Über-Rich Nazi Wants His Own Party

Elon Musk said he’s carrying out his threat to form a new political party after his fissure with President Donald Trump, announcing the America Party in response to the president’s sweeping tax cuts law.

He claims to be a centrist...

...but he's the clown who was throwing Nazi salutes and he poured money into Germany's neo-Nazi party. He claims "no donors", which means that this new party will be his toy. It'll be something for him to use to piss off Trump, up until the point where Trump has him denaturalized on trumped-up charges of visa fraud and nationalizes SpaceX on the grounds of national security.

It probably won't come to anything, as he has the attention span of a golden retriever.

Goldman Sachs, the Global Vampire Squid, Is Still a Hive of Evil and Villainy

Suffering is good for buisiness is the view of Goldman Sachs:

Goldman Sachs analysts attempted to address a touchy subject for biotech companies, especially those involved in the pioneering “gene therapy” treatment: cures could be bad for business in the long run.

“Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” analysts ask in an April 10 report entitled “The Genome Revolution.”

“The potential to deliver ‘one shot cures’ is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies,” analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday
...
“In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines … Where an incident pool remains stable (eg, in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.”.

Curing disease is bad for business? I know that this is an old story, but does anyone truly believe that they have changed? Goldman Sachs was evil when they helped crash the global economy for fun and profit in 2007-8 and they're still evil now.

One of the real problems I have with President Obama is that his administration did little, if anything, to do anything about the greedy bastards like Goldman-Sachs. That was likely due to his letting the DoJ get captured by a Wall Street guy.

Taxation or Tumbrels

Lord Bezos's upcoming wedding might come in at about $600 million. He's denying it, but considering that he dropped $2.5 million on the engagement ring and proposed on a yacht so large that there were plans to dismantle a bridge to get it out to sea. (They didn't, but it's still so honking large it needs a support ship to follow it around like a nautical butler.)

As much as I don't give a fuck about the Teamsters, I wish them well in their fight against the second-richest man on Earth.

The super-rich are almost daring us to take action against them. There seems to be three paths ahead: A police state, where the oligarchs stamp on our faces for fun and profit; taxation to cut down their fortunes to merely filthy rich; or a revolution to take them all down. This level of inequity cannot stand.

Bezos may be a canary in the coal mine with this wedding. And so is Luigi Mangione. Oh, the press is out there telling everyone that Luigi is evil and emphasizing "OMG, he kilt somebody", but those who live the sub-millionaire life, which is most of us, know the truth. Insurers, for example, deny that prosthetic limbs are necessary, figuring that people can be just as productive and active in wheelchairs, on peg legs and with hooks for hands.

Things will change, someday. The question is can it be managed to bring about a fairer society without a lot of turmoil.

The easy fix is to tax the billionaires down to a merely obscene level of wealth, to bring taxation back to 1950s levels and to tax capital gains over a certain amount as ordinary income (and pay into Social security). But since the billionaires have captured the incoming administration and one of them owns the GOP, I don't see it changing. Trump and his circle want to bring back 1890s America, where workers didn't have unions, worked for pittance wages and the plutocrats lived free and untaxed lives. But what they may get is 1790s France, where the plutocrats got separated from their heads.

The Joy of Living in Red States

Lesser pay, lesser rates of education and higher rates of spousal abuse, poverty, teen pregnancies, homicides, suicides, divorce, addiction, poor water, bad air, homelessness and so much more!

It all stems from rich bosses exploiting poorly-paid workers and conning them into voting against their own interests. But sometimes, just sometimes, they don't.

Widdle Elon Sets Fire to at Least $24 Billion.

And it may be as high as $32 billion, for that is about what he and his asshole financial genius buddies have lost since they bought Twitter.

Bartender, a round of your finest Schadenfreude for the house. Put it on Jack Dorsey's tab.

A Modest Proposal

It is this: Gather all the tech guys, crypto tycoons and venture capitalists in one spot on a remote deserted luxury island, ply them with liquor and cocaine, and then:

Why?

They want to "gamify" grocery shopping, with "dynamic pricing" that could change in milliseconds and even change depending on the shopper. They'd know who you are and figure that you could pay $40 for a large pack of toilet paper and the person behind you might pay $30.

None of this is good for consumers. It's all about making the population into digital serfs and permitting the corporate overlords to scrape every last sou out of our pockets.

While it may be hard to persuade people to go along with detonating some nukes to take care of these assholes, let's get a law passed that it shall be perfectly legal to sack and burn any store that employs these technologies.

I wrote this over a dozen years ago. I stand behind every word.

Fucking Over the Customers for Fun and Profit is What American Corporations Do

Southwest Airlines is to allow customers to reserve seats, scrapping the free-for-all of unassigned seating it has operated for 50 years.

The company said it also planned to charge for "premium" seats with more leg room, add red-eye flights, and redesign its boarding system.

The announcements came as the firm reported that profits plunged in the April-June period to $367m, down 46% compared with last year.

Chief executive Bob Jordan said the seating changes would "unlock new sources of revenue".
...
It had been known as a holdout in the industry for not hitting customers with extra fees for items such as checked baggage.

But its share price has dropped sharply over the last few years, as its profitability lags others in the industry.
...
"Although our unique open seating model has been a part of Southwest Airlines since our inception... this is the right choice - at the right time - for our customers, our people, and our shareholders," Mr Jordan said.

Shares in the firm rose more than 6% after the announcement.

Let's be clear about it: Jordan doesn't give a rat's ass about the employees or the customers. It's all about the share price. It's all about raping the customers as hard as they can to maximize revenue and please Wall Street.

MBAs and banksters have ruined this country. They've wrecked Boeing, they've made the other airlines into flying shitshows and now they're coming for the last airline that actually gave a shit about its passengers.

If you can't drive to where you're going, I respectfully suggest that you stay the fuck home.

Don't Worry, Some Fucker's Getting Rich Off of This Deal; Boeing Ed.

Boeing announced plans to acquire key supplier Spirit AeroSystems for $4.7 billion, a move that it says will improve plane quality and safety amid increasing scrutiny by Congress, airlines and the Department of Justice.

Boeing previously owned Spirit, and the purchase would reverse a longtime Boeing strategy of outsourcing key work on its passenger planes. That approach has been criticized as problems at Spirit disrupted production and delivery of popular Boeing jetliners, including 737s and 787s.

“We believe this deal is in the best interest of the flying public, our airline customers, the employees of Spirit and Boeing, our shareholders and the country more broadly,” Boeing President and CEO Dave Calhoun said in a statement late Sunday.

Boeing didn't "previously own Spirit." Spirit didn't exist, it was Boeing's Wichita Division. They spun it off because some of those assholes could make a boatload of money doing that (and break the union contracts) and now those same assholes are going to make even more money re-absorbing it. Calhoun is lying through his immaculately cared-for choppers: Boeing doesn't give a damn about "the flying public" and hasn't in the last three decades. They'd happily crash a fully-loaded 737 once every quarter if doing so made their stock price go up.

Zombies; Corporate Ed.

They are called zombies, companies so laden with debt that they are just stumbling by on the brink of survival, barely able to pay even the interest on their loans and often just a bad business hit away from dying off for good.

An Associated Press analysis found their numbers have soared to nearly 7,000 publicly traded companies around the world — 2,000 in the United States alone — whiplashed by years of piling up cheap debt followed by stubborn inflation that has pushed borrowing costs to decade highs.

And now many of these mostly small and mid-sized walking wounded could soon be facing their day of reckoning, with due dates looming on hundreds of billions of dollars of loans they may not be able to pay back.

“They’re going to get crushed,” Valens Securities Managing Director Robert Spivey said of the weakest zombies.

A bunch of those companies engaged in financial fuckery: They bought back lots of stock, which pumped up the stock price short-term, and the top executives took huge payouts. As the article described, such shenanigans got the top three execs at Bed Bath & Beyond $140 million in bonuses, but the stock price flatlined and the company failed.

Maybe when the DoJ gets done with Hunter Biden, they can go after those thieves. But I'm not holding my breath.

Spike This Shit

Capital One Financial is buying Discover Financial Services for $35 billion, in a deal that would bring together two of the nation’s biggest lenders and credit card issuers.

I have seen very few of these horizontal mergers of any stripe that benefit the American people. Such mergers end up with everyone paying more for whatever that industry produces. The only ones those mergers benefit are the vulture capitalists and the banksters, the same pack of economic saboteurs who have been ripping apart and devouring this country's economic base for decades.

If there is any regulatory input on this merger, the regulators should stomp on the proponents's dicks with golfing shoes. Figuratively, of course.

Because hanging them en masse in Battery Park would be wrong.

More Price-Fixing

An Illinois jury ruled this week that several major egg producers conspired to limit the U.S.'s supply of eggs in order to raise prices in a case stemming from a federal lawsuit originally filed 12 years ago.

Several large food manufacturing companies including Kraft Foods Global, Inc. and The Kellogg Company alleged in the lawsuit originally filed in 2011 that producers used various means to limit the U.S. domestic supply of eggs to increase the prices of eggs and egg products during the 2000s. The time frame of the conspiracy was an issue throughout the case; jurors ultimately determined damages occurred between 2004-2008.

A jury unanimously delivered its verdict Tuesday in the Northern District of Illinois and damages will be decided in a trial scheduled for next week.

The suppliers include the family company of an Indiana egg farmer running for the U.S. Senate in the state.

And, guess what? He's a Repubican.

Some Capitalists Deserve a Final Ride in a Tumbrel

The brass of Dutch Company Royal Phillips, including CEO Roy Jakobs, which, with full knowledge, kept selling CPAP machines even though their own scientists had discovered critical risks to the users. The company had thousands of complaints about the machines and kept them secret for over a decade.

This was basically Exploding Ford Pinto logic at work.

A Really Stable Genius

Imagine this: There's a technology company that has been around awhile. In that sector, its name has global recognition. It has a logo that is recognized by at leasst a billion people. A fairly common verb has become shorthand for using the company's website.

So what does your garden-variety stable genius do? He buys the company, trashes about 70% of its value and then changes the name and logo.

Even that was done with no regard for the law when it comes to doing work on buildings.

At Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, meanwhile, workers were seen removing the iconic bird and logo Monday until police showed up and stopped them because they didn’t have the proper permits and didn’t tape off the sidewalk to keep pedestrians safe if anything fell.

If there was somebody running the building who knew the rules, chances are that the Fat Turdlet either ordered them to do it anyway or had fired that person beforehand.

I'm semi-surprised that he hasn't tried to sue Marvel Comics over the term "X-Men" because he clearly thinks that he owns that letter.

My guess is that, if B-schools have a class "don't be like this moron", that he's going to feature in it within a few years.

Bribing,er, Doing Favors for a Supreme Court Justice is Apparently a Legit Business Expense

It seems that Clarence the Grifting Justice's ol' asshole buddy, Harlan Crow, deducted the costs of hosting Clarence on a yacht trip.

It's a tad bit more complicated than that but that's the gist of it. Crow used his "yachting business" to generate losses, so he could take the costs of his toy off his taxes.

Official announcement: I no longer give a fuck about people cheating on welfare, unemployment or workers' comp. If the uber-rich can cheat the system with impunity, poor and working-class people should, too.

If You Are an Employee of the State of Florida, DeSantis Has Been Raiding Your Pension Fund to Benefit His Donors

Despite a federal anti-corruption rule designed to prevent donors from receiving pension investments, private equity executives have donated millions to political groups supporting DeSantis, all while the governor oversaw the transfer of more than $1 billion of Florida public employees’ retirement dollars into these donors’ high-fee, high-risk “alternative investments.”

A Lever review found that had the state pension fund instead been invested in a simple, low-cost index fund, compared to its present mix of holdings, teachers, police officers, and other state employees would have about $10 billion more in their retirement funds.

It's a cute little scheme. DeSantis steered pension funds to Wall Street fund managers who run high-fee investments. Those fund managers then made donations to the Republican Governors' Association which, in turn, donates to Desantis's campaign fund.

DeSantis gets his campaign money, his donors make a shitload of money and the only people who get screwed are the state employees.

Do You Provide Data to ADS-B Exchange?

ADS-B Exchange has been an open-source provider of flight information. People around the world have set up stations that collect ADS-B data and then transmits it to ADS-B's servers. The commercial flight tracking companies buy their data from the FAA, which censors it. ADS-B didn't, so you could see anyone who was in the air.

But now, ADS-B Exchange has been sold to some skeevy private-equity firm. Because one guy had set up the site and owned it, he cashed out. Everyone pretty much assumes that the new owners will try to charge people to see the data on the site and will also censor the data of rich people who don't like the unwashed masses seeing where they go. People like Mr. Bonesaw and Elon the Loosely Tuned, for two examples.

So, as you might imagine, that hasn't gone over too well. ADS-B Exchange depends entirely on volunteers, people who put together somewhat eeasy-to-build ADS-B receivers and tiny computers to send in the data. Volunteers often don't take well to people making bank off of their efforts, so people are unplugging from ADS-B Exchange.

With any luck, the private-equity guys will end up having bought an empty sack.

Fuck those guys and the greedy mofo who took their money.

More Corporate Fuckery

Restaurants have been funnelling part of the fees paid by workers for mandatory training to a lobbyist operation to keep worker's pay low. This particular brand of evil fuckery is done by a company named ServSafe. That company once was run by a charitable organization, but the restaurant association bought it with the clear aim of using the profits generated by ServSafe to lobby against paying workers more.

The profits are high from those courses, which are mandatory in some states, because the courses are done online and each additional participant paus $15 and the courses cost the company pennies.

About the only thing that would be more evil is if a kid had to take an online Bar/Bat Mitzvah training course from a company that was owned by David Duke and Nick Fuentes.

NYT Strike

Their newsroom is on a one-day strike.

Whether or not to observe a digital picket line is your call.

Yeah, Like Nobody Saw That Coming

Elon Musk announced he will walk away from his tumultuous $44 billion offer to buy Twitter, leaving the deal on the verge of collapse. The Tesla CEO sent a letter to Twitter’s board Friday saying he is terminating the acquisition.

But Twitter isn’t accepting Musk’s declaration. The chair of Twitter’s board, Bret Taylor, tweeted in response that the board is “committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”

Color me shocked (not).

When You’re a Billionaire, Government Will Do Your Legal Work For You, Gratis

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Monday he is investigating Twitter over its reporting of how many accounts on the platform are from bots and fake users, saying the company may be misrepresenting the number to inflate its value and raise its revenue.

So Musk threatens to walk over the issue of how many bots are on Twitter, and Paxton falls all over himself to help Musk out.

If that doesn't smell like favoritism/corruption, I don't know what does.