Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• The City of London Is Hiding the World’s Stolen Money If there is one country at the system’s heart, it is Britain. Taken together with its partly controlled territories overseas, Britain is instrumental in the worldwide concealment of cash and assets. It is, as a member of the ruling Conservative Party said last week, “the money laundering capital of the world.” And the City of London, its gilded financial center, is at the system’s core. (New York Times)
• Donald Trump Built a National Debt So Big (Even Before the Pandemic) That It’ll Weigh Down the Economy for Years The “King of Debt” promised to reduce the national debt — then his tax cuts made it surge. Add in the pandemic, and he oversaw the third-biggest deficit increase of any president. (ProPublica)
• A Drug Addiction Risk Algorithm and Its Grim Toll on Chronic Pain Sufferers: The Pain Was Unbearable. So Why Did Doctors Turn Her Away? A sweeping drug addiction risk algorithm has become central to how the US handles the opioid crisis. It may only be making the crisis worse. (Wired)
• Homeopathy Doesn’t Work. So Why Do So Many Germans Believe in It? How Natalie Grams, who once abandoned her medical education to study alternative therapies, became Germany’s most prominent homeopathy skeptic. (Businessweek)
• How AT&T helped build far-right One America News As it lauded former President Donald Trump and spread his unfounded claims of election fraud, One America News Network saw its viewership jump. Reuters has uncovered how America’s telecom giant nurtured the news channel now at the center of a bitter national divide over politics and truth. (Reuters)
• A True Story About Bogus Photos of People Making Fake News A photographer set out to capture the misinformation producers in a small town in Macedonia. He wound up revealing uncomfortable truths about his own profession. (Wired)
• Original Sins: In the ’90s, Gavin McInnes played punk rock and helped create Vice magazine. Five years ago, he founded a very different organization: the Proud Boys, the far-right group that came to personify the vilest tendencies of Trump’s America. An interview with one of our era’s most troubling extremists (Vanity Fair)
• “Hacker X”—the American who built a pro-Trump fake news empire—unmasks himself He was hired to build a fake news op but now wants to put things right. (Arstechnica) see also Man who helped ignite George Floyd riots identified as white supremacist: Police The suspect wore a mask and carried an umbrella, police said. (ABC News)
• Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist. Almost Nothing Happened to the Adults in Charge. Judge Donna Scott Davenport oversees a juvenile justice system in Rutherford County, Tennessee, with a staggering history of jailing children. She said kids must face consequences, which rarely seem to apply to her or the other adults in charge. (ProPublica)
• New Bond Can’t Take On Beijing’s Supervillains A whole genre of geopolitical spy thrillers is now off limits. (Foreign Policy)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Soraya Darabi, co-founder and general partner of TMV. The firm has funded a broad cross-section of startups, 65% of which are led by women or people of color. Less than 5 years old, TMV has already had 10 exits.
The slippery slope of the GOP’s anti-vaccine-mandate push
Source: Washington Post
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