Saturday Report 7/30/22 - Crazy Alert! The Sperm Bros are touring the world offering to help women...

The Best of the Rest of the News

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

— Thursday my daily take was about how our manufacturing dependence on China cripples our ability to stand up for Taiwan, one of the most vibrant and boisterous democracies on the planet. Now China has doubled-down, threatening to shoot down Speaker Pelosi’s plane if she flies to that island nation. A new allies/axis split is developing, similar to the one that defined World War II. Instead of the US/UK/USSR versus Germany/Italy/Spain/Japan split of the 1940s, this one is the US/Australia/UK/EU/Ukraine/Taiwan — all highly functioning democracies — versus Russia and China, both authoritarian police states, each ruled by a single man. While WWII created the “odd couple” of the US and USSR fighting together to defeat fascism, this is a far clearer split between the two primary systems of governance — democracy and authoritarianism — seeking to reshape the world in a way friendly to their systems. Europe is deeply in trouble because two decades ago Germany’s Chancellor Gerhard Schröder cut a deal to get their oil and natural gas from Russia (and then went on, after leaving office, to try to take a fat consulting fee from the Russian oil/gas company). America is similarly in deep trouble because the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush “free trade” program med us dependent on China for our manufacturing. Germany is not doing everything it can to disentangle itself from reliance on Russian gas and oil, including prepping Germany’s people for less heat during a coming cold winter. America MUST begin pushing our corporations to bring their manufacturing home from China, so that country can no longer intimidate us. We should have started this process a decade ago when China started getting aggressive with Taiwan (we never should have moved our manufacturing there in the first place: this was all done just to save US companies the cost of American labor) and we’re way behind the 8-ball now.

— Republican Senators Pat Toomey and Mitch McConnell engineered a vote against funding for US veterans sick or dying from cancers and other diseases they got from open burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Josh Hawley (R-Chickencoop) and Ted Cruz fistbumped in celebration. It’s hard to imagine anything more disgusting than what these men did Thursday. The phone number for the Senate is 202-225-3121 if one of these people is your senator and you’d like to call to let them know your opinion of their spitting on our veterans. The list is at the end of this newsletter.

— In Ohio, multimillionaire hedge fund manager and GOP senatorial candidate JD Vance has said the quiet part out loud: women must, in his opinion, be subservient to their husbands “for the children,” even when their husbands beat, rape, or otherwise subject them to violence. Meanwhile, Missouri and four other states have laws preventing women from divorcing abusive husbands if they’re pregnant because, of course, women are merely baby incubators and need to know their place in the grand scheme of things. Here on Substack, Jessica Valenti is chronicling on an almost daily basis the insanity around the Republican misogyny and male supremacy built into their actions around abortion. To check out Jessica’s “All In Her Head” newsletter, which I highly recommend, just click here.

— Ever since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision, Congress has been in a state of perpetual paralysis as entire industries come together through trade associations like PhRMA and the American Petroleum Institute to spread around money and influence. Just since 2021, reports indicate Big Oil has spent over $200 million to sabotage efforts to address climate change, while the pharmaceutical industry is working in the shadows with the GOP to kill any sort of drug price reform. Both industries are making tens of billions in profits every quarter, so redirecting a few hundred million to buying off members of Congress is chicken feed. SCOTUS really screwed us all with this decision, as I laid out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America. Step one has to be to get the Court under the control of Congress that the Constitution envisions.

— Republicans hate gay and trans kids so much they want to deny them school lunches until the Biden administration stops requiring schools to report instances of hate and discrimination against LGBTQ children. Yes, they are that cruel. Twenty-two Republican state attorneys general are suing the Biden administration over funding for school lunches, arguing that their school districts should be free to trash queer kids without consequences.