Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• 20 days of fantasy and failure: Inside Trump’s quest to overturn the election: The result was an election aftermath without precedent in U.S. history. With his denial of the outcome, despite a string of courtroom defeats, Trump endangered America’s democracy, threatened to undermine national security and public health, and duped millions of his supporters into believing, perhaps permanently, that Biden was elected illegitimately. (Washington Post)
• How Misinformation ‘Superspreaders’ Seed False Election Theories Researchers have found that a small group of social media accounts are responsible for the spread of a disproportionate amount of the false posts about voter fraud. (New York Times) see also How fake news aimed at Latinos thrives on social media Democrats are paying attention after a surprising number of Latino voters in swing states supported Trump. (Vox)
• Their Patients Have COVID-19 and Still Think It’s a Hoax Nurses treating coronavirus skeptics are being spit on and harassed. Many want to quit. (The Cut)
• Remember Negative Oil Future Prices? U.S. Futures Watchdog Won’t Assign Blame for the Oil Price Crash. Market Watchers Say That’s a Big Problem. After more than 7 months of investigating the oil price collapse of April 20, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission released an interim report outlining the day’s events, but would not provide any definitive reasons for the price plunge, nor any recommendations as to how to prevent a future oil price crash. The regulator’s lack of conclusions raises the specter of credibility problems and an oil trading “Wild West.” (Institutional Investor)
• A growing number of Americans are going hungry 26 million now say they don’t have enough to eat, as the pandemic worsens and holidays near (Washington Post)
• Walmart and McDonald’s have the most workers on food stamps and Medicaid A sizable number of the recipients of federal aid programs such as Medicaid and food stamps are employed by some of the biggest and more profitable companies in the United States, chief among them Walmart and McDonald’s. The Government Accountability Office undertook the study to answer questions about the relationship between employers and the federal assistance programs. (Washington Post)
• Georgia secretary of state: My family voted for Trump. He threw us under the bus anyway. I have fought to uphold the integrity of elections in Georgia. It doesn’t matter if the attacks come from the guy I voted for or not. (USA Today)
• Republicans Rewrite an Old Playbook on Disenfranchising Black Americans As they try to somehow reverse Joe Biden’s victory, President Trump and his allies have targeted heavily Black cities, painting them as corrupt and trying to throw out huge numbers of votes. (New York Times)
• America Needs to Prosecute Its Presidents Pardoning Trump, like Nixon before him, would be a disaster. The healing myth has become part of a bipartisan catechism even though its central premise—that the pardon healed the country—is unsupportable. In the long run, “the Nixon pardon has had terrible ramifications.” It set the stage for later pardons related to executive self-interest, including George H.W. Bush’s pardons of many figures involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. (Foreign Policy)
• The Strange Last Days of Steve Bing: What led to the movie mogul’s suicide? For the first time, his closest friends reveal the dark drama behind a real life film noir and how the heir to a $600 million fortune ended up nearly broke. (Town & Country)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Greg Fleming, founding CEO of Rockefeller Capital Management based on the prior Rockefeller Family Office. They have about $43 billion in AUM. Previously, Fleming was President of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management and served as Chief Operating Officer of Merrill Lynch, where he ran Merrill’s Global Investment Banking business.
Here’s how international travel has suffered during the pandemic
Source: World Economic Forum
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