Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Trump’s China Trip Underscores How Power Has Shifted East. Given that Trump explodes at even the most trifling perceived affront—pulling 5,000 American troops out of Germany after Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the U.S. had been “humiliated” in Iran—it was telling that Xi felt empowered to lay down the law from the get-go. Indeed, the most enduring image from the entire visit is the two leaders standing outside the Ming Dynasty Temple of Heaven, with Trump remaining curiously tightlipped as reporters enquired whether they had discussed Taiwan. “China is beautiful,” Trump offered instead. (Time)
• Rich Guy Quote Journalism: How the media turns rich guys’ opinions into news. The answer is that there’s an entire genre of media coverage best described as “rich guy has an opinion.” On the journalistic genre that treats anonymous billionaires as primary sources. A useful media-critique read for the next hedge-fund profile. (String in a Maze) see also Pulitzer-winning newsrooms are quietly publishing mountains of gambling slop: A large network of prominent regional newspapers have posted thousands of low-quality articles promoting gambling and prediction markets. Advance Local, which owns The Oregonian, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Star-Ledger, and several other award-winning newspapers, has quietly published more than 17,000 online articles since 2022 pushing promo codes for sports books, online casinos and, more recently, prediction markets. Judd Legum on serious newsrooms quietly running gambling content farms for affiliate revenue. The journalism cross-subsidy has gotten unsubtle. (Popular Information)
• Polymarket’s Most Contentious Debates Are Being Decided by Anonymous Crypto Votes: The prediction market outsources its disputed resolutions to an anonymous vote of crypto token holders. Some of those voters have financial incentives that could affect their votes. (Barron’s free)
• Wealth is righteously earned and poverty is righteously dispensed: The cult of the just world: To state the obvious to anyone reading this newsletter every single one of these people mentioned – yes even Beyonce and Taylor Swift :( – got their billions the same way any other did: exploiting the labor of workers in a cruel economic system maximized for the few to be able to do just that. The end. A scathing piece on the moral architecture that makes American inequality feel deserved. Calvinism dies hard. (Welcome to Hell World)
• Profiting From Inflated Hospital Prices: This week’s CPI report shows hospital prices continue to race ahead of price increases in other health care sectors. In the past year, so have hospital profits. The supply-side story of health-care inflation. The cost curve has many parents, but the hospital pricing model is doing more work than most. (Washington Monthly)
• ‘The Biggest Student Data Privacy Disaster in History’: Canvas Hack Shows the Danger of Centralized EdTech: Thursday afternoon, millions of students at thousands of universities and K-12 schools were locked out of Canvas, a piece of catch-all education technology software that has become the de facto core of many classes. ShinyHunters, a ransomware group, hacked Canvas’s parent company and apparently stole “billions” of messages and accessed more than 275 million individuals’ data, according to the hacking group. The group also locked students out of Canvas. (404)
• Sinister, Malevolent, Venomous: Stephen Miller Is Like No Other White House Aide in Modern US History: On the Miller portfolio. The headline does the work; the body has the institutional detail to back it up. Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, has never hidden his disfigured and dangerous psyche. But now Donald Trump has empowered him to execute his fascist impulses. (Zeteo)
• The Age of No Innocence: What if all you knew was extremist politics? Welcome to being young in America. An essay on the disappearance of cultural innocence — for kids, for institutions, for ourselves. Heavy lift, worth carrying. This is History 221, The Far Right in America: 1920-2020. For a semester, students immersed themselves in an examination of America’s most ultraconservative political groups and figures, from the Ku Klux Klan, to the John Birch Society, to neo-Nazis, to the far-right creations of the modern political moment, like the Patriot movement and the embrace of Christian nationalism. Welcome to being young in America. (The Western Edge)
• The supreme court’s takedown of American democracy is complete: Austin Sarat with the full arc from Bush v. Gore through the latest term. A useful refresher on how we actually got here. Since the Citizens United decision of 2010, the justices have dismantled Americans’ voices. The only solution is at the ballot box (The Guardian)
• Trump’s Corruption Is Going to Sink Him: On the cumulative corruption headlines as a long-fuse political problem. The base may not care; the persuadable middle increasingly does. Conditions are right for voters to stop turning a blind eye to his greed, grift, and gold leaf. (The Bulwark) see also President Trump’s $TRUMP memecoin is preparing to launch a “Coin Club” membership scheme: Molly White on the latest tier of the Trump memecoin grift. The fact that this requires an SEC division to even parse is itself the joke. The website promises “elite and extraordinary experiences” as part of the newest scheme to revive a token that’s down 97% from its peak and still falling. (Citation Needed)
Video of the day: Tesla Never Stopped Developing The Model S
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Sheila Bair, former Chairperson of FDIC from 2006-11. She helped steer the agency through worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Her new book is aimed at young adults and teenagers, titled “How Not to Lose a Million Dollars.”
The Rich Really Do Pay Lower Taxes Than You
Source: New York Times
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