More Shit Comin'

Let's just say I trust these pricks about as far I can spit a bowling ball.

The rhetoric is always so sweet and the "deals" are always sold as being for the greater benefit of the state local economies and blah blah blah.

We've seen it a hundred times before.

So color me a deep dark shade of suspicious. The giant corporations have been peddling this bullshit for at least a coupla generations now, and what we're left with is a rapidly shrinking middle class and ruling elites who keep externalizing their costs with the help of coin-operated politicians and captive regulators.

You want to do something big? OK, but you get to pay for it. You own the risk, and you eat the cost. That's how we do things here.

Wanna do something amazing? Fine, but you show me exactly what you're committing to in terms of financing, and protecting me and my neighbors from the inevitable shit that always rolls down the hill into our yards.

Wanna get good and drunk? Great, but you don't put your drinks on my tab, and you pay for your own goddamned Uber to get your sorry ass home.

I'm sick to fucking death of helping rich people fatten up their bank accounts.



More data centers are coming to Colorado, demanding more power than they’ll need. Will customers foot the bill?

Colorado regulators want rules in place to shield ordinary household and business customers from getting stuck paying for increased generating and transmission capacity

The data centers are coming. The question is how many will there be and who will pay for the power and transmission they need?

In Colorado and across the country utilities are beginning to take steps — mainly through special tariffs for large-load customers — to try to answer both questions and in doing so protect consumers.

The Colorado Public Utilities Commission is requiring Xcel Energy, the state’s largest electricity provider, to use a set of “principles” when negotiating with data center developers, including upfront fees, 15-year contracts, minimum bills, security deposits and early-exit fees.

The Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, the wholesale power provider for electric cooperatives in four states including 15 in Colorado, is also developing a “large-load tariff” with similar protections.

The PUC also directed Xcel Energy to file a proposal for a large-load tariff in January that will be more binding than the principles, which are negotiating points.

What is happening in Colorado is part of a trend as at least 36 utilities — from Dominion Energy in Virginia to Wisconsin Electric Power to Arizona Public Service — have adopted large-load tariffs.

And while these tariffs are a start, consumer advocates and industry analysts caution that they may not completely protect residential and small commercial customers from data center-related costs.

“They do get rid of stranded costs and help with ratepayer burden,” said Sarp Ozkan, a vice president at the energy analytics firm Enverus. “They also do get rid of a lot more of the speculative projects, which we know has been a big driver of the expected volumes.”

“So, I think, these tariffs are heading in the right direction,” Ozkan said.

One basic problem is that data center projects are filing for more power than they will ultimately need and filing the same project with multiple utilities — “site shopping” — to find where they can connect to the grid most quickly.

About 90 gigawatts of peak data center demand requests are expected to be filed nationally between now and 2030, but only 65 GW will be needed, according to power sector consultant Gridwise Strategies.

The risk is if a utility builds or contracts for power and the data center doesn’t get built, the rest of the customers will end up footing the bill.

This is apparently what happened when Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric Power subsidiaries — in Indiana, West Virginia and Kentucky — acquired 750 megawatts of generating capacity for data centers that didn’t materialize, creating stranded costs.

Georgia is one of the hotbeds of data center development with 147 in the Atlanta area — 26 under construction and 52 more planned — according to the Data Center Map and data center consultant Baxtel.

Georgia Power in September told state regulators that in the previous 90 days 6 gigawatts of large-load projects were cancelled. A GW is enough electricity to power up to 750,000 average households.

Xcel Energy’s subsidiary — Public Service Company of Colorado — is projecting large-load customers will make up two-thirds of its new electricity demand and said it will need 950 MW of new generation to serve these customers over the next five years.

Between October 2024 and last May, however, seven potential Xcel Energy data customers projecting 4 GW of load withdrew service requests and more than a dozen new prospects with 3.5 GW of load filed service requests, according to a filing with the PUC.

Since then, one of Xcel Energy’s largest potential large-load customers withdrew its request for service, the PUC said.

“Public Service is in the best position to know the likelihood of the large loads actually connecting to its system,” the PUC said. “Yet in its more recent positions … the company stated it is unwilling to share the financial risk of the large loads ultimately not materializing.”

Data centers want proof of power. PUC wants proof they’ll show up to use it.
Colorado has 60 data centers with 49 in the Denver area and seven in Colorado Springs, according to the Data Center Map. While Georgia is the site for large-scale or hyperscale-data centers, each demanding from 120 MW to 1,800 MW of power, Colorado as a secondary market is home to smaller facilities.

One hyperscale data center is being built by QTS Realty Trust in Aurora. When completed, its 177-megawatt capacity will make it Xcel Energy’s single largest customer. For the most part Colorado has smaller colocation data centers which use 18 MW to 40 MW.

Colocation data centers — where companies lease computing power — are being built or expanded in the state by several companies — including CoreSites, Flexential and Novva Data Center.

In its 2024 electric resource plan Xcel Energy initially proposed adding 12,000 to 14,000 MW of new generation, projecting 19% increase in peak demand to 8.6 GW by 2031. The company said it will need to spend $22 billion by 2040 to keep up with demand

“We asked for what we thought we needed,” said Robert Kenney, CEO of Xcel Energy’s Colorado subsidiary.

The company in its PUC filings argued it faces a “chicken and egg” dilemma because data center developers won’t sign unless they are sure they can get necessary power, but the PUC wants them to sign before Xcel Energy seeks that generating capacity.

“Allowing the Company to procure a surplus of new generation to attract prospective large customers places an unacceptable amount of risk on the existing customers,” the commission said.

Concerned over the impact on rates and the risk of over-building, à la American Electric Power, the PUC set the new generation in the Xcel Energy electric resource plan approved November at 6,000 MW, with a second pool of projects if needed.

“Existing customers should not be required to bear higher electricity rates if large loads withdraw their interconnection requests, nor should existing customers be required to subsidize the cost of serving new large loads,” the PUC said in approving the plan.

Data centers should have “skin in the game”

The commission said it wanted data center developers to have “skin in the game” before Xcel Energy committed to new generation and transmission lines.

To that end, the commission included in the resource plan a protective set of “principles,” initially proposed by the company, in an effort to protect consumers.

The principles, the PUC said, would apply to any customer needing 50 MW or more of power. (Xcel Energy wanted the threshold set at 100 MW.) Each would need to provide a $250,000 non-refundable study deposit and a cash security deposit or letter of credit.

The data center would have to commit to a 15-year contract and early-exit fee equal to 75% of all the electricity the facility would have used over the life of the contract.

Xcel Energy could not include the new data center in its load forecast until the center signed agreements for electric service and for a connection to the grid.

Since these are only principles, it is left to Xcel Energy to negotiate terms with data center developers, but the commission warned that if the utility “negotiates away these approved commercial principles and a large customer does not materialize as expected, Public Service may share the risk associated with the shortfall in expected revenues.”

The agreements Xcel Energy and a data center developer strike could be supplanted when a new large-load tariff is approved sometime in 2026.

“We just need some clarity,” Jack Ihle, Xcel’s regional vice president for regulatory policy. “We have customers who want to connect to the grid.”

New data centers, however, don’t have to be all risk and no upside.

“Having new data centers in the greater Denver area is a benefit to the local and state economy,” Andrew Klein, CEO of the Westside Property Investment Company, said in PUC testimony on behalf of the East Metro Area Business Coalition.

“Additional tax revenues flowing to the state will benefit the state as a whole and make Colorado more attractive to other business sectors reliant on tech services,” Klein said.

Will Toor, the executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, said the aim is to promote economic development while ensuring that costs aren’t being shifted to other customers.

“Another factor to keep in mind on this is the potential role that load growth can play in actually helping with rates for all customers,” Toor said.

“As we look out at the future of the grid, there are investments that are going to be needed in things like wildfire resiliency, that are likely needed to some extent, regardless of the level of load,” he said.

The bigger the load the more those costs will be spread out among the customers even potentially lowering residential bills “if the rates are property set,” Toor said.

"No, really - we're acting in your best interests - like all mega-corporations and the ultra-wealthy. C'mon, you can trust us."

Separating the real proposals from the speculative ones

Tri-State — which serves 41 rural electric cooperatives in Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico — has at least 10 proposals for large data centers across its service area, with an estimated 7 GW of demand.

“They keep coming,” said Lisa Tiffin, Tri-State’s chief commercial officer. “I am not sure of the exact number now, but a few more have flown our way.”

Tri-State is regulated by the Federal Energy Regulation Commission and in August the association submitted a proposed binding tariff for data centers and other large-load customers to FERC.

“Tri-State’s existing resource and member planning processes are insufficient to handle the magnitude of applications,” the association told the commission.

Tri-State’s proposed tariff would apply to loads of 45 MW or more and require an evaluation fee based on the size of the project. For a 45-MW project the fee would be $80,000, for a 100-MW project it would be $150,000 and for 200-MW $250,000.

The data center would have to commit to minimum energy and minimum demand charges, a security deposit of $2.7 million for each project MW and a 15-year contract.

Tri-State is a wholesaler providing power to its member co-ops and its initial proposal included requirements between cooperatives and developers, which are considered retail sales. As a result the FERC rejected the tariff.

Tri-State is “going to lift out” the co-op requirements and address some other issues the FERC identified and resubmit the tariff in February. “We actually took the ruling as a good sign,” Tiffin said.

The mechanisms Xcel Energy and Tri-State are using to manage the cost and impacts of data centers — long-term contracts, upfront fees, security deposits and exit fees — are similar to those employed across the country, said Enverus’ Ozkan, who has evaluated 94 large-load tariffs.

They create a bar that separates real projects from speculative ones, he said. American Electric Power’s Ohio subsidiary has a tariff that Enverus estimates can add nearly $10 million in first-year costs for a 100 MW facility.

“It’s clearing the queue” of projects, Ozkan said. “So, we’ve seen that it is effective in weeding out some of the speculative positions.”

Consumers aren’t shielded from all the extra costs

These tariffs, however, still leave consumers potentially liable for some costs, analysts and consumer advocates say.

The 75% minimum bill in Xcel Energy’s principles, for example, could leave other customers on the hook for the remaining 25%, said Joseph Pereira, deputy director of the Colorado Office of the Utility Consumer Advocate.

“It’s impossible to fully segregate out all the costs,” Pereira said. “There is always some risk.”

A bigger risk may come from a fundamental “mismatch between the two industries,” Ozkan said. “It kind of covers the gamut.”


Data center developers are looking to get facilities up and running in 18 to 24 months, but it can take three to five years to build new generating capacity and transmission. The queues to get connected to the grid in some places are already three to five years long.


“So, there’s already a mismatch there between the generation and the load size, expectations of timing,” Ozkan said.

Data center developers are facing the need to undertake multiple cycles of intense and increasingly expensive capital expenditure within a single lease term, posing considerable tenant churn risks, according to a report from the Center for Public Enterprise.

They also face the risk of new generations of technology replacing the existing one, cash flows that are uncertain and debt playing a bigger role in financing, the Center report said.

All this leads to moving with dispatch while the utility sector plods along. Xcel Energy got the green light to add 6,000 MW of new capacity in November, while it is still fulfilling the capacity from its 2021 plan.

The PJM Interconnect is the nation’s largest grid — serving Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states — and in November its independent market monitor, Monitor Analytics, filed a complaint with FERC seeking to bar the grid from adding any more data centers until it builds more generating capacity.

And even if the new large-load tariffs are implemented, they do not cover all the costs of new infrastructure, according to Ben Hertz-Shargel, head of grid analysis at the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.

“When you look at what it costs to develop a gas plant, and you compare it to what these utilities are charging customers or proposing to charge, there’s a gap,” Hertz-Shargel said in a podcast.

In addition, new power plants and transmission are generally paid off over 20 to 25 years, while the data center contracts range from 10 to 15 years, potentially leaving other customers paying off the tail end of the amortization. An early exit from a contract would make it worse.

“The company leaves for whatever reason, and then all of a sudden, silently, deep, deep in a proceeding, you will see a line item of ‘allocated across customer classes,’” Hertz-Shargel said. “So, they may feel it later, but it won’t be this big clear, bright light saying, ‘You have been charged because you failed to foresee this.’”

These are the kind of issues that must be hashed out before the PUC next year in the large-load tariff proceedings to replace Xcel Energy’s principles, said Clare Valentine, a senior policy advisor at the environmental policy group Western Resource Advocates.

“This commission decision really represents the first step in setting these guardrails to protect Coloradans,” Valentine said, “but this is just the beginning of what we need to do to change policies to respond to this large load growth environment.”

Welcome

...to late-stage capitalism.

It's a fight between the New Robber Barons, who see you as nothing but a revenue opportunity, versus the woke mind virus that wants you to get help when you need it so your loved ones can get what they need to go on living.

The Dream

Trump actually said it - "The American dream is dead."

At the time (his 1st inauguration - the American Carnage speech), I thought it was more of his usual bombast about "everything sucks without me - only I can fix it" and blah blah blah.

I failed to apply my own Daddy State Awareness filter - ie: employ Opposite Speak, &/or issue a "warning" that's actually a threat, and that he's in the process of doing what he's warning us about.

So let's take a look at what our valiant Über-Capitalists have been up to.

“We’ve Been Sold a Story That Isn’t Remotely True”: How Private-Equity Billionaires Killed the American Dream

In her new book, Bad Company, journalist Megan Greenwell shows how the secretive industry has insinuated itself into average Americans’ lives.

In the canon of spectacular resignations, Megan Greenwell’s is up there.

On her last day as editor in chief of the beloved sports blog Deadspin, Greenwell published a blistering essay on the site about her soon-to-be former bosses at the private-equity firm Great Hill Partners, which had acquired Deadspin and other former Gawker properties earlier in 2019. In the essay, Greenwell accused Great Hill of undermining Deadspin’s staff at every turn and seeking a “quick cash-out” on its investment.

And it wasn’t just happening at Deadspin, Greenwell explained: “A metastasizing swath of media is controlled by private-equity vultures and capricious billionaires and other people who genuinely believe that they are rich because they are smart and that they are smart because they are rich, and that anyone less rich is by definition less smart.”

She’d written the post mostly for her own catharsis, Greenwell told Vanity Fair. But the response to it stunned her, as more than 1,000 messages poured in, many of them from readers who shared their own stories of how the private-equity industry had, in various ways, upended their lives too.

“It made me obsessive about reading about this, because I wanted to understand what had happened to me and to my coworkers and to my friends, and I realized that the only way to do that was by treating this as a reporting project,” Greenwell said.

Nearly six years later, Greenwell has funneled what she learned into a new book, Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream. The book is a deeply human account of the ways in which the multitrillion-dollar private-equity industry affected four different people: a Toys“R”Us supervisor who was laid off alongside the company’s 33,000 employees after the company declared bankruptcy following a private-equity acquisition; a rural doctor who watched private-equity ownership strip his Wyoming hospital of crucial services; a local reporter who helped lead union negotiations as private-equity-owned Gannett gutted newsrooms across the country; and an affordable-housing organizer whose own family suffered under a private-equity-industry landlord.

The book follows how private-equity firms like KKR, Bain Capital, Apollo Global Management, and more saddle the companies they acquire with insurmountable debt, even as the firms themselves profit. It also explores how each character in the book is fighting back against this model.

While Bad Company articulates how the industry works, its greater goal is to illustrate how the decisions the industry makes in the pursuit of profit influence us all. Greenwell spoke to Vanity Fair about who gets rich in private-equity takeovers, who gets hurt, and why no one in Washington seems willing to do much about it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Vanity Fair: I was grateful to you for writing a book about finance that doesn’t read like a book about finance. It’s about four people before, during, and after private equity came into their lives. Why did you want to structure it that way?

Megan Greenwell: It was really important to show what came before private equity, because I think there’s an unfair line of critique that really blames them for everything. In the industries I focus on—retail, housing, health care, and local media—private equity didn’t create the problem. It’s important to draw that out and talk about the mistakes that those industry leaders made that ushered private equity in the door. On the other end, I felt like it was incredibly important to show efforts to build something new. I am not an activist. I did not want to write a prescriptive book, but I also didn’t want to write a book that was like: Man, this all sucks.

Why did you decide to ground it in the stories of these people?

I really love books that go deeply inside a company. When McKinsey Comes to Town was such a brilliant business book. It is also just so not the type of reporter I am. I am not, ultimately, that compelled in my own work by getting inside a glass skyscraper and showing how decisions are made. What is most compelling to me is the effect on real people. I thought that was the only way I could not only get readers compelled by this sometimes dull but important topic, but also excite myself about it.

In terms of potential characters, I would say I talked to over 150 people in these four industries. So I was incredibly picky, because I knew that if readers weren’t compelled by these people themselves, then they weren’t going to hang with the book.

The central tension of the book is about the disconnect between what serves private-equity firms and what serves the communities that surround the businesses they buy. I’d love you to spell out how that disconnect manifests.

Leveraged buyouts are a huge percentage of what private equity does. The basic way leveraged buyouts work is that the private-equity firm bundles together money from their outside investors—university endowments, pension funds, ultrawealthy individuals. But that only ends up making up a small minority of the total money they use to acquire a company. The rest of the money is bank loans, and those bank loans are assigned not to the private-equity firm that made the decision to borrow that money, but to the company that they are acquiring.

So if I make an offer for your company, and I’m borrowing money to buy it, I’m not responsible for paying that money back; only you are. You end up with this complete divorce of incentives, where what is good for the private-equity firm is not necessarily what’s good for the portfolio company.

In industries that are real estate heavy—hospitals, retail, newspapers—private-equity firms will sell off the real estate assets of those companies to pocket the proceeds themselves. Then the portfolio company has to pay rent on the same land that they may have owned for years or decades. Now you have a situation where the private-equity firm is doing great because they’re collecting their management fees, plus they got this tidy little profit from the real estate sale, but their portfolio company is buried under debt from the acquisition and also rent payments where they previously owned their land outright.

You see the two paths start to diverge. The private-equity company is winning, and the portfolio company is getting weaker and weaker and weaker. That was the thing that really broke my brain.

You rattle off all the private-equity-owned chains that went under during the 2010s: Claire’s, Payless, Kmart, and many more stores of my youth. You also write that most of the biggest retail bankruptcies between 2012 and 2019 were private-equity-owned companies, and there was huge growth in private-equity ownership of housing during this time. What made this growth possible during that period of the 2010s?

There was a lot of cheap money available. Zero percent interest rates were super compelling to everybody. Beyond that, the exact factors were a little different for each industry. In some cases, these were industries that were booming. The Affordable Care Act really helped draw private equity into health care, because there was a bigger guaranteed pool of money.

The opposite of health care might be retail, where, at the time, a lot of these retail deals were done. Everybody could see that retail was likely to be an industry with some serious struggles in the relatively near future. Toys“R”Us was purchased in 2005, and Amazon was already growing really, really fast. Walmart was already very dominant.

If you were to set out and write a book about another industry, say the tech industry, and its impact on the world, it would probably hyperfocus on tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. It seems to me that there are no analogous household names in the private-equity space. Why is that?

A lot of people know the names of big private-equity guys, but they could not tell you that they are big private-equity guys. If you look around New York City, so many institutions are named after them. Henry Kravis, for example, of KKR, has multiple things at Mount Sinai named after him. He’s on the board of multiple cultural institutions. That’s a name that you see in the world, but I think you could ask 100 random New Yorkers who Henry Kravis is, and even if they’d seen his name, 95 of them are not going to be able to tell you.

I think that’s very much by design. Private equity is an industry that wants to continue to operate in the shadows. In so many cases, there’s so many layers of shell companies that you actually can’t figure out which private-equity firm owns what. I think that’s worked to the private-equity world’s advantage in huge ways. There’s just a little less scrutiny on you.

There’s certainly a narrative that private equity exists to rescue distressed companies and maximize shareholder value, which then benefits the pensioners and universities whose money is invested in private-equity funds, so everyone wins. What does the research say about the reality of that promise?

The one stat that’s really lodged in my brain is that 20% of companies acquired by private equity enter bankruptcy proceedings within 10 years, compared to 2% of other types of other companies. There is this narrative that the private-equity industry is made up of, essentially, superheroes who can come in and save struggling companies, and the data just shows that it is the opposite.

If you ask private-equity people about this stat, they will say, “But we buy companies that are already struggling!” But they’re buying companies that are struggling while claiming that they are the people who can save the company. It doesn’t make sense that there would be such a vast difference between the number of companies that go out of business under any other kind of ownership versus what happens when, allegedly, the smartest people in the finance world take over. We’ve been sold a story that isn’t remotely true.

There’s a 2023 study you cite that found that in three years after a hospital’s private-equity acquisition, the rate of preventable medical issues increased significantly. What are some examples of that?

In Wyoming, after Apollo Global Management bought these two hospitals and combined them into one—which meant, realistically, stripping the vast majority of services from one in particular—all sorts of terrible things happened. People just could not get the services they needed in an emergency in their hometown anymore. I’m not talking about advanced, specialized care that was never available at a rural hospital. I’m talking, all of a sudden, they couldn’t deliver babies anymore.

One of the two hospitals also eliminated its mental health ward, which was the only mental health facility in the entire county. All of a sudden, mental health patients were now in the hospital with other kinds of patients. They did not have the staffing or the facilities they needed to correctly treat mental health patients while protecting everybody involved.

In November 2020, there was a psychiatric patient at the hospital who was just in a regular room with no security guards, and he ran into the room of an elderly woman who was also being treated in the hospital and began gouging out her eyes with his fingers, and nobody stopped him until he had fully removed one of her eyes. The woman died of these injuries in what was declared a homicide.

Everybody knows when you cut staffing and cut supplies and all of these things, there are going to be negative consequences. This was just the worst possible outcome.

You call private equity the “prom queen” of DC, because donors on both sides of the aisle are so heavily represented in the industry. Do you have any hope that reform is possible?

There have been a variety of proposals at the federal level to regulate private equity, and those have ranged from pretty minimally invasive to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Stop Wall Street Looting Act, which she has proposed several times, which would functionally regulate the industry out of existence.

Thus far, none of those have made a ton of progress. Even things like closing the carried-interest loophole, which nobody in private equity wants, would not cripple their ability to do their jobs. Yet that has not passed, despite Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump, now twice, saying that loophole should be closed.

I don’t think there’s a lot of likelihood of serious regulation at the federal level anytime soon. That said, there is some interesting stuff happening on the state level in several places.

Massachusetts recently passed a bill increasing scrutiny of private-equity deals in health care, and Pennsylvania is now considering a very similar bill. Those two bills both grew directly out of catastrophic private-equity deals. In both Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, there have been recent collapses of health care companies that were owned by private equity. I think we will start to see more of that kind of progress, because I don’t think the number of catastrophes is likely to slow anytime soon.

Since you said you didn’t want to write this book about how everything sucks, what, if anything, is giving you a little bit of optimism?

I do not really have opinions on what is the best way to reform this system, but I think it’s pretty hard to look at the totality of the evidence and not conclude that the system is really broken. So to me, when people are doing something, it is a reason for some sort of optimism.

All four of the protagonists in my book are doing something. This is a huge problem, and it is necessarily going to require a multifaceted set of solutions. So fighting for legal changes is one. Lawsuits is a related but different one. Going head-to-head with the companies themselves is one. One of the protagonists in my book spent months going around to various pension fund board meetings, trying to convince them to seriously consider no longer investing in private-equity funds.

A lot of the work also has to be in reinventing industries. Private equity did not create the problems of any of these industries. Even regulating private equity out of existence would not suddenly turn those industries into healthy ones. The journalist character in my book spent basically her entire career working for Gannett, which was owned by a private-equity firm. And she made a pivot to go into nonprofit local news start-ups. A lot of the work that is most exciting to me is the people who are like, “Hey, how do we build something better?” It’s not all going to work, but without that kind of spirit of experimentation, nothing better is ever going to come.

Brace For Impact

There's this thing they teach in Econ 101 (and any given Marketing Seminar) called elasticity.

Trump's tariffs are in effect, and the last un-tariffed cargo ship we're expecting from China sailed a week or two ago.

It takes 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 weeks for the goods to sail o'er the bounding main, and then another week or more to get the stuff from the ports to the local Walmart.

So we can expect interruptions and delays and shortages and higher prices beginning in a month or so.

But one other thing about elasticity: even if Trump manages to get his head out of his ass long enough to think up some bullshit story about how he won The Great Patriotic Trade War, shit doesn't just suddenly get put right, and we're back to normal overnight.

First, other countries in the world - some we call "friend" - have been itchin' for a chance to fuck us over for a very long time. New trade deals that exclude the US are being worked out right now, and there's more than a fair probability that the rest of the world takes this opportunity to hedge their bets and not "get back to normal" - not when the US can so easily become unreliable.

Second, Capitalism leans pretty heavily on the notion of "scarcity" to keep their prices high in order to maximize shareholder value. There's a whole big bunch of companies creaming their jeans over the prospect of milking this problem for every nickel they can squeeze out of it, and plenty of them will never go "back to normal" because they're learning that lots of us will just sit here and take it. So don't expect prices to go back down once this shit is over - because they're going to find a way to keep us hangin' for as long as they can.

The Point

When Howard Lutnick railed about the American dream not being about buying cheap goods from China, that wasn't criticism or a call to greatness - that was him telling us what Republicans intend to do to American workers.

GOP policies have been aimed at making us all "Chinese peasants" for 50 years - and they're not even trying to disguise it now.

A coalition of hundreds of employers is asking the Trump administration to override the NLRB and dictate labor law

With the Trump administration implementing a blizzard of anti-worker initiatives on a near-daily basis, it’s difficult to imagine that these early assaults could be only the tip of the iceberg. But President Trump and billionaire Elon Musk may well have far worse plans to attack U.S. workers and labor relations.

One little-seen proposal from outside the White House has the potential to upend our entire system of labor relations. It comes from the “Coalition for a Democratic Workplace” (CDW)—an anti-union trade association of several hundred employers and employer associations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers. The coalition sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi asking her to repudiate and invalidate more than a dozen major decisions issued by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) during the Biden administration, and to instruct all NLRB appointees and employees that they cannot treat these properly issued decisions as governing law.

The decisions in question address important issues like which workers have the right to form and join a union and what remedies are available to workers who are illegally fired in retaliation for exercising their rights in the workplace. Like all decisions issued by the NLRB—a multi-member body that acts as a court to adjudicate labor disputes—they were issued after full briefing and consideration of the issues and are treated as precedent governing subsequent cases.

Ordinarily, the way employers try to get the NLRB to change a decision they disagree with is to challenge the decision on appeal. Many of the decisions identified in the memo have been challenged, and those court proceedings are in progress. Employers also have the ability to argue to the Board in future cases that it should revisit its own precedent. The NLRB would then consider the issue and arguments and decide whether to change its earlier decision. This process comports with the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which requires agencies to engage in “reasoned decision-making” when deciding cases. In other words, the agency has to explain itself when it changes course—it can’t just declare a new rule.

In what would be a radical—and clearly unlawful—departure from these well-established avenues for appeal, the employer coalition has asked Pam Bondi—who has no background or experience in labor relations—to unilaterally invalidate more than a dozen NLRB decisions with the stroke of a pen. While there is nothing in the National Labor Relations Act or any other federal law giving the attorney general any authority to overturn a NLRB decision, CDW cites President Trump’s executive order on independent agencies as authority for this action. That executive order purports to give the attorney general the authority to impose their own interpretation of any law onto independent agencies like the NLRB.

This dangerous suggestion is clearly unlawful in numerous respects. First, it completely undermines Congress’s directive that the NLRB functions as an independent agency, with labor disputes adjudicated by a panel of experts insulated from political influence. Second, if the agency did comply with this directive and revert to the law as it existed prior to the targeted decisions, any decisions following this earlier law would clearly run afoul of the Administrative Procedure Act, as the agency’s changed course would have no statutory explanation at all—the exact opposite of the “reasoned decision-making” that the APA requires.

Perhaps even more alarming is the damage this would do to our nation’s labor relations in the long term. One of the oft-cited criticisms of the NLRB is that the Board changes course and reverses itself too often, causing instability in the law. While reasonable minds can differ about how often is “too often” to revisit precedent, management and labor alike should be in agreement that abandoning the very concept of precedent altogether would be a huge step in the wrong direction.

Let’s play it out. If this scheme is successful and somehow withstands judicial review (a big if), the Trump administration could immediately undo all significant legal precedents issued by the NLRB during the Biden administration. Indeed, if an attorney general can unilaterally impose their own reading of the law on the agency without restriction, there is nothing to stop Attorney General Bondi from going further and directing the agency to abandon far longer-standing precedents with which she disagrees. Literally any aspect of labor law that has not been explicitly endorsed by the federal courts would be ripe for instantaneous revision at any time. And nothing would stop a future administration from doing the exact same thing—instantaneously revising all of labor law in a pro-worker direction and overturning any decision that favored management. Labor law would become so unpredictable and changeable as to be effectively useless. Workers and employers would bring cases before the NLRB at their peril—under the CDW’s view of things, any favorable ruling could be immediately erased by the attorney general.

Unfortunately, the lessons of history demonstrate all too well the danger to workers, employers, and the economy that can result—such as labor unrest and economic disruption—when there is no neutral entity that people can turn to in resolving disputes.

One would hope that is not the goal of any of the businesses and trade associations that comprise the CDW. Any reasonable employer should take prompt action to denounce this radical agenda and ensure it dies a quick and well-deserved death.

Wanna Know What's Crazy?

Ford offering a Shelby version pickup truck. That's fuckin' crazy.

Carroll Shelby would shove that thing up somebody's ass.

And WTF - $73,000 for a Jeep? A JEEP!?!

Time To Save Capitalism ...

... from the capitalists - again.

The plutocrats bought more and more coin-operated politicians who actually made it illegal for the corporations not to pimp their profitability (see Sarbanes-Oxley). They have a perverse incentive to turn everything into a revenue opportunity in order to wring every last penny out of it.

The way 21st century capitalism works is the equivalent of hunting to extinction a prey species vital to the survival of humankind.

About That Dead CEO

I won't celebrate the destruction of any human being - not even a blood-sucker like Brian Thompson.

I'd much rather just tax these individual pricks out of existence, and starve their rent-seeking middleman companies into oblivion.

That said, it's really easy to hear a musical quality in the righteous vitriol raining down on the whole fucked up system.

What Gives Capitalism A Bad Name

In the 30s and 40s, American companies (GM, Ford, Coke, IBM, etc) were doing a lot of business with the Nazis in Germany.

One example of the truly shitty things that some of these assholes did was GM lobbying hard in Washington against Lend Lease while supplying Germany the technology to help them invade and conquer their neighbors.

Elon Musk has entered the chat.

Russia Deploying Starlink in Ukraine—Reports

Ukrainian soldiers say Russia's military have begun using Elon Musk's Starlink satellite communications network in Ukraine, according to a journalist in the country.

"The military writes that the occupiers have Starlink with licensed accounts," Andriy Tsaplienko, a Ukrainian journalist, said on his Telegram channel, sharing a screenshot of two posts on X, formerly Twitter, that he says are from two Ukrainian soldiers.

"They began to deliver Starlink en masse, via Dubai, accounts are activated, they work in the occupied territories," one of the soldiers with the X handle @_Serhij_ wrote, referring to the four regions of Ukraine that were illegally annexed by Russia in the fall of 2022—Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

Another X user, @cpt_mitchell, said Ukrainian soldiers "can already see their Starlinks," adding: "I honestly thought they would do it sooner."

Starlink is operated by Musk's aerospace company SpaceX.

Russian news outlets also report that Starlink satellite communications systems are now being sold via multiple Russian online stores, supplied via an intermediary in Dubai. The systems are being sold to the Russian volunteer units for use in the annexed regions of Ukraine, according to the local publications.

Newsweek has contacted SpaceX for comment by email. There is no evidence to suggest that Musk or SpaceX are aware of, or are responsible for, the reported issue.

Musk's SpaceX deployed its Starlink satellites to help provide Kyiv with internet service in the early days of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Musk has said that the satellite-internet system provides Ukraine with a "major battlefield advantage."

In June 2023, Starlink obtained a Department of Defense contract to buy those satellite services for Ukraine. Musk's company has so far privately funded a network of nearly 4,000 satellites to be launched into low-Earth orbit. Kyiv's troops use it for battlefield communications in the war with Russia.

While the Starlink network doesn't work in Russia, it is now able to be used in the four annexed regions and in Crimea, which Putin annexed from Ukraine in 2014, Russian news outlet ComNews reported.

"Merchants do not hide the fact that Starlink kits are addressed to participants [of the war] and are bought up by them in large quantities," the publication reported.

The news outlet cited Russian volunteers in the war, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. They said that there are many Starlink kits being used by the Moscow's troops on the battlefield in Ukraine.

"The reasons for use are convenience, mobility and security," one volunteer said.

A source in the satellite communications market, familiar with the situation, told ComNews that Starlink systems are being delivered in bulk to Russia, and named Dubai as the location for the wholesale purchase of the equipment.

"Before being imported into Russia, terminals are registered under various foreign companies (Cyprus is often included), after which an account is activated under any name, often a fictitious one," the source said.

The manager of one company supplying equipment for military needs emphasized that regular units under the Russian Armed Forces are banned from using Starlink equipment, and said they are used only by volunteer units.

"If this rumor is true, supplying Starlink via intermediary in Dubai should be considered a breach of sanctions against Russia. This also raises the question if Starlink is available for the Russians in the front?" asked Pekka Kallioniemi, a postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University in Finland, in a post on X.

Newsweek has contacted the Pentagon for comment by email.

Musk previously refused to allow Ukraine to use Starlink internet services to launch an attack on Crimea to avoid complicity in a "major act of war."

"There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol," he wrote in early September 2023 on X. "The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor. If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation."

Once or twice every few generations,

it becomes necessary for us

to save capitalism from the capitalists.

No Good Ones

Adam Conover

We are just a tiny bit too gullible about certain things.

That Thing About Rights

IMHO, an awful lot of the shitty things happening around the world can be laid at the feet of anyone who's bought in to the bullshit notion that "government should work like a business."

Companies are dictatorships, and too many of the bean counters in charge of those companies care about little more than the monthly numbers and what color ink they see on a 12 column ledger.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Human rights and democracy eroding worldwide, U.S. finds

Respect for human rights and democratic norms eroded around the world in 2021, as repressive states increasingly detained opponents and struck out beyond their borders at those seen posing a threat, the Biden administration said on Tuesday.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken described what he called a continued “recession” in basic rights and the rule of law over the past year as he unveiled the U.S. government’s annual assessment of the global human rights situation.

“Governments are growing more brazen, reaching across borders to threaten and attack critics,” Blinken said, citing an alleged effort by Iran’s government to abduct an Iranian American journalist from New York; efforts by the Assad regime to threaten Syrians cooperating with German steps to try former regime officials; and Belarus’s diversion of a commercial flight to seize a journalist.

Blinken said the jailing of political opponents had become more common in 2021, with more than a million political prisoners detained in more than 65 countries. He singled out the imprisonment of peaceful protesters in Cuba; activists and advocates in Russia and Egypt, including Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and Egyptian human rights lawyer Mohammed al-Baqr; and opposition presidential candidates in Benin.

Hubris and isolation led Vladimir Putin to misjudge Ukraine

The Biden administration has already said it believes Russian forces are committing war crimes in Ukraine. Last week, U.S. officials helped orchestrate an effort to suspend Russia from the United Nations’ Human Rights Council.“In few places have the human consequences of this decline been as stark as they are in the Russian government’s brutal war on Ukraine,” he said, pointing to apparent atrocities revealed by the recent withdrawal of Russian forces from some parts of the country. “We see what this receding tide is leaving in its wake — the bodies, hands bound, left on streets; the theaters, train stations, apartment buildings reduced to rubble with civilians inside.”

The report laid out a litany of alleged abuses by both allies and rivals, including forced disappearances in Saudi Arabia and what it characterized as ongoing acts of genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghur Muslims in China. It also cited reprisals by Taliban authorities in Afghanistan against members of the former government and steps to limit freedoms of women and girls, as well as alleged abuses by all parties in the conflict in Ethiopia, including government troops from Eritrea.

Because the report is focused on trends in 2021, it did not explicitly address Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. But Blinken, in remarks to reporters, said that Russian forces’ abuses had been numerous since its offensive began on Feb. 24, including alleged executions, rape and the deprivation of civilians’ access to food, water and medicine.

Here in USAmerica, we've had our fingers in some really bad shit over the years. We can't keep ducking the consequences of our own shitty behavior while expecting everybody else to be held to account.

So this next bit is kind of a big deal - and we'll see how long before the Republicans latch onto it and start screaming about how Biden hates America.

Blinken said the United States would not be spared scrutiny over its own human rights violations. Since taking office, administration officials have said they would openly acknowledge chronic problems at home, including police violence against Black Americans.

“We take seriously our responsibility to address these shortcomings, and we know that the way we do it matters,” he said.

Sarah Yager, Washington director at Human Rights Watch, welcomed the report but said it failed to highlight the U.S. role in overseas conflicts where civilians have suffered widespread harm, including in Afghanistan and Yemen. The United States continues to provide arms and aircraft maintenance support to Saudi Arabia, which leads a coalition battling Houthi rebels in Yemen.

“Always a little odd to read about other’s human rights abuses as if US had nothing to do with them. e.g. no mention of US support to Saudi [Arabia] in Yemen but the #HumanRightsReport discusses Iran support to Houthis,” she said on Twitter. “No mention of US in Afghanistan or civilian harm caused in Kabul.”

Asked about how the Biden administration would balance human rights against other American interests, and how such acts would affect American partnerships with countries with poor human rights records, Blinken said that officials sometimes chose to press foreign governments in private, and sometimes in public, including in the annual rights report.

“It doesn’t distinguish between friend and foe. We apply the same standard everywhere,” he said.

Such strains have been particularly visible in recent months between the Biden administration and key Gulf allies like Saudi Arabia as U.S. officials seek to secure increased energy output amid the war in Ukraine and Gulf officials bristle at a host of issues, including what they see as overstated criticism on human rights.

Today's Weak Tea

If you sell products and services that facilitate people getting hurt or killed, then you own some of the responsibility.

You can't duck that responsibility simply by intoning some magic phrase like, "Well gee, we didn't know some asshole was going to use it that way."

OK, you didn't know. But now you do know, and now you have to step up and do something.

Content platforms have enormous power, and power has to be closely monitored and counterbalanced.

I don't know how to do that with Spotify and Facebook et al, and nobody wants a new era of Hayes Office or Catholic League bullshit, and we sure as hell don't want official government censorship. But waiting for "the free market to fix it" is inadequate because it's totally retrospective, having always resulted in unnecessary immiseration while we diddle around fretting about the delicate sensibilities of corporations who seem incapable of understanding that killing the customers is a really bad idea.

So anyway, here's a WaPo piece (pay wall)

Spotify responds after Joni Mitchell and others join Neil Young and demand the platform remove their content

Spotify broke its silence on Sunday and announced slight changes to its policies around content concerning covid-19, after facing a week of criticism for allowing its creators — particularly podcaster Joe Rogan — to spread misinformation about the pandemic.

“You’ve had a lot of questions over the last few days about our platform policies and the lines we have drawn between what is acceptable and what is not,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek wrote in a news release. “We have had rules in place for many years but admittedly, we haven’t been transparent around the policies that guide our content more broadly.”

That last sentence is perfect CorpSpeak

24 words that say exactly nothing.

The new changes include publicly publishing the company’s internal rules for what is allowed on the platform, “testing ways to highlight” those rules to its creators and “working to add a content advisory to any podcast episode that includes a discussion about COVID-19.”

“We know we have a critical role to play in supporting creator expression while balancing it with the safety of our users,” Ek wrote. “In that role, it is important to me that we don’t take on the position of being content censor while also making sure that there are rules in place and consequences for those who violate them.”

The controversy began last week, when rocker Neil Young posted a letter on his website demanding that his music be removed from Spotify in response to “fake information about vaccines” on the platform. He singled out Rogan, who hosts “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, as part of his issue with Spotify, writing: “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Two days later, Spotify began the process of pulling Young’s music, saying in a statement that they “regret” Young’s decision “but hope to welcome him back soon.”

Days later, others began joining Young. “I’ve decided to remove all my music from Spotify,” eight-time Grammy-winning songwriter Joni Mitchell wrote in a statement on her website on Friday. “Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives. I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.”

Nils Lofgren, the frontman of rock band Grin and a member of both Crazy Horse and Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, wrote in a statement on Young’s website that he would “cut ties with Spotify” and urged “all musicians, artists and music lovers everywhere” to do the same. Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston who hosts the “Unlocking Us” and “Dare to Lead” podcasts on Spotify, tweeted Saturday that she “will not be releasing any podcasts until further notice,” though she did not say why. Britain’s Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, who have a deal to host and produce Spotify podcasts, expressed “concerns” in a statement released Sunday.

Folk rocker David Crosby, a former bandmate of Young’s, tweeted that he would remove his music from the service, but “I no longer control it or I would in support of Neil.” That’s true for many rock stars lately, who could deal a blow to the streaming service if they hadn’t sold their entire catalogues already for large sums.

Others, including Howard Stern and “The View” host Joy Behar, have argued that while they don’t agree with Rogan, they don’t think the platform should remove his podcast, equating such a move to censorship.

The resulting fallout, according to Variety, found Spotify’s market capitalization falling more than $2 billion last week.

Spotify’s newly published platform rules shed light on why Rogan — who has suggested healthy, young people shouldn’t get vaccinated; praised ivermectin, a medicine used to kill parasites in animals and humans that has no proven anti-covid benefits; and invited prominent conspiracy theorists onto his show — has not been heavily penalized.

The rules include disallowing “content that promotes dangerous false or dangerous deceptive medical information that may cause offline harm or poses a direct threat to public health,” such as asserting that covid-19 is a hoax or “promoting or suggesting that vaccines approved by local health authorities are designed to cause death.”

Rogan doesn’t quite do any of that. He often argues that he’s merely asking questions and has insisted that he’s “not anti-vax.” And he’s particularly skilled at insulating himself from criticism by arguing that he knows nothing, so he can’t tell anyone anything. “I’m not a respected source of information, even for me,” he said.

And then finally, we get Rogan's attempt to cop out completely - "Who am I? I'm nobody. People shouldn't make decisions based on anything they hear from me."

And my favorite - the classic DumFux News Defense: "I'm just asking questions - I'm not telling anyone what to do or not do - they're all free to draw their own conclusions and make their own decisions and blah blah blah."

And ultimately, of course, they're right. No one should listen to them. At all. Ever.

But people do listen, and they do make decisions according to what they've heard.

When those decisions are based on bullshit being spouted by some asshole making bank on the ignorance and gullibility of his audience, that asshole has to be held to account. Which must then lead us to devise ways of prospectively mitigating the harm done by those assholes - and their asshole audience.

eVilleMike has spoken. So let it be written. So let it be done.

Today's Factoid

Here in USAmerica Inc, there are about 560,000 homeless people. We could provide all of them with healthcare, a 1-bedroom apartment including all utilities and wi-fi - plus a monthly stipend of $1,000 for some food, clothes and a movie once in a while - solely at the expense of America's billionaires, and every one of those billionaires would still be a billionaire.

The way we're doing things is stoopid - we have to do better.

USAmerica, Inc

Wealth To Scale

Standard issue currency - a single bill - as produced by the US Bureau Of Engraving, is .0043 inches thick (1 mm), and weighs .00220462 pounds (1 gram).

• A stack of 100-dollar bills equaling a million dollars is about 3½ feet tall and weighs about 22 pounds.
• A stack of 100-dollar bills equaling a billion dollars is over 3,000 feet tall and weighs over 20,000 pounds.
• Jeff Bezos owns a stack of 100-dollar bills that stands better than 120 miles high, and weighs well over 2,000 tons.

Jeff Bezos may be insanely rich, but it is a drop in the ocean compared with the combined wealth of his peers. 

The 400 richest Americans own about $3.2 trillion, which is more than the bottom 60% of Americans.

Now try to imagine a stack of 100-dollar bills equaling 3.2 trillion dollars that reaches almost to the moon.

To the fucking moon, motherfucker.

There's no way to get the whole concept of that level of wealth to fit in my little brain all at once, so here's a website that illustrates it:

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

Revenue Opportunity

Sometimes the slicing and dicing of market data gets more than a little ridiculous - although "kinky, submissive male Trump supporters with humiliation fetishes" might be quite a bit bigger cohort than I thought at first.

Anyway, there's always somebody looking to cash in on whatever little piece of shit floats by.

Daily Beast:

Groups such as the Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump are organizing their fellow disaffected Republicans. Former CIA and NSA director General Michael Hayden put out a message that is likely to influence the national defense and intelligence communities toward Biden. And leftist groups such as Vote Trump Out are swaying their fellow progressives who can’t stand centrist Democrats—and who are leaning toward voting for a third party or not voting at all—to vote against Trump by voting for Biden.

When such a wildly diverse group of organizers, across the right and left, comes together for a common goal, we’re clearly in an unprecedented all-hands-on-deck moment. Everyone’s doing their part.

But up until recently, there’s one group of potential Biden voters who have not been the subject of voter outreach: kinky, submissive male Trump supporters with humiliation fetishes.

Now, thanks to a Las Vegas-based professional dominatrix named Empress Delfina, this once-overlooked voting bloc is covered—and may be voting Biden. By force.

She calls it “Trump Conversion Therapy.” Her ad for this service reaches out to these potential Biden voters as follows: “Here’s your chance to get berated for being the degenerate Trump supporter you are. I reverse the brainwash you’ve succumbed to that made you into a Simple Stupid Drone. By using lethal mind fucking language and making you repeat dumbass chants like your Bullshitter in Chief made you do to warp you into submission, I transfer your ownership to me for my personal gain and entertainment. Embrace that you need to be saved from being a Trump-bot. Call now to begin your Trump Conversion Therapy.”

At $1.99 a minute, business is booming.

The interview in the piece makes for some interesting prospects for how the rest of us can look for ways to break some of these people free from Cult45.

Sample:

So what happens in a Trump Conversion Therapy session?

"Maybe half the guys just want to argue. They’re not open to getting converted at all. They just call to start berating my liberal politics. And I’m like, “Hey, if you want to pay me $1.99 a minute to argue with me, go right ahead. You’re not getting anywhere with me, and I’m happy to profit off your stupidity—just like your leader did.”