From Salt Lake City, just outside the public library:
Morgan Stanley says that it is not merely an “ally” but a “proud ally” of the 2SLGBTQQIA+. However, as far as I am aware, the bank does not offer discounts or preferential rates to customers who identify as 2SLGBTQQIA+. Should the Federal Trade Commission shut them down for false advertising unless they can show concretely what they’re doing for 2SLGBTQQIA+ customers worldwide? A company shouldn’t be able to obtain the “queer advantage” (see book below from the Salt Lake City Library) without paying for it, should it?
Separately, the New York Times says that humanity faces a “climate emergency” and an “existential crisis”. At the same time, I think that the newspaper takes money for ads for single-family homes (inherently energy-inefficient) and pavement-melting SUVs. Maybe the FTC can’t shut them down for hypocrisy, but perhaps the NYT could be forced to add a “context” box under every claim that the Earth is going Full Venus: “This newspaper profits from ads for SUVs and single-family homes.”
During our three-week sojourn in the American desert we discovered a few nice-to-have items from Amazon. These were available for overnight delivery to our house in Palm Beach County. Changing the delivery zip code to a small town in Utah, however, resulted in an update: one week (e.g., to Moab, Utah, full-time population of 5,000). Maybe it was just a question of price? There was no faster option offered at any price.
In its early 2-day-always-anywhere incarnation, Amazon Prime was a great leveler and put people in small towns on an equal footing, as far as convenience went, with people in big cities.
Maybe this is why Amazon went into the business of streaming interminable TV shows? People in out-of-the-way parts of the U.S. can binge-watch while they wait for their Bluetooth headphones?
Perhaps this will save bricks-and-mortar retail? Moab has a local bookstore that has survived nearly 30 years of competition from Amazon:
I hope that your Pride Month is going well. Let’s talk about the intersection between Pride and commerce….
In some sense it isn’t surprising that retailers would have some percentage of their stores devoted to 2SLGBTQQIA+ merchandise because at least some percentage of customers will want items that broadcast their passion for the Rainbow Flag Religion (see “Nothing against LGBTQ people, but they talk about being LGBTQ all the time.”). On the other hand, unless we think that followers of Rainbow Flagism are the majority of customers, it seems odd that 2SLGBTQQIA+ merchandise is right in the front of the store, given greater prominence than everything else that customers might want.
It wasn’t Pride Month last month, but retailers in Bozeman, Montana nonetheless were following a principle that I’m going to call Rainbow-first Retail, in which every customer will be exposed to 2SLGBTQQIA+ merchandise prior to the rest of the shopping experience.
Let’s start at Target. A shopper who comes in to get a toaster, a bottle of aspirin, or a bag of Cheetos must first walk by Pride Island, which is placed just inside the main doors:
Only haters would suggest that Rainbow Flagism is a religion rather than Science, yet Target sells a gingerbread-house-like kit labeled “celebratory offering” (bottom row below; click to enlarge):
You can “Spread the Love” with a spatula by Alice Butts:
I quickly found 2SLGBTQQIA+-themed apparel in sizes down to 3T (for three-year-olds):
What if Mindy the Crippler demands to be included in Pride Month? We can cover her unsightly golden fur with a beautiful rainbow “crop top” in the “pride pet apparel” category:
Is it then fair to say that Target has something for everyone? Perhaps not. An aircraft owner friend likes to say “I’m proud of my race and I’m proud of my sexuality” yet Target does not offer clothing celebrating white heterosexuality.
What if we’re having our 2SLGBTQQIA+ friends over for a party? Target sells 2SLGBTQQIA+ beverages:
The local merchants actually pushed Rainbow Flagism out to the storefront with flags in the windows and stickers on the glass. Customers are required to pay obeisance to the sacred flag before they can walk in and think about transacting business.
Quite a few merchants had the following signs and stickers on their front doors/windows:
Note that Muslims are lumped in with “LGBTQ community members”. We didn’t meet any recent migrants from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, or Somalia, but I wonder if they feel “welcome here” when they must walk by a giant rainbow flag in order to get food at the downtown market:
“Everyone Welcome” is stenciled on the glass. Would Ron DeSantis be welcome? Wouldn’t that be normalizing hate?
If the bookstore window was 100% devoted to 2SLGBTQQIA+, did they have anything inside on a different topic? Pulitzer winner about the greatest American of the 21st century:
Circling back to the “immigrants welcome” theme, locals told us that Bozeman has become completely unaffordable due to skyrocketing rents and house prices. Traffic lights are being added so quickly that we stopped at several that weren’t yet in Google Maps. Apartment buildings are being constructed in what were formerly low-rise neighborhoods. Example:
In addition to welcoming “All Countries of Origin” they welcome “All Religions” but have a rainbow sticker on the front door as well:
How can an observant Muslim feel welcome?
Here’s a shop that features, on the outside of the building, a dark-skinned person with a substantial bulge in the panties:
We didn’t see a single person with this skin color during two days in Bozeman.
Circling back to the Rainbow-first Retail theme of this post… why is it profitable? Why does the typical customer want to be reminded to observe Rainbow Flagism when going into a store to buy something that isn’t related to the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle?
Loyal readers may remember a review here of a book by a Los Angeles Times reporter on America’s taxpayer-fueled heroin habit (see Who funded America’s opiate epidemic? You did.). Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty covers the same story from the angle of the family behind OxyContin. The Sacklers, whose names adorn university and art museum buildings throughout the U.S. and Europe, have been convenient scapegoats, but it turns out that they didn’t do it alone. Some things that I learned from the book…
Arthur M. Sackler, the patriarch, died before OxyContin was invented (the slow-release coating was actually the invention of a British company that had been acquired by the Sacklers’ sleepy Purdue Pharma and was used originally for morphine pills called “MS Contin”). He was the significant art collector and benefactor of AOC’s party venue at the Metropolitan Museum (how did it cost $587 for a car ride from the Bronx to the Upper East Side?). With the help of some friendly bureaucrats at the FDA, who would go on to be of much greater assistance to his brothers’ company Purdue, he pushed the limits of what was legal/ethical in medical advertising, especially for Valium and Librium, but museums are still happy to display the name of Hoffmann-La Roche, which actually made the drugs.
The book describes McKinsey, “The firm that built the house of Enron”, working to help Purdue Pharma increase sales of OxyContin even after the company and three executives had pleaded guilty to federal crimes regarding claims made regarding the drug. McKinsey’s biggest idea, according to the author, was that Purdue Pharma’s salespeople should make more frequent calls on the doctors who were the biggest prescribers, i.e., the “pill mills” such as Eleanor Santiago‘s (1 million pills, which resulted in a 20-month prison sentence for the physician). McKinsey also consulted for Johnson & Johnson, the author says, to help them push more opioids out to consumers. (See “Behind the Scenes, McKinsey Guided Companies at the Center of the Opioid Crisis” (NYT 2022))
Speaking of Johnson & Johnson, they owned a division in Tasmania where all of the poppies were grown to enable the production of OxyContin and competitive opioid pills from Janssen (J&J’s pharma subsidiary, now famous for its never-FDA-approved one-shot COVID vaccine) and other companies (in-depth background). The Federal DEA was also complicit in allowing a massive increase in the import quota for this critical raw material.
The author describes Mary Jo White, later appointed by Barack Obama to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission, as instrumental in weakening the government’s efforts to punish Purdue, which was owned entirely by the Sacklers (not, however, by any of Arthur M’s descendants or cash-hungry former wives, “the Valium Sacklers” as opposed to the “OxyContin Sacklers”).
Consistent with Dreamland, the book previously reviewed here, Empire of Pain says that it was common for people to transition from Oxy to heroin sold by migrants from Nayarit, Mexico and that, in fact, 80 percent of heroin overdoses were among people who’d previously been prescribed OxyContin. (See also “From Nayarit to Your Neighborhood: Heroin’s Path to a Ready Local Market”.)
The book supports the heritability of success theory advanced in The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications. Even after a couple of generations that could have succumbed to idleness, the Sackler descendants are reasonably hard-working and successful. Madeleine Sackler, for example, has been successful as a filmmaker (ironically, a couple of them are about life in prison, which is not unrelated to the drug that has funded her lifestyle).
If nothing else, reading the book will make you cautious about taking that first bottle of painkillers that a doctor prescribes!
The author is a New Yorker writer and he asserts as fact that HIV/AIDS would have been a solved problem if Republicans had not blocked federal funding for research into a cure for this disease (yet SARS-CoV-2 continues to kill steadily despite literally $trillions in tax money that has been thrown at it; see Did vaccines or any other intervention slow down COVID?). He also asserts as fact that if Purdue Pharma was liable for opioid-related deaths then gun manufacturers are obviously liable for shooting deaths (never mentioning that the gun manufacturers have always been quite candid about the lethality of guns/bullets and that the theory of liability for the opioid industry is that the companies lied to Americans about heroin-style drugs not being addictive/harmful).
Loosely related… the Temple of Dendur at the Met, in what used to be called “The Sackler Wing” (funded by Arthur M, blameless in the OxyContin debacle), “temporarily closed” in June 2021 for coronapanic:
The company, formerly known as Facebook, continues to pay women less than men, whether they’re hourly workers or on salary, according to Meta’s most recently available reports on pay inequity in the UK and Ireland. The company also hands women smaller bonuses, the reports said.
The report on Meta’s pay gap in Ireland is the most recent, having been released quietly in December as part of a new law in the country that went into effect last year. In 2022, women working for Meta in Ireland were paid 15.7% less on average than men at the company. The difference in bonus pay in the country is even larger, with the average bonus for women being 43.3% lower than those that go to men.
For women working at Meta in the UK, where the company operates out of London, the pay gap is smaller but still prevalent, according to a report from last year detailing pay data from 2021. The average woman there was paid 2.1% less than the average man. And again, the difference in bonuses is much starker, with the average bonus going to women being 34.8% less than bonuses paid to men.
The lords of Silicon Valley are also fond of reminding the peasants how much smarter they are about money, even as many venture capital firms there underperform the S&P 500 (HBR 2014; a 2019 article). What about something simple like running a bank? With about $200 billion in deposits to protect, Silicon Valley Bank made a big bet that the Vanquisher of Corn Pop wouldn’t set off hyperinflation. The bank bought long-term Treasury bonds. When Bidenflation took off, the value of these bonds collapsed. From “What’s Going on With Silicon Valley Bank?” (WSJ):
SVB Financial bought tens of billions of dollars of seemingly safe assets, primarily longer-term U.S. Treasurys and government-backed mortgage securities. SVB’s securities portfolio rose from about $27 billion in the first quarter of 2020 to around $128 billion by the end of 2021.
These securities are at virtually no risk of defaulting. But they pay fixed interest rates for many years. That isn’t necessarily a problem, unless the bank suddenly needs to sell the securities. Because market interest rates have moved so much higher, those securities are suddenly worth less on the open market than they are valued at on the bank’s books. As a result, they could only be sold at a loss.
Many of the bank’s deposits are sizable enough that they don’t carry Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. protection. SVB said it estimates that at the end of 2022 the amount of deposits in its U.S. offices that exceed the FDIC insurance limit was $151.5 billion.
Before it disappears, let’s have a look at their home page:
Certainly nobody can accuse them of failure to represent a diversity of hairstyles.
What can you do to protect yourself in case some other banks were overconfident regarding our current rulers and their Borrow-and-Spend-Like-Drug-Dealers economic policy? Move money that is in cash into mutual funds or common stocks. The bank is just a custodian for these assets and if the bank fails you’re still a shareholder at the same level. If you must have cash of more than $250,000, spread it among multiple banks.
Let’s dig a little deeper into this failed bank. It seems that they too might have built a culture of equity by underpaying a group of employees unified by a gender ID:
They were experts on “sustainable finance” whose own enterprise just happened not to be sustainable.
“One Million Masks | SVB COVID-19 Response” (YouTube), in which SVB gives money to Shafqat Islam so that he can turn around and give non-N95 masks to people who want to avoid an aerosol virus
Here’s a pharma company that celebrates Black women:
For Black History Month, our Multi-Ethnic Momentum BIG shares Black trailblazers in pharmaceuticals. In 1908, Anna Louise James became the first Black woman graduate of Brooklyn College of Pharmacy. Committed to diversity: https://t.co/4D0g4qEjip
Maybe there are some Black employees just below the “executive “leadership” level?
It looks as though the top of the “people” page is a stock photo that includes a Black woman. The office building in which these non-Asian stock photo models are assembled has exposed brick walls. Below this is a photo of some actual employees. The walls are painted sheetrock and the workforce has a decidedly different skin color distribution compared to the stock photo models:
We’re a third of the way through Black History Month. Let’s check in with the voluntary apartheid economy that Americans have set up.
An email from Tripadvisor in which we are urged to “eat, stay, and shop” only at enterprises owned by people who identify as part of a particular race:
There’s never been a better time to put your money where your mouth is. … Here, we’ve rounded up a selection of 55 Black-owned businesses online that the team here at Oprah Daily recommends—including in the beauty, food and drink, fashion, and home decor categories. These thoughtfully curated selections are nothing short of stunning, so you’ll want have your wallet ready. Supporting them is something you can do all year long.
Want to watch some TV on Amazon Prime? The top option is a section segregated to one skin color:
Throughout the month of February, we will be spotlighting 10 Black-owned restaurants in every city with an NBA team. This initiative aligns with the league’s commitment to broader diversity and inclusion efforts in the communities where we work and live.
Readers: What are you seeing in terms of voluntary apartheid? (Official race-based programs, such as in government contracting or hiring, do not count.)
Related:
“Abolish the White Race” (Harvard Magazine, Sept/Oct 2002): “The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists.”
When JPMorgan Chase paid $175 million to acquire a college financial planning company called Frank in September 2021, it heralded the “unique opportunity for deeper engagement” with the five million students Frank worked with at more than 6,000 American institutions of higher education.
“To cash in, Javice decided to lie,” the suit said. “Including lying about Frank’s success, Frank’s size and the depth of Frank’s market penetration.” Ms. Javice, through her lawyer, has said the bank’s claims are untrue.
JPMorgan’s legal filing reads like pulp nonfiction, with jaw-dropping accusations. Among them: that Ms. Javice and Olivier Amar, Frank’s chief growth and acquisition officer, faked their customer list and hired a data science professor to help pull the wool over the eyes of the bank’s due-diligence team.
When Frank was born, in 2016, Ms. Javice was 24 years old, displayed great media savvy and claimed to have real-world experience with financial aid and the struggle to pay for college. “It’s grueling, it’s emotional,” she told The Daily Pennsylvanian, a student newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania, adding that her mother would frequently cry while talking to financial aid officers.
Ms. Javice’s personal story — and pledge to cut through the painful thicket of government forms, jargon and regulations surrounding the aid process — must have made compelling reading for angel investors and venture capitalists. Especially those who have little firsthand knowledge of how financial aid actually works.
Ms. Javice’s career helping others began, in her telling, on the border of Thailand and Myanmar. She spent time volunteering there one summer, between terms at her private high school in Westchester County, N.Y.
Ms. Javice has said she needed help herself while she was an undergraduate at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where she quickly drew notice by appearing on Fast Company’s 2011 list of the 100 most creative people in business.
There, she was on financial aid, and she found the forms confusing. So did her parents, according to an interview she gave to Diversity Woman magazine — including her father, Didier, who has worked on Wall Street for more than 35 years, with 11 years at Goldman Sachs and three at Merrill Lynch, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Ms. Javice appeared on the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 finance list. Then she made the Crain’s New York Business 40 Under 40 list. “Javice has done her homework,” the Crain’s article said.
In other words, the smartest people at Penn, in American business journalism, and on Wall Street accepted that someone who attended “private high school” while Dad worked at Goldman was a rags-to-riches heroine and a member of two victimhood classes: women and poor people.
(Separately, can the New York Times sue Diversity Woman magazine for trademark infringement?
Related:
Equity Funding fraud, in which Californians with a mainframe computer generated fictitious insurance policies (movie version stars suppressed-on-Twitter coronaheretic James Woods!); a good reminder that California was famous for fraud before it became famous for righteousness, lockdowns, school closures, mask orders, vaccine papers checks, and homeless encampments!
“Why Women-Owned Startups Are a Better Bet” (from the big Harvard MBA brains at Boston Consulting Group) says that all you need to do to outperform the S&P 500 is invest in female-founded companies such as Ms. Javice’s: “businesses founded by women ultimately deliver higher revenue—more than twice as much per dollar invested—than those founded by men”
A friend is a mid-level manager at one of the FAANG companies that enforces religious orthodoxy here in the U.S., e.g., by deplatforming those who fail to respect the rainbow flag. She expressed dismay that her division was being trimmed by 20 percent in order to shore up profits. I asked “What percentage of the people you work with aren’t worth having around even at a $0 salary because they’re either unproductive, annoying, or both?” She thought for a few moments and then answered “About 20 percent.”
So maybe the slim-down in the tech industry won’t change much.
Readers: What percentage of folks would you get rid of at your company even if these people were available at no cost to the company?
At this time, Florida Power and Light (FPL) has restored power to more than 45% of their accounts in Lee County, while LCEC has only restored power to 9% of their accounts (18,000 out of 183,000 customers).
Florida Power and Light is the Evil Empire of Electricity in Florida, a for-profit regulated monopoly.
LCEC is one of more than 850 not-for-profit electric distribution cooperatives located throughout 46 states and serving 75 percent of land mass in the nation. Cooperatives are in business to serve members at the cost of service. This business model is different from investor-owned utilities, which typically share profits with investors globally.
It seems as though the profit-seekers invested substantially more in resiliency than the non-profit folks.
Sunday morning: LCEC had 177,105 out of 199,097 customers tracked (11 percent on; note the inconsistency in total Lee County customers with the 183,000 figure above).
FPL had 132,930 out from among 288,630 in Lee County (54 percent on).
On Monday morning, the outage site still showed roughly the same number out: 177,369 out of 199,097 in Lee County. Either LCEC made no progress at all in 24 hours or we are seeing #FakeNews on the poweroutage.us site (someone’s computer system is broken?). Over the same roughly 24-hour period, FPL had reduced its Lee County outages from 132,930 to 100,220. I checked Twitter and found the following update from LCEC:
The power outage site shows 184,751 LCEC customers out across all locations.
https://poweroutage.us/area/state/puerto%20rico (a fair number of our Latinx brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in the American part of Latinx America remain without power after the September 18 impact of Hurricane Fiona)
