Good news: our Supreme Court rules that our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding mechanism is-so Constitutional, with Justice Thomas (is this an election year?) writing the majority opinion, ruling that our CFPB’s funding mechanism – our Federal Reserve system not only funds it, but determines funding levels – has ample precedent in American history. Not least because Congress delegated this authority via legislation, I would think. Naturally Justice Alito, he of the upside-down flag flying in front of his house just after the January 6 insurrection, called our CFPB’s funding mechanism “unprecedented” in his dissent.
More good news! The Biden Administration has proposed reclassifying marijuana from Schedule I – reserved for the most dangerous drugs with the least medicinal utility – to Schedule III. Thus pot would still be illegal at the federal level, but the crippling restrictions on medicinal research would no longer apply, and the tax burden on marijuana businesses would also fall. You should know that the organization Smart Approaches to Marijuana – from whence came the article’s content-free argument against the proposal – opposes both legalization and research, which I would think rather reduces the number of “smart approaches” available to them.
I find good news even in this bad news: unionization effort at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Tennessee fails by a fairly sizable margin, after Mercedes indulges in the kind of relentless anti-union propagandizing that the PRO Act would restrict if Congress would pass it. But Mercedes also made sizable concessions to workers, including ending a two-tiered wage system, making temp workers permanent, and starting a new bonus system, although I wouldn’t blame you for seeing that $700 “performance bonus” they handed out last month as a bribe (and one that works too often on good Americans trying to scrape through another week). But if a corporation treats its workers better out of fear of unions, then unions are still doing their job. And the only thing that’ll keep things moving forward at Mercedes is the continued threat of unionization.
When I hear that a Georgia state law taking effect this July could actually make that state’s voter challenge process even worse than it already is – keep in mind that a mere six professional right-wingers have challenged 90,000 voter registrations in Georgia – I start to think that this stupidity won’t end until liberals start challenging right-wing voter registrations the way right-wingers challenge Black and Brown voter registrations. We wouldn’t have to challenge 90,000 of them, either, before they cry uncle. And then the professional centrists will clutch their pearls about how uncivil liberals are, but it won’t matter, because we will finally have justice.
Uh oh: a Spectrum News report alleges that “millions” of good Texans’ tax dollars got diverted to an out-of-state charter school network founded by Houston’s Independent School District Superintendent, and perhaps not coincidentally, his corporation’s Colorado schools are all struggling, one of them closing down with $5 billion in outstanding bond debt. And yet he apparently gets to Hoover up Texas taxpayer money; nice work if you can get it! I know a lot of folks who fall for the promise of charter schools because their public schools are so awful, but we should make our public schools better, not divert public school funding to someone’s crony private schools that could be even worse.
Finally, continuing with our “nice work if you can get it!” theme, Robert Reich reminds us that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav somehow made almost $50 million last year despite his corporation losing $3 billion and his stock prices being a third of what they were two years ago. So he’s failing even by the yardsticks he would prefer you use to measure his performance! Measure him by, for example, CNN’s commitment to actual journalism (Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN, an arrangement that by the way should not exist) and he’d come off far worse. And luckily Fran Drescher’s there to remind us that his corporation cries poor when it’s time to pay their workers, but not when it’s time to pay the boss. A mere 50.8% of shareholders approved his pay package; one does wonder how management twisted the arms of that last 0.9%.
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