Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 53. Sunrise is 6:44 and sunset is 4:33 for 9 hours 48 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 36.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court affirms a lower court ruling in Browder v. Gayle 142 F. Supp. 707 (M.D. Ala. 1956), aff’d, 352 U.S. 903 (1956), that invalidated Alabama laws requiring segregated buses, thus ending the Montgomery bus boycott:
On 13 November 1956, while [Dr. Martin Luther] King was in the courthouse being tried on the legality of the boycott’s carpools, a reporter notified him that the U.S. Supreme Court had just affirmed the District Court’s decision on Browder v. Gayle. King addressed a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church the next evening, saying that the decision was “a reaffirmation of the principle that separate facilities are inherently unequal, and that the old Plessy Doctrine of separate but equal is no longer valid, either sociologically or legally” (Papers 3:425).
On 17 December 1956, the Supreme Court rejected city and state appeals to reconsider their decision, and three days later the order for integrated buses arrived in Montgomery. On 20 December 1956 King and the Montgomery Improvement Association voted to end the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott. In a statement that day, King said: “The year-old protest against city buses is officially called off, and the Negro citizens of Montgomery are urged to return to the buses tomorrow morning on a non-segregated basis” (Papers 3:486–487). The Montgomery buses were integrated the following day.
Looking at the economy ‘under the hood’ confirms what others plainly see on the economy’s exterior:
A leading investment bank has delivered an arresting diagnosis of the U.S. economy: the labor market, long a pillar of resilience, may be in real trouble. In their latest economic outlook, UBS economists led by Jonathan Pingle painted a picture of mounting weakness that extends well beyond headline job numbers, warning of a growing risk to households and the broader recovery….
For much of the year, top economists, including Fed Chair Jerome Powell, have said we’re in a “low hire, low fire” jobs market. For much of the year, employers were laconic in hiring, and seemed afraid to fire their workers; perhaps still wounded from the pandemic-era “Great Resignation.” UBS isn’t alone on Wall Street in worrying that, maybe the “low-fire” part of the equation isn’t quite true anymore….
Since the start of the year, household employment as measured by the main government survey has been falling by about 72,000 jobs per month through August. Such a pace is “well below” the rate required to keep up with population growth, let alone maintain a stable unemployment rate, which has now crept up to a post-2021 high. Labor force participation has slipped, and more than 800,000 people have left the labor force but say they still want a job.?
Economists note the broadest measure of underemployment, known as U-6, has jumped by 0.6 percentage points since January to 8.1%. That’s now 1.3 percentage points higher than at the end of 2019. Notably, the rise isn’t just about people out of work: more Americans are working part-time for economic reasons, another classic sign of slackening demand. “That is exactly the opposite of what should happen under a negative labor supply shock stemming from immigration,” UBS wrote, referring to the Trump administration’s argument that immigration restrictions would tighten the labor market.
(Emphasis added.)
See Nick Lichtenberg and Eva Roytburg, ‘Yikes’: Top investment bank looks under the hood of the economy and finds ‘the labor market doesn’t look that good,’ Fortune, November 10, 2025.
The nativists were sure that if the government forcibly abducted and deported enough people, there’d be good jobs for everyone remaining. And yet, and yet, labor demand continues to fall. Removing workers won’t increase labor demand; increasing capital’s demand for labor will increase labor demand.
The local nativists of Whitewater stood at the common council lectern and — at least twice since January — insisted that federal deportations would solve the cost of housing in Whitewater. That was wrong twice over (morally and practically). The solution to the cost of housing in Whitewater is an increase in supply.
The extreme populism of the federal administration has never been about economics, except on the occasion of falsely insisting it is about economics.
Moment newly opened bridge in China partially collapses: