“If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I would spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.”
Abraham Lincoln
“Some of the most corrupt people that you will meet in life are working
in corporate government law enforcement. They make criminals look like
amateurs.”
―
Suck It, Wall Street Matt Taibbi
Angry Hedge Fund Billionaire Is Mad at GameStop Redditors for “Attacking Wealthy People” Vanity Fair (furzy). Leon Cooperman has long been the poster child billionaire giving billionaires a bad name (as if that’s hard to do).
This is simultaneously revealing and silly. All the day-trader-y types despise Robinhood, so it’s not as if a good or bad Google rating will make any difference. But this does confirm a pet theory of a friend, that “reputation defender” firms have some sort of pay to play relationship with Google that has managed to stay secret
Could Amsterdam’s Radical Effort To Transform Itself Leave Capitalism Behind?
In April 2020, during the first wave of COVID-19, Amsterdam’s city government announced it would recover from the crisis, and avoid future ones, by embracing the theory of “doughnut economics.” – Time
Democracy cannot be defended by force; it is enforced through accountability
The Center for Systemic Peace: “The USA has dropped below the “democracy threshold” (+6) on the POLITY scale in 2020 and and is now considered an anocracy (+5). It has also lost its designation as the world’s oldest, continuous democracy; that designation now belongs to Switzerland (171 years), followed by New Zealand (142) and the United Kingdom (139).
Further degradation of democratic authority in the USA will trigger an Adverse Regime Change event. Users of the Polity data series should be aware that Polity measures patterns of authority demonstrated and observed in political behaviors involving interaction events between and within state and non-state entities. Polity measures political practices rather than proclamations. In 2016, CSP changed the coding for Political Competition in the USA to Factional (or polarized) Competition; this coding change dropped the USA’s POLITY score to +8.
According to the PITF Global Model, this change to “factional competition” placed the USA at high risk of impending political instability (i.e., adverse regime change and/or onset of political violence). In 2019, CSP changed the USA code for Executive Constraints from 7 to 6 due to the executive’s systematic rejection of congressional oversight; dropping its POLITY score to +7 and resetting its DURABLE score to “0”. In 2020, the coding for Executive Constraints will fall another point or two due to the executive’s systematic purge of “disloyalists” from the administration, forceful response to protest, villification of the main opposition parties; and undermining public trust in the electoral process, reducing the USA POLITY score in 2020 to +5 (anocracy).”
Millennials are not only buying homes, they’re buying multimillion-dollar ‘starter’ homes — and it defies 2 common myths about the generation at once Business Insider
Older Workers Accounted for All Net Employment Growth in Past 20 Years St. Louis
DEEP THROAT HAS LEFT THE PARKING GARAGE: RIP Hal Holbrook, famed Mark Twain and Deep Throat actor, dead at 95.
All the President’s Men is a great movie, but it is a movie, not a history lesson:
● Mark Steyn’s article on Mark Felt, the real “Deep Throat.”
● “‘Deep Throat’ never advised [Bob] Woodward to ‘follow the money.’”
● Woodward’s latest Trump book prompts myth-telling about Watergate. “‘[T]o explain Watergate through the lens of the heroic journalist,’ I wrote, ‘is to abridge and misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth’ — one that even Woodward has disputed. He told an interviewer in 2004: ‘To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.’”
● “The sale of the Woodward-Bernstein papers to the University of Texas in 2003, and the 2005 death of Mark Felt, the former FBI official whom Woodward has identified as Deep Throat, have led researchers to ever larger doubts about the accuracy of Woodward’s reporting on Watergate, and particularly his account of his relationship with his much-heralded, and often inaccurate, Watergate source.”
Tax justice has come a very long way as its co-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has reported today that: Three Norwegian lawmakers have nominated the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the Global Alliance
Read the full article…