Category: 9. Corporate Power is Protected

  • Very Simple Puzzle Pieces

    “There’s something a lot more sinister in this trend. It goes something like this: It’s too expensive to hire Americans locally to do grunt work, because they’re all too proud, and want to improve their lot, so they all get college degrees. And, hiring people with college degrees still comes at a premium. We can […]

  • Hedge Funds Prep the Farmland Bubble

    “Three years later, the purchase of farmland both in America and abroad by outside investors has increased-so much so that in February, Thomas Hoenig, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, warned against the violent possibilities of a farmland bubble, telling the Senate Agriculture Committee that “distortions in financial markets” will catch […]

  • At a Guess

    “At a guess, it will make a subset of random minutiae of everyday life more like Facebook while we continue to change the climate, burn up all our energy without developing any sort of sustainable replacement, turn dwindling supplies of rare earth metals into bullshit lifestyle gadgets that basically serve only to functionally make people […]

  • David Brooks is an Elitist Asshole

    “Here’s the crux of what makes their system so admirable in [David Brooks’s] eyes: ‘Britain is also blessed with a functioning political culture. It is dominated by people who live in London and who have often known each other since prep school. This makes it gossipy and often incestuous. But the plusses outweigh the minuses.’ […]

  • Feudal System 2.0

    “America is the one place in the western world where, if you profess to liking leisure time, travelling, working-to-live instead of the other way around, you eventually get branded as a lazy do-nothing and, consequently, rarely build up enough years of service at one place to get more than two weeks per year of paid […]

  • Justice Scalia and the Little Black Box

    “I’ve always wanted someone to run a black box experiment with all the SCOTUS justices. Here’s how it would work. Take any case, X. Break it down along ideological grounds… an opinion/ruling … favored a corporation over the consumer or the other way around; or expanded/upheld/restricted civil rights; expanded/restricted government power vs citizen rights, labor vs […]

  • How Roger Ailes Failed at Setting Up a Strong Republican Candidate for 2012

    ‘”[Fox News’s Roger] Ailes is the most successful executive in television by a wide margin, and he has been so for more than a decade. He is also, in a sense, the head of the Republican Party, having employed five prospective presidential candidates and done perhaps more than anyone to alter the balance of power […]

  • Roseanne Barr on the Lack of Change in the TV Industry

    “The line was a ridiculously sexist interpretation of what a feminist thinks—something to the effect of “You’re my equal in bed, but that’s it.” … Matt, who was watching from his office, yelled over the loudspeaker, “Say the line as written!” I said, “No, I don’t like the line. I find it repulsive, and my […]

  • Private Insurance is a Defective Product

    “Private insurance is a defective product. … Even middle-class families with supposedly good coverage are just one serious illness away from financial ruin. My colleagues and I recently found that medical bills and illness contribute to 62 percent of all personal bankruptcies — a 50 percent increase since 2001. Strikingly, three-quarters of the medically bankrupt had […]

  • Making the Rich Look Poor

    “Democrats have been arguing that their tax increases should solely affect income over $250,00 a year. The Journal makes that pot of income appear small by divvying it up into seven different lines [on the left]. See, the $100,000-$200,000 line is tall, and all the other lines to the right of it are short. That […]