Stephan: Everything in Trump world is a grift; there is always some crooked financial angle, in which your tax dollars are used to enrich Trump, his family, or one of his orcs. Here's the latest on the Steve Bannon Build the Wall grift.
Bannon and Trump fellow grifters
President Donald Trump was caught in a precarious position when one of his top former aides and former campaign CEO was indicted for fraud after running a fake effort to build the wall on the southern American border.
Over a year ago, the Pentagon inspector general began looking into a suspicious $400 million contract given from the Department of Homeland Security to the construction company linked to Bannon’s group. The funds came at Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Trump’s urging
“On Dec. 2, the Pentagon announced a contract worth up to $400 million to Fisher Sand and Gravel for the construction of 31 miles of new border barriers along the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in southern Arizona,” said the Washington Post.Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.
CEO Tommy Fisher launched an aggressive effort to try and score a contract, making several appearances on Fox News and paying at least $100,000 in lobbying. Fisher also personally lobbied the president, gave hefty donations to Cramer’s Senate campaign, and attacked […]
Stephan: New Zealand, which I think is the most interesting country in the world, because they now have a government that explicitly has made fostering wellbeing its first priority has announced a potentially game-changing wireless technology for power transmission. Here is the best explanation of what this breakthrough is about that I could find. As just a historical note, this is the approach to power transmission Nikola Tesla had in mind.
New Zealand wireless transmission Credit: Emrod
Yesterday we covered the news that New Zealand’s second-largest electricity distributor has signed a deal with startup Emrod to trial long-range wireless power transmission. Today we follow up with an interview with Emrod’s founder, Greg Kushnir, to talk about the deal, the technology, safety and redundancy concerns, the efficiency of the system and whether it can be used to transmit power back to Earth from a space-based solar array.
What follows is an edited transcript.
New Atlas: Congrats on this deal you’ve signed with Powerco. It sounds pretty significant.
Greg Kushnir: Any market traction with a new technology is significant. I think it’s been a huge leap of faith on behalf of Powerco.
So Microwave energy transmission has been possible for some time. What are the advances you guys have made?
You’re absolutely right. Transferring energy with microwaves has been around for decades. In the 70s, NASA showed it could support a helicopter drone in the air, charging it with microwaves from the ground. It’s been around for a while.
Stephan: Wealth inequality in the U.S. has become the central social crisis. You cannot have a healthy wellbeing oriented society when a tiny group of people are so rich that they live in a different world from the overwhelming remainder of the population. The top 1% have an average income of $718,766.
In my opinion, it is not so much that the uber-rich have bad intentions for everyone else, it is that they literally cannot imagine and empathize with the daily lives of the non-rich. When you can have anything you want, the way you want it from that perspective a monopolistic corporate structure is the way to go. Then you and people in your circle can efficiently get what you want. Works for the rich but not for anyone else. We should go back to the tax structure of the 1950s when. as the Tax Foundation has it, "The top federal income tax rate was 91 percent in 1950 and 1951, and between 1954 and 1959. In 1952 and 1953, the top federal income tax rate was 92 percent." You simply live in a different world when your hourly income, exceeds the yearly income for most individuals, and families, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Alice Walton all have incomes of a $1 million an hour.
Biden will bring in social progressives because he believes in facts, and the people around him are also fact-based. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are competent. Talk to anyone in Burlington, Vermont, and they will tell you would a good mayor he was. Warren's record is completely oriented to fostering wellbeing, and her programs work. It is becoming clear to a growing number of people that the only way we are going to get through climate change is by making wellbeing the first priority at every level. We have to get rid of Trump, and the circus of orcs around him, and put some in prison.
The concentration of market power in a handful of companies lies behind several disturbing trends in the U.S. economy, like the deepening of inequality and financial instability, two Federal Reserve Board economists say in a new paper.
Isabel Cairo and Jae Sim identify a decline in competition, with large firms controlling more of their markets, as a common cause in a series of important shifts over the last four decades.
Those include a fall in labor share, or the chunk of output that goes to workers, even as corporate profits increased; and a surge in wealth and income inequality, as the net worth of the top 5% of households almost tripled between 1983 and 2016. This fueled financial risks and higher leverage, the economists say, as poorer households borrowed to make ends meet while richer ones shoveled their wealth into bonds — feeding the demand for debt instruments.
“The rise of market power of the firms may have been the driving force” in all of these trends, Cairo and Sim write in the paper. Published this month by the non-partisan […]
Stephan: The ideal salary differential is CEOs make 11 times the average salaries of the typical worker at their company. That has gone completely awry as this report lays out.
New research published Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the top executives at the largest corporations in the United States now make 320 times more than what their typical employees earn in wages and benefits.
“CEO pay can be curbed to reduce the growing gap between the highest earners and everyone else with little, if any, impact on the output of the economy or firm performance.” —Jori Kandra, Economic Policy Institute
EPI’s latest annual analysis of executive compensation finds that the CEOs of the top 350 firms in the U.S. raked in an average of $21.3 million in 2019, a 14% increase from 2018. The 320-1 ratio of CEO-to-worker pay in 2019 is more than five times higher than the 61-1 ratio reported in 1989.
The think tank’s research comes amid a global pandemic that is likely to exacerbate the decades-long trend of surging income and wealth inequality in the U.S.—a trend that, according to EPI, won’t be reversed by CEOs opting to take salary cuts during a public health crisis that has left tens of millions of Americans jobless.
Stephan: When you have the kind of wealth inequality that vampire capitalism produces you get this.
Credit: Brian Stauffer for Rolling Stone
On June 29th, 2020, while America remained transfixed by anti-police protests, the chairman and CEO of the pharmaceutical company Gilead issued a much-anticipated announcement. In a breezy open letter, Daniel O’Day explained how much his company planned on charging for a course of remdesivir, one of many possible treatments for Covid-19. “In the weeks since we learned of remdesivir’s potential against Covid-19, one topic has attracted more speculation than any other: what price we might set for the medicine,” O’Day wrote, before plunging into a masterpiece of corporate doublespeak.
The CEO noted a study by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the National Institutes of Health, showing that Covid-19 patients taking remdesivir recovered after 11 days, compared with 15 days for placebo takers. In the U.S., he wrote, “earlier hospital discharge would result in hospital savings of approximately $12,000 per patient.”
The hilarious implication seemed to be that by shortening hospital stays by four days on average, remdesivir was worth $48,000 a dose. That O’Day might come to […]
