Our weekly roundup of the news, some trends, and our thoughts — plus a reading list for the weekend.
Debate: Presidential debate was back on Tuesday. Most outlets said that Harris won. Trump today claimed that 92% of people thought he won. Pope Francis said, “Both are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants or the one who (supports) killing babies. Both are against life. One should vote, and choose the lesser evil. Who is the lesser evil, the woman or man? I don’t know.”
Price Gouging: More Perfect Union released reporting this week that showed how Uber and Lyft were paying drivers different amounts for the same ride. Earlier this month, they also reported on how top meat companies collude and share information, allegedly by using a data analytics firm called Agri Stats, allowing them to restrict output, manipulate the market, and raise consumer prices. There are no laws against algorithmic wage discrimination, but the Sherman Act, the 1890 Antitrust law, could be effective against the meat companies’ practices. Both Harris and Trump proposed plans to bring down prices for Americans; Harris’ plan includes going after price gauging directly (though she doesn’t provide many details). The Week reported, “Most states already have price-gouging bans that prohibit businesses from jacking up their profits during a crisis like a hurricane or pandemic. If Harris' proposed federal ban is like those state laws, ‘only triggered by emergencies and targeted to specific firms, her proposal might not affect day-to-day prices all that much.” More Perfect Union also reported on why hotels have suddenly become so expensive, revealing a large scheme to fix and hike rates.
Springfield, Ohio: One thing to consider in the “they’re eating the cats” narrative — Springfield was a shrinking town that, as the The New York Times reports, came up with a strategic plan to attract business and reinvigorate the community around 2017: “City leaders pitched the town’s affordability, its work force development programs and its location, smack-dab between Columbus and Dayton and accessible to two interstates.” And it worked. Migrants were drawn to the new, open jobs and the employers were happy to have them. While GOP governors were bussing migrants to Democratic towns over the past year, they have reinforced a narrative that ignores the facts about our American and international laws surrounding migration: 1) Migrants are allowed to be here (the Springfield migrants are under a temporarily protected status), 2) they are allowed to have jobs (the Springfield migrants have Social Security numbers and work permits), and 3) they are allowed to move. As past (frequently cited) contributor Aaron Reichlin Melnick wrote on Twitter, “A lot of anti-immigrant sentiment comes down to the busybody belief that if you live in a community, you should be given ultimate decision power over who else is allowed to live in that community. I don’t control who my neighbor is. I’ve never been able to control that. That’s what it means to live in a free country. That didn’t happen, though...No migrants were resettled there.”
Climate: Fires continue across the West, forcing tens of thousands to evacuate. Louisiana was hit with a hurricane, leaving residents without power. South America is on fire too – from Brazil to Bolivia. The Texas Agriculture Commissioner said that Texas is running out of water. Zoë Schlanger, for the Atlantic, noted the scarcity of actual climate policy talk in the debate on Tuesday amidst all of this; Harris nodded to the home insurance crisis and clean energy manufacturing jobs under the IRA (but she also doubled down on fracking), and Trump mentioned solar panels. But, as Schlanger writes, “The next president will be a climate-disaster president, and will likely be forced by circumstance to answer at least one climate-change question. And at this point, it’s not just ‘What would you do to fight climate change?’ It’s ‘How will you help Americans handle its effects?’” We will continue to recommend our interview with Jake Bittle about his research on climate migration and what policy could look like.
Reading List:
A profile in Curbed on Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker, by Christopher Bonanos: “At some point, I remark to him, only you know what you didn’t do, what you left out or glossed over. ‘I think about that all the time.’ He looks at me meaningfully. ‘What you just said — no one will ever know if this is not there.’ He can’t let it go, can’t let the details slide, even invisibly. ‘I — I’m unable to.’”
The New Yorker published the “largest known database of possible American war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan”: “To analyze the database, we consulted John Roman, a researcher at NORC at the University of Chicago, who specializes in quantitative analysis of the civilian criminal-justice system. He was dismayed by the results. ‘It’s to the point where you have to question a little bit whether justice is a priority here or if something else is a bigger priority than justice,’ Roman said.”
A photo essay in The Dirt, following “the trail of an enigmatic type designer and fabricator”:“It's not just the East Village. It's just the replacement of personality with big stores and anonymity. His way of doing things is an expression of that personality versus anonymity. “
Sarah Kendzior’s essay, titled The King, on her Substack: “It is obvious what happened even if some are reluctant to cop to it: Bush-era Republican operatives, unable to function in the chaos of MAGA, saw an opportunity to remake the Democratic Party, which had been lurching to the right since the 1990s, and took it. They left receipts: the conservative Lincoln Project is Harris’s fourth biggest donor. Change in Democratic Party policy is determined by donations — not only the Lincoln Project’s — and then rationalized with the Trump/Not-Trump binary.”
This profile on Mk.gee in Dazed by Connor Garel: “It wasn’t a direct influence, but Gordon was reading a lot about the history of planned obsolescence while making the record, ‘about how lightbulb manufacturers in the 1930s got together and decided to make worse lightbulbs, because nobody was making any money,’ he says. ‘I like taking cheap, bad gear and trying to make the best song with it, because it forces you to say something interesting and to compensate for poor quality.’”