Trump's Billionaire Buds Bleeding Big Bucks

 

Pity the boys of the billionaire's club who flocked to the Malignant Fascist (our emphasis):

As Donald Trump took the oath of office on Jan 20, he was flanked by some of the world’s wealthiest people. The billionaires present that day – including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – had never been richer, flush with big gains from frothy stock markets.

Seven weeks later, it’s a different story. The start of Trump’s second term has delivered a stunning reversal for many of those billionaires sitting behind Trump in the Capitol Rotunda, with five having lost a combined US $209 billion in wealth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. [snip]

But any expectations that the start of Trump’s new term would continue to fuel market returns have been upended. The S&P 500 has lost 6.4 per cent since he took office, as mass layoffs of government employees and the president’s back-and-forth on tariffs have roiled equities, with the benchmark index tumbling 2.7 per cent on Monday (Mar 10).  

The companies behind the inauguration attendees’ fortunes have been some of the biggest losers, dropping a combined US $1.39 trillion in market value since Jan 17, the last trading day before the inauguration.

Here’s a look at some of those fortunes:

Elon Musk (down US $148 billion) ...

Jeff Bezos (down US $29 billion) ...

Mark Zuckerberg (down US $5 billion) ...

Bernard Arnault (down US $5 billion).

Sad!  But, when you elect a moron, you can expect these results. Of course, we won't be entirely happy until these parasitic chuds (let's also include the likes of Trumpers Peter Thiel, Sundar Pichai, and Larry Ellison, too) are walking around wearing a barrel asking for spare change, but things are heading in the right direction on the FAFO scale.

BONUS:  Paul Krugman writes about the emerging "Economic Excuse Industry."

(Photo: l. to r., Lady Zuck, Zuck, Lady Bezos, Bezos, Pinchai, "Chainsaw" Musk / Al Jazeera)

(h/t Silver Spring Bureau Chief)

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly -- Inauguration And MLK Day Edition

The good: 

When President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in as president of the United States inside the Capitol’s rotunda, he will do so facing a bust of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the federal holiday commemorating King’s legacy.

It's a disquieting contrast for some civil rights advocates who wish to fulfill the late reverend's dream of non-violent social revolution.

Events honoring King and advocating for his vision of a just society will occur across the nation as many in the U.S. observe the peaceful transfer of power in the capital. The concurrent events have been met with mixed feelings by civil rights leaders, who broadly reviled Trump’s rhetoric and stances on race and civil rights during his third presidential campaign.

But many leaders, including King's own family, see the juxtaposition as a poignant contrast and a chance to refocus the work of advancing civil rights in a new political era.

“I’m glad it occurred on that day because it gives the United States of America and the world the contrast in pictures. Is this the way you want to go — or is this the way you want to go?” said the Rev. Bernice King, the late King’s youngest daughter and CEO of the King Center.

“It’s not a day that he can be the star, which he loves to be,” King’s daughter said of Trump. “He has to contend with that legacy on that day, regardless of how he manages it and handles it in his presentation. I hope those around him are advising him well to honor the day appropriately in his speech.”...(our emphasis)

It's a contrast that will be almost certainly be lost on the MAGA mob (or maybe they see it as a victory over "diversity, equality, and inclusion" and other "woke" principles), but it's only the third time in 40 years that an inauguration has coincided with the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday.  Not much else "good" about this day.

The bad:

On Monday, the three wealthiest men in the world—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—are scheduled to be at the Capitol as honored guests for Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, seated where four years ago Christian nationalists, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, militia members, and other extremists, incited by his brazen lies about the 2020 election, violently attacked Congress to overturn American democracy and keep Trump in power. This transition—from brownshirts to billionaires—encapsulates what has gone wrong. It is a clear signal that the United States is broken.  [snip]

Accommodation—that’s what an authoritarian craves and needs. From business leaders, from the media, from influentials, and from voters. Trump’s army at the Capitol four years ago were radicals and fringe right-wingers. Now his squad comprises moguls and the Big Tech barons he and his followers once excoriated. A white flag of surrender should be flapping next to Old Glory. They are broadcasting a dangerous signal—resistance is futile—when a healthy democracy demands the opposite.

The American political system could not rid itself of Trump, and now the powerful, scared magnates who seek to protect and advance their own interests flock to his side and bolster his status and position. In doing so, they intensify the threat at hand. They make a dark day for America even darker.  (our emphasis)

We hope the Democrats' "toned down opposition" to the MF we've been reading about doesn't mean our "leaders" and "influentials" are going to turtle and find "common ground," because if that's the case, they need to fire their political consultants and pollsters, then find another occupation themselves.  This is an awful time in our nation's history.  We need to fight the fascists, not accommodate them, and Democrats who won't fight are not just useless, but dangerous.  See also this.

The ugly:

President-elect Donald Trump and his team have drafted a slate of pardons for people convicted for their role in the January 6 Capitol attack to be issued on Day 1, shortly after Trump is sworn in as president, two sources familiar with the plans told CNN.

Trump has repeatedly said he planned to swiftly pardon people who were convicted for their role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. During a December interview with Time Magazine, Trump said: “I’ll be looking at J6 early on, maybe the first nine minutes.”

The extent of the initial pardons is still unclear; however, one of the sources described them as enough to be seen as “delivering on his long-held promise.” About 1,270 people have been convicted of January 6-related crimes, and the vast majority of those defendants pleaded guilty. Only a couple hundred are currently behind bars.

Vice President-elect JD Vance said in an interview last week that rioters accused of violence shouldn’t be pardoned, while also arguing there was a “bit of a gray area” in some cases.

Several Republican allies of Trump have said they expect him to approach the pardons on a case-by-case basis, but two key GOP lawmakers on Sunday refused to rule out Trump potentially issuing pardons for some of the roughly 174 defendants charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon against police officers. (our emphasis)

Those 174 are his truest MAGAt believers.  He'll be awfully tempted to pardon all or many of them to be used as trusted thugs in the future, even if a majority of Americans disapprove.   Sic transit gloria, America.

Oligarchs Get Front Row Seats At Trump Inauguration

 

News item:

Top tech executives Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are scheduled to join President-elect Donald Trump’s grand comeback to the White House on Monday, sources told ABC News, reinforcing what's expected to be a closer relationship between big tech and the incoming administration.

Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos are expected to have a front row seats on the platform alongside Trump’s Cabinet picks and other elected officials, sources familiar with the planning of the inauguration said.

Throughout the transition, Musk has spent a considerable amount of time with Trump, frequenting the president-elect's Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and often accompanying him to various events. Bezos and Zuckerberg have also made trips down to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump since his November victory.

Meta and Amazon have donated $1 million each to the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee, as have other major tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple CEO Tim Cook. Meta, in particular, is donating to a presidential inaugural committee for the first time...

Man of the people!!

If we ever get rid of this Malignant Fascist and his melange of oligarchs and incompetent cultists, we need to remember who stood for our democracy and who stood with the MF.  These dangerous dweebs should be at the top of our FAFO list.  For now, you can always show your disgust by cancelling subscriptions, not buying products, and otherwise shunning these Quislings and their companies to the extent you can.  

In an update to the saying "You can't bring a knife to a gunfight," Democratic attorney (Democracy Docket) Marc Elias recently said, "You can't bring norms to a Trump fight."  Live that principle from now on.

QOTD -- Zuck Rhymes With Schmuck

 

"... One answer, I think, is that Zuck’s new image is as much about a shifting political environment within Silicon Valley as it about the changing winds outside of the industry. A period of tech-industry labor unrest--walkouts and protests at tech megaplatforms over sexual harassment, racism, and defense contracts[]--has given way to a 'reset' marked by mass layoffs and corporate clampdowns. A looser tech labor market (and a general national atmosphere of reaction) has shifted power back to management, and a highly visible clique of tech workers with quasi-libertarian, open-to-the-possibility-of-race-science politics, clustered on Twitter in communities like 'tcot' and 'tpot,' has presented executives with the tantalizing (if still ephemeral) prospect of workforce free of Obama-era idealism and political consciousness.

"News on Friday that Meta is ending its D.E.I. program should be seen in this context--as not just another way to cozy up to the Trump administration, but as another sally in a war against a workforce that tech management has come to see as dangerously left-wing. I’ve argued before that the hard-right turn of investors like Marc Andreessen should be seen in part as a kind of marketing strategy, an attempt to find founders and workers whose politics make them less likely to jeopardize profits with workplace action.2 I suspect that Zuck’s makeover functions at least in part in the same way. I don’t think Republican electeds much care if Zuck is cageside at M.M.A. matches or using right-wing slang like 'legacy media' and 'virtue-signaling'--but I think the kinds of employees he might like to attract probably do. (As do, from the other direction, the kinds of employees he would like to attrite)..."  Max Read, "Read Max" substack, on the aggressive "vice-signaling" of techbro Mark Zuckerberg.  Read's analysis of the emergence of Zuck-up as a sort of right-wing junior Musk (along with the execrable Jeff Bezos) seems on point.  Good read (no pun).

 

"A Kind of Surrender, Or Acceptance"

 

To no one's great surprise, the Malignant Fascist's insiders are spreading the word to business that they need to bend to the MF or face retribution. Some have already gotten the message and have approached the MF with monetary olive branches (e.g., Zuck, Bezos, etc.) in acts of anticipatory obedience. NBC News reports on this latest threat from the MF:

"...executives are bending policies — and bending a proverbial knee — by abandoning their social and environmental agendas in manners that could appeal to Trump. Leaders of multiple major media platforms appear to be reorienting their coverage to be less antagonistic. And Democrats, without much of an active resistance to underpin them, have taken a wait-and-see approach to a new president with whom they already have eight years of experience.

'We should treat him like a normal president,' a senior aide to a Democratic senator said. 'Because this is what normal presidents look like in America now.' (ed.-- waving the white flag already?).

The shift is due in no small part to how Trump won last fall. Whereas in 2016 many saw a fluke, Trump this time swept the swing states and won the popular vote. His victory came after episodes like the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and his criminal indictments — headwinds many believed were insurmountable."

Seventy-seven million MAGAts and other low information voters cast their ignominious ballots for the MF, several million less than President Biden's 81 million in 2020, but that's down the memory hole.

One of the shameless suck ups is Meta's Mark "Zuck-Up" Zuckerberg, who seems to be in competition with Jeff "Darkness" Bezos and South African fascist oligarch Kekius Maximus / Maximus Anus. More from NBC News:

"Meta’s moves are among the most noteworthy. The company plans to elevate Republican Joel Kaplan to lead its global policy team, and on Monday it added Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a Trump ally, to its board. Meta also announced it was ending a fact-checking program and replacing it with a community-driven system similar to the one Trump ally Elon Musk’s X uses. And Zuckerberg boasted that the company was relocating content moderators from liberal California to ruby red Texas.

'Remember, at the start of Trump’s first term, the mantra on the left is to not normalize,' a veteran tech industry lobbyist said. 'Do not normalize. That’s no longer the case.'

'So it’s not just a question for the tech companies, but a larger societal, cultural and political issue,' this person added. 'It’s a kind of surrender, or acceptance.'”  (our emphasis)

It's far easier if you lack a conscience or a moral core to surrender and shift direction out of fear or greed. Let's all hope that those supporters of the MF will be served the bulk of the shit sandwich he's about to fix for America.

(photo: New York Daily News)

 

Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Reporting in Rolling Stone is apparently confirming what was already in the wind about January 6 insurrectionists' prior coordination with Republican Members of Congress (paywall at link):

As the House investigation into the Jan. 6 attack heats up, some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent.

Rolling Stone separately confirmed a third person involved in the main Jan. 6 rally in D.C. has communicated with the committee. This is the first report that the committee is hearing major new allegations from potential cooperating witnesses. While there have been prior indications that members of Congress were involved, this is also the first account detailing their purported role and its scope. The two sources also claim they interacted with members of Trump’s team, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who they describe as having had an opportunity to prevent the violence. (our emphasis)

Now that the January 6 select committee has this information about the seditious Republicans (doubtless most members of the "Freedom Caucus", including Arizona madman Rep. Paul Gosar), getting them under oath in front of the cameras is imperative. This nest of traitors to our democracy needs to be cleaned out.

Meanwhile, wannabe Trump usurper and Florida man Gov. Ron "One Glove" DeSantis is putting out the welcome mat for Trumpist police thugs who lost their jobs because they refused to get vaccinated to protect their community:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has invited law enforcement officers around the country to come to Florida if they lose their jobs because they refuse to receive the Covid-19 vaccine.

During an interview on Fox News, DeSantis explained that he had "scientific" reasons for hiring unvaccinated police officers.

"On a scientific basis, most of those first responders have had Covid and have recovered," DeSantis claimed without evidence. "So they have strong protection and so I think that influences their decision on a lot of this that they have already had it and recovered."

"In Florida, not only are we going to want to protect the law enforcement and all the jobs," he continued, "we're actually actively working to recruit out-of-state law enforcement because we do have needs in our police and our sheriff's departments. So the next legislative session, I'm going to hopefully sign legislation that gives a $5000 bonus to any out-of-state law enforcement that relocates in Florida."

Our hearts go out to the good citizens of Florida.

The so-called "Facebook Papers" show a company under siege as more is known about its harmful effects on the world:

Facebook the company is losing control of Facebook the product — not to mention the last shreds of its carefully crafted, decade-old image as a benevolent company just wanting to connect the world.

Thousands of pages of internal documents provided to Congress by a former employee depict an internally conflicted company where data on the harms it causes is abundant, but solutions, much less the will to act on them, are halting at best.

The crisis exposed by the documents shows how Facebook, despite its regularly avowed good intentions, appears to have slow-walked or sidelined efforts to address real harms the social network has magnified and sometimes created. They reveal numerous instances where researchers and rank-and-file workers uncovered deep-seated problems that the company then overlooked or ignored.

Final responsibility for this state of affairs rests with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who holds what one former employee described as dictatorial power over a corporation that collects data on and provides free services to roughly 3 billion people around the world.

More here from the Washington Post. The "profits- before- people" business model will continue, certainly as long as Zuckerberg is holding all the cards. Meanwhile the best advice remains to disengage from it.

Dana Milbank writes that Republican weasel Glenn Youngkin's campaign for governor in Virginia is  both running away from and with Trump.  This long excerpt gives you the flavor of this slippery demagogue:

[W]hile Youngkin banished Trump, he could not wash away the stench of Trumpism.

At his rally here Saturday night in Richmond’s suburbs, Youngkin debuted his closing argument. It was a Trumpian blend of conspiracy theories, race-baiting and fabrications.

Conspiracy theory:

“Terry McAuliffe wants government to stand between parents and their children,” Youngkin said of his Democratic opponent. “And when parents across this great commonwealth said, ‘No, Terry, you’re wrong,’ he called his friend Joe Biden and asked the FBI to come silence us.”

PolitiFact already identified this baseless claim (that McAuliffe got U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to order the Justice Department to help combat growing threats against school-board members and educators) as a “pants on fire” lie. But Youngkin keeps repeating it.

Race-baiting:

“What we won’t do is teach our children to view everything through the lens of race,” Youngkin vowed, adding that “on Day 1, I will ban critical race theory.” It was perhaps the biggest applause line of the night.

Preceding Youngkin onstage, the Republican attorney general candidate, Jason Miyares, argued that “you cannot survive as a nation if you’re raising an entire generation of children to hate their country, and that is exactly what critical race theory is.”

Critical race theory isn’t taught in Virginia schools. It’s a phantom menace, whipped up by Fox News to fill White people with racial terror. Youngkin urged his supporters to fear a “20-year high murder rate,” even though overall violent crime decreased in 2020 in Virginia, among the safest states in the country.

Fabrication:

Youngkin complained that “Virginia ranks 50th in the nation in standards for kids to progress in math, reading,” but Virginia kids’ actual proficiency exceeds the national average.

He suggested that Virginia “children cannot pass an 8th-grade math equivalency test” because of pandemic school closures — “so we will proclaim that Virginia’s schools will never be closed again to five-day-a-week, in-person education.” In reality, Virginia’s 38 percent proficiency in 8th grade math topped the national 33 percent. And the test results to which Youngkin referred were from before the pandemic-related closures.

Youngkin claimed that McAuliffe “said there’s no place for parents in their kids’ education” (a line that prompted boos and shouts of “communist”). But McAuliffe didn’t say there’s “no place” for parents. He spoke out against vigilantism in which “parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions. I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” and “running down teachers.”

This is a race Democrats need to win.  They need to make sure their winning coalition from 2020 isn't asleep at the switch and gets out to vote (early voting continues through October 30).  

Finally, a reminder to check out Infidel 753's link round- up for the best, most comprehensive collection of links to posts of varied topics from around the Internet.  Always an excellent selection.

The Silicon Valley's New Right-Wing Players

Salon's RJ Eskow has 6 examples of offensive actions or statements  by some of America's new "titans" of industry, including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Marissa Mayer.  We're highlighting these two in particular because they're leaders in a cutting-edge industry (information technology for lack of a better term) that one supposes would be led by forward-thinking, progressive people, right?  Um, not necessarily.

On Krispy Kreme Christie bud (and baby libertarian?) Mark Zuckerberg's super-PAC:

The super-PAC’s first initiative is supposed to be immigration reform. But the group’s been running ads and making other efforts to support a hard-right political agenda, directly and through subsidiaries called Americans for Conservative Action and Council for American Job Growth. One ad features conservative Republican Marco Rubio. Others oppose Obamacare and promote the environmentally destructive Keystone XL pipeline.

On Marissa Mayer's participation on the Walmart board of directors and Google's involvement in far-right causes:

Mayer had the chance to meet with Walmart workers who were unjustly fired after protesting the corporation’s policies, but she refused to speak with them. She had them arrested instead.

Mayer’s public silence doesn’t just extend to mistreated Walmart workers. She prefers to let others do her political talking, too. Yahoo! is part of Zuckerberg’s right-wing super-PAC. It also reportedly remained in the Koch brothers far-right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), even after many other corporations publicly left the group over its extremist policies.

Apparently, Silicon Valley is in some danger of turning into Galt's Gulch.