A clock running backwards is right four times a day, and occasionally the conman does something good. One of them was to require hospitals to publish their prices for a long list of medical procedures.

In addition to giving patients the opportunity to say, "I will go elsewhere" — those who are well enough to do so — it is also likely to result in pressure to lower the prices. That will help all patients without insurance. However, it is likely to pressure on insurance companies to pay hospitals more, and thus charge more. Overall it will be an improvement, but the US medical system will still be lousy overall.

The US needs a national medical system, also known as Medicare for All.

200 Google workers have formed a union. They are determined to include contractors, so they have decided not to apply for formal recognition. We need to change US law so that contract workers, even subcontracted workers, can unionize.

New York City has prohibited fast-food chain restaurants from firing workers, or cutting their work hours, without just cause.

This should enable workers to be less intimidated by the manager. Criminal abuses such as theft of wages are rife in those restaurants, and this

protection may enable workers to exercise their legal rights by reporting the abuses.

I won't presume that the two bills just passed go far enough — I don't know enough to have an opinion on that.

The corrupter's call to pressure Raffensperger to carry out election fraud was, it appears, a federal crime and a state crime under the laws of Georgie. Democrats in Congress are rightly demanding to prosecute him. This may convince Biden not to let him off the hook. I hope so.

It is likely that the corrupter tried pressuring officials in other states, because corrupting Georgia alone would not have brought him victory.

Some call for Congress to impeach him again, but if there are not enough Republicans in the Senate willing to convict him, that would be futile. Anyway, what's the use of removing him from office a few days earlier?

Then we will face the challenge of keeping him in the US to face trial — stopping him from fleeing the previous day to a country which will not extradite him. The flight he has arranged goes to Scotland, but I suspect that would only be a temporary stop on the way to his ultimate destination.

Argentina has launched a government-run online store, CorreoCompras, to compete with the near-monopoly private store, MercadoLibre, which is the local equivalent of Amazon.

Although it may avoid many of the evils of Amazon, this is not guaranteed. It is run by a state-owned company, but a company nonetheless. It will be subject to the pressure to increase sales and that will translate into pressure to do the things Amazon does to increase sales — except whichever things the state orders it not to do.

However, the fundamental direct evils of Amazon are identifying people when they pay, and making them run non-free JavaScript code. On these issues, CorreoCompras is no better.