MEG Energy announces dividend as it reaps Trans Mountain expansion benefits

The two presidential nominees are using the week before their debate to sharpen their economic messages about who could do more for the middle class. Vice President Kamala Harris will discuss her policy plans on Wednesday in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, while Donald Trump will address the Economic Club of New York on Thursday.

Harris will use the New Hampshire campaign stop to propose an expansion of tax incentives for small businesses, a pro-entrepreneur plan that may soften her previous calls for wealthy Americans and large corporations to pay higher taxes. Trump, meanwhile, is betting that Americans crave trillions of dollars in tax cuts — and that growth will be so fantastic that it’s not worth worrying about budget deficits.

The candidates will debate next week in what will be their first meeting ever. The nation’s premier swing state, Pennsylvania, begins in-person absentee voting the week after. By the end of the month, early voting will be underway in at least four states with a dozen more to follow by mid-October.

In just 62 days, the final votes will be cast to decide which one of them will lead the world’s most powerful nation.

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Takeaways from AP’s report on JD Vance and the Catholic postliberals in his circle of influence

Ohio Sen. JD Vance’s 2019 conversion to Catholicism helped shape his political worldview, he has written.

It has also put him in close touch with a Catholic intellectual movement, viewed by some critics as having reactionary or authoritarian leanings, that has been little known to the American public.

That’s changing with Vance’s rise to the national stage as the Republican vice presidential nominee and running mate to former President Donald Trump.

The professors and media personalities in this network are generally known as “postliberal.” Vance has used that term to describe himself as well.

▶ Here are some takeaways from the AP’s reporting.

Harris is visiting New Hampshire, away from bigger swing states, to tout her small business tax plan

Vice President Kamala Harris is using a New Hampshire campaign stop on Wednesday to propose an expansion of tax incentives for small businesses, a pro-entrepreneur plan that may soften her previous calls for wealthy Americans and large corporations to pay higher taxes.

She wants to expand from $5,000 to $50,000 tax incentives for small business startup expenses, to eventually spur 25 million new small business applications over four years.

Harris is expected to stop at Throwback Brewery in North Hampton, outside Portsmouth, and meet with co-founders Annette Lee and Nicole Carrier. Their brewery got support to open its current location through a small business credit and installed solar panels using federal programs championed by the Biden administration, according to the Harris campaign.

The New Hampshire trip is a rare deviation for a candidate who is spending most of her time in Midwest and Sun Belt states with pivotal roles in November’s election.

▶ Read more here.

JD Vance’s Catholicism helped shape his views. So did this little-known group of Catholic thinkers

By his own account, Ohio Sen. JD Vance’s 2019 conversion to Catholicism provided a spiritual fulfillment he couldn’t find in his Yale education or career success.

It also amounted to a political conversion.

Catholicism provided him with a new way of looking at the addictions, family breakdowns and other social ills he described in his 2016 bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”

“I felt desperate for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral; that recognized that we are products of our environment; that we have a responsibility to change that environment, but that we are still moral beings with individual duties,” he wrote in a 2020 essay.

His conversion also put Vance in close touch with a Catholic intellectual movement, viewed by some critics as having reactionary or authoritarian leanings, that was little known to the American public until Vance’s rise to the national stage as the Republican vice presidential nominee.

▶ Read more here.

Federal judge rejects Donald Trump’s request to intervene in wake of hush money conviction

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected Donald Trump’s request to intervene in his New York hush money criminal case, thwarting the former president’s latest bid to overturn his felony conviction and delay his sentencing.

U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled that Trump had not satisfied the burden of proof required for a federal court to take control of the case from the state court where it was tried.

Hellerstein’s ruling came hours after Manhattan prosecutors raised objections to Trump’s effort to delay post-trial decisions in the case while he sought to have the federal court step in.

In a letter to the judge presiding over the case in state court, the Manhattan district attorney’s office argued that he had no legal obligation to hold off on post-trial decisions and wait for Hellerstein to rule.

Read more here.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The lower house of Mexico’s Congress approved contentious legislation Wednesday that would launch the most sweeping judicial overhaul of the century by requiring all judges to stand for election.

In a marathon session in which legislators were forced to meet in a gymnasium after protesters blocked the Congress building, the lower chamber approved the constitutional measure 359-135 in a party-line first vote. The measure, which requires a two-thirds majority, was expected to pass by a similar margin in a necessary second-round vote later Wednesday before going to the Senate.

Mexico’s ruling party says judges in the current court system are corrupt, and wants the country’s entire judicial branch — some 7,000 judges – to stand for election.

Critics say the constitutional changes would deal a severe blow to the independence of the judiciary, and they question how such massive elections could be carried out without having drug cartels and criminals field their own candidates.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has long railed against courts that blocked some of his building projects and policy measures because they ran afoul of constitutional and legal norms. The president has vowed for months to rush through a raft of measures like the judicial overhaul — as well as a proposal to eliminate almost all independent oversight and regulatory agencies.

The vote was expected to be extremely tight in the Senate, though the president’s party looked poised to win over the single vote it lacked there. If passed by the Senate, the constitutional proposal would be sent to Mexico’s 32 state congresses where it must be approved by most of them. López Obrador’s party controls a majority of the states.

Critics say the measure will devastate Mexico’s system of checks and balances.

“We should inaugurate a wall of shame that says: ‘Today begins the fall of our Republic.’ And it should have the date and all the faces of the Morena congressmen,” shouted Paulina Rubio Fernández, a PAN congresswoman, before the vote.

The vote Wednesday was made possible by López Obrador’s Morena party and its allies winning overwhelming majorities in the June 2 elections.

The all-night session came after protesters blocked the entrance to Mexico’s Congress on Tuesday in an attempt to demand debate on the judicial overhaul.

The overhaul has fueled a wave of protests by judges, court employees and students across Mexico in recent weeks, and reached another inflection point on Tuesday when protesters strung ropes across entrances to the lower house of Congress to block legislators from entering. That came as the country’s Supreme Court voted 8-3 to join strikes, adding more weight to the protests.

“The party with the majority could take control of the judicial branch, and that would practically be the end of democracy,” said protester Javier Reyes, a 37-year-old federal court worker. “They want to own Mexico.”

Under the current system, judges and court secretaries, who act as judges’ assistants, slowly qualify for higher positions based on their record. But under the proposed changes, any lawyer with minimal qualifications could run, with some candidacies decided by drawing names from a hat.

Mexico’s courts have long been plagued by corruption and opacity, but in the last 15 years they have been subject to reforms to make them more open and accountable, including changing many closed-door, paper-based trials for a more open, oral-argument format.

Voices both at home and abroad say the new changes could mark a setback in the effort to clean up courts.

U.S. Ambassador Ken Salazar said Tuesday that “there is a great deal of concern,” claiming the changes “could damage relations a lot, and it’s not just me saying that.” Salazar has pointed to the election of judges as his main qualm with the overhaul, noting that it would negatively affect investment and the Mexican economy.

López Obrador said last week he has put relations with the United States and Canadian embassies “on pause” after the two countries voiced concerns over the proposed judicial overhaul.

President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, López Obrador’s close ally, on Tuesday night once again defended the reform, writing on the social media platform X that it “does not affect our commercial relations, nor national or foreign private investments. On the contrary, there will be more and better rule of law and more democracy for all.”

“If judges, magistrates, and ministers are elected by the people, where is the authoritarianism?” she added.

The proposed changes would cover about 7,000 judges at various levels and would introduce a time limit for judges to rule on many cases to combat a tendency for some trials to stretch out over decades. More controversially, the reforms would also introduce “hooded judges” to preside over organized crime cases; their identities would be kept secret in order to prevent reprisals.

And the courts would be largely stripped of their power to block government projects or laws based on appeals by citizens. It would also almost certainly assure that the president’s party continues with significant political power long after López Obrador leaves office at the end of this month.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — America’s employers posted fewer job openings in July than they had the previous month, a sign that hiring could cool in the coming months.

The Labor Department reported Wednesday that there were 7.7 million open jobs in July, down from 7.9 million in June. The pace of hiring picked up, though, from June to July.

Wednesday’s figures indicate that fewer companies are seeking to add workers despite recent data showing that consumer spending is still growing. Last week, the government estimated that the economy expanded at a healthy 3% annual rate in the April-June quarter.

The number of job openings has been trending gradually down over the past year. Yet there are still roughly 1.1 job openings for every unemployed person, Wednesday’s report showed. That reflects the economy’s continuing need for workers and marks a reversal from before the pandemic, when there were always more unemployed people than available jobs.

The July report on job openings is the first of several measures this week of the labor market’s health that the Federal Reserve will be watching closely. If clear evidence emerges that hiring is faltering, the Fed might decide at its next meeting Sept. 17-18 to start cutting its benchmark interest rate by a relatively aggressive half-percentage point. If hiring remains mostly solid, however, a more typical quarter-point rate cut would be likelier.

On Thursday, the government will report how many laid-off workers sought unemployment benefits last week. So far, most employers are largely holding onto their workers, rather than imposing layoffs, even though they have been slower to add jobs than they were earlier this year.

On Friday, the week’s highest-profile economic report — the monthly jobs data — will be released. The consensus estimate of economists is that employers added 163,000 jobs in August and that the unemployment rate ticked down from 4.3% to 4.2%.

Last month, the government reported that job gains slowed in July to just 114,000 — far fewer than expected and that the second-smallest total in 3 1/2 years — and the unemployment rate rose for a fourth straight month.

Those figures sparked fears that the economy was seriously weakening and contributed to a plunge in stock prices. Late last month, Fed Chair Jerome Powell underscored the central bank’s increasing focus on the job market, with inflations steadily fading.

In a speech at an annual economic symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Powell said that hiring has “cooled considerably” and that the Fed does not “seek or welcome further cooling” in the job market. Economists saw those comments as evidence that the Fed may accelerate its rate cuts if it decides it is needed to offset a slowdown in hiring.

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