Week of 08/31/2020

 

The $200-Billion Problem
– by David Matthews 2

So amidst the political grandstanding and the fascistic race war and the protests and the racially-motivated killings and the mask-haters throwing temper tantrums, it recently came out that Jeff Bezos is worth $200-billion.

You know, Bezos.  The guy that owns the Washington Post and the super-conglomerate that is Amazon.  The guy that lost half his wealth to his now-ex, and now is worth about $200,000,000,000.

That’s a lot of zeros.  I could go on and on coming up with jokes about how big that number is.  I could tell you that Bezos would be making the equivalent of a lifetime of your paychecks in the time it takes you to just finish reading this paragraph.  But, really, it’s not worth wasting time like that.

I will say that Bezos is worth 200 times more than a certain orange-skinned narcissist in the White House will ever make even if he doesn’t end up in prison.  And I’m sure that fact alone has said orange-skinned narcissist infuriated.  No wonder why he hates Bezos and wants to make his businesses suffer!

But he’s not alone in the group of people that are infuriated knowing that the guy who is in charge of the mega-glom Amazon has so much money that it’s outright obscene.  We’re not just talking rich or even filthy rich.  It’s not even “Breaking Bad” rich or Mexican drug cartel rich.  We’re talking obscenely filthy disgusting Saudi Big Oil rich!

Now I’m sure you’ll have a whole bunch of people that will give that condescending glare and try to “educate” us about the fact that Bezos’ “worth” is really diversified into stocks and bonds and holdings and various different money programs and it’s not really physical dollar value.  I mean, yeah, if Bezos could sell all of his stocks and cash in all his bonds and withdraw all of his various accounts today and put them all into physical dollar bills, then it might be actually be $200,000,000,000.  But who would want to count?  And that amount of withdrawal would certainly cause some serious reverberations in the financial world.

Yes, a lot of Bezos’ “value” is hypothetical.  The stock market is all speculative.  Stock can be “worth” a thousand dollars today and then ten cents tomorrow.  Its value is ultimately meaningless until you buy or sell.  We’ve all seen it happen enough times.  We’ve been watching it with the Dow Jones in just this past year.

But the fact of the matter is that Jeff Bezos, as CEO of Amazon, is disgustingly rich.  His companies prosper, while the people at the bottom of his various corporate pyramids are not.

And that is a problem for a lot of people.  They want to know why Bezos – and, by extension, the rest of the corporate CEOs – can get so obscenely rich on the backs of the underpaid and undervalued haggard employees.  Why they’re not getting paid more.  Why they’re not getting hazard pay in the middle of working during a global pandemic.  Why their health and dental insurance packages are crap and cost more and more while covering less and less.  How can people at the bottom of the corporate pyramid be so undervalued and underappreciated and have to work harder and harder while the ones at the top get filthy rich and richer at every financial quarter?

So here’s the answer: because that is the name of the game in American business.

Let’s get brutally honest here... the name of the game for American business is profit, profit, profit.  Profit first.  Profit second.  Profit third, fourth, and fifth.  Profit ad infinitum and ad nauseum.  It’s not about keeping the business going.  It’s not about providing a first-rate product or service, or customer satisfaction, or winning awards, or whatever other artificial metric you can come up with.  It’s not even about the longevity of the business.  It is all about the profit.

A business can be running for ten years and still be considered a “loser” if they don’t make profit for all of those ten years, while a young upstart competitive company can be considered an “overwhelming success” in their first fiscal quarter simply because of profit.  And guess what?  That upstart company will buy out and shut down that ten-year-old business and then go bankrupt in the following quarter, and the execs still be considered “successes” simply because of the profit made before the bankruptcy.

And what is profit, you ask?  Profit is simply what is left of revenue after all the expenses are paid.  “Revenue” is money coming in.  All of those sales made on Amazon or through Amazon or distributed by Amazon.  All of the investment money from stock purchases.  “Expenses” include all of the salaries and benefits and overhead and materials and distribution costs and taxes and consulting costs for everyone below the upper executive levels.  In other words, everyone in Amazon that works for Bezos all the way down to the people who sweep the floors and clean the toilets and mow the lawn are all “expenses”.

The name of the game, then, is not just to make a profit, but to do so each and every financial quarter and in ever-increasing amounts.  It’s not enough to simply say “we made two-percent profit this quarter”.  No, that’s not good enough for the gods of Wall Street.  They expect you to give a number in advance of how much more you’ll make this quarter and then the next, and if you can’t make it, then you and your business are considered losers, and your stock value crashes, and you’re looking at getting bought out and/or replaced.

And it does not matter one whit about how you make that profit; just that you do.  If you have to slash income and jobs and benefits down to the bone marrow, so be it.  If you have to not pay certain bills, or to hold off on paying those bills to make those numbers, then so be it.  If you have to shuffle numbers to dummy companies like Enron did two decades ago and get an accounting firm to lie about it, then so be it.  If you have to deliver substandard or even dangerously defective product because you used bargain-basement materials to keep expenses down, then so be it.

Because once you do make those numbers, then the financial world loves you and your investors reward you with more stock options and bonuses and perks.  And that is all that really matters to the corporate executives.  It’s about making profit so they can get paid.

That is why Jeff Bezos is worth $200-billion along with all of the other big corporate executives in all of the other companies, and why the rest of us are getting underpaid and undervalued.  It is all about profit.

Do I think it’s right?  Of course not!  I’m not saying this to defend what has been going on.  I’m explaining this to you so you can understand where the real evil is.  It isn’t about Amazon or even Jeff Bezos!  It’s about a business and financial system that values profit over everything else.  It is the game that is broken, not the players.  Bezos and the other players are simply playing the game as it is currently meant to be played.

If you want Bezos and all the other business executives to change things so that employees get paid better and get better benefits, you can’t do it by taxes or regulations.  We have all seen how a change in government can undo any and all of those things in less than a decade.  There needs to be a sea change in businesses and in the game that they play.  It needs to stop being about profit first, last, and always.  Then, no matter who is in government, will the world of business do what is right.

Millionaires and billionaires and even hypothetical trillionaires come and go.  Jeff Bezos is just the latest of business players to either praise or scorn.  Think about all of the businesses that used to be king that are now going away for good.  The constant that remains is how the game is played.  That is where your outrage should be.  That is what needs to change for all of us to improve.

 

Week of 08/24/2020

“The Numbers Don’t Lie”...
Until They Do
– by David Matthews 2

“The numbers don’t lie.”

That’s the statement regurgitated over and over again by a local Atlanta TV station when it comes to coronavirus data.

They say “the numbers don’t lie” to tell people that the ever-increasing number of those infected with coronavirus and those who have died from it should be trusted and should be taken seriously.

“The numbers don’t lie,” they say.

Except that they do.

This is one of those BS statements that people love to make.  It’s like saying “you can’t fake” whatever it is you want people to buy into.  “You can’t fake steak.”  “You can’t fake the crunch of fruit.” 

Bull!  You can fake anything.  There’s a bakery that can bake a cake to look like a cheeseburger, or a T-bone steak, and visually it’s indistinguishable from the real thing until you cut into it.  Burger King is making a killing off the “Impossible Whopper” which uses plant-based fake meat that you really can’t differentiate from the sight, smell, or taste of the real thing.  “Imitation crabmeat” is actually fish, not crab.  Back in 2016, the New York Times reported that a lot of the fish that we bought and/or were served wasn’t what we thought it was.

How many times have we heard people exaggerate their credentials?  How many times have we heard people claim to be something that they’re not? 

The CNBC series “American Greed” focused one episode on a woman who claimed to be an accountant.  She lived in a prestigious house in California’s Orange County.  She showed off her degree from Pepperdine.  She lived a seemingly beautiful life with plenty of clients seeking her fiscal management skills.

Except it was all a lie.  She faked everything.  She never attended Pepperdine.  She has no degree.  It was a fake piece of paper framed on her office wall.  She didn’t own her expensive house like she claimed she did; she rented it.  And she wasn’t even an accountant.  She was a fertilizer saleswoman.  She literally sold crap!  And she pilfered her “clients” out of over a million dollars all to support her “Orange County” lifestyle.

The sad truth is that numbers *do* lie.

Remember Enron?  Twenty years ago, the big energy-mongering corporation constantly reported big money because their executives were able to play fast and loose with the numbers.  They shuffled debt and pretended it was revenue and they claimed huge stinking profits when in reality they were just sinking themselves further and further into debt.  But they were able to get away with it because they had help from a major accounting firm whose job was to supposedly “verify” that the numbers were true, even though they weren’t.

Think about it!  Enron executives made the numbers lie, and their accomplices in the major accounting firm certified the lie and claimed it was the truth.  And they were able to get away with it over and over again until they just couldn’t do it anymore, and then it destroyed the whole business and put thousands of people out of work.

We’ve been hearing about unemployment in 2020, especially as the global pandemic have ruined economies around the world.  But the numbers that we hear about who is unemployed in America are not honest or accurate, and this is something that has been going on for a long time.  Long before we elected a career con-artist to the White House.

The unemployment figures we hear in America only account for those who get unemployment assistance.  Not those who apply for that assistance but have not yet been approved, not those whose claims have been rejected, and not for those whose assistance has run out.  All of those people may still be out of work, still looking for work, but they do not count as being “unemployed”.  Also, if you cut the number of weeks covered by that assistance, of course you’re going to see the unemployment numbers drop dramatically.  That’s not because the economy is getting better.  It’s because those in government are intentionally gaming the numbers and making things worse for people.

Even the numbers attributed to the COVID-19 global pandemic – the very ones that we are being told by a certain Atlanta TV station that “don’t lie” – are not accurate.

The number of people who contracted coronavirus is inaccurate because we really don’t know how many people have it.  Testing for the virus in America has been so badly and negligently mismanaged that we will never really know how many people in America have or even had the virus.  We’re learning that some people who died of blood clots or heart attacks or strokes early in the year, especially those not in their senior years, may have actually died because of the effects of the coronavirus in their systems.  But we only learned that after the fact, and only after people requested an autopsy to actually look for the coronavirus.  And we’re still not doing mass testing because insurance providers refuse to cover it and hospitals refuse to administer it unless people are suspected of having it.  Sort of like trying to find out if the boat is sinking but waiting until it’s already taking on water.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the involvement of a certain orange-skinned narcissist in the White House and his death cult followers in their repeated denials of the seriousness of the global pandemic and his efforts to - in his own words - “slow down” or even prevent testing for everyone except for himself and his inner circle.  Not to mention his directives to send all related data from hospitals to his cronies instead of to the Centers for Disease Control.  So, like Enron did two decades ago, they can play fast and loose with the numbers, and there would be nobody to challenge them.

Let’s get brutally honest here... contrary to what people say, numbers *can* lie.  Numbers *do* lie, especially in the hands of known liars and con-artists.  In fact, numbers are the grifter’s greatest tool.  They give the illusion of legitimacy while camouflaging their criminal activities.  Look at Enron.  Look at the “Orange County” con-woman and the rest of the criminals seen in CNBC’s “American Greed”.  They all use numbers and our gullibility to trust those numbers without question to take advantage of us for their own gain.

I’m not saying that we should ignore the COVID-19 numbers.  Quite the contrary.  Until we have some kind of verification that cannot be influenced or compromised by those in the White House, we should accept the numbers as they are, but with the suspicion that they could be far worse.  The people in the White House have every reason to lie about those numbers, and not one reason at all for telling the truth.

The death-cult leader says “it is what it is”.  This commentator has a better saying when it comes to COVID numbers: “Better safe than sorry.”

 

 

Week of 08/17/2020

 

The Best Thing Trump Can Do Is The One Thing He Probably Will Not Do
– by David Matthews 2

Picture the scene...

It’s the last full week of August, 2020, and the Trump Party Convention (known previously as the Republican National Convention) is in full swing.  Or, at least as much as they can do with a global pandemic going on.  And the highlight of the whole partisan orgy is about to take place.  It’s time for their ruling savior and messiah, President Donald John Trump, to officially accept his “nomination” for a second term in office.

So all cameras turn to Il Trumpe as he stands before a podium or behind some desk in some remote location, knowing that all the world is watching him and getting a perverse satisfaction of it.  He can envision the throngs of people chanting his name.

And then... he says that he cannot accept the nomination for four more years in power.

In fact, he announces that he will be immediately stepping down from office and turning the reigns of power over to his number two, who is a number two, Vice President Pence.

At this point, all the Trump Party cultists are in complete shock and disbelief.  They have supported him for four years, through thick and thin, showing nothing but blind fealty and love through all of the criticisms and all of the controversies, and now he’s saying he is stepping away from it all.

The reason Orange One gives to his cultists is simple: he’s done everything he wanted to do as President.

He tells them that he’s made America “great again”.  He’s supposedly restored America’s “respect” in the world and put the leaders “on notice”.  He has saved the economy.  He has cut taxes and social programs.  He supposedly “fixed” the regulatory agencies, including his most recent reform of the US Postal Service.  He has put in the “right” judges in the Supreme Court and all the lower courts.  He has embarrassed the Democrats time and time again and thwarted their attempts to depose him through impeachment.  And, to top it off, he says that he even saved the nation from a dangerous global pandemic and put it on a path to an accelerated cure.

He’s done it all, he claims, and he says that there is nothing left to do.

And so, he says that he’s done and he will be putting all his support into the new President, Mike Pence, and he instructs his Trump Party loyalists to support and love Pence as they do him, and to help him “keep America great”.

And his cult followers rejoice in their leader’s declared absolute victory as their new chosen one would soon take the stand to give his new “acceptance speech”.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?  Even Trump’s critics would love to see that.

Too bad it probably will not happen.

Yes, there have been many people who say that Trump could very well just walk away from the White House.  They point to his previous endeavors where he just walks away from a sinking business and passes it to some other group so they could take the blame when they do collapse.  Just look at how he handled his casinos.  I mean, who drives a casino into bankruptcy?  Before Trump, it was unheard of.

And for the past few months there have been those that say that Trump is about ready to bail from the White House like everything else he screwed up.  They point to how he’s mismanaged the COVID-19 global pandemic, how the United States is leading the world in people affected with the coronavirus and leading in the deaths.  They point to the economy, with the number of people out of work and the number of people who have and will soon lose their homes through no fault of their own.  Sure, the financial crackhouse known as the stock market is on full overdose, but even insiders are saying the big crash is coming and it will be hard.  And don’t forget, we just experienced the biggest drop in the gross domestic product ever.  Ever!  Even the Great Depression didn’t gut one-third of the GDP!

Now would be the perfect time for Il Trumpe to do what he’s done in the past and bail.  He would be able to leave before the real manure hits the fan, he would be able to do so on his own terms, and he would be able to walk away with thunderous applause and sheer love and praise from his followers.  And he could even arrange a deal with Pence so that he would be pardoned for all his past crimes, just like Gerald Ford did for Richard Nixon when Nixon resigned.  The Great Narcissist could then retire to his gated Mar a Lago estate with his current wife and their son and watch the nation implode with complete impunity and lifetime pension and protection.

This commentator, however, doesn’t see that happening.

Let’s get brutally honest here... Donald Trump is a narcissist.  We all know this.  Even his own niece, a clinical psychologist, has openly said so.  And she is not alone in that assessment.  Trump has put himself into a position of seemingly absolute power, presumed absolute authority, with no consequences whatsoever, and on a cultist pedestal surrounded by people who love and worship him as a messiah and will do anything and everything for him and believe whatever he says.  He has turned his party into the Orwellian INSOC and himself as the literal Big Brother. 

As long as he is President, he can’t be touched.  He can’t be questioned.  He can’t be challenged.  He can go wherever he wants to, do whatever he wants, eat whatever he wants, and all paid for by the American taxpayers.  Not one penny comes from his own pocket while he is there.  He can play all the golf he wants to, and he has.  He doesn’t even have to stay at the White House.  He can stay at his Mar a Lago home and entertain loyal supporters all he wants.  And he has.  And all with the full protection of the American government.

He really can’t give that up, even if he wanted to.  Why would he want to?  He is seemingly addicted to the power and the adulation like a crack-whore to drugs. 

Sure, he could get a pardon for all his past activities.  He could even give himself a pardon before leaving.  But no President has ever done that before - no U.S. President has ever been so criminally despicable to even consider needing one - that it may not even be legal or permissible.  And there is always a chance that those pardons could be retroactively revoked by the next or even a future President.  Unheard of, you say?  So was the idea of a self-pardon before Il Trumpe took office.  One unheard of idea may require another to fix it.

That’s why he is doing everything in his power to cheat and rig the November election so he will win.  It’s why he is attacking the US Postal Service and attacking mail-in voting and doing everything he can to prevent people from voting... that is, if they’re not going to vote for him.

Oh, and don’t try to rationalize “tolerating” the Narcissist-in-Chief for four more years and expect him to step down because of term limits.  He has previously floated the idea of being a “president-for-life” and even posted videos of himself running over and over again ad infinitum.

The truth of the matter is this... the only way Narcissist Trump will leave office is if he is voted out in November and possibly even dragged out kicking and screaming in January.  Which means it is up to us, the American people, to do our part.  All of those fantasies of some other force doing it for the American people, or even him doing it himself, are just that... lazy fantasies.