Piercing the Corporate Veil, A Study in Bayhem, Bubbles, Box of Pox, and Suddenly Poor

The Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case creep and speculation continue.

Now there’s some rumblings among some who are supposedly more law-savvy than I am about this close bond between a corporation’s “religion” and the religion of the people who run it may be an exploitable tear in the corporate veil that protects those who run a corporation from certain financial and legal issues.

If that’s true, then that may be a semi-good thing to come from all of this.

But I’m not sure how that would all play out. It very well may end up being worse all around for everyone.

Of course, it may not matter all that much if the economy as a whole–on a global scale–pops all at once.

There are apparently some rumblings (again, from people who know a lot more about the issue at hand than I do) about how over-valued a lot of things out there in the financial and investment world are. And how little corporations (and actual people with lots of money) are investing in things. Real estate, stocks, bonds, each other… few are seeing a chance for a good return on their investment so they’re just holding on to their money.

And while that’s going on, the various central banks of various nations are, in one way or another, pumping more money into the economy… which is, of course, trickling up into these stockpiles. Because (and the article in today’s stream doesn’t touch on this idea, but it’s a pretty glaring omission) the vast majority of people don’t have investments like what they’re talking about, so all that money can only trickle up to the businesses that own and produce what the people at street level are buying.

With that money “stuck” in the cycle, it seems it’s leaving a bit of a vacuum for those who need it most while, yet again, the rich get richer. But if and when this massive series of bubbles pop, everyone’s going to lose big as everything plummets in value–including those vast storehouses of money.

Kind of terrifying.

About as terrifying as hearing that the CDC misplaced a box of smallpox sometime in the 50s. It’s okay, though… they found it. Sitting in a store room in a lab that’s been used by the FDA for the past 40 or so years.

That just leaves me wondering what the heck else has been misplaced over the decades and never missed.

Then there’s the newest revelations from the Snowden files. Seems the U.S. government did, indeed, have a whole lot of personal communications on hand that they probably shouldn’t have. How do we know? Because Snowden handed a bunch of it over to the Washing Post. So now all the officials who’ve been swearing up and down that their organizations never took and retained anything like these newly revealed documents are saying, effectively, “Okay, yeah, we had those, but they’re different! It was only a minimal violation of those people’s privacy! What Snowden’s doing with them is worse than what we did!”

Yeah, not buying the blame shifting, guys. You’re still the ones who collected it–and have been lying about it. Sure Snowden’s in the wrong, that’s not news. You’re still in more wrong overall.

Anyway, here’s the rest of the feed…