We have always been at war with Eastasia.
That one flight attendant Elon propositioned?
The Post is losing people faster than a Trump operation.
Stranger
Ruth Marcus is a major loss. Always a staunch liberal and one of their best writers. They are fools to be driving away such as her.
You misspelled “he”.
No, they’re doing exactly what they intended, and it contributes to their goal.
From Lawrence Britt’s 14 characteristics of fascism, I give you … #6:
A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’ excesses.
First one to get BINGO loses. Actually, we all lose. Cool, right??
The grift continues.
You know, I have never seen an episode of The Apprentice. Just never had any interest, even before Trump decided to destroy the nation in a temper tantrum.
But now that I can binge it on Prime Video, I still won’t watch it.
I don’t have Prime, but if I did, I wouldn’t watch Donald’s moldy old show. I mean, surely only his fans would find it at all interesting—or bearable.
So Bezos is courting Trump cultists to make up for all the people who cancelled their Prime memberships, eh?
I wonder if he’ll re-brand it. Instead of “Prime,” how about “Prime Heritage”…? Gets right to that ‘master race’ point.
We ended Prime and our subscription to the Post. I grew up in DC area and this is literally the first time in my life I don’t have a subscription to the Post.
Author Michael Lewis on Jeff Bezos’s cowardly moves to push the Post’s opinion section rightward:
"I feel some sympathy towards Bezos. I really like him, personally. […] I think the real Bezos is not a bad guy.
“But he’s done a bad thing. And it’s curious why. You would think, if you had $200bn, that you’d have some fuck-you money. I mean, how much do you have to have to be able to live by your principles? There’s some curve that bends, and at some point, when you have so much money, you’re back to being as vulnerable as someone who has almost nothing. He’s behaving like someone who has nothing, like he’s just scared of Trump. I think if you were with him and watching every step, you’d be watching an interesting psychological process where he’s persuaded himself that what he’s doing is good. He’s rationalised his behaviour, but his behaviour is really appalling.”
Bezos is terrified that his rocket company (Blue Origin) won’t get contracts if he doesn’t suck up to Trump. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that Elon Musk is going to use his suction to ensure that SpaceX is the only provider of launch services (something he has already spoken about to investors, saying that he sees no reason for the government to purchase services from ULA, Northrop Grumman, Rocket Lab, Firefly, or any other currently operating space launch launch provider).
If Bezos weren’t such a sniveling little coward terrified to use his enormous wealth for some good he would realize that the only thing that would have saved his Blue Origin ambitions would have been to oppose Trump but he read the tea leaves and saw that Harris was likely going to lose, and now has his lips to Trump’s anus in the desperate hope that this will somehow preserve government contracts. But he didn’t and now all he can hope is that Musk and Trump have such a falling out that the Department of Defense and NASA are ordered to use any other provider than SpaceX. So…I guess we’ll see what we see.
Stranger
I wonder if Trump has threatened Bezos in some way. Something more explicit than “blue origin won’t get federal contracts”. He’s acting like he’s scared. Maybe he’s just so wrapped up in his money that he’s afraid he might have less. I dunno. But that abrupt about face when the Post didn’t endorse Harris? Ever since then I’ve wondered what Trump has over him.
While Amazon.com is his bankroll, Blue Origin is Bezos’ one true dream in life; threatening to destroy that by not letting it at least compete for national security and NASA missions is essentially putting his balls in a vice and squeezing. And while I have plenty of criticisms of Bezos, he is a guy who legitimately made his fortune not through hype but anticipating an online marketplace where people would by cheap crap they don’t need as long as he be the middleman who can squeeze producers down to minimum (and sometimes negative) profit margins, purchased easier and delivered quicker than going down to the corner store for a pack of smokes. You’re right he’s scared because he knows better than anyone what will happen to business leaders who don’t comply in advance, and the only way to survive in a fascist, authoritarian regime is to curry favor with the the leader.
Stranger
I think pretty much every one of the fatcats has had a talking to by trumply minions. A talk amounting to
The Boss will sic the IRS on every company you own a hunk of, and on you. SEC too. Laws mean nothing now; they will find whatever they’re told to find. You will be as good as broke when they get done with you. Maybe you’ll end up in jail. So be a nice boy and shut up about any complaining about my rule. In fact I’d like some cheerleading whenever I call you for it.
Apropos here: Bezos may remain supine, but many in the business world are getting fed up. From the JP Morgan Chase site:
The author (Michael Cembalest) refrained from actually writing Fuck You Donald…but he might as well have done.
Great article. The facts are as we all know: random vandalism is not in fact a successful growth-enhancing policy. Not immediately, and not later on.
A JP Morgan analyst may write that, presumably with the at least tacit approval of the higher-ups. But what are they going to do about it?
Take a lot of short positions?
Perhaps. Although over in this thread some folks spoke of short positions which were promptly invalidated.
I for one think there is going to be a general trend of legit decline caused by legit real problems in the real economy. Most of which can be laid at the feet of musktrumply vandalism. But some of which were waiting to happen anyhow to an overvalued market. As always with calls to bail to cash to wait out the carnage, the hard part is picking your re-entry point.
At the same time, imposed on top of that secular decline, there is already, and will continue to be, an increasing amount of deliberate market manipulation, where the insiders front-run Administration announcements calculated to trigger a gain (or loss) response in investment sector X. You can get hammered pretty thoroughly by being long or short when they announce some BS intended to be instantly bearish or bullish respectively in that sector.