Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• The Meadows Texts: A Plot To Overturn An American Election: TPM Has Obtained Explosive Evidence Uncovered By The January 6 Select Committee. (Talking Points Memo)
• What Sam Bankman-Fried Got for His Baffling Media Blitz: The disgraced FTX founder didn’t help his case, and he probably made it worse. (Slate)
• The High Price of Bad Business: Corporate America’s Biggest Settlements: BP’s Deepwater Horizon to Bernie Madoff, these are some of the biggest payouts for everything from tax violations to insider trading.. (Businessweek)
• The Untold Story of the Insular Texas Family That Invaded the U.S. Capitol: The Munns became a national curiosity after five of them were indicted for participating in the insurrection. But the full scope of their malignant behavior is little known—including to the federal prosecutors tasked with investigating their crimes. (Texas Monthly)
• The 80-year-old book that explains Elon Musk and tech’s new right-wing tilt: The long shadow of James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution. (Vox) see also Elon Musk Is Turning Twitter Into a Haven for Nazis: Musk has welcomed neo-Nazis back onto the platform, engaged with them on his timeline, and posted multiple tweets that appeal directly to them. (Vice)
• How a Sprawling Hospital Chain Ignited Its Own Staffing Crisis: Ascension, one of the country’s largest health systems, spent years cutting jobs, leaving it flat-footed when the pandemic hit. (New York Times)
• How to ban 3600 books from school libraries: This year, at least 102 books have been removed from the shelves of school libraries in Clay County, Florida. Many of these books were pulled at the request of one man: Bruce Friedman. A conservative activist and longtime resident of New York, Friedman moved to Clay County this May. (Popular Information)
• The Corruption of Supreme Court Conservatives: The Court’s falling approval is worsened by conservative Justices’ blatant partisanship. Many of its decisions are untethered from any form of recognizable jurisprudence, and the contempt of conservative Justices for precedent is incomprehensible. The collapse of public approval for the Court – dismissed in arrogance by people like Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito – has nothing to do with disagreeing with “objective” decisions. Rather, it is a wide recognition that justices like Alito and Clarence Thomas consider themselves no different than lifetime senators, and don’t even bother to hide it. (The Threats Within)
• The real life consequences of vaccine conspiracists demanding unvaccinated blood: The anti-vaccinated blood trend “is taking the anti-vax hysteria to yet another absurd level” says one expert. (Grid) see also Why Republicans are so intent on rolling back the military’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate: It’s the GOP’s latest attempt to undo such policies. (Vox)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Robert Koengisberger, founder and CIO of Gramercy Funds Management, which manages $5.2 billion in distressed Emerging Markets Debt. Gramercy’s chairman is (previous MiB guest) Mohamed A. El-Erian; the firm is a sponsor of the Greenwich Economic Forum.
The 2020s Are the World’s Most Depressed, Stressed Decade…Ever
Source: Eudaimonia
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