It looks like Grand Rapids is getting a new soccer stadium. At least that’s the plan of Grand Action 2.0, a city development group helmed by DeVos, a Van Andel, and a president at 5/3 Bank. This new stadium, which will have the capacity for up to 8,500 visitors, will be funded mainly through public funds and a tax hike, with the vague promise that it will pay for itself some time in the next 30 years. 

The stadium will be built on a 7 acre plot of land just outside of downtown in West Grand Rapids. With that much space, the city could build around 1,000 much needed housing units, but with the addition of a stadium that number is reduced by half. Grand Action 2.0 is claiming that their stadium will “unlock the potential for 500 to 550 future housing units in the immediate area.” This allows them to present the false idea that the construction of this new housing is conditioned on whether the stadium gets built. All this, in the midst of Grand Rapids’ clear housing crisis with a need for 14,106 housing units by 2027, is a risky move.

The most important thing to note about this project is that a large percentage of its cost will be covered by public funds, around 65%, or 115 million dollars for the stadium alone. As of right now, it is unclear how much of the stadium’s net revenue will go directly to replenishing those funds, if any at all. 

Future neighbors of the soccer stadium have also brought up concerns of noise, traffic, parking and a spike in housing costs. So far very little has been done to address these concerns, seemingly showing a further lack of planning from the City Commission and Grand Action 2.0.

One of our core ideals is using our common resources to guarantee the Right to Housing, but the way Grand Action 2.0 has structured this deal is very concerning. Grand Action is very careful throughout their literature to refer to the new apartment units only as potential new housing. Public funds footing so much of the bill proves that at any point our government could fund the construction of social housing, but it chooses not to. 

A new soccer stadium that supports local and youth soccer would be a fantastic addition to the community. We just hope that the city will keep in mind that, right now, affordable housing and keeping public funds for public projects are the actual priorities, and should come before a new soccer stadium drawn up at the whim of billionaires.

The post Public Funds, Private Profits: How Grand Rapids is Building a New Soccer Stadium appeared first on Grand Rapids Democratic Socialists of America.

Students around the United States have shown incredible principles in the face of genuine threats to their current and future livelihoods. Grand Rapids Democratic Socialists of America fully support their efforts to demand that their schools divest from the profiteering of the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

This last month we’ve seen the next stage of development of the pro-Palestine protests in the form of student encampments on college campuses. Columbia University sparked the movement on April 17th, but it quickly spread across the coast then to the rest of the U.S., including two encampments in Michigan; one at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (which was brutally broken up last week) and the other at Michigan State University in East Lansing (which shut down on May 2nd). The protests have immediately brought backlash from the police and some members of the public, totaling 2,200 arrests in the United States. Others have been quick to note its striking resemblance to the student protests against apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, and against the Vietnam War in the 1960s.

One university, California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, a trade school in Arcata, California, managed to grow their protest large enough to occupy two of the campus buildings. They held this ground for days before the police swarmed early in the morning to catch them off-guard. The working class background of the students undoubtedly factored into their more militant and successful tactics – the broader American left could benefit greatly from paying close attention to what worked at the Cal Humboldt occupation.

Columbia, UT Texas, and UCLA also had violent police crackdowns, explicitly violating their first amendment right to protest. The police put students in direct danger; one officer even fired their gun at Columbia. In response Joe Biden said “dissent must never lead to disorder,” which is an openly fascist statement to make. Disorder becomes necessary when the “order” is what needs to be changed. Of course, Joe Biden would never renounce the disorder necessitated by the American Revolution.

MLK said it best in his letters from Birmingham Jail: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’

On Saturday, May 4th at the University of Michigan, student protestors interrupted the commencement ceremony. The Guardian covers this in detail – we thought this was a particularly salient point:

Israel has […] destroyed every university in Gaza, in addition to killing at least 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors, according to the UN, which has condemned Israel’s actions as “scholasticide”.

Also at the University of Michigan, on May 15th, thirty masked protestors left fake corpses outside the house of the chair of the university’s governing board (Associated Press covers this). Their encampment on the Diag is still up.

One college, Evergreen State College, has had school officials actually reach an agreement with the student protestors. However, when we take a closer look, the agreement is of course vague enough for a university administrator to feel comfortable with – they’ve promised to “work towards divesting from companies that profit from the occupation of Palestinian territories,” with no real timeline. The school is notable for being the alma mater of Rachel Corrie, an American activist who was killed in 2003 in Rafah by the Israel Defense Forces. Time will tell if Evergreen State College actually divests. If you would like an exhaustive list of universities that have made compromises with students, you can check that out here.

If you would like to donate to the cause, please consider giving aid to evacuating Palestinians, or to medical aid like Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). Second, if you would like to donate to the student activists, consider doing so here, though do note that bail funds tend to get an overwhelming amount of support. No arrests have been made at the Michigan encampments, so check to see you’re giving to someone who needs the aid.

Where do we go from here? If these protests don’t achieve their goals, what are the movement’s next steps? How can the working class gain the power it needs to demand a ceasefire in Gaza from the ruling class? If you’re interested in answering questions like these, please consider attending a meeting at the Grand Rapids DSA, we’d love to talk to you about how you can get involved.

The post College Encampments Seek Divestment from Israel’s Genocide of Palestine appeared first on Grand Rapids Democratic Socialists of America.

Jeff Wells joins the podcast to talk with us about the new book he coedited: Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God: Sermons, Essays, and Worship Elements from the Perspective of Open, Relational, and Process Theology. Purchase his book! https://www.amazon.com/Preaching-Uncontrolling-Love-God-Perspective/dp/1958670324 To speak with Jeff or join the mailing list, contact jefferywells.love@gmail.com Join us October 17–19 in Denver for theologybeer.camp ! Use the coupon code TAKEHEARTHOBBIT for $50 off your ticket. Sign up before June 1 for reduced ticket prices. Email us at religioussocialism@gmail.com if you plan to come, we'd love to meet up.

After seizing control of an Alexandria city council meeting, Northern Virginia locals introduced and passed their own resolution calling for an end to Israel's genocide.

At the start of the COVID pandemic, AC Transit cut bus service dramatically. The District has been slow in spending budgeted funds toward restoring cuts because it lacks the workforce to operate additional service. The same hiring and retention crisis faces many other transit agencies, and impacts other sectors like education and healthcare, as well. 

At AC Transit, one of the major drivers of the retention crisis is bus schedules that don’t build in enough time to ensure workers get a break to stretch, use the bathroom, or eat a meal. Nathaniel Arnold, vice president of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 192, spoke at the April 24 board meeting about the dire situation, expressing the union’s frustration that the agency has “not been putting the time on the runs that they said that they were going to,” and adding, “We’ll be able to retain our workforce by also making better working conditions for them so that they don’t leave.”

AC Transit’s board has called a special meeting on Wednesday, June 5, as part of its service realignment initiative. The issue of schedules that don’t work for bus operators and are unreliable for riders will be a major topic of discussion. A petition for workers and riders is circulating this month, and the union is calling on its members, and riders who support them, to turn out on June 5.

Majority spoke with ATU 192 member, AC Transit bus operator and assistant shop steward Jack Watkins about the stakes in the struggle for better schedules. – The Editors

Majority: What’s the problem with the schedules? What impacts are they having on you and your co-workers as bus operators?

Jack Watkins: The schedules are designed to be unsustainable. They’re designed to place subliminal stress onto the driver to where we internalize the necessity to make it to the end of the line [on time], with the implicit understanding that we know that it’s not possible to do safely. And that gets coupled with the [AC Transit] District constantly putting out “drive safely, drive safely,” to cover themselves. They put up paperwork and memos around driving safely, but then they create schedules and cut time off of the schedules, and create a situation where they know that it’s impossible to do that, and they expect us to silently adhere to that, to walk that impossible tightrope. And that eats into our mental health, our physical health and the way that we’re able to show up for the community.

Majority: Talk more about the impacts on the drivers.

JW: Most simply, we are pressured to strategize when and how to step away from the bus and take a moment to breathe. When we get to the end of the line, we’re often feeling that pressure of calculating to the minute how much time we have to find a bathroom, use the bathroom, come back from the bathroom and get back to that bus. So that we can make that next trip on time. The same regarding our ability to take breaks to recover mentally, to have water, and to have food. I know drivers that say that they don’t get the opportunity to eat their lunch so often that they’ve stop packing lunches. And then when they get off work late they end up stopping to get some fast food on the way home which negatively affects their bodies. With us having a sedentary job, we do try to plan for our mental and physical health needs, and that gets undermined by trying to maintain the schedule because even if we pack a salad or something that is nutritionally beneficial to us, we are often unable to eat it and we find ourselves eating when we get off work late at night, which throws off any healthy routine.

And also our mental health is messed up because we do a good amount of mental math at all times in addition to driving: our brain power is used up doing math to figure out how long it’s gonna take to get from one time point to the next time point. “I have to make it from Seminary and MacArthur down to MacArthur and Fruitvale in five minutes. How can I do that?” Driving safely and doing that is impossible. On a busy day or even at nighttime, it’s impossible to make it that many miles in five minutes with the lights and all that stuff while trying to drive safely. Calculating the risk-reward with me running through this yellow light? Keeping our heads on the swivel looking out for other cars driving around us and making sure that we maintain a safe distance from other vehicles. How fast are we trying to pull off from red lights or stop signs? We’re compromising all of these safety aspects, trying to maintain the schedules which is unreasonable. And it’s this pressure that goes unaddressed.  Management functions in a space where they’re able to pretend it doesn’t exist. 

Majority: How do the unsustainable schedules affect your riders? 

JW: Bus drivers make decisions to pass up passengers, particularly disabled passengers, passengers in wheelchairs. Not a week goes by that I don’t have somebody in a wheelchair that says the last bus passed them up. I believe that is a calculation that the bus drivers are making based on trying to maintain time.  Every day, a passenger says “hey, this bus passed me up,” if not the bus directly in front of me a bus earlier today or a bus on a different line. 

In addition to the way that we treat the passengers when they get on the bus with a pocketful of change, the immediate reaction to every bus driver that I know when they think about a passenger with a bunch of pennies is,  “oh man, they’re so slow,” and that in itself is evidence that they’re thinking about the speed at which they can operate the bus. And the passengers feel that; we treat the passengers like they’re a nuisance or we treat them like we’re rushing them. When I talk to passengers about my personal actions they talk to me about how they wish bus drivers were nicer to them, or they wish that bus drivers would take more time with them. The passengers regularly will apologize preemptively about doing regular things because they have been mentally trained to feel like by default they are going to be an inconvenience to the bus driver. 

Majority: How do the schedules impact attendance by operators? 

JW: We get burned out. I said to myself the other day, “Man, I wish I could call off today. I’m tired. Oh man, this day was really really stressful for me.” And a sizable amount of that stress comes from the constant act of doing all this math, finding these shortcuts, risk-reward, safety measures, all in effort to maintain these schedules. In addition to driving the bus, traffic, passengers, mental health, all of these things. That pressure from the schedules is making a job that’s already difficult, far more difficult.  And so people decide, “hey, I might not even have any hours available to take off but I’m calling off because I CAN NOT do this tomorrow.” And that’s when people have to make a difficult decision between their mental health and their ability to feed their families. And that’s a position none of us should have to be forced in to. And sometimes they end up making the decision to just come in to work because we need the money, but ultimately in a largely unfit position to drive the bus that day. And then, they may get into an accident or burn out one way or another, cuss somebody out and end up getting some type of disciplinary response. Because of the way that they’ve responded to the stresses, they get a one day suspension or whatever, and those things can certainly be mitigated through designing these schedules with operators in mind. 

Majority: What are the impacts on riders when an operator calls off due to stress? And what about longer-term absences like when they are injured or have kidney disease?

When people are out on injury or health reasons, that’s difficult. Because there is a culture that I believe has been created that automatically assumes that the people who are out on injury are not being honest about their injuries. When I hear people talk about injury, they say “no, no, it’s legitimate. I wish I didn’t have to do this but I have to go out because my shoulder is in so much pain.”  If somebody’s out and they don’t have enough people to cover that shift, then that bus just won’t show up and then somebody’s waiting for an extra 20 minutes. And things like repetitive motion injury is a regular part of the job. But I think a lot of injuries are exacerbated by our schedules being so awful. And then that ends up affecting everybody.

East Bay DSA stands in solidarity with ATU 192’s contract fight in 2019. (Photo: Keith Brower Brown)

Majority: What needs to be done to fix this?

JW: We need better schedules. The District creates the schedules. And they’re creating them knowing that they’re not sustainable, but also knowing that drivers have been internalizing the stress and the pressure to adhere to the schedules.  The District uses these metrics around “is the bus physically making it to the location on time?” Without any care or consideration for the internalized pressure. They value the bus making it to the end of the line, but not the driver making it happen.  And the way that operators can push back is by rejecting that internalized pressure. “Hey, I know you want me to do this job in this way, according to the schedule, but it is impossible.” We must show management how impossible it is. I think operators need to be vocal about it, and they need to move to action by following not the schedule itself, but following the safety protocols primarily. And I think that would make it harder for the district to justify their schedule cuts. A lot of passengers do have consideration for bus drivers driving safely.  The way that bus drivers will be able to show the District, management, and the board of directors the severity of the unsustainable schedules is by taking that power back, rejecting the internalized stress that the management and district puts on our shoulders. That’s how we use our power as bus drivers to show them that “hey, I understand that you’re telling me to do these contradictory things. But you’re paying me to drive this bus safely – and not even paying well enough to do that – the labor that you’re asking me for contractually is in regards to driving this bus safely, not in regards to doing these mental gymnastics and mathematical calculations on how I can thread an impossible needle.”

Majority: How can your riders support ATU workers in this struggle?

JW: The riders can can show up with us to the AC Transit board meeting on June 5. They can sign the petition asking the board to meet drivers’ needs by fixing the schedules to address our harsh working conditions. But mainly by showing up to the board meetings and speaking out to let the board of directors know about the conditions of the bus drivers and how that affects their ability to get where they need to go reliably. Riders can tell the board the conditions that they see for the bus drivers and how that translates to them. 

Members of the community can speak out at the AC Transit Board Meeting on June 5, 2024, at 5pm. The meeting will be held at AC Transit’s Oakland headquarters, at 1600 Franklin Street, second floor.

1864. That’s the year Arizona’s abortion ban was passed. The archaic law has remained dormant since 1976, when Roe v. Wade made abortion legal nationwide, but a little over a month ago, on April 6, the Arizona Supreme Court resurrected the law, banning abortion in almost all cases.  

The Arizona State Legislature has since passed another law to repeal the 1864 ban, which would default the state to a still strict, 15-week ban on abortion because of a law that was passed and signed by former Republican Governor, Doug Ducey, in 2022.  

Meanwhile a coalition called, Arizona for Abortion Access has been gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures to get a constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would create a “fundamental right” to receive abortion care up until fetal viability.

Tonight, we’ll bring you a dispatch from the frontlines of the fight for abortion rights here in Arizona and talk to socialist organizers about how they’re trying to change the dynamic so reproductive rights can no longer be tossed around like a football during election years. 

For more info on Arizona abortion ballot measure visit: https://www.arizonaforabortionaccess.org/

If you are a working person in Portland, housing is your major expense, and a constant struggle. Portland declared a ‘housing emergency’ in 2017, and the number of folks living on the street has only increased ever since.

The politicians’ response has been to call for the construction of ‘affordable housing’ — certainly needed and completely insufficient to the scale of the problem. Clamping down on rent speculation would seem a no-brainer, however any move in this direction unleashes the full wrath of the National Realtors Association, via our own Portland Metro Chamber of Commerce. 

But as socialists, we welcome this fight.

We created a Renters’ Survey and a Renters’ Rights Pledge. In the coming months, the Housing Working group will lead door to door canvasses to sign up hundreds of renters in support the Renters’ Rights Pledge. We will also demand that all local candidates for city council, and others, support of the Pledge. We will make Renters’ Rights the #1 political issue in our region’s politics. Join us and sign the Pledge!

On March 10, 2024, the Portland DSA General Assembly passed the Renter’s’ Rights resolution. The resolution was put forward by Portland DSA’s Housing Working Group after three months of door-to-door renters canvassing. The Housing Working Group based the resolution on the successful 2023 Tacoma 4 All ballot measure. To the six planks of the Tacoma 4 All platform, we added our own Eviction Representation for All demand, as well as a call for the State of Oregon to lift its ban on local rent control — and to raise the minimum wage so that one worker can pay for an apartment with not more than 30% of their income.