UNDER CONSTRUCTION - MOVED TO MIDDLEBORO REVIEW AND SO ON https://middlebororeviewandsoon.blogspot.com/
Tuesday, December 6, 2022
I really don’t owe my Trump-supporting friends an apology.....
JFK ASSASSINATION
As a U.S. citizen, you have a right to your own history. Demand it!
Trump's call to shred Constitution backfires bigly
Today's Top Stories:

Trump tries to backtrack after calling for the termination of the US Constitution
The disgraced ex-president trashed America's founding document in a preposterous call for the restoration of his powers and now wants us to believe that he would never ever do or demand such a thing, even though we can see that he in fact did since he posted it on the internet.
Take Action: Indict Ivanka Trump!
Herschel Walker's closing message: "I don't even know what the heck is a pronoun"
True to form, the bumbling GOP Senate candidate punctuated his impressively incoherent campaign with a head-scratcher of a closing — uh, okay, why not — "argument." Herschel Walker isn't qualified to operate an electric toothbrush, let alone take a seat in the US Senate. Dear gods above, let today be the last day we speak of this Republican puppet.
Take Action: Reject and disqualify Trump from running for President!

Trump screws over GOP responding to Hunter Biden laptop saga
No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen: Not a smart move.
9 million Americans were prematurely told they were approved for student debt forgiveness
In November, 16 million debt relief applicants were sent messages informing them that they had been approved to have up to $20,000 in student loans forgiven. Unfortunately, an additional nine million people also received emails saying they too had received loan forgiveness when in fact, the process had been shuttered entirely thanks to Donald Trump's planted minions in the federal judiciary, who will stop at nothing to obstruct the Biden administration and keep the American people from seeing any relief from a predatory and exploitative system.
Take Action: Don't let Republicans starve critical investments in children and healthcare!
Tampa police chief quits after trying to avoid golf cart ticket
The top cop in Tampa, Florida, went viral after body-cam footage showed her being stopped by a Pinellas County sheriff's deputy and trying to exploit her badge to wiggle out of trouble. Now, she's stepped down, proving that public pressure can get results and it IS possible to, ya know, occasionally hold law enforcement accountable.
Take Action: Protect renters from unfair evictions!

Supreme Court Justice Alito jokes about Black Santa and kids in KKK costumes during arguments in same-sex weddings case
The frivolous, performative lawsuit brought by a "Christian" computer company seeking to deny gay people service that — and we cannot stress this enough — has not actually had any gay people request its services, was treated as an opportunity by far-right extremist Samuel Alito as a chance to work on his standup bits, which included a deeply offensive hypothetical about white children wearing KKK costumes during a visit with "Black Santa." Alito, who has recently come under scrutiny for his appalling lack of anything resembling judicical ethics, has made it clear that he sees the rights of LGBTQ Americans as a joke and is eager to use his position to disenfranchise and discriminate against them.
Take Action: Tell Congress to break up Big Tech's monopolies!
Elon Musk’s Neuralink faces federal probe, employee backlash over animal tests
The tech bozo billionaire is now responsible for killing at least 1,500 animals, including sheep, pigs, and monkeys, as part of his nightmarish mission to transform the Earth into a dystopia where the most annoying men in the world have a direct plug into your brain. Thankfully, the feds are taking a look.

Right-wing billionaires are destroying America's newsrooms
Courier Newsroom: With our small-town newsrooms being turned into Trump's propaganda outlets by Sinclair Broadcasting, it's harder than ever to find factual, value-based news coverage at the local level. Courier Newsroom is leading the fight against right-wing misinformation and conspiracies by building the largest left-leaning local news network in the country. Can you chip in to help keep our democracy healthy and put a stop to Trump's dangerous conspiracies?
Michael Avenatti sentenced to 14 years in prison for stealing millions from clients
The crooked lawyer shot to fame for representing Stormy Daniels in her hush-money scandal involving serial cheater Donald Trump. At one point, Avenatti was even delusionally considering pursuing the Democratic nomination for president. In the end, it turns out he was just another white collar criminal scumbag. Maybe they should save the cell next to him for Donnie.
Florida deputy killed after officer roommate "jokingly" fires gun he thought was unloaded, officials say
It appears that cops cannot be trusted to not shoot each other, let alone other people.
Biden administration broadens immigration program for Haitian migrants, citing humanitarian crisis
The broadening program will allow certain Haitian immigrants to live and work in the country without fear of deportation due to the deteriorating humanitarian crisis in the destitute Caribbean nation, which has been beset by an outbreak of violence in recent months. It's a welcome respite from the Biden administration, which had previously deported as many Haitians in one year (20,000+) as the US had in the past twenty years.
Arizona certifies 2022 election despite GOP complaints
Sore losers and conspiracy theorists in the Arizona Republican Party have five days to file frivolous lawsuits challenging their stinging losses to Democrats in the midterms, which they almost assuredly will now do.
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Today’s Action: Phone bank for Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock!
Today’s the day. The incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and the observably awful, scandal-plagued GOP nominee, Herschel Walker, are finally facing off in Georgia’s long-awaited runoff election. Even though Democrats have already secured control of the Senate, one more seat in the upper chamber could mean the difference between advancing and safeguarding our progressive agenda or watching Republicans — set to take control of the House in a few weeks — roll back our hard-fought wins over the next two years.
It’s the final stretch, and we still need all hands on deck to keep Georgia blue! We need as many progressives in office as possible to preserve the rights we’ve been fighting so hard for — reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, gun-safety initiatives, justice reform, etc. Today is the last day to help identify supporters of Sen. Warnock, talk to on-the-fence voters, and help get them to the polls!
Georgia Votes is still hosting phone-banking parties for Raphael Warnock all day today until the polls close! Don’t wake up tomorrow wishing you had done more — commit to a final shift today and help keep Georgia blue!
PS — Please don't forget to sign the petition to expel the GOP congressmen who won’t condemn Trump’s call to terminate the Constitution, and be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
@advocacy | 1002 Hull St., Louisville, KY 40204
December 5, 2022 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
On Friday, December 2, President Joe Biden signed into law House Joint Resolution 100, “which provides for a resolution with respect to the unresolved disputes between certain railroads represented by the National Carriers’ Conference Committee of the National Railway Labor Conference and certain of their employees.”
What that long title means is that the U.S. government has overridden the usual union ratification procedures of a tentative agreement to hammer out differences between employers and the 115,000 workers covered by the agreement. Eight of the 12 involved unions had agreed to the deal, which provides 24% wage increases but no sick days, and four had not.
Their refusal to agree seemed almost certain to lead to a strike in which all the unions would participate, shutting down key supply chains and badly hurting the U.S. economy. Some estimated the costs of a strike would be about $2 billion a day, freezing almost 30% of freight shipments by weight, and causing a crisis in all economic sectors—including retail, just before the holidays. It would also disrupt travel for up to 7 million commuters a day and stop about 6300 carloads of food every day from moving. So the government stepped in.
Biden asked Congress on Monday, November 28, to act to prevent a rail strike, but there was a long history behind this particular measure, and an even longer one behind the government’s pressure on railroad workers.
The story behind today’s crisis started in 2017 when former president Trump’s trade war hammered agriculture and manufacturing, leading railroad companies to fire workers—more than 20,000 of them in 2019 alone, dropping the number of railroad workers in the U.S. below 200,000 for the first time since the Department of Labor began to keep track of such statistics in the 1940s. By December 2020, the industry had lost 40,000 jobs, most of them among the people who actually operated the trains.
Those jobs did not come back even after the economy did, though, as railroad companies implemented a system called precision scheduled railroading, or PSR. “We fundamentally changed the way we operate over the last 2½ years,” Bryan Tucker, vice president of communications at railroad corporation CSX told Heather Long of the Washington Post in January 2020. “It’s a different way of running a railroad.”
PSR made trains longer and operated them with a skeleton crew that was held to a strict schedule. This dramatically improved on-time delivery rates but sometimes left just two people in charge of a train two to three miles long, with no back-up and no option for sick days, family emergencies, or any of the normal interruptions that life brings, because the staffing was so lean it depended on everyone being in place. Any disruption in schedules brought disciplinary action and possible job loss. Workers got an average of 3 weeks’ vacation and holidays, but the rest of their time, including weekends, was tightly controlled, while smaller crews meant more dangerous working conditions.
PSR helped the railroad corporations make record profits. In 2021, revenue for the two largest railroad corporations in the U.S., the Union Pacific and BNSF (owned by Warren Buffett), jumped 12% to $21.8 billion and 11.6% to $22.5 billion, respectively.
About three years ago, union leaders and railroad management began negotiating new contracts but had little luck. In July, Biden established a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) to try to resolve the differences. The PEB’s August report called for significant wage increases but largely kicked down the road the problems associated with PSR. The National Carriers Conference Committee, which represents the railroads, called the report “fair and appropriate”; not all of the involved unions did.
And here is the deeper historical background to this issue: the government has no final power to force railroad owners to meet workers’ demands. In 1952, in the midst of the Korean War, believing that steel companies were being unreasonable in their unwillingness to bargain with workers, President Harry S. Truman seized control of steel production facilities to prevent a strike that would stop the production of steel defense contractors needed. But, in the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer decision, the Supreme Court said that the president could not seize private property unless Congress explicitly authorized it to do so. This means that the government has very little leverage over corporations to force them to meet workers’ demands.
But, thanks to the 1926 Railway Labor Act, Congress can force railroad workers to stay on the job. The 1926 law was one of the first laws on the books to try to stop strikes by providing a mechanism for negotiations between workers and employers. But if the two sides cannot agree after a long pattern of negotiations and cooling off periods, Congress can impose a deal that both sides have to honor.
The idea was to force both sides to bargain, but a key player in this policy was the American consumer, who had turned harshly against railroad workers when the two-month 1894 Pullman Strike, after drastic wage cuts, shut down the country. For the most part, Americans turned against the strikers as travel became diabolically difficult and goods stopped moving. Even reformer Jane Addams, who generally sympathized with workers, worried that the economic crisis had made forgiving the strikers “well-nigh impossible.”
While management generally likes the current system, workers point out that it removes their most effective leverage. Employers can always count on Congress to step in to avoid a railroad strike that would bring the country’s economy to its knees. On November 28, CNN Business reported that more than 400 business groups were asking Congress to enforce the tentative deal in order to prevent a strike. At the same time, the Supreme Court in 1952 took away the main leverage the government had against companies.
And so the House passed the measure forcing the unions to accept the tentative deal on Wednesday, November 30, by a vote of 290 to 137. Two hundred and eleven (211) Democrats voted yes; 8 voted no. Seventy-nine (79) Republicans voted yes; 129 voted no.
But then the House promptly took up a measure, House Concurrent Resolution 119, to correct the bill by providing a minimum of 7 paid sick days for the employees covered by the agreement. That, too, passed, by a vote of 221 to 207, with three Republicans joining all the Democrats to vote yes. Those three Republicans were Don Bacon (R-NE), who has gotten attention lately for trying to carve a space for himself away from the rest of the party as someone concerned about practical matters; Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA); and John Katko (R-NY).
It was a neat way for Congress to impose its will on the companies under the terms of the Railway Labor Act.
The Senate approved the bill on Thursday by a vote of 80 to 15, with Rand Paul (R-KY) voting “present” and four others not voting. The 80 yes votes were bipartisan and so were the 15 no votes. Five Democrats—Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), John Hickenlooper (D-CO), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT)—joined ten Republicans to oppose the measure.
Then the Senate took up the concurrent resolution, which it rejected by a vote of 52 yes votes to 43 no votes, with five not voting. That is, the measure won a majority—52 votes—but because of the current understanding of the filibuster rule, the Senate cannot pass a measure without a supermajority of 60 votes. The yes votes for the sick leave addition were nearly all Democrats, along with six Republicans. The no votes were all Republicans, with the addition of one Democrat: Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Biden maintains he supports paid sick leave for all workers, not just railroad workers, and promises to continue to work for it.
But the railway struggle was about more than sick leave. It was about a system that has historically made it harder for workers than for employers to get what they want. And it is about consumers, who—in the past at any rate—have blamed strikers rather than management when the trains stopped running.
—
Notes:
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1172/vote_117_2_00372.htm
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-concurrent-resolution/119/text
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-concurrent-resolution/119/actions
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1172/vote_117_2_00371.htm
https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2022491
https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2022490
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-expected-ask-congress-avert-rail-strike-source-2022-11-28/
https://www.bnsf.com/about-bnsf/financial-information/pdf/performance-update-4q-2021.pdf
https://www.progressiverailroading.com/bnsf_railway/news/BNSF-posts-record-earnings-for-2021--66004
https://railroads.dot.gov/sites/fra.dot.gov/files/fra_net/1647/Railway%20Labor%20Act%20Overview.pdf
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/2-unions-split-votes-on-rail-labor-agreement
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-expected-ask-congress-avert-rail-strike-source-2022-11-28/
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/30/politics/congress-rail-vote-house/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/12/03/rail-workers-paid-sick-leave/
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/02/business/railway-labor-act-freight-railroad-strike/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/28/business/rail-strike-business-groups/index.html
https://www.railwayage.com/freight/class-i/up-fritz-2021-most-profitable-year-ever/
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910; rpt. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), pp. 217-218.
Sam Bankman-Fried: The Rigged Wall Street System that “Valued” His Company at $32 Billion
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Sam Bankman-Fried: The Rigged Wall Street System that “Valued” His Company at $32 Billion
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 5, 2022 ~
If you have been following the Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX crypto exchange story since the company filed for bankruptcy on November 11, you have likely read the phrase “a valuation of $32 billion” dozens of times to describe the “valuation” of FTX as recently as February of this year. (We pulled up 47,600 results from a Google search.)
But here’s the funny thing. No media outlet has bothered to explain how FTX came by that $32 billion valuation or precisely how Sam Bankman-Fried, the co-founder and CEO of FTX, became a billionaire overnight. FTX wasn’t publicly traded so its share price wasn’t determined by millions of investors buying and selling its stock on a public stock exchange five days a week.
And here’s another funny thing: mainstream media reported in late September that FTX was looking to raise $1 billion more from venture capitalists while keeping its valuation at $32 billion, the same value that it had in February. But between February 1 and September 30, Coinbase, a crypto exchange that actually did trade on a public exchange where millions of real people bought and sold its stock, had lost 67 percent of its value.
To understand how FTX came by that magical $32 billion valuation, let’s use the example of a chain of privately-owned lemonade stands. The owner says his lemonade is the best in the world because he uses only organic lemons. He puts together a slick pitch deck and shows it to a bunch of venture capitalists. He wants to keep 55 percent of his company so he is willing to sell investors 45 percent of the shares. To keep things simple, let’s say that there are 1,000 shares in total in the company. To get to a $32 billion valuation, each share must be valued at $32 million.
If the lemonade stand owner can get some well-known venture capital firms to pay that $32 million per share, then Wall Street and the business press is happy to say that the firm has a valuation of $32 billion – even though price discovery on a public stock exchange has never occurred and only a small amount of the shares are actually sold.
In the case of FTX, only $1.8 billion in shares were actually sold to outside investors. But the $32 billion valuation was thrown around as if market forces had genuinely determined what the company was worth. Likewise, Sam Bankman-Fried was said to be worth $16 billion based on the shares he retained in FTX and related companies.
It’s impossible to say that the outside investors in FTX did any real due diligence to determine what valuation to place on FTX. The company did not have a functioning Board of Directors or even a CFO. The related-party transactions were so outrageous that they made another huckster, WeWork’s Adam Neumann, look like a Boy Scout. FTX was using company funds to buy up to $300 million in real estate in the Bahamas, putting some of the properties in the names of executives and one $16.5 million “vacation home” property in the name of Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents.
FTX’s outside investors included some high-profile names on Wall Street: SoftBank (also a big investor in the WeWork fiasco); Sequoia Capital – which has written down its $214 million investment in FTX to zero; Third Point Ventures, Tiger Global, BlackRock, Thoma Bravo, and others.
Venture capital firms have a vested interest in grossly over-valuing a private firm that hopes to eventually go public on a stock exchange. The more over-valued the company is the more money the private investors make when they cash out their shares during or shortly after the IPO (Initial Public Offering). In the case of Coinbase, some of its private investors cashed out of their shares at more than $300 per share on its first day of trading on April 14, 2021. (Coinbase went public as a direct listing. In a traditional IPO, early private investors and company executives are not allowed to sell their shares for several months due to a so-called lockup period. There’s no such prohibition in a direct listing.) Coinbase closed last Friday at $47.67.
The big Wall Street mega banks that underwrite IPOs are also incentivized to keep their mouths shut about wildly inflated valuations, because they collect a fee based on the dollar amount of the offering. And Big Law firms that serve as legal counsel to the underwriters don’t want to rock the boat out of fear they’ll be cut out of future deals.
Just 14 years ago the United States experienced the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression of the 1930s because of fast-talking hucksters on Wall Street pushing unregulated derivatives backed, in many cases, by little more than air. Millions of innocent Americans lost their jobs, their homes and their life savings in the crash.
Congress was supposed to write legislation that would make sure this kind of wholesale looting of the American people could never happen again. And yet, here we are today with millions of Americans’ life savings being looted by hucksters peddling cryptocurrencies backed by air – or stolen customers’ money in the case of FTX’s crypto token, FTT.
In his 1841 classic on market bubbles, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay wrote this about the Dutch Tulip bubble in the 17th century: “The rage among the Dutch to possess them was so great that the ordinary industry of the country was neglected…”
The legitimate business of Wall Street is to allocate capital efficiently to solid companies that will grow the U.S. economy, create good-paying jobs, and keep America competitive on the world stage. But despite Wall Street’s willingness to bring crypto dogs public and venture capital’s willingness to fund crypto startups, there has been a preponderance of evidence that crypto has been a scam from the very beginning.
Investors who thought that investing in crypto mining companies that used massive amounts of energy to solve complex mathematical problems that served no socially-beneficial purpose whatsoever have seen their investment dollars evaporate this year. The chart below shows the share price performance of ten crypto miners over the past 12 months versus the S&P 500 Index (Ticker SPX): Argo Blockchain PLC (ARBK), Bitfarms Ltd. (BITF), BIT Mining Ltd. (BTCM), Hive Blockchain Technologies Ltd. (HIVE), Hut 8 Mining Corp. (HUT), Greenidge Generation Holdings (GREE), Iris Energy (IREN), Marathon Digital Holdings Inc. (MARA), Riot Blockchain Inc. (RIOT), and Stronghold Digital Mining (SDIG).
Tulips anyone?
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