cheeks, and neck, and you can see his stubby white paws poking out. He’s looking to the side, and his eye is glowing a little from the camera flash. A couple cat pawprints are visible in the snowy foreground.

Eventually, I managed to coax him out from under the car, and we went back inside.

I’ve been maintaining a livable temperature by running a space heater in my little workroom, where I already spend most of my time. It’s cheaper than running the boiler to heat the whole flat, and thankfully the Irish government has been handing out electricity credits to help people get through the winter.

A couple days later, we awoke to find ourselves shrouded in fog, so I decided to see if I could get some evocative pictures during the cat’s salad run. I still need to get a new charger for my camera, and I find it hard capture the feel of a foggy day anyway, but I tried my best. It felt cold enough that the mist should have been freezing out of the air, but instead it hung around to make everything feel colder.

His Holiness made his usual first stop, giving me a chance to grab this picture. Fog seems to hold on to smells, so the air was full of slightly stale wood smoke, that seemed to be diffusing through the water droplets more than blowing from any definable source The bare branches of the maple trees stand out against the white fog that seems to have consumed the world outside our little oasis of reality.

This weather was much more acceptable to His sensibilities, but he still wasn’t thrilled about the cold, wet, white stuff on the ground, so when it came time to move on from the first grass patch, he was careful to walk where it was safe.

 

His Holiness has dark fur – brown-gray on the sides, with black stripes that thicken into the black that runs along his spine. His tail is similarly striped with a black tip. He’s a chunky cat, with thick fur that makes him look chunkier. His white legs seem stubbier than they are poking out from other the imposing bulk of his torso. In the picture, you can see that he’s walking along a curb where the snow has melted, forming a clear path through the treacherous white landscape. There was too much snow by that stump for him to graze there.

 

He followed that trail around to an area that had gotten a little more solar radiation, and stopped for a blessedly snow-free bit of roughage.

His Holiness is sitting on the corner of the paved walkway, looking back towards the mist-shrouded house. You can see the green grass fading smoothly into white snow behind him, contrasted with the tree trunk that fills the center of the picture.

Shortly after taking this picture, I decided it was time for both of us to go back inside to where it was warm.

For those of you who’re wondering about the title, it’s a reference to a very old newspaper comic called Pogo, about the lives of various anthropomorphic swamp critters somewhere in Georgia. I don’t need to go into too much detail, but Churchill “Churchy” LaFemme is a turtle with an interesting perspective on the transitive property of days:

The image is a four panel comic strip. In panel one, Pogo Possum is scooping a bucket of water, while angrily saying,

If you want to help me feed His Holiness, that we might be spared his divine wrath, or you just want me to be able to do things like eat and have shelter, consider tossing me a little money at patreon.com/oceanoxia. It can be as little as a few cents a day, and for immigration reasons it’s my only form of income right now. See this as me passing around the hat at the end of a bit.

Video: History alla PragerU

All my energy today has gone into prying a couple lines of fiction out of some crevasse in my brain, so here’s a video. It’s not new, but I find it interesting and a little entertaining, and hopefully you will as well. It’s about how conservative propagandists use history in their work.

Edit: Managed to get the crowbar down in between a couple brain wrinkles, and actually found a couple thousand words of the novel hiding in there, so that’s nice.

Charges over Flint Water Crisis dismissed on procedural grounds

The Flint water crisis of 2014 happened as a result of a Michigan democracy crisis that had started years earlier. Flint was one of the primary victims of the way the auto industry abandoned Detroit, and had been struggling financially for years. Rather than actually working to alleviate poverty and build up the community, Flint’s Republican governor decided to go with the too-popular lie that authoritarianism is more efficient and effective than democracy or other forms of self-governance. In an act of open defiance of democracy, the Michigan legislature passed a law, which the governor signed, re-instating the emergency management powers that the people of Michigan had resoundingly and directly voted to remove:

Following his election in 2010, Snyder and the Republican-controlled state Legislature expanded the powers of emergency managers. Michigan voters, through a November 2012 ballot proposal, repealed the controversial law.

But less than two months later, Snyder signed replacement legislation that he said improved upon the former law. It offered four pathways for struggling schools and municipalities: A consent agreement, Chapter 9 bankruptcy, mediation or emergency manager.

Michigan’s emergency manager law is facing scrutiny in federal court, where plaintiffs argue that the law is unconstitutional because it disproportionately targets black communities and continues a “narrative of structural and strategic racism.”

Emergency managers were given near-total power over their jurisdictions, and could outright ignore local elected officials. This was the setting in which the decision was made to switch Flint’s water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River, to save money, resulting in the poisoning of thousands of people, and potentially permanent brain damage for an entire generation of Flint’s children:

 

While it’s still difficult to know for sure, it seems like the decision to ignore warnings about the need for treatment to prevent corrosion was also apparently made to save money.

“As we all know, the water plant itself is operating fine, but without corrosion control chemicals, it had a detrimental impact on the lead pipes,” Adler said.

The city “made the decision” not to use corrosion controls “because they didn’t think they needed it,” Adler said. The state Department of Environmental Quality failed to ensure the chemicals were added, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency didn’t alert the public when an employee first raised a red flag.

“It was a failure at every level, all along the way. This was a perfect storm of bureaucratic mismanagement of a public health issue,” Adler said.

A previously released email showed that Flint water plant supervisor Mike Glasgow was also concerned about the conversion to Flint River water just days before the city would formally close a valve that had delivered Detroit water for nearly 50 years.

“If water is distributed from this plant in the next couple weeks, it will be against my direction,” Glasgow wrote in an April 17, 2014, email to officials at the state Department of Environmental Quality, suggesting management above him had its own “agenda.”

When we hear this person talking about “a perfect storm of bureaucratic mismanagement”, I think it’s worth noting that this was a spokesperson for Republican governor Rick Snyder. The GOP has a long-standing hostility towards the general concept of “government”, and they lean heavily on the notion that bureaucracy is both always bad, and only a government problem. Pretty much any time I get into an internet fight about healthcare systems, I have to explain to fellow USians that all the paperwork they have to deal with from health insurance corporations is also bureaucracy. With the USPS, the deliberately unpleasant tax system, under-funded schools, and many other areas of government, conservatives have a record of using sabotage not just to allow their corporate overlords to get away with harming people, but also to support their antigovernmental rhetoric by making the government worse on purpose. They like when there’s a huge government catastrophe like this, because it’s tailor-made for their perennial antigovernmental talking points.

And as always, the only parts of the government they actually dislike, are the ones that make life better for the general population. What’s more, their constant efforts to spread corruption and dysfunction also provide a degree of protection for themselves. There’s a quote that I’ve shared before:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

It’s from a comment by a composer named Frank Wilhoit, and while I don’t know how I feel about the broader argument he was making, this definition is useful all by itself. The conservative project of dismantling government, and then using the dysfunction they have caused to advocate for further dismantling, serves to both remove protection from the out-groups, and remove bindings from the in-groups. This was a crime of conservative, authoritarian governance, for which thousands of people will be paying for the rest of their lives. All of it happened under the authority and supervision of Rick Snyder, the Republican governor who signed the law bringing back the emergency management system his constituents had just rejected.

And a judge has thrown out charges against Snyder on procedural grounds:

A district judge in Genesee County tossed a pair of misdemeanor charges levied against former Gov. Rick Snyder for his involvement in the Flint water crisis, citing previous court rulings that state prosecutors incorrectly used a “one-person grand jury” to indict Snyder.

Snyder, who was governor in Michigan from 2011 to 2019, was charged with two counts of willful neglect of duty by a public official. Genesee County Judge F. Kay Behm signed an order remanding the charges Wednesday.

Behm’s order technically does not dismiss the charges, but sends them back to a lower court for dismissal.

Behm cited a Michigan Supreme Court ruling from June which stated government prosecutors erred in 2021 when they had a circuit judge serve as a “one-man grand jury” to indict Snyder and the other officials. She also noted circuit court rulings to dismiss charges against other former state officials which cited the Supreme Court ruling.

Snyder is the latest former official to have charges tossed related to the Flint water crisis, although state prosecutors, led by Attorney General Dana Nessel, have vowed to continue seeking charges related to the case. In October, charges for seven other former state and Flint officials were dismissed, although the state’s prosecution team has indicated it will appeal the decision to dismiss the charges.

In a statement, the prosecuting team said it plans to appeal Behm’s order.

“As we have reiterated time and again, rulings up to this point have been on process alone — not on the merits of the case,” the unattributed statement says. “We are confident that the evidence clearly supports the criminal charges against Rick Snyder, and we will not stop until we have exhausted all possible legal options to secure justice for the people of Flint.”

Snyder’s lawyer, Brian Lennon, said in a statement the prosecution efforts have been “amateurish and unethical.”

“The state has already wasted millions of taxpayer dollars pursuing meritless misdemeanor charges and this case should now be considered closed,” Lennon said. “The prosecution team’s statement saying it will appeal this ruling is further proof that they intend to continue their efforts to weaponize the court system against their political enemies.”

They always claim persecution, but I can’t help but note that the United States will hold people for weeks, months or even years without trial, often over petty shit like suspected shoplifting, but poisoning thousands of people? Well, that is generally done by members of the in-group, whom the law protects, but does not bind, and years later, the “criminal prosecutions” section of Wikipedia’s water crisis article shows an awful lot of dismissals.

More and more, I’ve been realizing that the United States is a conservative country, in that it is set up, at every level, to maintain racial and economic disparities. It’s not just the legacy of redlining, or environmental racism, or civil asset forfeiture, or white supremacy in law enforcement, or racism in the courts, or racism in legislation – it’s also a parallel infrastructure designed to smooth the way for those at the top (who are almost all white men). When you’re at the bottom, when the system screws up, you pay the price. At the bottom, you can spend years in prison even when everyone in the legal system agrees on your innocence. At the top, you can steal millions, and get a finger wag as you’re gently told to give it back.

And race is absolutely a part of this. Flint, MI is a predominantly Black city, and that fact is a big part of how this whole situation came to be in the first place. The system does actively harm poor white people as well, of course, but they are much more likely to be treated as part of the in-group that gets protection and exemption from the law, if their crimes and conduct merit honorary membership. That option is generally not available to people who aren’t white (though exceptions are sometimes made for wealth, power, or allegiance/usefulness to wealth and power). I think George Zimmerman – the man who murdered Trayvon Martin – is a good example of that. He had no authority, and not much in the way of political and economic power, but he adopted the role of being a member and defender of the in-group, and is therefor in the clear. Kyle Rittenhouse also comes to mind. There’s always some reason. Zimmerman was probably over-charged, given the available evidence. Was that an honest mistake by the prosecutors? Who can say? But the overall pattern is suggestive, to me, of more than just coincidence. They say justice delayed is justice denied, and it seems like we’ve seen nothing but delay on this case.

I’m glad to hear that prosecutors will keep trying, but the fact that this is where they’re at, so many years later, demonstrates the degree to which our “justice” system exists to serve and maintain hierarchical order, not any meaningful notion of justice.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Defunctland does a deep dive into Disney Channel’s theme

Usually, if I talk about Disney, I’m not going to be saying anything good. While I did like some Disney movies growing up, Disney as a thing didn’t really factor into my understanding of the world. Most of my related brain cells deal with labor violations, litigious and sometimes malicious overuse of intellectual property laws – you know, evil capitalist empire stuff. Still, I think it’s worth remembering that even if the cultural dominance of a corporation like Disney is a sign of deep systemic problems, it’s also just a big part of people’s lives, and that’s perfectly valid.

This documentary is an incredible work of investigative reporting about four musical notes, and how they came to be. It’s a mystery that turns up a lot of what’s best about Disney – the passion of the artists who work there, and the respect they had for each other. It’s a pleasant watch, and an interesting story.

Irish study confirms: A four-day work week is better for everyone.

I don’t often take days off. Some days I’ll do the bare minimum, but I’m still doing at least a little work. Part of that is because I’m afraid that if I take time off, I won’t be able to start back up with daily posting. A lot of it is that if I hope to ever get to the point where I’m making even minimum wage, I need to post often, and have content that people might consider paying for (patreon.com/oceanoxia). Basically, I’m an internet busker, and if I’m not putting in the time, I can’t expect to make a living. Honestly, I don’t expect that even if I do put in the time, which is part of why I’m working on the novel I’ve mentioned before. All of this is to say that I basically have a 7 day work week, which pulls in very little money (though you could help change that!), which makes it just a little amusing to write about a resoundingly successful trial of a four-day work week that took place right here in Ireland!

The project, backed by Fórsa and carried out in partnership by Four-Day Week Ireland, University College Dublin (UCD), and Boston College, examined the financial, social, and environmental impact that a four-day working week would have on businesses and employees in Ireland.

Following the trial, 100 per cent of employees indicated they would like to continue a reduced work schedule. Nine of the 12 companies involved are committed to continuing with the four-day week, while the remaining three are planning to continue but have not made a long-term commitment.

Lead researcher Dr Orla Kelly said: “All participating organisations plan to continue the reduced work schedule. Productivity levels are up. We found significant improvements across a wide range of well-being metrics, including positive affect, work-family and work-life balance, and several domains of life satisfaction.

“Conversely, stress, burnout, fatigue, and work-family conflict significantly declined. Levels of sleep deprivation have also fallen dramatically. We observed an increase across three forms of pro-environmental behaviour.

“The trial was particularly successful for women. They reported a significantly greater improvement in life satisfaction, had larger gains in sleep time and reported feeling more secure in their employment. Our findings hold important lessons for the future of work in this country.”

I’m not surprised. I’m a huge advocate of people having as much control over their own time as possible, and every time I see research on it, the result seems to be the same – moving to fewer days on the job is better for everyone, even the bosses. The one way it’s not better, which the articles I read don’t mention, is that it means that bosses have less control over their workers’ lives. Personally, I don’t think that’s a “downside” worth considering, but I think it’s something that does need to be considered when thinking about the motivations of business owners. A disproportionate number of them seem to be some form of petty tyrant.

It’s somewhat irritating to me that “improves productivity for employers” always has to be a part of it, though:

“In today’s working world there’s a mismatch between the amount of time we spend working and the time we spend with our families and friends. The four-day week can be at the forefront of a new age of work, providing transformative social benefits without losing pay or productivity.”

In a just world, the fact that the companies can afford it, and that it makes the workers’ lives better, would be enough. Still, in this case it seems that the drive for “more productivity” lines up with the goal of more freedom for workers, since happy, healthy workers tend to be more competent as well.

Despite this research, I suspect that it will be a long, hard struggle to make a shorter work week the norm. Powerful people seem to have a deep horror of any movement away from the arrangement that gave them their power, so we have to make the world better despite them.

But the case can be made, and studies like this show how important it is to fight for this stuff. Another day off is a huge boon in a world where so much of our time is dictated by work, getting to and from work, and trying to find moments to live in between it all. Further, with overproduction driving this climate crisis, a lot of the work that’s being done now needs to stop being done, and it would be good, in my view, if that didn’t result in anyone losing their home or going hungry. Some of that work can be replaced with environmental cleanup and restoration work – there’s a lot to do – but this is a golden opportunity to start to undo some of the social damage that has been done over the last couple centuries, and start moving towards a world where the point of life isn’t working, but living.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

The Lancet: Racism is a global public health hazard.

If you start to dig into the history of white supremacy, you start to realize that it’s still very much a part of the global political and economic system. It’s not the only force at work, of course, but it has left scars on both land and people, and it’s built into a great many aspects of how the world works. It’s not always something you can see, if you don’t have enough context for what’s in front of your eyes, but it’s there, and it continues to do real harm. There are, of course, people who are racist, and who cause harm deliberately for that reason, but it goes far beyond that.

White supremacy is a global public health problem. To some degree, we already knew that, right? Redlining – the racist housing policies that we’re told are in the past – continues to disproportionately expose communities of color to things like lead poisoning. Environmental racism is a known, global phenomenon, but I’m starting to think that we ought to view white supremacy as a sort of pollutant in its own right, or maybe a dangerous building material, like asbestos. The problem is that while the asbestos industry has definitely fought to keep making money (and keep exposing people to the stuff), the social infrastructure of white supremacy was designed to cause harm to people from the very beginning.

And for all many powerful people like to pretend racism isn’t a big problem, it turns out that it is a global public health crisis.

First, racism, xenophobia, and discrimination are fundamental determinants of health globally. The misclassification of race as a biological (rather than social) construct continues to compound health disparities. Four research papers show how discrimination leads to poorer health outcomes and quality of care. In a study of over 2 million pregnancies across 20 high-income and middle-income countries, neonatal death, stillbirth, and preterm delivery were more likely among babies born to Black, Hispanic, and south Asian women. Another shows how theft of land and destruction of traditional practices of Indigenous Brazilians are associated with adverse cardiometabolic outcomes. Among people diagnosed with brain tumours in the USA, Black patients were more likely to have recommendations against surgical resection, regardless of clinical, demographic, and socioeconomic factors, suggesting bias in clinical decision making. In Australia, everyday discrimination contributes to half the burden of psychological distress experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The logical conclusion is that racism and discrimination must be central concerns—for practitioners, researchers, and institutions—to advance health equity.

This issue also shows how systems intersect to perpetuate inequities. Racism converges with systems of oppression, including those based on age, gender, and socioeconomic status, to exacerbate or mitigate experiences of discrimination. The core problem is an inequality in power, historically rooted but still operating today. It shapes environments and opportunities. Specific recommendations for health include increasing cultural safety and diversity in the health-care workforce; co-designing with affected communities health-care systems that are more flexible, accessible, and welcoming; and strengthening Indigenous self-determination and land rights. A four-paper Series shows that social equity can be promoted best through interventions that target structures and systems, particularly through radical rights-based legal and political measures, led by affected communities. These are important lessons for health care, education, research, funding bodies, and government.

This report tries to quantify the material harm done by racism, and crucially draws attention to the fact that race is a social construct, and that pretending otherwise is itself harmful. It’s good to see research like this being done, and it’s good to see it being published in The Lancet. For all its mistakes, the journal is still well-respected, and I find it encouraging to see such a publication talking about the importance of self-determination, radical measures, and efforts led by affected communities.

As ever, this knowledge means little by itself. We already knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that racism, prejudice, and the infrastructure of white supremacy do ongoing harm, and that knowledge has not helped us stop it. What does make a difference is when people band together and use their collective power to demand change, or better yet to start making that change themselves. This is yet another example of justice delayed being justice denied. The way the British royal family clings to its stolen jewels may be the most glaring example of this, but the reality is that while the rich and powerful may be pay lip service to notions like justice and equality, they will do everything they can to obstruct both. Whether it was the broken promises to former slaves, the broken treaties with Native tribes, or the punitive debt imposed on newly “independent” colonies, justice has never been served, and that has compounded the harm, and re-inflicted the wounds on generation after generation. Do not trust to fairy tales about history having a moral arc – this will not stop unless we make it stop.

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Video: Positive Leftist News from November, 2022

Recently, I’ve been made aware that some people avoid watching the videos I post, because the content tends to be depressing, infuriating, or both. I know that the format just isn’t “for” some people, and that’s fine, but for those who do like videos, but are tired of bad news, well, at least we have PLN. There’s a particular frustration that comes with being a leftist in a world dominated by neoliberal capitalism. All of the major news outlets are owned by for-profit corporations, and they have a very definite pro-capitalist bias, while pretending to be “just reporting the news”. This pattern reaches peaks of enraging absurdity when it comes to moments like MSNBC’s panicked attacks on Bernie Sanders, a moderate social democrat whose values and policies seem to be in line with what most of even a right-wing nation like the United States wants.

Positive Leftist News features a wide variety of commentators from different backgrounds and different leftist schools of thought. It focuses on victories in the effort to empower the working people of the world, end oppression, and remove the artificial and/or unnecessary barriers that are maintained by the current capitalist order. This is news from all over the planet about real fights for systemic change, and I hope that it uplifts and inspires you.