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Silicon Valley Wants A Bailout
Americans for Financial Reform states: “The swift demise of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank and the actions taken by the federal regulators over the weekend underscore the folly of the partial rollback of the Dodd-Frank law in 2018
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Collapse of SVB: Single Payer Healthcare — For the Financial System Only
After 2008 the financial system was supposed to be fixed thanks to Dodd-Frank, stress tests, higher capital requirements, etc. Suddenly we wake up to discover that the collapse of a single bank mortally threatens the whole financial system and that authorities are reinstating single payer healthcare for the financial system (only).
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China Brokers Normalization Between Iran and Saudi Arabia
Saudi-Iran tensions have had many ups and downs in the past 40 years, but this is the first time they have agreed to lower the temperature through Chinese mediation. By not taking sides, China has emerged as a player that can resolve disputes rather than merely sell weapons.
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“The Partisan Pandemic Cottage Industry”
In a new piece for PESTE magazine, public-health researcher Abby Cartus critiques the mainstream narrative of pandemic response in the U.S., which contends that the reason the country’s pandemic response was so badly botched is the country’s deep partisan polarization.
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20 Years Later: “The Most Important Leak” That Almost Stopped the Iraq Invasion
Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed the Pentagon Papers, would comment: “No one else — including myself — has ever done what Katharine Gun did: Tell secret truths at personal risk, before an imminent war, in time, possibly, to avert it. Hers was the most important — and courageous — leak I’ve ever seen, more timely and potentially more effective than the Pentagon Papers.”
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Matt Gaetz, Progressive Caucus Team Up to Oppose Syria Occupation
“Ryan Grim of the Intercept reports in: “Matt Gaetz, Progressive Caucus, and Former Obama Ambassador Team Up to Oppose Syria Occupation” that: “The Obama administration’s ambassador to Syria [Robert Ford], a leading voice in favor of aggressively confronting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at the time, is now backing an effort by Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to force U.S. withdrawal from the country within 180 days.”
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Public Investments in the mRNA Vaccines
The U.S. government invested at least $31.9 billion to develop, produce and purchase mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. “Since the U.S. people and government made the investments and took on the risks that were needed to produce the vaccines,” said Shawn Fremstad of CEPR, “we also need to be the ones to direct how the value we created is used.”
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Amazon HQ2 Doesn’t Deliver Jobs: A Lesson on Corporate Subsidies
“Amazon’s HQ2 slowdown is the latest evidence that incentives do not enable a company to defy gravity. At least the State of Virginia’s subsidies — probably the smallest offered among the HQ2 finalists — are performance-based, so the State is not going to pay unless the jobs materialize. Residents of Long Island City in Queens are once again validated: they rejected what could have been massive displacement and then job disappointment.”
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Medicare and Drug Prices
Recent analysis in the Journal of Managed Care and Specialty Pharmacy predicts that Medicare will most likely negotiate prices for 38 Medicare Part D drugs and two Part B drugs between 2026 and 2028.
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Voters Rejecting Biden While DNC Rigs Process
“Joe Biden’s presidency has been an abject failure. This is certainly the impression one gets from looking at the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll results, which find that ‘more than 6 in 10 Americans (62 percent) say they would be “dissatisfied” or “angry” if Biden were reelected in 2024.’ Just seven percent of voters say they are ‘enthusiastic’ about Biden (one wonders who the seven percent are). Perhaps most astonishingly, the overwhelming majority of Democrats want to get rid of Biden.”
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“With a tiny staff, it has managed to place on the air and in newspapers, points of view otherwise excluded from the national debate.”
Howard Zinn