October 5, 2023

A Broken Congress Is What MAGA Always Wanted

https://www.thedailybeast.com/a-broken-congress-is-what-maga-always-wanted



There have been MAGA true believers shitting on the floor of the Congress ever since Jan. 6, 2021. But the right wing’s active desecration of the U.S. government extends far beyond ugly recent events on Capitol Hill, and dates back long before the Trumpist insurrection of two and a half years ago. In fact, the origins of the attacks on the government date back at least four decades to the Reagan administration, when the former president popularized the idea within his party that government was actually the enemy. His joke that the scariest words one could hear were, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” has metastasized from being a pitch for smaller government into a movement to blow the whole damn thing up.

What happened in the House of Representatives this past week, as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) led the anarcho-moronic wing of the GOP in a successful effort to unseat Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, was a continuation of the MAGA riot Donald Trump incited in an effort to stop the certification of Joe Biden as president. The goal was the same: to stop the government from functioning. The rationale was the same: if we can’t have our way, then fuck everyone and everything.

The only difference was that the stench left in the well of the House of Representatives this week was from the overheated, lie-laden rhetoric of a parade of smarmy politicians rather than from the steaming remnants of what the Trump rioters had for breakfast on Jan. 6. (Which, come to think of it, might be a distinction without a difference.) It might have seemed like chaos to the unschooled observer. But the historic and yet somehow tedious dramedy that played out during the past few days wasn’t just the logical consequence of the GOP’s descent into being a nihilistic mob that stands in opposition to everything and in favor of nothing.

It was also the culmination of the destructive tendencies of a long line of GOP leaders—from Newt Gingrich to Tom Delay, from the Tea Partiers to the Freedom Caucus, from Sarah Palin to Lauren Boebert. In fact, given their true goal of literally bringing down the House, what ended up happening was even better than the government shutdown they had hoped would begin last weekend. That would have likely been a brief interruption of government operations. Now, not only is Congress paralyzed, but it is virtually certain that the next Speaker of the House will be even weaker than McCarthy, the slim GOP majority will be even more fractious, and even less will get done from now until a new Congress is installed in January 2025.

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October 5, 2023

Why colonialism is not distinctly European

https://aeon.co/essays/settler-colonialism-is-not-distinctly-western-or-european





In 1931, Japan invaded northeast China and established a client state called Manchukuo (Manchuria). To secure control over Manchuria, over the next 14 years, the Japanese government lured 270,000 settlers there by offering free land to ordinary Japanese households. Japanese propaganda stressed, importantly, that this colonisation scheme was not inconsistent with Japan’s commitment to racial equality. Japanese farmers would bring new agricultural techniques to Manchuria and ‘improve’ the lives of native Manchus, Mongols and Chinese by way of example.

Japan’s settlement of Manchuria represents a case of settler colonialism, a concept that was initially developed in the humanities to explain the violent history of nation-building in North America and Australasia. Unlike traditional colonies such as India or Nigeria, as Patrick Wolfe explained, settler colonies do not exploit native populations but instead seek to replace them. The key resource in settler colonies is land. Where Indigenous land is more valuable than Indigenous labour – often because Indigenous peoples are mobile and cannot be easily taxed – native peoples are killed, displaced or forcibly assimilated by settlers who want their land for farming. Settlers and their descendants then justify these land grabs through discourses that both naturalise the disappearance of Indigenous peoples (it was disease!) and stress the benefits of the civilisation the settlers brought with them.



Although settler colonialism has become a valuable framework for explaining the history of Western countries like the United States and Australia, the dynamics that it describes are clearly quite general. Japan’s leaders in the 1930s, for instance, similarly salivated at the seemingly empty plains of Manchuria that could be a solution for all the food needs of Japan’s rapidly growing empire. And just like policymakers in the US, Japan had a variety of self-serving justifications for settling this new frontier. Its claim that Japanese farmers would contribute to ‘co-prosperity’ and ‘racial harmony’ in Manchuria and Korea bore little resemblance to the forced assimilation, discrimination and dispossession experienced by subject peoples there. As such, in popular and academic writing today, there is no resistance to naming Japanese colonialism and imperialism in East Asia or to placing Japanese settler colonialism in conversation with Western settler colonial projects.

What is odd, however, is that, while Japan’s colonisation of Manchuria was unfolding in the 1930s, there was much greater reluctance to condemn Japan by Western scholars otherwise committed to the abolition of racism and imperialism. This confusion helps illuminate why other, very similar settler colonial projects currently unfolding in the Global South have received relatively little attention or condemnation today.

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October 5, 2023

Passport Processing Times Are Finally Getting Better

The State Department announced the good news on Monday.

https://www.thrillist.com/news/nation/passport-processing-times-current-status



International travelers, you can now sigh in relief. Passport processing times are finally getting better after a very busy, delayed summer. According to a new media advisory by the US State Department, you'll have to wait a little less for your passport application to be processed now. This summer, processing times spiked up due to an increase in passport backlog, and already in late March, it took 10-13 weeks for regular processing (versus the 8-11 weeks of early March) and 7-9 weeks for expedited processing (it used to be 5-7 weeks).

Now, we're back to a more typical waiting time. The US State Department announced that travelers who filed on or after October 2 should now expect to wait 8-11 weeks for routine service and 5-7 weeks for expedited service. Keep in mind, though, that the State Department doesn't include delivery times in their processing times estimates, so that needs to be separately factored into your anticipated wait time. The State Department said the new and improved wait times are the product of a series of different efforts, from increased staffing to the modernization of its technology.

"Our dedicated staff have worked countless hours to reduce passport processing times. We are continuously reassessing our operations to maximize efficiencies and are introducing innovations to our customer service and processing models," read the official announcement. "We are investing in supporting and modernizing our technology, increased staffing levels by ten percent, and have hundreds of additional staff in the hiring pipeline. We remain focused on lowering processing times, and this reduction is an important first step."

There are a few resources you can use to try and make both your passport application and your travel experience smoother. First of all, the State Department encourages Americans to check its website to both learn how to apply and to check the status of their passport application. You can also find a direct link to check your passport renewal or passport application status right here. Additionally, the State Department encourages Americans traveling outside of the US to enroll in the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program, which allows them to receive important messages, advisories, and alerts about the destination they're traveling to.

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October 5, 2023

Americans in Europe: US finally moves to cut $2,350 fee for renouncing citizenship

The US looks finally set to push ahead with its promise to cut the fee for renouncing American citizenship from $2,350 down to $450, writes Helen Burggraf.

https://www.thelocal.se/20231002/americans-in-europe-us-finally-moves-to-cut-e2350-fee-for-renouncing-citizenship

https://archive.ph/Xg996

News that the US government will finally act on its pledge to cut the fee for renouncing citizenship - first promised last January - has been welcomed by American expat groups.The latest move was made public in a notice dated October 2nd and posted on the government's Federal Register. The State Department says it is “proposing to amend” the fee from its current $2,350 to $450, in response to concerns that “members of the public have continued to raise” since the fee was increased to the current amount from $450 in 2014.

The State department noted "the not insignificant anecdotal evidence regarding the difficulties many US nationals residing abroad are encountering" when trying to renounce citizenship. It said that $450 is only “a fraction of the cost of providing” the consular services involved in processing a Certificate of Loss of Nationality (CLN). The State Department said that it’s accepting comments on the matter from members of the public until November 1st.

The move has been particularly welcomed by group representing 'Accidental Americans' - predominantly citizens of other countries who were born in the US to foreign parents, who have since moved abroad and have had little connection to the US during their adult lives. Fabien Lehagre, the Paris-based founder of Accidental Americans Association said the State Department's notification represented “a massive relief for accidental Americans, as well as our fellow Americans living abroad.

"It's still quite a price tag, but hey, it's over 80 percent off," he said on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Rest assured, I do not intend to give up the fight to make the waiver procedure even more affordable,” Lehagre added. “Renunciation is a right, protected by the U.S. Constitution.” Because Accidental Americans are US citizens through birth and due to the United States’ citizenship-based tax regime, they are deemed by the US to have tax reporting (and potentially tax-paying) obligations for as long as they live, even if they never set foot in the US.

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https://twitter.com/USAccidental/status/1708113686034874700


related


Americans in Europe who renounced citizenship sue US over 'capricious' fee

Former American citizens based in Europe who renounced their nationality have launched a new lawsuit against the US over the huge fee they were required to pay to handover their passports.

https://www.thelocal.se/20231004/americans-in-europe-who-renounced-citizenship-sue-us-over-capricious-fee

https://archive.ph/VJLle

The class-action complaint was filed this week in the US District Court in Washington, DC, by four former American citizens currently residing in France and Germany as well as Singapore. Since 2014 American citizens have been required to handover $2,350 to renounce their nationality. Previously the fee had been $450.

Earlier this week The Local reported that the US State Department had finally made a move to cut the fee back down to $450 after initially having promised to do so in January.

Those behind the new law suit are demanding refunds for the thousands of US citizens who renounced their nationality after the fee had been hiked by more than 80 percent to $2,350.

The lawsuit claims the steep fee, is “arbitrary, capricious and illegal because, among other things, it was used to fund governmental functions completely unrelated to renunciation services in violation of federal law”.

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October 5, 2023

How to feel less stressed

Everyone handles stress differently. The ‘4Ds’ approach is about helping you find the coping strategies that work for you

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-feel-less-stressed



Vincent Van Gogh The Seine, Morning (Saint-Ouen) 1886, detail. Courtesy the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam



Need to know

James was a busy primary school teacher, married with three young children. In the middle of term time, he got particularly stressed, occasionally shouting at his class, and at his children at home. He soon caught himself but could get self-critical afterwards, even doubting whether he was in the right job. His sleep was frequently disrupted and after a tough week, he often resorted to drinking more alcohol than he would like, meaning he was overly tired and got stressed with his family. James had tried mindfulness training, but he couldn’t find enough time to keep it up. His wife prompted him to see a counsellor or psychologist, but James’s stress would come and go, and so he never looked into the possibility.

Stress is a part of everyday life, at work and at home. Everyone experiences the symptoms of stress in different ways, to different degrees. James’s story is just one example out of countless others – and we’ll return to him later. Stress for you might mean waking up early and not being able to get back to sleep, or becoming a little snappy and irritable with others. Or perhaps you are more easily overwhelmed, and when you’re stressed, your head feels full, you worry most of the time, and you’re constantly on edge or in a low mood. When stress is extreme, it can involve swings in mood, feelings of depression, flashbacks of upsetting events, and being excessively self-critical. Wherever you sit on this spectrum of stress symptoms, we hope this Guide will help you.

Stress is usually seen as a bad thing for understandable reasons. But the ‘soft’ signs of stress, such as worries popping into your mind, are an indication that your brain is trying to help you sort out a problem. For example, if you are immersed in work and a memory that you’ve got to give a presentation next week suddenly pops into your mind, this might act as a prompt to remember to start doing some prep for the talk! But if you don’t attend to your worries (you push the presentation out of your mind and make no plans to prepare for it), your brain can eventually fall back on more primitive ways of coping – such as the tensing of muscles, breathing faster and jumpiness. These are all part of the ‘fight-or-flight’ system that your brain uses to deal with an immediate danger (and which evolved in our mammalian ancestors to escape or attack a predator). They can be triggered on the (hopefully) rare occasions that you are suddenly physically threatened, but they can also come online because of danger that you imagine or anticipate, for instance, if you started to imagine your presentation being a complete disaster.

In our roles providing emotional support to a range of people and organisations (Louise), and researching mental health support models (Warren), we’ve found that although there are many ‘stress management’ programmes available, none of them fit with what we’ve discovered is the most helpful for people, nor with what people told us they were looking for. People told us they wanted helpful information and a range of strategies so they could choose how to deal with their own stress. Fortunately, we were already using a clinical approach that takes this perspective, based on what’s known as perceptual control theory (PCT). According to PCT, life requires control, and feeling well and coping with stress is about being in control of what matters. Ultimately, what matters to a person can only be determined by the person themselves, not by others and their assumptions of what ‘should’ work. From the perspective of PCT, stress comes about when trying to control one aspect of your life conflicts with trying to control another aspect. For example, it is not stressful to work extra hours if you have the time and energy to do so, but it is stressful if you need to get home in time to care for your family. Put simply, all problems are conflicts.

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October 5, 2023

Workers Funding Other Workers' Misery

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-10-04-workers-funding-misery-private-equity-pension-funds/



Critics of private equity often stress the business model’s impact on workers. Blackstone’s Packers Sanitation Services, Inc., was found to have illegally hired over 100 minors and placed them in dangerous jobs. Arby’s and Dunkin’ Donuts owner Roark Capital lobbied against a federal minimum wage. Fairmont and Sofitel owner Brookfield Asset Management has repeatedly threatened to retaliate against hotel workers attempting to unionize. And when the private equity purchase of Toys ‘R’ Us drove the toy retailer into bankruptcy, leading to a loss of over 30,000 jobs, its owners Bain Capital, KKR, and Vornado Realty Trust made off with about $200 million in management fees. “They’re making money even when they’re hurting the underlying business,” said Bianca Agustin, the co-executive director of retail workers advocacy group United for Respect, which found that over 1.3 million workers lost their jobs due to private equity and hedge fund ownership. But when private equity firms need the financing to continue inflicting this damage on workers, they turn, confoundingly, to other workers.

Public pension funds are now the largest backers of private equity, based on a database of 6,700 buyouts between 1997 and 2018 collected by recently graduated Columbia Business School Ph.D. student Vrinda Mittal. Pension funds, which are almost one-third of all investors in private equity, have invested 13 percent of their capital in the asset class—over $620 billion in 2022—up from 3.5 percent in 2001 and 8.3 percent in 2011, according to data from public pension research nonprofit Equable Institute. Pension funds like CalPERS, the second-largest in the U.S. with $462 billion in assets, said they are planning to allocate more money to private equity. “Private equity is fundamentally dependent upon public pension funds. [This] gives them a lot more power,” said David H. Webber, a Boston University law professor who writes about shareholder activism.



Public pension funds have been unmoved by an array of studies showing that private equity buyouts have led to job losses, wage cuts, lower revenue, labor productivity decline, and company bankruptcies. There are even examples of public employee savings being used to cut the wages of their own members. In 2011, Aramark, then private equity–owned and backed by 37 state and local retirement funds, underbid a custodians’ union for school cleaning contracts, and then offered the custodians their jobs back at $11 less per hour. “If you’re killing jobs, even if you get a good return, you could be hurting the fund because now you don’t have people paying into it,” Webber said. The growing clout with private equity offers pension funds the power to condition their financing on better labor practices. They can tell fund managers “the way you handle this [labor issue] is important to us if we’re gonna invest with you again in the future,” said Justin Flores, labor-jobs director at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. But pension funds contacted by the Prospect were reluctant to even discuss their private equity holdings, much less commit to using them in a way beneficial to their fellow workers.

A Repeated Pattern

At a New Jersey plant run by Refresco, which produces drinks like Arizona Iced Tea and Tropicana juices, safety violations ensued after the company was bought by private equity giant KKR last February. Ivan Rios, who has worked at the Refresco job site for 20 years—having joined when it was Whitlock Packaging—said working conditions at the plant did not get better after KKR took over, though KKR pledged to allow space for “worker voice” and improve workplace safety. In January, a worker fell off a tanker truck ladder, while a June case involving two workers who suffered steam burn injuries is still under investigation, an OSHA spokesperson confirmed. In April, another worker fell and broke his leg. OSHA told Refresco to investigate the incident, letters between the agency and Refresco’s lawyer showed. KKR and Refresco did not respond to a request for comment. Eight of the 16 investors in KKR Global Infrastructure Investors IV, the KKR fund that owns Refresco, are public pension funds, with investments of at least $1.28 billion. The New York City pension system, the fifth-largest in the country, is invested in the KKR fund, along with employee pension funds for New York state and Hawaii, and the Alaska Permanent Fund, data from Infrastructure Investor showed.

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October 5, 2023

Fear and loathing at the Competitive Enterprise Institute's annual gala

https://prospect.org/power/2023-10-04-one-night-with-elvis-competitive-enterprise-institute/



WASHINGTON – Dejected and battle weary, I sat down this past Thursday evening on the cold stone steps outside the National Portrait Gallery, just a few blocks from K Street. From inside the neoclassical fortress of the museum, I could still make out a faint hum. Moments earlier, I was basking in the rockabilly glow of a suspiciously short Elvis impersonator before being unceremoniously escorted out the back by security. I was an intruder at an annual gala dinner, packed with libertarian, rocking and rolling, climate change–denying partygoers. I didn’t last more than 15 minutes. I pulled out my phone and scanned the QR code on a pamphlet I snagged on my way out the door. It directed me to a multiple-choice questionnaire for feedback on the evening’s activities.



My scheme was doomed from the start. I’d been tipped off earlier that night from a source who provided no official invitation or registration credentials. His only advice was to “dress like a waiter” and try my chances at the door. I couldn’t pass up the chance to watch the bow-tied elite fraternize with the King of Rock and Roll. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, the evening’s sponsor, isn’t a garden-variety free-market think tank. In the 1990s, CEI sponsored the fringe Cooler Heads Coalition, which labels itself an “informal and ad-hoc group focused on dispelling the myths of global warming.” Cooler Heads intended to beat back the growing hysteria over invisible, nontoxic CO2 gently gathering in our planet’s atmosphere. In 2006, CEI ran television ads calling carbon dioxide “essential to life. We breathe it out. Plants breathe it in … They call it pollution. We call it life.” A second ad claimed glaciers were actually “getting thicker, not thinner.” The ads cited a scientist who said his work was being misrepresented.

More recently, CEI has gotten involved in practically every area of our economic lives, from finance to labor to food safety to telecommunications to health care, always on the side of deregulation and free markets. It has become a leading attack dog against Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair Lina Khan, lambasting her anti-monopoly policies—including last week’s lawsuit against Amazon. “This is madness,” said CEI’s president Kent Lassman in a statement. Far from a sideline player in the action, the institute’s former legal counsel Melissa Holyoak is currently awaiting Senate confirmation as a Republican appointee to fill a vacant seat at the FTC. (Her statement in confirmation hearings suggested she wouldn’t be a doctrinaire opponent to everything the FTC does, at least.) Former FTC commissioner and George Mason University law professor Joshua Wright, who stepped down from his academic post in August amid allegations of sexual misconduct, was a frequent guest and former speaker at CEI events.



The gala was more than an absurdist spectacle celebrating the 1950s; its attendees had bearing on our political moment, and were mostly intent on bringing our politics back into a smokestack-belching postwar era when there were fewer environmental laws (in part because of a lack of understanding about pollution and climate). I made my first enemy at the backdoor checkpoint, where my press pass failed to pass muster with a guard who told me the registration window for the dinner reception had closed weeks ago. Circling around to the front, I managed to slip past security undetected by sidling up to another guest sporting a name tag. My luck ran out when I realized I had picked the worst possible time to make my entrance. The opening ceremony had already wrapped up, with awards presented to two economists for their tireless efforts in proving that the market is always right. (The honorees’ book is called Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.) The previous year, the award went to Silicon Valley tycoon Balaji Srinivasan, a short-list candidate to head Donald Trump’s Food and Drug Administration and an advocate for replacing the nation-state with private enterprise–run “network states.”

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October 5, 2023

After 50 Years, This Right-Wing Law Factory Is Crazier Than Ever

https://prospect.org/power/2023-10-04-alec-50-years-right-wing-law-factory/



With the political media’s attention firmly fixed on Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-FL) dethroning of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, a secretive corporate pay-to-play group that quietly shapes state laws across the country is holding its 50th anniversary gala this week at the National Portrait Gallery, just a mile away. Over the past five decades, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has brought corporate lobbyists and conservative state legislators together behind closed doors to draft and promote hundreds of model bills affecting the pocketbooks and rights of millions of Americans. ALEC’s agenda extends to almost every area of public policy, as lawmakers take these model bills written by powerful special-interest and far-right groups—including the tobacco, gun, oil, pharmaceutical, and telecom industries—back to their statehouses and introduce them as their own. From lower wages to increased mass shootings, more pollution, fewer consumer protections, and less bodily autonomy, the negative impacts on everyone living in the U.S. have been profound. And since ALEC masquerades as a tax-exempt charity, your tax dollars subsidize it all.

From Evangelism to Corporatism

Inspired by then Gov. Ronald Reagan and the Powell Memorandum, three right-wing legislators in Chicago originally founded ALEC in 1973 as the Conservative Caucus of State Legislators. By 1975, the group designed to promote a socially conservative and pro-corporate agenda at the state level was renamed the American Legislative Exchange Council and moved to Washington, D.C., under the leadership of Paul Weyrich, a Christian right activist who also helped found the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority. Weyrich was appalled at the direction the country was heading and argued that groups like ALEC and Heritage, which he ran out of the same Capitol Hill townhouse, were needed to “overturn the present power structure of this country.” Consequently, in the 1970s, ALEC’s agenda focused heavily on the culture wars of the day through its opposition to abortion, racial integration of private schools, and the Equal Rights Amendment. However, by the 1980s, ALEC had struck up strategic alliances with the tobacco industry and other increasingly politicized corporations that recognized the potential for the organization to advance their interests.

ALEC offered a seemingly neutral front and a large network of legislators who could move hundreds of pro-business bills on everything from fighting tort reform to opposing environmental regulations—all without leaving any industry fingerprints. ALEC’s 1996 business plan cemented its current pay-to-play structure for moving pro-corporate and right-wing legislation. “ALEC must begin to function more like a business, and recognize that it has a product that it provides to a defined customer base for a ‘profit,’” the plan stated. “ALEC’s product is policy, and its customers are state legislators and private sector supporters.” ALEC’s corporate members pay thousands of dollars each year in order to buy both access to ALEC-affiliated legislators and a seat on the group’s policy task forces or Private Enterprise Advisory Council. They pay thousands more for sponsorships at ALEC events and to drive the agenda with policy sessions of their choice. Dues from legislators, on the other hand, are just $200 per year and account for less than 1 percent of ALEC’s annual revenues.

Manufacturing Public Policy

True to its business plan—which claims “ALEC is the most effective delivery mechanism for conservative policy alternatives at the state level”—ALEC has helped hundreds of corporations, trade associations, and right-wing groups quietly move their agendas in the states in exchange for their funding. Since ALEC attempts to hide its activities, no public-interest groups have yet been able to compile a complete count of ALEC bills. But in corporate recruitment documents obtained by Common Cause and the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) from the 1990s, the group claimed that its legislative members introduce more than 1,000 ALEC bills every legislative cycle. A 2019 investigation by USA Today and The Arizona Republic found that “bills based on ALEC models were introduced nearly 2,900 times, in all 50 states and the U.S. Congress, from 2010 through 2018, with more than 600 becoming law.” “With a success rate at more than 20 percent, I would say that ALEC is a good investment,” ALEC’s then-Executive Director Samuel Brunelli boasted to members in 1995. “Nowhere else can you get a return that high.”

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October 4, 2023

The Ultimate Leaf Peeper's Guide to Fall Foliage Hikes

The best way to take in the autumnal splendor? Go for a walk in the woods.

https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/fall-foliage-hike-how-to



All across the United States, chlorophyll is starting to break down in green leaves, revealing vibrant pigments and transforming verdant summer scenery into a red, orange, and yellow harbinger of sweater weather. It’s fall foliage season, baby! And one of the best ways to peep those leaves is through hiking. If you’re ready to take a gander, now’s the time to start planning your jaunt. You can see leaves change pretty much anywhere in the US, but getting the most out of a brilliant foliage-focused hike requires at least a little bit of knowledge and forethought. Whether you’re a seasoned trekker or simply want to see the annual autumn extravaganza while moving your body, a well-prepared hike promises a good time.



When to go foliage hiking

Peak fall foliage occurs at different times in different parts of the US, due to factors like latitude, elevation, climate, and tree species. In the northern states and higher elevations, mid-September to mid-October is prime time. Mid-latitude states, like those in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions, typically peak in mid-October, while southern states and lower elevations shine in late October to early November. On the West Coast, you can spot some fall colors in October, mainly at higher elevations. Timing varies from year to year, and predictions—like those made by this interactive fall foliage forecast map—are based on past years, so checking local foliage reports is your best bet for the most accurate forecast. No matter where or when you hike, remember that “peak foliage” is entirely subjective. Even partially turned and past-peak leaves can still dazzle with their dramatic colors. Late-season hikes may even reveal “snowliage,” an utterly unique combo of snow and fall foliage particular to high elevations.







Where to go foliage hiking

If your goal is to view some foliage, you might consider heading to the highest hill with a lookout point. After all, a 360-degree panorama from a summit or ridgeline hike is hard to beat. But spectacular fall foliage can be seen at all heights. For shorter, more accessible hikes, walk along lakeshores, ponds, rivers, and coasts for views of vivid leaves mirrored in the water (double the autumnal delight). In terms of geographic location, Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire are classic leaf-peeping locales for a reason. New England’s wide range of elevations and microclimates makes it home to many deciduous trees, including maples, oaks, birches, beeches, and hickories. Each of these tree species has unique chemical compounds that contribute to their fall leaf colors. To see the best fall colors in New England, consider hiking around Mount Mansfield in Vermont’s Green Mountains, or explore New Hampshire’s White Mountains via Franconia Ridge. In Massachusetts, you’ll find day hikes of all stripes in the scenic Berkshires region. You can also check out the Precipice Trail in Maine’s Acadia National Park for glorious views of the coast alongside a leafy color show.

Luckily, New England is hardly America’s only place to peep some leaves. New York is not exempt from autumn’s charms: Breakneck Ridge, accessible from NYC, begins with a short scramble that yields panoramic views of the Hudson River Valley followed by a meandering forest path. Virginia has the Priest Wilderness, a 5,900-plus-acre reserve, where about 5.4 miles of the Appalachian Trail cut through groves of yellow poplar, ash, chestnut oak, and scarlet oak. Observation Point Trail in Utah’s Zion National Park is an unexpected autumn treasure. In Great Smoky Mountains National Park, try the Alum Cave Trail or Clingmans Dome for panoramic views from the observation tower. And though you won’t see a symphony of red and orange, almost any hike in Glacier, Grand Teton, or Rocky Mountain National Park proves that golden yellow aspen groves can carry their own show. The Midwest’s fall colors also really punch above their weight; just look at Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for striking fall scenes in Tahquamenon Falls State Park, home to one of the largest waterfalls east of the Mississippi.

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October 4, 2023

Supreme Court Seems Hesitant to Toss Out the CFPB

https://prospect.org/justice/2023-10-03-supreme-court-hesitant-toss-out-cfpb/



The Supreme Court heard arguments today in a case that could threaten all financial activity in the country. The plaintiffs, an association of payday lenders, have asserted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding mechanism, which involves a capped appropriation from the Federal Reserve (which formerly conducted consumer financial protection activities), is unconstitutional. And while oral arguments are an imperfect indicator of the final result, the justices appeared fairly unconvinced.

“How do you decide how much is too much?” asked Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who repeatedly questioned the premises of Noel Francisco, the former solicitor general under Trump who argued the case for the Community Financial Services Association of America (the payday lenders). As several justices pointed out, the courts have no ability to decide whether a capped appropriation is, as Francisco repeatedly claimed, too high, and whether therefore Congress was giving over to the executive the power to combine “sword and purse” in appropriating government funding. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, on multiple occasions, pointed out that there was nothing permanent about the CFPB’s funding mechanism. “Congress could change it tomorrow,” he said. “There’s nothing perpetual here.”

The case, which advanced through the ultraconservative Fifth Circuit, specifically challenges a payday lending rule that the CFPB finalized, but the lower court ruled that every single rule that passed through the CFPB, all of which was conducted through funding deemed unconstitutional, would have to fall, including a lot of rules banks would want to see upheld, like safe harbors that allow for the smooth functioning of mortgage markets. In an amicus brief, the Mortgage Bankers Association warned that calling into question all CFPB rules could “destabilize the mortgage market.” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who argued the case for the CFPB, referred to that amicus during oral arguments.



The Dodd-Frank Act established the CFPB and placed it inside the Federal Reserve, which had previously undertaken its functions. The CFPB director asks the Fed for transfers that are “reasonably necessary” to carry out its operations. This stands outside of congressional appropriations, though Congress capped the annual amount that the CFPB can receive at $600 million in 2009, then adjusted upward for inflation. The CFPB spent $622 million in fiscal year 2022, where its cap was $734 million. Francisco argued that this violates the appropriations clause of the Constitution, and transfers Congress’s determination of what the government can spend to the executive, as long as it doesn’t reach a number that, Francisco said, was higher than the CFPB would ever spend.

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