Welcome back dear friends to the Monday Good News Roundup, where myself and my crew of story searchers Killer300 and Bhu bring you some good news stories to start your week work off the right way. Its late where I am, so lets skip the formalities and get right into new business.
At worker cooperatives, workers both own and run the business. Sometimes they must buy in to become owners, and they may also have representation on a board of directors. Worker-owners tend to benefit far more directly from their co-op’s economic success, as the proceeds and the control stay with them. While co-ops make up a small portion of U.S. small businesses, the pandemic and its aftermath have helped popularize the model. According to Mo Manklang, policy director of the nonprofit U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, there are now 465 verified worker-owned coops in the country, up 36 percent since 2013. And about 450 more are in their start-up phase.
Given today’s epic income inequality and tremendous corporate consolidation and union-busting — with the work that is actually available increasingly unstable and episodic — it’s no wonder that the people are drawn to a model that gives them back some power. The interest in co-ops marks a return to what Emily Kawano, the co-director of the co-op development organization Wellspring Cooperative Corporation, calls making a “livelihood” rather than just earning a paycheck.
One of the things the Pandemic did was expose just how messed up our current economic structure is, so the fact that people are now inspired to try and change thing for the better is some real good news.
The soon-to-be-launched app, called “Call It!”, was motivated by the Guardian’s investigation into the actor and producer Noel Clarke earlier in the year.
The app allows film and TV industry workers to anonymously provide top-level reports of incidents of misconduct to executives or senior producers on their sets.
“By alerting producers that this is happening, it gives them the opportunity to go and talk to the cast and crew and remind them that there is a zero-tolerance approach, and make sure that training is being provided if reports keep coming through,” explains Wilson.
The reports will be stored in a dashboard on the app, which lets executives track the mood and well-being of their teams in real-time, meaning that they have no excuse to turn a blind eye. Instead, the information will “empower them to take action where necessary,” Wilson adds.
Technology is an amazing thing, especially when it can be used to stick it to creepy predators working in the entertainment industry. Hopefully we get something like that in the states.
As EV adoption has soared in recent years, engineers have been hard at work improving charging technologies to put range anxiety to rest, in a bid to convince more potential car buyers to go electric. Now, those technologies are beginning to see the light of day, with the Swiss tech giant ABB recently launching the world’s fastest electric car charger.
Called Terra 360, the new modular charger can feed electricity to up to four vehicles at once, meaning that drivers don’t have to wait if somebody else is already charging ahead of them at the refill station, but simply use another plug. The chargers are also extremely fast, with one full charge taking no longer than 15 minutes while delivering 100km of range in less than three minutes.
Like I said, technology is an amazing thing.
Although the history of homeless organizing is seldom told, these groups are taking up the mantle of a long line of activists before them: Nearly four decades ago, the National Union of the Homeless had 25 local chapters and 35,000 members in cities across the United States. Guided by a commitment to working-class solidarity and a vision of collective liberation over neoliberal reform, its members staged various successful housing takeovers, shifting people’s material conditions as well as public perceptions of homelessness. As the pandemic continues to devastate America’s poorest, the union’s victories — as well as its decline — have much to teach activists in the months ahead.
If Unions didn’t work, then big business would not be so eager to kill them. Lets stay together strong and organized.
new generation of economists has recently emerged in influential jobs across Germany. This group now regularly shapes political decisions and public opinion, shifting the debate, among experts and citizens, on key European topics such as public debt, the European banking union, and the international role of the euro. Contrary to the previous generation of German economists, many of the new cohort studied and worked abroad. They are at ease with European colleagues and less obsessed with inflation or fiscal discipline than their predecessors were. Whoever succeeds Scholz as finance minister—many think it may be Christian Lindner, the liberal Free Democratic Party leader who, economically, is more orthodox than Scholz—he or she will operate in this new, more relaxed intellectual context.
Nice to see stories of people working on the economy who know how economics actually work, instead of just “throw all the money at the rich.”
Biden has been using this kind of language—moralizing the COVID debate and vilifying noncompliant Americans—for the past month. It’s a formula that Republicans have often exploited in other contexts. Here’s how it works: First, you identify a politically vulnerable minority. Then you accuse that minority of deviant behavior. You depict these people as a threat to everyone else, and you blame them for the country’s troubles. Over the years, conservatives have cynically applied this algorithm to many topics, such as homosexuality, welfare, immigration, Islam, and kneeling for the national anthem. But now it’s being turned against Republicans, because they’ve chained their party to a genuinely deviant minority: vaccine refusers.
I love this, mainly because I hate Anti Vaxxers. Like, we successfully killed one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and these jerks came along and brought it back to life. So yeah, lean on the Anti Vaxxers, have them get their shots already so we can get back to our lives.
The suburban model of the mid 20th century, however, came with a set of laws and institutions designed to protect it against future encroachment — urban fragmentation that enables powerful local homeowners to block new development, and a thicket of formidable zoning regulations, parking requirements, setbacks, height limits, and other regulations. Those who realize the need to create a denser America have only begun to hack through that tangle, and resistance is fierce.
But as Dougherty notes, the victories are slowly piling up — most recently and perhaps most notably, SB 9 and SB10, two new California laws that end single-family zoning by allowing duplexes everywhere, upzone areas near transit hubs, and streamline the permitting process for this new housing. Other states are passing similar laws.
These new laws will not turn the U.S. into Japan, where efficient networks of trains weave “suburbs” denser than Brooklyn into huge megalopolises, and housing is affordable because developers are empowered to build as much as they want. But they will change the suburbs — especially the inner-ring ‘burbs that lie between dense urban centers and far-flung exurban sprawl. As Dougherty puts it:
I hope that this spreads to New York as well. My home stat is absurdly expensive to live in, and I could use a way to live in it affordably.
We’ve studied the history of the amendments to the U.S. Constitution and found that most of them come in waves after long periods of constitutional inaction. What’s more, those short bursts of activity typically have followed periods of deep division and gridlock like ours. In fact, history suggests that periods of extreme political polarization, when the normal channels of legal change are blocked off due to partisan gridlock and regional divides, can usher in periods of constitutional reform to get the political system functioning again.
What this suggests is that a new round of constitutional revisions might be possible in the not-too-distant future.
I know these are frustrating times, but we’re gonna break through eventually, and when we do some good things will be coming, we just have to keep strong.
That does it for this week. I hope you all have a wonderful morning and enjoy all the good news. I know I did.