pvtize good socialize bad

maybe belated redumbdent

extracts from the commons, dump your costs on public

see bankruptcy

---

an 11 23

to be honest, I didn't really care whether the Arizona Diamondbacks or the Texas Rangers won the World Series. Once my two favorite teams—the Dodgers and the Red Sox—were eliminated, I didn’t have a stake in the outcome of the World Series. I just wanted to watch to see first-rate baseball and see interesting games, and the Diamondbacks and Rangers didn't disappoint.

Most of the 30 MLB teams are owned by billionaires. But the owners of the Rangers and the Diamondbacks are particularly disgusting. Ken Kendrick, who owns the Diamondbacks, and Ray Davis—whose Rangers won the World Series in Game 5 on Wednesday night with a 5-0 shutout win—are both billionaires with a history of providing financial support for Republican candidates and right-wing causes.

:{:{According to Forbes magazine, Davis has a personal net worth of $2.9 billion. Before getting into the baseball business, Davis was CEO of two fossil fuel corporations—Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) and Energy Transfer Equity (ETE}:). ETP is a natural gas distributor and pipeline company. Davis stepped down as CEO in 2007 but still owns 2.4% of the company. In 2017, despite protests by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, Energy Transfer finished building the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline.

The corporation operates over 125,000 miles of pipeline that move approximately 30% of America's oil and natural gas. Davis and a group of investors bought the Texas Rangers for about $600 million in 2010; it's now worth $1.5 billion. Since 2021, Davis has donated at least $225,000 to Texans for Greg Abbott, the state's right-wing Republican governor, according to state campaign finance records. He's also donated to other Republican candidates.}:

In 2003, the Chicago Cubs hosted the first Pride game to celebrate their LGBTQ fans. Since then, all but one of the 30 Major League teams have hosted an annual Pride Day or Pride Night event. The Texas Rangers are the only team without a Pride Night.

Ken Kendrick is only worth $1 billion, according to Forbes, but he's a much bigger donor to politicians and right-wing causes than Davis. He and his wife Randy have made large donations to conservative groups connected with the Koch brothers. According to FEC filings, he has donated to many Republican election deniers, including Arizona U.S. Congressman Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs as well as to conspiracy-theory nutjob Congresswoman Lauren Boebert of Colorado.

Kendrick founded a software company called Data Technology which merged in 1979 with another company called Datatel. General Motors bought the company in 1988 for $511 million, giving Kendrick a big boost in his personal wealth. He made more money by investing early in Woodforest National Bank, which now has more than $1.7 billion in assets. Woodforest National Bank is Walmart’s largest retail partner. Kendrick became part-owner of the Diamondbacks with the team's inception in 1995 and has been the managing general partner (the major owner) since 2004.

Kendrick is one of those Republicans who decry "big government," but he's perfectly happy receiving government subsidies for his business from Arizona taxpayers. The Diamondbacks built Bank One Ballpark (later renamed Chase Field), the first retractable roof stadium in MLB with a grass field, in 1995 with the help of $253 million dollars in public financing through an increase in sales tax in Maricopa County. This happened during a huge county budget deficit and lack of funding for other services. The County Supervisors approved the tax increase without asking for voters' approval. In 2016, Kendrick decided that the stadium needed about $65 million worth of repairs, and estimated that it would need a total of $187 million of upkeep costs over the final 12 years of its lease with Maricopa County. And of course, they wanted the taxpayers to pay for it. County officials refused. One of them, Andy Kunasek, described the Diamondbacks as “parasitic enterprise.” When the County wouldn't provide Kendrick with the subsidy, he sued the County in an attempt to get out of the Diamondback's lease, which expires in 2027. Kendrick has hinted that if the County doesn't pay for those improvements, he'd consider moving to the team and building another stadium.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, Kenrick is also a union-buster. In 2020, when the 30 major league owners locked the players out for three months (essentially, an owners' strike), Kendrick was one of the four most reactionary owners who voted against signing a new collective bargaining agreement with the players union.

So it was a win for the Rangers last night, and congrats to all the players. However, no matter which way this series may have gone, it would have been one right-wing billionaire or another holding the trophy in the end.

---

// grover

no twt

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/aoc-twitter-abc-veritas/

walter kos

Racial disparities in society are only accentuated by emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, all inequities in our society have just been exposed that much more by the current crisis. Our system is a capitalist one that has relied on racism and concentration of capital and wealth to control a massive population of have nots. One of the symptoms of this racism is that small businesses owned by Black and Latino Americans have been frozen out of an already rigged process of COVID-19 stimulus relief. This is due in part to the fact that historically and presently, people of color have a considerably harder time getting loans from banks.

Not having a relationship with a bank makes getting Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) stimulus money considerably harder and as a result, while small businesses in general have been mostly kept out of the Republican, big business-focused package, it has been much harder on businesses of color. (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan.) Already undercapitalized, Black-owned businesses weren't going to ask for the large amounts that other bigger small businesses were going to ask for—and banks make bigger fees on bigger loans. NBC News' Olivia Solonpointed out that while fiscal conservative, anti-"welfare" crusaders like the fake news makers over at Project Veritas decry the big government spending of the CARES package, they didn't seem to have an issue with taking more than half a million of taxpayer money to keep their lights on.

The "non-profit" organization, most recently known for hyping up a completely empty and veryquickly debunked election fraud "exclusive," received $558,900 in PPP stimulus, according to searchppp.com.The right-wing, make-em-up investigative organization is fronted by James O'Keefe—a sort of older version of pathetic GOP fraudster Jacob Wohl. He's best known for hiring people to say they were sexually assaulted in order to discredit real victims of sexual assault. It's this kind of dirtbaggery that gets Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' ultra right-wing wife to present you with an award at the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. (True story.)

democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez boosted this story, synthesizing the racism and hypocrisy wrapped up in a holiday season bow.

This led to some right-wingers rubbing their tiny braincells together to attack Rep. Ocasio-Cortez for selling $58 "Tax the Rich" sweatshirts on her campaign's website. Unfortunately, there's math and the small factor of paying workers living wages. Not everything can be made for cheap in China, guys who seem to want to have a trade war with China but don't understand how costs work....

aoc: Black-owned small businesses were widely shut out from accessing PPP loans, yet right-wing disinfo org PV took half a million in public money while decrying direct federal assistance as “radical socialism.”

Republicanism in a nutshell.

aha this is a kind of extraction, pvtize profits, socialize costs; corps are tax dodgers thus leeches

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/bernie-sanders/

'The Walton family is the real welfare queen': GAO report details how taxpayers subsidize corporate giants' low wages

pinpointing a reality denounced as "morally obscene" by Sen. Bernie Sanders, a new government study shows how some of the nation's largest and most profitable corporations—including Walmart, McDonald's, Dollar General, and Amazon—feast upon taxpayer money by paying their employees such low wages that huge numbers of those workers throughout the year are forced to rely on public assistance programs such as Medicaid and food assistance just to keep themselves and their families afloat.

According to a statement from Sanders' office, the study he commissioned the Government Accountability Office to carry out—titled "Millions of Full-time Workers Rely on Federal Health Care and Food Assistance Programs"—found that an estimated 5.7 million Medicaid enrollees and 4.7 million SNAP(Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) recipients who worked full-time for 50 or more weeks in 2018earned wages so low that they qualified for these federal benefits. In addition, an estimated 12 million wage-earning adults enrolled in Medicaid and 9 million wage-earning adults living in households receiving SNAP benefits worked at some point in 2018.

Upon the study's release Wednesday, Warren Gunnels, staff director and policy adviser for Sen. Sanders, tweeted: "The real looting in America is theWalton family becoming $63 billion richer during a pandemic, while paying wages so low that 14,541 of their workers in 9 states need food stamps—all subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. Yes. The Walton family is the real welfare queen in America."

According to the Washington Post:, based on the GAO report:

Walmart was one of the top four employers of SNAP and Medicaid beneficiaries in every state. McDonald's was in the top five of employers with employees receiving federal benefits in at least nine states.

In the nine states that responded about SNAP benefits—Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Tennessee and Washington—Walmart was found to have employed about 14,500 workers receiving the benefit, followed by McDonald's with 8,780, according to Sanders's team. In six states that reported Medicaid enrollees, Walmart again topped the list, with 10,350 employees, followed by McDonald's with 4,600.

In Georgia, for example, Walmart employed an estimated 3,959 workers on Medicaid—an estimated 2.1 percent of the total of non-elderly, non-disabled people in the state receiving the benefit. McDonald's was next on the list, employing 1,480 who received Medicaid, or 0.8 percent of the total of non-elderly, non-disabled people on the program.

"At a time when huge corporations like Walmart and McDonald's are making billions in profits and giving their CEOs tens of millions of dollars a year, they're relying on corporate welfare from the federal government by paying their workers starvation wages," said Sanders in a statement. "That is morally obscene."

With the individual wealth of high-ranking executives and members of billionaire families like the Walton's, who own Walmart, soaring even as front-line, minimum wage employees and their families struggling to stay afloat amid the devastating Covid-19 pandemic, Sanders argues that the stark contrast should be a wakeup call for those who have refused to see how unjust and economically backward it is for the federal government, meaning taxpayers, to subsidize the cruel wages that massive profitable companies force their workers to accept.

"U.S. taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize some of the largest and most profitable corporations in America," said Sanders. "It is time for the owners of Walmart, McDonald's and other large corporations to get off of welfare and pay their workers a living wage."

The Walton family is worth $238 billion. Yet they pay wages so low, 14,541 of their workers in 9 states are forced… https://t.co/NHcullycqz

— Bernie Sanders (@Bernie Sanders)1605742875.0

"No one in this country should live in poverty," Sanders added. "No one should go hungry. No one should be unable to get the medical care they need. It is long past time to increase the federal minimum wage from a starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to $15, and guarantee health care to all Americans as a human right."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Will an oil tycoon who donated $500,000 to support Trump’s re-election get bailed out by his administration?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/will-an-oil-tycoon-who-donated-500000-to-support-trumps-re-election-get-bailed-out-by-his-administration

no lnx

Will an oil tycoon who donated $500,000 to support Trump’s re-election get bailed out by his administration?

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon March 12, 2020

With oil prices plunging during the coronavirus outbreak, the Trump administration is weighing a federal bailout for oil and natural gas companies, according to a new report.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted a fracking boom under his administration, but oil and gas companies have seen profits drop amid an oil price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia.

“Alarmed” by the prospect that some of these companies, many of which are already in debt, [see desmog]could go out of business, White House officials have pushed for a federal bailout in the form of low-interest government loans, The Washington Post reported.

Among those pushing for the bailout is Harold Hamm, a billionaire Trump adviser who owns Continental Resources, an energy company which lost half of its market value Monday.

Hamm told The Post that although he had not made “direct” contact with the president, he advised the administration to consider “any action that the administration might take to protect and preserve American interests at this time from being unfairly disadvantaged.”

Hamm has given more than $500,000 to support Trump’s re-election effort since 2017, the government watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington noted.

Some Trump advisers told The Post that the administration was eyeing “targeted assistance” for the companies. Though under consideration, another official warned that “political blowback over the idea may eventually lead campaign advisers and others in [the] administration to talk Trump out of it.”

Chris Rupkey, the chief economist at MUFG Union Bank, told the outlet that he expects significant political backlash.

“It’s difficult when governments selectively target individual industries,” he said. “And there’s going to be pushback on it, because it’s political and may be tied to the administration’s contacts and the people it knows.”

Cornell University professor Robert Hockett, who has advised Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on economic policy, added that it was ridiculous to look out for big fracking companies while millions need relief.

“We are in the midst of a crisis where people are literally having to skip work and may miss paychecks or face medical debt,” he said. “The idea you would look to help out shale companies now is like something out of a satire or a bad movie. It’s absurd.”

Trump also said that he was looking at bailing out airlines, cruise lines and the hospitality industryTuesday, as they reel from the impact of COVID-19, the disease spread by the novel coronavirus. But the bailout proposals have received public pushback from Republicans.

“They can take care of themselves,” Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., told The Washington Examiner. “Why do you overreact just when there’s a little pain? That doesn’t make sense.”

Nick Loris, an economist at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, said such a bailout “would not sit well” with fiscal conservatives.

“Not only would it potentially put taxpayers on the hook for future potential losses and bankruptcies, it would distort the risk-taking process that is so critical in making these investments,” he told the outlet. “We’ve seen the resiliency in the industry before, and I believe we’ll see it again.”

However, Alex Doukas, the lead analyst for advocacy group Oil Change International, predicted that Trump’s big-money donors would heavily pressure the administration to ignore the criticism.

“With oil prices in free fall, expect oil companies to turn to their age-old tactic of bullying governments for even more subsidies on top of the hundreds of billions they benefit from annually,” Doukas said. “Instead of more handouts to polluters, governments should make big investments in high-quality green jobs that will put people to work and ultimately end our dependence on the volatile fossil fuels that create climate chaos.”

Journalist David Cay Johnson described the lobbying effort as “corporate socialists” seeking “welfare from the Trump administration.”

“Bailing out the oil industry won’t help the workers who have to choose between their health and their paychecks. It won’t help the people who could go into medical debt from COVID-19,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., tweeted. “We need paid family leave and Medicare expanded to every American.”

“The American people are worried about missing paychecks, affording coronavirus tests, & being able to afford healthcare period. But [Trump] wants to bail out the oil industry?” Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., added. “Leave it to Trump to prioritize his friends over the American people.”

Igor Derysh is a staff writer at Salon. His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and Baltimore Sun.

irony: polluter corps who greedy dumb overinvest in capacity like coal get bailouts/subsidy, and judge will toss their pension obligation (and even let them loot the fund supposed to be used to recover the land after), but stuents who wisely invest in own future cannot declare b. judges may be sons of Rove like griffin? FTI wrecked economy and cooked planet then makes $ repping the villains.

aha: re bankruptcy pattern: privative profit socialize losss, corp welfare/socialism

coal (extraction, pollute commons for free/subsidized, kill workers but then use as prop/ cheerleader in war on coal;

opioid also a kind of grift/extraction, on the backs of rural working ppl who get hurt/worn out on job like coalminers (tho trad had union protection and law eg black lung b/c of historic injustice, but ~ by McConn/chao champions of coal)

not-for-profit college also extractive grift that blood funnel of vampire squid into fed vet ed money.

nuke power

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-mitch-mcconnell-gave-a-sweet-deal-to-the-kentucky-coal-industry/

no lnx

How Mitch McConnell gave a sweet deal to the Kentucky coal industry

Written by Maureen Nevin Duffy / DC Report December 30, 2019

Kentucky coal miners—along with the rest of us—will be paying the price to keep the government running next year. And we can thank Kentucky’s senior senator, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for the sellout.

Buried in the giant $1.4 trillion government spending package that McConnell ushered through the Senate last week was a relatively modest $15 billion, 30-year payout to sustain the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund—a boon to the majority leader’s home state coal miners. As many as 1 in 5 of coal miners suffer from black lung.

But here’s the kicker: What McConnell had removed from the must-pass funding legislation. In order to keep the government running, McConnell threw out provisions that would have forced coal companies to commit to higher payments toward the health-care costs of their employees and retirees, nixing requirements to extend the commitment period and modestly increase the tax on coal mining companies that are supposed to support the trust fund.

In short, McConnell let the coal industry skip out and leave the $15 billion black lung tab for everyone else to pay.

The move was mind-boggling, considering McConnell is already under scrutiny and criticism for partnering with a previously sanctioned Russian businessman, Oleg Deripaska, who McConnell voted to de-sanction. Deripaska, who owns Rusal, a Russian-owned coal company, joined McConnell in a project that his home state of Kentucky voted in 2017 to invest $15M of taxpayer money.

‘A Handout’

“This is a handout. This is a giveaway,” Jim Waters of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, told WaPo in August. Waters reasoned that judgment might have been clouded by the possible thousands of area jobs that could be added. “I think the excitement of that overrode some of the due diligence.”

McConnell’s strange allegiances to influences domestic and foreign have clearly reached the grassroots level. As Mikaela Curry, a community organizer and member of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, wrote in an op-ed in the Courier-Journal, Feb. 22, entitled, “Mitch McConnell is silent on coal while Kentucky miners suffer and die”: “When McConnell speaks up for coal, it always seems to align with the people profiting in the fossil fuel industry and not the hard-working people he is supposed to represent.”

Disabled Miners

Most poignant are the call outs to McConnell from those suffering physically as well as financially from his unwillingness to make the coal companies own up to their responsibility to their current and retired workers and their families. Patty Amburgey, now secretary of the local black lung association in Letcher County, is the widow of a coal miner who died of Black Lung Disease after leaving mining, “blind, unable to feel his legs or arms, and constantly short of breath,” according to his obit.

“I’m asking [Mr. McConnell] to please remember that East Kentucky is a mining area,” his widow wrote in Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. “And we do have a lot of miners and the election is coming up. I want him to understand that.” Obviously, Mr. McConnell is betting his Appropriations Bill will heal these sores and smooth his way to re-election.

But that may not be so easy in practice. Instead of increasing the excise tax rate in effect in 2018, which sunset on Jan. 1, 2019, Congress failed to act, which allowed the tax for coal companies to reset to 1985 rates, lowering contributions by 55% (from $1.10 per ton of coal from subsurface mines to $.50 and from $0.55 per ton for coal from surface mines to just $0.25), which many in Congress had contested.

Companies Protected

After congressional wrangling, the 2020 tax rate will revert to 2018 rates of $1.10 and $0.55 per ton, respectively. But those prices will sunset again on Dec. 31, 2020, and if not renewed will revert to the 1978 rate of $0.50 and $0.25 per ton. The companies also are protected from market price rises by a ceiling cap on the tax of 4.4% of its coal selling price.

In June, the House Ways and Means Committee approved a 10-year extension as part of a broader package. Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) proposed the rate be renewed at a higher rate through 2029. He and co-sponsors want to see the Trust Fund fully funded with no sunsets.

While Moscow Mitch steers millions toward business ventures with oligarchs, many in Appalachia want lawmakers to realize that a hike in the excise tax of $0.14 per ton for surface-mined coal and $0.28 per ton for underground-mined coal would eliminate the debt in the Fund completely by 2050, according to the General Accounting Office.

https://www.ecowatch.com/fracking-cleanup-costs-2641678836.html

In over their heads with debt, U.S. shale oil and gas firms are now moving from a boom in fracking to a boom in bankruptcies. This trend of failing finances has the potential for the U.S. public, both at the state and federal levels, to be left on the hook for paying to properly shut down and clean up even more drilling sites.

Expect these companies to try reducing their debt through the process of bankruptcy and, like the coal industry, attempting to get out of environmental and employee-related financial obligations.

The Bankruptcy of EP Energy

In October, EP Energy — one of the largest oil producers in the Eagle Ford Shale region in Texas — filed for bankruptcy because the firm couldn't pay back almost $5 billion in debt, making it the largest oil and gas bankruptcy since 2016.

EP Energy hasn't produced a profit since 2014 and Bloomberg reported that the company would need oil to be at "a price closer to $70 per barrel" for EP to be profitable. Oil has not come close to averaging over $70 a barrel since 2014.

Despite its financial struggles at current low oil prices, the company plans to continue operating after restructuring and eliminating up to $3 billion in debt. However, EP has not identified any funds that it would be setting aside for well cleanup, which is not unusual for an oil and gas company.

In response, as part of the**bankruptcy**proceedings, the U.S. Department of the Interior filed a document arguing that EP Energy is still responsible for its obligations to assure the "decommissioning, plugging, and abandonment" of any of the EP Energy wells that are located on leased federal and tribal lands.

Ideally, that would mean EP Energy sets aside funds for the proper cleanup and end-of-life processes for its oil and gas wells, which number more than 800 in the Eagle Ford region.

However, the federal government hasn't even named a number yet for how much that should be. The Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Indian Affairs "are currently still assessing the status of reclamation and plugging and abandonment obligations across the Debtors' onshore federal and Indian leases," writes the Interior Department.

...

desmog has been going on about this bubble ponzi scheme a while?

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/11/06/debt-fracking-chesapeake-energy-stock-price-dollar

1219

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/robert-reich-calls-out-jp-morgan-chase-ceo-jamie-dimon-for-dismissing-socialism-while-accepting-government-bailouts-and-championing-trumps-tax-cuts/