Category Archives: economics

Republicans often talk about the will of the voters but they’ve made it very clear they make exceptions — like when voters don’t do what Republicans want them to. Voters in Michigan passed constitutional amendments in favor of early voting and same-day registration. Republicans in the state legislature are suing to stop the changes, on the grounds only the legislature can make those decisions (this is a fringe theory known as “independent legislature”).

Over in my state, North Carolina, the Republican-dominated legislature has empowered its members to shield their records from public access. It’s almost like those fine moral, upstanding Americans have something to hide. (On the plus side, a judge has blocked parts of North Carolina’s new forced-birth laws coming out of the same session).

In Wisconsin there’s a court battle over whether the legislature can fire the state’s top election official for not fixing things for Republicans — wait, that’s not how they phrased it. They also want to sideline the new justice for being anti-gerrymandering and pro-choice.

The US military academies got an exemption from that recent Supreme Court decision banning consideration of race in admissions. Unsurprisingly someone’s suing to change that. I’m not surprised the two young men suing haven’t been discriminated against, they just claim it’s inevitable if they do apply.

Alex Jones claims he’s still too broke to pay the Sandy Hook families their lawsuit settlement but his spending proves he’s lying.

This is from a few years back but it’s still a little shocking: attorney Neal Katyal told the Supreme Court US companies that benefited from child slavery can’t be sued or punished. The Supreme Court agreed.

In 2000, Al Gore filed lawsuits asking for a recount. Guess what, that’s not the same as Trump demanding states find him more votes.

Slime supremacist Stephen Miller’s legal group wants Kellogg’s investigated for putting RuPaul on its cereal boxes.

Philadelphia’s archdiocese has settled a child-rape case for $3.5 million.

Everyone’s entitled to a public defender if they can’t afford an attorney. As Radley Balko discusses, it’s a hollow right because the public defender system is a train wreck.

North Carolina is spending $100 million on a new digital case-management software for the court system. Is the software worth it? Plaintiffs have filed lawsuits, prosecutors report problems but the company is dismissive, arguing in court filings that “the case contained “no plausible factual allegations” against the company, which has “no legal duty to protect plaintiffs” and is not responsible for the software’s daily use.

Heather Cox Richardson looks at Trump’s trial in New York and concludes his bluster and temper tantrums aren’t going to help him. She’s more optimistic about a MAGA collapse than I am, but from her keyboard to god’s ears. Because this kind of bullying — Trump targeting the court clerk in his NY case — needs to stop. He received a restraining order forbidding him from talking about the trial on social media but promptly posted a link to the prosecutor’s home address. I hope there’s consequences.

The strategy of fake plaintiffs in religious-conservative cases needs to stop too.

Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro claims his role in Trump’s 2020 efforts to overturn the election focused entirely on the law. Nope, he was arguing that lawsuits had political benefit: ““the impression that the courts lacked the courage to fairly and timely consider these complaints, and justifying a political argument on Jan. 6 that none of the electoral votes from the states with regard to which the judicial process has failed should be counted.””

Chick-Fil-A has been the right wing’s favorite restaurant for ages (at least on paper — I wouldn’t bet they patronize it as much as they write about it) until recently it became too woke for conservatives. The issue? They have a diversity, equity and inclusiveness vice president at the company. For a lot of conservatives, as noted at the second link, thinking about diversity means choosing less qualified POC or women over more qualified white people and that’s racist!

Ron DeSantis, who’s making I Hate Diversity his brand, says if he were president, federal civil rights investigations will include fighting diversity, including in the military, where diversity truly horrifies right wingers. As I’ve said before, letting people of all races, genders, and orientations enlist isn’t woke, but for people who fantasize about the ability to fight as the ultimate test of manhood (never mind whether they do or not), it’s agonizing.

As I’ve mentioned before (here and here) there was never a time when jobs were handed out without race and gender being an influence. It’s just that a century ago the bias was in favor of white men; I guarantee you, nobody pretending they want a meritocracy would be demanding one if they were thrown back a hundred years. Nor do they care about legacy admissions and other bias factors that disproportionately benefit upper-class white people.

Despite the squealing about how we should be color/gender blind, it takes a conscious effort to overcome bias. For example, orchestras hire more women musicians if they don’t know their gender (auditioning unseen behind a screen). One study that sent out near-identical resumes with different photos attached found a white man with a felony was more likely to get a job interview than a black man with the same resume but no rap sheet. Other studies have found people are biased in favor of natural talent over hard work. That isn’t the same sort of discrimination but does show how our unbiased assessments are anything but.

Overcoming that sort of bias takes conscious effort. Right-wingers don’t want business making that effort because it doesn’t benefit white dudes, end of story.

In other economic news:

Did a consultant contribute to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank?

Another day, another crypto firm shows cracks.

“It’s like being on vacation all the time, with occasional scrambling to do a thing, then doing the thing for a couple of hours, then going back to the rest of my life,”— says one of the “jobless employed.”

“The real problem here is that a more rational work culture would include the recognition that it’s OK to get paid full time wages for doing ten or fifteen hours of work a week, since that’s what everybody should be doing at this point, given how rich we’ve become as a society. But we can’t have that because any such recognition would dampen economic growth and profit maximization, which is obviously a terrible thing because [step in argument missing].” — LGM responding to the previous link.

Labor protests in the newspaper business.

The National Eating Disorder Association’s staff made the decision to unionize. So NEDA’s replacing human hotline staffers with chatbots.

“Johnson & Johnson said on Tuesday that it had agreed to pay $8.9 billion to tens of thousands of people who claimed the company’s talcum powder products caused cancer”

LGM dissects and mocks a really bad argument for why workers should return to the office.

For workers whose jobs require showing up in person, the economy isn’t improving.

The right-wing war against diversity in business.

The impact of COVID-quitting on one county (this is from 2021, but it’s interesting).