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Recessions fears 1, climate concerns 0

If you’re scoring at home, (and who’s not?) getting off the buying merry go round is proving to be incredibly difficult – even with ever-present reminders of plague, drought, and the cost of everything cross-referenced with the need to exercise and eat better, the joys of being outdoors and seeing people again. It’s all so confusing, especially when the answers are RIGHT there. You’re so close, Brigette:

As gas and food prices climb, Brigette Engler, an artist based in New York City, said she’s driving to her second home upstate less often and cutting back on eating out.

“Twenty dollars seems extravagant at this point for lunch,” she said.

And before you start, no one mentioned anything about anything being easy. But that doesn’t mean everything has to be intentionally more difficult to understand, i.e., predicated on a growing economy and not spooking ‘investor confidence.’ JFC… what does any of that even mean? Please subscribe to my newsletter, Which Word to Italicize:

How people spend their money is shifting as the economy slows and inflation pushes prices higher everywhere including gas stations, grocery stores and luxury retail shops. The housing market, for example, is already feeling the pinch. Other industries have long been considered recession proof and may even be enjoying a bump as people start going out again after hunkering down during the pandemic.

Still, shoppers everywhere are feeling pressured. In May, an inflation metric that tracks prices on a wide range of goods and services jumped 8.6% from a year ago, the biggest jump since 1981. Consumers’ optimism about their finances and the overall economy sentiment fell to 50.2% in June, its lowest recorded level, according to the University of Michigan’s monthly index.

That’s from the same article and I don’t mean to single out CNBC. Just listen Marketplace or any business/economic news and the dissonance is a cacophony (Ed. ?). Unemployment is bad, but a tight labor market rattles the Dow. Prices at the pump have drivers worried about filling up, but what’s the real price of fuel? Hint: Europeans already know. Sure there’s a macro-micro disconnect. But the larger disconnect is the one we keep shoring up: individual actions of millions, propped up and egged on by the corporate and government altars to the status quo, heating up the planet beyond what it can support.

Whether or not we need more reminders of the need to change how we live, more are on the way.

Image: Merry-Go-Round Photograph by Jurgen Lorenzen

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How a Bill becomes a Law

un-apNo, not that one – but I love that one. This one, directed at Earthlings, named for our universe’s cultural heart and designed to avoid the worst:

the Paris climate agreement had passed a critical milestone toward adoption. At a UN General Assembly meeting in New York this morning, 31 nations officially signed onto the accord, making it very likely that the deal will enter legal force this year.

You may remember that the Paris agreement—an international pledge to limit us to 2 degrees Celsius of global warming, by weaning every nation off fossil fuels—was adopted at an international summit in December 2015. But before it can go into effect, it needs to be formally ratified by 55 countries that together account for 55 percent of global carbon emissions.

The accord received a major boost earlier this month, when the United States and China, two carbon behemoths that together account for nearly forty percent of global emissions, jointly announced their intention to ratify the deal. Before today, 27 other nations that collectively represent some 2 to 3 percent of global emissions had also signed on.

This is the tipping point we were looking for, to try to put off that other one. So many other wires have been tripped in setting off the renewable energy cascade, we might as well formalize the shift. Many difficulties still afoot and Team Fossil is going to fight even harder, but this is continued progress to be promoted and echoed.

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Easy to Miss

Linda Greenhouse is one of the top journalists who cover the Supreme Court – so many of the other few are also women, why is that? Anyway, there is much you just cannot explain to yourself or others without knowing (sounds axiomatic, I swear I wish it was), and Greenhouse brings some light to recent heat in this column:

You remember Lilly Ledbetter, the poised grandmother who addressed the 2008 Democratic National Convention. A native of Possum Trot, Ala. And a former overnight-shift manager at a Goodyear tire factory, where she was the only woman in her job category. Ms. Ledbetter learned only as she neared retirement that despite promotions and regular raises, she was being paid much less than any of the men. The Supreme Court ruled by a vote of 5 to 4 that she should have figured that out years earlier, and threw out her sex-discrimination lawsuit because she was too late in filing a formal complaint.

Two women, a generation apart: one disrespected by the three-day rant of a thuggish talk show host, the other dissed by five members of the Supreme Court. Each is an accidental heroine (as was Anita Hill, more than 20 years ago) whose plight touched a nerve already inflamed by deeper concerns roiling the public sphere.

In Lilly Ledbetter’s case, it was a mix of old and new: the old concern about equal opportunity and fairness in the workplace given new urgency within the Democratic base by distress at the Supreme Court’s abrupt rightward shift following Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement and her replacement by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. It was Justice Alito who wrote the majority opinion in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber.

The decision interpreted the 180-day statute of limitations in the country’s basic law against job discrimination, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The court held that the 180-day clock for reporting incidents of discrimination starts running with the initial discriminatory act – in this case, the long-ago decision to pay Ms. Ledbetter less than her male peers. The majority rejected her lawyers’ argument that the clock should be deemed re-set with every subsequent paycheck that reflects and carries forward the original discrimination.

Sandra Fluke didn’t ask to become a cipher for contraception, so it’s important to know that more than a woman’s personality stands behind the significance (and durability) of this issue. Same with Lilly Ledbetter; why do you need to understand what the above court case is about? Tell me again, what does green mean?

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Pocket Change

It’s funny, and not ha-ha, but so many people (and you’re related to at least a few of them) spend so much time keeping up with stock market numbers, rises and falls in the Dow, the price of gold other such particularly ridiculous prisms through which to see the world that when you hear/read someone talking sensibly about the the absurd way this “system” is treated and treats itself it can be, well, refreshing.

A federal judge angrily blocked Citigroup’s proposed $285 million settlement over the sale of toxic mortgage debt, excoriating the top U.S. market regulator over how it reaches corporate fraud settlements.

…

Rakoff called the Citigroup accord too lenient, noting that the bank was charged only with negligence, neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing, and could avoid reimbursing investors for more than $700 million of losses. Private investors cannot bring securities claims based on negligence.

“If the allegations of the complaint are true, this is a very good deal for Citigroup; and, even if they are untrue, it is a mild and modest cost of doing business,” the judge wrote.

The judge basically told the SEC and Citigroup to shove it, interrupting one of the very commonplace, move-along, nothing-to-see-here disgraces taking up valuable time in courthouses across the country. The settlement without any admission of guilt is one of the more nefarious innovations to ever come along, allowing companies to pay their way out of crimes, prep the memory hole and begin the process again as soon as possible. It’s all too cozy, and no one seems to notice anymore. There are no business reporters who take the side of anything but corporations and business. It’s amazing but even a judge paying attention realized that the wash was still dirty after this rinse cycle and decided to plop the whole load back in the machine, hopefully this time with some bleach.  They still continue to call the aggrieved parties ‘investors’ as though it’s somehow the ultimate distinction. It’s really just a description of people who deserve to be ruled by corporations.