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Saturday night tragedy struck Dadeville, Alabama, when a shooting tragically interrupted a Sweet 16 birthday party at the Mahogany Masterpiece, a small dance studio. Four lives were lost, and 28 others were injured, some critically, in the attack.

As a result, law enforcement launched an investigation into the incident at the request of the Dadeville Police Chief. The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA) is appealing to the community for any pertinent information that could aid in the matter. Currently, police have not identified any suspects or motives as they continue the investigation.

Ivy Creek Healthcare, a hospital located in Dadeville, treated approximately 15 gunshot victims and reported that at least 17 ambulances were called to the scene. Some of the wounded were released, while additional individuals were flown to a trauma center in Birmingham.

The attack also claimed the life of Phil Dowdell, a star high school athlete and the grandchild of Annette Allen, the birthday celebrant’s grandparent, who was also injured and transported to the hospital.

In response to the incident, Rich Rodriguez, the head football coach for Jacksonville State University, took to Twitter to mourn the death of Phil in a statement.

Meanwhile, Dadeville is described as a small city with a population of roughly 3,000 and is located only a short drive from the Alabama State Capital in Montgomery.

The State Superintendent of Education, Eric Macky, underscored that “multiple communities and high schools” were significantly impacted by the tragedy. Furthermore, counselors will be available at local campuses to support students throughout the difficult process.

In light of the matter, the White House announced that President Biden was fully briefed while Governor Kay Ivey posted on Twitter and conveyed her grief about the events in Dadeville.

Yet, while emotion runs high and the suffering of the afflicted is palpable, ALEA is adamant that justice be served, and the community is encouraged to come forward and provide any assistance to the investigation.

Federal regulators bailed out Silicon Valley Bank after its historic collapse. But they offered no such rescue to the low-income communities to which the bank had pledged an $11 billion community benefits agreement.

Silicon Valley Bank in Santa Clara, California, days after the bank collapsed. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

When federal banking regulators bailed out Silicon Valley Bank’s wealthy depositors and gave its new owner a $17 billion discount, it turns out they offered no such rescue to another group impacted by the bank’s historic collapse: low-income communities to whom it had promised billions in lending.

Banking regulators told the Lever this week that “these pledges ended with the failure of the bank,” evaporating an expected source of affordable mortgage and small-business loans in California. The move could leave thousands of planned Bay Area affordable housing units in jeopardy at a time when a quarter of area residents are struggling to afford basic necessities and halt a $10 million program to increase homeownership in communities of color.

Those pledges were made as part of an $11 billion community benefits agreement signed by Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) ahead of a major merger in 2021. Progressive lawmakers and financial reform groups had urged regulators to preserve the agreement as a condition of SVB’s sale to First Citizens Bank & Trust Company, but no such terms were included in the deal they ultimately struck.

“Federal regulators missed an opportunity to show the American public that they work in their best interest, and not in the interests of banks,” said Paulina Gonzalez-Brito, executive director of the California Reinvestment Coalition (CRC), which collected twenty-two thousand signatures on a petition calling on regulators to enforce the agreement, one of the most comprehensive negotiated to date with a major bank.

Advocates push for fair lending commitments from banks seeking to merge because regulators rarely do. While new megabanks can mean less equitable lending and more consumer fees, federal agencies typically rubber-stamp the deals — as they did with SVB’s $900 million acquisition of a Boston-based bank in 2021, writing that the deal posed no serious risks.

The recent string of bank failures has already triggered calls to reverse Trump-era deregulation of large banks. But advocates like Gonzalez-Brito say it should also prompt a freeze on the mergers allowing those banks to grow so large in the first place, absent new rules to mandate such deals provide tangible benefits for the public.

First Citizens, the bank that purchased SVB at a deep discount in March, is a case in point. The Raleigh, North Carolina–based bank has grown more than tenfold since the 2008 financial crisis through its acquisitions, scooping up a slew of failed rivals and winning approval — or waivers — from regulators for a series of major mergers.

In 2021, when First Citizens’ plan to purchase the financial services company CIT Group — itself the product of a highly controversial 2015 merger — was in the public eye, the bank agreed to a community benefits plan. But First Citizens has to date been silent on whether it will fulfill the pledges made by SVB.

“We remain concerned about the full adoption of the community benefits agreement and are ready to fight for it if needed,” said Gonzalez-Brito. CRC will meet with First Citizens next week to ask them to honor the agreement.

Mergers Get Rubber-Stamped

When banks want to merge, regulators are supposed to consider several factors, including whether the deals entail any benefit to the public and whether they pose risk to the stability of the financial system.

But in practice, regulators typically perform only a “perfunctory” public interest analysis before rubber-stamping the deals. From 2006 to 2017, the Federal Reserve did not reject a single one of the nearly four thousand merger applications it received.

Banking consolidation often reduces the availability and increases the cost of credit and financial services for consumers.

In the absence of stronger oversight, and with a new wave of mergers underway, financial reform advocates have increasingly sought to extract voluntary commitments from banks to provide affordable loans and services to low-income communities.

Take SVB’s $900 million acquisition of a Boston bank in 2021.

The Federal Reserve approved the deal without fanfare, asserting that “customers of both banks would benefit.” To try to ensure that those benefits actually accrued outside of SVB’s tech and venture-capital bubble, community groups negotiated an agreement that included pledges of $4 billion in small-business lending, $1 billion in residential mortgage loans, and $10 million in down payment and other assistance for low-to-moderate income homebuyers.

But SVB’s collapse and the dissolution of that agreement is a prime example of why voluntary commitments are no substitute for robust regulation, said CRC’s Gonzalez-Brito — and why regulators should stop the practice of rubber-stamping mergers.

“Often we hear the rationale from regulators that a merged bank is a stronger bank,” Gonzalez-Brito said. “Silicon Valley Bank really calls that into question.”

President Joe Biden’s administration has signaled it may revisit the rules for reviewing bank mergers. Last year, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), one of the agencies involved in approving the deals, solicited comments on whether the approval framework should be updated to account for the risks of increasing consolidation in the banking sector.

Bank lobbying groups submitted comments opposing any far-reaching changes, as did an investment bank that regularly advises on such mergers and was recently hired by the FDIC to auction off SVB. No proposed rules have been issued to date.

A Bailout for Some

When Silicon Valley Bank failed in March, the FDIC promptly stepped in to rescue its customers — just ten of whom held more than $13 billion in largely uninsured deposits. (The FDIC only insures the first $250,000 of a customer’s deposits.)

Soon after, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) wrote a letter urging the agency to oversee continued implementation of the community benefits agreement, noting that the temporary bridge bank set up by the agency was “assuming and fulfilling SVB’s other contractual obligations.”

“Failing to require any new buyer of the bank to continue implementation of SVB’s community benefits plan would mean a loss of at least $2 billion in loans and investments to support affordable housing in California communities,” Waters wrote.

At least eleven Bay Area affordable housing projects were dependent on loans from SVB, according to local outlet KQED. The bank’s collapse brought construction screeching to a halt on a 112-unit building across from San Francisco’s City Hall that would have provided affordable housing for people with disabilities.

The impact extends beyond California. As the result of its 2021 merger with Boston Private Bank & Trust, SVB was also involved in the financing of at least seven hundred affordable housing units currently under construction in the Boston-area, according to a letter sent to First Citizens last week by ten members of Massachusetts’s congressional delegation.

“In the middle of a worsening affordable housing crisis, it is critical that there is a continuation of these activities under new ownership to avoid the disruption of local affordable housing development pipelines and initiatives,” reads the letter, led by Democratic representatives Ayanna Pressley and Stephen Lynch.

First Citizens has said it is in discussion with Boston community leaders. The bank did not respond to the Lever’s questions about whether it would fulfill specific lending commitments.

Under the terms of its deal with the FDIC, First Citizens paid nothing up-front for SVB’s assets, deposits, and loans, and the FDIC will cover its losses on commercial loans in the portfolio for the next five years. While First Citizens is now among the top-twenty largest US financial institutions, it remains just below the $250 billion threshold that would trigger tougher regulation.

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.

Despite the silver lining of green energy initiatives, Canada’s most recent federal budget does little for the country’s working people. In this, it stays consistent with the Liberal Party’s determination to throw its working-class constituents overboard.

Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, speaks at a news conference with Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s deputy prime minister and finance minister, right, at a day care in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on March 29, 2023. (David Kawai / Bloomberg via Getty Images

On March 28, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland unveiled the 2023 federal budget, hailing it as a “historic opportunity.” The budget was widely anticipated to include major green energy incentives in response to President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). It delivered on this front, providing Can$20.9 billion over six years bundled in a series of tax credits for clean electricity, clean hydrogen, and clean technology manufacturing. However, the overall budget is a mixed bag, with its climate initiatives serving as a proxy for other half measures contained therein. On matters of importance for working people — such as housing and public sector wages — the budget appears to be a total failure.

Environmentalist organizations, for starters, were ambivalent about the climate plans outlined in the budget. Keith Stewart, energy strategist for Greenpeace Canada, said the group “welcomes the unprecedented federal investments in greening the grid, which will be critical as we phase out fossil fuels by replacing them with electricity from renewable energy sources.” However, he cautioned, the budget outlines continued plans to subsidize oil and gas companies, sending mixed messages. “No money in the world could convince oil companies to become good actors on climate change, so it would be far more effective to simply regulate their emissions and invest scarce public funds into accelerating investments in efficiency and electrification,” Stewart added.

Equiterre, the environmentalist NGO where Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault worked before he entered politics, criticized the budget’s dependence on unproven carbon and storage technology, which allows oil and gas companies to continue production unabated. Equiterre’s director of government relations Marc-André Viau said:

This budget is in line with the government’s environmental vision, which aims to achieve its environmental objectives through a combination of clean and less clean technologies. Some announced measures such as the decarbonization of electricity networks are promising, but some, such as the significant financing of carbon capture and storage, are causing perplexity.

Furthermore, the budget doesn’t contain any investments in public transit. The clean transportation program manager for Environmental Defence Canada, Nate Wallace, warned that a lack of funding in emissions-reducing public transit will lead to a “death spiral” of service cuts and fare increases that will “push people into their cars.” Wallace expressed hope that the government’s coming update on permanent transit funding, expected later this year, will address funding shortfalls, but noted that these investments are needed immediately. He did, however, applaud the federal government’s investment in zero-emission vehicle manufacturing as a “measured response” to the IRA.

Concessions to the New Democratic Party

Another major component of the budget is $13 billion for the expansion of a means-tested dental-care program for those who make less than $90,000, which was a key piece of the federal Liberals’ agreement with the left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP). The NDP committed to support the Liberal minority government until 2025 in exchange for certain concessions under the agreement.

In 2022, the federal government created a temporary dental benefit cash payment for children under twelve, in families under the income threshold, which will be replaced next year with a government insurance program. This year, eligibility will expand to people under eighteen, seniors, and people with disabilities who fall below the income threshold and lack private insurance. By 2025, everyone in households earning less than $90,000 will become eligible.

To address rising inflation, the budget includes a onetime “grocery rebate” on the federal Goods and Services Tax, which will provide families with two children up to $467, seniors $225, and single people $234 to help them pay for groceries. This year’s average monthly grocery bill, for a family of four, is expected to be $1,357. The NDP has inexplicably touted this meager spending — which Freeland described as “narrowly focused and fiscally responsible” — as a win for affordability.

Pharmacare, another important Liberal concession for the NDP’s support, remains absent from the budget. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh acknowledges that this won’t come to fruition before the expiration of their deal, but continues to prop up the Liberal government nonetheless. Evidently, Singh believes that there is merit in focusing on the affordability, climate, and dental-care half measures, in spite of the fact that the Liberals were likely to implement these items anyways. It is likely that the Liberals will outline a framework for implementing a pharmacare system — just in time for the next election. This will maintain the party’s perennial promise of pharmacare, a pledge they’ve been making for the past quarter century.

No Money for Housing

The Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness (CAEH) lambasted the budget for not including any measures to ease the housing affordability crisis. “It’s clear that the federal government does not see the scale and urgency of these crises, and have offered no solutions,” said CAEH president and CEO Tim Richter. “For thousands of Canadians who will not be able to pay their rent this week, they will find no relief or meaningful support in this budget. Too many others will be projected unnecessarily into the life-threatening experience of homelessness.”

The only housing commitment in the budget is a $4 billion investment in an Urban, Rural and Northern Indigenous Housing Strategy. While the measure is very much needed to address the disproportionate number of homeless indigenous people, it is insufficient. It’s also being delivered by the Canada Housing and Mortgage Company, rather than National Indigenous Collaborative Housing Inc. This decision calls to mind antecedent colonial impositions that have always been disguised as charity.

The lack of urgency on the housing file makes sense when you realize that 38 percent of parliamentarians own real estate, meaning that they stand to profit from housing scarcity, according to disclosure records compiled by Davide Mastracci at Passage. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland co-owns two rental properties on Aquinas Street in London, UK, with her husband, New York Times reporter Graham Bowley, from which they draw income. She also owns a residential property in Kyiv and farmland in her hometown of Peace River, Alberta.

Housing Minister Ahmed Hussen owns a rental property in Ottawa, from which he draws income. It’s entirely unsurprising that those who benefit from the housing affordability crisis fail to appreciate its urgency.

Labor Relations

Echoing Biden, Chapter Three of the Canadian budget states that in order for companies to take full advantage of green energy subsidies, they will have to guarantee “that wages paid are at the prevailing level.” However, as we saw with the IRA, the devil is in the details. In the first six months since the US legislation passed, most of its $50 billion in investments have gone to companies in states that suppress unionization with “right-to-work” laws, which allow individual workers to opt out of unionization. The Canadian budget promises that the government will introduce anti-scab legislation by the end of the year, but this leaves a large window for employers to hire scabs.

Buried in Chapter Six of the budget, however, is a 3 percent across-the-board cut to the public sector to be implemented over four years for $7 billion in savings, followed by $2.4 billion in cuts annually. Crown corporations, which are owned by the state, are instructed to make “comparable spending reductions” beginning next year. Fred O’Rordian, head of tax policy at Ernst & Young, a firm notoriously amenable to reducing the size of government, described these measures as a “pretty blunt instrument,” which fails to “distinguish between programs that are already running efficiently and effectively and those that aren’t, and it doesn’t identify programs that are no longer necessary.”

The government insists that these cuts cannot come at the expense of “direct benefits and service delivery to Canadians” [emphasis added], meaning they’re going to come at the expense of those who deliver the benefits and services, whether through job cuts or wage freezes. Either way, an increasingly overworked public service will be forced to do the same job with fewer resources. As Chris Aylward, the head of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), which represents federal public sector workers, puts it, “This budget screams austerity.”

More than one hundred thousand PSAC members have voted in favor of entering a legal strike position. If they do go on strike, there won’t yet be any legislation in place to prevent the government from hiring scabs. One might understand the sweeping public sector cuts outlined in the budget, in this context, as a warning to public sector employees that if they want to retain their jobs, they should limit their demands at the bargaining table.

All in all, the Liberals’ latest budget is in keeping with the party’s time-honored modus operandi: pay lip service to the needs of regular people and then pass legislation that keeps the boss class happy. The Liberals are nothing if not consistent.

Even a year ago, the idea that corporate price gouging played a major role in the inflation crisis was a crazy, left-wing talking point. Now it’s the claim of central bankers and mainstream economists.

People shop for groceries in a Manhattan store on October 26, 2022 in New York City. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

As winter gives way to spring, many changes are afoot: birds are chirping, flowers are blooming, and influential and powerful people are finally acknowledging that corporate profiteering is playing a role in inflation.

From the start, left-leaning economists, news outlets, and politicians have argued that corporate price gouging has spurred our current cost-of-living problems — that firms weren’t just passing on their own higher costs to consumers, but using the many headlines about inflation to mark up prices more than necessary and quietly make a tidy profit. This was largely dismissed by establishment voices as a left-wing excuse to bash corporations, even as corporate profits soared to record levels and executives explicitly told investors that this is exactly what they were doing.

But as is so often the case, what was once a supposedly fringe, kooky left-wing position is now being recognized as reality. Take last month’s testimony from Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. Asked by Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, if workers’ wages and benefits could keep growing steadily in a scenario where inflation was tamed and corporate profits fell, Powell replied that this was possible “in the shorter term.” It was a major admission: Powell’s anti-inflation strategy has been explicitly to “get wages down,” yet here he was saying that wages could keep growing if the country was to get out of its inflation woes — as long as the current sky-high corporate profits took a hit.

This comes after comments in January from then Fed vice chair Lael Brainard that “wages do not appear to be driving inflation in a 1970s-style wage-price spiral,” and that “retail markups in a number of sectors” are creating what might be called “a price-price spiral” instead. (Brainard is now the head of President Joe Biden’s National Economic Council). That month also saw the release of a Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City paper that concluded that “markup growth was a major contributor to inflation in 2021,” being responsible for as much as half of that year’s inflation rate.

This seems to be taking hold in Europe, too. Reuters reported that in February, twenty-six European Central Bank (ECB) officials gathered at a retreat in Finland to discuss the matter, with more than two dozen slides’ worth of data presented to the group showing that company profits were growing bigger and bigger and were also outpacing wage growth, partly thanks to firms’ ability to set prices. Since then, a host of European policy makers have made similar points publicly, including ECB president Christine Lagarde and Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey.

At a March speech in Frankfurt, ECB executive board member Fabio Panetta warned that “opportunistic behaviour by firms could also delay the fall in core inflation,” and that “some producers have been exploiting the uncertainty” created by inflation to pump up their profit margins. “We should monitor the risk that a profit-price spiral could make core inflation stickier,” he urged.

Later that month, ECB economists noted the unusual fact that business profits were still going up despite a cyclical economic slowdown, arguing that the cost rises companies were facing in making their products “also made it easier for firms to increase their profit margins, because they make it harder to tell whether higher prices are caused by higher costs or higher margins.” They concluded that “the effect of profits on domestic price pressures has been exceptional from a historical perspective.”

This seems to be recognized across the continent. The central bankers of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have recently made the same points as these ECB officials, cautioning that “price hikes exceeded cost rises in several sectors” and had contributed to inflation, and promising to watch for a “profit-inflationary spiral.”

Even economists at profit-driven investment banks are sounding the alarm. “Today’s price inflation is more a product of profits than wages,” UBS Global Wealth Management chief economist Paul Donovan wrote in November, charging that firms had “taken advantage of circumstances to expand profit margins.”

More recently, in April, Albert Edwards, global strategist at Société Générale, France’s third largest bank, expressed disbelief at the “unprecedented” and “astonishing” ways that big business had used the inflation-driving disruptions of the past few years as an “excuse” to run up “super-normal profit margins.” Calling for price controls, he warned that this behavior, coupled with the way ordinary workers are being made to foot the bill for these excesses, could “inflame social unrest” and lead to “the end of capitalism.”

Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have put forward bills to hold down firms’ price hikes and claw back their resulting profits. But because discussing the role of corporate price gouging in the inflation crisis has been rendered virtually taboo the past few years, and because the Fed’s limited tool set only lets it attack workers’ wages instead of firms’ profits, these ideas haven’t gotten much traction. Instead, the US central bank is persisting with a strategy that its own staff are predicting will tip the country into recession.

If and when that happens, we’ll no doubt see an uptick in the popular anger Edwards warns about, especially if that downturn is met with more bailouts for the rich while workers are once more told to grit their teeth and make do with scraps. The jury’s out on whether the second part of Edwards’s prediction will come true — but the Federal Reserve sure seems dead set on finding out.

Once upon a time, “the shot heard around the world” referred to the beginning of the American Revolution or the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that sparked World War I. Now, in the postmodern fantasies of Ron DeSantis, “the Florida equivalent of the shot heard round the world” refers to his equally great war against […]

On Friday, France’s Constitutional Council upheld Emmanuel Macron’s deeply unpopular pension reform. The move shows the bankruptcy of a constitution that puts only minimal checks on the president’s power.

Protestors demonstrate against the decision by the French Constitutional Council to approve President Emmanuel Macron’s contentious pension reform law outside Hotel de Ville on April 14, 2023 in Paris, France. (Kiran Ridley / Getty Images)

On Friday, France’s Constitutional Council decided to uphold the core of President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular pension reform — giving the green light to a law that will raise the country’s retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four. This was the most likely outcome from the April 14 ruling, with the arbiters of France’s fundamental law sticking to their conservative instincts to safeguard the government’s package. In a parallel decision, it rejected a demand for a referendum on the reform, although a separate request for a nationwide vote was submitted on Thursday and will be judged in the coming weeks.

Having pocketed this victory, Macron’s hope is that the council’s decision will tie the knot on his controversial reform by providing it with a desperately needed dose of institutional legitimacy. As Macron claimed last month, the ruling would cap off the law’s “democratic pathway,” an egregious euphemism for his government’s muscling of a reform package rejected by a clear majority of the French public, an alliance of the country’s unions, and opposition parties of the Left and Right.

Macron’s pension reform has become the law of the land without ever having faced a direct vote from elected representatives in the National Assembly, where the president’s coalition is short of an absolute majority. Besides failed no-confidence votes in the lower house on March 20, the closest thing that Macron’s government has to approval from legislators was a shotgun vote forced on the Senate earlier last month. This major overhaul of the country’s pension system was adopted in a fifty-day blitzkrieg thanks to the use of a special legislative track designed for budgeting bills.

Macron’s unscrupulous deployment of the full arsenal of executive prerogative has opposition parties claiming that he ran afoul of parliament, as French people pore over the more obscure elements of a constitution designed to favor the presidency. But according to the Constitutional Council, the rolling out of these tactics — on something as important to the country’s social compact as the retirement age — was still within the bounds of constitutional stipulations on respecting parliamentary deliberation.

The council ruled that while there was an “unusual character” to the powers deployed by Macron’s government, this ultimately “did not have the effect of rendering the legislative process contrary to the Constitution.”

Completed Democratic Process?

“The text has arrived at the end of its democratic process,” Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne tweeted shortly after the council’s decision. “Tonight, there are no victors or vanquished.”

For the opponents of the legislation, however, this ruling does little to paper over what they claim to be the law’s gaping democratic illegitimacy. “Tonight’s decision is going to reignite the movement in opposition to this reform,” newly elected CGT union leader Sophie Binet told reporters in front of Paris’s city hall, where thousands gathered Friday evening to protest the decision. Macron, meanwhile, has said that he now hopes to resume a shattered dialogue with worker representatives, but union leaders are not asking members to call off strikes and have refused to speak with the president before May 1 demonstrations. Early Saturday morning, Macron signed the legislation into law. It is set to enter into effect on September 1.

“I hope that in the coming days we’ll keep seeing a permanent popular agitation,’” Danièle Obono, a France Insoumise MP from Paris, told Jacobin. “We’re not going to turn the page until this reform has been pulled. They’ve won a pyrrhic victory. They’re going to pay for this for the rest of the term.”

Macron’s decision to steamroll parliamentary and public opposition was reckless in its own right, and risks worsening a certain democratic malaise. This is something that Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National hopes to exploit in the years ahead, however much the political limelight has been stolen from it in recent months by striking workers and street protests. What currency will warnings about the threat that Le Pen poses to French institutions still have, after a supposedly moderate president has so brazenly warped them to suit himself?

The deeper problem, as the council’s decision perhaps indicates, is that Macron had a pathway that made his coup de force possible — and he took it. “If we strictly look at the law, it’s not very easy to justify the claim that the process has been unconstitutional,” says Bastien François, a political scientist and constitutional scholar at the Sorbonne. “Politically, it’s more than clear that this was a dangerous move. Juridically speaking, it’s more complicated.”

“There were still a number of possible juridical motives to censure this law,” France Insoumise European MP Manon Aubry maintains. “The sincerity of parliamentary debate was not respected. . . . there was a series of technically constitutional powers used in an abusive way to pass a retirement reform through a track meant for social security budgeting.”

But even if we accept that the body of jurisprudence that could have been drawn on to censure the government’s handling of the retirement reform is weak, this is itself partly a symptom of the Constitutional Council’s restrictive interpretation of the constitution. In her timely 2023 work La Constitution maltraitée: Anatomie du Conseil constitutionnel, constitutional scholar Lauréline Fontaine calls this the “social disillusionment of the Constitutional Council” — with the guardians of the constitution disregarding the stipulations on the “social” nature of the Republic that Charles de Gaulle reluctantly admitted into the text when it was adopted in 1958. The “constitutional council has set aside the social provisions of the French constitution,” Fontaine told Jacobin.

Rubber Stamp

Friday’s decision is another reminder of the lack of real institutional checks on the executive in France’s Fifth Republic. While the Constitutional Council is officially charged with checking the constitutionality of laws, the body more often serves to validate the wishes of the government in power.

The council’s treatment of Macron’s retirement reform provides a textbook case of the body’s minimal understanding of constitutional oversight. Leaving the centerpiece of the package intact (the hike in the retirement age), the council rejected as unconstitutional two small items included in the legislation in response to critiques about the problem of late-career unemployment. These were the so-called senior index, which would have had certain employers reporting statistics about the amount of elderly employers on staff; and then the creation of special contracts with payroll tax exonerations designed to encourage companies to hire workers nearing the end of their career.

In fact, many speculate that the government included these measures precisely to give the Constitutional Council something to censure. Macronite ministers even publicly lamented that measures like the exonerations — included as a bid to curry favor with the center-right parts of the opposition — would undermine the broader mission of a law designed to make budget savings.

The council’s “wise ones of Rue de Montpensier,” as they are called in French political jargon, bring together nine figures nominated sequentially by the president of the Republic and the presidents of the National Assembly and Senate. Six of its current members have joined the bench since Macron took office, which means that they were selected either by the president himself, his party’s leader in the National Assembly, or the chief of the loyal, center-right opposition Senate.

Two of its members have been ministers under Macron, with Jacqueline Gourault leaving cabinet in March 2022 to join the council. Alain Juppé, former leader of a key faction of the center right who has joined the president’s coalition since 2017, was prime minister during a failed 1995 bid to reform the retirement system — a plan ultimately withdrawn in the face of popular pressure. Although the council’s current chief, Laurent Fabius, is said to be at personal loggerheads with Macron, he sat alongside Macron for two years of cabinet meetings during the presidency of François Hollande, when he and Macron were foreign affairs minister and economy minister, respectively.

“That makes two former prime ministers, two former ministers, two former MPs, and three others intimately connected with holding governing power,” says Fontaine. “It’s well known that you nominate people to the Constitutional Council who will ensure that the body acts as it has for decades, changing little to laws while from time to time handing down a symbolic rebuke of marginal measures.”

Beyond the ideological, professional, and personal proximity to Macron, the culture of the Constitutional Council such as it has developed means that this is a group extremely sensitive to and familiar with the wishes of a sitting government. “The council has been conceived as the mirror of the actors that surround it so as not to interrupt what they want to do,” says Fontaine. “[It] functions more as an annex to the government rather than as a real counterbalancing power grounded in the popular will.”

It could be objected that a constitutional court should not be porous to the vagaries of public opinion. But there are moments when the need to preserve a society’s governing institutions demands sensitivity to the wishes of that society. The president and his gaggle were confronted with this choice, too — and decided to pit technical authority against substantive democratic legitimacy.

Ultimately, there was no way that Friday’s decision would not be political. “[This decision] agitates a growing political crisis in this country,” says Aubry. “Having everything fall on these nine people can’t be a decent way to seal the country’s future. It’s not credible.”

Macron is running riot — helped by out-of-touch institutions that are leaving a weary society with few ways to hold his power in check.

It’s not easy to stay awake at the wheel when you’re a long-haul trucker. A 1935 National Safety Council paper found that some truckers “used an onion to moisten dry eyelids”; others, to keep from nodding off, “would light a cigarette and sleep until it burned down and awakened them by scorching their fingers.” Jimmy […]

Ruth DiRienzo-Whitehead, a 50-year-old mother residing in Pennsylvania’s Horsham Township, was taken into police custody last week, charged with first- and third-degree murder concerning her 11-year-old son Matthew Whitehead.

According to prosecutors, DiRienzo-Whitehead allegedly strangled her son in a tragic and deadly attempt to prevent him from facing their family’s financial struggles.

The incident happened on Tuesday morning last week when police found Matthew Whitehead passed away in the master bedroom. An autopsy showed that the cause of death was ligature strangulation, confirming the presence of ligature marks on both the front and back of the boy’s neck. In addition, facial swelling and petechiae on his eyes were noted.

When Daniel Whitehead, Matthew’s father, awoke from sleep at 7 AM, he found the bedroom door securely locked. After entering the room, he located his son lying lifelessly on the bed. He checked the garage and noticed their black Toyota Highlander was gone, and he immediately alerted the police afterward.

The vehicle was ditched in the Atlantic Ocean in Cape May, New Jersey, more than 120 miles from the family’s home. Police confirmed that a black dress belt was found inside the SUV. DiRienzo-Whitehead is suspected to have abandoned the car in the sea and then walked toward the town of Wildwood Crest near the area.

At around 3:30 AM on Wednesday, police spotted a woman resembling DiRienzo-Whitehead, dressed in tattered pajamas and appearing confused and disheveled. Upon being identified, she reportedly uttered, “I know what I did”, an obvious reference to her crime.

Somewhat surprisingly, despite increased NATO pressure, Macron has not only refused to take back his statements, but has even reiterated them, openly declaring that “being an ally does not mean being a vassal … [or] mean that we don’t have the right to think for ourselves.”

Every so often I’ll look up what certain twentieth-century intellectuals said of Francisco Franco. I’m always struck by how many of them were fooled by him: they swooned, like innocent debutantes, when the blue-shirted Falange marched past. To my mind, this “Franco test” is for the political right what the Stalinist show trials were for […]