“Candidate Donald Trump thought that bombing Yemen was “just a failed mentality” when then-President Joe Biden did it. “It’s crazy. You can solve problems over the telephone. Instead, they start dropping bombs. I see, recently, they’re dropping bombs all over Yemen. You don’t have to do that. You can talk in such a way where they respect you and they listen to you,” Trump said in a May 2024″
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“Trump is now dropping bombs all over Yemen. Over the weekend, the U.S. military launched its first air raids on Yemen in months, hitting targets around the country and killing at least 53 people. Sources in the administration have told The New York Times that the attacks will continue for weeks”
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“Instead of calling Biden a warmonger, as he had a year ago, Trump claimed on Sunday that Biden’s “pathetically weak” policy had allowed “unrelenting campaign of piracy, violence, and terrorism” against American shipping.”
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“Trump’s notoriously hawkish national security adviser, Mike Waltz, thinks this campaign will be different. “These were not kind of pinprick, back and forth—what ultimately proved to be feckless attacks. This was an overwhelming response that actually targeted multiple Houthi leaders and took them out. And the difference here is, one, going after the Houthi leadership, and two, holding Iran responsible,” he told ABC on Sunday.”
“President Donald Trump said Wednesday the United States will end the Biden administration’s concessions aimed at promoting free elections in Venezuela, canceling a license that allowed U.S. oil company Chevron to produce and export oil in the country.”
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“Chevron’s oil exports out of Venezuela reached 294,000 barrels a day in January, the highest level since it resume shipments from its operations there in early 2023, Reuters reported earlier this month citing data from Venezuela’s state-owned company PdVSA. That crude oil went to refineries in the United States, according to the data.
Venezuela produced just over 1 million barrels a day of oil in January, according to data it reported to OPEC.”
“The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act stands as the single largest piece of legislation to address climate change in United States history.
The IRA contains nearly $370 billion for programs like tax credits for more efficient appliances, building new battery plants, and subsidies for renewable energy. And it triggered a boom in new construction and manufacturing for things like solar panels. It also created hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
But two years later, much of that money remains unspent.
The largest investment — ever — for the clean energy transition has yet to materialize into actual hardware like heat pumps or wind turbines. Despite more than $7.5 billion allocated to building electric vehicle chargers, for example, only a handful have been built. About 40 percent of big IRA projects hit delays, according to the Financial Times.”
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“Now President-elect Donald Trump has said he wants to claw back the unspent money and congressional Democrats are getting antsy. In a recent letter, dozens of senators and representatives wrote to the White House asking Biden to get more money out the door, from the IRA as well as other legislation like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.”
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“One of the big challenges with spending most federal funds in programs like the IRA is that the money doesn’t go straight to suppliers for construction materials, EV chargers, batteries, or home insulation. Rather, the funds are sent to state and local authorities who then distribute the money.
That added step creates a lot of complications. First, a lot of local officials simply are not set up to receive a lot of cash all at once. It requires rigorous accounting and record-keeping, so before they can use the money, recipients have to invest in the personnel and tools to track it. Then when money hits bank accounts, local officials have to decide where to spend it. That means seeking out proposals, soliciting competitive bids, and giving enough time for communities to weigh in. Even for “shovel-ready” projects, they often have to contend with last-minute hurdles like rising financing costs from inflation, supply chain snarls, and litigation that can halt ground-breaking.
Local governments also have their own incentives. While Biden’s White House wanted to juice the clean energy economy as fast as possible, often state and local governments want to stretch out the funds. “There’s always a sense that if money is spent too quickly, people might get used to the money, maybe even addicted to it, and then officials would have to raise taxes to make up the difference” when it runs out, said Donald Kettl, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy who studies government spending.
Delays also result from how the funding is leveraged, whether it’s a grant, a loan, a loan guarantee, or a tax credit. Tax credits add an inherent lag because you don’t receive the cash benefit until you file your taxes.”
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“There are also factors beyond Biden’s direct control at play. Changes in global demand and uncertainty about the outcome of the presidential election led some companies to hold off on executing IRA-funded projects. And those that do want to get rolling often have to go through a tedious, sometimes years-long permitting process before they can break ground.”
“Trump talked repeatedly about runaway grocery prices during the campaign, pledging that if elected, paying over $4 for a carton of eggs would be a thing of the past. “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day 1,” he pledged. But after
“The question of whether a single federal trial judge should have the power to halt a federal law or policy throughout the entire country is hotly contested. As Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a 2020 opinion arguing against nationwide injunctions, “there are currently more than 1,000 active and senior district court judges, sitting across 94 judicial districts, and subject to review in 12 regional courts of appeal.” If nationwide injunctions are allowed, any one of these district judges could potentially halt any federal law, even if every other judge in the country disagrees with them.
The problem is particularly acute in Texas’s federal courts (Mazzant sits in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas), where local rules often allow plaintiffs to choose which judge will hear their case. During the Biden administration, Republicans often selected highly partisan judges to hear challenges to liberal federal policies — and those judges frequently rewarded this behavior by issuing nationwide injunctions.
Such injunctions can potentially be lifted by a higher court, but the process of seeking relief from such a court can take weeks or even months — and that’s assuming that the appeals court is inclined to follow the law. Federal cases out of Texas, for example, appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which is dominated by far-right judges who frequently defy Supreme Court precedents that are out of favor with the Republican Party.
Moreover, while some Republican judges such as Gorsuch expressed doubts about these nationwide injunctions, the GOP-controlled Supreme Court frequently let such injunctions against the Biden administration remain in effect for many months — even if a majority of the justices eventually concluded that the policies at issue in those cases, which often involved disputes over immigration policy, were legal. So the Court apparently did not view ending the practice of nationwide injunctions as a high priority so long as those injunctions thwarted Democratic policies.”
“”If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned,” J.D. Vance, now the vice president, said last week. But that “obvious” caveat was notably missing from the indiscriminate pardons Trump actually issued, which he claimed were necessary to remedy “a grave national injustice” and start “a process of national reconciliation.”
Such a reconciliation is impossible when the president is willing to excuse political violence as long as it is perpetrated by his supporters.”
Did all the death and destruction wrought by Israel trying to get Hamas achieve anything? If Gaza is still ruled by a terrorist organization, won’t it just rebuild, then attack Israel, and this happens all over again?
“In August 2022, Biden announced a blanket forgiveness of up to $20,000 in federal student loans for single borrowers earning less than $125,000 or couples earning less than $250,000. This plan—estimated to cost over $500 billion—was swiftly blocked in federal court, and the Supreme Court later struck it down as an unconstitutional exercise of the spending power.
While Biden couldn’t quite bring home the grand prize, he managed to cancel billions in student loans through now-blocked changes to the federal student loan program. Unsurprisingly, these changes also led to a big increase in the estimated 2024 federal deficit—a $145 billion hike.
The seminal achievement of Biden’s student loan overhaul was the introduction of the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, an income-driven repayment plan that dramatically reduces most borrowers’ monthly payments. Under the previous version of the program, borrowers were directed to pay 10 percent of their discretionary income (calculated as earnings above 150 percent of the federal poverty rate) for 20 years before receiving forgiveness. Borrowers will now pay just 5 percent of their discretionary income (now estimated as earnings more than 225 percent of the federal poverty level), with some receiving forgiveness after only 10 years. While the program was estimated to cost taxpayers nearly $500 billion over the next decade, federal courts fully blocked the program by July 2024.
If somehow allowed to go forward, the SAVE plan would be likely to incentivize students to take on much larger student loan balances, because the program requires borrowers to pay so little back before forgiveness. Ultimately, it’s difficult to see how this extra spending doesn’t encourage colleges to hike tuition.”
“in the face of increasingly tough competition both domestic and foreign, US Steel started to look for a buyer. Late last year it found one in Nippon Steel, the largest steel manufacturer in Japan, which offered $14.9 billion for the company.
In many ways, it seemed like a natural fit. The world’s current leading steel producer, by a wide margin, is China, and just as a US-Japan alliance is the linchpin of efforts to contain China militarily, a US-Japan corporate merger could be a linchpin of efforts to contain China’s efforts to dominate the steel market. Letting a military rival control the production of such a crucial material (and such an important one for defense applications like warships and warplanes) comes with clear risks.
Except the deal now will not go through. President Joe Biden, who came out in opposition to the deal in March, announced on Friday he would block the sale on the grounds that the deal represented a threat to national security.
“It is my solemn responsibility as president to ensure that, now and long into the future, America has a strong domestically owned and operated steel industry that can continue to power our national sources of strength at home and abroad,” Biden said in a statement. “And it is a fulfillment of that responsibility to block foreign ownership of this vital American company.”
The decision comes after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS, an interagency council controlled by Biden’s Cabinet and other appointees) decided not to formally recommend whether the takeover should go forward, though it did express reservations about the deal in letters to Nippon Steel and US Steel. CFIUS has the power to vote mergers and acquisitions it deems dangerous to national security.
National security, though, is not necessarily the reason why Biden made the highly unusual decision to block the deal, even though US Steel is threatening to shut down multiple mills should the deal not go through, which could put thousands out of work. His administration’s diplomats had reportedly told Japanese officials they need to kill the merger so Democrats would win Pennsylvania last November. (Even though Kamala Harris also came out against the deal on the campaign trail, she still lost Pennsylvania by over 100,000 votes.) Donald Trump also signaled opposition to the acquisition.
Why did this deal become so unpopular? Some of it surely is the symbolism of “US Steel” being sold to “Nippon Steel,” which if included as a plot point in a late ’80s/early ’90s movie about the unstoppable economic rise of Japan, would come across as a little too on the nose. Unsurprisingly, Trump, whose form of nationalism has a distinct 1980s vintage, explained his opposition as motivated by a desire not to sell out to “Japan.”
But the bigger reason politicians lined up against the deal is that the leadership of the United Steelworkers union (USW), which includes most of US Steel’s workforce among its 60,000 steelmaking members, strongly opposed it, though many members dissented. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) candidly stated he’ll oppose the deal as long as the union does.”
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“One can hardly blame the United Steelworkers union for being skeptical of minimills, given how the spread of the business model has decimated its membership. The problem is not just that minimills require fewer workers, but that they tend to be located in southern, anti-union states, with non-union labor.
There are a total of eight operational integrated steel mills in the US, all owned by US Steel or Cleveland-Cliffs; three are in Indiana, two in Ohio, one in Michigan, and one in Pennsylvania. The eighth, in Granite City, Illinois, idled its blast furnaces indefinitely late last year, though it continues to roll and finish steel slabs produced elsewhere. All eight of these facilities are unionized, six by the United Steelworkers.
By comparison, there are 88 electric arc furnace facilities in the US. While it’s hard to know what share are unionized, most are not; only about 23 percent of iron and steelworkers in the US overall are covered by a union contract, down from over half in 1983. Given that almost all workers in integrated mills are covered, it’s reasonable to surmise that the large majority of minimill workers aren’t in a union, making steel a majority non-union industry overall.
There are always exceptions, like a US Steel electric arc furnace facility in Alabama where workers are USW members, but for the most part, big integrated mills mean union power, and minimills with electric arc furnaces mean union decline. Nucor, the largest steel company in the US with over 25 million tons sold last year to US Steel’s 15.5 million, both pioneered minimills and is famously non-union. Even US Steel, long a center of union strength, acquired an Arkansas non-union electric arc furnace mill in 2021.”
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“How did this tie into the Nippon Steel bid? Essentially, the steelworkers saw Nippon as threatening to move US Steel toward minimill-type production and away from the conventional blast furnace/basic oxygen furnace integrated mills where the union is strongest.”
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““The reality is that there are certain crucial products that simply cannot be made without blast furnaces, including those used in automotive, energy, and national security applications,” the union insisted. They have a point. We can’t run the world economy on recycled scrap metal alone, and advanced high-strength steel (AHSS), needed for car manufacturing among other uses, tends to be made with blast furnaces, not electric arc furnaces, in part because scrap of high enough quality to make AHSS is rare. EAFs running on iron produced through direct reduction, not blast furnaces, may be able to make inroads here, but right now we need blast furnaces for cars.
There are other union concerns as well. The acquisition was announced without giving the union prior notice, which it claims violates the collective bargaining agreement reached between the union and US Steel.
Moreover, the union had another buyer in mind: Cleveland Cliffs, the No. 2 steel company in the US and the only other operator of traditional integrated mills. The company committed to the union that no union member would lose their job upon acquisition, and would continue to operate blast furnaces. Once again, the USW position emphasizes keeping traditional mills, with large union workforces, going.
However, Cleveland Cliffs only offered $7.3 billion, about half of Nippon’s $14.9 billion, for US Steel. It reportedly offered much more than that privately in response to the Nippon bid, but even then it didn’t match the Nippon offer. A Cleveland Cliffs purchase would have also raised major antitrust issues that would presumably bother the unusually antitrust-focused Biden administration. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the US auto manufacturers’ lobby, wrote to policymakers to express concern over one firm controlling 100 percent of US blast furnaces, and 65 to 90 percent of the steel used in vehicle manufacturing.
Industry press coverage of Cliffs notes quite candidly their strategy of trying to dominate blast furnace production so they can charge a higher price. In other contexts, that’s a kind of monopoly-oriented strategy that Biden appointees like Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan or Department of Justice antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter would normally object to.”
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“Some environmental groups criticized the deal on the grounds that Nippon is committed to keeping high-emissions blast furnaces running — precisely the opposite conclusion of the steelworkers’ union. If the steelworkers were right, that probably would have been good news for Nippon and US Steel’s carbon footprint.
As it stands, electric arc furnaces are far cleaner than blast furnace/basic oxygen steel production.”