Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• DOGE-Pilled: Luke Farritor could have been an artist, or a builder, or someone dedicated to seeing a great historical mystery through. Instead he wound up at the Department of Government Efficiency, slashing, dismantling, undoing. Luke Farritor could have been an artist, or a builder, or someone dedicated to seeing a great historical mystery through. Instead he wound up at the Department of Government Efficiency, slashing, dismantling, undoing. (Businessweek)
• Trump officials accused of defying 1 in 3 judges who ruled against him: A comprehensive analysis of hundreds of lawsuits against Trump policies shows dozens of examples of defiance, delay and dishonesty, which experts say pose an unprecedented threat to the U.S. legal system. (Washington Post) see also On the Supreme Court’s Constitutional Vandalism in Service of Inherited Wealth: How Oligarchs Bought a Constitutional Theory to Kill the New Deal. (Notes from the Circus)
• Elon Musk is turning US liberals off not just Tesla but electric vehicles in general: Disgust at the CEO’s rightwing activism is casting a pall but conservatives are no more likely to buy EVs. (The Guardian)
• The Enshittification of American Power: First Google and Facebook, then the world. Under Trump 2.0, US statecraft is starting to mimic the worst tendencies of Big Tech. (Wired)
• Chinese graphite is crucial to electric car batteries. Commerce just put a 93.5% tariff on it: The Trump administration is imposing a substantial tariff on a raw material that is critical for electric vehicle batteries, which could significantly raise the cost of building EVs in the United States. (CNN)
• How Axios rebranded conservative ideology as objectivity: Our news is carefully curated by conservative billionaires: Sinclair Broadcast pushes right-wing propaganda into 40% of local news markets. Fox News is in 70M homes. The WaPo and Politico owners are Trump donors. CBS has a political bias monitor. (Popular Information)
• The FBI Took Her $40,000 Without Explaining Why. She Fought Back Against That Practice—and Lost. The twist underscores just how little accountability exists in civil forfeiture, which allows law enforcement to seize assets without charging the owner with a crime. (Reason) see also Dropped cases against LA protesters reveal false claims from federal agents: Records show border patrol gave inaccurate testimony about people it jailed. Prosecutors now face ‘embarrassing’ dismissals. (The Guardian)
• How Trump Killed Cancer Research: Attempting to eliminate funding for certain kinds of “woke” studies, the Trump administration erased hundreds of millions of dollars being used for cancer research. (Wired)
• In Game-Changing Climate Rollback, E.P.A. Aims to Kill a Bedrock Scientific Finding: The proposal is President Trump’s most consequential step yet to derail federal climate efforts and appears to represent a shift toward outright denial of the scientific consensus. (New York Times)
• The Singer Who Skewered America: So long, Tom Lehrer. (Yascha Mounk)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Erik Hirsch, Co-CEO Hamiliton Lane, which manages or advises on $958 billion in client assets. Previously, he was an M&A banker at Brown Brothers Harriman, and a municipal financial consultant with Public Financial Management, specializing in asset securitization, strategic consulting and sport stadium financings.
Drug prices have outpaced inflation since the 1980s
Source: USA Facts
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