Congress does something!!; there is no good news in the UK; the last NAFTA summit before Donald Trump gets elected and tears up the deal (he can't really do that).
The Senate invoked cloture Wednesday on the PROMESA act, a bill that would provide a process for Puerto Rico to restructure its $70 billion in debt and protect it from creditor lawsuits.
President Obama is expected to sign the bill this week, and not a moment too soon: Puerto Rico has another $2B in payments due on Friday. The island's governor has warned that even with PROMESA, it will default on at least $1B of the "most senior" debts.
But the bill would protect Puerto Rico from the lawsuits already being filed by the hedge funds that hold its debt, which are demanding that they be paid back even before essential government services are provided.
The fear of such a "race to the courthouse" had the White House pushing hard to pass the bill. Many senior Republicans went along (saying the alternative was a federal bailout), while other Republicans objected to any relief at all — and many Democrats, including Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT), opposed the "colonialist" oversight board that would be empowered to restructure debt.
To progressive critics, PROMESA addresses the worries of creditors without really addressing the needs of regular Puerto Ricans. But given that the island is currently in a downward spiral of population loss and economic slowdown, preventing total catastrophe is a decent first step.
The European Union and member countries are continuing to engage in pre-negotiation posturing about the terms on which Britain might leave the EU. On Wednesday, several member countries made it clear that they won't allow Britain to take part in the common European market (as Brexit supporters promised voters would be possible) without also taking part in free movement of EU citizens (which Brexit supporters promised voters they'd avoid).
Furthermore, some reports indicate that France and Germany might offer the UK a "deal" that would simply bar British banks from access to the EU market — which would be politically appealing but would cause the UK to lose a great deal of its tax base (to, surprise, France and Germany).
Of course, it's not at all clear who'll be doing the negotiating for Britain, as both major parties are holding new leadership elections. In the Conservative Party, the pending resignation of PM David Cameron creates a vacuum; in the Labour Party, a successful no-confidence vote against Jeremy Corbyn opens him up to the equivalent of a primary challenge.
The biggest donor to the "Leave" campaign, meanwhile, is making noises about creating a whole new party to consolidate the Brexit coalition into a durable right-wing movement. He credits his success to "an American-style media approach": "Facts don't work."
It doesn't look like there needs to be much more effort to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment. In the days after the referendum, 70 percent more hate crimes were reported than on the same days last month.
The heads of Canada, the US, and Mexico met Wednesday, in the last North American summit featuring the three young, charismatic (and attractive-for-politicians) leaders known occasionally as the "Three Amigos": President Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
This year's trilateral summit was more serious than usual. After all, the summit is a part of NAFTA — which presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has promised to renegotiate and which many Americans (including progressive economists) have soured on.
Between Trump and Brexit, maybe it's unsurprising that Obama and Peña Nieto ended up defending economic globalism itself: "That's here, that's done," Obama said.
In fact, the summit added two more: an agreement for exporting Canadian beef to Mexico, and a new Canadian policy that will allow Mexicans to travel to Canada without visas (which probably gives Trump agita for other reasons).
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"I sat across from white girls in oversized T-shirts, white boys in basketball shorts, sweet kids with good hearts and sleep still in their eyes, who told me—either very nicely or very snidely, never anything in between—that it was harder for white people to get into college now than anyone else, because of affirmative action. They said this as their parents wrote me $450 checks to 'edit' their essays."
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