A dockworker strike looms next month, threatening to close ports on the East and Gulf coasts and throw the economy into chaos weeks before the presidential election. The Biden administration has few options to avert disaster.
Dockworkers say they’ll strike on Sept. 30 if no new contract is in place, potentially halting activity at ports from Maine to Texas that collectively handle more than 60% of total U.S. container volume. The International Longshoremen’s Association suspended negotiations in June over a technical dispute, and no new talks have been scheduled.
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At the height of the pandemic port disruptions, President Biden got directly involved in efforts to unclog the Los Angeles-Long Beach gateway before the midterm elections. His intervention revealed Democratic worries about the politically dangerous connection voters were drawing between port backups and inflation and product availability.
This time, many retailers and other cargo owners are taking comfort that because of its election-season timing, a strike would never occur or would last only a few days—because the Biden administration would have to intervene.
That belief ignores the dynamics that elevate the risk of what would be the first coastwide strike along the East and Gulf coasts since 1977, upending the $588 billion in annual containerized imports that moved through these ports in 2023, according to an estimate from S&P Global Market Intelligence. A strike would shatter importers’ longstanding trust in these ports’ stability.
Scott Sumner shares a vital insight about trade. A slice:
Foreign Affairs also has an excellent piece on trade relations with China:
A China that is increasingly cut off from Western markets will have less to lose in a potential confrontation with the West—and, therefore, less motivation to de-escalate. As long as China is tightly bound to the United States and Europe through the trade of high-value goods that are not easily substitutable, the West will be far more effective in deterring the country from taking destabilizing actions. China and the United States are strategic competitors, not enemies; nonetheless, when it comes to U.S.-Chinese trade relations, there is wisdom in the old saying “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
Financial Times reports that “Biden’s industrial legacy is marked with factory delays and pauses.” (HT Tyler Cowen) A slice:
Companies said deteriorating market conditions, slowing demand, and lack of policy certainty in a high-stakes election year have caused them to change their plans.
Jon Miltimore explains “why corporate America’s retreat from social activism is good for everyone.”
Dan McLaughlin is unimpressed with David French’s plea for conservatives to vote for Kamala Harris. Two slices:
I’m a longtime Trump critic who voted third party in 2016, voted write-in in 2020, and planned to write in again in the Trump-vs.-Biden race. I’m also still a conservative Republican. I agree with French that Trump has been a menace to the Republican Party and the conservative movement, that he has acted against our systems of law in ways that cannot easily be absolved or minimized, and that he is a corrosive force in our national life. I’ve supported some very bad people who agreed with me, but it’s harder to write off character and fitness for the job in the presidency, given its vast powers. I’ve always said there were only two things that could make me consider a vote for Trump: a Kamala Harris nomination and a serious push for Court-packing by the Democrats. The past month has brought us both. I’m still not sure if I could pull the Trump lever even against Harris, but that’s another day’s argument.
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There are conservative cases to be made for some very hard choices in this world. But one of the central duties of a conservative is to remember, always, that there are trade-offs for everything. To frame a case for Kamala Harris in the presidency only in the negative sense that it avoids another Trump administration is to pretend away those trade-offs. But they will not go away by ignoring them.
Juliette Sellgren talks with Michael Cannon about health policy.
Jeff Jacoby is correct: “The case for colorblindness is as compelling — and vital — as ever.” A slice:
ON THE first page of The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, Coleman Hughes describes himself as a black person who always found race “boring.” Growing up in New Jersey, he gave little thought to his racial identity or to those of his friends. “I didn’t think of them as ‘black,’ ‘white,’ ‘Hispanic,’ and ‘mixed race,'” he writes. “I thought of them as Rodney, Stephen, Javier, and Jordan.”
Then he went to college.
“In four years at Columbia, hardly a week passed without a race-themed controversy,” Hughes recalls. During orientation, students were directed to sort themselves by race and discuss how they “participated in, or suffered from, systemic oppression.” The school newspaper promoted the idea that white supremacy was prevalent on campus. One professor was adamant that all people of color were victims of racial injustice, Hughes relates, “even as my daily experience as a black person directly contradicted that claim.”
Though he still considered race itself boring, he was fascinated by the racial obsessions of American cultural elites, especially those who call themselves “antiracists.” The more he explored those obsessions, the more convinced he became that the principle of colorblindness is the only ethical and workable basis for governing and living in a multiethnic democracy. That principle Hughes defines simply: “We should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives.”
Fountain of Youth? (HT Humanprogress.org)
