Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• How the IRS Was Gutted: An eight-year campaign to slash the agency’s budget has left it understaffed, hamstrung and operating with archaic equipment. The result: billions less to fund the government. That’s good news for corporations and the wealthy. (ProPublica)
• The New Era of Political Violence Is Here: The danger is not organized civil war but individual Americans with deep resentments and delusions. (The Atlantic) see also As Right-Wing Rhetoric Escalates, So Do Threats and Violence: Both threats of political violence and actual attacks have become a steady reality of American life. Experts blame dehumanizing and apocalyptic language. (New York Times)
• Everyone is thrilled that Medicare can finally negotiate drug prices. Prepare to be disappointed: The provision allowing Medicare to directly negotiate drug prices looks powerful on the surface. But the negotiation provision as enacted won’t have that effect, at least in the near term. It’s pockmarked with loopholes that save the pharmaceutical industry from its most severe potential effects. Among other flaws, which we’ll get to in a moment, negotiated price changes won’t start to take effect until 2026, and then only for 10 drugs, selected from among 100 accounting for the highest spending by Medicare, and only after they’ve been on the market for many years. (Los Angeles Times)
• Banana Ships And The Hidden Fees Of Ship Cargo: A cadre of ocean carriers are charging exorbitant, potentially illegal, fees on shipping containers stuck because of congestion at ports. Sellers of furniture, coconut water, even kids’ potties say the fees are inflating costs. (gCaptain)
• Closing Down the Billionaire Factory The private equity industry has been running America for four decades. This is how the ‘billionaire factory’ emerged, and why the public has had enough. (Matt Stoller)
• How a Former Transcendental Meditation Devotee Ended Up Funding America’s Wildest Right-Wing Spy Op: The saga of Gore-Tex heir Susan Gore is a parable of the dark turn the Republican Party has taken. (Mother Jones)
• Hundreds of kids witness parents shot to death. This is what it does to them: No one knows how many children in America witness their parents being shot to death. Like almost every aspect of the gun violence epidemic, its effects on child witnesses are seldom researched.. (Washington Post)
• No one has been held accountable for the catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal: Who’s to blame for Afghanistan’s tragedy? Everyone. (Vox) see also A Terrible Year: It’s been one year since the fall of Afghanistan. Our Afghan allies—the ones lucky enough to be alive—are still suffering. (The Bulwark)
• Left to rot: The lonely plight of long Covid sufferers: Some studies suggest long Covid could affect as much as 30 percent of people who are infected (Politico)
• Election deniers march toward power in key 2024 battlegrounds GOP nominees who dispute the 2020 results could be positioned to play a critical role in the next presidential election. (Washington Post)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Bill Browder, founder of Hermitage Capital Management, and author of Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice and Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath.
States With Abortion Bans Are Among Least Supportive for Mothers and Children
Source: New York Times
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