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kpete

kpete's Journal
kpete's Journal
July 2, 2016

Elizabeth Warren advocating for those Trump thinks of as losers...

Finally, concentration has contributed to the decline of what was once a strong, robust middle class in this country. As corporations get bigger, and bigger, and bigger, a handful of managers get richer, and richer, and richer. And god-bless—in America, we celebrate success. But what about everybody else? What about small business owners and community bankers – people who used to be able to hold their own with big guys but now find it harder and harder to keep up with the armies of corporate lawyers and lobbyists determined to rig the economy against them? What about the employees at Wal-Mart who scrape by on help from the food pantry and Medicaid, but who never have enough money to build any security? What about them? They are stuck.

Concentration is not the only reason for rising economic insecurity, but it is one of them. Concentrated industries result in concentrated profits. It’s the ultimate price squeeze. When markets are not competitive, big businesses are able to extract monopoly profits by setting prices that are higher and higher above the cost of making an item or providing a service. In 2014, the top 500 largest firms pocketed 45 percent of the global profits of ALL American businesses. And the vast majority of those profits went to the wealthiest of the wealthy. As of 2013, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans held nearly half of all the stock and mutual fund assets held by all Americans.

And who gets a shot at their own dream? When big business can shut out competition, entrepreneurs and small businesses are denied their shot at building something new and excited.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2016-6-29_Warren_Antitrust_Speech.pdf

July 2, 2016

NYT story on Trump's birther phase says Trump sent no investigators to Hawaii, made little effort to

Raising questions about the president’s birth certificate — and even threatening to send a team of investigators to Hawaii — had served its purpose, raising Mr. Trump’s political profile and, whether he knew it or not at the time, providing him with the rudimentary foundation upon which he built his 2016 campaign.

He even skirted close to birther innuendo after the massacre in Orlando, Fla., this month, calling into “Fox & Friends” to insinuate that Mr. Obama might sympathize with Islamic extremists. “He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands,” Mr. Trump said.

But for all of his fascination with the president’s birth certificate, Trump apparently never dispatched investigators or made much of an effort to find the documents.

Dr. Alvin Onaka, the Hawaii state registrar who handled queries about Mr. Obama, said recently through a spokeswoman that he had no evidence or recollection of Mr. Trump or any of his representatives ever requesting the records from the Hawaii State Department of Health


http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/us/politics/donald-trump-birther-obama.html

July 1, 2016

Now if Scalia were replaced by me (Trump) we wouldn't have that




Now if we had—Scalia was living, or if Scalia was replaced by me, you wouldn’t have had that, OK? It would’ve been the opposite,” Trump said of the ruling, which struck down a restrictive Texas abortion law.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_57754e2ae4b0bd4b0b13db65



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