-Much reporting is needed on the contracting out of government functions on a massive scale of federal, state and local governments. The federal government provides summaries of these contracts but, despite bipartisan support in Congress, still does not provide the full text of this trillion dollar outsourcing. That effort has stalled in Congress due to pressure from contractors. For more leads, see the new book The Privatization of Everything by Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian.

-Howie Hawkins, as the former Green Party presidential candidate, has thoroughly read HR1 and has found serious hurdles erected for third party and independent candidates. One is so sweeping that it should shame the two-party duopoly.

-Everyday the shrinkage in the number of hospital beds in America that started in the late 1970s is making patients and staff pay the price. Why isn’t the government, much less the industry, restoring the tens of thousands of beds that endless hospital mergers dismantled over the years? Don’t they see more pandemics on the horizon?

-The New York Times reports that augmented reality goggles will become normalized this year. Has Facebook and its Oculus subsidiary thought through the widely-damaging and interruptive consequences from the use of this separation-from-reality by tens of millions of young people? Or is this just another un-vetted technology that will lead to our society asking: “If we only knew at the time!”