April 11, 2015

Michigan groups propose flurry of marijuana proposals

Michigan's political scene is lighting up with marijuana talk — finally, critics say.

Years behind other states, Michigan is seeing competing groups form rapidly to push for ways to legalize the drug, with players possessing more political savvy, more money and more conservative politics than in the past.

Their appeals? The promise of a rush of tax dollars for cash-strapped government budgets, tens of thousands of new jobs, safer access to cannabis for medical users and fewer nonviolent stoners taking up police attention and jail space.

"The first thing we're saying is regulate it and the second thing is, let's bring in tax revenue," said Matt Marsden, spokesman for the Pontiac-based Michigan Cannabis Coalition.

On Friday, the group filed language for a ballot proposal with the Board of Canvassers in Lansing. It's one of three statewide groups to announce this week their rapid moves to put proposals on the statewide ballot in November 2016, a presidential election sure to have a big voter turnout. ..............(more)

http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/04/10/cannabis-marijuana-pot-legalize-republican-democrat-libertarian-michigan/25611827/

April 11, 2015

Broadening the city through a universal fare card

Broadening the city through a universal fare card


[font size="1"]» The Paris region plans a single monthly fare for transit access, eliminating zones for pass holders, with the dual goals of encouraging more transit use and social integration.[/font]


What if it were possible to travel as much as you’d like by train or bus within Connecticut, from Stamford to New Haven, Hartford, New London, Waterbury, Danbury, Putnam, and hundreds of other towns, and then to travel within them, all on one transit fare card at the monthly price of just $76?

That’s what, in essence, will occur beginning in September in Île-de-France, the region that surrounds and includes Paris and which is practically the physical size of Connecticut—albeit far more populous and benefiting from a far more extensive transit system.

The plan is to eliminate the current five-zone transit fare system for people holding weekly or monthly passes and replace them with a universal, unlimited fare. The universal card will apply to virtually all transit services within Île-de-France, which is the most populous region in France, with 12 million inhabitants spread over 4,638 square miles (for comparison, the city of Paris proper has 2.3 million residents in 41 square miles, and New York City, which has a universal fare card for Subways and buses, is 305 square miles). The map below compares the shape and scale of Île-de-France with the New York region. Imagine a single monthly fare card for all transit service in that area.

The new monthly fare option will cost €70 ($76) for regular users,* up slightly from €67.10 for unlimited rides today in Paris and small areas just adjacent to the city and way down from €113.20 today for unlimited rides across the full region. The policy was adopted last December by the regional government and fulfilled a 2010 electoral promise by the governing socialist (PS)/green (EELV) coalition. ......................(more)

http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2015/03/30/broadening-the-city-through-a-universal-fare-card/

April 11, 2015

Proposals to Eliminate Federal Funding Result in 43 Percent Cut in Public Transit and Would Cost U.S

from the APTA:



Proposals to Eliminate Federal Funding Result in 43 Percent Cut in Public Transit and Would Cost U.S. Economy $227 Billion


More than 350 Organizations in Communities Across the Country Call on Congress to “Stand Up for Transportation” and Invest Long Term in the Nation’s Transportation Infrastructure

Two proposals introduced in Congress to eliminate federal funding for public transportation would be disastrous for local communities and their economies, according to a new analysis developed by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). The analysis shows that proposals to cut federal funding for public transit would result, on average, in a 43 percent reduction in a community’s capital improvement funding. Overall, the loss of federal capital and operating funding would put at risk more than $227 billion in economic activity over six years.

The loss of federal funds would impact the reliability and safety of bus and train service as well as jeopardize new services and projects. Specifically:
• 38,000 buses or 57 percent of the nation’s public transit bus fleet would not be replaced.
• Overall, 66 new public transit projects​ could be stalled. Many of these projects serve as a catalyst for economic development in every region of the country.
• Rail maintenance, expansion and rail car replacement would be significantly impacted.
• Small and rural communities would be adversely affected because a greater percentage of their total funding is from the federal government.

“A lack of federal funding for my system in Denver would be devastating because in just one year it would result in a 15 percent cut in public transit service, and a $74 million cut in my budget which translates directly to job losses in both the private and public sector,” said Phillip A. Washington, APTA Chair and General Manager and CEO of Denver Regional Transportation District. “Our country has been on a vacation from investing long term in our infrastructure. That is why we are mobilizing citizens today across the country to ‘Stand Up for Transportation’. It is time to stop the madness and Congress needs to commit to investing long term in our public transit and road infrastructure.”

There are two proposals in Congress that eliminate public transit funding from the Highway Trust Fund. Under both scenarios, the association says it would be disastrous for local communities and their public transportation systems. ................(more)

http://www.apta.com/mediacenter/pressreleases/2015/Pages/150409_Federal-Funding.aspx

April 11, 2015

It's Time to Think Boldly About Building a New American System

from YES! Magazine:


It's Time to Think Boldly About Building a New American System
The inability of politics to address poverty, climate change, and other basic challenges has fueled extraordinary experimentation in American communities. Welcome to a new conversation on how we make change happen.

Editor's note: This video and statement are part of the Next System Project, a multi-year initiative to spark deep conversations on how to deal with systemic change in the coming decades.

It’s time for everyone who cares about our troubled country to face the depth of the systemic crisis we now confront as a nation. We must step back from the daily fray and ask: How do we actually get on a path to the kind of society—and world—we’d like now and for future generations? We must begin a real conversation—locally, nationally, and at all levels in between—on how to respond to the profound challenge of our time in history.

“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending,” Lincoln said, “we could better judge what to do.” Today’s answer to Lincoln’s charge is grim. If one looks at “where we are” among advanced democracies across more than a score of key indicators of national well-being—including relative poverty, inequality, education, social mobility, health, environment, militarization, democracy, and more—we find ourselves exactly where we don’t want to be: at or near the bottom.

We face a systemic crisis

The challenging realities of growing inequality, political stalemate, and climate disruption prompt an important insight. When big problems emerge across the entire spectrum of national life, it cannot be due to small reasons. When the old ways no longer produce the outcomes we are looking for, something deeper is occurring. We have fundamental problems because of fundamental flaws in our economic and political system. The crisis now unfolding in so many ways across our country amounts to a systemic crisis.

Today’s political economic system is not programmed to secure the wellbeing of people, place and planet. Instead, its priorities are corporate profits, the growth of GDP, and the projection of national power. If we are to address the manifold challenges we face in a serious way, we need to think through and then build a new political economy that takes us beyond the current system that is failing all around us. However difficult the task, however long it may take, systemic problems require systemic solutions. .................(more)

http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/its-time-to-think-boldly-about-building-a-new-american-system

April 11, 2015

The Assistant Economy

from Dissent magazine:


The Assistant Economy
Francesca Mari ▪ Spring 2015


In 1975 Susan Sontag, the American intellectual famous for On Photography and Against Interpretation, was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer and survived after a radical mastectomy, extensive radiation treatments, and thirty months of debilitating chemotherapy. In the aftermath she needed someone to help her catch up on her correspondence. Her editors at the New York Review of Books recommended a former Review assistant named Sigrid Nunez, who lived near Sontag on the Upper West Side.

Strictly speaking, Nunez was Sontag’s assistant for a very short while. But the psychological fallout was significant. The first time Nunez arrived for work, Sontag grilled her for gossip about the Review. The second time, Nunez met Sontag’s mother. The third time, Nunez was set up with Sontag’s son, the nonfiction writer David Rieff. Soon they began dating, and Sontag invited Nunez to move in because she couldn’t bear the thought of her son moving out.

Nunez was no longer an assistant, but Sontag still expected deference. Nunez, then an aspiring novelist (now an established one), would wake up early to try to snatch the solitude she needed to write, only for Sontag to knock on her door and cajole her into eating breakfast. Sontag wanted to edit Nunez’s fiction, and she was hurt when Nunez didn’t accept her suggestions. Nunez found the whole relationship difficult, perplexing, and at times almost obliterating.

.....(snip).....

Welcome to the main artery into creative or elite work—highly pressurized, poorly recompensed, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes menial secretarial assistance. From the confluence of two grand movements in American history—the continued flight of women out of the home and into the workplace, and the growing population of arts and politically oriented college graduates struggling to survive in urban epicenters that are increasingly ceded to bankers and consultants—the personal assistant is born.

.....(snip).....

As in The Devil Wears Prada, fear of the boss and the ever-present threat of dismissal line the personal assistant’s work with both dread and excitement. Scott Rudin, the superproducer behind so many Oscar-nominated movies every year (in 2008, Rudin’s There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men were nominated for eight Oscars each), is notorious for his temper (revealed on the front pages most recently by the Sony leak, in which he called Angelina Jolie a “minimally talented spoiled brat”). He has four or five assistants at any one time, and his former underlings now fill some of Hollywood’s most prominent positions. But while practically every studio head has once served Rudin, the majority of his assistants don’t survive the fourth month. The Wall Street Journal once quoted an estimate by some of Rudin’s assistants that he had gone through 250 of them in five years. Rudin admitted to 119, excluding the kids who hadn’t survived what he referred to as the two-week “trial period.” Sometimes he fires them all at once. They tramp to the café across the street to await a call from the office manager, who often rehires them. ............(more)

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-assistant-economy

April 10, 2015

Just How ‘Socially Advanced’ Is the U.S.? You Might Be Surprised

via truthdig:



Although the United States, in the words of columnist Nicholas Kristof, is “the most powerful colossus in the history of the world,” it lags significantly in quality of life for its citizens. In the Social Progress Index 2015 the U.S. does not make the top 10, or even top 15. The global study measured “basic human needs,” “foundations of wellbeing” and opportunity.

Overall, the U.S comes in at 16th, and some indices are particularly startling.

As Kristof writes in The New York Times: “The index ranks the United States 30th in life expectancy, 38th in saving children’s lives, and a humiliating 55th in women surviving childbirth. O.K., we know that we have a high homicide rate, but we’re at risk in other ways as well. We have higher traffic fatality rates than 37 other countries, and higher suicide rates than 80. We also rank 32nd in preventing early marriage, 38th in the equality of our education system, 49th in high school enrollment rates and 87th in cellphone use.”

The top countries in the study are Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Iceland, New Zealand and Canada. Of the 133 countries rated, Central African Republic comes in last, right after Chad and Afghanistan.

“One way of looking at the index,” says Kristof, “is to learn from countries that outperform by having social indicators better than their income levels. By that standard, the biggest stars are Costa Rica and Uruguay, with New Zealand and Rwanda also outperforming.” ...................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/where_does_the_us_rank_among_the_worlds_most_socially_advanced_nations_201

April 10, 2015

Broad Support for LGBT Rights Somehow Caught Republican Governors By Surprise

(In These Times) After Indiana Republicans passed a license to discriminate law, a restaurant called Memories Pizza in the Hoosier town of Walkerton stepped up last week to make sure potential customers knew its religious rules: “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Certification of Heterosexuality, No Service.”

Indiana GOP Gov. Mike Pence provided official sanction for such acts of oppression when he signed a gay-bashing version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It enabled individuals and businesses to legally claim their faith required hateful acts of intolerance. Pence got all huffy when human rights groups accused him of seeking to change the state’s slogan from Hoosier Hospitality to Hoosier Hostility.

Marriage-equality-hating Indiana Republicans were joined by counterparts in Arkansas, North Carolina and Georgia in advancing government-sanctioned discrimination. This is not the way Americans treat each other. Well, not in 2015 anyway. America traveled down the path of intolerance for too many centuries. Now, Americans look back at all-white lunch counters with shame. Despite anxiety about ISIS, they disapprove of blaming terrorism on all Muslims. Americans aren’t perfect inclusive egalitarians. But they’re trying. On a deeply spiritual level, they hate institutionalization of minority hate.

And that’s what was going on in Indiana, Arkansas, North Carolina and Georgia. Bans on marriage equality have failed. So these states tried to crash those ceremonies by denying the couples wedding flowers and cakes, then cloaking that vicious discrimination in a sheepskin of religiosity. ..............(more)

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17816/indiana_discrimination_law_is_un_american

April 9, 2015

Jamie Dimon says financial crisis is coming, blames regulation

LONDON (MarketWatch) — You ain’t seen nothing yet, when it comes to market wreckage from a financial crisis, according to J.P. Morgan boss Jamie Dimon.

In his annual letter to shareholders, the bank’s chief executive warned “there will be another crisis” — and the market reaction could be even more volatile, because regulations are now tougher.

He argued the crackdown on the financial sector, added to more-stringent requirements for capital and liquidity, will hamper banks’ capacity to act as a buffer against shocks in financial markets. Banks could become reluctant to extend credit, for example, and less likely to take on stock issuance through rights offering, which would essentially create a shortage of securities.

Such factors “make it more likely that a crisis will cause more volatile market movements, with a rapid decline in valuations even in what are very liquid markets,” Dimon said in the letter. “Recent activity in the Treasury markets and the currency markets is a warning shot across the bow.” ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/jp-morgans-dimon-warns-next-crisis-will-be-even-more-volatile-2015-04-09?dist=lcountdown

April 9, 2015

Amy Goodman: Capital Punishment? A Dead Policy Walking

from truthdig:


Capital Punishment? A Dead Policy Walking

Posted on Apr 8, 2015
By Amy Goodman


A jury in Boston has returned a guilty verdict on all 30 counts against the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Now the jury must deliberate on the punishment, which could be either life in prison or death. Capital punishment is outlawed in Massachusetts, but Tsarnaev was tried in federal court, where the death penalty is allowed. The jury will have to decide whether he lives or dies. The case provides a new reason to take a hard look at capital punishment, and why this irreversible, highly problematic practice should be banned.

Anthony Ray Hinton is alive today, a free man. But just last week he was on death row in Alabama, where he spent 30 years. Hinton was the 152nd person in the United States to be exonerated from death row, where he spent three decades for a crime he did not commit. He was accused of killing two fast-food restaurant managers in 1985. There were no eyewitnesses, nor fingerprints. Prosecutors alleged that bullets found matched a revolver belonging to Hinton’s mother. Hinton had ineffective counsel, and no money to mount a credible defense or to hire a genuine expert witness to challenge the ballistics.

“The American criminal-justice system ... treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent,” Bryan Stevenson told me. He is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and the attorney who eventually freed Anthony Ray Hinton. The unfair trial was just the beginning. “We developed the evidence that showed that these bullets could not be matched to a single gun and that it wasn’t Mr. Hinton’s gun,” Stevenson explained. “The state then refused for 16 years to even retest the evidence. ... It was really unconscionable that they chose to risk executing an innocent person over risking the perception that they were somehow making a mistake or not being tough on crime.” In a remarkable and, according to Stevenson, extremely unlikely turn of events, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to look at Hinton’s case, and unanimously overturned his conviction. “Had they not intervened, I think the risk of a wrongful execution would have been very, very high,” Stevenson said.

Nearby, in Louisiana, Glenn Ford was released in March 2014, also after three decades on death row. Evidence cleared him of the 1983 fatal shooting of a jewelry-store owner. Now, as a free man, he faces a death sentence of a different kind: stage 4 lung cancer that has spread to his bones, lymph nodes and spine. He is in hospice care, and wasn’t strong enough to speak to me this week. But Marty Stroud was. He is the man who prosecuted Glenn Ford 30 years ago, and today regrets that he did so. He now says that Ford had an unfair trial in which key evidence was suppressed by police and the prosecutors, and that Ford lacked the money to mount a proper defense. Moreover, Stroud says, if he had properly done his job at the time, and all the evidence was collected, they would not have even been able to arrest Glenn Ford, let alone try him for the crime. Now, 30 years later, prosecutor Marty Stroud feels differently about capital punishment: “I am 100 percent against the death penalty. It is barbaric. And the reason it is barbaric, is that it is administered by human beings, and we make mistakes. We are not infallible.” ................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/capital_punishment_a_dead_policy_walking_20150408

April 9, 2015

When American transit agencies ignore the world’s move to open gangways

from the Transport Politic blog:



When American transit agencies ignore the world’s move to open gangways


[font size="1"] Virtually every new metro or subway train purchased by transit agencies over the past ten years has been built with open gangways—allowing passengers to walk from one end of the train to the other. Except in the United States.[/font]


New York City’s Second Avenue Subway project, which in its first phase will bring transit service north from 63rd to 96th Streets in Manhattan, will provide many benefits for commuters, offering three new stations and much easier access from the Upper East Side to western Midtown. It will reduce congestion on the Lexington Avenue Subway (4/5/6) by as much as 13 percent—a boon for commuters on the single-most-used transit corridor in the country. And it will respond to the simple fact that New York City is growing quickly; it has added half a million people since 2000 and continues to expand.

But the Second Avenue Subway project has its issues—notably the fact that at $4.5 billion, it’s outrageously expensive given its 1.7-mile length. Given these construction costs, few projects of this magnitude are possible. So what alternatives do congested, growing cities like New York have to increase the capacity of their transit systems?

All around the world, cities investing in their metros—a term I’ll use here to describe systems like New York’s Subway, the Bay Area BART, and others—are choosing to include open gangways on their trains.* It’s a simple concept to understand: Basically, people who board a train are able to walk from one end of the train to the other without opening doors or stepping outside of the train.

Open gangways provide a number of advantages: One, they expand capacity by allowing riders to use the space that typically sits empty between cars. This added capacity means that a metro line can carry more people with trains of the same length. Two, it allows passengers to redistribute themselves throughout the train while the vehicle is moving, reducing problems associated with many people boarding in the same doorway, such as slow exiting times and poorly distributed standees. Three, it increases safety at times of low ridership by increasing the number of “eyes” in the train. There are no obvious downsides. .................(more)

http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2015/04/06/when-american-transit-agencies-ignore-the-worlds-move-to-open-gangways/