January 17, 2022

From the Washington Post comes this piece. It’s early, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is making a solid bid for Hypocrite of the Year. He rants and raves about how Democrats will “break” the Senate if they so much as touch the filibuster. …

The Democrats and Republicans rubber-stamped another enormous budget for the Pentagon. They allocated $768 billion for the military in 2022, roughly $24 billion more than the White House requested from Congress. Given all the challenges we face at home, does it make any sense to keep spending so many hundreds of billions on the Pentagon?

In 2020 the U.S. military’s budget accounted for almost 40 percent of the world’s military expenditures. …

Sales declined from November to December; a trend backed up by data from the Census Bureau, which showed a decline of 1.9%in those two months. …

RIYADH-Saudi Arabia courted the world’s top companies to modernize its economy. Instead, the business environment has grown more hostile and investors are souring on the oil-rich kingdom.

Uber Technologies Inc., General Electric Co. and other foreign firms were hit by surprise tax assessments often totaling tens of millions of dollars.

Originally published at https://www.wsj.com on January 15, 2022.

There are over 200 Million businesses on Instagram. And, according to the platform, 90% of people on Instagram follow a company. One of the ways that brands on the app share content with audiences are through branded Instagram Stories. …

It’s hard to believe that any sane person could believe Trump won the election. Every state audit has confirmed that Biden won, and yet the psychopath is throwing tantrums whenever someone in his party acknowledges that Biden won. Make no mistake about it; Trump is becoming irrelevant, and his batshit crazy followers in Congress are going down.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) asserted on Thursday that scientists have been wrong “since the beginning of time.” During an interview on Real America’s Voice, Steve Bannon told Greene that Dr. Peter Hotez of the Baylor College of Medicine had criticized her and other conservatives for their campaign against Covid-19…

U.S. workers enjoyed the most robust wage gains in decades last year. For the vast majority, it wasn’t enough to outpace inflation. But consumers are unusually willing to continue paying for increasingly expensive goods and services as corporations are about to report record profits. …

The word influencer was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2019, but influencer marketing is nothing new. Scandals, fake followers, bot technologies, and the pandemic crisis converged have put a halt to influencer marketing growth and tarnished the public view of influencers as a whole. Can pharma leverage influencer marketing?

…