Unionized, Galvanized And Ionized, Con't

Donald Trump went to a non-union auto plant in Michigan on Thursday, with non-union workers on a non-union floor, to demand that actual striking union auto workers support him in 2024 or else.

 

Former president Donald Trump sharpened a stridently nationalist pitch for a general election rematch against President Biden, trading the GOP primary debate stage for a factory floor where he demanded union support for his vision of more aggressive state intervention in industrial policy.

With public surveys consistently showing him with a double-digit lead over his Republican rivals nationally and in early nominating contests, Trump sought to portray the next election as a choice between certain doom for the auto industry or utopian-sounding industrial growth built on trade restrictions, fossil fuels and even expropriation of foreign assets.

“I’m here tonight to lay out a vision for a revival of economic nationalism,” Trump said. “The Wall Street predators, the Chinese cheaters and the corrupt politicians have hurt you. I will make you better. For years, foreign nations have looted and plundered your hopes, your dreams and your heritage, and now they’re going to pay for what they have stolen and what they have done to you, my friends.”

He added: “We’re going to take their money. We’re going to take their factories. We’re going to rebuild the industrial bedrock of this country.”

A campaign spokesman did not immediately clarify what Trump meant by taking “their” money and factories.

Without specifying how, Trump suggested he could restore domestic manufacturing immediately and with a pen stroke.

“A vote for President Trump means the future of the automobile will be made in America,” he said to chants of “USA.”

“It will be fueled by American energy. It will be sourced by American suppliers. It will be sculpted from American iron, aluminum and steel, and it will be built by highly skilled American hands and high wage American labor. We’ll do it first day in office; it’ll be signed out first day in office.”

Trump offered his support to striking members of the United Auto Workers but demanded the union’s official endorsement or else warned of their imminent extinction. He excoriated Biden administration policies encouraging domestic investment in electric vehicles, calling them an existential danger to U.S. manufacturing and describing efforts to limit planet-warming emissions as irreconcilable with auto industry jobs.

“It’s a government assassination of your jobs and of your industry, the auto industry is being assassinated,” he said. “To the striking workers, I support you when you go to fair wages and greater stability. And I truly hope you get a fair deal for yourselves and your families. But if your union leaders will not demand that Crooked Joe repeal his electric vehicle mandate immediately, then it doesn’t matter what hourly wage you get. It just doesn’t make a damn bit of difference because in two to three years you will not have one job in this state.”

A Biden campaign spokesman accused Trump of mischaracterizing the current administration’s policies. “Trump had the United States losing the EV race to China and if he had his way, the jobs of the future would be going to China,” spokesman Kevin Munoz said in a statement.

 

Open threats to auto workers to either join his nationalization of the auto industry or be destroyed. That's the kind of second term Trump wants, and he's making the threats very clear. He has been for months.

 

And still half the country is willing to re-elect him, not in spite of the carnage he'll wreak upon America, but so they can be backing up the bad guys. Penty of our neighbors, co-workers, and family want a healthy chunk of Americans reduced to second-class status so that they believe they can benefit, or at least stay out of the crosshairs for a while.

History of course tells us what happens to those collaborators.

 

 

That Poll-Asked Look, Con't

The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll has Trump up by nine, and while that's a major outlier, the fact is the GOP plan to impeach Biden while Trump burns down everything to martyr himself over his four trials. It may be working.

 

President Joe Biden's job approval rating is 19 points underwater, his ratings for handling the economy and immigration are at career lows. A record number of Americans say they've become worse off under his presidency, three-quarters say he's too old for another term and Donald Trump is looking better in retrospect -- all severe challenges for Biden in his reelection campaign ahead.

Forty-four percent of Americans in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll say they've gotten worse off financially under Biden's presidency, the most for any president in ABC/Post polls since 1986. Just 37% approve of his job performance, while 56% disapprove. Still fewer approve of Biden's performance on the economy, 30%.

On handling immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, Biden's rating is even lower, with 23% approval. In terms of intensity of sentiment, 20% strongly approve of his work overall, while 45% strongly disapprove. And the 74% who say he's too old for a second term is up 6 percentage points since May. Views that Trump is too old also are up, but to 50% in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates.

Such is down-on-Biden sentiment that if a government shutdown occurs at month's end, 40% say they'd chiefly blame him and the Democrats in Congress, versus 33% who'd pin it on the Republicans in Congress -- even given the GOP infighting behind the budget impasse.

 

Yeah, that's right, Biden will get the blame if the government shuts down. I almost have to ask if the poll took place in a GOP party meeting at this point, but if any of this is remotely true, we're going to give this country away to the fascists because ground beef is $5 instead of $4 a pound.

The crosstabs are...not good. 74% of Americans think the economy is bad, with 87% angry about gas prices and 91% thinking food prices are bad. Hell, at this point a clear majority is upset about the unemployment rate being lower than it was under Trump, 57%. 

 

Some 29% of Americans believe Joe Biden stole the election anyway. Only 60% believe he won legitimately, and the big one, only a third of Dems would back Biden for a second term. That's been true for over a year now.

 

On the other hand, this weekend's NBC News poll finds Trump and Biden tied. 

Looking ahead to the 2024 general election, the NBC News poll shows Biden and Trump tied in a hypothetical contest among registered voters, 46% to 46%.

In June, Biden held a 4-point lead over Trump, 49% to 45%.

According to the new poll, Biden is ahead of Trump among Black voters (76% to 14%), voters between the ages of 18 and 34 (57% to 34%), whites with college degrees (56% to 34%), Latinos (51% to 39%) and women (51% to 41%).

Trump is ahead among rural voters (67% to 31%), men (51% to 40%) white voters (51% to 41%) and whites without college degree (63% to 32%).

Among independents, Biden gets 42%, while Trump gets 35%.

Notably, Biden leads Trump by 18 points among those who “somewhat disapprove” of the president’s job performance (49% to 31%). And nearly 1 in 5 registered voters who say they have concerns about Biden’s age still vote for him over Trump.

In other hypothetical matchups, Biden holds a 1-point lead over DeSantis, 46% to 45%, well within the poll’s margin of error. 

The other good news in that poll, a solid majority oppose the impeachment inquiry against President Biden and it's not even close, 56%-39% against.

The bad news is that given third party candidates, Trump pulls ahead.

In a multi-candidate field including third parties, Trump gets 39% from registered voters, Biden gets 36%, an unnamed Libertarian Party nominee gets 5%, an unnamed No Labels candidate gets 5% and an unnamed Green Party candidate gets 4%.

 

So yes, third party spoilers are just that, and while I don't expect any third party candidate to get more than 1 or 2 percent nationally, it would be enough to throw the election to Trump.

Still, between that Washington Post poll and columnist David Ignatius calling for Biden and Harris to step aside for 2024, you'd be forgiven if you thought the Post had it in for Biden in order to cover a competitive open primary, which the GOP is most certainly not.

Labor Daze In Milwaukee

As Americans across the country celebrate Labor Day today, President Biden makes his case for Bidenomics in Wisconsin in an op-ed in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

 

Three weeks ago, at a clean energy factory in Milwaukee, I met an IBEW electrician who builds and repairs America’s growing fleet of wind turbine generators. He said, “In America, with hard work and a little faith, anything is possible.”

He embodies the spirit of Labor Day, which honors the dignity of the American worker and recognizes that Wall Street didn’t build America, the middle class built America, and unions built the middle class.

We’ve seen that spirit throughout our history, especially over the last three years as we’ve been rebuilding our economy from the middle out and bottom up, not from the top down. Our plan, called Bidenomics, is working.

I’m proud of the historic laws I’ve signed that are leading our recovery and resurgence. More than 13 million jobs, including 800,000 in manufacturing. Unemployment below 4 percent for the longest stretch in 50 years. More working-age Americans are employed than at any time in the past 20 years. Inflation is near its lowest point in over two years. Wages and job satisfaction are up. Restoring the pensions of millions of retired union workers – the biggest step of its kind in the past fifty years.

But the real hero of our story is the American worker. It's nurses and homecare workers who put on protective gear and cared for our loved ones. It's truck drivers and grocery workers who get up every day to keep our shelves stocked. It's bricklayers, steelworkers and machinists who are restoring American leadership in the industries of the future.

We’ve attracted over $500 billion in private investment to make clean energy technology, semiconductors and other innovations here at home – creating good-paying jobs that don’t require a four-year degree. Under decades of trickle-down economics, we let jobs and factories go overseas, and China started to dominate manufacturing. Not anymore because we’ve investing in America. Those jobs are coming home and factories are being built here.

But there’s more to do. Here’s what else we are doing for America’s workers.

The Department of Labor is proposing a rule that would extend overtime pay to as many as 3.6 million workers. An honest day’s work should get a fair day’s of pay. A mom in Wisconsin who makes 37,500 a year and has sometimes worked 60-hour weeks could now be eligible to earn time and a half for all the time she works in a week over 40 hours. She can support her daughter and family.

While Congressional Republicans block increasing the minimum wage and attack unions, I will continue to make progress where I can. Last year, I signed an executive order requiring contractors who are doing business with the federal government to pay a minimum $15 an hour for hundreds of thousands of workers. This summer, we updated what’s called Davis-Bacon prevailing wages for the first time in 40 years. That means all those jobs we’re creating with federal investments will pay a prevailing wage you can raise a family on. I continue to call on Congress to pass the Richard L. Trumka Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, to make it easier for workers to organize and join a union and bargain collectively for better pay, benefits, and conditions.

Additionally, a new report from the Treasury Department this week provides the most comprehensive look ever at how unions are good for America. It definitively concludes that unions help raise incomes; increase homeownership and retirement savings; and reduce inequality, all of which strengthen our economy.

 

And all these things are true, and yet more Americans believe the economy is worse now than it was under Trump in the depths of his pandemic economic collapse that put 20 million Americans out of work. 

Recency bias works both ways. In politics, it's always "But what have you done for me today?" Biden makes that case here, but he's largely going to be ignored as three-quarters of Americans, including a majority of Democrats, say Biden is too old to even be running in 2024.

It's a Trump v. Biden race unless something fundamental gives in the next year, and that race is effectively tied despite Trump facing scores of federal and state felonies.

We're facing obliteration, and yet it's still the damn horse race.

Jobapalooza, Con't

July's jobs numbers are a slight miss, but we should have seen the last interest rate hike in a while, so there's that.

The US job market has returned to pre-pandemic form.

Employers added just 187,000 jobs in July, slightly above the monthly average seen in the decade before the pandemic, according to new data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Economists were expecting a net gain of 200,000 jobs last month. June’s job growth was revised down to 185,000 jobs from 209,000.

July’s headline number and the downward revisions to the monthly job total for May and June (down 25,000 jobs and 24,000 jobs, respectively), are further indications that the nation’s labor market is gradually cooling off. Moreover, it further fuels the notion that the Federal Reserve can achieve a “soft landing” of reining in inflation without massive layoffs.

The July unemployment rate ticked down to 3.5%, from 3.6%.

 

Yes, the downward revisions from May and June mean the economy added fewer than 140,000 jobs this month, but we also seem to have hit the sweet spot as far as inflation reduction without companies laying off millions of workers too.

It really does look like we're on the glide path for the rest of the year.

Pity if the Republicans get control of things and we lose another 20 million jobs like the last guy did, right?

What? that same clown is running a second time in 2024 and he's been indicted on multiple state and federal counts in New York, with more pending in Georgia and maybe even Michigan?

He doesn't have much of a chance then, right?

Right?

 

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis's hand-picked Disney control board has abolished diversity, equality, and inclusiveness (DEI) programs for the district and ordered the firing of all employees involved, calling the programs unconstitutional, illegal, and wasteful of taxpayer dollars.

In the ongoing battle between Walt Disney World and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Disney’s governing district – whose current board was hand-picked by DeSantis and took control of the district in February – abolished all of its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, the district said in a Tuesday news release.

The statement from the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District cited an internal investigation into the Reedy Creek Improvement District’s policies, claiming the district “implemented hiring and contracting programs that discriminated against Americans based on gender and race, costing taxpayers millions of dollars.”

“The so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives were advanced during the tenure of the previous board and they were illegal and simply un-American,” district administrator Glenton Gilzean said. “Our district will no longer participate in any attempt to divide us by race or advance the notion that we are not created equal.”

CFTOD will dissolve the district’s DEI committee and eliminate any job duties relating to DEI. District employees will also be prohibited from using staff time to pursue DEI initiatives, the statement said. However, this change affects only the government and not the companies that operate inside the district (i.e. Disney) and would seem to eliminate contracting protocols that in the past gave special consideration of women and minority owned businesses during the procurement processes.

According to the new oversight district, Reedy Creek “wasted taxpayer dollars” by entering into contracts based on race- and gender-driven goals and “aggressively” monitoring contractors’ race and gender practices under its Minority/Women Business Enterprise and Disadvantaged Business Enterprise programs. CFTOD said it estimates the previous district spent millions of dollars finding businesses who helped meet these DEI quotas.

 

Once again the plan here is for Republicans to make diversity, equality, and inclusiveness illegal across the country for not just government, but private employers as well. Hiring anyone who isn't a buttery male will leave your company open to being sued for discrimination, so companies will basically stop hiring anyone other than white guys.

 

Anyone left who isn't will have to constantly defend their job when it comes to performance reviews, promotions, and new initiatives. Having to work twice as hard to get half the recognition will be codified into law. 

You didn't think ending affirmative action would stop with universities, did you?

Last Call For Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

More performative nonsense here from Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis as he's suggesting he wants the state to sue Anheuser-Busch parent company InBev over shareholder stock losses for the state's pension fund due to the stupid controversy over Dylan Mulvaney's TikTok ad for Bud Light, but it's also an open threat against Fortune 100 companies that's working.

 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is hinting at legal action against Bud Light's parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, for the beer brand's promotion earlier this year with TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney.

Bud Light's March Madness promotion with Mulvaney, a transgender actress and activist, sparked an uproar among some conservatives, including singers Kid Rock and Travis Tritt, who called for a boycott of the popular beer. An ongoing sales slump for Bud Light has been attributed to backlash from both conservatives and the LGBTPQ community over the marketing campaign.

In an interview Thursday with Fox News, DeSantis said that Florida's pension fund contained over $50 million worth of Anheuser-Busch shares. Bud Light's decision to team with Mulvaney was followed by a sales slump, and as a result the state's pension fund has suffered collateral damage, according to the 2024 presidential candidate.

"When you start pursuing a political agenda at the expense of your shareholders, that's not just impacting very wealthy people, it impacts hardworking people who were firefighters, police officers and teachers," DeSantis told Fox News.

"And it could be something that leads to a derivative lawsuit filed on behalf of the shareholders of the Florida pension fund," he added. "Because, at the end of the day, there's got to be penalties for when you put business aside to focus on your social agenda at the expense of hardworking people."

In the letter, DeSantis said AB InBev has struggled recently because the company decided "to associate its Bud Light brand with radical social ideologies."

"It appears to me that AB InBev may have breached legal duties owed to its shareholders and that a shareholder action may be both appropriate and necessary," DeSantis wrote.

 

Steve M does the math on how much Florida taxpayers have been "harmed" by a trans woman drinking watery beer online:

Let's break that down.

The pension fund is $180 billion. Florida held $46 million in AB InBev stock, which means it constituted approximately .026% of the fund. The stock lost $8 a share; $8/share times 682,000 shares = a $5,456,000 loss. That's something like .0028% of the fund. You're going to sue over that? How much would it cost the state to try to recoup that tiny amount, which is a relatively normal stock loss?

Oh and let's look at that decline in context:

The company’s stock price has fallen since then from $66 a share to $58, though it’s still higher than its 52-week low of $44 from September 2022, which was well before the company’s recent controversies.

So the stock has gained 31% over the last eleven months.

This seems like an empty threat. But I think lawsuits of this kind are coming.

 

He's right. The real target isn't Mulvaney herself or even InBev, it's your employer's diversity, equality and inclusiveness initiatives.

Two years ago chief diversity officers were some of the hottest hires into executive ranks. Now, they increasingly feel left out in the cold.

Companies including Netflix, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have recently said that high-profile diversity, equity and inclusion executives will be leaving their jobs. Thousands of diversity-focused workers have been laid off since last year, and some companies are scaling back racial justice commitments.

Diversity, equity and inclusion—or DEI—jobs were put in the crosshairs after many companies started re-examining their executive ranks during the tech sector’s shake out last fall. Some chief diversity officers say their work is facing additional scrutiny since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions and companies brace for potential legal challenges. DEI work has also become a political target.

“There’s a combination of grief, being very tired, and being, in some cases, overwhelmed,” says Miriam Warren, chief diversity officer for Yelp, of the challenges facing executives in the field. Warren says the fear that company commitments are imperiled fuel her and others to feel “more committed to the work than ever.” Yelp’s DEI budget has grown for the past five years.

In interviews, current and former chief diversity officers said company executives at times didn’t want to change hiring or promotion processes, despite initially telling CDOs they were hired to improve the talent pipeline. The quick about-face shows company enthusiasm for diversity initiatives hasn’t always proved durable, leaving some diversity officers now questioning their career path.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in police custody in May 2020, companies scrambled to hire chief diversity officers, changing the face of the C-suite. In 2018, less than half the companies in the S&P 500 employed someone in the role, and by 2022 three out four companies had created a position, according to a study from Russell Reynolds, an executive search firm.

Once mostly tasked with HR matters, today’s diversity leaders are expected to weigh in on new product development, marketing efforts and current events that have an impact on how workers and consumers are feeling. Warren and other CDOs said the expanded remit is playing out in a politically divided environment where corporate diversity efforts are the subject of frequent social-media firestorms.

New analysis from employment data provider Live Data Technologies shows that chief diversity officers have been more vulnerable to layoffs than their human resources counterparts, experiencing 40% higher turnover. Their job searches are also taking longer.

“I got to 300 applications and then I stopped tracking,” says Stephanie Lubin, who was laid off from her role as diversity head at Drizly, an online alcohol marketplace, in May following the company’s acquisition by Uber. In one case, Lubin says she went through 16 rounds of interviews for a role she didn’t get, and says she is now planning to pivot out of DEI work.

 

The goal here, as I have said on numerous occasions, is the roll the country back to before the civil rights era.  It's to make America's largest employers limit their hiring of non-white, non-straight, non-male and non-Christian employees, lest they be attacked for discrimination and right-wing boycotts, which affect the stock price, which allows red states to sue as pension shareholders. which leaves the company open to attacks that they discriminate against white, straight Christian males and lowers the stock price, and so on.

The goal is to make the act of hiring someone who isn't a white straight Christian male subject to penalties, so that companies just stop doing it.  It's performative now, but it's having its intended effect. The right is celebrating this, and have every reason to push harder on this, and imply to white voters that they will directly benefit from total Republican rule.

Believe me, multi-billion and multi-trillion dollar corporations will abandon every pretense of diversity, equality and inclusiveness if red states make it prohibitively unprofitable to do so in order to operate in their states. It's already happening.

It'll carry the penalty of law soon, and that's when the employment picture changes dramatically across the country, rolling back decades of improvements, out of fear of shareholder lawsuits and civil action.

More of this is absolutely coming.

Last Call For Jobapalooza, Con't

With more than 200,000 jobs created in June in the US economy, Heather Long at the Washington Post takes a look at who's getting those new jobs, and for the most part it's Black, Asian, Hispanic, and immigrant workers taking advantage.

 

The U.S. labor market is on a gravity-defying streak. The June jobs report was a tad softer than expected, but the overall trend is so strong that recession fears are fading. Hiring remains solid across many industries, including construction, and companies are largely holding on to their workers.

There’s growing optimism that the country can avoid a downturn. One key reason this is possible is the surge of new workers. Nearly 4 million more people are employed now than just before the pandemic hit. That’s more families with steady incomes to spend, which helps explain the vigorous sales of everything from cars to gardening supplies. There has also been a big upshift in the labor force since the pandemic: Low-paying hospitality employment still hasn’t recovered, as workers have traded up to higher-paying business, health-care and warehouse work. This has brought another boost to incomes and an important mental shift as more workers who used to hop from job to job now see themselves on a steady career path.

The mistaken notion that Americans don’t want to work can now be put to rest. Nearly 81 percent of Americans ages 25 to 54 are working, the highest share since 2001. What has been particularly jaw-dropping is how resilient job gains have been since March 2022, when the Federal Reserve started aggressively hiking interest rates. Back then, Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell argued the labor market was “unhealthy.” There was a misguided belief that it would take a recession to get supply and demand for goods — and workers — back to more normal levels. But what many experts missed was how many workers of color and immigrants wanted to work and were still looking for opportunities.

Fewer White people are employed now than pre-pandemic. In contrast, over 2 million more Hispanics are employed now, over 800,000 more Asian Americans and over 750,000 more African Americans. This same trend played out just before the pandemic. Companies were also complaining then that they could not find workers, and experts were saying the nation was at “full employment.” Yet month after month, Black and Hispanic people (largely women) kept entering the labor force and getting jobs. It’s also notable that over 2 million more foreign-born people are employed now than before the pandemic. This means that more than half of the new workers have been immigrants.

If the U.S. economy ends up having a soft landing, it will largely be because immigrants and people of color have kept entering the labor force — helping to keep production going, consumption solid and wage growth (and inflation) cooling to a more sustainable level.

What’s going on is partly a result of low unemployment, what economists often dub a “tight” labor market. Black and Hispanic people often do not get hired until late in a recovery. In the past year, there has also been a strong uptick in jobs in government and health care, sectors in which women of color have historically found employment opportunities. Employers have also expanded their hiring searches, improved pay and benefits, and removed requirements for college degrees for many positions. All of this has helped expand opportunities. This past spring, for the first time, Black Americans were as likely to be employed as White Americans.

"There is sufficient demand that employers aren’t discriminating. They need workers,” economist William Spriggs told me in a conversation shortly before his death last month.

 

The other big shift is the increase in remote work. Working from home definitely helps single parents take better jobs than flipping burgers or ringing up checkout orders and it greatly helps to eliminate childcare costs. That means more money for working moms to help their families. It's a win-win situation and employers, now having remote work infrastructure in place because of the pandemic, are able to hire more folks and do it quickly.

 

It's another big reason why remote work isn't going anywhere. Yes, employers want workers back in the office, but not everyone has to be, and employers are taking advantage of that to hire good people who'd otherwise be barred by structural issues like child care, and commuting time and money costs. Take those away and suddenly you have a much larger pool of available employees to choose from. It especially helps Black women enter the workforce as a result.

It's smart all the way around, and it's a bit weird that Long doesn't mention this.

Last Call For The (Red) State Of (Blue) Cities

Texas Republicans have passed legislation that all but eliminates home rule for Texas cities, making nearly all municipal laws void in Democratic controlled cities and subject to GOP state legislative control instead.

A sweeping Texas bill stripping authority from cities passed the state Senate on Tuesday and is now headed to the governor’s desk.

House Bill 2127 takes large domains of municipal governing — from payday lending laws to regulations on rest breaks for construction workers to laws determining whether women can be discriminated against based on their hair — out of the hands of the state’s largely Democratic-run cities and shifts them to its Republican-controlled legislature.

According to the Austin American Statesman, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has been a vocal supporter of the bill.

Progressive critics argue the legislation — which one lawyer for Texas cities called “the Death Star” for local control — represents a new phase in the campaign by conservative state legislatures to curtail the power of blue-leaning cities.

Opponents of the bill include civil society groups like the AFL-CIO — and representatives of every major urban area in Texas, along with several minor ones.

They argue the shift in power it would enable would hamstring cities’ abilities to make policies to fit their unique circumstances.

“Where the state is silent, and it is silent on a lot — local governments step into that breach, to act on behalf of our shared constituents,” state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt (D) told the Senate on Tuesday.

“We should be doing our job rather than micromanaging theirs.”

But the bill’s Senate sponsor, state Sen. Brandon Creighton (R), said it was necessary to protect “job creators” from “cities and counties acting as lawmakers outside of their jurisdiction.”

Both the legislation’s sponsors and the principal trade group that backed it — the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) — have argued local regulation poses an existential threat to Texas businesses.

“As prices escalate, property taxes increase, and workers remain in short supply, small business owners are continuing to struggle in this economic environment,” said Annie Spilman, state director of the NFIB, in a statement earlier this month. “Arduous local ordinances, no matter how well-intended, exacerbate these challenges.”

 

And once again it's that businesses don't want to be forced to pay higher wages or to supply better benefits in larger cities.  They want to buy labor at well below the going rate and force workers to be miserable because there's no competitors willing to pay more and forcing even anything close to a living wage or standard benefits found in every other western country is an "arduous challenge" for the corporate class. 

In Texas, the second-biggest border state, the supply of cheap labor cannot be curtailed for any reason, either. Stripping protections provided by cities for workers has to go, you see.

We all float down here, Billy.

Jobapalooa, Con't

The Biden Boom in the jobs market continues to thunder ahead with another great month. Steve Benen:

 

Expectations heading into this morning showed projections of about 180,000 new jobs having been added in the United States in April. As it turns out, according to the new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, those projections turned out to understate what appears to be an extension of the hot job market. CNBC reported this morning:

Job growth fared better than expected in April despite bank turmoil and a decelerating economy, the Labor Department reported Friday. Nonfarm payrolls increased 253,000 for the month, beating Wall Street estimates for growth of 180,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate was 3.4% against an estimate for 3.6% and tied for the lowest level since 1969.

While the unemployment rate isn’t my favorite metric, it’s worth noting for context that in January 2021, when President Joe Biden was inaugurated, the unemployment rate was 6.3%. Now, it’s 3.4% — a level the United States did not reach at any point throughout the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s. Before this year, the last time the jobless rate reached a figure this low was May 1969. (We hadn’t yet landed on the moon and Woodstock was still a few months away.)

I’m mindful of the chatter about whether the economy is in a recession, but by any reasonable measure, these are not recession-like conditions.

As for the politics, let’s circle back to previous coverage to put the data in perspective. Over the course of the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency — when the Republican said the United States’ economy was the greatest in the history of the planet — the economy created roughly 6.35 million jobs, spanning all of 2017, 2018 and 2019.

According to the latest tally, the U.S. economy has created nearly 13.2 million jobs since January 2021 — roughly double the combined total of Trump’s first three years.

 

Again, Biden has created double the number of jobs in 27 months than Trump did in 36, but the economy is "in a recession" and Biden's marks for the economy continue to be dismal because that's what the Villagers are telling them. 

Oh, and at a record-low 4.7%, Joe Biden has given us the lowest Black unemployment rate so far.  Biden cut that in half since he took over, and it's the first time that Black unemployment has been under 5%. The gap between Black and white unemployment is also the lowest it's been, 1.8% (White unemployment is 3.1% right now).

Let me say this again, white unemployment is three point one percent and white voters say this is the worst economy of their lifetimes and shit like that.

It's ludicrous how this is being portrayed in the hostile right wing noise machine.

But hey, the numbers speak for themselves.

Jobapalooza, Circus Of The Damned Edition

The March jobs report came in on target with 236K jobs on a 239K expectation.

Nonfarm payrolls rose about in line with expectations in March as the labor market showed increased signs of slowing.

The Labor Department reported Friday that payrolls grew by 236,000 for the month, compared to the Dow Jones estimate for 238,000 and below the upwardly revised 326,000 in February.


The unemployment rate ticked lower to 3.5%, against expectations that it would hold at 3.6%, with the decrease coming as labor force participation increased to its highest level since before the Covid pandemic.

Though it was close to what economists had expected, the total was the lowest monthly gain since December 2020 and comes amid efforts from the Federal Reserve to slow labor demand in order to cool inflation.

Along with the payroll gains came a 0.3% increase in average hourly earnings, pushing the 12-month increase to 4.2%, the lowest level since June 2021.

 

So despite all the doom and gloom about recession that's been going on for 18 months now, the Goldilocks scenario is very much on track.

That is until House Republicans default on the national debt and crash us into the ground.

It was midway through Representative Kevin McCarthy’s drawn-out battle for the House speakership when Representative Jodey C. Arrington of Texas, one of his public supporters, began quietly approaching colleagues to see whether they would be open to backing his No. 2, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, instead.

The support was not there. When Mr. Arrington, a fourth-term Republican who chairs the Budget Committee, floated the idea with Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, for instance, the answer was a hard no. Mr. Banks promised to lead the opposition if Mr. Scalise tried to mount a serious challenge to Mr. McCarthy, according to two people who said Mr. Banks told them about the incident. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.

Mr. McCarthy eventually won the speakership and promised not to bear grudges against the right-wing holdouts, who extracted major policy and personnel concessions in exchange for their votes. But the suspicions and divisions exposed during that process remain and are spilling out into the open as Mr. McCarthy faces his most consequential test: reaching a deal with President Biden to avert a catastrophic default on the nation’s debt as soon as this summer.

Mr. McCarthy has told colleagues he has no confidence in Mr. Arrington, the man responsible for delivering a budget framework laying out the spending cuts that Republicans have said they will demand in exchange for any move to increase the debt limit.

Aside from the perceived disloyalty, Mr. McCarthy regards Mr. Arrington, a former official in the George W. Bush administration, as incompetent, according to more than half a dozen people familiar with his thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

The tension has burst into public view, contributing to confusion and mixed messages from Republican leaders about what their plan is and when they might be ready to share it.

 

Imagine being someone that Kevin McCarthy considers incompetent. The response from the Circus Clowns is that the ringmaster may need to go.

In a sign of how difficult things could get for GOP leaders, members of the hardline House Freedom Caucus are already talking about the cudgels they have at their disposal to use in those upcoming fights – namely, the power of any single member to force a floor vote on ousting the speaker. Restoring the procedural tool, known as the “motion to vacate,” was one of the key concessions Kevin McCarthy made in his bid to become speaker.

“It hasn’t come up as far as in a serious conversation, as this needs to be enacted. But as we look at these issues … It does come up from time to time, as we game plan and we look at all of the alternatives and contingency plans that could play out over the next two years,” said freshman Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona, one of the McCarthy holdouts who ended up voting “present” on the last ballot.

 

Needless to say, the House GOP Circus of the Damned has no plan.

 

Default and economic catastrophe is the plan. 

President Biden and the Dems need to figure this out quickly before it's too late.

Last Call For That Debt Ceiling Feeling

The House Republican Freedom Caucus response to President Biden's proposed budget unveiled this week is "Cut it in half for starters and maybe we won't collapse the economy into a years-long depression."

A powerful group of far-right Republicans on Friday issued a new set of demands in the fight over the debt ceiling, stressing they may only supply their votes to raise the limit if they can secure about $130 billion in spending cuts, cap federal agencies’ future budgets and unwind the Biden administration’s economic agenda.

The ultimatum from the House Freedom Caucus — led by Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) — threatened to deal a massive blow to government health care, education, science and labor programs. Seeking tougher work requirements on welfare recipients and the repeal of federal funds to fight coronavirus and climate change, the conservatives’ wish list appeared to complicate efforts to clinch a deal and avert a looming fiscal calamity.

At the heart of the political standoff is the debt ceiling, the legal limit on how much the U.S. government can borrow to pay for spending that policymakers in both parties have already approved. Congress must raise or suspend the current $31 trillion cap as soon as this summer or risk a default, an unprecedented crisis that could rattle markets globally while triggering a potential recession in the United States.

But Republicans have promised to use the fast-approaching deadline to extract fiscal reforms from the White House, many of which target President Biden’s signature economic priorities. Appearing at a news conference, Perry said the goal is to “shrink Washington,” and added: “Doing this will lower dollar for dollar the amount needed for any increase in the debt ceiling.”

The far-right caucus called for clawing back nearly $400 billion to boost clean energy and combat pollution in the Inflation Reduction Act, for example, and an end to the “student loan bailout,” as Perry described it, referring to the president’s debt cancellation measure, which is awaiting a Supreme Court ruling. They also targeted the roughly $80 billion recently approved to help the Internal Revenue Service pursue tax cheats, arguing it empowers the government to target innocent Americans. That move could add to the deficit, however, since it could prevent Washington from collecting money it is owed.

Conservatives further pushed for regulatory reform legislation, while emphasizing the need for tougher work requirements on food stamps, Medicaid and other programs that aim to help low-income Americans. Democrats contend these efforts could result in millions of deserving families being forced off federal benefits, since a wide array of federal anti-poverty initiatives already require beneficiaries to seek employment.

The demands served as a direct challenge to Biden, who has repeatedly pledged he will not haggle with Republicans over the country’s credit. Speaking at the White House later Friday, the president took aim at conservatives’ latest requests: He said it showed the “value set” the GOP had and predicted the impacts would fall hardest on police officers, firefighters and the nation’s health care.

“I don’t know [if] there’s much to negotiate on,” Biden said.

 

Meanwhile, the longer the debt ceiling fight goes on, the closer we get to an economic meltdown that will sink the US economy for years to come.

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, meanwhile, appeared Friday on Capitol Hill to deliver her own urgent plea for action, citing the catastrophic ramifications if Congress fails to raise the debt limit in time. Appearing before the House Ways and Means Committee, she reminded lawmakers that the government has never defaulted — and doing so would “trigger an economic and financial catastrophe.”

The intensifying political stalemate capped off a week of mixed economic news in an ever-divided Washington. It began with a fresh warning from Jerome H. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, who on Wednesday signaled the central bank may have to raise interest rates more aggressively to keep tamping down inflation. Such a move could help lower prices by raising the cost of borrowing, at the risk of squeezing spending and investment in ways that could leave Americans out of work.

 

Jobs report today showed another 311k jobs created.  Where it goes from here, well, it seems like Republicans need to destroy that jobs streak in order to get elected...

Last Call For The Huckster's Daughter

I guarantee you that Arkansas GOP Governor (and former Trumpian Mouth of Sauron) Sarah Huckabee Sanders is going to try to resolve the problems that her public education reform bill creates with her new law shredding child labor laws in the state.

 

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) signed into law this week legislation that rolls back significant portions of the state’s child labor protections.

The law eliminates requirements for the state to verify the age of children younger than 16 before they can take a job.

Sanders believes the provision was “burdensome and obsolete,” spokeswoman Alexa Henning said in an emailed statement. Remaining state and federal regulations are still in effect, she said. Sanders signed the Republican-backed bill on Tuesday.

Federal officials have pledged to crack down on child labor law offenses after regulators discovered hundreds of violations in meatpacking plants and after press reports emerged of children working in hazardous occupations around the country.

The Labor Department fined Packers Sanitation Services, a subcontractor for meatpacking plants, $1.5 million in February for illegally hiring children, some of whom sustained chemical burns after working with caustic cleaning agents.

Other states are also considering loosening child labor protections. A bill advancing in Iowa would allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work certain jobs in meatpacking plants and would shield businesses from civil liability if a youth worker is sickened, injured or killed on the job.

 

As red state "education reforms" close down more and more schools and leave kids without an education, more and more of them are going to end up in meatpacking plants, factories, farms, construction work and more doing, as Dubya famously put it, "The jobs Americans don't want to do." 

Republicans understand full well that "school choice" means not everyone will get into the local magnate school with the swimming pool and media lab and the best teachers.  They understand full well that school funding will be decimated, and "failing" schools closed.

This will leave thousands of kids with no schools to attend. Eliminating child labor laws is the proposed solution. The school to prison pipeline is so 2016.

It's the school to meatpacking plant now.

Are there no workhouses?

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

The next step after Republicans end affirmative action programs in colleges and universities with an expected Supreme Court ruling this summer is to end diversity in hiring and gutting the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, as Texas is not only ending diversity hiring in state government agencies, it's declaring diversity programs to be illegal, almost certainly giving SCOTUS the future case they'll need to destroy the EEOC for good. 

 

Gov. Greg Abbott’s office is warning state agency and public university leaders this week that the use of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — policies that support groups who have been historically underrepresented or discriminated against — is illegal in hiring.

In a memo written Monday and obtained by The Texas Tribune, Abbott’s chief of staff Gardner Pate told agency leaders that using DEI policies violates federal and state employment laws, and hiring cannot be based on factors “other than merit.”

Pate said DEI initiatives illegally discriminate against certain demographic groups — though he did not specify which ones he was talking about.

“The innocuous sounding notion of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) has been manipulated to push policies that expressly favor some demographic groups to the detriment of others,” Pate wrote.

Diversity, equity and inclusion is a moniker used for policies developed to provide guidance in workplaces, government offices and college campuses intended to increase representation and foster an environment that emphasizes fair treatment to groups that have historically faced discrimination. DEI policies can include resources for underrepresented groups, which can include people with disabilities, LGBTQ people and veterans. In hiring, it can include setting diversity goals or setting thresholds to ensure that a certain number of diverse candidates are interviewed. At universities, DEI offices are often focused on helping students of color or nontraditional students stay in school and graduate.

The governor’s directive represents the latest effort by Republican leaders fighting back against policies and academic disciplines that Republicans nationwide have deemed “woke.” DEI, along with critical race theory, has become a target of conservatives who argue that white people are being unfairly treated or characterized in schools and workplaces.

“Rebranding this employment discrimination as ‘DEI’ doesn’t make the practice any less illegal,” Pate wrote. “Further, when a state agency spends taxpayer dollars to fund offices, departments, or employee positions dedicated to promoting forbidden DEI initiatives, such actions are also inconsistent with the law.”

 

Texas is certainly going to get the pants sued off them over this, and that's exactly what they want. I expect other red states to do the same in the months ahead, ending diversity and inclusion efforts for private employers as well.

They're going to gut the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, just like they have the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. And once again, doing this during Black History Month sends a clear message to everyone.

Jobapalooza, Con't

A gigantic jobs report for January coupled with recent lowered inflation numbers means the Biden Boom is rolling on.

The number of new jobs created in January rose by 517,000 to mark the biggest increase in six months, suggesting little erosion in a dynamic U.S. labor market even though the economy has show lots of signs of weakening.

One caveat: The government’s formula to adjust for seasonal swings in hiring sometimes exaggerates employment levels in January. It’s unclear whether that was the case last month.

Yet employment grew even faster in the waning months of 2022 than previously reported, indicating the labor market is still quite robust.

The unemployment rate, meanwhile, slid to a 54-year low of 3.4% from 3.5%, the government said Friday. That’s the lowest level since 1969.

Hourly pay rose a modest 0.3% for the second month in a row, reflecting the smallest back-to-back gains in almost two years.

The increase in pay over the past year also slowed again to 4.4% from 4.8%, indicating some relaxation in wage pressures. The Federal Reserve has been worried that rapidly rising wages could make it harder to bring down high inflation.

U.S. stocks DJIA, -0.11% SPX, +1.47% fell in premarket trades and bond yields rose after the report.

Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had forecast an 187,000 increase in new jobs last month.

Big picture: The economy is slowing and the threat of recession is rising as higher interest rates depress growth. Many large companies such as Amazon AMZN, +7.38%, IBM IBM, +0.96% and Fedex FDX, +6.13% have announced layoffs and more job cuts are expected.

Yet the economy has also proven quite resilient and lots of businesses are reluctant to fire workers given how hard it was to hire them in the first place. The U.S. might even be able to avoid a recession if job losses remain on the low side.

 

With revisions, the jobs numbers were three times the expectation.  Even if adjustments were off by 100k or even 200k, it's still a rocket-powered jobs report.

 

And record-low 3.4% unemployment?  Yeah, Biden did that.  I don't know where this "recession" is going but people need to stop calling it that, because we're not in one.

Last Call For Recession, Receding

We're not in a recession, folks. We're just in a booming economy, because we have a Democratic president, and a hateful, garbage media.

 

The U.S. economy finished 2022 in solid shape even as questions persist over whether growth will turn negative in the year ahead.

Fourth-quarter gross domestic product, the sum of all goods and services produced for the October-to-December period, rose at a 2.9% annualized pace, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had expected a reading of 2.8%.

The growth rate was slightly slower than the 3.2% pace in the third quarter.

Stocks turned mixed following the report while Treasury yields were mostly higher.

Consumer spending, which accounts for about 68% of GDP, increased 2.1% for the period, down slightly from 2.3% in the previous period but still positive.

Inflation readings moved considerably lower to end the year after hitting 41-year highs in the summer. The personal consumption expenditures price index increased 3.2%, in line with expectations but down sharply from 4.8% in the third quarter. Excluding food and energy, the chain-weighted index rose 3.9%, down from 4.7%.

While the inflation numbers indicated price increases are receding, they remain well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

Along with the boost from consumers, increases in private inventory investment, government spending and nonresidential fixed investment helped lift the GDP number.

A 26.7% plunge in residential fixed investment, reflecting a sharp slide in housing, served as a drag on the growth number, as did a 1.3% decline in exports. The housing drop subtracted about 1.3 percentage points from the headline GDP number.

Federal government spending rose 6.2%, due largely to an 11.2% surge on nondefense outlays, while state and local expenditures were up 2.3%. Government spending in total added 0.64 percentage points to GDP.

Inventory increases also played a significant role, adding nearly 1.5 percentage points.

“The mix of growth was discouraging, and the monthly data suggest the economy lost momentum as the fourth quarter went on,” wrote Andrew Hunter, senior U.S. economist for Capital Economics. “We still expect the lagged impact of the surge in interest rates to push the economy into a mild recession in the first half of this year.”

 

If we have another situation in 2023 like we did in the first half of last year with negative GDP turning positive the second half, we're going to still be good. Yes, interest rates are going to slow the GDP. The Fed is still the Fed, and it will raise rates until inflation is smashed under 2%. That's going to take another 6-12 months.

We'll see how much pain the labor market goes through. I want to believe that the economy won't slide into a real hardcore recession, but with the House GOP ready to completely collapse us into a recession over the debt ceiling, all bets are off.

Tech Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself, Con't

The antitrust legal troubles for Google continue with another massive federal lawsuit over the company's monopoly on digital ads, and a recommendation from the Justice Department that the company be broken up.

 

The Justice Department and a group of states sued Google on Tuesday, accusing it of illegally abusing a monopoly over the technology that powers online advertising, in the agency’s first antitrust lawsuit against a tech giant under President Biden and an escalation in legal pressure on one of the world’s biggest internet companies.

The lawsuit said Google had “corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising.” The lawsuit asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to force Google to sell its suite of ad technology products and stop the company from engaging in allegedly anticompetitive practices.

It was the fifth antitrust lawsuit filed by U.S. officials against Google since 2020, as lawmakers and regulators around the world try to rein in the power that big tech companies exert over information and commerce online. In Europe, Amazon, Google, Apple and others have faced antitrust investigations and charges, while regulators have passed new laws to limit social media’s harms and some practices such as data collection.

In the United States, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, was sued in 2020 over claims that it illegally crushed nascent rivals. Google has faced particular scrutiny. In 2020, a group of states led by Texas filed an antitrust lawsuit against it involving advertising technology, while the Justice Department and another group of states separately sued Google over claims that it abused its dominance over online search. In 2021, some states also sued over Google’s app store practices.

The Justice Department and Google didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Biden administration is trying to use uncommon legal theories to clip the wings of some of America’s largest businesses. The Federal Trade Commission has asked a judge to block Meta from buying a virtual-reality start-up, a rare case that argues a deal could harm potential competition in a nascent market. The agency has also challenged Microsoft’s $69 billion purchase of the video game publisher Activision Blizzard, a notable action because the two companies are not primarily seen as direct competitors. 

 

It's definitely not helping Google's case when it does things like "Make $13 billion in profits in 2022" and then "Lay off 10,000 employees" because $13 billion in profits is apparently not enough. 

Still, it's going to be difficult to win this case.

The administration’s efforts are expected to meet fierce resistance in federal courts. Judges have for decades subscribed to a view that antitrust violations should mostly be determined by whether they increase prices for consumers. But Jonathan Kanter, the chief of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, and Lina Khan, the F.T.C. chair, have said they are willing to lose cases that allow them to stretch the boundaries of the law and that put corporate America on notice.

 

So, don't expect much here from this particular case. Google is still going to control nearly all digital advertising in the US and will for the foreseeable future.

Last Call For The Boomers Pack It Up

One of the big reasons why unemployment is so low is that Covid deaths have left close to a half-million people being removed from the workforce. But as tragic and as awful as that is, the real workforce reductions in America's worker pool is coming from the fact the oldest Boomers turned 75 in 2020 and that they are starting to retire by the millions.

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell struck a particularly somber note at his press conference earlier this week when he mentioned that one reason the labor market is so tight right now is that many workers died from COVID-19.

The big picture: Economists have theorized for a while about the impact of COVID deaths on the labor market. Now, research has started to emerge and key public figures like Powell are starting to talk about it explicitly."Close to a half a million who would have been working ... died from COVID," Powell said while talking about the U.S. labor shortage.

Go deeper: In a footnote to a speech he gave on Nov. 30, Powell estimates that 400,000 working-age Americans died in excess of what was anticipated pre-pandemic.

State of play: Compared to pre-pandemic projections, there are around 3.5 million people effectively missing from the American workforce, as Powell explained in that speech at the Brookings Institution.This number includes older workers who left the labor force earlier than expected. "These excess retirements might now account for more than 2 million of the ... shortfall," he said.

The other 1.5 million comes from a decline in immigration and "a surge in deaths." Overall, 1.09 million Americans lost their lives to COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins data.

Our thought bubble: The role these deaths play in the economy often gets overlooked, possibly because it's so devastating to contemplate.But when considering the state of the U.S. workplace, it's worth remembering that many Americans lost colleagues, friends and loved ones over the past few years. It's a toll that will take many years to understand and lifetimes to grieve.

 

With hundreds of thousands of Americans retiring every month, no wonder Republicans want to dismantle the economy and Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs, and no wonder they want Covid precautions to end. 

Dead Boomers don't collect benefits.

Shutdown Countdown, Armageddon Edition

House Republicans are planning to destroy the economy entirely in order to strip funding from Medicaid, infrastructure, and everything else that the Biden administration passed last year.

House Republicans are preparing a plan telling the Treasury Department what to do if Congress and the White House don’t agree to lift the nation’s debt limit later this year, underscoring the brinkmanship newly empowered conservatives will bring to the high-stakes negotiations over averting a U.S. default, according to six people aware of the internal discussions.

The plan, which was previously unreported, was part of the private deal reached this month to resolve the standoff between House conservatives and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) over the election of a House speaker. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), a leading conservative who helped broker the deal, told The Washington Post that McCarthy agreed to pass a payment prioritization plan by the end of the first quarter of the year.

The emerging contingency plan shows how Republicans are preparing to threaten to not lift the nation’s debt ceiling without major spending cuts from the Biden administration. Congress must pass a law raising the current limit of $31.4 trillion or the Treasury Department can’t borrow anymore, even to pay for spending lawmakers have already authorized. Economists warn that not raising the debt limit could cause the United States to default, sparking a major panic on Wall Street and leading to millions of job losses.

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said Friday said that the Treasury Department will begin “extraordinary measures” next week to ensure the federal government is able to meet its payment obligations but that it cannot guarantee the United States will make it beyond early June without defaulting. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated Friday that the administration will not negotiate over the debt ceiling.

Treasury Department aides declined to comment on the GOP plan, and a spokesman for McCarthy did not return requests for comment.

Understand that if the debt ceiling breaches, the economy collapses. These idiots are about to destroy the country's economy for years, if not decades. Massive inflation, interest rate hikes, and unemployment going fro 4% to 14% overnight is just the beginning.

In the preliminary stages of being drafted, the GOP proposal would call on the Biden administration to make only the most critical federal payments if the Treasury Department comes up against the statutory limit on what it can legally borrow. For instance, the plan is almost certain to call on the department to keep making interest payments on the debt, according to four people familiar with the internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. House Republicans’ payment prioritization plan may also stipulate that the Treasury Department should continue making payments on Social Security, Medicare and veterans benefits, as well as funding the military, two of the people said.

Such a move would be unprecedented and hugely controversial, and even releasing the plan could turn into a major political liability for the GOP. A hypothetical proposal that protects Social Security, Medicare, veterans benefits and the military would still leave out huge swaths of critical federal expenditures on things such as Medicaid, food safety inspections, border control and air traffic control, to name just a handful of thousands of programs. Democrats are also likely to accuse Republicans of prioritizing payments to U.S. bondholders — which include Chinese banks — over American citizens.

“Any plan to pay bondholders but not fund school lunches or the FAA or food safety or XYZ is just target practice for us,” a senior Democratic aide said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a proposal that hasn’t yet been released publicly.

McCarthy and House conservatives intentionally left the details of the prioritization plan unsettled in their initial agreement, with the understanding that it could take weeks for Republicans to decide which federal spending programs must be protected, the two people familiar with the talks said, and amid uncertainty about the best way to draft the legislation.

 

So the House GOP will decide who lives and who dies. Millions, maybe tens of millions, will be out of work. Entire government departments will be shut down and the impact of misery will be immediate. There's no way these clowns will get a loaded revolver pointed at Uncle Sam's head through the Senate, let alone Biden's desk, so we're looking at a wipeout of trillions of dollars.

 

Not to mention that the secondary knock-on effects will trigger economic disasters across the country. It will be absolute chaos, and people will suffer and die as a result.

 

They'll blame Biden for it. They won't be able to "prioritize" a damn thing, because the economy will break completely.

We warned all of you this was coming, and people voted to break the government anyway.

Last Call For Biden Working It Out

The Biden Administration is making a move to put an end to non-compete contracts, which could benefit workers by hundreds of billions in pay raises in the years ahead.

 

In a far-reaching move that could raise wages and increase competition among businesses, the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday unveiled a rule that would block companies from limiting their employees’ ability to work for a rival.

The proposed rule would ban provisions of labor contracts known as noncompete agreements, which prevent workers from leaving for a competitor or starting a competing business for months or years after their employment, often within a certain geographic area. The agreements have applied to workers as varied as sandwich makers, hair stylists, doctors and software engineers.

Studies show that noncompetes, which appear to directly affect roughly 20 percent to 45 percent of private-sector U.S. workers, hold down pay because job switching is one of the more reliable ways of securing a raise. Many economists believe they help explain why pay for middle-income workers has stagnated in recent decades.

Other studies show that noncompetes protect established companies from start-ups, reducing competition within industries. The arrangements may also harm productivity by making it hard for companies to hire workers who best fit their needs.

The F.T.C. proposal is the latest in a series of aggressive and sometimes unorthodox moves to rein in the power of large companies under the agency’s chair, Lina Khan.

“Noncompetes block workers from freely switching jobs, depriving them of higher wages and better working conditions, and depriving businesses of a talent pool that they need to build and expand,” Ms. Khan said in a statement announcing the proposal. “By ending this practice, the F.T.C.’s proposed rule would promote greater dynamism, innovation and healthy competition.”

The public will be allowed to submit comments on the proposal for 60 days, at which point the agency will move to make it final. An F.T.C. document said the rule would take effect 180 days after the final version is published, but experts said that it could face legal challenges.

 

Expect this to be tied up in courts well into 2024, when Republicans hope there will be a new FTC chair and a new President. Expect significant resistance to this from business groups and especially Silicon Valley as well.

 

As much as this needs to happen, I predict that the new rules will never take effect.

Last Call For California Schemin'

California Democrats passed the FAST Recovery Act into law last year, which was designed to put wages for the state's hundreds of thousands of fast food workers before a council selected by Gov. Gavin Newsom that would determine fair wages for employees. But restaurant groups and fast food franchisees immediately challenged the law in January and now say they have enough signatures to send the law to voters in November 2024, almost three years after the law was supposed to take effect.

A restaurant business coalition announced on Monday that it has gathered enough signatures to challenge a new California law that would create a state-backed labor council to set pay and working conditions for the fast-food industry.

Save Local Restaurants, a coalition opposing the law, it filed more than 1 million signatures to postpone the law and place a referendum on the November 2024 ballot.

Counties will now have eight business days to provide a count to the secretary of state’s office. Opponents need roughly 623,000 valid signatures.

If the statewide total reaches the required amount, counties will have 30 business days to verify signatures through random sampling.

Sufficient valid voter signatures would place a question on the 2024 ballot asking voters whether the law should take effect.

It could also lead to a costly battle between organized labor and the fast food industry, with spending reaching hundreds of millions of dollars. Save Local Restaurants raised more than $13.7 million between last January and September.

The law, known as the FAST Recovery Act, would create a first-in-the-nation labor council to set wages and working standards for fast food workers. The council’s regulations would apply to any chain restaurant with at least 100 locations in the United States and could set minimum wages at $22 an hour for fast workers by next year.

The law was set to take effect Jan. 1 after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the legislation last September. But one day later, opponents filed a referendum to halt the formation of the council.

They argue the law would result in higher food prices and new regulatory burdens for franchise owners. “The FAST Act would have an enormous impact on Californians, and clearly voters want a say in whether it should stand...it is no surprise that over one million Californians have voiced their concerns with the legislation,” the coalition said in a statement. ”


Supporters say the law would give workers a voice in regulating a sector of the state economy that employs more than a half-million people.

Service Employees International Union, which has been supporting the fast-food workers, said companies are “trying to silence voices of half a million Black and Latino workers to increase their billion-dollar profits.”

“It is abhorrent that these corporations have already spent millions of dollars in an attempt to deliberately mislead California voters and stamp out the progress fast-food workers have won, said SEIU President Mary Kay Henry in a statement. “California’s referendum process has been completely taken over by corporations who think they can buy the right to overturn laws they don’t like and exempt themselves from accountability.”

 

Henry is right about this. Sending legislation to a ballot referendum is exactly how Uber and Lyft beat California's law turning rideshare drivers into full-time employees, meaning they would be eligible for benefits. The rideshare giants spent billions convincing Latino voters in the state they they would be fired first unless the law was defeated, and it worked.

Expect much of the same to follow in the years ahead.