Boing Boing has the article Private equity bosses took $200m out of Toys R Us and crashed the company, lifetime employees got $0 in severance,

Private equity’s favorite shell game is to take over profitable businesses, sell off their assets, con banks into loaning them hundreds of millions of dollars, cash out in the form of bonuses and dividends, then let the businesses fail and default on their debts.

This is why I started to use the term vulture capitalists to describe these private equity types. It is good to have an article like this that I can point to. This has some details that I can use to explain why I call them vulture capitalists. When these people say the government should be run like a business, this is exactly what they mean. Their plan for government is to strip the assets, pay the money to themselves, and leave the rest of us to pay for the bankruptcy.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Most Ignored and Most Far-Reaching Supreme Court Ruling Yet: Anti-Trust Law Hollowed Out.

A major Supreme Court ruling, Ohio vs American Express, was completely ignored by most media outlets, even though it will have potentially devastating repercussions for consumers in the so-called ‘platform economy’: Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Facebook, etc. White collar criminologist Bill Black explains the consequences.

I have been postponing reading this for a day or so. Now that I finally got around to looking at this, I find that it about the most horrible economic thing that the Supreme Court could have done.

This is a legislative decision made by the Supreme Court that they have no right to be making. It will go a long way toward increasing income and wealth inequality.

Enforcement of anti-trust laws has been sadly lacking from the executive branch of the government. The solution to much of our income inequality is more stringent anti-trust enforcement. The Supreme Court has just banned this increased enforcement in a very large part of the economy.

Naked Capitalism has the article Anthony Kennedy and Our Delayed Constitutional Crisis.

With swing-vote status comes great responsibility, and in the most consequential — and wrongly decided — cases of this generation, O’Connor and Kennedy were the Court’s key enablers.

It’s enough to make you wonder if the Supreme Court was such a good idea from our founding ancestors. Many of you may not be old enough to remember how reviled the Warren Supreme Court was by the segregationists who were against the civil rights decisions. There are always going to be people who think the Supreme Court is horribly wrong. Enshrining them in black robes is not going to make them into wise and unbiased people that everyone can look up to in awed reverence..

In the end, it is always about politics and power.

I’ll say this for Trump. Without him we might have gone on for another 8 years thinking that Democratic President Hillary Clinton was going to solve our problems.

TruthDig has the article Nomi Prins on the Banks That Run the World (Audio and Transcript)

In this week’s episode of “Scheer Intelligence,” host and Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer talks with Nomi Prins about her latest and what Scheer calls her “most ambitious” book, “Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World.”

None of this is news to me. I only hope that their explanation of what is going on is clear enough for many others to understand what happened and what will happen. A clear understanding as presented in this interview might be our only hope to get control of the situation.

It’s not the Rothschilds. It is people much closer to home than that. Sure, maybe the Rothschilds may have some hand in this, but if you concentrate on them, you are taking your eye off the ball.

YouTube has the video Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Talks to Glenn Greenwald About the Democratic Party and 2018 Midterms.

House candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talks to Glenn Greenwald about the need for Democratic Party reform, her views on immigration and criminal justice reform, her approach to “identity politics,” why she has taken such unusually blunt positions on Israel and Palestine, and the challenges of running against a machine boss politician.

A more in-depth discussion with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is always welcome.

Jimmy Dore had a segment MSNBC Admits They’re Clueless On Progressive Politics.

Joy Reid tweeted that apparently everybody in political journalism is taking a “crash course” on Ocasio-Cortez. Some of us have been aware for awhile now, Joy.

The earliest recorded post about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on this blog was May 30, 2018 in the post White Fear: As the GOP Veers Toward Fascism, Establishment Democrats Face a Grassroots Insurgency.

If you only get your news from the corporate press, you are woefully under-informed.

NPR has the interview Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez On Her Primary Victory.

I saw a posting of this interview that misunderstood what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said. Here is the whole snippet of what she actually said.

OCASIO-CORTEZ: Well, I think – I do think that we have to have a secure border. We need to make sure that people are, in fact, documented. But that doesn’t mean that we threaten people’s lives. It doesn’t mean that we kill them. It doesn’t mean that, you know, we have people sabotaging water supplies on our border. I don’t think that we respond by actively harming and potentially putting people’s lives in danger.

INSKEEP: Oh, you’re talking about the idea of, like, getting rid of water supplies so that it’s harder for migrants to move across, that sort of thing.

OCASIO-CORTEZ: Right.

If you only look at Inskeep’s clarification question and her answer, you don’t realize that she is saying “right” to his clarification of what she is against. She is not proposing sabotaging water supplies. She is stating that she opposes sabotaging water supplies.

So knock this misstatement loudly and vociferously if you should happen to run across it. Keep a link to this blog post so that you will have the proper reference to use when you debunk the false meme.

On some other occasion, when she has more time, I hope she gets into the need for us to stop interfering in the governments of these people’s countries so that it drives them away from home and toward the safety of the USA.

Yahoo! has the article Stocks- Wall Street Higher as U.S. Softens Foreign Investment Stance.

Investing.com – Wall Street opened modestly higher on Wednesday amid news that the White House administration would take a less harsh approach to foreign investment restrictions.

This is utterly ridiculous. The USA refuses to take actions that would make us economically competitive with China. That being said, we at least had investment restrictions that kept China from taking complete advantage of its superior competitive position. By starting a trade war, #45 has now backed himself into a position that he has to soften the one effective tool that we had to stave off the competition until we woke up to how the world economy really works.

What the USA government should be doing to compete economically is to invest in our economy to make it more productive and to stimulate it into full capacity operation. We should moderate the income and wealth inequality to put more money into the hands of people who actually buy stuff. We should lift the financial burden on getting an education to become a world class participant in the world economy. We should stop spending so much money on munitions that we then just blow-up to keep our empire going. We should lift the burden of paying for health care from our corporations by implementing Medicare For All.

Business Insider has the article There’s a compelling explanation for why we’ve never found aliens — and it could mean humanity is doomed.

A study recently published in the journal Astrobiology suggests there are four different scenarios a civilization can follow as it develops. One of those four pathways leads to sustainable existence. But in the other three, civilizations overuse resources and collapse or die off as a result.

The article also links to the YouTube video Could Alien Civilizations Predict the Fate of Our Planet?

Truthdig has the article America’s March to Inequality: Why the U.N. Poverty Report Alarms Trump’s Plutocrats.

So if the UN report were taken seriously, the US would require a social revolution to even approach the normality of a France or Germany, where a handful of billionaires don’t take food out of the mouth of hungry babies.

And that is why the shock troops of Trumpism are so eager to discredit it.

Just read the article if you need any more statistics on what is going wrong in the USA society these days.