“Politics is downstream from culture”

Who knew, Big Tech is corporate communism, which may explain why there should be a Magnitsky law for the US. A Ghislaine Maxwell pardon could occur if she gave up those tapes of the previous guy.

BOAT COPS (grabbing bullhorn from the slavering media horde): MA’AM, IN THE PAST 24 HOURS, YOU HAVE HALTED $9.6 BILLION WORTH OF SHIPPING TRAFFIC. HOW DO YOU PLAN TO PAY FOR THIS?

ME: Oh god…

I open my online banking app. Somehow, it contains only a CVS receipt. Everyone groans.

BOAT COPS: We thought so.

Like rats fleeing a sinking vessel, all my teeth fall out at once. I scramble to catch them and stuff them in my pockets. Once again, my phone buzzes. It’s another text from my father.

DAD: So how’s the whole boat thing going?

A dead squirrel is right twice a day because one third of the trinity lays an egg. And Robin laid a Faberge egg.

Trumpian Republicans often rail against “elites” — especially “coastal elites” — and big tech is one of their favorite targets. But liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is not swayed by their rhetoric. This week in his column, Krugman argues that Republicans in 2021 are still committed to anti-working class policies and make that painfully clear with their actions.

Krugman notes that the American Rescue Plan Act — a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief and stimulus bill that President Joe Biden recently signed into law — didn’t receive “a single Republican vote in Congress.” And he doubts that other legislation that helps average Americans will either.

Krugman writes, “Why are elected Republicans still so committed to right-wing economic policies that help the rich while shortchanging the working class?…. I ask why Republicans are ‘still’ committed to right-wing economics because in the past, there wasn’t any puzzle about their position.”

The economist notes that although Republicans have “managed to win elections by playing to the cultural grievances and racial hostility of working-class Whites,” the GOP never abandons its “pro-rich priorities.”

[…]

Krugman wraps up his column by stressing that when it comes to economic policy, the most important thing is not what Republicans say, but what they do.

“I suspect that the absence of true populism on the right has a lot to do with the closing of the right-wing mind,” Krugman writes. “The conservative establishment may have lost power, but its apparatchiks are still the only people in the GOP who know anything about policy. And big money may still buy influence even in a party whose energy comes mainly from intolerance and hate.”