The Obamanauts Are Rebranding as Evil
Whether it’s Jay Carney speaking for Amazon, Robert Gibbs working for McDonalds to kill the minimum wage, Seth Harris’ role in drafting the anti-worker Proposition 22, David Plouffe doing PR for Uber, and Tim Geithner being ……… Tim Geithner, it does seem that for all their prior protestations of working for the public weal ring rather hollow.
We lead with the story of how Clark and Jeanette Parker of Beverly Hills used charter schools as a piggy bank, following a long history of dodgy accounting in the “charity” sector, moving to a new location whenever their self-dealing and underperformance became known by the local educational regulators.
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The Parkers have cast themselves as selfless philanthropists, telling the California Board of Education that they have “devoted all of our lives to the education of other people’s children, committed many millions of our own dollars directly to that particular purpose, with no gain directly to us.”
But the couple have, in fact, made millions from their charter schools. Financial records show the Parkers’ schools have paid more than $800,000 annually to rent buildings the couple own. The charters have contracted out services to the Parkers’ nonprofits and companies and paid Clark Parker generous consulting fees, all with taxpayer money, a Times investigation found.Presented with The Times’ findings, the Parkers did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
How the Parkers have stayed in business, surviving years of allegations of financial and academic wrongdoing, illustrates glaring flaws in the way California oversees its growing number of charter schools.
Many of the people responsible for regulating the couple’s schools, including school board members and state elected officials, had accepted thousands of dollars from the Parkers in campaign contributions.
Like other charter operators who have run into trouble, the Parkers were able to appeal to the state Board of Education when they faced the threat of being shut down; the panel is known for overturning local regulators’ decisions. A Times analysis of the state board’s decisions has found that, over the last five years, it has sided with charters over local school districts or county offices of education in about 70% of appeals.
California law also enables troubled charter operators to escape sanction or scrutiny by moving to school districts more willing to accept them. The Parkers have used this to their advantage, keeping one step ahead of the regulators.
“They’re like cats,” said Kawamoto, who began working at one of the couple’s charter schools in 2006. “They have so many lives.”
Charter schools are technically public schools operated by private entities. Make the subject to the freedom of information acts that normal schools do.
—P.C. Hodgell
On the “Good News” side, we have a public education advocate turned public education advocacy lawyer Robert Skeels, who has been beating the Charter School establishment like a drum in court:
On Tuesday, March 23, 2021, I got my second big win in court against a charter school corporation. It was also a major victory over their California Charter Schools Association (“CCSA”) trade association, which tried to use the case to carve out immunity to the California Public Records Act (“CPRA”). I represented @DotKohlhaas in the action.
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My first win against a corporate charter school was a year ago as third chair in a suit to overturn a wrongful expulsion of a student of color. The Partnerships to Uplift Communities (“PUC”) charter chain (of convicted felon Ref Rodriguez fame) had violated the student’s due process rights. Violated isn’t a strong enough word for what they did. PUC unilaterally changed the charges at the appeals hearing and then branded the child as a terrorist in his permanent record. Under the tutelage of the brilliant partners at the law firm I was a part-timer at the time (I am currently transitioning to full time there), plus sage advice from @DrPrestonGreen, we built a strong case.
It was my argument that the charter corporation never proved specific intent — a crucial element to Ed. Code § 48900.7, as well as PUC’s glaring lack of notice afforded to the student, that saw the court overturn the wrongful expulsion and give the student their life back.
This latest case was a charter trying to hide all its dirty secrets by not complying with the CPRA. The scandal-ridden The Accelerated Schools (“TAS”) charter chain’s leaders absconded when the community started pushing back and started asking questions about union busting.
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I suppose I can’t blame them. The charter industry — long used to unaccountably spending tax dollars in total secrecy — fought tooth and nail the imposition of the CPRAand Brown Act added by Ed. Code § 47604.1(b)(2)(A). When the statute took effect January 2020, charter school corporations were already looking for ways to skirt the law. At the firm where I’m a junior associate, we use the CPRAfor pre-discovery work against charter corporations. Michael Kohlhaas dot org, on the other hand, has used the CPRAto expose some of the ugliest, scandalous conduct by an industry already infamous for scandal. Uncovering the vile Nick Melvoin’s sharing of Los Angeles Unified School District’s (“LAUSD”) confidential legal strategieswith their then party-opponent in a lawsuit(the CCSA) was a blockbuster revelation enabled by the CPRA.
When one looks at the corruption, self dealing, and opacity of the Charter School industry, it’s almost as if the entire process was designed to serve the dual goals of resegregating public education and allowing private operators to loot the public coffers.
Oh wait, it was.
Matt Gaetz is everything the Republicans were looking for in Hunter Biden.
— Dr. Antifa Rioter-Elect, Esq (@AntifaRioter) April 2, 2021
I have not been writing about the rapidly metastasizing web of sex, drugs, and money laundering surrounding Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz because it’s too weird for me to get a real handle on the whole thing.
But if I were to boil it down to one sentence, I would just quote Dr. Antifa Rioter-Elect, Esq, so I am quoting Dr. Antifa Rioter-Elect, Esq.
It appears that the Santa Clara Police Officers Association is attempting to shake down local businesses.
Is it time to replace ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) with ACAM (All Cops Are Mobsters)?
In a move that seems straight out of a mafia playbook, the union representing Santa Clara’s police officers solicited donations from businesses in exchange for police department support.
In its “2021 Business Supporter” flyer, sent to local retailers, the Santa Clara Police Officers’ Association said, “Place our decal in your window, and we will direct our ‘FRIENDLY’S’’ to support you!”
The message appears to imply special treatment for those businesses displaying the decal after donating money to the union. The idea of the police department playing favorites based on donations contradicts claims that it values fairness and “will perform this service professionally and with integrity.“
Santa Clara Councilmember Anthony Becker expressed alarm over the flyer.
“I want answers to what they mean by ‘friendly’s,’” Becker said. “If they aren’t paying in, are you not going to protect them? Why would you put that on your flyer if you’re not going to really mean something out of it?”
The debacle led to Santa Clara City Hall releasing a statement saying donations made to the police union “are not related to the level of police service received.”
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Another question raised by the flyer is what the requested donations will be used for. Union president Alex Torke publicly said donations made during annual campaigns are “deposited in a distinct account that is used strictly for donations to charities and charitable causes.” However, some speculate the money might be leveraged to influence elections or political causes.
“You can see…how they have used the money in the past,” said a Santa Clara City Hall insider who asked for anonymity. “A lot of their money has been used towards the PACs for political purposes.”
[Councilman Anthony] Becker said he would like to see a full accounting by the union of its budget.
“They don’t divulge they fund political candidates during elections,” Becker said. “I think they need to be a little more transparent about where that money’s going…and who they’re supporting with it. I’d really like to see that money going towards things we need, not political agendas.”
Becker claims some businesses told him they were directed by the police to not display his political signs during the last election cycle.
When the cops are racketeers.
It’s rather more common than one would like to think.
Have you heard about SPACs? (AKA, “Blank check companies.”
The short version is that they are shell companies created to raise capital to take other companies public.
The SPAC issues shares, raises money, and then buys a company, taking the target public.
If this sounds dodgy, as in, “Why don’t those companies go public on their own?” you are right.
The answer is, as far as I can tell, evading regulations and increasing the opacity of the investment, since there is no SEC due diligence and the like.
Their rates of returns to investors suck, as they are typically a number less than 0, a loss, though the managers make bank, and I suppose money launderers are OK with taking the hit.
As such, it is not surprising that the SEC has opened an investigation into the recent explosion of these arcane financial instruments:
The U.S. securities regulator has opened an inquiry into Wall Street’s blank check acquisition frenzy and is seeking information on how underwriters are managing the risks involved, said four people with direct knowledge of the matter.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in recent days sent letters to Wall Street banks seeking information on their special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, dealings, the four people said.
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The SEC, which declined to comment for this story, has previously said it was monitoring the SPAC boom, but the letters are the strongest sign yet that it is stepping up scrutiny of such deals and the Wall Street banks that underwrite them.
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Wall Street’s biggest gold rush of recent years, SPACs have surged globally to a record $170 billion this year, outstripping last year’s total of $157 billion, Refinitiv data showed.
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Investors have sued eight companies that combined with SPACs in the first quarter of 2021, according to data compiled by Stanford University. Some of the lawsuits allege the SPACs and their sponsors, who reap huge pay-days once a SPAC combines with its target, hid weaknesses ahead of the transactions.
Hiding weakness ahead of the transactions is the PURPOSE of SPACS.
BTW, if you are wondering just how dodgy this whole mess is, look no further than WeWork, whose IPO infamously collapsed on insider looting and misleading accounting. They now intend to go public via merging with a SPAC:
Even though WeWork has long lost billions of dollars, it always found ways to attract huge investments from deep-pocketed investors. Now, less than two years after it was rescued from a collapse, the co-working company has found yet another backer willing to overlook its losses.
The company announced on Friday that it had agreed to merge with a blank-check firm in a deal that would give it a listing on the stock market it was denied when it was forced to shelve an initial public offering as investors questioned its financial strength and dubious governance practices.
Instead of a traditional I.P.O., WeWork is merging with BowX Acquisition, a company listed on the stock exchange for the sole purpose of buying a business, in a type of deal that has become hugely popular in recent months. Investors, bankers, and even celebrities and athletes have rushed to float such special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, because they offer their creators a chance to mint huge profits relatively quickly. And merging with these vehicles is attractive to companies like WeWork because they provide an express lane onto the stock market without the obstacles that scuttled WeWork’s public offering in September 2019.
“Obstacles,” what a quaint way to describe flagrant fraud and misrepresentation.
This is yet another way for Wall Street to steal from you,
People don’t fear Andrew Cuomo any more, and so more and more people are dropping a dime on his corrupt behavior. Case in point, people are now telling reporters that Cuomo arranged for family members and close associates to get special access to Covid-19 testing.
We are going to see more and more of this:
As the coronavirus pandemic swept through New York early last year, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration arranged for his family members and other well-connected figures to have special access to state-administered coronavirus tests, dispatching a top state doctor and other state health officials to their homes, according to three people with direct knowledge of the effort.
As part of the program, a state lab immediately processed the results of those who were tested, the people said, even as average New Yorkers were struggling to get tested in the early days of the pandemic because of a scarcity of resources. Initially, the lab was capable of running only several hundred tests a day for a state with 19 million residents.
The use of state resources to benefit people close to the governor raises serious ethical questions, experts said. New York law prohibits state officials from using their positions to secure privileges for themselves or others.
Drip, drip, drip.
Cuomo’s career is toast, and only bad thing about this is that it did not happen a decade ago.
Someone states the obvious, that if you want to rein in tech giants, start treating them like the criminals that they are.
Between criminal violations of anti-trust laws, violations of wiretapping laws, securities law violations, and conspiracies to violate laws and regulations (Uber, AirBnB, etc.) these guys should be subject to arrest, trial, and imprisonment”
On March 25, the CEOs of Google, Facebook, and Twitter will once again testify before a committee of the House of Representatives, this time about the spread of disinformation on their platforms.
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Fortunately, there are two options to buy time, neither of which requires congressional action. It merely requires the government to apply regulatory tools that do not get used frequently, namely subjecting business executives to felony prosecution.
The first option is an antitrust case against Google led by the attorney general of Texas that alleges a price fixing conspiracy in digital advertising. The complaint names Facebook as a co-conspirator. Price fixing falls under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, significant because it does not require proof of harm. The attempt itself is a crime. And if, as has been alleged, there is evidence of an agreement for mutual legal defense, there may be a second count. When appropriate, executives can be subject to felony prosecution, punishable by up to three years in prison. Google denies any wrongdoing.
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The second option would be a securities fraud investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. For a decade or more, journalists have reported evidence of overstated user counts and advertising views by internet platforms. They assert that a material percentage of advertising clicks are manufactured by fraudsters exploiting the lack of transparency in digital advertising. The opacity of all digital ad platforms relative to traditional media and Google’s dominance of digital ad infrastructure have prevented a thorough accounting.
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Securities law requires public companies to report accurate numbers. For internet platforms, user count and ad views are key to investor sentiment, the latter an essential revenue driver. If ad views are overstated, then revenues must also be overstated. If the overstatement occurred over many years, with the knowledge of the executives, then the SEC has the option to pursue a felony case, creating legal jeopardy for senior executives who may face prison time. Such cases are not common, but the circumstances surrounding internet platforms certainly warrant a thorough investigation.
While it has not been a common practice to use felony cases to reform an industry, these are extraordinary times. The goal is not to put executives in jail, but rather to create incentives for good faith negotiation with corporations whose behavior poses a threat to society and the authority of the government.
It used to be common practice to use felony cases to reform an industry, just look at the prosecutions, and long jail sentences in the 1930s, see the fate of Richard Whitney, former head of President of the NYSE.
He was not the only one.
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The Biden administration wants to restore faith in government. Its aggressive actions to distribute Covid vaccines and pass the American Recovery Act are important first steps, but not enough. Directing executive branch agencies to enforce the antitrust and securities laws against flagrant violators would be welcome next steps. Doing so against Google and Facebook would begin the process of reforming an industry that continues to act recklessly.
I know I say this a lot, but I want to see them frog-marched out of their offices in handcuffs.
Remember disgraced former Missiouri Governor Eric Greitens>?
He resigned after credible allegations emerged of rape, blackmail, and other sexual misconduct with hid hair stylist.
In fact, impeachment proceedings had begun by the time he resigned.
Well now, he is looking to run for the US Senate to replace retiring Senator Roy Blunt.
He seems to think that the aforementioned crimes just don’t make a difference, talk about chutzpah:
Former Missouri Republican Gov. Eric Greitens on Monday announced a bid to replace retiring Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.).
Greitens’s announcement came nearly three years after he resigned as governor amid mounting scandals, including allegations that he photographed a woman nude without her consent in an effort to conceal an extramarital affair.
Despite the scandals, Greitens has floated a Senate bid for weeks, even before Blunt announced his retirement earlier this month. On Monday, he made his decision official.
“I have been so encouraged by the people of Missouri that I am happy to announce tonight that I am running for the United States Senate to continue serving the people of Missouri,” Greitens told Fox News’s Bret Baier.
Also, he is a Jew, so in addition to being a narcissistic psychopathic megalomaniac, he is a, “Shanda fur die Goyim,” an embarrassment to Jews around the world for his behavior.
It makes him a perfect Republican though.
At the New York Times, they are describing the response to Black Lives Matter protests by the police as, “Mishandled.”
This is patently wrong, and IMHO deliberately misleading.
The brutality of police in confronting what were largely non-violent protesters were police riots.
Their behavior was deliberate and premeditated:
For many long weeks last summer, protesters in American cities faced off against their own police forces in what proved to be, for major law enforcement agencies across the country, a startling display of violence and disarray.
In Philadelphia, police sprayed tear gas on a crowd of mainly peaceful protesters trapped on an interstate who had nowhere to go and no way to breathe. In Chicago, officers were given arrest kits so old that the plastic handcuffs were decayed or broken. Los Angeles officers were issued highly technical foam-projectile launchers for crowd control, but many of them had only two hours of training; one of the projectiles bloodied the eye of a homeless man in a wheelchair. Nationally, at least eight people were blinded after being hit with police projectiles.
Now, months after the demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police in May, the full scope of the country’s policing response is becoming clearer. More than a dozen after-action evaluations have been completed, looking at how police departments responded to the demonstrations — some of them chaotic and violent, most peaceful — that broke out in hundreds of cities between late May and the end of August.
In city after city, the reports are a damning indictment of police forces that were poorly trained, heavily militarized and stunningly unprepared for the possibility that large numbers of people would surge into the streets, moved by the graphic images of Mr. Floyd’s death under a police officer’s knee.
The police were prepared. Their goal was to create violence, and some property damage, in an attempt to discredit protestors, and to a significant degree, they succeeded.
This was malice, not ineptitude.
It turns out that Purdue Pharmaceuticals conducted an in-depth probe of the Sackler family, but they are refusing to release the results.
If the results exonerated anyone, they would been in a press release:
Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin, conducted what may be the most extensive investigation yet of the Sackler family, exploring whether they committed crimes or financial improprieties, but the company has kept most of its findings secret.
In a bankruptcy filing late Monday, the drugmaker acknowledged hiring attorneys, forensic accountants and other financial experts to probe members of the family who own the company and profited billions from opioid sales.
According to the filing, the team searched for evidence of wrongdoing by the family, reporting to a special committee of Purdue’s board between April 2019 and earlier this month.
Yet in its filing, Purdue Pharma chose to reveal almost nothing of what investigators uncovered, a decision that infuriates opioid activists and some government officials.
“They’re still trying to cover up the facts,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who has sued the company and it owners, in a statement.
“Purdue’s disclosure filing says it paid its lawyers for a 22,000-hour investigation of the Sacklers, but it doesn’t disclose any of their findings,” she added.
First, the Sacklers decided to become drug pushers, and when they got caught, the Sacklers decided to loot the company before declaring bankruptcy.
Once again, I think that the best way to deal with this is to apply the Billy Ray Valentine principle, “You know, it occurs to me that the best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people.”
By August of 2005, Karl Rove had managed to manipulate the public discourse in such a way as to make meaningful criticisms of George W. Bush almost unthinkable.
Then came Katrina, and much like New Orleans and its levees, the ensuing backlash washed away Rove’s carefully constructed barriers intended to protect bush, and everything started coming out.
The same is going on with Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo right now, and here is an update:
FWIW, I don’t think that “Rat Faced Andy” is going to resign except perhaps as part of a plea deal, because he wants to make sure that he has this chip in his pocket until it is certain that he won’t be going to jail.
I so hope that he goes to jail.
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has specifically asked Merrick Garland to investigate allegations that the FBI refused to conduct a full investigation of Brett Kavanaugh following his 2018 nomination to the Supreme Court.
Given that something in excess of $90,000.00 of Kavanaugh’s debts mysteriously vanished in the months prior to his nomination, this should have been investigated, and it wasn’t.
In fact, as Whitehouse notes, the FBI refused to even call people back who contacted the agency with concerns regarding the now Supreme Court Justice:
The FBI is facing new scrutiny for its 2018 background check of Brett Kavanaugh, the supreme court justice, after a lawmaker suggested that the investigation may have been “fake”.
Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator and former prosecutor who serves on the judiciary committee, is calling on the newly-confirmed attorney general, Merrick Garland, to help facilitate “proper oversight” by the Senate into questions about how thoroughly the FBI investigated Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing.
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The FBI was called to investigate the allegations during the Senate confirmation process but was later accused by some Democratic senators of conducting an incomplete background check. For example, two key witnesses – Ford and Kavanaugh – were never interviewed as part of the inquiry.
Among the concerns listed in Whitehouse’s letter to Garland are allegations that some witnesses who wanted to share their accounts with the FBI could not find anyone at the bureau who would accept their testimony and that it had not assigned any individual to accept or gather evidence.
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He added that, once the FBI decided to create a “tip line”, senators were not given any information on how or whether new allegations were processed and evaluated. While senators’ brief review of the allegations gathered by the tip line showed a “stack” of information had come in, there was no further explanation on the steps that had been taken to review the information, Whitehouse said.
“This ‘tip line’ appears to have operated more like a garbage chute, with everything that came down the chute consigned without review to the figurative dumpster,” he said.
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Whitehouse said he is seeking answers about “how, why, and at whose behest” the FBI conducted a “fake” investigation if standard procedures were violated, including standards for following allegations gathered through FBI “tip lines”.
The allegations of sexual assault are concerning, but the financial irregularities, which are job one of any background investigation, and it appears that the FBI did not do this.
We already knew that Kavanaugh was the Federalist Society’s, “Made Man,” in a political sense, but it now appears that he was a, “Made Man,” in a way that is more akin to its original meaning of a fully initiated Mafiosi.
He’s in, and they pay his debts, bury his bodies, and make everything go away.
It turns out that the Trump family tradition of exploiting charities for personal gains even extends to rescue dogs.
In this case, it’s Eric’s wife Lara, who has diverted millions of dollars to the Trump organization from Big Dog Ranch Rewsuc Rescue.
It’s pretty cold to steal from rescue dogs.
On the bright side, it probably means that her campaign for US Senate is dead before it even started:
A dog rescue charity that has links to Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, has spent almost $2m at Trump properties in the last seven years, according to US media reports.
While other companies and groups have distanced themselves from the Trumps since the 6 January attack on the capital, the Florida-based Big Dog Ranch Rescue is expected to spend another $225,000 at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago country club for an event this weekend, according to a permit filed with the town of Palm Beach, which was reported by HuffPost.
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HuffPost reported that Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings show that the charity has spent as much as $1,883,160 on fundraising costs for events at Mar-a-Lago and a nearby Trump golf course since 2014. Lara Trump, who is married to Eric Trump, has been a chairwoman for charity events since 2018.
Donald Trump’s Trump Foundation, which was dissolved in 2019, and Eric Trump’s Eric Trump Foundation are known to have used money from donors for events and other expenses at Trump properties. Donald Trump admitted in court documents that he used charity money to buy a portrait of himself.
They really are a repulsive lot, aren’t they?
It has been common knowledge for years that Andrew Cuomo deliberately managed a, “Toxic Workplace,” so the allegations of sexual harassment should not be a surprise:
Cuomo’s leadership style often confuses ruthlessness with greatness, abuse with strength. Interviews with dozens of former Cuomo employees and those who have worked with or adjacent to his administration reveal a governing institution that has been run, at times, like a cultish fraternity, and at others, like a high-school clique — a state executive chamber in which the maintenance of power, performance of pecking orders, and pursuit of competitive resentments matter as much as policy.
Sexual harassment is not really a matter of sex, it is a matter of power, and since before his days as New York State Attorney General, Cuomo has been consistently crapping on people who are under his authority.
What’s more, Cuomo has always operated in a thoroughly corrupt manner, not just with his quid pro quo with nursing home chains, “You donate to me, and I’ll get you immunity,” but in other more profoundly explicit ways, such as his steering bond deals to donors in direct contravention of federal law.
He’s not just a bully and a dirt-bag, he is a corrupt bully and dirt bag: (Even if he never personally touches that money)
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has since 2012 taken in more than $131,000 in campaign contributions from three major financial firms that were then tapped by his administration to manage state bond work, according to an International Business Times review of campaign finance documents and state bond prospectuses. The Democratic governor accepted the money — and his officials handed out the government business without competitive bids — despite federal rules that bar campaign contributors from receiving taxpayer-financed state bond work.
Last week, Cuomo officials designated the three banks that contributed the campaign funds — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America — as the dealers for a $33 million bond issue, enabling the firms to reap lucrative fees. That came on top of the Cuomo administration assigning the firms to manage a $68 million bond issue last fall, even as federal law enforcement officials were investigating allegations that New York lawmakers were doing favors for political donors.
Federal rules bar states from awarding bond work to parties who have donated to gubernatorial campaigns within the last two years (more than $86,000 of the campaign cash from the firms flowed to Cuomo in the last two years). The rules aim to prevent financial firms from gaining influence over officials who have the power to select which firms receive the lucrative bond business. The rules explicitly seek to stop financial companies from circumventing those strictures: They prohibit firms from channeling contributions to bond overseers through PACs, which are giant pools of money distributed to multiple campaign war chests.
“The pay-to-play rules are very clear,” said Craig Holman, an ethics expert at the watchdog group Public Citizen. “If Andrew Cuomo’s receiving any money from a PAC controlled by a municipal dealer, he’d be in violation of pay-to-play rules.”
On the sexual harassment front, we now have a much larger number of women claiming inappropriate behavior, as well as an increase in the severity of the behavior reported, which has resulted in a formal referral of the matter to the Albany police.
In addition, leaders in the state house, and most of New York’s Democratic Congressional delegation have called for him to resign, including Chuck Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand, who wouldn’t take a dump without poll testing it.
I really hope that he is done. He is a truly odious human being.
Peter Diamandis, a tech entrepreneur who seems to won every single game of bullsh%$ bingo that he has ever played, just topped himself.
No charges, of course, because nothing is a crime any more if you are rich:
In late January, tech impresario Peter Diamandis hosted an exclusive, indoor conference for a group of ultra-wealthy patrons in Los Angeles. As MIT Technology Review reported last month, the get-together, where no masks were required, became a covid-19 superspreader event.
Four days later, as staff, speakers, and attendees began testing positive for the virus, an email went out to those who had taken part. It invited them to join an “informational webinar” featuring a doctor who had been at the event—an attempt to put their minds at ease.
Diamandis had held the Abundance 360 Summit, or A360, in violation of a ban on private gatherings during a covid surge. At least 86 people were present, some having flown in from around the world; many had paid $30,000 in assorted fees for the privilege of attending in person. Everyone was tested daily, but the virus took hold nonetheless, and at least 32 people contracted covid either directly or indirectly as a result of the four-day program.
The webinar on January 30 featured Matt Cook, a trained anesthesiologist from the San Francisco Bay Area who had started a medical practice using alternative therapies. A follow-up email sharing the URL to view a recording of the call was accompanied by an order form for products from Fountain Life, a company focused on longevity treatments, of which Diamandis is a cofounder and director.
Between the webinar and the Fountain Life order form, attendees were told about a range of products that were claimed to either treat covid-19 or prevent it outright. What they were not told was that seven of the recommended products were also classified by the US Food and Drug Administration as “covid-19 fraudulent.”
The fraudulent cures included amniotic fluid, the liquid that surrounds a baby in utero and is rich in stem cells, and colloidal silver, a suspension of metal particles often touted as having antimicrobial effects, but which the FDA has said “is not safe or effective for treating any disease or condition.” Cook recommended taking both of them as an inhaled mist using a nebulizer, an electric machine similar to an asthma inhaler.
In a more enlightened time, this guy would be in jail awaiting trial.
If it were just the rich people who were exposed, I would not be outraged, but you have to figure that a lot of people who caught this were ordinary Joes who were bartending, serving canapes, and generally submitting to the whims of said rich folks.
It is remarkable just how many enterprises that Softbank funds are fraudulent, criminal, or fraud and criminality adjacent.
When one looks at their investment targets, like WeWork, Uber, and DoorDash, which are basically criminal enterprises, with defrauding investors, evading transportation and safety regulations, and stealing from delivery boys (respectively) being central to their business models.
And now another SoftFank funded dodgy outfit has blown up, Greensill, which financed supply chains.
It’s model was to pay suppliers immediately at a discount, and then collect the difference when the large firms actually buying the stuff paid on a 90 day, and frequently longer, cycle.
Its finances were sufficiently sketchy that their insurer stopped writing them policies, and then the house of cards collapsed:
Supply chain finance disruptor Greensill is undone by its own financial alchemy, putting at risk thousands of jobs in the UK, Australia and the EU. The timing could not be worse for already buckling supply chains.
Disruptor seems to be a synonym for criminality and ignoring the lessons of finance learned over more than 500 years of fractional reserve banking.
On Monday, the supply chain finance firm Greensill Capital filed for insolvency after defaulting on a $140 million loan it owes to Credit Suisse. Its parent company in Australia had already filed for insolvency there. According to UK court documents, Greensill had “fallen into severe financial distress” and can no longer pay off its debts. Over the past week many of the company’s directors have been frantically jumping ship, including its chairman Maurice Thompson, Australia’s former foreign minister Julie Bishop and former Morgan Stanley executive David Brierwood.
The firm has been in trouble for some time, as I warned in a previous NC post. A number of its client companies already collapsed in 2020. In the aftermath attention switched to the financial menage á trois Greensill had formed with its primary backer, Soft Bank, and Swiss mega-lender Credit Suisse. Greensill was also under investigation by German banking regulator BaFin and the Association of German Banks, an industry group, over its German subsidiary Greensill Bank’s huge exposure to a single client: U.K.-based steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta.
Yep, SoftBank.
When you want to get in on a fraud, pump it up, and get out leaving suckers holding the bag.
Greensill’s fall from grace was as spectacular as its meteoric rise, writes the FT‘s John Plender:
Greensill Capital went from nothing in 2011, when Lex Greensill abandoned a big-bank career, doing global supply chain financing at Morgan Stanley and Citibank, to go it alone. By 2019 this upstart non-bank says it had extended $US143 billion ($185.5 billion) of financing to 10m-plus customers and suppliers in 175 countries. Its founder also notched up powerful contacts in government and hired former UK prime minister David Cameron as an adviser.
Yeah, hiring David Cameron as an adviser is another tell that they are relying on smoke and mirrors more than anything else.
It turns out that the model Greensill used was “Working” in the short term because it allowed companies to cook the books:
For large companies the advantages are twofold: they get to preserve cash on-hand by extending payment terms with vendors. They can also record the amount they owe to the supply chain finance firm or bank as accounts payable on the balance sheet rather than as debt. This makes their liquidity position appear healthier than it actually is. And that can be dangerous. Companies can conceal the true size of their debt for longer, leaving investors and creditors bearing bigger losses when they finally collapse, as happened with Spanish green energy giant Abengoa in 2015, UK outsourcing giant Carillion in 2018 and NMC Health, the former FTSE 100 private hospital company, in 2020.
They then repackaged and resold the debt, but this was dependent on these bonds being insured, and when their insurer decided to stop writing policies, and the debt became profoundly unattractive to put it mildly. so the house of cards collapsed.
Once again, though, the principals of the firm will be fine, but this collapse is ricocheting around the trans-national supply chain, and we don’t know when this game of musical chairs will end.
If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because it’s rather similar like Bear Stearns in 2008.
One hopes that the repercussions are less severe.
A court has overturned the patently bogus conviction of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which means that he can run for the Presidency of Brazil in the next election.
Given that he is the most popular politician in Brazil by a lot, he is very likely to win.
The short version of the story is that the judge overseeing the trials colluded with prosecutors to convict da Silva of taking bribes to refurbish an apartment that he never lived in, and probably never owned.
One hopes that Lula has learned his lesson, and understands that so long as they remain in positions of power, his opponents will stop at nothing to destroy him, up to, and probably including violence and assassination against him, his family and his supporters.
They need to be turfed out, sooner rather than later:
Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva could be set for a sensational comeback attempt after a supreme court judge annulled a series of criminal convictions against the leftist icon and restored his political rights.
The ruling, which analysts called a political bombshell, means Lula is almost certain to challenge Brazil’s incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro, in the 2022 presidential election.
………
Lula was president of Latin America’s largest economy for two terms, between 2003 and 2011, and oversaw a historic period of commodity-fuelled growth and poverty reduction. The Workers’ party (PT) politician, who is now 75, had hoped to seek a third term in 2018 but was sidelined after being jailed on disputed corruption charges, paving the way for Bolsonaro’s landslide victory.
Lula was released from prison in November 2019 after 580 days behind bars but remained unable to seek election after being stripped of his political rights.
The entire “Car Wash” affair, and the ascension of Bolsonaro that followed, is yet another indication of just how toxic US meddling in Latin America has been over the past 250 years.
In a strong statement, the New York State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins has called for Governor Andrew “Rat-Faced Andy” Cuomo to resign.
New York State House Speaker Carl Heastie has expressed doubts that Cuomo can continue to be effective as a leader.
There are now five women who have accused him of inappropriate behavior, and unlike many politicians, Cuomo has no reservoir of goodwill to draw upon among his fellow politicians in Albany.
Everyone in that town hates him, and the no longer fear him, so his political power, along with his once-prodigious fundraising ability are waning.
I do not think that he will resign though, too much hubris there, so either he loses the Democratic primary election, loses the general election, or is indicted on some sort of criminal charges. (I hope for the latter)
In a potentially crippling defection in Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s efforts to maintain control amid a sexual harassment scandal, the powerful Democratic leader of the New York State Senate declared on Sunday that the governor should resign “for the good of the state.”
The stinging rebuke from the Senate leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins — along with a similar sentiment from the Assembly speaker, Carl E. Heastie, who questioned the “governor’s ability to continue to lead this state” — suggested that Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, had lost his party’s support in the State Capitol, and cast doubt on his ability to withstand the political fallout.
Once hailed as a pandemic hero and potential presidential contender, the governor has seen his political future spiral downward over eight perilous days in the wake of a New York Times report about Charlotte Bennett, a former aide to Mr. Cuomo.
In a series of interviews with The Times, Ms. Bennett, 25, said that Mr. Cuomo, 63, had asked her invasive personal questions last spring about her sex life, including whether she had slept with older men, and whether she thought age made a difference in relationships.
Ms. Bennett is one of five women who have come forward in recent days with allegations of sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior against Mr. Cuomo, with one predating his tenure as governor.
………
Ms. Stewart-Cousins is the most prominent New York State official to call for Mr. Cuomo’s resignation, and her statement carries significance: Her Senate would be the jury for any impeachment trial of the governor, if such an action were passed by the Assembly.
It also carries symbolic weight: In 2008, when Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned during a prostitution scandal, his decision was partially precipitated by a loss of support from Albany’s legislative leaders.
Mr. Heastie did not call for Mr. Cuomo to resign, but suggested that it was time for him “to seriously consider whether he can effectively meet the needs of the people of New York.”
The writing is on the wall, and I hope that eventually Cuomo’s (metaphorical) blood is on the floor of the Senate.
It turns out that even under the insane rules under which the Texas energy markets operate, producers overcharged distributors and consumers to the tune of $16 billion.
Runnign the math, that’s about $550 for every man, woman, and child residing in Texas.
There are no plans to claw this back, because ……… Texas.
I’m thinking that we should allow Mexico to claw back the whole state:
An independent market monitor said the Texas power-grid operator made a critical mistake that resulted in $16 billion in electricity overcharges last month, and recommended that the charges be reversed.
The monitor concluded that Texas kept wholesale prices high for 33 hours longer than warranted as the state dealt with a major winter storm that led to power shortages and mass blackouts and should correct this mistake by retroactively repricing its wholesale power market for that period.
A Public Utility Commission of Texas spokesman said the issue was slated for discussion at a scheduled meeting on Friday.
A reversal of the charges would be a boon to many participants in the market—from retailers to electric cooperatives, wind farms to multistate generators—that suffered significant financial harm when they needed to buy power at the peak price of $9,000 per megawatt hour.
The entire culture of government in Texas is deeply and pervasively corrupt, both at the elected official level as well as at the bureaucratic level.
It needs to be addressed, with many senior Texas political officials, and senior bureaucrats, frog-marched out of their offices in hand cuffs.
Senator Sinema a little too happy for poverty wages to remain pic.twitter.com/ze2T2CGtML
Horriffic
It’s one thing to vote against raising the minimum wage, even if you are, as Kyrsten Sinema (D=AZ) is, nominally a member of the Democratic Party.
It’s quite another to show up dressed like a Japanese school girl, and then cast your vote with a thumbs down as one is a roman emperor.
It’s even worse when one sees the unholy glee she expresses in crushing MILLIONS of American workers.
Kyrsten Sinema is even more of a psychopath than is Mitch McConnell.
At least HE has the decency to skulk in the shadows while he does evil.
Sinema revels in the evil that she is doing.
Getting rid of her and Manchin is worth losing the Senate.