Toys Я Us Worker: Wall Street Billionaires Should Not Be Making Money By Putting People Out of Work.

Let's not romanticize Toys Я Us. It pressured people to buy expensive toys that they couldn't afford and that their children didn't need. I would expect that most of the toys sold there were media tie-ins, so that children would perform unpaid advertising for other programs which themselves were full of advertising.

In addition, the odd and inexplicable admixture of Cyrillic with the Latin alphabet is annoying — and does "toys ya us" actually mean anything?

This does not, however, excuse the harm done by leveraged buyouts or invalidate the arguments made in the article.

Ramzy Baroud: *Thousands of foreign journalists, with no cultural or political connection to the Middle East, were shipped in, to replace their Arab colleagues, and to participate, willingly or otherwise, in the dirty propaganda campaigns championed by one rich Arab countries or another.*

The repression of journalists by Middle-Eastern countries is well documented, so I am confident that that claim is true. The other claim, about naive foreign journalists brought in for propaganda purposes, might be true also, but I have no independent basis to judge that point.

'Staggering' New Data Shows Income [after taxes] of Top 1% [in the US] Has Grown 100 Times Faster Than Bottom 50% Since 1970.

US citizens: call on Pelosi to meet with Extinction Rebellion hunger strikers.

If you call, please spread the word!

*Calls grow for laws requiring firms to reveal links to deforestation.*

I am generally skeptical about systems which expect company A to make sure supplier B doesn't engage in practice C. The problem is, A has every incentive not to try very hard to stop B from doing C and covering it up.

I wonder if it might be more effective to impose on all possibly deforestation-related products an import tariff whose rate is based the fraction of deforestation in the country of production since a given base year. The tariff function could be 1/R - 1, where R is the fraction of the forest in the year 2000 which still survives. After 90% deforestation, the tariff would be 8 times the exporter's selling price.