Biden's Presidency Will Be Easily Erased, Gamestop...Explained?, NY Committed Nursing Home Genocide, Wal-Mart Signals the Era of In-Person Retail is Over? (The Five for 01/28/21)
Hey,
Well, what a strange week. Everybody is going crazy over Gamestop/AMC/The Stock Market (we’'ll get to that), but there’s some other important news going on….which is really what The Five is all about.
Before we dive in.
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On to The Five.
[one]
This one might sound boring, but there’s a lot going on here.
President Biden has signed 33 Executive Actions in his first week in office.
To compare that to the last eight administrations:
President Donald Trump: 4 executive orders in first week
President Barack Obama: 5 executive orders in first week
President George W. Bush: 0 executive orders in first week
President Bill Clinton: 2 executive orders in first week
President George Bush Sr: 1 executive order in first week
President Ronald Reagan: 0 executive orders in first week
President Jimmy Carter: 1 executive order in first week
As a rule, I’m cautious of executive actions (which include “Executive Orders” and “Executive Memos” which are slightly different…read about that here) because these actions by any POTUS go against the way the Constitution is set up…for laws to start in Congress and be hashed out by a group of people, not one person.
If you’re a conservative, odds are you don’t like Biden’s orders (particularly the Keytone XL pipeline, re-joining the Paris Accords and distributing COVID funds to minority/LGBT businesses first vs. those who need it most). If you’re a liberal, you may like some actions but not others. (Or, you could like all of them, I guess).
But regardless of your emotions, this is an unstable precedent. The odds that the next Conservative President will come in and undo all of these Executive Actions in four or eight years is pretty high.
Both Republicans and Democrats can likely agree that it would be better for Biden’s agenda to go through Congress, where the ideas can be hashed out, argued over, refined and then passed into law. Nobody will get exactly what they want, but whatever legislation gets through won’t be whiplashed back the other way with a changing of the Partisan Guard at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
It’s pretty impossible for me to summarize the breadth and depth of these Executive Actions, but NBC News has a complete list you can read through.
[two]
Gamestop, Gamestop…what can we even say about you?
Rather than even attempt to summarize and comment on what’s happening here, I’m just going to point you to some great resources the Discord community pulled together (seriously, you should join my private social network here).
Video Game Voiceover Actress Avalon Rose has the funniest take.
Here’s an excellent technical breakdown originally posted to Reddit.
Here’s a more journalist-y explanation from The Wall Street Journal.
The whole situation has raised the question of how “coasters” (people on the east and west coasts) are able to access and manipulate (by putting a friend on TV telling everyone to sell ____ stock so it will tank) while the everyperson who can buy stocks on their phones are partially locked out by Robinhood and TDE Ameritrade, two online portals for buying individual stocks.
Furthermore, how politicians treat the stock market is a constant source of hard questions about how our government and investment regulations are working (or not).
Before COVID really hit the US, the then-Senator allegedly dumped $18 million in stock with “insider” info from her government job about how bad the novel Coronavirus would be.
Similarly, Nancy Pelosi bought a bunch of Tesla stock ahead of a Biden policy change ordering all government vehicles to be electric, which seems like insider trading to an Average Joe like me.
Whatever’s happening here…feels more like a major sea change to the financial industry via internet message boards like Reddit…in the same way social media disrupted every part of politics-as-usual.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked about Gamestop stock, and she replied that the “the first female Treasury Secretary…is monitoring the situation.”
Umm…that’s great that Janet Yellin is a woman, I guess. She also took $7 million in fees for “speeches” to Wall Street, which is the Hedge Fund world’s way of paying bribes.
I’m much more concerned with Yellin’s shady financial dealings than with the race, sexual orientation or gender of the person holding that office.
Oh, and one more thing (I actually paused sending this to drop this news in)…if you wanna know how crazy it is that Robinhood has shut down trading on the Gamestop Stock, Ted Cruz and AOC agree on something.
[three]
This should be a bigger scandal than it’s current coverage.
I like CNBC’s brief summary of the New York COVID Nursing Home Scandal:
New York underreported coronavirus deaths in nursing homes by as much as 50%, according to a new report from New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The 76-page report comes after a months-long investigation by the attorney general’s office into allegations that nursing homes failed to follow Covid safety protocols.
The investigation found that the number of Covid deaths among nursing home residents in some facilities rose by more than 50% when including residents who died in the hospital., according to a new report from New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Fox News reporting brings some additional context:
Cuomo has defended the nursing home policy as in-line with guidance from the Trump administration at the time.
James' report said that government guidance requiring the admission of COVID-19 patients into nursing homes may have put residents at increased risk of harm in some facilities and may have obscured the data available to assess that risk.
To summarize, NY Governor Cuomo forced nursing homes to admit patients with COVID, to clear out some hospital beds. COVID then spread like wildfire, and killed a lot of people.
Perhaps the person who won the biggest on the Gamestop stock fiasco was Andrew Cuomo himself, who’s been able to stay out of front page headlines while the investment world goes wild.
[four]
I guess the good news is that while the U.S. is pretty much going to hell, peace just keeps happening in the Middle East. The Times of Israel reports on new social and cultural ties between Israel, Palestine and Iraq via Facebook and TikTok:
Many of the posts seek to give people a glimpse of the country that exists beyond the conflict, and videos of a Foreign Ministry employee talking to ordinary Israelis amid the high-rise towers of Tel Aviv get instant traction. “What’s special in our activity is that we’re focused on putting forward what we consider the real face of Israel,” says Gonen.
“We talk about diversity, about coexistence between Jews and Arabs and about innovation. It’s everything you won’t see in the traditional Arab media, which looks at Israel just through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We’re trying to extend the view that people take.”
Surprisingly, one country where posts are particularly popular has no normalisation with Israel on the horizon: Iraq.
“There, we saw in the past few years that we get very good and positive responses, far beyond than other countries in the Arab world,” Gonen says. ‘So we opened a special page that has information on the Jewish heritage in Iraq and about the good relations that existed between Jewish and Arab people there before the establishment of the state of Israel. And we talk about the community of Iraqi Jews in Israel and bring their stories.”
[five]
And finally…Wal-Mart is betting that when we can return to in-store shopping more conveniently post-COVID, nobody is going to want to.
The New York Post reports:
Walmart said it will convert space at dozens of its stores into high-tech warehouse space as it expects a surge in online orders for pickup and delivery will persist beyond the pandemic.
The Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer said some store locations will get divvied up while others will get additional square footage to create on-site mini-fulfillment centers, in which automated robots roam the floor to retrieve certain items and bring them to an assembly work station.
The robots will whittle the process of picking and packing orders down to “a few minutes,” Tom Ward, senior vice president of customer product in the US, said in a blog post on Wednesday.
Personal shoppers will be used, however, to retrieve fresh food like meat and produce as well as bulkier items, he said.
Walmart is betting that the pandemic fueled surge in online shopping and reliance on delivery and store pick-up options will continue for years and that these investments will allow it to better compete with the likes of Amazon.
And that’ll do it for this Thursday.
Seriously, come hang with the other whip smart readers of The Five. Join the Discord and be a part of my private social network.
Until the next one,
-sth