Kevin Drum

The auto strike isn't over yet, but the Wall Street Journal reports that the UAW has reached agreement on a new contract with one of the Big Three:

As part of the proposed contract, Ford has agreed to give factory workers a 25% wage increase over the life of the agreement, including a 11% bump in the first year, according to people familiar with the details. The wage increase would bump the top pay for assembly line workers from around $32 an hour to roughly $40 an hour.

The UAW has also reduced the time it takes for new hires to reach the maximum wage, reducing it to three years from eight previously.

There's nothing in the story about ending the two-tier wage structure currently in place, but it sounds like it's probably gone. New hires will be paid the same wages as everyone else within three years of being hired.

The UAW membership still needs to vote to accept the deal before the new contract becomes final. Presumably GM and Stellantis (Chrysler) will follow along fairly quickly now that Ford has come to terms.

In 1999 Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas bought a luxury motor home for $267,000. It was financed by a loan from his friend Anthony Welters, a health insurance millionaire.

In interviews, Welters said the loan had been "satisfied" in 2008 but declined to say just what that meant. So the Senate Finance Committee subpoenaed him to get the details. It turns out that Thomas was required only to make interest payments on the loan. The New York Times tells the rest of the story:

The principal amount borrowed would come due in a balloon payment on the loan’s maturity date, in December 2004....But in 2004, when the principal came due, Justice Thomas did not make good on his debt, according to records obtained by the committee and cited in their report. Instead, Mr. Welters granted him a 10-year extension, with the same interest-only terms....Then, in late 2008, Mr. Welters simply forgave the balance of the loan, according to the committee’s report.

As usual this has tax implications but isn't necessarily an ethics violation because the Supreme Court has virtually no ethics rules. A Supreme Court justice can essentially accept a gift of half a million dollars¹ and not bother disclosing it.

¹This is adjusted for inflation, natch.

The judge in Donald Trump's business fraud trial called Trump to the witness stand today to ask about something he'd said during a recess:

The dispute began during a break in the testimony Wednesday morning. Speaking to reporters in a hallway, Trump complained that Engoron, a Democrat, is “a very partisan judge, with a person who’s very partisan sitting alongside of him, perhaps even much more partisan than he is.”

....On the witness stand, Trump said his remark outside court was a reference not to the judge’s law clerk, who sits next to Engoron in the courtroom on the bench, but to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who had been on the witness stand earlier in the day testifying against his former boss.

The judge, for obvious reasons, didn't believe Trump and fined him $10,000, the second time he's fined Trump for disparaging members of the court.

It's probably pointless to ask, but I wonder what goes on in Trump's mind when he does this stuff. Does he:

• Not care about the gag order?
• Forget about it in the heat of the moment?
• Not believe the judge will enforce it?
• Figure the money is peanuts and he can afford it?

Beats me.

Hanging out at the beach waiting for the kids to come in.

According to Voteview, here's the skinny on Mike Johnson, our new Speaker of the House:

He's pretty conservative, but a little less conservative than Jim Jordan. According to their ideology rankings, he's the 82nd most conservative member of the House, compared to 9th for Marjorie Taylor-Greene and 20th for Jordan.

The number of new one-family homes purchased ticked up at an annualized rate of 83,000 in September:

It's remarkable that new home sales have stayed so robust in face of massively higher prices:

The last time prices increased like this, during the high-interest Volcker regime of 1979-82, new home sales were cut in half and didn't recover until rates came down. This time, sales dropped from the pandemic bubble high, but then increased when the Fed raised rates and have continued to increase even as the Fed has held rates high.

People just want to buy houses and apparently nothing will stop them.

So after all this drama, Mike Johnson suddenly gets unanimous Republican support and is our new Speaker of the House? wtf? These people are crazy.

Meta is being sued by 41 states for knowingly putting teens in danger. There are two big complaints.

The first is that Facebook and Instagram recruit users under 13 in violation of the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. This is plausible and easy to understand.

But the other, bigger complaint is that Facebook and Instagram are dangerous for teens—and Meta knows it. Nevertheless, they actively try to get teens addicted to their platforms. This one is much trickier to evaluate, not least because about half the complaint is redacted. But having read the entire court filing, the states' basic case goes like this:

1. Facebook and Instagram try hard to get teens to use their platform.
2. They have also adopted features that keep teens coming back for more.
3. There is landslide evidence that use of these platforms is bad for teen mental health.
4. Facebook and Instagram publicly deny all of this.
5. This is a violation of the business codes in the various states.

This sounds like a big stretch. It's obviously not illegal to market social media to teens. It's also not illegal to make a product they like a lot. Nor is it at all clear that Facebook and Instagram are broadly dangerous. A mere deterioration of teen mental health over the past decade doesn't prove anything. Instagram's infamous internal "body image" study really doesn't prove anything. The Frances Haugen whistleblower roadshow ended up mostly a bust. And the evidence of serious mental health effects is very, very thin.

Given all this, it's going to be tough to make a case that Meta's repeated denials of being the online equivalent of a heroin pusher constitute misleading representations under the law. But of course, you never know what a jury will think, do you? I wouldn't be surprised if this eventually ends in a "no admission of guilt" settlement.

Oh come on. He only got nominated a few hours ago:

????????BREAKING — TOM EMMER has dropped out of the race for speaker.

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) October 24, 2023

This was already ridiculous, but now it's positively insane.

On the other hand, it's looking better and better for a Kevin McCarthy comeback!

The Wall Street Journal reports that militia groups allied with Iran have started targeting American forces:

Iran in recent days has unleashed the regional militias it has spent years arming.

....Though Pentagon spokesman Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said Monday that the U.S. doesn’t have information that Iran “explicitly ordered” the recent militia attacks, Defense Department officials also say that Tehran is either actively encouraging the drone and missile strikes or is refraining from discouraging them. “When you see this uptick in activity and attacks by many of these groups,” a senior Defense official said, “there’s Iranian fingerprints all over it.”

This just gets worse and worse. But I don't have anything insightful to say about it. I'm just passing along the news.