We begin today with Will Hoffmann of the Asheville Citizen-Times detailing the growing water crisis in Asheville, NC because of the devastation caused by Hurricane/Tropical Storm Helene.
...the most urgent problem is the growing water crisis, which poses both long and short-term health risks for Asheville residents. Without high pressure water, hospital functions are "significantly challenged," as even simple tasks like hot food preparation, toileting and showers are not possible, Lowe said.
The road back to consistent water in the city of over 93,000 may be long.
City Assistant Manager Ben Woody described the impact on the water department as "catastrophic," as there is "very limited access" to the William Debruhl Water Plant because the primary road to the plant had been washed out. Three water plants need "extensive repairs," but there are already federal agencies on the scene "helping us make repairs," Woody said, noting that the city of Greensboro has sent water repair crews and equipment.
The storm had washed out 24-inch and 36-inch water main lines and transmission lines at the North Fork Water Treatment Plant, Woody said. The city had installed redundancies on the site in 2004, after Hurricane Ivan flooded the area, but those were washed out too, he said.
Be careful what you wish for when it comes to immigrants, Renée Graham of The Boston Globe reminds us.
Without evidence and contrary to recent FBI statistics about significant declines in major crime nationwide, Trump claims that immigration is fueling a crime surge. And he is promising to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” by removing millions of undocumented immigrants, because keeping this nation as white as possible is a founding doctrine of the MAGA movement.
When Trump makes such declarations, he gets cheers, applause, and chants of “Send them back.” But if such a thing were even possible, this nation would all but collapse without legal or undocumented immigrants.
In his remarkable 1965 satire, “Day of Absence,” playwright Douglas Turner Ward imagines a small Southern town that awakens one morning to find all of its Black residents gone without a trace. From crying babies untended by Black nannies — a white woman laments that her baby doesn’t know her nor is she “acquainted wit’ it” — to unmanned and silent factories, the town grinds to a halt. Its befuddled white residents are rendered dysfunctional without the presence of the Black people they’ve always despised.
America would become that town writ large without immigrants.
William Gavin of Quartz writes about the dockworkers strike affecting multiple ports on the East and Gulf Coasts, respectively.
The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) represents more than 85,000 workers and has been negotiating with companies, terminal operators, and port associations represented by the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) since last May. Without a contract between the groups, as many as 45,000 members are walking off the job at more than a dozen major ports, including facilities in New York and Texas. [...]
The ILA is demanding higher wages and a salary that outpaces inflation, which is cooling after a long stubborn streak, and provides more than the small wage increases included in its last contract. Between 2018 and 2024, employees received a $1 per hour increase to their wages, to a maximum of $38 per hour — about $79,000 annually on a 40-hour work week — while new employees started at $20 an hour.
Workers are also pushing for protection against automation and new technology devices in terminals. Exact details of the union’s demands, or the alliance’s offers, haven’t been disclosed.
Paul Krugman of The New York Times points out a study that indicates that Trumponomics would be inflationary.
How inflationary would Trumponomics be? A new study from the Peterson Institute for International Economics tries to put numbers to the likely effect. It estimates that depending on the extent to which Trump’s policies on tariffs, the Fed and, in particular, immigration are enacted, they would raise inflation between about four and seven percentage points above the base line, meaning inflation of about 6 percent to 9 percent.
Should you believe these numbers? Economic models aren’t exactly famed for the accuracy of their predictions. But there’s a way to think about this issue that makes the Peterson numbers quite plausible: Trumponomics could create economic disruptions similar to those caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. So it makes sense that the result would be a surge in inflation comparable to what we saw in 2021-22.
Here’s what I mean: Many economists now agree with the analysis laid out in August by Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, who attributed much of the inflation surge to side effects of the pandemic. Public health concerns led to a large, although temporary, drop in the labor force, which in turn caused widespread labor shortages, with unfilled job openings greatly exceeding the number of people seeking work. A sudden shift of demand away from services toward goods overloaded supply chains — remember all those freighters steaming back and forth off the coast, waiting for a chance to unload? — creating shortages of many items and soaring prices. Inflation came down only after these disruptions eased.
Now think about what Trump is contemplating. Rounding up millions of foreign-born workers would cause an immediate large reduction in labor supply. Tariffs would drive up the cost of imported goods as surely as shipping costs and inadequate port capacity did in 2021-22. Trumponomics would, you might say, be a plague on the economy.
Here’s the full interview that the “All the Smoke” podcast hosts Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson conducted with Vice President Kamala Harris.
I especially appreciated that the Vice President talked a lot about mental health.
Finally today, Jim Barger Jr. writes a long and spectacular essay for The Bitter Southerner celebrating the 100th birthday of the 39th president of the United States, James Earl Carter.
Jimmy Carter’s eyes are piercingly blue — transfixing, unnerving, fiercely intentional. When he sets them upon you, you dare not look away. Caricatures of him have always focused on his toothy smile. But now, as he completes his one hundredth trip around the sun, it’s not his smile that comes to my mind. It’s his eyes.
The first time I met Jimmy Carter I was 6 years old, and he was visiting with family friends in my hometown of St. Simons Island, Georgia, in 1977, not long after his presidential inauguration. The next time was during the summer of 2022, when I spent time with the Carters in their home in Plains, discussing our shared love of fly fishing with our mutual fishing buddy, Dr. Carlton Hicks. Both times, I was struck dumb by Jimmy Carter’s eyes. They were the color of the sky on a clear day. They cut right through me. They asked silent, probing questions I was too afraid to ask myself and too afraid to answer. His gaze — when fixed upon you — makes you want to do better. It makes you know you can do better. It makes you ask yourself why you haven’t done better all along.
When I heard the news of his terminal diagnosis and of his decision to receive end-of-life hospice care in the late winter of 2023, I sat down at my writing table and tried to process the specter of his death. I stared blankly out the window at shadows of live oaks stretching across golden spartina grass in the midafternoon sun out to the Altamaha River estuary where Jimmy Carter loved to fish for speckled trout. Palmettos waved gently in the breeze. An indigo bunting alighted in a thicket of wax myrtles. The arresting little bird preened his blue feathers and whistled his joyful song so proudly and so loudly that I heard it through the windowpane. The diminutive migrant songbird wasn’t due for another month at least, maybe more. It had come too soon. I wasn’t ready for it. It wasn’t time yet. My dog, Buster, wandered in and looked up at me with sad brown eyes. He walked around in a circle twice and flopped down on the old pine floor in a pool of February sunshine.
Have the best possible day everyone!
