The Truth Is So Boring

020: Infrastructure Insider Trading, Bees, and Legally Smoking Pot at Work

00:00 / 57:59

Correction:

uhh, so, I did some more research and it turns out you can’t “legally smoke pot at work”.

Can employers prohibit use of cannabis during meal or break periods?
Yes, employers may prohibit cannabis during “work hours,” which for these purposes means all time, including paid and unpaid breaks and meal periods, that the employee is suffered, permitted or expected to be engaged in work, and all time the employee is actually engaged in work.
Such periods of time are still considered “work hours” if the employee leaves the worksite.
Adult Use Cannabis and The Workplace (pdf)

it gets worse:

Can employers prohibit use of cannabis during periods in which an employee is on-call?
Yes, employers may prohibit cannabis during “work hours,” which includes time that the employee is on-call or “expected to be engaged in work.”
Can employers prohibit cannabis possession at work?
Yes, employers may prohibit employees from bringing cannabis onto the employer’s property, including leased and rented space, company vehicles, and areas used by employees within such property (e.g., lockers, desks, etc.).

I’ll make a note of this on the next episode, and strive to more thoroughly research topics in the future. This information just makes all the more salient my point towards the end of the episode on how disconnected these sorts of policies are from the reality of the origins of cannabis prohibition and drug-use-criminalization in the first place.

slides

quick headline: Deere picketer struck by vehicle

@jamieson

Awful. It appears a driver struck and killed a picketer on the line at the John Deere facility in Milan, IL early this morning.
In 2019, a UAW striker was killed on the picket line at a GM plant in Tennessee.

— Interstitial: Workin’ in the coal mine

Endangered bumblebee is blocking Ill. airport expansion that will destroy rare prairie — but only for another week

A federally endangered bumblebee (the rusty patched bumble bee) has temporarily saved one of Illinois’ rarest prairies from the bulldozer, but only until Nov. 1.

Meanwhile, biologists and conservationists are working to convince the prairie’s owner, the Chicago Rockford International Airport, to change its plans for a roughly 280-acre expansion that would go through the heart of the Bell Bowl Prairie in Winnebago County.

This 5-acre virgin gravel prairie is part of only 18.4 acres of this type of prairie left in the state, according to the Illinois Natural Areas Inventory.

Bell Bowl Prairie contains at least 164 species of plants, many of which are rare, and birders have found rare nesting birds such as the grasshopper sparrow.

“It’s like having a 500-year-old ancient, grandfather clock and saying, ‘I’m going to tear it up and throw it in the fireplace so I can roast marshmallows,’ ” said Randy Nyboer, a recently retired ecologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and Illinois Natural History Survey.
…
Airport officials would only comment in an email statement about the expansion plans.

The airport

followed all guidelines and rules set forth by the FAA, federal, state and local government that are required in order to proceed with any development in the assessment area. This included public notices, public meetings and notices to all media in the area. As required, RFD (the airport) completed the environmental assessment in 2019 and ultimately received a finding of no significant impact from the FAA in November 2019,

said Zack Oakley, deputy director of operations and planning for the airport, in the statement.

Endangered species laws say that habitat needs to be protected when a rare organism is on the property —but once it leaves — the habitat can be disturbed. Some biologists consider that to be a major flaw in endangered species protection laws, and attorneys general in 17 states filed a lawsuit in 2019 after the Trump administration further gutted the Endangered Species Act.
…
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, queen bees hibernate underground in winter and emerge in spring to lay eggs that produce new queens, males and workers. The old queen, males and workers die before the end of the season. New queens, already laden with eggs, then burrow a few inches beneath the soil to hibernate.

Disturb the prairie soil and any new queen bees that decided to hibernate there may not survive to reproduce.

“It’s like bulldozing the bumblebee,” Nyboer said.

No one knows for sure, however, if any queen bees are hibernating in Bell Bowl Prairie, and endangered species laws don’t address that issue.

The rusty patched bumble bee has declined by 87% in the past 20 years and is likely present in 0.1% of its historical range, according to the fish and wildlife service.

While technically not illegal to “bulldoze the bumblebees”, the government does have some leverage over the airport.

the airport received at least $44 million in governmental funding, with a $9 million federal grant in 2019 sanctioned by U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth.
The land institute is staging a letter-writing and Facebook campaign, called Save Bell Bowl Prairie, asking politicians who have earmarked money in the past for the airport, to intercede.

some notes on the bee

B. affinis requires three different types of habitats (each for foraging, nesting, and hibernating) which are geographically close to one another, making this species particularly vulnerable to extinction. It requires a temperate climate, and can even withstand cold temperatures that most species of bumblebees cannot. Members actively forage between April and October, thus requiring flowers to bloom for a long period of time. little information is known of their hibernation habitat, but they most likely will live underground or burrow into rotting logs during the winter to survive.
Until the 1980s, it was one of the most common species of bumblebee in southern Ontario.

— interstitial: past and future ruins

Congressional Corruption

Unusual Whales article

For literally months now, the White House has been negotiating with Senate Republicans (and moderate Senate Democrat Joe Manchin) on what constitutes infrastructure and who should pay for it. Republicans, led by Senator Shelley M. Capito, were adamant that taxpayers (like you and I) should pay to maintain traditional infrastructure like roads, bridges and broadband. Meanwhile, Biden and the Senate Democrats had a broader definition of infrastructure that included things like school construction/repair and even home/elderly care. They also argued that corporations and the rich (people making more than $400,000/year) should pay for it.

Biden’s more extensive plan was for $2T, republicans countered with $928B

They stripped away funding for green initiatives and social infrastructure, focusing solely on… roads, bridges, waterways, broadband, etc. Biden had been vocal about his willingness to reduce his plan by more than $1 trillion, but required guaranteed funding for clean energy and new jobs. This counteroffer appeared unable to meet those demands and ultimately negotiations with Senator Capito broke down.

A bipartisan deal was struck by leaving Sen. Capito out of the conversation and making a series of compromises.

no increase in the gas tax or EV user fees in order to pay for these new investments. No increases to corporate taxes either… taxes will be raised on individuals making over $400k/year and IRS enforcement will be beefed up to make sure those making 400,000 a year pay more.

Comparison of some of the big-ticket budget values:

Congressional trades

A short list of stocks was compiled by skimming through the many “Top X stocks that will benefit from Biden’s infrastructure bill” articles that have been published in the last couple months. This list was used to filter congressional trades made since Biden first introduced this plan on the campaign trail.

Highlights from the house data:

Rep. Susie Lee picked up CCI back in August 2020 and is now up 24%. Recently, she picked up Evoqua Water Technologies Corp (AQUA) in mid-February and she’s currently up 42%.
Rep Debbie Wasserman’s spouse picked up EMKR, a relatively unknown mixed signals optical equipment company. It was their only purchase this year. The 45k they invested at $6.28 (over a two day period three purchases) rallied to $10.34 at peak. She is up +60%. This broadband company is interesting primarily because it likely will benefit from both versions of the infrastructure bill. A lot of reps/senators play broadband and these companies will likely benefit from the “Build America” initiatives.
On March 17, Rep. William Keating bought a huge swath of stocks in different industries. Some infrastructure-themed stocks he picked up during that time included CCI, Caterpillar Inc (CAT), Jacobs Engineering Group Inc (J), and United Rentals Inc (URI). All this before Biden’s big announcement on the details for his infrastructure bill. He’s up 20% on CCI and 8% on J.

In contrast, Senators haven’t disclosed as many infrastructure-related trades since July 2020.

Everyone seems to be super into TSLA right now SMDH. and it really makes no sense while the federal government is working on its formal inquiry into Tesla’s autopilot system.

In mid-August, the NHTSA launched an investigation into 765,000 affected Tesla vehicles with model years from 2014 to 2021. The investigation was launched due to eleven instances of Tesla vehicles crashing into emergency vehicles since 2018. The vehicles were allegedly operating with Autopilot of Traffic Aware Cruise Control. https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-autopilot-nhtsa-probe-oem-adas-system-comparison/

Senator Ron Wyden’s spouse bought Oshkosh stock (OSK) just after Biden announced his big climate change proposal on July 20, 2020. She’s held since and is up 67%.
Senator Shelley Capito’s spouse bought American Tower Corporation (AMT), a notable wireless infrastructure giant, on December 31, 2020. He’s up 18%. Interesting to note that Senator Capito’s counter-offer did not decrease funding to broadband at all

Lobbying Activity

Lobbying activity is disclosed at both the House and Senate level. How much money flooded into the Senate at the beginning of the year and could this have affected what sectors were prioritized later during negotiations?
…the highest contributions were reported by the broadband sector (CCI with $1.89M and AMT with $1.43M), followed by energy companies and general infrastructure stocks in construction and metals. This may be why broadband investments didn’t budge during negotiations!
I want to…state, the companies lobbying against certain measures are not being considered here. For example, there are huge lobbying efforts against certain EV credits. These lobbying efforts are indirect and more difficult to quantify, but need to be stated and understood in the changing nature of the bill. Please see numerous legacy oil and gas companies for their lobbying efforts here.

Crown castle and ATC own the land broadband towers are on
It was interesting to note CAT getting lots of investment from Congress but not a lot of return for them…yet.
Energy
- NextEra Energy, Inc. is an American energy company with about 58 GW of generating capacity (24 GW of which were from fossil fuel sources)
- Cummins Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and distributes engines, filtration, and power generation products.
- valero energy
- Enbridge Inc. is a multinational pipeline company headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. (carefully research and word comment here regarding involvement in displacement of native people and the ongoing military occupation by the canadian and US governments)

Takeaways

Biden’s deal was sacrificed slightly, however, it is still set to pass.
Importantly, numerous House members and Senators have purchased stock that will directly benefit from this deal.
This is huge. With the incoming infrastructure projects, the benefit from trading these infrastructure stocks cannot be oversold. Politicians are benefiting from these deals, with possible projects to be awarded in these numerous stocks. They purchased before; they are benefiting after.
Have they leveraged both their vote and inside knowledge of these trades due to lobbying? Perhaps. CCI is one of the largest lobbying powers, and incidentally, numerous House members purchased its stock. What do they know that the average person does not?
The argument has been made that Congressional members should not have any financial stakes in the success or failure of specific companies (private or public), especially before a bill. The question should always be how can public good be best served unbiasedly.

CDTY clip (7.5 min)

This clip is from Congressional Dish’s recent “Thank You Episode“, however, she would probably prefer that I refer you to the more thoroughly researched and valuable material in her recent BIF The Infrastructure BILL episode, about the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework, and the fascinating ways it is failing to meet the necessary climate goals but a wild success at lining the pockets of corrupt politicians like Joe Manchin and others.

A Jaywalking Manifesto (didn’t make it into the episode)

By Simoun Magsalin, 10-12 minute read

The streets are the life-blood of the city—common areas used by all citizens.
The history of industrial capitalism is also the history of the enclosure and privatization of the commons. This was most visible in England in the 19thcentury where common lands used by peasants and farmers for livestock to graze were enclosed for the benefit of a growing bourgeoisie while those who lost access to the commons were forced to flock to the city to find employment in factories—the process of proletarianization. Similarly, streets that were once common spaces for use by the citizens of the city have become enclosed spaces reserved for a specific type of commodity: the automobile.
Citizens of the city have been regulated to defined spatial and temporal peripheries of the streets: the sidewalk, crosswalk, pedestrian overpass, the occasional street festival. In the Philippines, our sidewalks are even further subdivided with the abortive phenomena of the pink or orange lines on some sidewalks such as on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue which denote where street vendors are allowed to set up or not.
The vast majority of the street is reserved for the automobile commodity and its resulting car traffic. Thus the life-blood of the city becomes the near-exclusive domain of the automobile commodity. To step outside these peripheries is to be subjected to the violence of state in terms of the punishment of jaywalking or the violence of the automobile commodity that literally kills millions across the globe.

Jaywalking as Invented
The sign says, “It is forbidden to cross [the road], people have died here,” but it is such a ubiquitous threat that its credibility is doubtful.
To deviate from our defined spaces on the street is to become a “jaywalker.” “Jaywalking” was an invention by automobile capitalists (Norton, 2008) to shift blame on accidents from cars and drivers to pedestrians. After all, the jaywalker shouldn’t have been on the road if they didn’t want to be run over!
The creation of “jaywalking” then becomes the part-and-parcel for the enclosure of the street reserved for automobile use.
That is to say: to create a jaywalker, one must create jaywalking. Ursula Le Guin says it best: “‘To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.’”—from The Dispossessed. (Le Guin, 1974).
Thus the enclosure of the streets needs no physical barriers (though these may still be used). The enclosure is ideological—its manifestation as the invention of jaywalking. This criminalization is in turn enshrined as ordinances and is policed by actual police.
Yet the police is not actually necessary to enforce this enclosure. Foucault’s reading of the panopticon reminds us that we do not have to be watched at all times for us to police our own behavior. The very regime of enclosure, its ordinances, and its police has accustomed us to obey its delimitations even if we are not actively policed. That, and of course, the very threat of death by automobile.
Yet the invention of jaywalking itself is part of a larger logic of organizing our cities under the logic of automobiles—an automobile urbanism (if it may be called so).

Automobile Urbanism
Automobile urbanism subordinates humans to the rule of capital and to the rule of a specific commodity—the automobile.
Automobile urbanism is not just the enclosure of streets, automobile urbanism has ordered our cities around and for the the automobile: parking lots, gas stations, widened roads and highways, bridges, underpasses, overpasses, and bypasses. An entire ecology is made for the automobile commodity where humanity are mere pedestrians. In a joke from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, an alien wrongly assumes the dominant species of Earth is the automobile.
Urban citizens are subordinated to this automobile urbanism and the neoliberalization of urban spaces. The urban citizen—particularly the working class—are out of sight and out of mind to the automobile urbanite.
Automobile urbanism has gentrified and sequestered spaces that divide the city between those with automobiles and those without. In English, to gentrify is to reserve for the gentry class, but its French translation is perhaps more accurate for the scenario at hand: embourgeoisement, or to make bourgeois. After all, bourgeois referred originally to walled off towns, set apart from the rest.
Thus the entire world is ordered under the bourgeois logic of the automobile commodity. To the automobile: the wide lanes. To the urban citizen: the spatial and temporal peripheries of the street (the sidewalk, crosswalk, pedestrian overpass, street festival, closed to cars on weekends). The urban citizen is then demoted to pedestrian.
The enclosure of the streets from foot traffic is also an act of class warfare—dispossessing the urban citizens of public spaces and the paving of homes for wider boulevards.
This is literally true for Haussmann’s Paris (1850s), Moses’ New York (1960s), (Harvey, 2008) and Metro Manila today. As David Harvey expains, Haussmann decimated the neighborhoods of Paris to build wide boulevards to make it easier to crush proletarian rebellions. Similarly, Moses decimated the neighborhoods of New York for a new grand plan for the endless growth of capitalism. As an added bonus, the destruction of urban poor communities is a proven method of repression, as Harvey and Henri Lefebvre notes.
Are streets made wider to accommodate more people or to accommodate more automobiles? It is well noted that wider streets incentivizes faster speeds for drivers, making our streets more dangerous and more hostile to citizens.
Our streets have become dangerous for citizens. Commuting citizens risk life and limb to get to work and back. The road is a hostile place where commodity of the car is king.
Consider the cinematic trope of a car driving into ball bouncing into the street followed by a child’s death by automobile impact: We have canonized the hostility of our streets in our imagination. This hostility is only a small part of the larger hostile world of capital that make up our environs.
However, automobile urbanism was not inevitable. In the United States in particular, it was a product of keynesian growth-for-the-sake-of-growth and cynical fordist wage hikes to generate demand for automobiles. Automobile companies had to systematically destroy tram systems and force the phasing out of other transportation for urban citizens to adopt automobiles.
In this sense, the automobiles are spectacular needs or needs that are illusionary. For if we are not forced by the world of capital to work and regulated to homes far from work and amenities, we do not actually need automobiles and its false mobility. Without the world of capital that marks us as proletarian, automobiles in its commodified forms have no real use. Automobile commodities are false needs imposed by the world of work.
The Philippines has uncritically adopted automobile urbanism. This is partly as a result of neo-colonialism where peripheral countries become destinations for finished commodities such as the automobile. Just as in the United States, cars were privileged over trams and jobs and amenities were made more and more distant from homes.

The Automobile and Mobility
Neoliberalism and its logic of marketization has exacerbated automobile urbanism in promoting literally automobility—mobility as an individual responsibility to be resolved by individual means. The solution of course, is the market—buy a car!
Yet the automobile is not just a commodity—it is capital in of itself. Specifically, an automobile is a mode of transportation that enables the automobile owner to transport themselves, others, capital, and commodities.
Automobility becomes a means of livelihood: transporting car-owners from work to home and back. Thus automobile urbanism has ordered cities beneath the ever marching vroom of automobiles rather than ordered for the everyday needs of citizens.
Mobility becomes a class issue. Those with cars can expect to cover more ground and thus more opportunities. Those without cars then have less options for finding work due to limitations of commute and can access less amenities than otherwise.
We have become second-class citizens in our own cities, the first-class being the automobile owner. Automobile urbanism reserves the streets for them; the proletarian and commuters are afterthoughts.

Returning to Jaywalking
In the context of automobile urbanism, jaywalking becomes the entering of spaces that have become reserved for automobiles.
Jaywalking is framed as an issue of safety and discipline. Yet safety and discipline for whom? Safety for citizens walking on the street? Or safety for automobiles to go about its way?
The very concept of jaywalking puts the burden of safety on the pedestrian—an admittance that the streets are hostile for foot traffic.
For whom is the discipline with regards to the pedestrian? Discipline for the preservation of order—to assure the streamlining of streets for the service of capital!
Jaywalking is an offense to the capitalist order, pitting the mobility of the citizen against the mobility of the automobile, capital, and commodity. Jaywalking threatens to delay the otherwise smooth transportation of capital and commodities throughout the city.
To restrict working class mobility is class warfare for mobility is how the worker can get to the place to rent away their time through wage labor.
Thus increasing penalties for jaywalking is nothing less than a concentrated class war offensive. It is an attack on the mobility of the urban citizen, especially working class citizens that do not usually own automobiles.
Those that do own automobiles quickly learn that the automobile is colonizer of everyday life, to borrow a term from Henri Lefebvre. The automobile colonizes everyday life by forcing its owners into its zone of sheer consumption which manifests not just in the monetary cost of gasoline and of constant repairs, but also deep ecological and health costs.
Automobiles—and of course, capitalism—are literally starving us of oxygen by increasing carbon dioxide parts per million in congested and polluted cities.
And who are even the so-called jaywalkers? Is this not yet another criminalization of homelessness, ambulant vending, and more—the criminalization of working class mobility itself. This is yet another case of creeping authoritarianism; martial law is redundant—it is already here!
And how is this working class mobility punished? Another fine that cannot be paid? Unpaid community service—thereby foregoing wages for those hours? And for what? Is this not redistribution in favor of the state? State coffers that are then plundered?
Thus the streets must be reclaimed. Every step that is “jay” is defiance in the face of the automobile machine. Honk away mga punyeta1—I am walking here.

Right to the City
Yet it is not enough to jaywalk. It is not enough to reclaim streets as our streets for people. We must reclaim the whole city, to create a humanistic—nay, revolutionary—urbanism for the citizens of the city. A right to our streets—a right to the city!
“The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.” (Harvey, 2008)
The Right to the City asks of us: whose city for whom?—for automobiles or for citizens? Jaywalking in this sense is to reclaim the streets as the life-blood of a humanist urbanism—a city for humans rather than automobile commodities.
As Lefebvre, Harvey, and Murray Bookchin notes, urban spaces are where class conflict is most obvious. As minor as it seems, the invention of jaywalking is part as a means of control that capital has over the development of the city and its citizens.
An assertion to our urban mobility will necessarily be connected to struggles in ecology, for housing, for work. For what is the point of mobility if we are denied housing? Or if we go to work for meager pay? Or if our mobility is policed at every turn by the state?
The struggle for our mobility as citizens of the city is thus a microcosm of a larger anti-capitalist struggle that revolts against the colonization of everyday life by capital and commodities. Indeed, it is a microcosm of a larger struggle against authority for an anarchy of movement.
Jaywalking then is class war as it is the penalization of mobility ordered by the automobile urbanism that divides our cities. Against the penalization of mobility is the anarchy of the streets that revolts against the authority of the automobile and the possibility of the right to the city.
Reclaim our streets, reclaim our cities! The struggle for an urbanism for all is already underway!

— interstitial: Sweet Pea (Moduloktopus “ReZen”)

NY Employers cannot test for cannabis use

New York employers are no longer allowed to drug test most workers for marijuana, the state Department of Labor (DOL) announced in new guidance.
While many legal cannabis states have made it so workers can’t be penalized for testing positive, New York appears to be the first to explicitly bar employers from testing for THC at all—with limited exceptions for certain categories of workers.
Employers can still punish people for being actively impaired on the job, but the new rules create a high threshold for proving impairment, going so far as to say that the odor of cannabis is not enough on its own to be used as evidence.
…
In essence, New York’s DOL said in an FAQ published earlier this month that drug testing requirements for marijuana constitute discrimination.

“Can an employer test for cannabis?”
“No, unless the employer is permitted to do so pursuant to the provisions of Labor Law Section 201-D(4-a) or other applicable laws.”
“Can an employer drug test an employee if federal law allows for drug testing?”
“No, an employer cannot test an employee for cannabis merely because it is allowed or not prohibited under federal law.”

…
Since there’s no device that can test for active impairment—and tests for THC metabolites can show traces of marijuana for weeks after a person consumes marijuana—employers must show that a given worker “manifests specific articulable symptoms of impairment” in order punish them over on-duty marijuana use.

Those symptoms must “decrease or lessen the performance of their duties or tasks” and “interfere with an employer’s obligation to provide a safe and healthy workplace, free from recognized hazards, as required by state and federal occupational safety and health laws,” DOL said.

“Observable signs of use that do not indicate impairment on their own cannot be cited as an articulable symptom of impairment. Only symptoms that provide objectively observable indications that the employee’s performance of the essential duties or tasks of their position are decreased or lessened may be cited.”

Also, the department explained that employers aren’t required the penalize workers if they use or possess marijuana during work hours, but they have that option available to them if they can meet its standards of evidence.

The whole framing of cannabis use specifically and drug use in general seems wholly disconnected from the reality of the origins of these policies. Liberals and conservatives alike handwring about safety and impairment upon repealing the oppressive policies thoroughly summed up in this short quote from John Erlichman, councel and Assistant to President Nixon for Domestic Affairs (you know the one):

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
— as quoted in “Legalize it all”, Harper’s Magazine, April 2016

27 Oct

#OtD [on this day] 27 Oct 1970 the Nixon administration passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, as part of their “war on drugs”. A Nixon adviser later admitted it was based on a lie to disrupt left-wing and Black power movements. https://libcom.org/history/articles/war-on-drugs
https://twitter.com/wrkclasshistory/status/1453370915652263942

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Drug_Abuse_Prevention_and_Control_Act_of_1970

The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, Pub.L. 91–513, 84 Stat. 1236, enacted October 27, 1970, is a United States federal law that, with subsequent modifications, requires the pharmaceutical industry to maintain physical security and strict record keeping for certain types of drugs.[1] Controlled substances are divided into five schedules (or classes) on the basis of their potential for abuse, accepted medical use, and accepted safety under medical supervision.
The CSA also creates a closed system of distribution for those authorized to handle controlled substances. The cornerstone of this system is the registration of all those authorized by the DEA to handle controlled substances. All individuals and firms that are registered are required to maintain complete and accurate inventories and records of all transactions involving controlled substances, as well as security for the storage of controlled substances.

Outro

Srsly wrong “Smashing ventilators” clip (7m12s)

Listen to Srsly Wrong’s The Dawn of the Dawn of Everything.