Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, that wonderful time of the week when myself, Killer300 and Bhu (AKA the GNR newsroom) bring you all the good news to start your Monday off right.
My new year is off to a pretty good start all things considered; I am on partial unemployment now, which means I now have some money in the bank for the first time in over a year. And I got a lid for my pan so I can cook stuff on a skillet now (Last Friday I made Hamburger Helper with Spam and it was edible), so yeah, things are generally going well for me at the moment. And I hope the new year finds you well as well.
And if not, I hope our good news can at least brighten your day a little, so lets get right to it.
Apologies for sending this one late, I have Covid. It’s pretty mild, but my thinking is slow, so my writing process is slow.
This is the first issue of 2024, and I’m excited, because finally we’re starting to see the results of antitrust enforcement. As I said in last year’s review, turning on enforcement isn’t like flipping a switch, it takes time and carries momentum, but the stuff launched since 2020 is starting to bear fruit and will continue to do so over the next few years.
For this issue, I’ll look both backwards and forward, both the broad trends in monopoly-related commerce and policy over the last year, and as well as what is likely next year. But make no mistake about what is happening, the revival of competition policy is a genuine revolutionary shift in political economy thinking.
Ok, so what were the basic narratives of 2023? There were two. First, it became much harder to construct monopolies via merger, as globally, mergers fell to a 10-year low (and Wall Street bonuses for deal-makers fell by 25%). Second, antitrust cases finally hit the courts in trials, with a few results, but setting up key decisions next year. This Wall Street Journal headline says it all:
Its time for less Union busting, more Monopoly busting. And 2024 is the year its gonna happen in.
Happy Monday all. A few things today:
Joe Biden Is A Good President - On Friday, we got another really good jobs report, and the President gave his first big campaign speech of 2024, a spirited and powerful defense of our democracy. Together, these two events confirm our basic understanding of the 2024 election right now:
Joe Biden is a good President. The country is better off. The Democratic Party is strong, and winning elections across the US. And they are stuck with Trump, who is far more degraded, extreme and dangerous - and further away from the electorate - than he was in 2020 when he lost by 4 and a half points. Taking all this together it’s clear, as we enter 2024, in every way possible, that I would much rather be us than them.
For more on 2024, catch this new Deep State Radio pod where I join David Rothkopf, Tara McGowan and Tom Bonier; my MSNBC op-ed and Morning Joe appearance; and an analysis where I argue while our coalition is wandering a bit right now, our numbers with Hispanics and younger Americans are likely far better than some recent polls have shown.
Its true and they should say it.
Several state Republican parties are reportedly going bankrupt and struggling to raise funds while being weakened by infighting, in a year when some of these states could be crucial for the election of America's next president.
In Arizona and Michigan, two states where the GOP presidential candidate will likely have to win a majority of suburban voters to get back in the White House, the state Republican parties are running critically short on money. In Arizona, the state GOP has just $14,800 left in the bank at the end of August, as reported by the Arizona Mirror.
In Michigan, the state Republican Party had $93,000 in its bank accounts as of July 2023. A recent draft report shared by insiders with MLive in early December said that the party was on "the brink of bankruptcy."
According to the report drafted by an attorney hired by GOP activist Warren Carpenter: "In only a matter of a few months, the party is essentially non-functional and, worse yet, the party and others associated with the party are now facing potential civil and criminal consequences for breaking laws."
Excuse me if I may indulge in a malicious chuckle at the misfortune of the wicked. *Ahem* BWAHAHAHAHAHA. You know “Get woke go broke”? Yeah I got a better one “Go Fash no cash.”
The tax-credit rules for clean hydrogen proposed by the Biden administration last month have a specific purpose: to drive the development of a brand-new source of carbon-free fuel for long-term decarbonization needs, ultimately decreasing carbon emissions.
But it turns out that one of the new structures needed to underpin the rules will be important well beyond the hydrogen sector — it will help further the clean energy transition more broadly.
That needed structure is a system to track and match carbon-free power from generation to consumption on an hour-by-hour basis. “Hourly matching” is becoming a central — albeit controversial — part of the evolution of how clean energy is tracked, bought and sold by major corporate buyers and national governments, as well as how these transactions are accounted for — their “attribution,” in clean-energy tracking jargon — under international climate agreements.
Another slam dunk from the Biden administration.
Keith Kimbrough is the first to admit that electric school buses were not an easy sell in the tiny unincorporated town of Martinsville.
In Martinsville, which sits just outside of Nacogdoches in the Piney Woods region of East Texas, pickup trucks are the vehicle of choice, and oil field jobs are prevalent.
Diesel exhaust is not top of mind.
And yet the modest school district here has become the first in the state to entirely replace its diesel school bus fleet with no-emissions electric buses. Martinsville Independent School District applied for and received a $1.6 million grant last year from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Its Clean School Bus Program — funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 — is investing $5 billion to replace existing school buses with zero-emissions and low-emissions models across the country, especially in school districts that serve rural areas or low-income students.
Martinsville ISD began running its morning and afternoon routes with the new buses in late October 2023.
I love living in the future. I mean look at those things. I wish I could have gone to school on one of those they look so cool!
America’s electrical grid is increasingly powered by renewable energy, and this helped slash the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions last year — even as the wider economy grew, according to new estimates by Rhodium Group.
A record-shattering number of solar power projects and utility-scale battery installations contributed to the drop in U.S. power-sector emissions, which fell by 8 percent in 2023 compared to the previous year, analysts said in a preliminary report released on Wednesday. Renewables helped accelerate the long-term decline of coal-fired electricity generation, which hit a record low last year. Electricity from fossil gas — which emits relatively less CO2 than coal but is high in methane — also increased substantially.
At the same time, Americans relied less on fossil fuels to heat their homes and offices, owing to last year’s milder-than-average winter. Residential and commercial buildings saw a 4 percent drop in emissions due to shrinking demand for gas, fuel oil and propane. U.S. households are also buying more all-electric heat pumps and bidding farewell to gas-burning furnaces.
For these reasons, “In 2023, the U.S. experienced something it hasn’t since before the COVID-19 pandemic: a growing economy paired with shrinking greenhouse gas emissions,” the Rhodium analysts wrote in a research note.
Slowly but surely things are changing for the better.
Hawaii shut down its last coal plant on September 1, 2022, eliminating 180 megawatts of fossil-fueled baseload power from the grid on Oahu — a crucial step in the state’s first-in-the-nation commitment to cease burning fossil fuels for electricity by 2045.
But the move posed a question that’s becoming increasingly urgent as clean energy surges across the United States: How do you maintain a reliable grid while switching from familiar fossil plants to a portfolio of small and large renewables that run off the vagaries of the weather?
Now Hawaii has an answer: It’s a gigantic battery, unlike the gigantic batteries that have been built before.
Great news out of Hawaii.
The world has experienced fundamental changes over the past several years, and especially in the wake of the COVID pandemic. This is especially true when it comes to urbanism and mobility. One of the cities that epitomizes this transformation the most is Paris. What has occurred in the “City of Light” is nothing short of phenomenal, and all in a relatively short period of time. However, while Paris is now seen as the standard by which other cities are to be measured in the media when it comes to green mobility, especially now in the run up to the 2024 Olympic Games, there’s more to the story. That is, the real transformation of cities and their mobility patterns are taking place on a much broader scale and across multiple European cities, and all at the same time for a variety of reasons.
Europe is slowly becoming a greener place to live.
Change is slow, and then comes all at once. Korean governments have been discussing banning the dog meat trade since the 1980s, but hadn’t gotten legislation over the finish line until Tuesday, after unanimous parliamentary approval.
“This is history in the making I never thought I would see in my lifetime,” Chae Jung-ah, the executive director of Humane Society International Korea, said in a statement.
Despite the legislative stagnation over the years, the dog meat industry has been dwindling on its own. “Compared with the late 1990s,” reports The Wall Street Journal, “the number of dog-meat restaurants has fallen by about 75 percent to roughly 1,700 restaurants nationwide, according to government figures.”
Appetite for it has fallen off, too. More Koreans now own pet dogs, and younger generations in particular aren’t interested in traditional dog meat dishes. A December 2023 survey by Aware found that over 90 percent of respondents have no intention of eating dog meat in the future, a number that has been increasing year by year and is similar across those who own and don’t own pets.
Good news out of Asia. Like I like my meat, I’ll even eat Veal. But even I have my limits. Don’t eat dogs.
Many terrible things happened in 2023. But there were significant improvements the world over that will affect millions of people—many of which fell between the cracks of bad news. Here are 10.
I still stand by that I think that 2023 was not as terrible a year as we have been getting.
The first weekend of November 2023, Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) held its annual convention at a hotel near O’Hare Airport outside of Chicago. It was the 48th convention since the rank-and-file union reform movement’s founding in 1976. The mood was confident and upbeat, with organizers announcing an attendance of 500 Teamster members from across the country. It was the largest TDU convention since 1997.
The Friday dinner banquet speaker was Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien, who took stock of what his administration had accomplished since taking office in March 2022. He focused especially on the union’s contract fight at package giant UPS this past summer, which culminated in the best contract ever negotiated at the company. He also spoke of the union’s plans to organize Amazon, an existential threat to the union.
On Saturday evening, the featured speaker and guest of honor at the dinner banquet was United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain, who was fresh off of leading an unprecedented strike against all three of the Big Three automakers, dubbed the “Stand-Up Strike.” The six-week strike had resulted in the best auto contracts negotiated in decades, with Fain grabbing national headlines for his militant class war message, combined with an “aw shucks” demeanor befitting his small-town roots in Kokomo, Indiana.
On stage at the TDU convention, though, Fain was playing the role of fiery working-class tribune far more than that of friendly uncle. He brought the crowd of rank-and-file Teamster activists to its feet with a no-holds-barred speech that denounced the billionaire class and held up the Stand-Up Strike as a fight not just for UAW autoworkers, but the entire working class. Importantly, he connected the new militancy in the UAW directly to the rank-and-file union reform movement that TDU has played a key role in building for the past several decades. As he put it, “there is no Stand-Up Strike without TDU.” As Fain left the stage, the crowd erupted in spontaneous chants of “Eat the Rich,” Fain’s signature slogan, appropriated from a profile of him in the New York Times.
We have reached a tipping point of capitalism. Either the Either the executive class are going to back off and stop squeezing us for every penny, or things are gonna get ugly in a hurry. Luckily Unions have been kicking all of the ass the last year and that doesn’t seem to be changing any time soon.
n response, Manuel says, the St. Tammany Library Alliance uses diverse strategies and tactics to challenge the bans. They encourage organizers to research books, create shareable infographics, organize group meetings, reach out to local political leaders, attend meetings and make petitions.
It seems to be paying off. Public comment at library board meetings increasingly tilts in support of the challenged books, and the alliance has helped fight off several proposed bans.
Back at the committee meeting, library director Kelly LaRocca shares the findings of the internal review. Two Boys Kissing, she reports, portrays “the joy and despair of being a teen, especially a gay teen.” Once public comment ends, the board votes to keep the title on the shelf.
About two months later, in October — with 150 challenged books waiting for internal review and limited library capacity to assess them — the St. Tammany Library announced a policy change: It would no longer pull challenged books from circulation while the books await review. That decision effectively thwarts the key right-wing strategy of using cumbersome processes as a backdoor means of banning books. Still, with new challenges surely ahead and book-banning laws continuing to spread nationwide, the alliance knows they’re in for a long fight.
“We are very consciously and meticulously trying to make our community visible, and I think that’s definitely upset some people,” Manuel says. “They want us to be quiet so we can ignore each other, but we’re not going to be quiet.”
The wave of book banning happening right now is horrible and inexcusable, and I am glad we have people pushing back against it.
Good New Polls in NH, PA - So the two weekly tracks out this week, Morning Consult and Economist/You Gov, have Biden-Trump at 43%-42% and 43%-43%. Since Thanksgiving, the race has stablized around these kinds of results, with Biden being tied or ahead now in a majority of recent independent polls. He has clearly recovered from a dip earlier in the fall, and it is no longer accurate to say that Trump has a polling advantage or leads in the election. It’s a close, competitive race right now, with lots of undecideds and people flirting with third parties. It’s why it’s good the Biden team turned is significantly ramping up it’s campaign now - it’s time to go out and win this thing.
While there continues to be polls that aren’t great for Biden, there also continues to be encouraging polls. In a recent post I offer some guidance on how to stick with larger sample, high quality polls and be quick to discount partisan polls or those with lower sample size or analysis based on very small demographic subgroups. There’s just a lot of junk out there right now, and polling continues to be very noisy. So here’s the encouraging news in polling this week (all polls can be found on 538):
things are looking good as we start 2024. I am currently cautiously optimistic.
In five years, Fresno’s core will be transformed into the first major hub on America’s most ambitious active infrastructure project: a 500-mile bullet train shuttling people 200-plus mph from San Francisco to Los Angeles in under three hours. But unlike Interstate 5, the state’s north-south connector, it’ll run through the heart of the Central Valley.
If you listen to California’s political class, the high-speed rail project sounds like a textbook boondoggle – over-budget, delayed and larded up with waste. Yet in communities across California’s farm belt, the discourse is refreshingly different.
It’s a symbol of transformation for a region that’s already bursting with activity. As the population declines in much of California, the Central Valley is growing, and forecasters say it will welcome 5 million new residents by 2060.
High-speed rail’s success will likely shape the region’s future, helping diversify its economy, build more housing and revitalize cash-strapped cities. But despite a litany of unmistakable benefits for California, the project remains a political pariah – pleading for a breakthrough in a bad-faith debate over the remaining budget gap.
We seriously need to bring trains back as a thing, and this is a good start.
Three states described their efforts to reduce carbon emissions from transportation during a Friday webinar hosted by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
These state efforts come as the Biden administration faces pushback from other states against its greenhouse gas performance measurement rule. The rule, issued Nov. 22, 2023, requires state departments of transportation to establish two- and four-year statewide emissions reduction targets and requires metropolitan planning organizations to set four-year emissions reduction targets for their planning areas.
Nice to see some states making an effort to help clean up the environment.
No quote from this one, but Ranked Choice voting would be a vast improvement on the current system.
I recently wrote about Belmont, North Carolina, where landowners and the city are planning a 15-acre extension of downtown. The plan carries the historic street grid through the property and offers a compelling vision for doubling the size of the small main street district.
From Poundbury to the Pearl District, many of the most successful new urban projects have been extensions of a town or city. They take existing urbanism and build on it by expanding a walkable street network.
This is not a new idea; it is how cities and towns routinely grew for centuries before suburban sprawl—which gained momentum circa 1950 in the US. Most cities and towns are now surrounded by sprawl, cutting off opportunities for a walkable urban town extension.
Yet there are still many places where cities and towns can be extended with walkable urbanism—if you look carefully. The result generally works well when cities and towns act on opportunities to expand the street grid. New Urbanism is created that doesn’t displace anyone—and the development is location-efficient and sustainable. In short, town extensions are golden opportunities that typically succeed.
Here are 10 examples of new urban plans and developments—eight in the US and two in England—that extend the street grid of a city or town.
Less urban sprawls, more little towns inside cities.
In 2023, however, the Proud Boys appeared to be "circling the drain," reports Tess Owen of Vice, who has covered the Proud Boys for years. While warning that the group is still a violent threat, especially to LGBTQ people, there is little doubt that they've seen a dramatic decline in activity. There were "just 36 uniformed appearances by one or more Proud Boys across 17 states last year, compared to the 63 appearances across 21 states that we logged in 2022," Owens writes. The events they did have had relatively low turnout, as well.
There's a few things going on. As Owens notes, it's common for extremist groups to fall apart fairly quickly. They are composed of nasty people who seek conflict, so it's inevitable that they fight and splinter over time. There's evidence some Proud Boys are decamping to neo-Nazi groups. I'd argue that the Proud Boys are impacted by the same forces that are causing Moms for Liberty to falter. Republicans bet big into 2022 on far-right groups, but instead, the GOP underperformed in the 2022 and 2023 elections. The backfire effect is reducing enthusiasm for this new breed of culture warriors.
The GOP’s descent into far right extremism does not seem to be working as well as they hoped.
n a significant victory for the privacy of people seeking abortion in the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission has issued a groundbreaking ban on the sale of individuals' medical location data. The FTC settlement announced on Tuesday is the first of its kind and concludes the agency’s investigation into the smartphone surveillance company Outlogic (formerly X-Mode Social), which bills itself as the “second largest U.S. data company” and tracks people through more than 100 smartphone apps. Outlogic is now prohibited from selling or sharing any person’s private location data that could be used to track someone to a health care facility, domestic abuse shelter or place of worship.
The FTC accepted the consent agreement on a 3-0 vote. In a joint statement, FTC chair Lina Khan pointed at the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that constitutional protections against unchecked government surveillance extend to geolocation tracking “even when the data is originally collected by private companies.”
Good on the FTC, We wont go back.
A grand jury returned a "no bill" in the case against Brittany Watts, 33, of Warren, Ohio, the prosecutor said, meaning they decided there will be no indictment. In the court filing, the grand jury foreman said the jury met for two days and examined seven witnesses regarding Watts' miscarriage before issuing their decision.
Watts, at 21 weeks and 5 days pregnant, began passing thick blood clots and made her first prenatal visit to a doctor's office in September 2023. The doctor told her that her water had broken prematurely and the baby most likely wouldn't survive. Over the next three days, Watts made multiple trips to the hospital before miscarrying into her home toilet. Testimony and an autopsy later confirmed that the fetus had died in the womb.
I mean she should not have been charged with anything anyway because wow. But congrats Ohio, you managed to clear the “did the bare minimum not to be complete tools” award.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis faced a sharp, surprising rebuke from a conservative appeals court on Wednesday, which dealt him a major setback in his quest to banish state prosecutor Andrew Warren from office. In fact, “setback” may be too mild a term: DeSantis got smoked at the court, which effectively accused him of abusing his office to punish Warren on the basis of protected speech. Most surprisingly, the governor’s harshest critic was Judge Kevin Newsom, a staunchly conservative Donald Trump appointee who went out of his way to charge DeSantis with an unconstitutional assault on “representative democracy.”
DeSantis, a Republican, suspended Warren, a twice-elected Democrat serving as state attorney near Tampa, from office in August 2022. Florida’s constitution permits the governor to suspend elected prosecutors only for specific reasons, like “neglect of duty” or “malfeasance.” So DeSantis issued an executive order claiming that he had dismissed the prosecutor for refusing to enforce criminal laws, including Florida’s bans on abortion and transgender health care. Warren responded with a federal lawsuit alleging that DeSantis had, in reality, targeted him because he had criticized the state bans, violating his First Amendment right to speak on a matter of public concern. At the time, the right-wing press panned his suit; National Review’s Dan McLaughlin, for instance, condemned it as “bogus,” “a joke” that “no responsible jurist” could support.
Man, DeSantis can not catch a break can he? I guess its true what they say: Instant Karma is gonna get you.
“I Would Much Rather Be Us Than Them” - My Thoughts on Where We Are As 2024 Voting Begins - Think about what we’ve seen in the past few weeks: the US economy remains strong, best recovery in G7, best job market since the 1960s, wage growth/new business starts/prime age-worker participation rates historically elevated; inflation is at/near Fed target rates, some prices are falling, rents/mortgage rates/gas prices are down, the soft landing appears to be happening; crime and murder rates have come down substantially over the past year, and remain a fraction of what they were 30 years ago; we have the lowest uninsured rate ever recorded, and ACA signups this year have set records; we’ve seen record domestic oil and renewable production, making America more energy independent then we’ve been in many decades; the President has forgiven over $130b in student debt, by some measures Gen Z home ownership rates are outpacing Millennials and Gen X, years of minimum wage increases across the county has created a much higher entry level wage for young and new workers; consumer sentiment is rising, and measures of life/job/income satisfaction are at elevated levels right now; the historic investments the President has made will create opportunities for American workers for decades to come, leave America far stronger and by dramatically accelerating the energy transition from fossil fuels make it far more likely we prevent the planet from warming; polling out this week has the President with sturdy leads in MI, NH and PA, and gaining 3 points and leading now in one important national tracking poll; after a great 2022 election, Democrats just saw a blue wave in 2023, as we won elections of all kinds across the country and outperformed our 2020 results - an election we won by 4.5 pts - by an average of 5 points in almost 40 state legislative special elections; one of the third party/rogue party candidates are getting serious traction, while the NeverTrumpers, aligned with us, are gaining strength.
We’ve got a great vantage point for 2024. Lets make sure we make the most of it.
And on that note we must once again bid adieu to the Monday GNR. See you all next week!