Reading the news articles on Ms Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s impassioned speech concerning the COVID-19 bailout legislation was interesting to say the least. The Fox News commentary where Tucker Carlson spent a few minutes talking about how she wanted to give individual payouts to illegal aliens was the most comical part. During the brief excerpt he showed there was no mention of immigrants at all. I researched the topic as any competent investigator would, and found she was referring to aliens with a tax ID number. The individual stimulus money will not be sent to these people, who are working in the United States and paying taxes. I can see no reason to exclude people paying US taxes from the stimulus, citizens or not. It’s true an illegal alien can get a tax ID number but, that wouldn’t be smart. They’d probably get caught and deported. I can’t imagine there are a lot of them. If they are paying taxes, who cares? They should probably be granted citizenship for their overt honesty, something this country could use more of.

What Ms Ocasio-Cortez was saying, and what Carlson was trying to direct attention away from, is the practice of attaching a whole bunch of other crap to bills. Further, she pointed out the bill should have been divided up so each could have been voted on independently. The individual payouts and payouts to small businesses, she argues, should not be attached to payouts to large corporations. These should have been different bills debated on their different merits. She’s right.

The EPA is going to stop enforcing pollution laws as per the bailout. Vanessa Taylor from The Mic wonders what affect air pollution has on the sufferers of COVID-19. This article by Matt Stoller of The Guardian points out the trend of small business disappearing and be replaced by a limited number of retail chains will accelerate. Boeing wants 60 billion dollars. The catastrophic failure of their 737 MAX planes (from Seeking Alpha) and defense contracts forced them to buy back 65 billion dollars worth of stocks. This is mismanagement, not COVID-19. The virus’ effects on intelligence have not been well documented however.

Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s speech points out political hamstringing and deal making between power players. Simplifying this process by abandoning the habit of attaching special interest bs to every bill that goes through congress is a good idea. It is a moral idea. Breaking the bill down into parts would add some transparency to government and our representatives in it.