(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . From the GNR Newsroom its the Monday Good News Roundup [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-08-07 Welcome back to the Monday Good News roundup, where your GNR newsroom (Myself, Killer300 and Bhu) bring you the feel good stories to get your week started right. We got a lot this week so lets get right on it. While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different. Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.” Neither country is a utopia, as readers of the crime novels by Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbø will know. Critical left-wing authors such as these try to push Sweden and Norway to continue on the path toward more fully just societies. However, as an American activist who first encountered Norway as a student in 1959 and learned some of its language and culture, the achievements I found amazed me. I remember, for example, bicycling for hours through a small industrial city, looking in vain for substandard housing. Sometimes resisting the evidence of my eyes, I made up stories that “accounted for” the differences I saw: “small country,” “homogeneous,” “a value consensus.” I finally gave up imposing my frameworks on these countries and learned the real reason: their own histories. Bit of an older article I know, but I think it does illustrate that we can eventually take down the rich and powerful and make them pay their fair share. It was the word that the far right of the Republican party most wanted to hear. Kevin McCarthy, speaker of the House of Representatives, said this week his colleagues’ investigations of Joe Biden are rising to the level of an “impeachment” inquiry. Republicans in Congress admit that they do not yet have any direct evidence of wrongdoing by the US president. But, critics say, there is a simple explanation why they would float the ultimate sanction: they need to put Biden’s character on trial because their case against his policies is falling apart. Facts do not care about your feelings. A statement said so smugly by the right so very often. And its true. The only thing they don’t consider is that more often than not the facts agree with us. Yes, the NYT dropped a new national poll today showing the election even, 43-43. But a reminder that in that other large sample, independent polls conducted in July, Biden has opened up a small lead: July Biden-Trump (via 538) Monmouth 47-40 Quinnipiac 49-44 YouGov/Yahoo 47-43 Morning Consult 44-41 (new this week, Biden gained a point) YouGov/Economist 44-40 (Biden has been gaining this weekly track) Ipsos/Reuters 37-35 So outside the NYTimes, Biden is leading by an average of 4 points in recent independent polls. A late June high-quality NBC News poll had Biden up 4, and a new AARP poll of battleground House districts also has Biden up 4. I’m fairly confident going into 2024, anyone else? The eyes of America are on Hollywood this summer, but not for the usual reason: writers and actors for film and TV are shutting down production with their first joint strike since the 1960s. The Writers Guild of America (WGA), representing 11,500 writers, went on strike May 2 and were joined on the picket line July 14 by the 160,000-strong Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). In the public imagination, strikes are often considered to be fights where workers demand better pay or more generous benefits. These are common reasons for strikes, and indeed higher wages and residual payments are among the central demands in the current Hollywood walkout. But strikes are also one of unions’ most powerful weapons for fighting back against business owners and corporate managers who claim the right to run workplaces like private dictatorships. Unions, in other words, need not only use strikes to demand a larger share of the pie that workers produce — they can also wield them to affect how workers make that pie. WGA and SAG-AFTRA are doing that, too, in fighting for contract provisions that shape the nature of the work process. Writers are demanding that studios increase the minimum size of writers’ rooms on TV shows and agree to prohibitions on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the writing process. Actors, meanwhile, want protections against the use of AI-generated likenesses and limits on the use of self-taped auditions. Its time to remind the bosses of a simple truth: They need us, we don’t need them. A little over a year ago, when the Amazon Labor Union won its historic union election on Staten Island, I asked, with a healthy degree of skepticism, if this time really is different. If the long, slow, rearguard action of a declining American Labor Movement was maybe, just maybe, coming to an end. If there was a real resurgence, a real chance for the labor movement to blossom anew. In that year, we’ve seen Starbucks workers organize across the country. We’ve seen union election wins with “dictators holding sham election”-type numbers. We’ve seen the White House and the National Labor Relations Board support workers like they never have in my lifetime or probably yours. It’s been exciting and deeply satisfying. Churchill said his idea of paradise was to sit in a comfortable armchair with a cigar and a snifter of brandy, being handed telegrams alternately announcing victories on land and victories at sea. It’s been a bit like that for labor folk. But I’ve remained skeptical, partly because I’m a curmudgeon, and partly because at the end of the day the labor movement is only going to thrive if it can deliver improvement in the lives of its members. Folks who are still reading three paragraphs into this piece usually have loftier ambitions for organized labor than better wages; we want to change the world. But there’s a sort of Maslow’s Hierarchy of unions; members aren’t going to be motivated to fight for the working class as a whole when they don’t see the union doing much to improve their own lives. And while there have been some powerful economic wins by unions in the past year, the scale and scope of those victories was limited. They were great victories, to be sure. But even at its lowest ebb, there are almost always moments of hope and promise in the labor movement. Other unions were struggling. The Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island was no closer to a contract than a year ago. The Starbucks campaign remains exciting and energizing, but the company hasn’t shown any sign it’s going to buckle. The jury was still out, at least in my mind. But Tuesday, the Teamsters won their contract fight at UPS. The UPS win was a real game changer, and we’re gonna keep making progress to revitalize the labor union. No lightning round this week, but do enjoy GNR theater: Houston has long been a poster child for urban planning ills. Mega highways cleave downtown, with an expansion potentially on the way. No zoning regulations have led to a free-for-all with endless rows of townhouses dominating prime neighborhoods. Houston’s massive size and dispersed development have made it one of the most car-centric cities in America. Now Houston is set to pass a radical revision of its land-use ordinances that local advocates say could trigger a wave of construction for sorely needed missing-middle housing. The city’s new omnibus legislation is the product of a three-year process by the Planning and Development Department's Livable Places initiative to better understand the city’s housing needs and chart a policy plan to address them. The combined changes use a mix of parking, dwelling, and lot size rules to allow the private market to bring new housing types to residents. More and more cities are becoming devoted to changing for the better, providing more affordable housing to those who desperately need it. he former site of Midtown Mall, which was the brain-child of famed mall-builder Victor Gruen, Parcel 5 was a 1.2 acre rectangular piece of land in the center of in-process or completed apartment-based repurposing projects such as Tower280, The Metropolitan, The Sibley Building and more. While the city sought development options for the space, advocates like Ray “Ray Ray” Mitrano, Steven Carter, Mary Lupien, Richard Glaser and myself envisioned this sad, empty moonscape as a swath of urban greenery, mimicking the successful Columbus Commons in downtown Columbus, Ohio. The argument was solid, but it needed examples of what Parcel 5 could be if activated. Enter the aforementioned Trombone Shorty’s signature event at Jazz Fest’s Parcel 5 stage in June of 2016, marking the first major city-sponsored event at the empty lot. Thousands of people stood, cheering, clapping, and vibing to the music while standing on an uncomfortably rocky surface. The equivalent of a gravel parking lot surface did not deter the crowd from absorbing the iconic musical energy, while basking in the colorful lights and heights of an evolving downtown that had struggled for so long. Unknowingly and ironically, city government, who’s intentions were to develop the lot, gave park proponents like myself exactly what they needed. Very inspiring, and a tale from my own backyard. For the past few years, California has been trying out a new way to do energy efficiency. Rather than measuring the value of efficiency investments based on estimates — the dominant method throughout the U.S. — the new approach uses real-world data to pay providers based on how useful their projects are to the power grid. Now data from some of these efforts is coming in — and the results look promising. So says Matt Golden, CEO of Recurve, the company that created the software platforms to administer many of the ​“pay-for-performance” programs that have rolled out across parts of California. Whatever you gotta do to get the job done. Nearly half of Republicans say they would not vote for former President Trump if he were convicted of a felony, and 52% wouldn't vote for him if he were in prison on Election Day, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published Thursday. Why it matters: Trump remains the runaway favorite for the 2024 Republican nomination, but the poll suggests his legal woes could still harm his general election chances. All we gotta do is put this orange sack of crap in jail and its all over. The SAG-AFTRA Foundation has raised $15 million in the last three weeks for its emergency financial assistance fund, with some of Hollywood's biggest stars donating $1 million or more. I recall a time when Oprah was the most powerful, influential person on the planet. If that is true than the Hollywood execs should really watch their asses because they have earned a powerful enemy indeed. Friday, August 4th - The August BLS jobs report is out and it’s another good one - 187,000 net new jobs, unemployment down to a near record low of 3.5%, average hourly earnings up strongly at 0.4% (4.8% annualized) and 4.4% over the past 12 months. With inflation now at 3% over the past 12 months, real earnings are firmly back in positive territory. But there is no doubt that our blistering hot economy is slowing, as was the Fed’s goal, making it likely that we will not see any more interest rate hikes this year. Despite what some people may say and some more may think, Biden is actually doing a good job so far. The state of Wisconsin does not choose its state legislature in free and fair elections, and it has not done so for a very long time. A new lawsuit, filed just one day after Democrats effectively gained a majority on the state Supreme Court, seeks to change that. The suit, known as Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, seeks to reverse gerrymanders that have all-but-guaranteed Republican control of the state legislature — no matter which party Wisconsin voters supported in the last election. In 2010, the Republican Party had its best performance in any recent federal election, gaining 63 seats in the US House of Representatives and making similar gains in many states. This election occurred right before a redistricting cycle, moreover — the Constitution requires every state to redraw its legislative maps every 10 years — so Republicans used their large majorities in many states to draw aggressive gerrymanders. Fingers crossed. If this works we can keep dismantling Gerrymanders nationwide. At the start of the year, it seemed as if 2023 might be a highly dramatic year for politics. For the first time in well over half a decade, Donald Trump’s grip over the GOP appeared to be slipping, setting him up for a brutal fight in the primary. And while Biden was generally expected to run for a second term, it wasn’t totally implausible that he could stand down. There were at least some pieces in place for real unpredictability before the general election. But this, as we all know, is not how it turned out. Biden, for better or worse, announced his bid for re-election a few months ago, immediately making him the presumptive Democratic nominee for President. Around the same time, Trump experienced a surge in Republican primary polling that has put him right back where he started before the midterms—i.e., not far from essentially being his party’s presumptive nominee as well. While nothing even in the short-term future is entirely certain when you’re talking about an 80-year-old and a 77-year-old—the latter of which is under a total of four active or very likely criminal indictments—you can already say that if the 2024 election does end up being Biden v. Trump again, we’ll have known well beforehand. Nothing is ever certain so don’t let you guard down, but this seems promising. The biggest solar installation in the eastern U.S. could soon perch atop one of the nation’s largest coal mines in southeastern Kentucky. Developer BrightNight unveiled the unique effort at the Starfire mine last week. The surface mining operation, dating back to the 1960s, cropped rolling Appalachian mountaintops into a series of leveled plateaus; most of the area has been remediated with soil compaction and grass seeding, though mining continues in one corner of the parcel. If BrightNight’s plan succeeds, it will cover a 7,000-acre swath of this landscape with solar panels. Out with the old, in with the new. Every once in a while the political cognoscenti latches onto a particular poll result, either because it confirms their priors or seems to suggest new ones. This week, for example, the New York Times/Siena poll of GOP primary voters released on Monday prompted much discussion for five reasons: I really think 2024 will be when we rid ourselves of this orange boil once and for all. Fingers crossed. The U.S. economy is in the midst of a wonderful — and unexpected — workforce boom. More than 3.1 million workers joined the labor force in the past year, meaning these people started looking for jobs and, largely, are getting hired. Almost no one expected this. It’s a nearly 2 percent expansion of the labor force — something that has not occurred since the tech craze of July 1999 to July 2000 and was more common in the 1970s and 1980s. People are getting back to work it seems. When it comes to the Republican primaries, attacks on “wokeness” may be losing their punch. For Republican candidates, no word has hijacked political discourse quite like “woke,” a term few can define but many have used to capture what they see as left-wing views on race, gender and sexuality that have strayed far beyond the norms of American society. The GOP have been using the tired old culture war bullcrap for years to distract their voters from real issues, and now it seems like they have finally had enough. And that’s enough from me for one week. I will see you all next week with more good news. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/7/2185705/-From-the-GNR-Newsroom-its-the-Monday-Good-News-Roundup Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/