https://www.economistgroup.com/esg/board

Chaired by a Baron, the Lord Paul Deighton, who also chairs the Heathrow airport and was involved in banking and the conservative governments of UK, handling part of the covid crisis for Boris, and being involved with the Pandora papers scandal.

The rest of the board has their own stories.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Deighton,_Baron_Deighton

The editorial board had written an unpublished endorsement for Harris, and they have been publicly endorsing presidents for the past ~50 years. This year they did not, and recently it was made public why: the billionaire owner, Jeff bezos, ordered them not to.

It is more about there being proof that the owner is having editorial control of the paper, than about any endorsement.

The owner controlling editorial decisions is to many, myself included who also cancelled my subscription, a violation of journalistic principles and not the product we are paying for.

I want to read a publication where skilled journalists can speak their mind, and that is no longer certain at the Washington Post, instead I must interpret their opinions as filtered through a billionaire’s goals and opinions. I do not want to pay for that.

Cool, I like it here more.

Instead of a bowl of candy that kids would take one of on the night of Halloween, a US holiday, they are jokingly offering a small amount of a drug, likely cocaine, to the kids.

It’s a very long article with many examples, but these highlight well

One 82-year-old woman, who wore pajamas with holes in them because she didn’t want to spend money on new ones, didn’t realize she had given Republicans more than $350,000 while living in a 1,000 square-foot Baltimore condo since 2020.

By the time a Taiwanese immigrant from California passed away from lung cancer this year at age 80, she had given away more than $180,000 to Trump’s campaign and a litany of other Republican candidates – writing letters to candidates apologizing for not getting donations to them on time because she was going into heart surgery. She had only $250 in her bank account when she died, leaving her family scrambling to cover the cost of her funeral.

And a 78-year-old, a widow who limited showers to save on her water bill and canceled her long-term care insurance, didn’t understand why the retirement savings her husband had left her was dwindling so quickly. After CNN reached out to her family, they learned that the woman gave more than $200,000 in donations to Democratic political groups and candidates.

This whole thing is a plague, citizens United and this concept of pacs, and all this money in politics is absurd. I think in the modern day of internet and with each campaign setting up a website, and normal reporting and debates, town halls, and Rally’s is sufficient, we don’t need all these mailers, and constant ads, and texts, and so on and so on. it’s more just a giant transfer of wealth from the people to networks and ad agencies.

All this money has turned politics towards sensationalism, and it’s hurting society.