Category: Cronies

Ice cream proletarians

Climate Cult Cronies 19 Comments

I’ve never had a Ben and Jerry’s ice cream treat yet, and after seeing the Canadian branch’s deep dive into Marxism-Leninism and various other woke causes, I won’t be doing so any time soon. Have these guys not learned anything from the Bud Light experience?

Mining, drilling, and logging corporations have been exploiting Indigenous communities for generations. Enabled by the government and unjust laws, they steal land, extract resources, and leave behind polluted water, ruined landscapes, and scarred communities.

When Indigenous activists and community leaders stand up and protest, companies regularly bring in police to silence them and even force them from their own land. In fact, a secretive special unit of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) was created in British Columbia with the sole purpose of suppressing protests.

 

Shocked, I tell you! Shocked!

Alternative Subsidy Cronies Great Moments In Socialism 36 Comments

If Rodriquez literally could not see this coming, he’s not fit to fill the role of municipal dogcatcher, much less a federal cabinet post. Either that, or this was the desired outcome and he’s feigning indignation.

“Well, Meta, I always said it was complicated; Google we still have conversations as recent as this morning,” Rodriguez told CTV’s Power Play Thursday afternoon. “I’m a bit surprised by Google’s reaction.”

What’s more surprising about this mainstream news item is that, for once, it solicited comments that were actually critical of the government:

“The government made a big bet, seemingly just based on the notion that somehow this was all just a big bluff; I don’t think it read the room,” he said. “I don’t think it fully appreciated the current circumstances and it put a fundamental principle of the internet – the notion of free flow of information through linking – at risk.”

We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars

Alternative Subsidy Cronies Roadkill Uncategorized 12 Comments

David Harsanyi;

The left likes to treat skeptics of electrical cars as if they were Luddites. Truth is, making an existing product less efficient but more expensive doesn’t really meet the definition of innovation.

Even the purported amenities and technological advances EV-makers like to brag about in their ads have been a regular feature of gas-powered vehicles going back generations. At best, EVs, if they fulfill their promise, are a lateral technology.

Which is why there is no real “emerging market” for EVs in the United States as much as there’s an industrial policy in place that props up EVs with government purchases, propaganda, endless state subsidies, cronyism, taxpayer-backed loans, and edicts. The green “revolution” is an elite-driven, top-down technocratic project.

And it’s increasingly clear that the only reason giant rent-seeking carmakers are so heavily invested in EV development is that government is promising to artificially limit the production of gas-powered cars.[…]

In today’s real-world economy, though, Ford announced this week that it was firing at least 1,000 employees — many of them white-collar workers on the EV side. Ford projects it’s going to lose $3 billion on electric vehicles in 2023, bringing its EV losses to $5.1 billion over two years. In 2021, Ford reportedly lost $34,000 on every EV it made. This year it was losing more than $58,000 on every EV. In a normal world, Ford would be dramatically scaling back EV production, not expanding it. Remember that next time we need to bail out Detroit.

Then again, we’re already bailing them out, I suppose. Last week, the U.S. Energy Department lent Ford — again, a company that loses tens of thousands of dollars on every EV it sells — another $9.2 billion in taxpayer dollars for a South Korean battery project. One imagines no sane bank would do it. The cost of EV batteries has gone up, not down, over the past few years.

Hitting the ditch

Climate Cult Cronies It's Probably Nothing 40 Comments

As anyone who has purchased a vehicle lately will tell you, it’s little wonder that automakers are now in cost-cutting mode. At these prices, the marginal consumer is simply saying no. My local dealer informs me that production schedules for some models are so backed up that the buyer must either pony up more dough for next year’s model or forfeit the sale.

Ford Motor Co (F.N) said on Tuesday it will begin layoffs this week, impacting mostly engineering jobs in the U.S. and Canada, as part of the Detroit automaker’s move to exit unprofitable locations and cut headcount.

The development comes after the company said in May it expects to take up restructuring charges between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in 2023.

Buried in the story is this little note about EV production:

Ford CEO Jim Farley has previously said the automaker had too many people and that not enough of its workforce had the skills required as the auto industry shifts to electric vehicles and digital services.

Scapegoating as a national sport

Cronies Great Moments In Socialism nannystate 20 Comments

Sometimes one has to wonder why any investor would bother to park his money in Canada these days. In the case of a particular parliamentary committee looking at food prices, the solution being offered to rising prices is to hit competitors with higher taxes. I’m sure that will make food prices go down, right?

If Canada’s Competition Bureau finds that grocery store giants are profiting excessively from food inflation, the federal government should consider slapping a windfall tax on those excess profits.

Rather than condemn such a ludicrous idea, the  milquetoasts at the Retail Council of Canada had this to say:

“While we welcome the collaborative tone of the report, we would caution against increased government intervention in the operational aspects of the retail food business.”

“Ex-Mayor Lori Lightfoot” Is Not The Name Of A DC Comics Character

Cronies If Women Ran The World Khmer Noir 10 Comments

But it should be.

Harvard University has granted a fellowship in public health to former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who recently became the first Chicago mayor to lose a re-election bid in 40 years after a controversy-ridden tenure as the Windy City’s top boss.

In her role as the Menschel Senior Leadership Fellow, Lightfoot “will teach a course in the fall at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health,” the Ivy League institution recently announced.

The June 1 announcement lists several of Lightfoot’s achievements as mayor, such as leading the citywide response to the pandemic and creating a “Racial Equity Rapid Response Team.”

A sweetheart deal

Cronies Great Moments In Socialism It's Probably Nothing 21 Comments

When central banks started hiking short term interest rates in recent months, banks with balance sheets full of supposedly “safe” long-term treasury bonds suddenly found themselves staring at serious capital losses. But not to worry. Troubled banks can now offer up these assets as loan collateral at the Fed at purchase value instead of market value. And no one needs to know that they’re doing it. What could possibly go wrong?

https://twitter.com/JoeConsorti/status/1666946804892532738

Liberation struggles

Cronies Great Moments In Socialism More Pavilions At Folkfest 23 Comments

What’s the root cause of Robert Mugabe’s destruction of Zimbabwe, and the fact that it went on for as long as it did without anyone making a serious effort to stop it? It has a lot to do with ideas originating in the West and an academic and political culture that actively promoted the worst of them.

Smith’s fears were not based on century-old horror stories about Reconstruction. If he believed that white minorities would be run out by the new regime in spite of all prior reassurances to the contrary, it was because that’s exactly what had happened in Algeria. If he worried that the country’s economy would be knocked back to subsistence, with famine following, it was because post-colonial Africa (with the exception of oil-boom Nigeria) had seen negative per capita economic growth in the 1970s. By the time of UDI, the world already had before it the examples of Ghana (Afro-fascism), Tanzania (police state), and the Congo (civil war). Instead of asking why Smith thought Zimbabwe would go the same way, we should ask why anyone thought it would be the exception.

 

It’s Probably Nothing (Bumped)

Cronies Democrats It's Probably Nothing 21 Comments

Fortune;

US regulators were working into the night to resolve First Republic Bank crisis late Sunday after midday deadline passed for submitting final bids to take over struggling lender.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. had asked banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co., PNC Financial Services Group Inc., and Citizens Financial Group Inc. to submit offers, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Bank of America Corp. and US Bancorp were also invited but decided against bidding, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential talks.

If no agreement is reached, regulators would have the option of seizing First Republic and taking ownership of the bank.

Spokespeople for JPMorgan, PNC, Citizens Financial, US Bancorp, Bank of America and the FDIC declined to comment.

Morning update @FDICgov: To protect depositors, we entered into an agreement with JP Morgan Chase Bank to purchase and assume all deposits and assets of First Republic Bank.

3 out of the 4 largest bank failures in history have occurred in the last two months.

Foreign investors begone!

CPC Leadership Cronies nannystate 42 Comments

It was the elder Trudeau who instituted the Foreign Investment Review Act which was thankfully jettisoned during the Mulroney years. Fast forward to the present era, and we now find the current leader of the Conservatives agreeing with Trudeau the younger that it should at least be resurrected on an ad hoc basis.

Why is a party allegedly dedicated to a free market economic system suddenly embracing this kind of mercantilist thinking? This is supremely ironic for a man who is campaigning on removing “gatekeepers” from the economy.

Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative party, is calling for the federal government to block Glencore Plc’s bid to buy Canada’s largest diversified miner, Teck Resources Ltd., adding yet another political voice against the potential takeover.

Under FIRA, foreign investors were at least well aware of the hurdles they faced when trying to invest capital in Canada. Now, the hurdles are invoked on a whim and can apparently come from any political direction.

The not gold standard

Cronies DigitalCurrency Great Moments In Socialism 21 Comments

As part of Zimbabwe’s ongoing struggle to stave off a return to the dark ages, it recently began minting and selling gold coins. Some pundits are claiming that this heralds a return to a gold standard, but that would require paper currency denominated in a weight of gold with redemption for gold upon request. So far, these clowns seem to have all that completely backwards. Is there any hope for this train wreck of a nation?

The “Mosi-oa-tunya” coin, named after Victoria falls, can be converted into cash and be traded locally and internationally, the central bank said.

Last week, Zimbabwe more than doubled its policy rate to 200% from 80% and outlined plans to make the U.S. dollar legal tender for the next five years to boost confidence.

Annual inflation, which hit almost 192% in June, cast a shadow over President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s bid to revitalise the economy.

Sparky cars for the masses!

Alternative Subsidy Climate Cult Cronies 27 Comments

Whoever calls this an investment with a straight face is utterly delusional. An investment implies an identifiable return related to the profitability of the company. In this case, taxpayers can kiss the money goodbye. In a race with the United States to see who can go bankrupt first, Canada is obviously not going to win, but we seem to think it shows character to die trying.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government agreed to subsidies that may top $13 billion over a decade to land an electric-vehicle battery plant by Volkswagen AG, the company’s first gigafactory outside Europe.

The money is provided through an unprecedented contract negotiated by Trudeau’s industry minister, François-Philippe Champagne. Canada will provide annual production subsidies as well as a grant toward the factory’s capital cost — effectively matching what the German automaker could have received via the Inflation Reduction Act if it had located the plant in the U.S., according to government officials.

Crisis Factory

Cronies Great Moments In Socialism nannystate 2 Comments

We’ve all heard the term Military Industrial Complex, but economist Peter St. Onge has come up with a new term for the actions of central banks as they vainly attempt to “manage” the economy: the Crisis Industrial Complex.

In essence, the Fed plays venture capitalist to the crisis industrial complex. Financing each crisis in that vulnerable early stage when voters might not be up for paying $14 trillion to run around Afghanistan, or $7 trillion to pay people not to work, or the $50 to $90 trillion — not a joke — they want for a New Green Deal.

This bridge financing is important in that start-up stage of a new crisis, when the product’s not off the ground yet. Like offering a free trial to get somebody to subscribe, it has to be free long enough for the parasitic supporting infrastructure of academics, activists, media, and crony companies to build up, to metastasize. That venture stage manufactures the consensus, identifies and censors the dangerous conspiracy theories, keeps the money flowing to the opportunists who will sustain it as a permanent parasite.

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