President Business Guy

Trump Media plummets 10% in premarket trading, with stock slide poised to accelerate

A sell-off of Trump Media is poised to pick up speed Thursday, with shares of former President Donald Trump’s company down more than 10% in premarket trading.

The company behind the conservative social media app Truth Social, which trades on the Nasdaq as DJT, was hovering around $27.50 per share ahead of the market’s open.

That would be more than 36% lower than it stood at the start of June, when Trump Media stock cost just over $49 a share.

The slide represents a massive on-paper loss for Trump, the majority owner of Trump Media stock.

Trump’s 114,750,000 shares in the company, worth more than $5.6 billion at the beginning of the month, would be worth around $3.2 billion based on Thursday’s moves before the bell.

Trump Media has been in a slump since May 30, when a New York jury convicted the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

That downward trend accelerated Tuesday, dovetailing with a company deadline related to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s expected approval of its registration statement.The stock fell nearly 10% in Tuesday’s session, on more than double the average trading volume.

After the bell, Trump Media revealed that the SEC had declared its registration statement effective — an announcement followed by the stock plunging more than 17% in post-market trading.

The development authorizes early investors in Trump Media to exercise warrants they hold in the company, and it allows stockholders to publicly resell securities covered by the registration statement.

Change Gonna Come

I had planned to move from Virginia back to Colorado in 2018 or 2019, but some things went a little squirrelly, and I got put back about a year and a half, and then COVID fucked everything up, and then in 2022, the market for real estate (and for rentals) went totally fucking nuts, and it took me another year to sort thru it enough to get a place at a semi-reasonable price.

Anyway, what I don't know about economics could fill volumes, but I do know that when a market overheats, it tends to get tangled up in "irrational exuberance" (thank you, Mr Greenspan), and you have to expect a snap-back effect - aka: "market correction", which can be anything from a Dip-In-Market-Valuation to boing, as the whole thing craters in on itself.

It seems we are entering a period of correction. Keep your fingers crossed.

The pandemic years of overpaying for homes are over, according to a Denver realtor group’s analysis

Home sellers should also be ready to make more concessions to potential buyers.

As COVID-19 sent waves of uncertainty rippling through the housing market, sellers would list their homes and soon after have multiple offers from buyers — both individuals and investors — who had never even seen the place and would pledge well over the asking price.

Those days are long gone, and it’s time sellers admit it.

That’s according to the latest Denver Metro Association of Realtors Market Trends report that looks at October sales in Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Clear Creek, Denver, Douglas, Elbert, Gilpin, Jefferson and Park counties.

“Ultimately, sellers need to get the pandemic years out of their minds,” wrote Libby Levinson-Katz, head of DMAR’s Market Trends Committee, in a statement.

The low-interest rates of the COVID-emergency era are over, with mortgage rates now reaching around 8%.

As a result of that and more workers returning to work, demand has dropped.

“Sellers need to focus on value and put themselves in the buyer’s shoes,” Levinson-Katz said. “Buyers are no longer willing to overpay and, as such, pricing is the number one key in this market to sell a home.”

DMAR recommends sellers make concessions and even obtain pre-inspection reports on their homes and make any needed fixes ahead of putting a home on the market.

The rub for buyers is the rise in mortgage interest rates

High mortgage rates are putting many buyers off, even with market conditions seemingly in favor of people looking for a new home.

Some buyers have turned to hard-money loans and gifts from friends and family to make homeownership possible, according to DMAR.

“Many buyers tend to hibernate for the winter, but for those who continue to look through the holiday season, there is less competition and sellers are usually more motivated to sell before the end of the year,” DMAR noted.

The sharp rise in home costs the area saw over the past few years has evened out

At the end of October, the median sales price of a home was $585,000, the same as it was in September.

But month to month, the number of closed homes plummeted by more than 11%. Over the past year that drop is nearly 16%.

Properties are now listed for a median of 16 days, and there are currently two-and-a-half months of inventory on the market.

While interest rates are turning people off from buying at the moment, Levinson-Katz wants them to reconsider that: “The key is to get onto the escalator of homeownership and experience appreciation as it moves upwards over time.”

Would now be a good time to talk about collusion and price-fixing?

Colorado renters could be part of price-fixing lawsuit

DENVER (KDVR) — Tens of thousands of Coloradans live in apartment complexes whose management companies are accused of algorithmic price-fixing that inflated rental prices across the nation.

A group of apartment renters brought a class-action lawsuit against some of the nation’s largest landlords on Oct. 19, including:

• Greystar Real Estate Partners
• Lincoln Property Co.
• FPI Management
• Mid-America Apartment Communities
• Avenue5 Residential, LLC
• Equity Residential
• Essex Property Trust
• Thrive Communities Management
• Security Properties

Companies accused of inflating rent prices

The lawsuit includes real estate analytics software firm RealPage as a defendant. A ProPublica investigation preceding the lawsuit found high concentrations of RealPage-using landlords in cities where rents have risen dramatically in the past few years.

Denver suburb rent rising even faster than city core

It alleges that each of the management companies illegally shared RealPage’s algorithm-born pricing with each other in order to inflate rental prices, rather than competing with each other on rent prices to attract renters.

Property managers vigorously disputed the charges in comments to ProPublica.

Apartment landlords in Colorado named in lawsuit

Six of the landlords named in the lawsuit have properties in Colorado:

• Greystar Real Estate Partners
• Lincoln Property Co.
• FPI Management
• Mid-America Apartment Communities
• Avenue5 Residential and Equity Residential

The landlords managed at least 200 upscale apartment complexes in the Denver metro from Castle Rock to Boulder, with the majority in Adams, Arapahoe, Denver and Jefferson counties. Most have dozens or hundreds of units.

Colorado man convicted in ‘We Build the Wall’ fraud trial
About half are owned by Greystar. Equity Residential operates 32 and Avenue5 Residential 24.

Prices range widely across properties by location and apartment size. The average low end of the price is $1,609. The average highest price is $5,327.

The lawsuit hits home in an era where broader consumer inflation is colliding with unprecedented spikes in both home sales prices and rental prices, particularly in Colorado.

It's attracting some attention at the national level as well.

Tenants Are Suing Landlords for Allegedly Price-Fixing Rents with Software and the Feds Could Get Involved

The DOJ has requested to participate in a lawsuit by tenants alleging that landlords colluded using RealPage software to artificially inflate rents.

A pair of lawsuits from tenants across the U.S. allege that landlords use rent-setting software to illegally collude and boost their rents.

One lawsuit was filed in a district court in Tennessee and one in Washington. Both lawsuits were filed a year ago after a ProPublica investigation revealed that real estate software and analytics company RealPage’s rent-setting software, formerly called YieldStar, was artificially raising rents by sharing market data from competitors and setting prices for them, as well as sometimes encouraging landlords to leave units vacant.

Over 20 lawsuits from renters across the country alleging RealPage committed antitrust violations were consolidated in April in Tennesse’s Middle District, chosen for its central location. The United States Department of Justice filed a notice on October 17 asking for permission to participate in oral arguments on December 11. The court approved the government’s request, and the DOJ has until November 15 to submit a formal statement of intent if it wants to participate.

The RealPage class action complaint alleges that a “cartel” of landlords “artificially inflated prices in the multifamily real estate market in the United States” using RealPage's software. Now called RealPage Revenue Management Software, the program relies on market data it collects as well as rental data inputted by landlords. While landlords should theoretically be competitors, in practice they would “work with a community,” as one landlord is quoted as saying in the complaint. The complaint alleges that RealPage requires its users to accept at least 80 percent of its rent recommendations, and that users actually accept about 90 percent, giving RealPage market influence equal to its clients’ combined units.

But the most controversial practice alleged in the complaint—and laid out in the ProPublica report—is that YieldStar encouraged landlords to leave a certain amount of units vacant so that all the property managers using the service could artificially inflate rents. The goal was allegedly that “collectively in the market, there is never an oversupply of available units, artificially maintaining and inflating prices,” the complaint says. RealPage also coached its landlords that this practice would allow them to sacrifice “physical occupancy” for “economic occupancy.”

The main plaintiff in the lawsuit, Andrea Crook, rented from Mid-America Apartment Communities, Inc., a publicly traded real estate investment trust based in Memphis that is named as a defendant in the suit along with RealPage. Other large corporate landlords are named as defendants in the complaint, including Greystar and Cushman & Wakefield.

Are you a tenant at a property owned by one of the companies named in the RealPage or Yardi lawsuits? Has your rent increased? Motherboard wants to hear from you. Email roshan.abraham@vice.com or reach him on Signal at 646-657-8247.

When reached for comment, a RealPage spokesperson said that the company wouldn't comment on pending litigation and instead directed Motherboard to a "white paper" on revenue management written by a third-party consultant.

Another lawsuit in Washington makes similar allegations about a California-based company called Yardi Systems. The company was founded in 1984, when it provided property management software for the Apple II computer.

That class action alleges that from September 2019 to the present, Yardi and a group of multifamily apartment managers colluded to set prices through a centralized price-fixing software it launched in 2011 called “RENTMaximizer.” (The software has since been rebranded as RevenueIQ.) The lawsuit says the pricing was “supracompetitive,” or above what the market would have otherwise determined.

“In the absence of knowledge about competitors’ pricing strategies, property managers can only make their best educated guesses and set their prices at optimal positions, usually a bit lower than what offered by competitors—to attract renters in the market,” the lawsuit argues.

But the company “unlawfully solved this problem” with RENTMaximizer, the lawsuit argues, which “effectively outsources the management of rental pricing from a landlord to Yardi itself, which then implements higher prices collectively across a group of landlords.”

The lawsuit quotes Terri Dowen, Yardi’s VP of sales, as saying RENTMaximizer “simplifies the process by eliminating rent rate guesswork.” The complainants believe this proves that the software was “marketed as a means to eliminate the discounting that would occur in a competitive market.”

The complaint quotes Yardi marketing materials that say landlords who use the service “beat the market by a minimum of 2%” and “gain on average more than 6% net rental income.” Other marketing material for the product said users could “consistently beat the market.”

While the property managers who worked with Yardi are also accused of collusion in the complaint, this doesn’t always mean they directly communicated. (Although the complaint alleges they did that too.) Like RealPage's program, the software relies on data from landlords, who input rents in units they own, then get to see comparative rents in their area. Yardi then provides the landlord a recommendation for the units they own.

Landlords boasted about the higher rents they charged with the software in Yardi’s marketing. Brantley White, president of Ardmore Residential, was quoted in a 2016 Yardi press release saying, “RENTmaximizer has allowed us to push rents more aggressively and takes more human error out of the process.”

According to the complaint, other witnesses who worked at property management companies confidentially gave plaintiff attorneys testimony. A leasing consultant at Bridge Property Management is quoted as saying, “It was ridiculous. We were supposed to be helping these people who couldn’t afford a home. Instead, we were raising rents.”

The complaint says that many of the property managers being sued directly communicated with each other, as well, and a confidential witness said that one company would “call their competitors, often on a weekly basis, and specifically ask what prices those competitors were charging.”

Yardi did not respond to Motherboard's request for comment sent to available channels; the company appears to only have a media contact for its Matrix research service.

While there’s no data on how many households have rents set by Yardi’s software, an executive at the company claimed Yardi was used for 8 million residential units across the world. The attorneys also ran an analysis of 23,000 households using Yardi to see if rents were higher and found they were 6 percent higher among units where landlords used the software, in line with the company’s marketing claims.

Good Government

We're constantly bombarded with nonsense about how government is always bad and can never be good because it's always getting in the way of free enterprise and blah blah blah.

5 people are dead - 4 of them were paying customers who stupidly (IMO) gave $250,000 to some jagoff with an out-sized ego, expecting him not to cut any corners, and to take good care of them.

Suckers.

‘Titanic’ Director James Cameron Points to Flaws in Titan Sub’s Design

The “Titanic” director and diving expert said he’d had concerns from the start about the vehicle’s hull composition and claims about its network of hull sensors.

James Cameron with short white hair and a dark shirt stands next to a green scale model of his Deepsea Challenger diving vessel.

“We’ve never had an accident like this,” James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of “Titanic,” said on Thursday.

Mr. Cameron, an expert in submersibles, has dived dozens of times to the ship’s deteriorating hulk and once plunged in a tiny craft of his own design to the bottom of the planet’s deepest recess.

In an interview, Mr. Cameron called the presumed loss of five lives aboard the Titan submersible from the company OceanGate like nothing anyone involved in private ocean exploration had ever seen.

“There’ve never been fatalities at this kind of depth and certainly no implosions,” he said.

An implosion in the deep sea happens when the crushing pressures of the abyss cause a hollow object to collapse violently inward. If the object is big enough to hold five people, Mr. Cameron said in an interview, “it’s going to be an extremely violent event — like 10 cases of dynamite going off.”

In 2012, Mr. Cameron designed and piloted an experimental submersible into a region in the Pacific Ocean called the Challenger Deep. Mr. Cameron had not sought certification of the vessel’s safety by organizations in the maritime industry that provide such services to numerous companies.

“We did that knowingly” because the craft was experimental and its mission scientific, Mr. Cameron said. “I would never design a vehicle to take passengers and not have it certified.”

Mr. Cameron strongly criticized Stockton Rush, the OceanGate chief executive who piloted the submersible when it disappeared Sunday, for never getting his tourist submersible certified as safe. He noted that Mr. Rush called certification an impediment to innovation.

“I agree in principle,” Mr. Cameron said. “But you can’t take that stance when you’re putting paying customers into your submersible — when you have innocent guests who trust you and your statements” about vehicle safety.

As a design weakness in the Titan submersible and a possible cautionary sign to its passengers, Mr. Cameron cited its construction with carbon-fiber composites. The materials are used widely in the aerospace industry because they weigh much less than steel or aluminum, yet pound for pound are stronger and stiffer.

The problem, Mr. Cameron said, is that a carbon-fiber composite has “no strength in compression”— which happens as an undersea vehicle plunges ever deeper into the abyss and faces soaring increases in water pressure. “It’s not what it’s designed for.”

The company, he added, used sensors in the hull of the Titan to assess the status of the carbon-fiber composite hull. In its promotional material, OceanGate pointed to the sensors as an innovative feature for “hull health monitoring.” Early this year, an academic expert described the system as providing the pilot “with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.”

In contrast to the company, Mr. Cameron called it “a warning system” to let the submersible’s pilot know if “the hull is getting ready to implode.”

Mr. Cameron said the sensor network on the sub’s hull was an inadequate solution to a design he saw as intrinsically flawed.

“It’s not like a light coming on when the oil in your car is low,” he said of the network of hull sensors. “This is different.”

They Knew

Drug makers and drug sellers and drug prescribers and drug insurance providers all knew what was going on.

This doesn't happen outside the consciousness of those involved.

WaPo:

For the first time, a database maintained by the Drug Enforcement Administration that tracks the path of every single pain pill sold in the United States — by manufacturers and distributors to pharmacies in every town and city — has been made public.

The Washington Post sifted through nearly 380 million transactions from 2006 through 2012 that are detailed in the DEA’s database and analyzed shipments of oxycodone and hydrocodone pills, which account for three-quarters of the total opioid pill shipments to pharmacies. The Post is making this data available at the county and state levels in order to help the public understand the impact of years of prescription pill shipments on their communities.

My home county

In the heart of the heartland 

- and -

Just six companies distributed 75 percent of the pills — oxycodone and hydrocodone — during this period: McKesson Corp., Walgreens, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, CVS and Walmart, according to an analysis of the database by The Washington Post.

Top pill distributors, 2006 through 2012

(go to the article to see the rest of the top 100 suppliers)

The long slide into Coin-Operated Government has produced some incredibly shitty results.

Plutocratic Regulatory Capture and the failure of the Free Market to "self-regulate" has to be obvious now.

This approach - remedial vs preventive - isn't just costing us way more than good government would cost us. It's killing us.

John Oliver

The addiction treatment industry is dangerously unregulated. John Oliver explains why many rehab programs should incorporate more evidence-based care and carefully reconsider their doctor-to-horse ratio.

Makes me wonder if there are dots in need of connecting - something that would give us a clearer picture of a legalized system of Drug Cartels right here in USAmerica Inc.

• Pharma
• Prescribers
• Insurance
• Healthcare
• Law Enforcement
• Prisons
• Lobbyists
• Congress

I'm a capitalist because god's a capitalist.

I have to take in more calories than I need right this minute because I need a surplus of  energy in order to do the work required to get my next meal. I have to make some profit.

And I insist on appropriate regulation because god insists on appropriate regulation.

Without a properly functioning pancreas, my blood sugar goes wacky and I die.

Without a properly functioning brain stem, my heart rate goes wacky and I die.

...my body temperature

...etc etc etc

"Government Interference in the Free Market System" is what freed the slaves, dummy.

Every once in a while, we have to step up and save capitalism from the capitalists.

Every Man A Millionaire

Warren Buffett is currently sitting on $100 Billion Cash.

One Hundred Billion Dollars - CASH

Mr Buffett is known as one of the good-guy rich guys, and he knows he shouldn't have that kinda scratch lying around doing nothing.

But not even Warren Buffett knows what he oughta do with all that money when stock prices are crazy high, and most companies worth buying are over-valued, and and and.

He's said recently that the market (Wilshire 5000) is currently valued at about 140% of US GDP, and that usually means there's a "correction" coming.

The word "correction" in this context generally means "Honey, I won't be home for supper tonight because I plan on stepping in front of the train".

Typically, markets collapse right about now.

So here we go again.

BTW, we have a simple response to the GOP's favorite bromide of Tax Cuts for Over-Privleged Entitled-Feeling Rich-As-Fuck Elitist Assholes will boost the economy, create a gazillion jobs and increase federal revenues:

We're left with only one really great way to use all that money, and it ain't Supply Side. After 35 years of trying really really really hard to make it work, and trying even harder to get everybody to pretend it works, we now know the single most important thing about it -  that shit don't work.

I hate saying it, but we prob'ly need to tax the fuck outa some folks and put the money into Education, Trades Training, and Infrastructure.

It's called Keynesian Economics and it works.  We know it works because it always works because that's how a modern economy fucking works.

The Marketplace Of Ideas

Meanwhile, over at Amazon:

Seems Like Good News

From Juan Cole:

Saudi crown prince Muhammad bin Salman announced Friday that Saudi Arabia would use its oil assets to back a $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund. The move suggested to many observers that the kingdom is preparing for a likely end of the petroleum business and transitioning to being primarily an investor. While it is true that the money for the sovereign wealth fund is expected to come from petroleum sales, it also seems clear that the kingdom recognizes that it has a stranded asset that won’t be nearly as valuable in a decade or two as it is now. It could even end up, like coal, being regulated out of existence in many countries.

Here are 3 reasons Saudi Arabia is likely making this massive change in economic strategy:

1. Climate change denial, which the Saudis pushed and helped fund, has failed. A majority of Americans now accepts that humans burning fossil fuels is causing global warming. And that’s in anti-science, capitalist-ridden America. Everywhere else in the world it goes without saying. Since the impact of global warming will become increasingly apparent in the coming decades, likely pressure to abandon burning fossil fuels will grow. Already, most new investment in power plants is in renewables,not coal and gas.

2. Another fossil fuel, coal, is being quickly phased out and will likely be illegal in fifteen or twenty years. It is being phased out by the Environmental Protection Agency because it puts out pollutants, including CO2. The writing is on the wall for coal and petroleum.

3. More affordable, longer-range electric cars are now coming on the market, with the Chevy Bolt due next December and Tesla 3 the following year. Most petroleum is used for transportation, so electric vehicles are deadly to that market. The new generation of electric cars is less than $30,000 in the US after tax rebates. And it typically can go 200 miles on a charge. Tesla is putting fast recharging stations everywhere it can, and people have already gone across the country in a Tesla. Battery costs are falling and batteries are becoming more efficient, so the writing is on the wall for the combustion engine. Consumers are combining electric cars with solar panels on their houses, getting free fuel. Low gasoline prices won’t impede solar car sales because prices would have to fall another dollar US before EVs would not be worth it.

In as little as fifteen to twenty years, petroleum may be illegal in some places; and will be in retreat everywhere. Saudi oil is a stranded asset. So they are attempting to create a revenue stream from investments. As for fossil fuels, their business model is under severe pressure.

So, if I look past the part about The House of Saud becoming even more parasitic than they are now - at least they're making some attempt to move away from literally burning the place to the ground trying to milk every last dime outa the suckers, to a new and exciting career as straight-up Rent-Collecting Leeches.  Which somehow seems bizarrely logical in that it means they're being more "honest" as to the total buggery of what they're all about(?)

Baby steps.

An Outrageously Blatant Act Of Journalism

And the name of the rat bastard pinko librul media type who insisted on at least trying to hold this valiantly entrepreneurial job creator accountable for something completely out of his control?  Kallie Cart, WCHS Channel 8 Eyewitness News

I have no idea if Ms Cart has done anything else of note in her career, but when a Press Poodle does anything even close to a decent job of imitating a real reporter, I think it's important to pile on some laurels.

Now, maybe if she took a hard look at the failures of the Regulatory Regime, we'd have something even more worthy of my much-sought-after kudos.  Go get 'em, Kallie.  Keep doin' good.

hat tip = Addicting Info

A Certain Lesson

Totally unfettered Free Market Capitalism at it's finest:

A California doctor who duped patients out of more than $1 million after claiming her herbal supplements could cure cancer has been jailed for 14 years.

Christine Daniel charged patients up to $100,000 for six months of treatment, which she claimed could also cure diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

'Daniel robbed victims of more than money – she also stole their hopes and dreams for a cure,' U.S. Attorney Andre Birotte Jr. said after the doctor was sentenced.

A little interference from an oppressive gubmint might've come in right handy for somebody like Paula Middlebrooks.  The good doctor charged her $60,000 for "treatment" with a concoction consisting mainly of Beef Flavoring Extract and a Sunscreen Preservative.  And then, not long after "Dr" Daniel triumphantly declared she'd been cured, Middlebrooks died - her breast cancer having spread through her body unchecked.

Christine Daniel doesn't get any more paydays for ruining any more lives - not for the 15 years of her prison sentence anyway.  But what stopped her was the criminal justice system.  It wasn't the market; it wasn't the invisible hand; and it sure as fuck wasn't Angie's List.

Counting The Costs

The Chinese economy is a juggernaut.
The Chinese economy is the greatest thing since perforated toilet paper.
The Chinese figured out how to get Gubmint outa the way, and they've unleashed the awesome power of the unfettered free market.

From James Fallows at The Atlantic:

Last week I mentioned the effects that China's latest pollution emergency was having on Chinese citizens and foreigners living there. Here's a picture posted on Twitter just now from a friend in Beijing, showing the view from the 30th floor out toward our former neighborhood.

Always remember - nature bats last.

Connections

I don't know what's up here, but it smells really bad and I just wanna get something posted that maybe starts me stroking in the right direction.

From Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone:

The great mystery story in American politics these days is why, over the course of two presidential administrations (one from each party), there’s been no serious federal criminal investigation of Wall Street during a period of what appears to be epic corruption. People on the outside have speculated and come up with dozens of possible reasons, some plausible, some tending toward the conspiratorial – but there have been very few who've come at the issue from the inside.

We get one of those rare inside accounts in The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins, a new book by Jeff Connaughton, the former aide to Senators Ted Kaufman and Joe Biden. Jeff is well known to reporters like me; during a period when most government officials double-talked or downplayed the Wall Street corruption problem, Jeff was one of the few voices on the Hill who always talked about the subject with appropriate alarm. He shared this quality with his boss Kaufman, the Delaware Senator who took over Biden's seat and instantly became an irritating (to Wall Street) political force by announcing he wasn’t going to run for re-election. "I later learned from reporters that Wall Street was frustrated that they couldn’t find a way to harness Ted or pull in his reins," Jeff writes. "There was no obvious way to pressure Ted because he wasn’t running for re-election."

And from Reuters (via The Agonist):

With less than two months to go before the U.S. presidential election, a new survey found 61 percent of Americans say a candidate's commitment to rooting out corporate wrongdoing will be key in deciding who gets their vote.

Along with keen interest in knowing each candidate's plans to fix the struggling economy, voters want government to do more to fight corporate misconduct - which they say helped cause the financial crisis.

"In these difficult economic times, Americans are mad as hell about corporate wrongdoing and are going to do something about it in the November elections and beyond," said Jordan Thomas, a partner at law firm Labaton Sucharow, which commissioned the survey and which represents corporate whistleblowers.

This is the first I've heard of a continuing disgruntlement over Corruption Inc - it seemed to me that it had been pushed way down the list of priorities.  But when I stop and put some thought into it, I start to see it making some real sense.  How do you fix the problem of Too Much Big Money In Politics if you don't fix the problem of Private Up-Side and Public Down-Side?

Oh yeah - no more thing.  When your clear-eyed and sensible Repub friends start yammerin' about how we need lots more deregulation to "unleash the mighty power of unfettered American free-market know-how", see if this rings a bell for 'em (from an AP story cited in the comments at The Agonist referenced above - and got practically no mention anywhere):

A Texas company that profited for decades by supplying mentally disabled workers to an Iowa turkey plant at wages of 41 cents per hour must pay the men $1.37 million in back wages, a federal judge ruled late Tuesday.

The judgment against Henry's Turkey Service in Goldthwaite is the third of more than $1 million against the company after state authorities in 2009 shut down a dilapidated bunkhouse in rural Iowa where the men had lived since the 1970s.

Without Apology - Part 2

(con'd from Without Apology - below)

If I argue "when healthcare coverage is outlawed, only outlaws will have healthcare coverage", I suspect "conservatives" to scoff and tell me I'm stupid to think they're trying to "outlaw" healthcare coverage.

But they're wrong.  Being against HealthCare Reform and against ObamaCare (and and and) almost always goes with a package that includes being in favor of Free Market Solutions. These guys will always spout the standard suite of platitudes:

• the market will always find a fair balance on its own
• the market brings innovation to satisfy all needs of every market segment
• the competition of the market will force prices down so everybody can get it on the benefits
• everything is good as long as government stays out of it completely

etc.

But outlawing coverage is (effectively) exactly what happens.  In a system of completely unfettered capitalism, the Market is the law, and your paycheck is Law Enforcement.

In that system, what's the difference between being unable to buy it and being forbidden by law to possess it?

Heart And Soul

My maternal-side Grandpa owned a grocery starting in the early 20s, and when the Depression hit, he became pretty well-known locally for his huge heart and willingness to extend credit for those in need - even to the point of having forgiven thousands of dollars in accounts receivable well after the time most of his customers got back on their feet again.

As I learned something about politics, I always assumed he was a fairly "typical Liberal Democrat", but my mom set me straight on that one, telling me he was a life-long Republican and near-extreme conservative who hated FDR and The New Dealers with a passion.  That took me by surprise, and it made me understand that there's a kind of paradox that's always existed in American politics, but has recently begun to disappear at an alarming rate.

I guess it comes down to my favorite Tom Morris quote from his book, If Aristotle Ran General Motors: "There is no contradiction in having a hard head and a soft heart".

So anyway, this is not the heart and soul of American Capitalism, because there is no soul, no heart, and no honor in it:

This is the real deal, because this is where all the heart and the soul and the honor is in American Capitalism:

Connecting Dots

Ya gotta be careful with correlations (not everybody lying down with their eyes closed is dead), but when these things pop up, we need to take a good look to make sure there's no real causatives in motion.
This one really bugs me because the Consumer Product Safety Commission has been another one of those "bloated and evil bureaucracies" the Repubs are always complaining about, and trying to defund and defang.

From USA Today:

Children's product recalls dropped 24% in 2011, but injuries and other incidents associated with these recalls grew 7%, a report out today says.

The decline in recalls is likely due to companies' adherence to a new children's product safety law, according to Kids In Danger, which did the report. But the advocacy group says that the secrecy surrounding product safety recalls makes it difficult to draw conclusions.

Product liability is a big deal.  It's one of the mainstays of an appropriately regulated Free Market System because if the customers have the kind of recourse that can kill a company (one that's been proven grossly negligent and is thereby in for a much-deserved major ass-whupping), then companies have to be aware of the stick that goes with the profit carrot.  But if the companies can buy some coin-operated politicians and first, make it harder to get good safety info; and second, make it a lot harder for us to mete out those beatings, then they improve their profits and shift more of the risk onto the buyers.

Don't be fooled - this is exactly what Tort Reform is about.

Censorship

Intellectual property is an important thing.  You have a reasonable expectation to own your work, and to profit from it.

That said, I tend to take a fairly expansive view of The Fair Use Doctrine.  I think the creator of the content usually derives benefits from the use of his creation which - again, usually - outstrip the costs of lost revenues and/or watch-dogging.

The reflex of jealously guarding your proprietorship generally has the effect of narrowing your audience, which is kinda not the fucking point, now is it?


PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.


Anyway, the larger point is that ceding control over the internet to anybody other than the users is just a bad idea.

The Free Market At Work

(hat tips = The Agonist and Hullabloo)

"Welcome to the AshleyMadison.com era"

From Media Bistro:

“Now that Newt is the leading contender in the race for the GOP nomination, we felt compelled to make a point to illustrate how times have changed when a serial divorcee/adulterer is capturing the hearts of the American people,” says Noel Biderman, founder and CEO, premier online affair service Ashleymadison.com.