How about a little corporate corruption, hey, Boeing?

I’ve got a lot of family in the Seattle area, and the Boeing disease used to be devastating — Boeing sneezed, and families all across the region would be sent home to shiver and starve. It’s not quite as bad now, but the corporate giant is still a huge influence on the region, and when they screw up, everyone gets to suffer. And wow, but have they been screwing up, with control of the company in the hands of MBAs who really don’t know what they’re doing.

The latest catastrophe, on top of the 737 MAX disasters, is that they used prior profits to buy back stocks to artificially inflate their value, a game that was illegal before Saint Reagan wrecked the economy. That’s the kind of scheme they teach you in business school, I guess, but it means that right now they’ve got no reserves to weather the storm of airplane crashes.

This mad scramble for cash and the existential urge to “preserve cash in challenging periods” comes after this master of financial engineering – instead of aircraft engineering – blew, wasted, and incinerated $43.4 billion on buying back its own shares, from June 2013 until the financial consequences of the two 737 MAX crashes finally forced the company to end the practice. That $43.3 billion would come in really handy right now.

The sole purpose of share buybacks is to inflate the stock price because they make the company itself the biggest buyer of its own shares. But those $43 billion of share buybacks cost the company $43 billion in cash. Now those buybacks have stopped because Boeing needs every dime of cash to stay liquid and alive, and shareholders, who’d been so fond of those share buybacks, are now getting crushed by the damage those share buybacks have done to Boeing’s financial position.

I suspect airlines are facing dramatic losses of revenue as people stay home on top of that, so few companies are going to buy airplanes. Boy, aren’t those clever financial wizards running the show really great at lining their own pockets, but not so good at running an aerospace company? And yet the Republican government’s solution to economic problems is to hand these kinds of wizards even more money that they will convert into personal wealth at the expense of the company’s worth and health.

It’s called CORRUPTION

I’ve always wondered how the members of congress get so rich after a few years in office. I guess a few of them write best-selling books (or, at least, get amazing advances on books that end up in the remainder pile), but others have a sure-fire method that works every time: corruption. The pandemic is smoking out some of the profiteers.

Senator Richard Burr got all kinds of insider briefings on the coronavirus. In public, he reassured everyone that everything is under control and that the US was well prepared.

In a Feb. 7 op-ed that he co-authored with another senator, he assured the public that “the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus.” He wrote, “No matter the outbreak or threat, Congress and the federal government have been vigilant in identifying gaps in its readiness efforts and improving its response capabilities.”

In private, at a club for business people who paid $10,000 for the privilege of listening, he said something different.

According to the NPR report, Burr told attendees of the luncheon held at the Capitol Hill Club: “There’s one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history … It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”

He warned that companies might have to curtail their employees’ travel, that schools could close and that the military might be mobilized to compensate for overwhelmed hospitals.

Then he went on a selling spree, dumping all of his stock.

Then there’s Senator Kelly Loeffler, who assured the public that this was all a Democratic plot and that Trumpie was doing a great job.

Meanwhile, she sits in an intelligence briefing about the virus, and immediately begins dumping stocks. Millions of dollars worth of stocks.

Both of these people need to be fired immediately. I won’t go so far as to suggest that they be hanged from a lamppost with a “PROFITEER” placard hung around their necks, but you know plenty of other politicians are playing this game and need to be discouraged. If hanging is out of the question, maybe we should require that the investments and businesses of all politicians be put in trust when they’re elected. That’ll clean up all the millionaires and billionaires in office.

There’s a reason I don’t pharyngulate polls anymore

The cranks have gotten smarter. How could I possibly wreck this poll from Lou Dobbs?

On the one hand, Dobbs has “cleverly” made it impossible to participate in the poll without approving of Trump.

On the other hand, it’s ridiculous, and they’ve totally given up on the idea of using a poll to gather honest information, and they’ve reduced it to meaningless noise from the claque, which is what I was trying to show with bombing polls anyway.

So I win, I guess?

There’s ordinary evil, and then there’s greedy, grasping, gratuitous evil

We’re going to have to work on our categories, I see. This one is a mess about profiteering, lawyers who serve greed rather than justice, and an astonishingly selfish view of a pandemic as an opportunity to exploit everyone. Patent trolls are trying to block companies that make COVID-19 diagnostic tests.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to begin this story or how to fit all the insanity into the title. It’s a story involving patents, patent trolling, Covid-19, Theranos, and even the company that brought us all WeWork: SoftBank. Oh, and also Irell & Manella, the same law firm that once claimed it could represent a monkey in a copyright infringement dispute. You see, Irell & Manella has now filed one of the most utterly bullshit patent infringement lawsuits you’ll ever see. They are representing “Labrador Diagnostics LLC” a patent troll which does not seem to exist other than to file this lawsuit, and which claims to hold the rights to two patents (US Patents 8,283,155 and 10,533,994) which, you’ll note, were originally granted to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos — the firm that shut down in scandal over medical testing equipment that appears to have been oversold and never actually worked. Holmes is still facing federal charges of wire fraud over the whole Theranos debacle.

However, back in 2018, the remains of Theranos sold its patents to Fortress Investment Group. Fortress Investment Group is a SoftBank-funded massive patent troll. You may remember the name from the time last fall when Apple and Intel sued the firm, laying out how Fortress is a sort of uber-patent troll, gathering up a bunch of patents and then shaking down basically everyone. Lovely, right?

So, this SoftBank-owned patent troll, Fortress, bought up Theranos patents, and then set up this shell company, “Labrador Diagnostics,” which decided that right in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic it was going to sue one of the companies making Covid-19 tests, saying that its test violates those Theranos patents, and literally demanding that the court bar the firm from making those Covid-19 tests.

This is shaking up my perspective — I thought conservatives were the apotheosis of evil and Satan incarnate, but these guys seem even worse. Irell & Manella are American lawyers based in Los Angeles, so the only hope for my equanimity is that they’re also Republicans.

Susan Collins is objectively more evil than Joe Lieberman

And Lieberman is pretty ding-danged evil. This is, I presume, an excerpt from The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, which describes all the backroom maneuvering that went on to get Obama’s stimulus bill passed. It’s what our politicians do that tells us most about their character, not what they say to the press, and whoa, was Collins behind some awful policy decisions.

So…she hates education, refusing to fund school construction, and she wanted to “kill outright” all preparations for a pandemic. When Joe Lieberman is begging you to be slightly less wicked, you know you’re a bad person, and Joe Lieberman is the earthly manifestation of centrism.

That brings back bad memories of how awful the Republicans were during the Obama administration, and now they’re even worse.

Scratch out the word “economy” and replace it with “pandemic response”, and it’s still true.

Donald Trump’s greatest accomplishment

He has a remarkable ability to infest, corrupt, and destroy even the most reputable institutions. Will you ever believe a doctor’s report on the health of a president ever again? Do you still wishfully hope that Mr Smith Goes to Washington accurately portrays how an honest man can shape the Senate? Do you believe any more that “CDC” stands for “Center for Disease Control”?

Of course, he had help. It would be nice if the poison in the body politic had a single name and we could just boot the creep and get back to having trust, but I just can’t get out of my head the fact that 43% of the electorate think he’s doing a good job coping with a medical crisis.

“Stop testing.”

They started testing for SARS-CoV-2 in Seattle, with one researcher, Helen Chu, leading the way. They started getting positive hits, and then the federal government stepped in, but not to anyone’s benefit.

The state laboratory, finally able to begin testing, confirmed the result the next morning. The teenager, who had recovered from his illness, was located and informed just after he entered his school building. He was sent home and the school was later closed as a precaution.

Later that day, the investigators and Seattle health officials gathered with representatives of the C.D.C. and the F.D.A. to discuss what happened. The message from the federal government was blunt. “What they said on that phone call very clearly was cease and desist to Helen Chu,” Dr. Lindquist remembered. “Stop testing.”

I found that shocking. Stop collecting information, stop responding to patient concerns, minimize the threat. This is not what I want the government to do.

On a phone call the day after the C.D.C. and F.D.A. had told Dr. Chu to stop, officials relented, but only partially, the researchers recalled. They would allow the study’s laboratories to test cases and report the results only in future samples. They would need to use a new consent form that explicitly mentioned that results of the coronavirus tests might be shared with the local health department.

They were not to test the thousands of samples that had already been collected.

While I sympathize with privacy concerns, this is a situation where public health ought to have priority. Being diagnosed with COVID-19 does not create a permanent stigma. It guides the appropriate response to the affected individual.

Especially since this is what’s happening:

In the days since the teenager’s test, the Seattle region has spun into crisis, with dozens of people testing positive and at least 22 dying — many of them infected in a nursing home that had unknowingly been suffering casualties since Feb. 19.

My mother lives in that area, she’s a few years older than I am (just a few), and she’s already had a few respiratory episodes that required temporary hospitalization. When I talked to her the other day, she’s self-quarantining and avoiding going out in public at all…but I feel like if there were a problem, she wouldn’t get the help she would need, but instead is going to be told to shut up.

Can we not pick the “safe” one who always seems to lose?

I pretty much agree with everything this guy says, except for the clumsy Batman analogy, but I fear it might be too late. I don’t have much hope that today’s primaries will change the trajectory of the electorate towards the moderate centrist. Ick.

But sure, vote for whoever wins the nomination. You know, the Democrats had a low bar to hurdle this time around, it’s rather depressing that they picked the guy that barely clears it.