Category Archives: Random

“You can be a hot mess express and still leave the world better than you found it.”

In the final episode of our series, we talk about Diana’s untimely death and the everlasting conspiracy theories surrounding it. Digressions include RPGs, Madonna and Tickle Me Elmo. This episode contains spoilers for the movie “The Queen.” 

Support us!

http://patreon.com/yourewrongabout
http://paypal.me/ywapodcast
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about?ref_id=10420

Links!

• Andrew Morton’s “Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words”
• Tina Brown’s “The Diana Chronicles”
• Sally Bedell Smith’s “Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life”
• Tom Sancton and Scott Macleod’s “Death of a Princess”
• The British inquest report
• “Dodi’s Life in the Fast Lane”
• “The Diana Mysteries”

Pictures!

The Swan Lake dress:

The swimsuit:

The from-space pictures:

The last picture:

The crash:

The country mourns:

The eulogy:

The outdoor wedding:

This week, Diana leaves the royal family with her reputation intact and her title slightly edited. Digressions include “Love Actually,” “Pride and Prejudice” and Marie Antoinette. Both co-hosts reveal their staunch affirmative stance on wine moms. 

Support us!

http://patreon.com/yourewrongabout
http://paypal.me/ywapodcast
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about?ref_id=10420

Links!

• Andrew Morton’s “Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words”
• Tina Brown’s “The Diana Chronicles”
• Sally Bedell Smith’s “Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life”

Pictures!

The cubular home:

The mom jeans:

The secret gym photos:

The revenge dress:

The trip to Angola:

The panorama interview:

This week, Diana swaps out her husband for a Horse Dude and Mike and Sarah act out other people’s PG-13 dirty talk. Digressions include shoulder pads, Billy Joel and “Seinfeld” (twice!). There’s a moment 55 minutes in that is going to make you feel very weird. As with previous installments, this episode contains detailed descriptions of disordered eating.

Support us!

http://patreon.com/yourewrongabout
http://paypal.me/ywapodcast
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about?ref_id=10420

Links!

• Transcript of the infamous Charles and Camilla phone call
• Transcript of the “Squidgygate” call
• Andrew Morton’s “Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words”
• Tina Brown’s “The Diana Chronicles”
• Sally Bedell Smith’s “Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life”

Pictures!

Performing with the Royal Ballet:

Expo ’86:

Horse Dude:

Giggling with Fergie:

The handshake:

This week, Diana gets married, joins her new family and meets the press.
Digressions include Judy Garland, Edward Cullen and the AITA subreddit. Unfortunately, this episode includes detailed descriptions of suicide attempts and eating disorders.

Support us!

http://patreon.com/yourewrongabout
http://paypal.me/ywapodcast
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about?ref_id=10420

Links! 

• Andrew Morton’s “Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words”
• Tina Brown’s “The Diana Chronicles”
• Sally Bedell Smith’s “Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life”

Pictures!

The black dress:

The wedding:

The honeymoon:

The baby:

The public tour:

The bikini:

The sweater:

We start our new series with the story of a girl, a prince and the society that convinced them they liked each other. Digressions include camels, Beyoncé and the idiosyncrasies of British place names. We’re sorry to say that this episode has detailed descriptions of disordered eating.

Support us!

http://patreon.com/yourewrongabout
http://paypal.me/ywapodcast
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about?ref_id=10420

Links!

• Andrew Morton’s “Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words”
• Tina Brown’s “The Diana Chronicles”
• Hillary Mantel’s “Royal Bodies”
• Zoë Heller’s “Where Prince Charles Went Wrong” (Mike said it was Adam Gopnik on the show! That sucks and he’s sorry!)

Pictures!

Here’s Diana when she’s 7 or 8. She’s on the right.

Here’s the infamous picture outside the kindergarten. Those legs!

And here’s the clip we watched. We warned you it was awkward!

I made a video:

I sort of couldn’t help myself. When I lived in Denmark I volunteered at an asylum center. I mentored a 17-year-old Afghan refugee. Since then, I’ve had friends and colleagues get jobs in international refugee policy. Seen them, one by one, become frustrated at the stinginess, the injustice, the cruelty masquerading as bureaucracy. It’s impossible for me to talk or write about this in my own voice without getting worked up, so I tried using someone else’s.

I grew up in a super religious family. Church on Sundays, hands clasped before dinner, Bible camp every summer. I remember talking to one of my parents’ friends when I was maybe 13 or 14. She worked at a homeless shelter, she provided food and clothes and beds all winter, a big brick building in the middle of a neighborhood I had lived my whole life avoiding.

I was in my Ayn Rand phase at the time, and I asked her, wasn’t she worried about dependency, fraud, the homeless people going to her shelter, getting food, then going to another and getting more?

“They need our help,” she said. And that was it. End of sentence, end of conversation. I remember being struck by that, the simplicity of it, the clarity of genuine, actual, real-world grace being defined in four words right in front of me.

This is why I get so upset about refugee policy. It is one of the few areas where our institutions are explicitly guided by morality. Developed countries started taking in refugees from the ashes of World War II. The economic and political benefits of doing so—and there are many—were unknown at the time, irrelevant. We took them because they needed us to. It really was that simple.

Since then, of course, it has become complicated. There’s nothing surprising about this. Institutions need vetting processes, evaluation criteria, annual audits, fine, whatever. I get that. Just because a policy was founded in generosity does not mean that it has no limits.

But the debate about those limits and the steady strengthening of them makes me—I don’t know how else to put it—very sad. As a person, I know that genuine grace is an aspiration I will never reach. As a citizen, I find it difficult to accept that my institutions have stopped trying.

The Carnegie Council’s ‘Impact’ podcast interviewed me about my article The Myth of the Ethical Shopper. I told them the same thing I always say:

MICHAEL HOBBES: None of these violations take place in a vacuum. The only thing we can do to systematically improve those conditions is to work politically.

That would be something like trade deals. In the Dominican Republic, a condition of accessing the U.S. market was increasing the strength and size of their labor inspectorate. It used to be really corrupt. Inspectors were just kind of walking around, getting bribes from whichever factory they went to. Then all of a sudden they were required to have a law degree to be an inspector, they got better salaries. Now, these guys are doing really interesting work. That’s not in very many bilateral trade agreements, but it’s something that the AFL-CIO and other domestic labor rights organizations have been pushing for.

That stuff is really boring, it’s political, it’s technical, it’s slow, it’s policy—but it’s much more effective than buying a t-shirt that has a fair trade label on it.  You don’t know what the conditions of production were, even if it has that sticker on it, and neither does the company selling it to you.

The audio and transcript are at the link!

UPDATE: Here’s the sequel. I show up right at the end!

When I lived in London 10 years ago, biking to work was almost unheard of. I remember a colleague of mine, the only cyclist I knew, rolling up her pantleg, lifting her shirt, to show me all her scars.

Since then, though, cycling has nearly doubled, and is expected to surpass driving in just three years.

London has—visibly, significantly—become friendlier for cyclists. The bike-hire scheme, the bright blue “cycle superhighways,” you even see tourists and kids out cycling now. I started biking on my work-trips to London about six years ago, and it seems like every time I visit, there’s more quietways, better signs, (slightly) nicer drivers, fewer close calls.

I am perplexed by how this happened. All the arguments for cycling to work—cheaper, less pollution, more exercise—applied as much a decade ago as they do now. So why have they suddenly found purchase?

As far as I can tell, the decisive factor for the rise in bikes, and bike infrastructure, in London has been successful campaigning by grassroots NGOs. Starting in the early 2000s, cycling campaigners changed tactics, updated their messaging and started getting results. They’ve become so powerful that drivers even complain about the “cycle lobby” with the same sneer as Americans talk about the NRA.

It’s super cool! I’ve spent much of the decade since I left London campaigning for human rights, and I’m in awe of the way “Ride your bike!” has run circles around “Legalize drugs!” “End tax dodging!” and “Accept refugees!” as a message that’s supported by a wide swath of the public. I am also, rather relevantly, a cyclist, and I want other cities to put in bike lanes so I can bike on them and not die!

So—*cracks knuckles*—how did London cycling campaigners do it? What are the lessons that the broader field of social campaigning can take from this particular one?

1. Get Your Shit Together

The most striking thing about cycle campaigning in the UK is the 60 or so years they wasted broadcasting the wrong messages and arguing for the wrong policies.

Cycling peaked in the UK in 1949, at 37% of all miles traveled. As the road-building and car-buying frenzy of the 1950s took off, old-school cycling campaigners, led by an NGO called the Cyclists Touring Club, landed on the idea that separated, dedicated bike lanes were a bad thing.

Here’s a cartoon from the 1930s that sums up the opinion among many cyclists at the time.

The idea here is that building special roads for bikes represents a surrender. Cyclists had been using the roads for decades, since way before mass car ownership. Being separated from cars, shunted off onto their own little lanes, was a form of marginalization, a way for drivers to colonize space that rightfully belonged to cyclists. We have the right to be in the road, the CTC argued, and that’s where we’re going to stay.

This is, obviously, utter fucking madness. While Danish and Dutch cycling campaigners were pressing their governments to build roads that kept them away from speeding vehicles, UK cyclists were fighting to be right in their path.

For the rest of the 20th century it went on like this, the CTC promoting the baffling, murderous idea of “vehicular cycling“—bikes should act like cars. If you’re nervous about traffic behind you, or unsure about how to cross an intersection, you should “take the lane”: Bike in the middle of the road, block all the cars behind you, go through the infrastructure just like a car would. Rather than advocating for roads that would make cycling safe for children, the elderly or the disabled, the CTC actively encouraged infrastructure that kept cycling a niche pursuit, an option only for the brave, the stupid, the Spandexed (in Britain they call them MAMILs—Middle-Aged Men in Lycra).

The CTC gave training to cyclists, encouraged them to wear helmets and bright orange vests and hoped that drivers would finally, magically, pass them with more distance. They even argued that the bike lanes in Denmark and the Netherlands, which had steadily reduced accidents, deaths and injuries, were generating “incompetent” cyclists. Meanwhile, the proportion of Brits biking to work plummeted to just 2.8 percent. These days, despite the fact that the majority of children in the UK live less than 3 miles from school, less than 2 percent of them get there by bike.

The broader lesson here, other than “never trust anyone wearing Spandex,” is, I think, something about in-groups and out-groups. You can’t really blame the CTC for employing such a self-annihilating strategy. It’s a membership organization. Once all the roads got built, the only people left biking on them were hardcore cyclists—the dudes you see bent over their handlebars, helmets on, earbuds in, wrapped in bright yellow vests, running red lights through central London. Those guys were the CTC’s constituents—not the 50 percent of the population who consistently tell researchers they would bike if the infrastructure was better.

Their own mandate ensured that they were working for current cyclists, not potential ones. The CTC made various attempts over the years to change its strategy, but its own members revolted, reiterating their commitment to biking on the roads, not on bike lanes. It was only in the 2000s—when the CTC finally got competition by rival NGOs, when its bullshit started getting called out on bike blogs—that it updated its strategy.

This is relevant for all kinds of social issues beyond cycling. As much as we (rightly) lionize grassroots organizations, they’re all beholden to their own internal constituencies, vulnerable to advocating for the wrong ideas. For decades, the CTC “owned” the issue of cycling promotion just like Amnesty International “owns” abolishing the death penalty and Greenpeace “owns” not hunting whales. Most social issues are like this, they have one NGO that leads the work on gathering information and communicating it to back to the public. Some of these NGOs are great and some of them suck. And it can take decades to detach the sucky ones from an issue and replace them with one that will actually get something done.

There’s also a lesson here about appropriation. Transport for London, the agency in charge of (not) building bike lanes, must have loved the CTC. It could invite the CTC round, show them some deathtrappy infrastructure, get their sign-off and start building. The government got to save money on building bike lanes and got the added bonus of saying “Hey, we consulted cyclists before we built this” if anyone complained.

You see this everywhere in human rights: The NGOs that are the most comfortable with the status quo, the ones that are already cuddle-distance from politicians, are the ones that get invited to the consultation, that get a speaking slot at the conference, that get repeated and retweeted by people in power. For a shark, the best thing about having a favorite remora is that it keeps the other remoras off of you.

2. Kick It Old School

Cycling started to get successful in the runup to the 2012 London mayoral elections. The new cycling NGOs, the ones challenging the CTC’s monopoly on bipedaling, launched a campaign called “Love London, Go Dutch” and started lobbying candidates to sign it. Since then, they’ve persevered, timing advocacy to coincide with major political events and pressuring politicians to include cycling in their manifestos.

Considering how recent this all is, you would think it would be a parable about the importance of new media, how cyclists twitterred and Facebooked and Snapchatted their way into a bike boom. But, the more you look into it, the more it starts to look like an example of the opposite.

The London Cycling Campaign, the main NGO advocating for better bike lanes, has 12,000 members, 30,000 supporters and handful of franchises—the Camden Cycling Campaign, the Hackney Cycling Campaign, and so on—focused on each of London’s boroughs. This entire network has been mobilized to relay a clear, simple, specific message to London’s politicians at every level: Build us more bike lanes.

Most of the ways they do this are decidedly old-school. They hold protest rides. They show up at town-hall meetings. They give their members the contact details of their ward councilor. One of the smartest things they’ve done is the annual “Sky Ride,” one Sunday a summer when London closes all its highways so families can bike on them. This not only generates positive messaging (you can only bitch at Transport for London so many times), it also produces photos of adorable children on bikes that the LCC can show to politicians and ask “Why can’t kids do this every single day?”

Another analog strategy they’ve used is converting cycling deaths from statistic to tragedy. As anyone with eyes and a brain will tell you, biking in London is dangerous. What it’s not, though, is uniformly dangerous. The vast majority of cycling deaths happen at intersections—at, in fact, the same fucking intersections, over and over again.

In 2013, after six cyclists were killed in two weeks, most of them by delivery trucks, the LCC started pointing out to the media, the public and politicians that these deaths were not inevitable. They gave names and backstories to the people that were killed and organized a mass ride to London’s 10 deadliest intersections. Stop Killing Cyclists, another NGO, held a mass ‘Die-In‘ outside Transport for London. All this direct action demonstrated the argument that biking is not dangerous. What’s dangerous is how London’s governing bodies arrange public space so cyclists have to share it with trucks and taxis and buses. Accidents are the result of negligence by engineers and planners, not carelessness by cyclists.

Earlier this year I interviewed a consultant who has advised the Gates Foundation on its use of technology to solve global poverty. The National Rifle Association, he pointed out, is one of the most effective lobbying organizations in the world. And sure, it has a website, it’s on Twitter. But mostly, it wins at everything not because it uses new media but because it has perfected the old: Forming a constituency, articulating a clear agenda and threatening politicians with the loss of a voting bloc if they don’t fall in line. Cycling campaigners finally figured out that if you want politicians to listen, you have to hit them in the only place it hurts.

3. Take the Right Lessons from the Right Countries

This is Exhibition Road, in West London. On the left is what it used to look like. On the right is what it looks like now.

The idea here is “shared space”: Rather than a forest of signs telling drivers, bikers and walkers how to behave, the street allows everyone to interact with each other, to negotiate between themselves. We’re all adults here, after all, and it’s a kind of freedom to be in a space that’s open to improvisation, rather than striped into types and speeds and modes.

This concept, its architects love to point out, is actually borrowed from the Dutch, who famously pulled out stop signs at intersections and un-painted bike lanes in favor of streets that were uniform, interactive, human.

It’s a super appealing idea! We’ve all been to streets where people are sitting at cafes, or cruising past on their bikes, or slowly cruising past in their convertible. They’re delightful.

The only problem is what Exhibition Road is actually fucking like.

Picture by Mark Treasure

 

A friend of mine works nearby, so I bike down this street nearly every time I’m in London. Pulling out the stop signs and putting in those painted roundabouts has given cab drivers license to careen though them with barely a swerve. Pedestrians and bikers, far from “sharing the space” with the cars whizzing past, are huddled onto the sidewalk out of their way, the same way we are on every other goddamn street. Who wants to sit at a café where you breathe in diesel, where you shout over engine noise, where you’re boxed in by parked cars?

This is what Mark Treasure calls “placefaking.” Everyone agrees, in principle, that neighborhoods need destinations: Plazas and streets made for visiting, rather than driving through. Dutch cities have a lot of these. They’re clean, peaceful, cute, slow. You find yourself using words like “stroll” and “wander.”

And, yes, those Dutch streets have pretty pavements and very few road signs. But that’s not what makes them places. What makes them places is that they have barely any cars on them. The Dutch do this deliberately. They put blockades at one end of a street to keep cars from using it as a through route. Or they create loop-de-loops of one-way streets so they don’t actually lead anywhere. Those streets are cute and quiet because the only people who drive on them are people who live there or are delivering something. Pretty paving is fine, sure, it can stay. But it’s the least important thing about what makes a place a place.

This is the constant danger of any type of campaigning: The actors you’re aiming it at will take components of the shit you’re asking for and ignore the purpose behind it. They’ll try to give you what you want without taking anything away from anyone else. The way countries do this is by passing laws that campaigners ask for, then refusing to enforce them. The way companies do this is by finding easy, profitable fixes to their sustainability problems. They switch to fluorescent light bulbs, or they sell their waste to recycling companies. All this shit is frosting, ways for governments and businesses to look like they’re improving while continuing to violate human rights or run a polluting factory. Well, we tell ourselves, it’s better than nothing.

This is what I always found to be the hardest part about campaigning: Not the messaging, but the monotony. Exhibition Road used to be a clogged esophagus for cars. It remains one, but improving it any further just got exponentially harder. Taking two steps forward and one back is, as I have argued in basically everything I’ve ever written, the way the world works. And it is exhausting.

4. Focus on Structural Solutions

One of the most ubiquitous insights of the last 10 years is that the countries that have the highest percentage of organ donors are not the ones that cajole their citizens through public awareness campaigns. It’s the countries where donating your organs is the default on the form. It’s that simple. By making it the norm, that little tick box teaches people that donating their organs is the baseline, expected, that they should have a reason not to.

The idea that our environment affects our behavior, often in invisible ways, has wormed its way into the zeitgeist, from tax forms to TED Talks, and there’s nothing governments like these days more than bragging about how they’re “nudging” their citizens toward pro-social behavior.

The implications of this—both the idea and its current faddishness—for campaigners in general and cycling in particular are obvious: Streets teach you how to drive on them. The width of the lanes, the sharpness of the corners, the smoothness of the tarmac, they’re all telling you the “right” speed to drive at, whether you’re consciously hearing them or not.

A few years ago, some cycling NGOs in the UK launched a campaign called “20 is plenty.” They wanted cities across the UK, as well as large parts of London, to make the speed limit 20 miles per hour. Slowing traffic, went the logic, would encourage people to bike, would quiet streets to make them more walkable for pedestrians, more play-innable for children.

This, it turns out, was a huge waste of everyone’s time. Islington, one of the London boroughs that imposed the lower speed limits, found that it reduced the speed of traffic by … 1 mph. Portsmouth, an entire city, did the same thing and saw average speeds fall from 19.8mph to 18.5mph and the number of deaths and injuries actually increase.

Since that campaign, cycling campaigners have wised up. These days it’s all about structural solutions—updating intersections with separate traffic lights for bikes, or retrofitting trucks so drivers can see the cyclist at their flank before they turn on top of her. As a government report on the Portsmouth experiment notes, “20mph limits are most appropriate for roads where average speeds are already low.” In other words, update the roads, not the rules.

Not that that’s easy. When I used to consult corporations on how to protect human rights, the first thing they always suggested was a handbook: A little guide with tips for their managers on spotting child labor or gender discrimination or human trafficking. We would spend a month researching it, a month writing it—and about 10 minutes implementing it. Making up new rules and delivering new messages is easy. That’s exactly why it’s the first resort of under-budgeted government departments and marginalized corporate sustainability departments.

If you look at the two social issues where companies have genuinely improved in the last 30 years—workplace accidents and corruption—it’s because they started monitoring their own performance, gave bonuses to managers who improved and fired managers who didn’t. Alcoa famously started examining all of its workplace accidents, poring over them like plane crashes, to make sure they never happened again. Siemens installed an ombudsman whose entire job was to root out corruption in his own company. That’s what institutions do when they actually want to solve a problem. Handbooks and rules and awareness-raising are what they do when they want to seem like they are.

5. It’s the Money, Stupid

Here’s a graph of the percentage of trips made by bike in the UK. Joe Dunckley of At War With the Motorist has handily added boxes for each time a politician has declared that a “cycling revolution” was afoot.

This is both extremely cynical and extremely accurate. Every 7-10 years for the previous 50, the UK government has released a “Let’s Get Britain Cycling!”-type strategy document. The fonts have changed over the years, but the content is remarkably consistent. The survey of existing biking levels. The consultation with cyclists. The statement of the urgent need for better infrastructure. The same sore-thumb-obvious observations that cycling is good for health, environment, pocketbook. A dash of concern for its maleness and whiteness, a sprinkling of the word “inclusive.” Then a dozen or so recommendations for making it mass. Build infrastructure, train kids, sensitize drivers.

Then, nothing.

The pdfs recede into the tangled ivy of the Department for Transport website. The recommendations are ignored, their contradiction with binding engineering policies unresolved. And the targets—get 10% of Brits biking to work, double the number of kids biking to school—get repeated, verbatim, in the next strategy, the next decade.

Let’s not pretend to be surprised by any of this. Bold announcements and flaccid follow-through are inherent to the structure of democratic politics. Our representatives get acclaim for announcing things and criticism for actually doing them. It is cheap and easy to hold consultations, produce models and projections and release a target and a “roadmap.”

Actually doing stuff is where it gets hard, expensive and vote-subtracting. Getting people cycling requires coordinating overlapping jurisdictions, tendering out contracts, meeting a timetable, allocating a budget. This is the stuff of trade-offs and sacrifices, the exact kind of things for which we need politicians—and for which we never reward them.

It is tempting to say that this time is different. Boris Johnson, before he became the most hated man in Britain, was the mayor of London for eight years. He was also a cyclist, and the first London politician to (sort of) follow through on the government’s commitment to promote biking. As one of his last acts in office, he installed a big, fat, separated bike lane right along the Thames, narrowing the road and pissing off thousands of drivers. Nearly every single mayoral candidate in his wake signed on to keep expanding bike lanes.

Which is great! But then, a week after the election, after the political commitments and pastel statements, the government released its nationwide Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy … and steady cuts to the cycling infrastructure budget. By 2020, cycling will be funded by the UK government at roughly the same level as hoverboarding.

The lesson that emerges from all this is an essential corollary to the earlier rule, the one about forming a voting bloc and mobilizing it: The only thing that matters is the money.

All of those earlier strategy documents failed to allocate any significant budget to cycling infrastructure. The 1996 strategy envisioned the creation of a “National Cycling Network” across the country, but didn’t fund anyone to pave it. Local councils got some volunteers to clear branches off rural trails and put up a few signs, that was it. In 2001, the government announced a Cycling Project Fund that would encourage cities to install cycle lanes. It was £2 million. Nationwide. That’s about what London spends on the Tube every two hours.

This is a tricky issue for the left. Progressives are constantly being accused of trying to increase government spending, of creeping toward communism. As a result, left-wing social movements are often reluctant to admit that social change does, in fact, cost money. Instead of arguing that our issues require—and are worth—investing in, we act like they’re freebies. Organic farms are cheaper than industrial ones! Renewable energy pays for itself! Higher wages will improve productivity! And we accept, infuriatingly, plans like the last dozen or so in the UK, ones that make all the right commitments but aren’t willing to pay for them.

At my dayjob, I’ve spent the last three years helping developing countries write National Action Plans. The idea is to get a government to commit to taking action, to make binding targets, to finally coordinate all its ministries and agencies toward a shared goal. Women’s rights, child labour, HIV/AIDS, climate change—pick your issue and at least a dozen developing countries have one of these plans to address it.

But in all the processes I participated in, no one ever seemed to check what had happened to all the previous plans, why the last set of targets weren’t reached. For me, brought in as a consultant, my job was the make sure the plans made the right commitments, not whether they were ever carried out. I could go home and tell my donors that, because of me, the government of Country X adopted a plan on Issue Y and promised to reduce Problem Z by 50 percent before 2025. Then, my job was over. No one wanted to pay for someone local to show up every day after that, to make sure these commitments ever become anything more than a wish list.

In the last few years, London cycling campaigners have gotten smarter, and angrier, about this. There was a huge outcry when the stingy Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy was announced, and campaigners felt comfortable, finally, pointing out that the bike lanes on London’s bridges carry more people every day than all the car lanes combined, and it’s about time they got paid like they did.

For decades we’ve been doing it backwards, trying to get the targets first and hoping the funding will follow. Campaigners have finally realized, fuck the targets. Get the cheddar first and then start debating how to spend it.

 

We like to think of social change as a rolling snowball, that it builds speed and momentum as it goes. And maybe, at some point, it is. But for the decades before that, it’s a child learning to walk. Teetering, spinning, going backwards, falling down.

It’s not clear that this “cycling revolution” in London is going to last. Social change of any kind is fragile. Britain has, understandably, more pressing issues to focus on at the moment. Maybe in 10 years biking will be gone and the new lanes Boris built will be filled with self-driving Razor Scooters or something. Or, maybe London will finally be as safe and fun as Amsterdam to bike in. But at least, finally, campaigners have figured out the right thing to ask for and the right way to ask it. Campaigners for other issues should make sure they’re doing the same thing.

This video, and the article it’s based on, are the culmination of about 10 years of feeling increasingly powerless in what I do for a living.

Things were never good in Chisumbanje, but they have never been this bad. One of Chachengwa’s granddaughters is 13 years old. After she stopped going to school because Chachengwa couldn’t afford the tuition anymore, she became one of the many wives of a village elder. She’s already pregnant. The daughters of Chachengwa’s neighbors and friends have jumped the border to Mozambique, becoming prostitutes in the cities or on the highways, making just enough money to eat plus a little extra to send back home. The men were promised jobs on the sugarcane plantations, but the company running them only hires temporary workers and pays just $2, plus a warm meal, for a day’s work.

[…]

You know where I’m going with this, right? I’m about to tell you that the company behind all this is Monsanto, or Shell, or Coca-Cola. That your car is running on the ethanol this plant is producing. That the U.S. government is funding or facilitating or failing to prevent what is taking place here.

But none of that is true. The company responsible for all this is called Green Fuel. It is headquartered in Zimbabwe, it isn’t listed on any stock exchange, it doesn’t sell any products in the United States, and it has no Western investors.

And it is, increasingly, the rule rather than the exception. When you think of the worst abuses in poor countries — land grabs, sweatshops, cash-filled envelopes passed to politicians — you probably think they’re committed by companies based in rich ones: Nike in Indonesia, Shell in Nigeria, Dow in Bhopal, India.

These are the cases you’re most likely to hear about, but they are no longer representative of how these abuses actually take place — or who commits them. These days, the worst multinational corporations have names you’ve never heard. They come from places like China and South Africa and Russia. The countries where they are headquartered are unable to regulate them, and the countries where they operate are unwilling to.

Every time I travel to Africa to find out how corporations are violating human rights, I hear the same thing: The western companies, the ones we boycott and rally against and shout down, aren’t the worst offenders. In fact, they’re barely on the radar. The worst companies, the ones that really terrify people, are the Chinese, the Korean and the Indian ones.

For years now I’ve been asking people in my field, at conferences, during trainings: What are we doing about south-based companies? 

So far, the answer I hear the most is that we have to wait for consumer movements to spring up in the BRICs, for Chinese consumers to chase down their companies in Africa the way we chased down Nike in Indonesia.

In other words, what we should do is a) wait and b) hope.

That fucking sucks, obviously, but it’s not like I have a better answer. When you write these articles you always have to end on a note of optimism, no matter how false, just so you don’t drag readers down into despair with you. But somehow I couldn’t muster that this time. I genuinely don’t know what to do about this problem and, as far as I can tell, no one else does either.

I’ve been watching, impotently, as my home city has embarked upon a giant infrastructure project that has no chance of success. Two weeks ago, I decided to stop boring my German friends by complaining about this all the time and start boring the entire internet!

Here’s the video I made about the huge mistake Seattle has made, and why other cities make the same one over and over again.

I did a live interview on Leonard Lopate’s show on WNYC yesterday. According to the comments on their site, I am an insufferable upspeaker? Whatever, I managed not to curse for a whole 40 minutes. I consider this a major accomplishment.

Today I have an article on Highline about how Mark Zuckerberg should give away his $45 billion.

It’s a big deal for me! Not like because it’s on the internet and super long and got fact-checked and stuff. It’s the first story I’ve written that I didn’t show to my mom before I showed it to my editor.

In the last two years, since I started experimenting with this whole journalism thing, it’s always felt like a hobby.  Even as I started getting paid, started dealing with editors, started getting invited to say stuff on panels, it always felt fake, like any moment they will realize I’m just this asshole in his pajamas. 

But on this one I was like ‘OK Mike what would a real journalist do?’ I called up hella people. I learned what the terms ‘off the record’ and ‘on background’ mean. I looked at tax filings. I called up the organizations I was complaining about and asked them to respond.

All of that is work. And, for the first time, this little journalism project of mine felt like a job. I had, of course, a ton of help. My editors are great, the infographics people made everything look terrific, the fact-checker was exactly the kind of junkyard dog you need him to be.

I have no idea if this little hobby is ever going to lead to anything real. Maybe I’ll always feel like I’m faking it. Maybe the people already doing it feel like that too. At least from now on, I’ll take some of the pressure off my mom.

Originally published on Humanosphere

British trains used to ‘slam doors’, metal slabs that swung outward, a latch on the outside. If the train was pulling into a station, passengers could reach out through the window, swing the door open and hop off without waiting the extra few seconds for the train to come to a full stop. During long delays, they could lean out, have a cigarette and shut it again when the train started moving.

The downside of the slam doors was the accidents. Every year, a few people fell off the back, pulled under the wheels. Passengers waiting at train platforms got bashed in the face by the doors as they swung open. The trains put up signs, of course, don’t open this, watch your step, but every year, the doors caused between 5 and 10 deaths, and dozens of injuries.

The need for replacing the doors seems obvious, but for decades, the UK stubbornly refused. Updating the doors would have required designing an automatic opening mechanism, then paying workers to replace each swinging door with a sliding one. With hundreds of trains, thousands of doors, the cost was in the billions. So Britain did nothing. It left the doors as they were, cleaned up the mess from the fatalities but did nothing to prevent them.

I spent last month in Seattle. The city has been in a decade-long debate about what to do about the Alaskan Way Viaduct, an elevated waterfront freeway, one of the city’s busiest north-south arterials. In 2001, an earthquake rattled the viaduct, weakened it. Even after the city added extra steel and sensors to all the weak points, everyone knows it’s not going to survive the next earthquake. As my friend, a Seattle city planner, puts it, ‘the next time someone sneezes on that thing, it’s coming down.’

And again, it seems obvious what the city should do. Close the viaduct, tear it down, build a safer one. But they haven’t. Fourteen years now, it simply remains, carrying just as many passengers as before. When the next earthquake happens—and in Seattle, it is indeed a when, not an if—a not-insignificant number of people will die in their cars, crushed by concrete and steel. There’s even a road underneath the viaduct, a popular tourist area, bike lanes, hot dog stands. Those people, if the earthquake is during the day, will probably die too.

Countries have a formula they apply to these sorts of problems, it’s called the value of preventing a fatality, of VPF. In Jonathan Wolff’s Ethics and Public Policy, where I read about the train doors, he notes that in the UK, the value of a human life is £1.4 million. In the United States, it’s apparently $6 million.

What that means is, since the train doors killed up to 10 people a year, Britain was willing to invest up to £14 million in retrofitting them. If the cost went over the VPF, it would leave them. It did, so it did. In Seattle, tearing down the viaduct, spending years rebuilding it, would interrupt the commute of millions of people, would cost billions in lost productivity. Whatever mayor or governor decided to do it would be voted out of office.

I’m not even sure I disagree with leaving the viaduct up. I biked beneath it almost every day in Seattle, I took that photo standing right under it. A small chance of, say, 60 people dying in exchange for keeping a major urban arterial might actually be a worthwhile trade-off.

What’s interesting to me isn’t that we make these choices, but that we are only allowed to make them invisibly. A politician who stood at a podium and said ‘saving 10 lives isn’t worth more than £14 million’ would be seen as a monster. Yet that is indeed the decision Britain’s politicians reached, and the one we live with intrinsically in things like our drinking age, our speed limits, our pharmaceutical regulations, our sentencing laws. At the population level, almost every decision means lives lost. Since 1979, 10 people have apparently been killed by Bic cigarette lighters. Is banning them worth the inconvenience of millions of people taking slightly longer to light their cigarettes? Meh, probably not.

This month, the international community will come together to sign the Sustainable Development Goals, an ambitious framework to end poverty, achieve gender equality and improve global health. As I’ve written before, it’s a mess, a soup of unmeasurable indicators and undefined targets, things like ‘halve per capita global food waste’ and ‘encourage companies … to adopt sustainable practices’

One of the reasons it’s so bad, I’m convinced, is that in development, we aren’t allowed to talk about these trade-offs, the kinds governments and citizens make every day. With the viaduct, with cigarette lighters, we traded a small risk of fatalities for the inconvenience of preventing them. With train doors, Britain decided there were more pressing risks to spend its resources on, more passengers it could save for its pounds elsewhere.

Yet in development, we never talk like this. One of the main criticisms of the Millennium Development Goals, the precursor to the Sustainable Development Goals, was that they neglected some development issues in favor of others. Domestic violence, human trafficking, corporate tax evasion, all of them got left behind.

I remember a meeting at my last human rights job. We were a department of four people, trying to plan our activities for the next year. We brought in a strategy consultant, he gave us each a matrix of organizational priorities, stuff like land resettlements in Africa, foreign direct investment in Myanmar, sexual harassment in the Middle East. He asked us to rank them in priority from high to low.

After a few minutes of scribbling, one of my colleagues reported that she had marked every issue as ‘high priority.’ The consultant looked confused. ‘Those are all really critical issues,’ she said, ‘with profound impacts on peoples’ lives. We should be working on all of them.’ I looked around, everyone else in the department was nodding.

It’s understandable, this. No one wants to argue that one development issue is more pressing than another, to stand up and declare ‘state surveillance of political dissidents affects fewer people, and less severely, than human trafficking. Lets prioritize the latter.’ No one wants to admit that working on one problem leaves all the other ones in place.

When you work at Nike, when you have to decide on launching an ad campaign for sandals instead of sneakers, you’re allowed to make arguments why one should take precedence over the other. But in development, lives on the line, you can’t. So we say yes to everything, we plan our years without differentiating between priorities, we stretch ourselves thin. And we fail, again and again.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with the Sustainable Development Goals. Maybe governments will pick the ones they want to reach, will defend the choice to leave others behind. Maybe they will be honest about the choices they make, we make, all the time, the trade-offs that come with resource constraints and political realities.

But I think, I fear, that they won’t. That the international community will fail to make the decisions that governments do every day, that we will give developing countries rules and principles, but no tools for choosing between them. That we will, once again, tell poor countries to replace their train doors and rebuild their viaducts all at once.

In 1913, Henry Ford started paying his workers $5 per day, a huge amount for the time and a more than 100% raise from what they were previously earning. It’s seen as a milestone in modern capitalism, the moment when employers realized that workers were also consumers, that raising their wages created a generation that would buy as well as work.

Last week in London I randomly read The Greatest Business Decisions of All Time, which has a chapter on Ford’s decision and some of the unsightly details of how he rolled it out.

It came with some strings attached. The headline pay was divided into two parts: wages (about $2.40 per day for an unskilled worker) and “profits” (about $2.60 per day). All workers received wages for their work at Highland Park, but they shared in the profits only if they were deemed worthy. Six months’ service was required to qualify.

Married men were eligible, as were men under the age of 22 who were supporting widowed mothers or brothers and sisters. All women supporting families also qualified. But unmarried women and men who were not supporting dependents were excluded.

Ford made it clear that a “clean, sober, and industrious life” was required to receive the higher pay. An employee had to demonstrate that he did not drink alcohol or abuse his family. Moreover, he had to make regular deposits in a savings account, maintain a clean home, and be of upstanding moral character.

Workers who accepted the new wage would also be subject to company rules about how to conduct themselves during off-hours. As Ford explained it, “The object was simply to better the financial and moral status of the men.”

To enforce his lifestyle dictates, Ford mobilized an army of investigators that at one point numbered 200. They were expected, Lacey writes, “to make at least a dozen house calls every day, checking off information about marital status, religion, citizenship, savings, health, hobbies, life insurance, and countless other questions.” To help them meet their quotas, Ford provided each inspector with a new Model T, a driver, and an interpreter for help in ethnic neighborhoods.

I know this sort of thing isn’t all that surprising, but it really does bum me the fuck out. This is exactly what people mean when they talk about privilege. Here was one of the best jobs, in one of the nation’s most economically dynamic cities, and it was only open to men who were the right religion, the right background, who passed the similarity test by their bosses.

I remember chatting with a retired government worker from Belfast at a conference a few years ago who told me that he had a set of interview questions to determine which candidates were Protestants and which ones were Catholics. What primary school did they attend? What neighborhood did they grow up in? What sort of work did their parents do?

It’s appalling, this, not to mention wasteful, and it makes me wonder the ways we do this now. As a gay person, I always feel a bit guilty about the fact that I’ve never experienced any discrimination directly. I’m pretty invisible; by the time people find out I’m gay I’m usually hired.

We talk a lot in this country about how quickly we’ve all made the turnaround on gay rights, and I wonder how much has to do with gay people’s ability to pass these little tests. We were already in the boardrooms and behind the judicial benches way before it was safe to do. Once it was, we had friends and colleagues who had a financial incentive in keeping us there. Most other marginalized groups never get that chance.

In my Solutions Journalism network interview I said

I talked to someone at a well-known labor NGO about this and he said he has three staff members. The best way to stretch that into impact is to go after Apple, which can improve conditions for hundreds of thousands of employees with a snap of its fingers. Or at least that’s the perception. Individually it’s understandable. But collectively, it means no one is looking at where the worst violations are.

The next day I got an e-mail from Kevin Slaten, a Program Coordinator at China Labor Watch. He’s the guy I was talking about. Here’s what he said. 

I did not say that we just focus on Apple, Michael. We focus on companies that have major buying influence in a given factory or industry supply chain–which includes Apple, among many other buyers which CLW has reported on over the past 15 years. Look at CLW’s report database for a list of reports by industry and related brand companies.

While I understand the general point you are making–lots of manufacturing takes place in small firms–you failed to mention the sectoral (or even broad economic) pull-on effect from raising the bar among large groups of workers: it changes the expectations and demands of other workers. We talked explicitly about this logic. (An additional academic paper bearing out this point.)

For example, ever since the Yue Yuen show factory strike in April 2014, in which as many as 60,000 workers demanded arrears on years of unpaid insurance, workers all around the region (and even throughout China) have increasing protested over this exact issue. Workers’ consciousness has been shifted. 

Another example: when I did field work for my MA in NE China (on labor rights defense), workers in an industrial zone (with hundreds of thousands or millions of workers) from different companies would talk knowledgeably about their working conditions relative to the industry or region. This caused many people I interviewed to “vote with their feet” and find better work. It radicalized others to protest. 

To put it in the terms you used: workers in smaller and more abusive plants are more likely to protest or find a new job (starving the poorer plants of labor) if those workers believe that there are better conditions elsewhere. In this interview (and in your article) you focus on the concept of increasing amounts of products going to countries whose consumers seem to “care less” about sweatshops. Putting aside the factual accuracy of this statement for now (there have been lots of anti-sweatshop protests in Taiwan, HK, and elsewhere in E. Asia), it ignores the power of improving working conditions at key locations within an industry. 

Anyway, most of the above information is context. My reservation is with your characterization of our interview. Your description suggests that our organization just focuses on Apple; this is not an accurate characterization of the interview or CLW’s work.  

Sorry to Slaten for mischaracterizing our interview. He’s right, their reports offer a lot of nuance I didn’t capture in my piece. Go read ’em!

Here’s another follow-up to my article, originally posted on the Huffington Post.

So on Wednesday I wrote this article for Highline arguing that consumer movements are never going to end sweatshops. The worst conditions are in sub-contractors, small workshops and factories producing for emerging markets. We can lean on multinational corporations all we want, they don’t have the information or the power to ensure decent factories, and neither do we.

Since the article came out, much of the reaction has been two covers of the same song. Either ‘Well I buy my T-shirt from sustainable brands’ or ‘Well I only buy local.’

Let me be super clear about this, in words I might have minced in the piece itself: that is impossible. And pretending it’s not is exactly what keeps sweatshops from being solved.

First, your T-shirt. Let’s say it really was produced by an American company, made in the USA, by people earning a living wage, and that wasn’t just a marketing ploy to get you to pay more for it.

Congratulations. But just because something was sewn together in the United States doesn’t mean that’s where it’s actually from. The vast majority of the world’s textiles are produced in India and China. For my article I asked a CSR manager of an international brand—you don’t wear it, but you’ve heard of it—how they monitor textile factories. ‘Oh we don’t,’ she said. ‘No one does.’

And that’s not the last layer. Most of the world’s cotton is bought and sold like oil, a commodity, consolidated in huge markets in Dubai, zig-zagging through middlemen. It’s hard to find out what country it comes from, much less how it was produced. As the Environmental Justice Foundation puts it, ‘six of the world’s top seven cotton producers have been reported to use children in the field.’

Then there’s how it got to you. Shipping is one of the least scrutinized industries in the world. Boats are in international waters, employees work around the clock, they dump weird stuff into the ocean. Who’s going to stop them?

But let’s pretend for a minute. Let’s say your T-shirt was produced in a decent factory, with decent textiles and decent cotton, that it came to you on a decent boat. Fine. That is one thing. Think of all of the stuff you buy. Your dental floss. Your furniture. That spatula you bought at the dollar store.

You can’t choose three or four products where’d like to avoid complicity in forced labor and low pay, and just decide not to worry about everything else. Your coffee might be fair trade, but what about the machine you’re brewing it in? Check the bottom, dude, I’ll bet five bucks it was made in China. Your car was welded together in Mexico, from iron ore mined in Brazil, smelted in Paraguay. The acetaminophen you take for a headache was produced by a company that keeps poor countries from producing generic medicines for its own people.

The point here is not to gloat, or to play the coastal-elite “I’m more ethical than you” game. The point is, you do not have the power or the information to implement your values. None of us want to promote sweatshops or poison tropical rivers. But we all do. No amount of label reading or better buying will escape this fundamental fact.

But that’s not the point either! The real question is, even we could buy ethical products, would that improve working conditions in the developing world?

In 1750, the Quakers concluded that slavery was an unjust institution and spent the next century advocating to abolish it. Imagine if, instead, they came up with a certification, a commitment that they wouldn’t buy clothes made from slave-picked cotton.

Think about what a gift that would have been to slave owners. All they had to do was rope off a section of their plantation, hire workers, then charge extra for ‘slave-free’ cotton. It would have been perfect: They make more money, get the Quakers off their back and, the best part, get to keep their slaves.

This is how we’ve spent the past 25 years: Instead of advocating to end the conditions that offend us, we’ve done exactly the thing that allows them to proliferate. Auditors told me that some factories in China are divided up with thick black curtains. Since brands only inspect the lines making their own products, suppliers can keep conditions however they want in the rest of their factories.

This is what you’re doing when you buy a fair trade T-shirt or an organic avocado: Concentrating your attention on the tiny corner of the global economy that is not shrouded to you. Instead of raising the floor, you’re raising the ceiling. Fair trade allows us to go around bad institutions and let the worst sweatshops remain, rather than take responsibility for the myriad ways in which we reward them.

“Many global actors assume there’s an institutional void, but there isn’t,” says MIT’s Matthew Amengual. “The state is involved. Positively or negatively, it’s there. Rather than transcending local institutions with global rules, we should be trying to work with them.”

What he means, and what I’ve seen again and again in the developing world, is that sweatshops don’t happen without the participation of their host governments, and they don’t get solved without them either.

One of the reasons India’s garment sector, to take just one example, is so exploitative is that only 2 percent of its textile factories use shuttle-less looms. Without equipment to make them more productive, the only way factories can compete is by extending shifts and keeping pay low. In China, 15 percent of textile factories have shuttle-less looms. The government provides loans and grants, it has deliberately invested in making small factories more productive. India’s own Ministry of Textiles boasts that its desperately poor workers are a competitive advantage: “Rising wages and cost of living in countries closely competing with India,” says the agency’s strategic plan, “provides a vast opportunity for India to capitalize.”

Domestic systems are decisive, and the lack of them can be devastating. Functioning courts, independent unions, empowered civil society, free media, this is the stuff that solves sweatshops, not companies with better CSR policies, not improving the performance of just a few factories. Comcast doesn’t treat you like shit because it’s an evil corporation, it does so because it’s a monopoly, because our government allows it to be one. Sweatshops happen for the same reasons.

Whenever I go on this little rant in front of my fair-tradey friends, they always give the same response: “Hey, it’s better than nothing.” I think that’s the worst argument ever, but for a second let’s entertain the possibility that it’s not. If that’s our only criteria, there’s a lot of other “better than nothing” stuff we could be doing instead. Give money to a NGO that helps register unions in the developing world. Sign a petition. Write your senator.

Our primary leverage over the developing world comes in the form of market access (bilateral trade agreements, TPP, the World Trade Organization) and financial instruments (the World Bank, the IMF, export credit). Companies lobby to protect their interests in these negotiations, and it’s about time we started doing it too.

These steps are small, slow, unlikely to leap us to instant improvements. But isn’t the argument of the boycotters “If everyone acted like me, things would get better”? Well if everyone put pressure on the institutions that can actually eradicate sweatshops, we might actually solve them. Otherwise, we’re just drawing the curtains.

That’s me being interviewed by the Solutions Journalism Network. I’ve written like four articles for the internet, so I’m super qualified to talk about the state of journalism as a field and what it needs to do differently.

The nice thing about these post-game interviews is that you can include caveats and nuances that didn’t make it into the article. A lot of NGO friends of mine have been like, ‘dude, why the hatorade on advocacy NGOs?’

There’s no incentive for [advocacy NGOs] to go after the Li & Fungs of the world, or the smaller companies that no one has heard of. Most NGOs are under-resourced, they’re trying to have the biggest impact with few staff, little time and this huge mountain of terrible conditions they have to bring to the world’s attention.

I talked to someone at a well-known labor NGO about this and he said he has three staff members. The best way to stretch that into impact is to go after Apple, which can improve conditions for hundreds of thousands of employees with a snap of its fingers. Or at least that’s the perception. Individually it’s understandable. But collectively, it means no one is looking at where the worst violations are.

And some more on the Brazilian labor inspectors. I need to write something about this for work-work one of these days. For all the developing countries I’ve been to, I’ve never seen one that has even tried to build up its domestic systems like this.

Brazil used to have a quota system where inspectors were assessed and paid bonuses based on the number of workplaces they inspected. Just like corporate auditors, this gave them a checklist approach. They were literally going door to door, inspecting small workshops instead of big ones because they were quicker to inspect and that’s how you could meet your quota.

Then, in the early 2000s, the government launched this big campaign to eradicate child labor. The inspectors pushed back, like ‘we’re never going to actually end child labor doing inspections this way.’ They were able to switch from quantitative to qualitative assessment methods, and they started prioritizing workplaces according to risk. They also started bringing in all these other government agencies. A weapon the academics talk about a lot is deferred prosecution agreements, where prosecutors tell farms ‘fix this by the time we get back, or we’ll take you to court.’ That threat of litigation is a huge reason why businesses fall into line.

And this is why solutions have to be domestically owned. The effectiveness of the inspectors comes from their mandate, their budget and their support from high-level politicians and the population. You can’t manufacture that from outside. And it’s not going to last if it’s not locally embedded.

And, if you’ve ever met me in real life, I’ve probably mentioned this within like six minutes: There’s no such thing as a good or a bad idea, only how it’s applied.

In development, we have a ton of ideas that aren’t world-changers, but provide modest gains if you roll them out right. Microcredit went through this lifecycle where when we first found out about it, it was going to SAVE THE WORLD. Then all these other NGOs jumped on the bandwagon and they didn’t know what they were doing and the results faltered. Then microcredit became A USELESS SCAM.

In the last few years, microcredit has levelled out to just this one tool among many that works under certain circumstances but not others. In a lot of places, it works really well, but it’s not the shortcut we thought it was. I actually consider that a huge success, but imagine pitching that to your editor.

There’s hella more at the link!