Some random stuff:

Never-before-heard audio, obtained exclusively by CNN, shows how former President Donald Trump's longtime adviser Rudy Giuliani relentlessly pressured and coaxed the Ukrainian government in 2019 to investigate baseless conspiracies about then-candidate Joe Biden.

[...]

During the roughly 40-minute call, Giuliani repeatedly told Yermak that Zelensky should publicly announce investigations into possible corruption by Biden in Ukraine, and into claims that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election to hurt Trump. (These separate claims are both untrue.)

"All we need from the President [Zelensky] is to say, I'm gonna put an honest prosecutor in charge, he's gonna investigate and dig up the evidence, that presently exists and is there any other evidence about involvement of the 2016 election, and then the Biden thing has to be run out," Giuliani said, according to the audio. "... Somebody in Ukraine's gotta take that seriously."
The new audio demonstrates how Giuliani aggressively cajoled the Ukrainians to do Trump's bidding. And it undermines Trump's oft-repeated assertion that "there was no quid pro quo" where Zelensky could secure US government support if he did political favors for Trump.



https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/07/p...den/index.html



Looks like more of this will come out. That Trump will throw Rudy under the bus is guaranteed but does Rudy have something on Trump to prove he was acting on orders? Rudy of all people, the former head prosecutor at SDNY must know how Trump works and the legal jeopardy he was in.


Like I was saying about the ocean of money at the top of the tree not having anything to invest in:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...from-the-top-1


Also, relatedly, if your income is around the fifty thousand dollar mark you're being pickpocketed for forty plus thousand dollars a year relative to the pre Reagan era. This article dates the beginning of this upward redistribution at 1975 but that's a statistical artifact from twin recessions and adverse economic conditions in the mid seventies brought about by two huge oil price spikes at a time the US economy was far more geared to the price of oil than it is now. In reality this redistribution started under Reagan and they admit as much later in the article:


There are some who blame the current plight of working Americans on structural changes in the underlying economy—on automation, and especially on globalization. According to this popular narrative, the lower wages of the past 40 years were the unfortunate but necessary price of keeping American businesses competitive in an increasingly cutthroat global market. But in fact, the $50 trillion transfer of wealth the RAND report documents has occurred entirely within the American economy, not between it and its trading partners. No, this upward redistribution of income, wealth, and power wasn’t inevitable; it was a choice—a direct result of the trickle-down policies we chose to implement since 1975.
We chose to cut taxes on billionaires and to deregulate the financial industry. We chose to allow CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock buybacks, and to lavishly reward themselves with the proceeds. We chose to permit giant corporations, through mergers and acquisitions, to accumulate the vast monopoly power necessary to dictate both prices charged and wages paid. We chose to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and the bargaining power of labor. For four decades, we chose to elect political leaders who put the material interests of the rich and powerful above those of the American people.

https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion...ality-america/

It's easier to get wide circulation and coverage of an article like this if you're not explicitly bashing one political party which is why they did the 1975 thing.

Incidentally somebody managing to save a thousand dollars a month from 1985 to now out of the forty thousand a year they should have earned would have a retirement fund of four million dollars if they'd invested it in the stock market. Now of course the market wouldn't have gone up so much if the redistribution hadn't have occurred and the top one percent having pumped so much of that fifty trillion into it but back of the envelope says still over three so six million plus for a couple. Half of Americans have zero retirement savings right now.



https://twitter.com/BenzionSanders/s...41476769730568

Israel are now about to be run by a guy who explicitly sets out why they'll never stop their ongoing slow motion ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Here's one of his election adverts:




And this is going to keep on affecting US coverage of Israel which has altered fractionally since the latest load of bombing. Coverage is now very very fractionally less pro Israel. This is making Israel very angry:

https://twitter.com/JacobMagid/statu...20975692877830




I should have put this in the previous post:

https://www.piie.com/research/piie-c...-it-has-fallen



Hell in a handbasket latest:

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/evangeli...n-in-churches/



and various stuff:

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/sta...20912945287181


https://twitter.com/matthews_p/statu...09322766368771


https://twitter.com/clairecmc/status...98154261811201



https://twitter.com/JeffreyGoldberg/...47145967288322



https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1399814975854551041