In more ordinary times we'd be pleased as punch to find Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) producing a policy paper excoriating corporations for their short-term obsession with shareholder value at the expense of research, development, and "long-term corporate capabilities," but these are not more ordinary times, and this is Marco Rubio we're talking about here, so not only is he short on actual solutions that might ameliorate the problem, he of course won't admit that public investment has ameliorated the problem fairly decisively in the past. Should I give him credit for slamming "outsourcing investment decisions to financial markets" as any good anti-bankster would? Nah -- not when the only alternative he'll entertain is corporations making all the important decisions, when corporations making all the important decisions is how we got here in the first place.
It may be premature to announce, as Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has done, that "the days of insulin price-gouging are over" in Colorado with the passage of a bill capping out-of-pocket insulin costs at $100 a month, but $100/month is a lot more manageable than $600 to $900 a month, which is the kind of thing that leads diabetics to ration their insulin, a strategy that might not be significantly safer than Russian roulette. So if insulin-producing corporations demand more money from health insurance corporations to make up the shortfall, will those health insurance corporations then pass that cost on to their customers? If they want to be even more popular, perhaps!
I don't think it's good news that our President might not really "mean it" when he calls the media "the enemy of the people," since his votaries, who live vicariously through their President's tantrums, do mean it. I also don't think that we should feel very sorry for media outlets like CNN, which has never really had an adversarial relationship with the Our Glorious Elites, no matter how much acting out they might do. If they really wanted to cultivate an adversarial relationship with our President, they'd go after, say, his attempts to gut clean air and clean water regulations, rather than the drama he creates to distract us.
Regarding that video manipulated to make Rep. Pelosi sound "drunk": I guess it's good that our "liberal" media did a better job debunking it than they did with all those more obviously-manipulated videos coming out of Project Veritas in 2009 and 2010, and I guess it's good that you might need someone to "interpret" the altered audio for you ("she sounds drunk, get it?"), but I fear it won't be long before more radical alterations of video become more common and less detectable. Still, if Ms. Pelosi were less of a corporatist and more of a populist, the release of an obviously-altered video aiming to make her look bad wouldn't have made a difference. I mean, this President is a fake populist, and that seems to insulate him from actual facts that actually make him look bad.
Finally, at the risk of seeming very late to the party, I enjoyed the Game of Thrones finale more than most folks seemed to do. And more than I expected to: the finale overcame, as well as could be done, the fatal flaw of the show's final season -- namely, that it frogmarched Dany into madness rather than (at least!) letting her go mad at her speed. We can all easily tabulate other wrong notes (Tyrion's nomination of Bran for King, for example, had at least one Hallmark card moment), but the thing I'll always remember about the finale is a group of survivors coming to grips with their complicity in creating the decadent society that almost destroyed them and everyone they knew and loved. I was even surprised to consider that all those pornographic scenes from the show's early years might have had an actual narrative purpose! Given Bronn's eagerness to spend state money rebuilding the brothels that made the show infamous, I don't know how it'll turn out for Westeros. But I hope we do at least as well when the most decadent human being ever to hold high office in Amerca -- a man whose continued presence in that office indicts us all -- goes before the voters next year.
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