Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, where your intrepid GNR Newsteam (Myself, Killer300 and Bhu) bring you the good news stories to start your week off right.I hope everyone had a pleasant fathers day. I have no personal stuff to talk about, so lets get right to the good news.
Before getting to the monopoly-themed news of the week, I want to touch on a lurid story that’s been percolating for months in the antitrust world, but was given huge lift this weekend by the Wall Street Journal.
Over the past few days, the WSJ’s Brody Mullins has published three front page stories on a former Federal Trade Commission official and George Mason University professor named Josh Wright, who was fired last year after multiple women came forward publicly alleging Wright had used his various positions of power to induce sexual relations with them. According to the accusations, Wright was able to advance the careers of students at law firms and in government, and did so, based on whether they were sleeping with him.
So this guy apparently has been undermining antitrust efforts for years. And is often the case, people who are scumbags in one aspect are often scumbags all the way through, and so he was caught being a creeper. Good riddance to him says I.
Happy Sunday all. I don’t often post on Sundays, but had some encouraging news to share so sending along a quick one.
Encouraging New Biden Polls - There are now three new polls showing modest movement toward Biden:
November is coming sooner than you think, I’m kind of distracted by personal stuff, but I remain confident we have this. Its looking better all the time.
They see fraying city budgets, and they see what’s behind all those unfixed potholes, crumbling infrastructure, understaffed public safety departments and growing backlogs of unfunded maintenance.
They see a built environment often hostile to people on foot and bikes, and they see the pattern that underlies it.
They see the housing crisis and the dysfunction at its root.
They see a hollowed-out downtown and understand why it has more empty storefronts than actual visitors.
Just as the character Neo eventually learned to see the computer code giving rise to the simulated reality of the Matrix, Strong Towns advocates like you have learned to see the Suburban Experiment, the underlying “code” that is making our communities less safe, less inviting and more financially fragile.
Instead of accepting small towns dying as an inevitability, some people are out there trying to make things better. Good for them.
ormer President Donald Trump has been stung by a number of polls in recent days, including those suggesting his hush money felony conviction may be harming his 2024 election chances.
With less than five months to go, Trump and President Joe Biden still appear to be neck-and-neck in the race, although results of recent polls suggest that Biden may be ahead.
More excellent polling news. Bad news for Trump is good news for us.
housands of people recently signed a petition from Faithful America that urged Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Department of Education (DOE) to stop the "hijacking of Jesus's name" with their civics course in public schools within the state.
In its petition from last Wednesday, Faithful America, an organization of Christians supporting social justice causes while opposing "Christian nationalism," accused Florida of "bribing public school teachers to indoctrinate students in the tenets of Christian nationalism" by offering a civics course that the organization believes "wrongly assert the Ten Commandments form the basis for U.S. law."
See, this is what real Christianity looks like. Christianity is supposed to be about being kind and peaceful and helping the little guy, but all too often the powerful and corrupt hijack Jesus to justify their own cruelty. There’s nothing more unChristian than the current GOP.
Recently, over at my Substack newsletter on urbanism, I wrote about the transformation of Amsterdam from an old European city, to a car-choked city in the middle of the 20th century, back to a “European” city. A lot of people are probably unaware that Europe did flirt with car-dependence and automobility, even in the cities, and then—unlike the United States—took a hard look at what that meant and rolled it back.
The car has a place in Europe, obviously, but not a preeminent one as it came to have in the United States. The point is that Europe could have ended up where the United States now is, and up until the 1970s it was on that path. “Europe” wasn’t always “Europe.”
I think its time to admit that building cities around cars is not working.
The Michigan Department of Transportation has rescinded a proposal to expand a highway — and the advocates who helped propel that victory are sharing their lessons for communities across the U.S. fighting similar battles.
In late May, transportation officials in the Great Lakes State announced that they would no longer consider adding a lane to a seven-mile stretch of U.S.-23 in both directions near Ann Arbor, quashing a plan that experts say would have unleashed a flood of drivers, despite a local commitment to slash vehicle miles traveled 50 percent in just 10 years. Instead, the agency is studying options that would add separated bike lanes, improve sidewalks, and add wider shoulders to be used as busways during peak traffic.
Area media credited that victory to city councilors and local transportation commissioners, as well as a group of citizen advocates working under the name Trains Not Lanes to encourage the DOT to pursue not just rail, but also a wide range of shared and active transportation solutions to region’s travel challenges — and to ditch highway expansion projects that they know won’t work.
“One of my collaborators, Lauren Hood, says something very profound: ‘You can't just be against something, you have to be for something,’" said Rob Goodspeed, one of founders of Trains Not Lanes. “We liked how [the name] describes a direction we as a community want to go in to meet our transportation demands; it resulted in some slight confusion, [because] ‘trains,’ for us, stands for all public transit, and also multimodal active transmission options. But once we get beyond that, [it worked].”
Sometimes that’s all it takes to get positive change.
ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) — Rochester Mayor Malik Evans announced a 10-point plan to make Rochester a “Vision Zero” city Thursday.
Evans was joined in his announcement by the family of 19-year-old Jared Jones, who was fatally struck by a truck while riding his bike on Lake Avenue in 2022.
The goal of “Vision Zero” is to eliminate traffic fatalities.
Significant news for me personally because Rochester is right next door to me. Hope it works out.
KYLE, Texas — One Hays County community is going the extra mile to make the city safer and more walkable. The City of Kyle is investing in a Sidewalk Master Plan so residents don't have to walk in streets to get to to schools and parks.
“It’s important for me to have my local streets walkable and my street where I am, there are no sidewalks,” said Kyle resident Steve Delory.
Delory is one of many Kyle residents who participated in one of two open houses held on Thursday. They’re giving feedback on sidewalks in their neighborhoods and pinpointing what’s working, what’s not, and what should be changed.
Not just in Rochester, the fight for safer streets is all over the place.
Some of the biggest companies in the world have bought renewable electricity for their operations for years — and now crave something more.
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft — all of which have goals to power their operations with clean electricity — have acknowledged that simply buying wind and solar credits isn’t enough. Amazon wants to invest in clean energy projects that maximize emissions reductions. Google and Microsoft have said that, to authentically decarbonize their operations, they need to source enough clean energy to make it through every day and night. This principle applies to society at large: The grid won’t be rid of fossil fuels until it can get reliable, clean electricity at any time of day. The trick is figuring out how to do that in today’s electricity system.
Now mega-utility Duke Energy wants to make it happen. The power provider, which serves 8.4 million customers in the Carolinas and four other states, worked with those tech giants on a novel plan to let large corporate energy consumers purchase higher levels of clean energy than previously available, all the way up to the fabled 24/7 coverage.
Sounds like Duke Energy is putting in the work. Good for them.
In a sweeping change that could improve millions of Americans' ability to own a home or buy a car, the Biden administration on Tuesday proposed a rule to ban medical debt from credit reports.
The rule, announced by Vice President Kamala Harris and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra, comes as President Joe Biden beefs up his efforts to persuade Americans his administration is lowering costs, a chief concern for voters in the upcoming election.
Excellent news from anyone suffering from medical woes.
Every year, California’s gas utilities spend billions of dollars operating, maintaining, repairing, and replacing aging pipelines that deliver a fossil fuel incompatible with the state’s long-term climate goals.
What if those utilities could just shut down their oldest and most expensive pipelines one neighborhood at a time, and give the customers living there all-electric heating systems and appliances instead?
That’s the idea behind SB 1221, a bill working its way through the California legislature. It would pave the way for the state’s gas utilities to set up 30 “zonal decarbonization” projects — entire neighborhoods where the cost of electrifying customers would be significantly lower than the cost of upgrading or replacing the old gas pipes.
Every little bit helps.
June 10 (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Monday rejected a bid by Uber (UBER.N)
, opens new tab and subsidiary Postmates to revive a challenge to a California law that could force the companies to treat drivers as employees rather than independent contractors who are typically less expensive.
An 11-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a lower court ruling that said Uber failed to show that the 2020 state law known as AB5 unfairly singled out app-based transportation companies while exempting other industries.
Companies will always go out of their way to treat their workers as less than what they are worth, its up to the courts to stand up for the little guy, and this time they have.
Here are two key facts about transmission lines: The U.S. needs a lot more of them to transition away from fossil fuels; they’re also incredibly difficult to build.
A big part of the challenge is negotiating permits for the power lines — which typically cross hundreds of miles of land — from the numerous jurisdictions and hundreds of private landowners along the planned route. This is a very slow process — too slow at its current pace for the U.S. to build enough power lines to meet its climate goals.
For the past half decade, bipartisan groups have been pushing federal and state lawmakers and transportation agencies to clear the way for a potential shortcut: siting power lines alongside highways.
Last month, Minnesota lawmakers handed them an early victory on this high-voltage highway concept. As part of a bundle of climate laws and policies passed in this year’s legislative session, a provision in an omnibus transportation bill has ended a decade-long prohibition against siting utility infrastructure on the land along state and interstate highways owned and managed by the Minnesota Department of Transportation.
Good news out of Minnesota.
nflation cooled more than expected in May, new data showed Wednesday, delivering a welcome piece of news just hours before the Federal Reserve is set to make its latest announcement on interest rates.
this and more compliments of Hopium.
This year, more people will head to the polls than any other year in history. With several major elections being held worldwide, 2024 has been dubbed “the mother of all election years,” among many other epithets.
Six months in is a good time for an update, especially since the past two weeks have seen a handful of elections with particularly interesting outcomes. In the cases below, regardless of outcome, democracy has clearly been at work, with voters often having a say that defied expectations.
When we vote we win. And this November we will prove it.
WASHINGTON — In a blow for anti-abortion advocates, the Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a challenge to the abortion pill mifepristone, meaning the commonly used drug can remain widely available.
The court found unanimously that the group of anti-abortion doctors who questioned the Food and Drug Administration’s decisions making it easier to access the pill did not have legal standing to sue.
Another defeat for the anti abortion people, sensing a pattern here.
Chiquita Brands International, the banana giant, has been found liable for funding a right-wing Colombian paramilitary organization, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), that targeted labor organizers, and must now pay $38.8 million in damages, Al Jazeera reported.
“This historic ruling marks the first time that an American jury has held a major U.S. corporation liable for complicity in serious human rights abuses in another country,” according to a press release from the plaintiff EarthRights International.
In 2007, Chiquita admitted in a sentencing agreement to paying the AUC protection money from 2001 to 2004, though company representatives insisted it was a victim of extortion. A U.S. court ordered it to pay a $25 million fine, the National Security Archive noted. No executives who authorized the payments were identified, much less prosecuted.
Good, I hope this starts a trend of other companies being called to task on this sort of crap. Like you don’t even know the kind of fucked up stuff that companies do to other countries. Trust me you will never look at a Hershey bar the same way again.
Parts of a Florida law banning gender-affirming healthcare for minors have been ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge.
U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle’s wrote in an order released Tuesday that “gender identity is real” and invalidated much of a 2023 law that prohibited children from accessing puberty blockers and hormones.
“The state of Florida can regulate as needed but cannot flatly deny transgender individuals safe and effective medical treatment — treatment with medications routinely provided to others with the state’s full approval so long as the purpose is not to support the patient’s transgender identity,” Judge Hinkle wrote in his 105-page decision.
Courts continue to fight back against the GOP’s cruel mistreatment of Trans people and their attempts to legislate them out of existence.
TALLAHASSEE, Florida — A Florida appeals court on Wednesday refused to go along with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ argument that he can shield public records due to executive privilege — a right that had not been recognized previously under state law that could have drastically expanded the governor’s ability to keep records from the public.
And another pie in the face for presidential no hoper Ron DeSantis as he continues his inevitable slide into obscurity. I look forward to the day when I can no longer remember this human turds name.
Stories of working under heat stress are common in the restaurant and food service industry, where back-of-house workers stationed “on the line” must stay on their feet for hours, cooking and prepping next to hot stoves, ovens, fryers, and more. But increasingly, this workforce must contend with an additional source of heat exposure: the record-breaking summer temperatures and heat waves taking place outside the kitchen. The confluence of indoor and outdoor heat has inspired some workers to unionize and fight for stronger safeguards at work. Employees at a Seattle-based sandwich chain recently secured historic protections against extreme heat in their first union contract. Labor organizers say they expect more food service workers to organize and bargain around heat in the years to come.
You know what they say, if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen…. and into a picket line because you shouldn't HAVE to stand the heat, you deserve better dammit!
And now its time for another edition of GNR theater. All about the Washington DC Metro. Enjoy
When French President Emmanuel Macron reacted to the devastating defeat of his party in last week’s elections to the European Parliament, he responded by impulsively dissolving the French National Assembly. Macron grandly proclaimed that the French people needed to decide what sort of country they wanted.
Commentators across the political spectrum denounced Macron for his arrogance and narcissism. In voting for Marine Le Pen’s party, French voters were not rejecting the Republic; they were rejecting Macron. How could he possibly believe that his grandiose words would cause them to change their allegiance? The likelihood was that Le Pen’s National Rally party would gain the most seats; her protégé, 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, would be named prime minister; and Macron would be a lame duck for the remaining three years of his term, governing in coalition with the far right.
But then something quite unexpected happened. Macron’s move caused the dispirited French left—Socialists, Communists, Greens—to put aside their differences and resolve to run on a common program as a New Popular Front. It now looks as if the left could be more unified going into the June 30–July 7 snap elections than at any time since the presidency of François Mitterrand, whose first government in 1981 included both Socialists and Communists.
AN inspiring tale to be sure, lets hope things work out for our friends in France.
And that’s it for this week, come back next week for more good news. We’ll be waiting.