At the Blog
On Monday, Vanessa Williamson explained how Trump’s capricious tariffs and attacks on the IRS are the latest iteration of a long anti-tax, anti-democratic tradition. From slaveowners to Gilded Age industrialists to the contemporary Republican party, oligarchic forces throughout the country’s history have fettered the tax power of the state to ensure that the government would be too feeble to rein in their power.
On Wednesday, Elle Rothermich traced how Medicare’s hospice benefit, which provides a per diem rate rather than paying for individual services, has perversely transformed hospice into a target for private equity. While reformers tend to diagnose this as a standard market failure problem, Rothermich argues that to address the issue, we need to do more than merely stabilize the hospice industry through greater competition—we need to create and safeguard spaces where care remains uncommodified.
In LPE Land
Across the country, Starbucks workers have launched an unfair labor practice strike. For those keeping score at home, NLRB judges have found that Starbucks has committed more than 400 labor law violations, engaging “in a scorched earth campaign” against union organizing at its stores. Now is your chance, as Eamonn Coburn argued earlier this year, to revive the social consensus that union-busting is morally, not just legally, wrong.
In the Harvard Law Review, Kate Redburn has a new piece explaining what happened in Skrmetti, and what it means for trans rights and sex equality more broadly.
For New Yorkers newly excited about municipal power, this coming Wednesday, LPE NYC Night School invites you to a conversation about how to make NYC more equal, featuring NYC Councilmember Sandy Nurse, Fiscal Policy Institute Executive Director Nathan Gusdorf, and the LPE Project’s departed captain, Corinne Blalock. Details here.
At Food and Power, Claire Kelloway discusses What Mamdani Can Learn from Past and Present Public Grocery Projects.
At the Conversation, Cassie Powell explains that when private equity firms aren’t busy running hospice care into the ground, they are snapping up mobile home parks and driving out the residents who can least afford to lose them.
At the Climate and Community Institute, Jacob Udell and Routhy Gourevitch have a new brief, “Financial Distress in the Multifamily Rental Market, and What It Means for Tenants.”
At Sidecar, Martijn Konings considers Trump’s attempt to bring the Federal Reserve to heel.
Hot new book alerts: Jason Jackson’s Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry: How Capitalist Legitimacy Shaped Foreign Investment Policy in India is out next week, while Anna Law’s Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants is available for pre-order.
Finally, speaking of books, Cultural Critique online has published a roundtable on Timothy Kaufman-Osborn’s The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule within America’s Universities, which you may remember from his post, The Anti-Democratic Legal Form of the University (and How To Fix It).
