Wells Fargo isn't the only corporation overstating the good it plans to do its workers with its brand new corporate tax cut: AT&T announces it'll give out $200 million in bonuses to its workers -- then announces it's laying off about 1,000 of them. Those bonuses, of course, amount to $1,000 per worker, which is nice, unless you now have no job. And note well that AT&T made about $13 billion in profits in 2016, and is on pace to exceed that in 2017; if their 2017 performance merely duplicated their 2016 performance, they stand to get a $1.8 billion-plus tax cut, so that one-time bonus of $200 million doesn't look so big now.
Trump Administration eases fines against nursing homes that abuse their residents. I've said it before and I'll say it again: President Trump cares only about other bosses like himself, and if you're not a boss, you're shit to him. And if you listen to these nursing home executives talk about "relief" from being punished for their wrongdoing, you'll think the biggest whiners in America aren't working families, but CEOs. (Hopefully, though, you already think that.)
Speaking of Mr. Trump's implacable hostility to regulations that actually help the American people, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has proposed rolling back offshore drilling safety regulations enacted after the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Which was just seven years ago, which I doubt the residents of the Gulf have forgotten already. What can one say to this act of brazen greed? Only this: when I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.
Another day, another life-saving drug whose price has gone up astronomically over the last few years. This time we learn that lomustine, used to attack brain cancer and lymphoma, has gone from $50 a pill to $768 a pill since Bristol Myers Squibb sold it to NextSource in 2013. NextSource's CEO says his corporation bases prices "on the costs it incurred in developing the medication and the benefits it provides patients," which prompts two responses: a) what costs did you incur, exactly, in "developing" a 40-year-old drug and b) what "benefits" did you add over the last four years that justify a 1400 percent price hike?
Finally, Miranda S. Spivack at Reveal News discusses how "Trump Vowed to Fix U.S. Infrastructure, But His Budget Stiffs Small Towns." Generally, you can't grandstand about America's failing infrastructure and then try to zero out the Community Development Block Grant program, clean water programs at the EPA and the USDA, and discretionary Department of Transportation funds. Of course, Mr. Trump's vision for infrastructure spending isn't for small towns -- as Michael Hudson has instructed us, it's "developer welfare." Again: only other bosses matter to Donald Trump; you and I don't.