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WASHINGTON (AP) — After an extended period of gloom, Americans are starting to feel better about inflation and the economy — a trend that could sustain consumer spending, fuel economic growth and potentially affect President Joe Biden’s political fortunes.

A measure of consumer sentiment by the University of Michigan has jumped in the past two months by the most since 1991. A survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that Americans’ inflation expectations have reached their lowest point in nearly three years. And the same survey, released last week, found that the proportion who expect their own finances to improve a year from now is at its highest level since June 2021.

As tech industry giants face an overdue reckoning in Washington, allies of “Big Tech” — Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft — have fought back hard against accountability. Amid regulatory scrutiny, industry interests have tried to convince Americans that they benefit from Big Tech’s anti-competitive behavior. As September polling by Data for Progress found, however, Big Tech’s aggressive lobbying hasn’t moved public opinion. Data for Progress found that voters across party lines are concerned about Big Tech’s harm to consumers, markets, and the political process.

Though Facebook and other tech giants feign concern for small businesses, the electorate isn’t buying their PR campaign. Sixty-nine percent of voters across party lines agree that the power wielded by Big Tech companies disadvantages small firms and hurts consumers. In contrast, only 24 percent of voters disagree with this notion.

This year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has stepped up its enforcement of antitrust laws, bringing major lawsuits against companies including Amazon, Google, and Meta. Recent YouGov polling finds that most Americans support antitrust laws and believe that penalties for violating them should be increased. The vast majority hold negative views of monopolies, and while most believe there is at least some competition within U.S. industries, more than one-third believe it is not enough. Americans are far more likely to believe stricter antitrust enforcement would help the U.S. economy rather than hurt it — and the same holds for views on the effects of stricter enforcement on consumers, workers, and small businesses. Large companies, on the other hand, are more likely to be thought to be hurt by such laws rather than helped.

When asked broadly, most Americans (67%) say it is a bad thing for a single company to dominate a market; just 6% say it is good, 16% say neutral, and 11% aren't sure.

As VP Kamala Harris enters the presidential race, her strong stances for reproductive rights and drug access offer insights into future actions. Lowering drug costs In a June 2023 statement, the nursing organisation National Nurses United endorsed Harris as a candidate for vice president, praising the current Administration’s passing of the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022. The bill allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices with drug manufacturers to help curb inflation. Harris has also previously boasted about the success of the Administration and its role in capping insulin prices to $35 a month through the Inflation Reduction Act, in a 20 July tweet. Many have spoken out in support of the legislation, but some members of the pharmaceutical industry remain dissatisfied with the change. In August 2023, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) responded to the bill saying, the legislation was the result of a “rushed process” with the aims of “short-term political gain”. The pharmaceutical trade body argued that the medicines selected thus far already had significant rebates and discounts, because of private negotiations on Medicare Part D prices. In an August 2023 statement, Harris stated that the administration still has plans to cap the total cost of prescription drugs at $2,000 a year. “There are many factors that drive up healthcare costs and make medications more expensive,” she added.

Reducing prescription drug prices has long been a goal of Democrats in Congress and the White House. But in a strange twist, a group of Senate Democrats—along with one Republican—has backed a bill that would increase drug prices by preventing people from challenging weak or invalid patents. How patent thickets raise drug prices As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the single biggest problem with prescription drug prices is the fact that federal law gives strongly preferential treatment to biologic drugs over traditional small molecules. Biologic drugs—drugs manufactured from living cells—represent less than one percent of all U.S. prescriptions, but roughly half of all U.S. drug spending, net of rebates. In part this is because there are lots of subtle things one can tweak about how a biologic drug is designed and manufactured that have minor effects on a drug’s performance, but major effects on a drug’s financial value. That’s because each of those subtle tweaks, if patented, leads to a new, 20-year monopoly for the drug manufacturer. By law, every patent—no matter how much or how little innovation it contains—gets the same 20-year exclusivity rights. Drug companies have gotten very good at using thickets of these weaker patents in the U.S. to troll or block low-cost “biosimilar” competition. But the patent thicket strategy hasn’t worked as well in Europe. Why? The success of patent opposition procedures in Europe The European Patent Office has long had an opposition procedure by which any individual or company could challenge the validity of a recently issued patent. Patent examiners can’t always know whether or not something that someone is trying to patent is obvious to someone skilled in the art, or has been done before. The opposition process allows those claims to be litigated in a simple and low-cost way. This ends up being good for innovation. Truly innovative patents that survive the opposition procedure are thereby strengthened, because courts know that these patents have already survived a thorough vetting. And weak patents that should never have been issued are whittled away. Take the case of Humira, the AbbVieAbbVie 0.0% arthritis drug that reached $20 billion in annual sales. Humira’s core composition of matter patent expired in 2016, and “biosimilar” generic versions of Humira launched in Europe in 2018. But thanks to AbbVie’s thicket of over 100 weak patents that remained on the books in the U.S., it took until 2023 for biosimilars to launch in America. AbbVie took advantage of the 5-year delay to further raise prices on Humira in the U.S., and the company netted about $80 billion in Humira revenue in the U.S. between 2018 and 2023 at American consumers’ expense. The U.S. adopts its own patent opposition procedure In 2011, the U.S. Congress passed the America Invents Act, sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Tex.), which the Congressional Research Service describes as “the most significant patent statute enacted by Congress in over 50 years.” The AIA’s most important reform was the creation of two new European-style patent opposition procedures, through a new agency called the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). Silicon Valley tech companies had long been frustrated by patent trolls who hamstrung their products with trivial patents, and the passage of the AIA was a major victory for U.S. innovators. Thanks to PTAB’s streamlined process, challenging a patent through PTAB costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, compared to millions of dollars through the more traditional system. Unfortunately, it has taken a while for the U.S. patent opposition process, called inter partes review, to get going. As I described in a 2020 paper, early attempts by private actors to invalidate weak drug patents using PTAB were stymied by an aggressive drug industry lobbying campaign. Here’s how it works: Once a patent has been issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, anyone can challenge the validity of the patent using post-grant review (if the patent was issued no more than nine months ago) or, more commonly, inter partes review (for patents issued more than nine months ago) by petitioning PTAB. PTAB then decides to either deny or institute the petition, based on whether the petition and its initial response “shows that there is a reasonable likelihood that the petitioner would prevail with respect to at least 1 of the [patent] claims challenged in the petition.” Once PTAB institutes the petition, and begins adjudicating the patent challenge, the parties frequently settle, ending the opposition process in about 30 percent of PTAB cases. According to the USPTO, of the 27,804 patent claims challenged in fiscal year 2023 (each patent can contain several claimed inventions), PTAB ruled against the patent holder 5,894 times, or 22 percent of the time. Roughly 21 percent of the claims were settled (the yellow bars on the above chart). Of the roughly 3.8 million active patents in the United States, as of September 2023 the PTAB opposition procedure has fully invalidated 1,037 and partially invalidated 3,170, or 0.11 percent of active patents. Because the economic rewards of patent monopolies are so high, Congress’ creation of PTAB has turned out to be one of the most heavily litigated statutes in modern history. From 2016 to 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court heard no fewer than six cases regarding PTAB. While the High Court has ended up tweaking how PTAB works, however, the opposition procedure remains largely intact. As drug companies continue to use thickets of weak patents to protect their high-priced drugs, it is essential to preserve and improve the patent opposition process in the United States. But, strangely, a group of largely Democratic members of Congress is going in the opposite direction, by introducing legislation that would sabotage the America Invents Act’s reforms.

Two prominent congressional Democrats this week wrote to eight pharmaceutical company CEOs, urging them to remove 130 patents from a government registry.

Democrats have hit on a new tactic in their long battle with drug companies: challenge patents that they say are deliberate attempts to game the system and box out low-cost, generic competitors.

[Alex, Hans, “Poll: 49% of Independents think Trump should drop out post-guilty verdict”, ]

One of the first polls conducted since a New York Jury found Donald Trump guilty of falsifying business records find that a significant minority of Republicans and Independents want him to drop out and a majority of registered voters approve of the jury's decision.

Powerful leaders of the Democratic establishment quickly embraced Vice President Kamala Harris on Sunday after President Biden’s shocking exit from the race, hoping that a seamless succession could end a month of damaging chaos and transform a contest widely believed to be tipping toward Republicans.

By Sunday evening, Ms. Harris appeared to have a glide path to the nomination: No other top Democrats announced plans to challenge her, though some stopped short of an endorsement, including the party’s top congressional leaders and former President Barack Obama.

Ultimately, Harris's seeming upward trend in the polls and the fact that she's polled better than Biden in many recent surveys will give Democrats reason to hope that she has a higher ceiling of support than the president, whose polling numbers had remained pretty stagnant throughout the campaign. This seems especially true because fewer Americans have expressed an opinion about Harris than Biden in approval polling. In theory then, the public has less concrete views about the vice president, which could allow her to win over some voters who didn't want to consider Biden.

It’s too soon to analyse Harris vs Trump polls. Harris had not been a presidential candidate before today and name recognition of Biden explains his often better numbers than Harris. A recent national YouGov poll for CBS News gave Trump a five-point lead over Biden and a three-point lead over Harris.

There are two things that should advantage Harris. One is that economic data has improved, with inflation dropping and real earnings up. The other is that, while Biden would have been almost 82 by the election, Harris will only be 60 by then. Trump is 78, so the age split that was unfavourable to Biden will be favourable to Harris.

Kamala Harris has made no effort, whatsoever, to suggest that she should replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president. But if the switch were to be made, polls now suggest that the vice president would be a particularly strong candidate against Republican Donald Trump.

In fact, several recent polls point to Harris as a potentially stronger candidate than Biden or other Democrats who have been mentioned as possible nominees. One of those surveys, released Thursday by ABC News and The Washington Post, put the vice president several points ahead of Trump in a head-to-head matchup.

Harris backers have plenty to point to in the aftermath of June’s presidential debate.

There’s the obvious stuff: Harris is younger, can actually string sentences together, and has already been campaigning against Trump this year. These points were once again demonstrated this week — while Biden was forced to recover from Covid at his home in Delaware during the week of the Republican National Convention, Harris was on the trail with North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.

“The copyright and patent laws we have today look more like intellectual monopoly than intellectual property,” wrote Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles in their recent book about the U.S. economy. Concerns about overprotection of intellectual property acting as a barrier to innovation and its diffusion are not new. But they have gained greater salience now that knowledge has emerged as a dominant driver of economic activity and competitive advantage.

Digital technologies have enabled the emergence of an “intangible economy,” based on soft assets like algorithms and lines of code, rather than physical assets like buildings and machinery. In this environment, intellectual-property rules can now make or break business models and reshape societies, as they determine how economic gains are shared.

Burgis ’24 (Ben is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, “Joe Biden’s Replacement Must Embrace Economic Populism,” https://jacobin.com/2024/07/joe-biden-stepping-down-kamala-harris-economic-populism)

Joe Biden is out of the race, and a second Trump term would be a nightmare. To avoid it, Democrats need more than a candidate who can complete sentences. That candidate must put pro-worker policies at the heart of their campaign. Anyone who would rather not find out should be happy that Biden has dropped out. He almost certainly would have lost. But that doesn’t mean that Vice President Kamala Harris — or whoever else might replace him — will win the election. The ability to complete sentences is a good first step. But the content of those sentences still matters quite a bit. Even before the extent of Biden’s cognitive difficulties became apparent, he may have torched his reelection prospects by backing Netanyahu’s grotesque assault on the population of Gaza. No matter how he’d performed on the debate stage, it would have been very hard to imagine, for example, Biden winning my home state of Michigan — which is both a crucial swing state and home to the largest concentration of Arab American voters in the country. A different nominee who is not as closely associated with that horror might make a difference, especially if he or she made a clear break from Biden’s policy, although it’s also possible that the damage is done at this point. On the domestic front, Biden was desperate enough to start making some tentative steps in a positive direction in the final weeks of his candidacy. He talked about ending medical debt, for example, and finally moving toward desperately needed reforms to the Supreme Court — an issue that had been raised by the “Squad” of left-wing members of Congress. He unveiled a plan to effectively cap rent increases at 5 percent, making major landlords’ tax breaks contingent on their adhering to this limit — although, in a telling moment, he fumbled the delivery of this announcement, telling the NAACP Convention that he was going to limit rent increases to fifty-five dollars. These moves were not only the right thing to do in themselves but evidence that some Democratic Party power brokers correctly understand that a constituency that desperately wants reforms like these could be crucial to winning the election. A candidate less likely than Biden to say “$55” when they mean “5 percent” might be able to blunt the appeal of Trump and running mate J. D. Vance’s cynical reactionary populism. Kamala Harris is now the front-runner for the nomination. As hard as this is to remember, she once claimed to support Medicare for All. Over the course of the 2020 presidential campaign, she moved away from this in fumbling efforts at triangulation, but she could take the idea up again. Trump and Vance are leaning hard into populist rhetoric this year. Vance’s RNC speech covered the pain of communities devastated by deindustrialization, the housing crisis, the opioid crisis, and more. Lines like “jobs were sent overseas, and our children were sent to war,” hit home. When it comes to supporting policies that would do anything about these problems, it’s all hot air. Trump was a ferociously anti-labor president, and Vance’s legislative scorecard from the AFL-CIO sits at 0 percent. But the fake populism taps into very real pain, and that appeal can’t be countered by insisting that everything is basically fine and all we need are competent liberal technocrats to sensibly steer the ship of state. Even if Harris or some other nominee did embrace a substantively populist policy agenda, they might well go down to defeat. Too many voters might dismiss it as empty election-season rhetoric. Harris in particular might not be a believable messenger. And with barely more than a hundred days until Election Day, there just might not be enough time to effectively reframe the election. But fake populism being countered with policies that would actually help ordinary workers could give America — and the world — a chance to avoid whatever’s lurking on the other side of a Trump victory this November.

President Joe Biden’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president has set the stage for a much tighter and uncertain race in November, according to some experts.

Biden stepped down from the race Sunday as top Democrats pressured him to drop out following a disastrous debate performance and as Republican nominee Donald Trump was leading in the polls.

It’s hard to convince people to voluntarily reduce consumption and curb reproduction. That’s not because humans are unusually pushy, greedy creatures; all living organisms tend to maximize their population size and rate of collective energy use. Inject a colony of bacteria into a suitable growth medium in a petri dish and watch what happens. Hummingbirds, mice, leopards, oarfish, redwood trees, or giraffes: in each instance the principle remains inviolate—every species maximizes population and energy consumption within nature’s limits. Systems ecologist Howard T. Odum called this rule the Maximum Power Principle: throughout nature, “system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency.”

In addition to our innate propensity to maximize population and consumption, we humans also have difficulty making sacrifices in the present in order to reduce future costs. We’re genetically hardwired to respond to immediate threats with fight-or-flight responses, while distant hazards matter much less to us. It’s not that we don’t think about the future at all; rather, we unconsciously apply a discount rate based on the amount of time likely to elapse before a menace has to be faced.

2.4. Radical Degrowth Perhaps for the majority of degrowth proponents the notion of degrowth denotes a radical change of (or many radical changes in) the economy. This may involve changes in values, ethics, preferences, financial systems, markets (versus informal exchange), work and labor, the role of money, or even profit-making and ownership (Latouche, 2009; Schneider et al., 2010). Such an approach comprises degrowth notions 2 and 3, but it is broader. Fournier (2008) has called it “escaping from the [capitalist] economy.” The main problem I see here that this is such a grand, imprecise idea which lacks a good, thorough analysis that it will be impossible to obtain political support for it in a democratic system. More importantly, it is void of a good view on systemic solutions and instrumentation, making it unclear how to upscale radical changes in lifestyles and grassroots initiatives by small subsets of the population (“niches”) to society as a whole. Alternative lifestyles, i.e. outside the cultural norm, have always existed but have never been adopted by the large majority of people. So why would this now suddenly be different? This does, of course, not mean such lifestyles need not exist or do not deserve respect. They may influence slow change in dominant lifestyles, but cannot be expected to be copied by the masses. Writings on this issue tend to be normative and idealistic rather than analytical and realistic. They seem to be motivated more by political ideology about justice and equity than about solving urgent and threatening environmental problems (an “ecological imperative”). As a result, they do not necessarily offer an effective approach to combat environmental problems. One can certainly be positive about the underlying humanistic ideals of equality, solidarity, citizenship, locality and “good life.” However, a drastic change in the economy upfront seems an overly risky experiment and a diffuse, undirected strategy that is not sure to meet the desired environmental aims. Moreover, it may well result in unintended social and economic chaos and instability. The main historical, large-scale experiments aimed at moving away from market capitalism which we can learn from, namely central planning by communist states as in the former USSR, Eastern Europe and China, certainly do not offer a good record in terms of clean production and environmental regulation — quite the opposite. Here, a lack of market mechanisms and other incentives seems to have given rise to excessive waste and inefficiency, also in relation to environmentally relevant categories of inputs and outputs.

Indigenous people, for example, have already experienced the apocalypse and indigenous knowledge has been warning us about climate change for centuries. As the image below shows – with the causes of eco-injustice in the center and their antidotes around the edge - the roots of today’s global crises are not new. Capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, white supremacy, state violence, and Enlightenment humanism (and its domination of non-humans) underlie our global crisis and the Great Unraveling of civilization. Today’s troubling rise of eco-fascism, for example, coincides with a global rise in white supremacy, authoritarianism, and right-wing nationalism. “We are seeing the beginnings of the era of climate barbarism,” writes Naomi Klein. A growing number of “preppers” are building bunkers and stockpiling resources. The ultra-rich are buying $3 million apartments in underground missile silos to comfortably survive future catastrophes. Such responses protect the power and privilege of people who benefit from the collapsing system. They offer no breakthrough paths for transitioning society towards greater justice and sustainability. People who accept the Great Unraveling as the only reality tend to embrace rugged individualism, tribalism and protectionism. They see a dying system and respond reactively under stress. On the other hand, people who respond proactively through solidarity, justice and collective action are laying the groundwork for the Great Transition.

A surprise announcement by the International Energy Agency (IEA) last week could be good news for energy intensive industries worldwide. Free Download: Cut Your Shipping Costs Firms have been investing billions in energy efficiency and global emissions reduction technology yet the targets seem to be ever ratcheted lower in spite of gains made, but a report to be published on June 15 will show that for the first time in 40 years emissions of carbon dioxide did not rise last year. According to a Financial Times article after growing at an average of 2.4% over the last decade in 2014 the global economy grew 3%, while the amount of CO2 pumped out remained at the 2013 level of 32.3 billion tons. There have only been three times in four decades when emissions fell or stopped rising, the FT quotes the EIA as saying. After the oil price shock and US recession in the early 1980s; in 1992 after the collapse of the former Soviet Union; and in 2009 during the global financial crisis. Many Factors Led to Reduction As you would expect, the reasons are a fortunate coincidence of trends, not one single factor. Energy shifts in China, said to be the world’s biggest polluter are a major contributor, as its use of coal, one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions, has been cut and the country has installed more hydroelectric, wind and solar power. At the same time, the country’s electricity consumption growth rate has fallen from 10% a year to about 3-4% as China imposes energy efficiency standards for industry, shuts older factories and shifts away from the heavy manufacturing that has powered its economic growth. That trend still has far to run as our recent posts on the closure of polluting steel and coke plants and coal-fired power stations reports, China is on a mission to reduce environmental pollution and in particular to improve air quality in the face of growing public outcry as was graphically illustrated by the documentary “Under the Dome.” In tandem with developments in China, the FT reports wealthy countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) group of nations have started to “decouple” economic expansion from emissions increases, as they install more renewable energy plants and set stricter standards for everything from car fuel economy to home appliance energy use. Back to that pain manufacturing has been experiencing for the last 20 years, all that investment is showing some return by way of falling emissions levels. In the past five years, OECD countries’ economies grew nearly 7% while their emissions fell 4%, the IEA has found. Downside risks remain. Some 1.2 billion people in the developing world are still without electricity and countries such as India are at present committed to building many more coal-fired power stations which, once operational, would lock us in to higher emissions for decades over the life of the plants. Not an Either/Or Situation But what the findings do show is that rather than accept emissions are going to continue to rise regardless of our best efforts for many years to come, it is possible they could be stabilized at current levels while economic growth continues. It isn’t an either/or situation. But encouragingly the cost and pain Western consumers have gone through is paying off. That is not to say politicians will let matters rest at current levels, expect emission limits to continue to be reduced but the switch to natural gas both for power generation and industrial use will continue to gradually reduce carbon emissions regardless of reduced targets. A recent Telegraph article gives some encouragement regarding the economic sustainability of that trend, saying prices will fall in the years to come as a number of massive new LNG projects come online (particularly in Australia) to feed the Asian market with natural gas. According to the UK’s BG Group, supply has remained stalled at levels recorded in 2011 and that last year shipments grew by only 1.5% to around 243 million metric tons. However, by 2025, the company is forecasting that the LNG supply will reach 400 mt, a 5% annual growth rate, almost twice the projected growth rate in demand resulting in a glut of supply and falling prices. Japanese gradual restarts of nuclear plants will reduce demand in Asia’s second-biggest economy for LNG and the start of exports from the US of LNG from shale will also add to supply in addition to other projects outside of the Australian mega projects. The US Department of Energy estimates that natural gas burned in power plants produces about half as much carbon dioxide as coal and fewer nitrogen oxides, too. Growth Can Work With Emissions Cuts If natural gas can provide some of this increased demand, particularly if India can be encouraged to install renewable and natural gas for power generation rather than coal, then a cap below the target 2% rise in CO2 may be more readily achievable than many had feared, while still sustaining global growth with all the benefits in reducing poverty in the developing world that growth can deliver. The next crunch date will be the December gathering in Paris of global leaders looking to agree targets and limits for the years ahead. These findings from the IEA give hope that reductions can be achieved without the expense of crippling costs or disproportionate limits to growth.

But now let me talk about degrowth more in the terms of it is a direct political project, which is as an answer to climate change. I would cut this into a few pieces. Is degrowth necessary for addressing climate change? Is it the fastest way to address climate change? And is it desirable? It has to be at least one of those things to be the strategy you’d want to take.

And I don’t think it is. Let’s start with necessary. Many countries in Europe, even the United States, are growing while reducing their carbon footprint. Now, you could say they’re not doing so fast enough depending on the country. But they could all do so much faster if there was enough political will to deploy more renewable technology, to tax carbon, to do a bunch of things that we have not been able to pass. So it is clearly true that we can decouple growth and energy usage.