Snow Days

And gutting public infrastructure wasn’t the only way that neoliberalism brought out the worst that the winter storms had to offer. It was also the speed-up at work, the shredding of social safety nets, and the fracturing and atomization of communities. All of these factors combined to leave people tired, frustrated, isolated, scared, and cold.

Snow Days Under Socialism
What would winter look like in a world where human needs trumped private profits?
by Owen Hill 1-23-16

Last winter, my home of Portland, Maine was transformed into an eight-week nightmare of parking bans, dangerously low temperatures, and the churning burden of just making it through each day.

It may seem a trivial challenge — lots of snow — but E. J. Graft got it right in a New York Times article titled “Boston’s winter from hell”:

[F]or those of us living here, it’s not a pretty picture. We are being devastated by a slow-motion natural disaster of historic proportions. The disaster is eerily quiet. There are no floating bodies or vistas of destroyed homes. But there’s no denying that this is a catastrophe.

Notably, more than just the snow, it was the storms’ intersection with neoliberalism that made the winter so unbearable. As Dana Mittenbacher pointed out at Socialist Worker, Boston experienced a near-total collapse of public transportation. This collapse was a direct result of decades of underfunding, budget cuts, and free-marketization that left infrastructure weak and vulnerable ...

More here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/01/blizzard-snow-storm-northeast-socialism-capitalism/