Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau caught Wells Fargo charging much higher fees to students than its competitors -- and then promptly buried the report. Because how can we ever punish usurers and create jobs at the same time? Seriously, this is what our Administration thinks -- or wants you to think.
ProPublica and The Atlantic describe how eight years of Congressional budget-cutting has "gutted" our Internal Revenue Service. If you're of the mind that this is a good thing, you must be alright with corporations refusing to pay what they owe, and you must also be alright with working families paying more for roads and bridges and cops and libraries, since that's what happens when the folks at the top don't pay their fair share. What do you call a liberal? A conservative who just bottomed out over a pothole.
Kara Mannor at TruthOut reminds us that the Americans with Disabilities Act (or ADA) is not the legacy of the late President George H.W. Bush (who signed it into law) but rather the legacy of all the activists who fought for it. You could say the same of just about every good thing we've ever done as Americans -- that the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, for example, aren't a Lyndon Johnson "legacy" but a legacy of those who fought for them. Read the whole article, though, which takes us all the way back to that time, 90 years ago, when governments tended to classify disabled folks as "unemployable."
The government of Egypt is apparently trying to stop the sale of yellow vests, so they don't have a yellow vest protest movement like other nations do now. Well, it's a good thing there are literally no other articles of clothing that could possibly be repurposed into a mass movement against neoliberal economic policy! A government that must resort to banning yellow vests is a government that's lost all the arguments on the merits. And maybe, you know, not giving people the back of your hand all the time is a better way of forestalling protests.
Fast food corporation McDonald's pledges to curb antibiotic abuse in its beef by 2020. And a crapload of spokeshacks rush forward to say "but we don't want to stop using antibiotics on sick animals," when literally no one in America has called for that. But that's what people do when they've lost the argument -- they don't just invent opponents, they invent opposing arguments. And when four out of every five antibiotics in America go to nominally healthy feed animals to make them meatier and help them endure squalid living conditions, we know it's not an issue of "treating sick animals" per se.
Finally, I saved the biggest slab of stupid for last: no no no we should not fantasize about Joe Biden running on a "unity ticket" with Mitt Freaking Romney or any of the other far right-wingers our media calls "moderates" merely because they don't actually drag their knuckles on the ground. How many times must I tell these pimps! A ticket with a centrist Democrat and a right-wing Republican is not a unity ticket -- it leaves out the majority of Americans who want Medicare-for-All health insurance, protection from financial predators, and cleaner air and water. And sacrifices all of that to the altar of "entitlement reform," though our author (an advisor to at least five famous Republican politicians, how about that!) has the sense not to call it that. (Hate to pile on, but Ralph Nader is only from the "lunatic fringe" if you think product safety is the "lunatic fringe," and in no way shape or form was Jerry Brown a "front-runner" for the 1992 Democratic Presidential nomination.)
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