Especially when it comes to migrant workers I’m sure you’ve seen the horrific pictures of that cruel, spiked buoy barrier Texas Gov. Greg Abbot has unfurled in the middle of the Rio Grande. Luckily, the feds have decided to take action: One of the more pernicious developments in our politics is the effort by red-stategovernors to assert outsize power over immigration in their states, in ways designed to appeal to national right-wing audiences. For instance, the state of Texas recently placed a large barrier in the Rio Grande, supposedly to keep migrants out, but actually justto send a message to Fox News viewers that the state is securing the border where President Biden allegedly refused. But now the Justice Department has sent a letter to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott notifying him that the department will sue the state over the barrier if Texas does not commit to removing it by Monday afternoon.
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Draw your own conclusions Anne Applebaum responds (h/t Laffy) to the Russian missile attack overnight on the Ukrainian port city of Odessa: “I believed Russia would not destroy historic Odesa, because of the city’s significance to the Russian empire. But I was wrong – now it seems they know they will never control it again, so they are happy to see it burn.” “Russian missiles badly damaged a historic Orthodox cathedral in the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa, sparking outrage and prompting President Zelensky to vow retaliation,” CNN reports: Odesa is a key cultural center, and has long links with Russia. It was founded under Catherine the Great and was once Russia’s second most important port. Euromaidan Press: During the night of 23 July, Russia launched five types of missiles at the south-Ukrainian port city of Odesa, destroying port infrastructure, residential buildings, and the largest Orthodox Church in the city, Operative Command South said.
The Italian Edition of The New Economics: A Manifesto (Keen 2021) will be published in November by Meltemi, and I will attend the BookCity book fair in Milan to launch the book on November 18th. I owe a great intellectual debt to many great Italian economists, from Pierro Sraffa (Sraffa 1960, 1926) and Pierangelo Garegnani … Continue reading "Preface to the Italian Edition of The New Economics: A Manifesto"
Biden quietly reverses decades of antitrust policy A schoolteacher friend from the Boston area once dismisssed the “Taxachusetts” smear. She liked the services Massachusetts provided for her and her child. She did not mind paying for them. Imagine that. Franklin Foer examines the fetish — for fetish it is — behind making efficiency the highest good in setting business policy and practice. There is more to life than low, low prices. Not that federal policy since the Reagan era recognizes that. Or the Chicago school of economics. The Joe Biden administration has been quietly resetting federal policy on mergers, on antitrust and economic concentration. Since the Reagan administration stopped enforcing antitrust laws, Foer explains, “the American economy has grown dangerously concentrated, dominated by a shrinking number of airlines, banks, tech companies, and pharmaceutical firms (to name just a few examples). Corporate titans have amassed outsize influence over the political process, smothered start-ups, and often treated consumers with shocking indifference.” Readers don’t need this explained to them. They’ve lived it.
It’s the GOP way If you hadn’t heard, cruelty is the point. Government deriving its “just powers from the consent of the governed” is no longer operative for the GOP. Democracy is no barrier to America’s authoritarian right getting its way. Aside from insurrection, it does not get more blatant than this (NBC News): Alabama Republicans on Friday defied a U.S. Supreme Court order by passing a new congressional map that includes only one majority-Black district. The GOP-controlled Legislature had called a special session to redraw an earlier map after the Supreme Court reaffirmed a federal court order to include two districts where Black voters make up voting-age majorities, “or something quite close to it.” But on Friday, state Republicans approved a new map with just one majority-Black seat and a second district that is approximately 40% Black. […] Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed the redistricting map into law Friday night. A federal court will hold a hearing on the map Aug. 14. Oh, the GOP is not done yet: The Justice Department has notified Texas that it plans to file a lawsuit over Gov.
Or is it the stupid contrarianism? Tim Miller has put his finger on it. That’s all there is to modern “conservatism” (and, frankly, a certain segment of leftism too.) Basically, the future of American politics is just a bunch of snotty little adolescent bitches saying whatever it takes to get a rise out of their enemies. Gosh I wonder if people with a more … serious agenda might take advantage of this moment?
It’s going to get worse: A Nebraska teenager who used abortion pills to terminate her pregnancy was sentenced on Thursday to 90 days in jail after she pleaded guilty earlier this year to illegally concealing human remains. The teenager, Celeste Burgess, 19, and her mother, Jessica Burgess, 42, were charged last year after the police obtained their private Facebook messages, which showed them discussing plans to end the pregnancy and “burn the evidence.” Prosecutors said the mother had ordered abortion pills online and had given them to her daughter in April 2022, when Celeste Burgess was 17 and in the beginning of the third trimester of her pregnancy. The two then buried the fetal remains themselves, the police said. Jessica Burgess pleaded guilty in July to violating Nebraska’s abortion law, furnishing false information to a law enforcement officer and removing or concealing human skeletal remains. She faces up to five years in prison at her sentencing on Sept. 22, according to Joseph Smith, the top prosecutor in Madison County, Neb. The police investigation into the Burgesses began before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
Gosh, I wonder why? Who could have guessed that would happen? Republican voters with a college degree and a built-in skepticism of Donald Trump were supposed to form the backbone of Ron DeSantis’ strategy to win the 2024 GOP presidential primary. Instead, they’re leaving his campaign in droves. A trio of Republican primary polls, including previously unpublished data obtained by McClatchyDC, show that Florida’s governor has suffered steep declines in support among GOP voters with at least a bachelor’s degree, an erosion that threatens to undermine his candidacy. Their defections — which started in the spring and have continued this summer — are disproportionately responsible for DeSantis’ overall decline in the race, where polls show he now sits a distant second place to Trump. In all three surveys, the governor now has barely half the support with college-educated white voters that he did when the year began, larger drop-offs than he suffered with other demographic groups.
The public isn’t seeing this … yet. But there are 16 months to the election. It may start to sink in with some of them: Morgan Stanley is crediting President Joe Biden’s economic policies with driving an unexpected surge in the U.S. economy that is so significant that the bank was forced to make a “sizable upward revision” to its estimates for U.S. gross domestic product. Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is “driving a boom in large-scale infrastructure,” wrote Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley, in a research note released Thursday. In addition to infrastructure, “manufacturing construction has shown broad strength,” she wrote. As a result of these unexpected swells, Morgan Stanley now projects 1.9% GDP growth for the first half of this year. That’s nearly four times higher than the bank’s previous forecast of 0.5%. “The economy in the first half of the year is growing much stronger than we had anticipated, putting a more comfortable cushion under our long-held soft landing view,” Zentner wrote.
Is Hollywood out of ragtag bands of world-savers? We have seen a spate of unusual weather across the country lately, you may have noticed. The video from Rocky Mount, NC on Wednesday looked like a scene from Twister. Nothing to see here. Again. North Carolina sees fewer tornadoes than the Midwest. Still, about 31 hit the state in an average year, according to the National Weather Service. Hurricanes and tropical storms generate many of those along the coastal plain. Neither spawned the EF3 that hit Rocky Mount and a Pfizer plant on Wednesday: An important Pfizer pharmaceutical plant in North Carolina was severely damaged on Wednesday after a powerful tornado ripped through the area, threatening production lines that normally provide huge amounts of medicine to U.S. hospitals. Meanwhile, torrential rain flooded parts of Kentucky and communities from California to South Florida endured scorching heat that at times reached record-high temperatures. Pfizer confirmed the large manufacturing complex was damaged by a twister that touched down shortly after midday near Rocky Mount, but said in an email that it had no reports of serious injuries.