Corpse President Says Companies Can’t Do What They Want

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President Joe Biden pauses as he concludes his address to the nation from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, July 24, 2024, about his decision to drop his Democratic presidential reelection bid. | Sipa USA/Newscom

Biden will block steel merger: The outgoing president, who has about two weeks left in his term, has decided to use his last vestiges of power to tell U.S. Steel that it can’t be purchased by Japanese company Nippon Steel, putting the kibosh on a $14.1 billion deal.

The administration is expected to announce this decision later today, according to people within. The justification will apparently be national security-related, which is especially odd because the two companies have previously talked up how this merger will “combat the competitive threat” posed by China. For his part, President-elect Donald Trump has also said he would block the deal if it landed on his desk. Note that both President Joe Biden and Trump are most likely responding to pressure imposed by steelworkers unions within the U.S., which have been vocal in opposition to the deal.

Of course, U.S. Steel still wants to be acquired. The problem is that the options are dwindling. “Cleveland-Cliffs Inc., based in neighboring Ohio, pursued US Steel before Nippon Steel won the bidding,” notes Bloomberg, “but it has since bought a Canadian producer and waffled on whether it would still want all or some of US Steel.”

Note too the disturbing precedent this sets, in terms of the types of flimsy justifications that can be used to block deals between companies that have agreed to them. In pretty much all areas of regulatory policy—and economic policy more broadly—Joe Biden has been a nightmare. Good riddance.

Seattle minimum wage hike forces closures: Surprise, surprise! The very thing libertarians and conservatives have been warning about for years, which has been born out in locality after locality, is now happening in Seattle, Washington.

Starting on January 1, the minimum wage in the city has jumped to $20.76, up from $17.25. But note that the minimum wage is always and everywhere $0—the business you’re employed by could always turn to dust, and that’s what some have done in advance of this wage hike taking effect. A popular waffle shop just closed, with owner Corina Luckenbach citing the high cost of labor as the main reason. “This is financially just not going to make sense anymore. Because, just for me, the increase would cost me $32,000 more a year,” Luckenbach told Fox 13 TV. Expect more closures to follow.

Hell is a warning label: The surgeon general has a new pronouncement to make: With a growing corpus of research purportedly linking alcohol to cancer, warning labels ought to be affixed so that people will drink with caution. Of course, this would require an act of Congress, so it’s not clear that such a thing will be prioritized.

“Many people out there assume that as long as they’re drinking at the limits or below the limits of current guidelines of one a day for women and two for men, that there is no risk to their health or well-being,” said Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. “The data does not bear that out for cancer risk.” (Full advisory here.)

This is classic Public Health Brain in action: Color me skeptical that warning labels do jack shit. Though cultural change—such as shifts away from cigarette smoking—can happen over time as new research emerges convincing people of a substance’s harm, the warning labels have always struck me as wholly silly.

Scenes from New York: I have returned from nearly three weeks in Texas just in time to get all riled up about this New Year’s Eve subway shoving, in which 23-year-old Kamel Hawkins pushed a 45-year-old man onto the tracks while a train was coming, severely injuring him. The victim is likely to survive, but the suspect should have faced consequences for his violent behavior long ago: He has a long rap sheet and was already facing assault charges for throwing bleach on a woman. (“He’s not a bad kid,” his father told The New York Times, which practically nobody believes.)

On New Year’s Day, there were two subway system stabbings: One in Morningside Heights, and the other near 14th Street and 7th Avenue.

Felony assaults within the system are up 55 percent in 2024 compared to 2019 statistics—before the pandemic sent lots of straphangers out of the subway system, and introduced a lot of chaos within. There were 10 murders within the system this past year, and 25 shovings onto the subway tracks.

If you wanted to paint a rosier picture of subway crime, you could point to the fact that there’s just one assault per 2 million rides. But these stats don’t capture the number of crazy, erratic, and threatening people with whom a rider must routinely deal, the grisly backdrop of a dysfunctional city that can’t solve this problem even with a budget of $4 billion devoted to it.

QUICK HITS

  • “South Korean anti-corruption investigators failed to arrest impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol after a nearly six-hour standoff with his security team on Friday, showing tensions remain high even after he has been suspended from his duties,” reports Bloomberg. Yoon, you might recall, briefly imposed martial law last month before being stopped by fellow politicians and mass protests.
  • “China’s property meltdown has since 2021 destroyed around $18 trillion of Chinese household wealth, according to an estimate by Barclays, eclipsing the losses suffered by Americans in the financial crash of 2008-09,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “That hit, along with the trauma of Beijing’s heavy-handed response to the Covid-19 pandemic, helps explain why Chinese consumers aren’t spending freely.”
  • Sen. John Thune, the Republican from South Dakota, will serve as Senate majority leader. Thune’s first challenge will be “shepherding multiple baggage-laden Trump nominees to confirmation in the closely divided Senate, where he can afford to lose no more than three Republican votes if Democrats hold together in opposition” per The New York Times. 
  • Bernie Sanders, H-1B visa opponent:
  • The writer Milli Hill documents instances of the word woman being culled from content related to pregnancy and breastfeeding. Her latest dispatch is the 54th edition of documenting this phenomenon; peruse her archive if you’d like to see how pervasive this is.

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