Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• How Joe Manchin Aided Coal, and Earned Millions: At every step of his political career, Joe Manchin helped a West Virginia power plant that is the sole customer of his private coal business. Along the way, he blocked ambitious climate action. (New York Times).
• U.S. global Covid work will ‘grind to a halt’ without more cash With a more than $4 billion request stalled in Congress, USAID officials are now forced to plan for the possibility that their funding will run dry in the next few months. (Politico) see also Ending a pandemic costs money. Congress isn’t willing to pay. The U.S. risks rolling back years of progress on testing, drugs, vaccines and more. (Grid)
• Donald Trump, John Eastman, and the Silence of the Justice Department. It is no exaggeration to say that the history of the United States has never seen an account of a president’s conduct quite so devastating as the first nine pages of Judge David Carter’s opinion of March 28 in Eastman v. Thompson. The opinion, legally speaking, concerns the Jan. 6 Committee’s efforts to secure emails from John Eastman, the law professor who provided President Trump with advice aimed at overturning the 2020 election. But that is not why it will be remembered. (Lawfare)
• The U.S. Still Doesn’t Know How To Track A Pandemic For two years we’ve tried to make sense of COVID-19 trends with metrics that were fundamentally impaired by our chronically decentralized and underfunded public health system. If the country doesn’t want to repeat its mistakes, it will have to take radically different actions the next time a health crisis hits. (FiveThirtyEight)
• Why the School Wars Still Rage: From evolution to anti-racism, parents and progressives have clashed for a century over who gets to tell our origin stories. (New Yorker) see also How a lawsuit over a teen spurred Florida Republicans to pass the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law Florida GOP lawmakers frequently cited the Littlejohns’ lawsuit as they debated the bill during the recent legislative session. (Politico)
• 40 Years of the Reagan Revolution’s Libertarian Experiment Have Brought Us Crisis & Chaos “Please name one country, anywhere in the world, any time in the last 7000 years, where libertarianism has succeeded and produced general peace and prosperity?” (Hartmann Report)
• Local health officials report threats, vandalism and harassment during the pandemic Local health officials handling the day-to-day response to the coronavirus crisis have faced hostility like never before, according to a new study of 1,499 episodes of harassment during the first year of the pandemic. Of 583 local health departments surveyed by Johns Hopkins University researchers, 57 percent reported episodes of staff being targeted with personal threats, doxing, vandalism and other forms of harassment from 2020 to 2021. (Washington Post)
• Killing Wolves to Own the Libs? The predators were reintroduced to the state in the nineties—and have been the object of political controversy ever since. An aggressive new law allows people to hunt or trap as many as they can. (New Yorker)
• A Report Card on Race: How Far We’ve Come, How Far We Have to Go Measuring progress on matters big and small in the nearly two years since the murder of George Floyd. (Businessweek) see also A year after the Atlanta shootings, Asian women live in fear: ‘How are we all going to stay safe?’ Last year, attacks against Asian Americans soared, and one-third of the community reported fearing threats, physical attacks and violence, according to the Pew Research Center. Since the start of the pandemic, horrific attacks against Asian elders, as well as Asian-owned businesses, have been reported throughout the country. (Washington Post)
• The Case That Killed #MeToo in Sweden Sweden is not a smaller, colder America with better child care. It is a different society entirely. (New York Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Bill Gross PIMCO co-founder who managed the Total Return Fund, which at $293B was the world’s largest mutual fund. Gross advised Treasury on the role of subprime mortgage bonds, and was named Morningstar’s Fund Manager of Decade in 2010.
Minerals critical to U.S. national security are overwhelmingly imported
Source: Cowen & Co via Bruce Mehlman
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