Yes, and those exploitative labor relationships so popular in the South serve to reproduce an embedded social structure that favors the usual suspects. Pic stolen from an excellent piece in the NYT yesterday from Jamelle Bouie.

Such a great development. We can talk all we want, but votes like this one are where the rubber actually hits the road in terms of shifting power from capital to labor.

This inevitably happens in states and in industries with low or no union participation. Reason number 1,000 why workers have to stick together. Unionize … and strike.

There is room for a lot of good faith debate here, but FWIW I reckon It is a mistake for the left to prematurely roll over and telegraph an inevitable Biden vote (whether on this or any other issue) just because Trump would be worse. The time for that utilitarian calculus is much closer to November. Right now, if you want policy change — you have to raise hell.

As much as you love to hate ‘em, this is what the Tea Party and their ideological successors got right about wielding power within their own party. When the time comes, by all means circle the wagons and vote pragmatically, but during primary season you have to come across as a credible threat to the party power structure.

I’ll personally be willing to (attempt!) to shame my progressive friends into voting blue, say, around October. In the meantime, I am proud of folks for speaking their mind and standing up for human rights.

They know exactly what they are doing.

This is wild. Mine would be raising a racket at 3am playing in the tubes. Is it relatively quiet?

Add the Carroll verdict and we are North of $440 million in about 3 weeks.

Edit: Also need to calculate statutory interest on top of this. Appeal bond is going to be brutal.

Rolling Stone following a rich tradition started by the late, great Hunter Thompson. His obit for Nixon is an absolute classic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/

Our distinguished House Speaker voted against expulsion.

This is frightening stuff. I feel like it should be at the top of every newscast, every conversation, but somehow we seem to be sleepwalking into the end of democracy. A “nah, can’t happen here” attitude, coupled with Trump fatigue, social media distractions, struggling to make ends meet, and good old fashioned apathy, are going to get people killed.

Too early to tell for sure, but Georgia is starting to look grim for Trump, Inc. The state RICO statute by its nature lends itself to rolling up these “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” type conspiracies that are hard to prove individually but taken together show a coordinated pattern of conduct. With every co-conspirator who rolls over and takes a plea deal in return for testimony, it gets easier to prove, and more worrisome for those left.

Open question is whether the Fulton County DA can prove the requisite RICO predicate acts. I think they are trying to pin them on false statements and an unlawful attempt to influence an official, as well as the county election office interference, but it would be interesting to see a dispassionate analysis that evaluates the likelihood of success with those allegations.

Also unclear is what impact Meadows’ testimony in the Federal case will have, if any, on the Georgia proceedings.

It is one thing to hop on the internet and complain about the system (like we are doing now), but another to actually do something about it.

Unionizing - and then actually striking for better pay and conditions - are the most immediate ways to move the ball. As he says, workers have not historically improved their conditions by working harder, but by refusing to work en masse.

As pointed out time and time again, the MAGA caucus is interested in maximum chaos for social media clout, not governing. It will be interesting to see how much of the ‘mainstream’ GOP goes along with this idiocy.

I get the sense they are pretty spineless, because after all, who wants to anger the base and have to give up the fancy Washington restaurants to return to the sticks and live among the rubes once the inevitable MAGA primary challenger takes you out?

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The truth is, the biggest pharmaceutical companies aren’t really drug development companies at all: they’re marketing, lobbying, and litigation firms with patent portfolios. While Big Pharma holds vast portfolios of existing patents for prescription drugs, the innovation pipeline for new drugs actually has very little to do with Big Pharma. In reality, public sources — especially the NIH — fund the basic research that makes scientific breakthroughs. Then small, boutique biotech and pharmaceutical firms take that publicly generated knowledge and do the final stages of research, like running clinical trials, that get the drugs to market. The share of small companies in the supply of new drugs is huge, and it’s still growing. Fully two-thirds of new drugs now come from these small companies, up from one-third twenty years ago. It is not the research labs of Pfizer that are developing new drugs.

This is completely true. The majority of research, at least for life saving drugs and not baldness cures, takes place at universities and small research firms, much of it funded by the NIH. If the investigators are successful, they spin off a company or license the IP.

Big drug companies then step in, long after the initial “drug discovery” is done. They have captured the regulatory system and, yes, can fund and run Phase 3 trials with their deep pockets and armies of bureaucrats, but at that point they are acting more like record labels, extracting rent (loosely defined) from a convoluted regulatory and distribution system that they themselves had a hand in creating.

Fuck ‘em.

This is really cool.

Viewers get a throw-away line about Big Three’s “record profits” but no sense of what those profits have been: Ford, General Motors and Stellantis made a combined $21 billion in profits in just the first six months of this year. According to the UAW, they’ve earned a quarter trillion dollars in profit since 2013.

This right here. There is a staggering lack of understanding about just how money is circulated in the economy. The assumption is that if you let billionaires and corporations concentrate capital it will be good for the rest of us because they will create jobs. That is true at the margin when capital is at a premium, but in an era easy money, investment isn’t the problem. You can also rest assured that without unions corporations will cut every job they can to boost the bottom line.

Conversely, there is this puritanical sense among some that if you pay workers more, then they will get lazy … or something … and that is bad for the economy. This is bullshit. Billionaires hoard capital. Workers, because they have to, spend their paychecks (lower marginal propensity to save) and keep money circulating. Paying people decently is good for the economy.

I am deeply suspicious of of overly simplistic answers to complex human questions, but I swear that 90% of modern U.S conservative policy can be explained either by grift or fear of the other.

Nah, I would probably get canned. Thanks for the kind word, though!

You too. Thanks.