US citizens: call on Congress to tax excessive CEO pay.

The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.

If you phone, please spread the word!

*Corporate profits were the biggest factor driving up prices last year and will be again in 2023 unless businesses are forced to absorb rising wage bills, the head of the European Central Bank has said.*

Drug companies' money is keeping the UK's NHS from collapse, but also corrupting every part of it.

To keep the NHS effective and honest, it must be funded adequately by the state.

Prigozhin has continued occasionally meeting with Putin since his apparent "coup attempt."

This lends support to the idea that it was theater, not a real coup.

A Florida law which prohibits citizens of certain countries from owning property is being criticized as "racism against Asians", but it is clear that that is confusion.

The law prohibits citizens of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria from buying property within 10 miles of "critical infrastructure."

Of those countries, China, Iran, North Korea and Syria are in Asia. Cuba and Venezuela are not. Russia is partly in Europe and partly in Asia. This law is clearly not directed at "Asians".

The fact that South Korea, Japan and Taiwan are not in the list shows that this is no racism against East Asians. The inclusion of Syria but bot Jordan and Iraq shows this is not a matter of racism against Arabs. The inclusion of Colombia and the Dominican Republic shows that this law is not about racism against Hispanics.

The law is clearly intended to terrorize scapegoats, since instead of simply prohibiting the purchase, it proposes to put the purchaser in prison: a terrible danger to anyone who might overlook some piece of critical infrastructure 9 miles away.

The ban appears to be limited to a small fraction of the state's territory, but I suspect that in practice important urban areas are entirely excluded because cities tend to have airports, seaports, power plants, water/sewage treatment sites, and military bases scattered around. (Consider, for comparison, the way many cities have almost nowhere that someone on the sex offender list is permitted to live.)

I think Republicans are constructing an imaginary "national security" scare so they can pretend to "protect" the country from it, and adding a little scapegoating so that they look tough. If they wanted to truly protect the US from acts of sabotage, they ought to make it apply to Republicans instead of Chinese.