Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Our constitutional crisis is already here The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:(Washington Post)
• The Failed Game Plan for Overthrowing the 2020 Vote The basis of John Eastman’s memo: Get Pence to lie, then count on the GOP to be Trump trucklers. (The Bulwark)
• An Insider from the Purdue Pharma Bankruptcy Speaks Out A new memoir by a victims’ advocate describes a process that seemed fixed from the start. (New Yorker)
• How Accounting Giants Craft Favorable Tax Rules From Inside Government Lawyers from top accounting firms do brief stints in the Treasury Department, with the expectation of big raises when they return. (New York Times)
• The Pandemic and Climate Crisis Have Shown the Costs of Inaction The past year has laid bare a great many problems that are past due for solutions, including some we already know how to fix. It’s time to stop messing around and do it. (Businessweek)
• China’s war on fun: Like helicopter parents, dictators think it’s dangerous to enjoy life Technologies developed in Silicon Valley have enabled all kinds of fun opportunities for surveillance and repression, and China’s conformity-inducing social credit has blazed a trail that others will follow to one degree or another. (UnHerd)
• The Bottom: The Emergence and Erasure of Black American Urban Landscapes In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood. It stood in the hills above the valley town of Medallion and spread all the way to the river. It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom. (Avery Review)
• Murder Rose by Almost 30% in 2020. It’s Rising at a Slower Rate in 2021. The increase in U.S. murders this summer does not appear to be as large as the record spike last summer. (New York Times)
• Vermont Publishing House Chelsea Green Is Peddling Coronavirus Misinformation “As far as I’m concerned, Chelsea Green’s profit from this book is blood money.” (Seven Days) see also Will ‘Dr. Disinformation’ Ever Face the Music? The Federation of State Medical Boards, the national umbrella organization for the state-based boards, issued a statement making clear that doctors who generate and spread covid misinformation could be subject to disciplinary action, including the suspension or revocation of their licenses (KHN)
• Gabby Petito, Online Detectives, and the Queasy Places Our True-Crime Obsessions Have Taken Us Nothing about how the internet has consumed and shaped news about a missing woman is exactly surprising or new, but taken as a whole, it may represent a grim future. (Vanity Fair)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Hubert Joly, former Chairman Chief Executive Officer of Best Buy, who turned the company around, returning them to profitability and a 10X stock run in the face of competition from Amazon. He has been named a Top 100 CEOs by Harvard Business Review, and 10 CEOs in the U.S. by Glassdoor. He is the author of a new book “The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism.”
Mapping America’s hospitalization and vaccination divide
Source: Washington Post
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