A Friday visit to "Some Assembly Required" - please follow link to original - read the rest of it.
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#Occupy Congress: While the commoners wander around occupying parks and streets, corporations have #occupied Congress, lock, stock and anti-labor laws, crying poverty and hardship. But in the 2008-9-10 tax years, 30 big-name corporations paid a negative 6.7% on $160 billion in profits, while laying off 93,000 workers, depressing wages, and dropping health insurance coverage. But they managed to spend half a billion lobbying for favors.

Old Time Religion: Eliot Spitzer has a stirring call to action, urging small stockholders to revolt against corporate management and force reforms on Wall Street. Quaint, his belief that management cares in the least what shareholders want.

Smoke, Mirror: When it heard the rumor that the Group of 20 nations were putting together $600 billion to rescue the euro, the stock market climbed rapidly. When the IMF said the story was a bunch of hooey, the enthusiasm ebbed and the market fell a little. But for a while there, the smartest people in the world believed that 20 broke and indebted nations could come up with $600 billion to rescue all of Europe - even though it would take $2 trillion to rescue just Italy.

High Noon: In the showdown between the Texas drought and Texas' trees, some 100 million to 500 million trees perished. Hard to tell when weather shades into climate.

Well, Duh: The IMF suddenly realizes that aggressive austerity measures such as those now being applied in Europe (and very much like those it insisted on throughout the third world for thirty years) exacerbate the problems and that slow and steady fiscal consolidation and subsequent lowering of debt levels is a far better approach. They didn't get the memo.