Assorted content for your weekend reading.
- David Dayen discusses how manufacturing monopolies have produced the U.S.' shortage of baby formula. And Alyssa Rosenberg recognizes that any reasonably-governed country would be moving heaven and earth to ensure infants don't suffer due to corporate greed.
- Meanwhile, Nina Lakhani exposes how meat packing giants and the Trump administration sacrificed workers' lives rather than allowing any health and safety protections to be applied even in the face of a deadly virus. And Nora Loreto asks why we still don't have anything remotely approaching an accounting of the lives lost to workplace-spread COVID in Canada.
- thwap points out how anti-inflation rhetoric is being used as yet another excuse for class war against workers.
- Alexander Furnas et al. study how lobbying leads to changes in policy - finding donations to be less of a direct influence than ideological sorting.
- On the bright side (and in a prime example of policy we should be looking to emulate) Sam Jones reports on Spain's plans to provide menstrual leave among other additional measures to ensure improved gender equity.
- Finally, Stephen Maher discusses the increasing threats and harassment facing people seeking to run for office - though it's well worth noting the asymmetry based on ideological orientation as fascist groups primed to treat others as subhuman apply that theory to the political sphere.