Hey, folks: guess which other industry is totally hamstrung by monopoly power? Yes, that’s right, the defense industry, where five-count-’em-five corporations control just about everything, and all they care about is goosing up their stock prices, since, you know, nobody can actually compete with them anymore. And these corporations indulge more and more in stock buybacks and less and less in, you know, research and development. Plus they take taxpayer money to invest, so we should take any complaint they make about how “volatile” the market is for their work with a pound of salt. Plus they whine a lot, just like you'd expect from rich folks and CEOs.
Bad news, everyone: in bailing out the Silicon Valley Bank, our government has elected not to honor SVB’s commitments to help finance affordable housing in the Bay Area. We all agitated for the opposite, but I guess I shouldn’t have expected so much from the same folks who hurriedly called SVB a “systemically important bank” when it was bailout time, after assuring us SVB was not systemically important when that might have prevented SVB from taking over another bank. But don't worry: the Fed that caused all this to happen will investigate it and get to the bottom of it! Meanwhile, good San Franciscans soon won’t even be able to afford the Tenderloin.
Because we need it, Marjorie Cohn at TruthOut reminds us that the two Tennessee legislators expelled for joining a peaceful anti-gun protest aren’t the first legislators to get tossed out for their activism. The three legislators she discusses – 18th century British MP John Wilkes, former House Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, and Georgia state Rep. Julian Bond – all had the last laugh, though I doubt today’s reactionary Supreme Court would have ruled in favor of the last two. To think that Tennessee’s House Speaker actually compared what Messrs. Jones, Pearson, and Johnson did to the attempted coup of January 6. Justice demands that he loses his next election to a shrub.
When I hear that Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is asking applicants to state boards and commissions to name the accomplishment of hers that they admire most, I find myself wondering where she learned to do that! I kid, of course – she learned it from her Personal Lord and Savior, who once infamously had his Cabinet members go around the table and compliment him on something he’d done. Even a room full of Republicans hated that idea, though they probably only hated it because it happened to them – which I’d usually consider the beginning of wisdom, except that Republicans seem to go out of their way to avoid wisdom.
Finally, not only did Justice Thomas get free vacations from his “friend” Harlan Crow without disclosing it, in 2014 Mr. Crow also bought a single-story home and two vacant lots which Justice Thomas owned at least a third of and he didn’t disclose that, either. Republicans hounded Abe Fortas off our Supreme Court in 1968 over less. And if Mr. Crow really bought the place so he could make a little Justice Thomas museum, I would think there are other ways to do that beside putting six figures in Mr. Thomas’s bank account. (In case you were wondering, we have long had evidence that Mr. Crow’s groups have been getting a lot of sympathy from Justice Thomas on our Court.)
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