Mike Whitney at Counterpunch praises the Brexit vote, calling it, among other things, "a fundamental rejection of austerity for working people and subsidies (QE) for the markets." Key point: the EU stokes the fires of racism by letting corporations drive down everyone's wages by importing cheaper foreign workers, and the EU benefits as much from voter racism as anyone else -- yes, even this time, not just by enabling actual racism to become a "mainstream" viewpoint, but by making it far easier to taint actual economic populists (ahem!) with the suspicion of racism.
"Brexit Was Sold as a Victory for the Working Class," says Evelyn Anne Crunden at ThinkProgress. "It Wasn't." Yes, a lot of "Leave"'s spokespeople are liars, extremely wealthy, or both, but noting that doesn't actually prove her thesis, and she spends so many paragraphs on that fact that you should be suspicious. Also, I find her thesis wanting -- even if immigration correlates with an increase in GDP and tax revenues, those increases will go to the already-too-wealthy if we keep enabling corporations to use immigrants to drive down wages. And if I were the British, I'd prefer to have more say in my future, and leaving an EU that can (for example) strike down British environmental laws if some corporation throws a tantrum gives them a chance at that. A chance, I said -- as a citizen, you still have to make the most of that chance, even if (just like in America!) none of the major party elites are going to be any help.
McCain amendment that would have expanded FBI warrantless surveillance powers fails by a mere two votes -- meaning it got only 58 votes, and I bet they can fearmonger two more Senators into joining this effort. No, this is not a reason to support every bill or amendment needing 60 votes to pass -- it's a reason to support the kinds of things that would prevent bills like this ever from getting traction in the first place, like loosening the iron grip big donors have on politicians so that said politicians (who are people too, after all) might finally feel free to defend the Constitution.
Dave Johnson reminds us that ramming through the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" during the upcoming "lame-duck" session makes a mockery of democracy. And we live in such a sick, immoral, and decadent society now that the Senate Majority Leader thinks it's perfectly OK to say, out loud, that Congress shouldn't vote on the TPP before the November elections precisely because it's a Presidential election year, which, in the past, we would have more quickly recognized as cowardice. He'll make an excellent drone for President Trump.
Chris Morran at The Consumerist talks about a Consumerist reader whose broadband provider (Comcast, of course) has admitted it shouldn't have taken almost $2,000 out of his checking account as an "early termination fee" -- but also tells him to sort it out with his own bank. Comcast apparently even created "a blank contract" "without my signature," per the reader, and then lied to him about the check being in the mail for nearly two years. This is exactly the kind of sickness, immorality, and decadence we get when we accord respect to people merely because they make gobs of money any way they can, as if working within the rules of a civilized society is so squaresville. But please, right-wingers, keep telling us that corporations should be completely free or laws and regulations.
Finally (cue cheers from convention crowd), Politico finds Donald Trump calling himself "the king of debt." "I'm great with debt," he goes on to say. "Nobody knows debt better than me. I've made a fortune by using debt, and if things don't work out I renegotiate the debt." I guess he's trying to say he would be better at controlling the national debt than Hillary Clinton (or Gary Johnson, if he even knows who Gary Johnson is), but I take issue with his self-coronation -- compared to Wall Street banksters, he's more like the Court Jester of Debt.
Comments