You Silly Old Russia

$20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.00

That's how much Russia wants Goggle to pay them for - something.

Can you say "shakedown"?  I knew you could.

Google fined $20 decillion — more than world’s total wealth — by Russian court

U.S. tech giant Google has closed up shop in Russia, but that hasn’t stopped a court there from leveling it with a fine greater than all the wealth in the world — a figure that is growing every day.

The fine, imposed after certain channels were blocked on YouTube, which Google owns, has reached more than 2 undecillion rubles, Russian business newspaper RBC reported this week. That’s about $20 decillion — a two followed by 34 zeros.

The fine is significantly more money than the combined total global net wealth of $477 trillion, according to Boston Consulting Group, and the worldwide gross domestic product last year of about $105 trillion, according to the World Bank.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet — one of the five most valuable companies in the world — is valued at about $2 trillion. The fine is about 10 billion trillion times the company’s value.

In a case of verbal symmetry, the penalty could soon reach a googol, a 1 followed by 100 zeros, the mathematical term that inspired the name of the search engine.

Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary for Russian President Vladimir Putin, told reporters Thursday that the figure was symbolic and should be a reason for Google to pay attention to the Moscow Arbitration Court’s order to restore access to the YouTube channels.

“I actually can’t even pronounce that number,” Peskov said. “Rather, this sum is filled with symbolism. These demands demonstrate the essence of our channels’ grievances against Google.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

The sum grew so large because the fine increases with time in noncompliance, with no upper limit. The order was made after 17 blocked channels joined a lawsuit against Google’s American, Irish and Russia-based companies, according to RBC. The lawsuit predates Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and was initiated in 2020 by a channel that YouTube blocked to comply with U.S. sanctions.

But the invasion escalated hostilities between Russian authorities and Western social media platforms. Google’s Russian subsidiary filed for bankruptcy in 2022 after its assets were seized in response to fines.

YouTube and other platforms blocked some Russian media to viewers outside of the country in response to the war in Ukraine. The platform banned more than 3,000 channels this year linked to pro-invasion voices including Russian celebrities, according to Google’s Threat Analysis Group.

Russia’s media regulator and censor, Roskomnadzor, has repeatedly ordered Google to unblock particular YouTube accounts. Roskomnadzor has also fined Google for failing to remove YouTube content, such as videos uploaded by Ukrainian groups.

However, YouTube continued to be accessible in Russia after other Western social media platforms were blocked following the invasion of Ukraine. But in recent months, users say the platform has dramatically slowed or ceased loading videos altogether, which experts told The Washington Post was probably linked to state censorship, though Russia blamed Google for the problem.

Have You Seen This Man?

No, I'm not going to do the milk carton thing. Not because I've suddenly decided I'm above doing something so trite and stale and sophomoric and whatever. I just couldn't get it to look right.

Gen Sergei Surovikin

Known as General Armageddon, and a Putin darling, that Surovikin guy has gone missing. He hasn't been seen in public since a couple of days after Prigozhin's mutiny fizzled, during which time, he missed his wife's birthday.

That doesn't mean he's been disappeared met with a tragic accident. There's a host of possibly legit reasons, none of which come readily to mind at the moment.

He needs not to count on being welcomed back into the slimy embrace of the Russian Kleptocracy though, because any given big shot (even in a fairly decent government or business) has a hundred guys looking to torpedo his ass so they can step in to replace him, taking all the goodies that go with that position.

So yeah - I think he's either totally fucked, or semi-fucked, but fucked all the same.

Sarah Kendzior

Primped And Ready

Michael Cohen says he took out an equity loan on his house to get the $130K for Stormy Daniels.

Michael Cohen (and his father-in-law) loaned $26M to a guy in Vegas, who wants to transition from the taxi business to the marijuana business.

The Hill:

President Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen and Cohen's father-in-law reportedly loaned at least $26 million in recent years to a taxi mogul who is shifting his business to selling legal marijuana, The Associated Press reports.

The AP obtained documents showing that Cohen and his father-in-law have loaned millions to Semyon “Sam” Shtayner, a longtime Nevada business associate of Cohen's father-in-law who is transitioning from the business of owning taxi medallions to a business built around selling marijuana edibles.

CNBC:

The Shtayners, like Cohen's father-in-law, are immigrants from Ukraine.

Cohen owns 32 taxicab medallions in New York.

His father-in-law, Shusterman, was charged with two other men in 1993with conspiring to defraud the IRS in connection with his own New York taxi business. He pleaded guilty to a related charge that same year, and was placed on probation for two years.
There may be a reasonable-sounding explanation - even for this one - but it just keeps getting harder to reconcile all the weird and sketchy shit that goes on in and around Cult45.

Kleptocratic Kakistocracy

Kalamitous?

Kataclysmic?

Katastrophic maybe?

We're only a 'K' away - but even that's just a way to distract us from the on-rushing shit storm.

Nice Try

I appreciate the attempts, but at some point this shit just ain't funny anymore.

OK - Maybe Just One

1. "How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion."

2. "Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape."

3. "Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a 'disposable' culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new."

4. "Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system."

5. "Today in many places we hear a call for greater security. But until exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples is reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence."

--Pope Frank

I don't put any credence in it just because the guy happens to be the pope; I put some credence in it because the guy happens to be right.

(I said I was takin' a little break - not crawling off to die)

Today's Reading Assignment

(hat tip = Charlie Pierce)

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone:

This is the third act in an improbable triple-fucking of ordinary people that Wall Street is seeking to pull off as a shocker epilogue to the crisis era. Five years ago this fall, an epidemic of fraud and thievery in the financial-services industry triggered the collapse of our economy. The resultant loss of tax revenue plunged states everywhere into spiraling fiscal crises, and local governments suffered huge losses in their retirement portfolios – remember, these public pension funds were some of the most frequently targeted suckers upon whom Wall Street dumped its fraud-riddled mortgage-backed securities in the pre-crash years.

Today, the same Wall Street crowd that caused the crash is not merely rolling in money again but aggressively counterattacking on the public-relations front. The battle increasingly centers around public funds like state and municipal pensions. This war isn't just about money. Crucially, in ways invisible to most Americans, it's also about blame. In state after state, politicians are following the Rhode Island playbook, using scare tactics and lavishly funded PR campaigns to cast teachers, firefighters and cops – not bankers – as the budget-devouring boogeymen responsible for the mounting fiscal problems of America's states and cities.

And nobody makes it easier to understand than Victor Juhasz: