ONLY DEMOCRATS AND THEIR EXPERTS CAN BE RELIED UPON TO RUN THE COUNTRY CLAIMS THE CURRENT CROP OF EXPERTS!

Washington Post Warning: If Trump Wins, We’ll No Longer Have the “Experts” in Charge

Like the weirdos appointed by the Biden administration…?

“The most politically powerful person right now in the state is a hog farmer,” Frerick tells ABC RN’s Late Night Live.

And he wondered how one farmer could come to amass and sell more than 5 million pigs each year.

Frerick is a fellow of Yale’s Thurman Arnold Project, which researches competition policy and antitrust enforcement. Recently he published Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry.

After that conversation at the bar, Frerick realised that what was happening in the pork industry — this huge consolidation of power and wealth — was happening throughout the US food system.

When he started investigating, he found that a handful of US families controlled most of the US’s food production and distribution system, including meat, dairy, grains, fruit and groceries.

While some have recognisable names, most are private individuals running private companies. All are worth billions of dollars.

And while their influence is evident in the US, it stretches around the world — and that includes Australia.

How did these farmers become so powerful?

The history of American agriculture is rooted in slavery and genocide but it was in the 1980s that the pro-corporate framework really took hold , Frerick says.

With the election of Republican president Ronald Reagan, Frerick says that “the guardrails came off and you see this massive consolidation of power in the hands of a few people”.

In the 1950s, then-president Dwight D Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture urged farmers to “get big or get out”, and succeeded in passing a bill that watered down laws protecting small family-run farms.

Reagan continued to water down this legislation.

Frerick says this meant his home state of Iowa, which had some of the best soil in North America, was transformed into an industrial wasteland.

“It’s empty, it’s dead, it’s barren — you don’t see animals, you smell them,” he says.

For example, in Iowa, pigs currently outnumber people seven to one.

“We basically shove most animals into these massive sheds called confinements, where they never see a blade of grass.”

He says where Iowa used to be made up of independent, middle-class family farms, it is now mostly families of low-wage workers employed by the mega-rich and often out-of-town agricultural barons.

And Frerick believes these mega-rich baron families have one thing in common which led to their success.

“They were willing to cross ethical lines others weren’t willing to cross. [For instance] most hog farmers weren’t willing to pack thousands of their animals into a windless metal shed,” he says.

So who exactly are the families that own so much of the agricultural industry?

The hog barons: Jeff and Deb Hansen

Via their Iowa Select Farms pork production company, the Hansens own 800 farms in 50 counties in Iowa. That makes them the fourth largest pork producer in the US. Iowa Select Farms’ revenue from 2022 was $91 million.

Frerick learnt that the Hansens live between their home in the only gated community in Iowa and a home in Naples, Florida.

“[And] they have their own private jet that they fly back and forth between the two and allegedly on this jet are the words ‘When pigs fly’, ” Frerick says.

The grain barons: The Cargill-MacMillan family

Frerick says he grew up aware of the company owned by the Cargill-MacMillan family.

“I played soccer next to a Cargill plant, I went to church by a Cargill plant, but [the family is] not consumer-facing, they don’t put their name on anything,” he says.

So, he never realised the scale of the operation.

The family owns equity in the food company Cargill Inc, one of the largest privately owned corporations in the US, with branches around the world, including Australia.

According to Forbes, 21 of the Cargill-MacMillian family members are billionaires.

Yet despite their reach, Frerick says the family aims to keep a low profile.

“[For example] they’re still in Russia, they don’t care about Putin because you don’t know who they are and so you can’t boycott [them],” he says.

“They want to be in every grain production region in the world and they want to shape those markets to their personal benefit.”

Frerick says the other advantage of the family’s anonymity is that “it’s actually really, really hard to find out what they own, how much they own, where they operate”.

And how they operate.

In 2022, the president of the New South Wales Farmers Association, Xavier Martin was critical of the way “multinational middleman” like Cargill treat NSW grain growers.

“There’s a heck of a lot of farmers who’ve had an absolute belting and then find they’ve got a hundred-tonne gorilla … completely mugging them at the market,” Mr Martin said.

The dairy barons: Mike and Sue McCloskey

Select Milk Producers, the sixth largest milk co-operative in America, is owned by Mike and Sue McCloskey.

The couple started their own dairy in California with just 250 cows, but they’ve since moved their operation to New Mexico and Indiana. And now their co-operative is an operation with 35,000 cows.

Beyond dairy farming, Frerick says the pair are also involved in American politics.

“The dairy [barons] were very early supporters of [Trump]; they gave him a massive amount of money,” the author says.

In 2016, following the election of Donald Trump, Mike McCloskey was considered for the role of US secretary of agriculture, but was not appointed to the role.

While their farming operation is based in north-west Indiana, the McCloskeys claim residency at the Ritz-Carlton in Puerto Rico, Frerick says.

The grocery barons: The Waltons family

“They’re the largest company we’ve ever seen in the food system in the history of mankind,” Frerick says.

The Waltons, the owners of Walmart, are unsurprisingly America’s richest family, and Frerick describes them as the “king of kings”.

Frerick says a Walmart supplier once described their relationship to the grocery monolith as “it’s supply and command … they dictate you”.

The berry barons: The Driscolls

It’s easy to find berry brand Driscoll in Australian supermarkets, but the company is headquartered in California.

Brothers J Miles and Garland Reiter founded the company in the late 1800s, and the company now sells one in three berries in the world.

Yet Frerik says: “They don’t grow a single berry.”

He says companies like Driscoll often contract out their production to people in other countries who can engage in labour practices that would not generally be accepted in developed countries.

A 2022 Guardian investigation found that berry farm workers in Portugal appear to have been working illegally long hours picking berries for less than minimum wage.

Some of the berry farms identified in the investigation supply berries to European supermarkets through Driscolls.

Frerick explains the creation of the supermarket baron Walmart led to the offshoot of “parent” barons.

He adds: “That’s how Driscolls became a baron … they realise one company wants four berries for 4,000 stores year round,” he says.

“And so what you see is massive consolidation in the food system.”

The beef barons: The Batista family

The billionaire Brazilian Batista brothers, Joesley and Wesley, own JBS Foods, one of the world’s largest meat processing companies.

This company has been heavily involved in political influence.

In 2020, top executives of the company pleaded guilty to bribing more than 1,900 Brazilian politicians to advance their business interests.

The company was fined yet, as Frerick explains, the brothers “kept their monopoly”.

In Australia, JBS is the country’s largest meat and food processing company, employing more than 14,000 workers across 50 sites.

You might not know the name JBS. But if you buy Primo ham, McDonald’s burgers or meat from Coles, Woolworths or Aldi, you’re likely eating JBS products.

Recently, JBS expanded into fish farming in Tasmania, acquiring Huon Aquaculture, a major salmon producer sold around Australian and exported globally.

Where to from here?

Frerick would like to see the US return to sustainable, independent farming practices because he believes the current food system in America is “truly radical” given the size and scale of these current farming enterprises.

“Honestly, the simplest thing is to put animals back on the land,” he says.

“We have to end this industrial model; it’s better for rural communities, better for the environment [and] it makes better tasting food.”

Agriculture is a major contributor of emissions and as the world deals with a deepening climate crisis, Frerick says the American food system needs to change.

“You have industrial dairy occurring in the West and aquifers that cannot sustain them, that are just awful for the cows and awful for the workers.”

Frerick says it all comes down to political will.

“You just have to break [these companies] up. This isn’t hard,  it’s more about the question of political courage.”

Zombies: Ranks of world’s most debt-hobbled companies are soaring, and not all will survive

NEW YORK (AP) — They are called zombies, companies so laden with debt that they are just stumbling by on the brink of survival, barely able to pay even the interest on their loans and often just a bad business hit away from dying off for good.

An Associated Press analysis found their numbers have soared to nearly 7,000 publicly traded companies around the world — 2,000 in the United States alone — whiplashed by years of piling up cheap debt followed by stubborn inflation that has pushed borrowing costs to decade highs.

And now many of these mostly small and mid-sized walking wounded could soon be facing their day of reckoning, with due dates looming on hundreds of billions of dollars of loans they may not be able to pay back.

“They’re going to get crushed,” Valens Securities Managing Director Robert Spivey said of the weakest zombies.
Added Miami investor Mark Spitznagel, who famously bet against stocks before the last two crashes: “The clock is ticking.”

Zombies are commonly defined as companies that have failed to make enough money from operations in the past three years to pay even the interest on their loans. AP’s analysis found their ranks in raw numbers have jumped over the past decade by a third or more in Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the U.S., including companies that run Carnival Cruise Line, JetBlue Airways, Wayfair, Peloton, Italy’s Telecom Italia and British soccer giant Manchester United.

An Associated Press analysis found the number of publicly-traded “zombie” companies — those so laden with debt they’re struggling to pay even the interest on their loans — has soared to nearly 7,000 around the world, including 2,000 in the United States.
Takeaways from AP analysis on the rise of world’s debt-laden ‘zombie’ companies
FILE – Trader Michael Milano, center, works with colleagues on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on May 30, 2024. World stocks are mixed on Friday, June 7, 2024, after a steady day on Wall Street as markets anticipate key U.S. jobs data to be revealed later in the day.

To be sure, the number of companies, in general, has increased over the past decade, making comparisons difficult, but even limiting the analysis to companies that existed a decade ago, zombies have jumped nearly 30%.

They include utilities, food producers, tech companies, owners of hospitals and nursing home chains whose weak finances hobbled their responses in the pandemic, and real estate firms struggling with half-empty office buildings in the heart of major cities.
As the number of zombies has grown, so too has the potential damage if they are forced to file for bankruptcy or close their doors permanently. Companies in the AP’s analysis employ at least 130 million people in a dozen countries.

Already, the number of U.S. companies going bankrupt has hit a 14-year high, a surge expected in a recession, not an expansion. Corporate bankruptcies have also recently hit highs of nearly a decade or more in Canada, the U.K., France and Spain.

Some experts say zombies may be able to avoid layoffs, selloffs of business units or collapse if central banks cut interest rates, which the European Central Bank began doing this week, though scattered defaults and bankruptcies could still drag on the economy. Others think the pandemic inflated the ranks of zombies and the impact is temporary.

“Revenue went down, or didn’t grow as much as projected, but that doesn’t mean they are all about to go bust,” said Martin Fridson, CEO of research firm FridsonVision High Yield Strategy.

For its part, Wall Street isn’t panicking. Investors have been buying stock of some zombies and their “junk bonds,” loans rating agencies deem most at risk of default. While that may help zombies raise cash in the short term, investors pouring money into these securities and pushing up their prices could eventually face heavy losses.

“We have people gambling in the public markets at an unprecedented level,” said David Trainer, head of New Constructs, an investment research group that tracks the cash drain on zombies. “They don’t see risk.”
WARNING SIGNS

Credit rating agencies and economists warned about the dangers of companies piling on debt for years as interest rates fell but got a big push when central banks around the world cut benchmark rates to near zero in the 2009 financial crisis and then again in the 2020-21 pandemic.

It was a giant, unprecedented experiment designed to spark a borrowing binge that would help avert a worldwide depression. It also created what some economists saw as a credit bubble that spread far beyond zombies, with low rates that also enticed heavy borrowing by governments, consumers and bigger, healthier companies.

The difference for many zombies is they lack deep cash reserves, and the interest they pay on many of their loans is variable, not fixed, so higher rates are hurting them right now. Most dangerously, zombie debt was often not used to expand, hire or invest in technology, but on buying back their own stock.

These so-called repurchases allow companies to “retire” shares, or take them off the market, a way to make up for new shares often created to boost the pay and retention packages for CEOs and other top executives.

But too many stock buybacks can drain cash from a business, which is what happened at Bed Bath & Beyond. The retail chain that once operated 1,500 stores struggled for years with a troubled transition to digital sales and other problems, but its heavy borrowing and decision to spend $7 billion in a decade on buybacks played a key role in its downfall.

Those buybacks came amid big paydays for top management, which Bed Bath & Beyond said in regulatory filings were intended to align with financial performance. Pay for just three top executives topped $140 million, according to executive data firm Equilar, even as its stock sunk from $80 to zero. Tens of thousands of workers in all 50 states lost their jobs as the chain spiraled to its bankruptcy filing last year.

Companies had a chance to cut their debt after then-President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul slashed corporate rates and allowed repatriation of profits overseas. But most of the windfall was spent on buybacks instead. Over the next two years, U.S. companies spent a record $1.3 trillion repurchasing and retiring their own stock, a 50% jump from the prior two years.

SmileDirectClub went from spending a little over $1 million a year on buying its own stock before the tax cut to spending $780 million as it boosted pay packages of top executives. One former CEO got $20 million in just four years. Stock in the heavily indebted teeth-straightening company plunged before it went out of business last year and put 2,700 people out of work.

“I was like, ‘How did this ever happen?’” said George Pettigrew, who held a tech job at the company’s Nashville, Tennessee, headquarters. ”I was shocked at the amount of the debt.”

Another zombie, JetBlue, suffered problems felt by many airlines, including the lingering impact of lost business during the pandemic. But it also was hurt by the decision to double its debt in the past decade and purchase hundreds of millions of dollars of its own stock. As interest costs soared and profits evaporated, that stock has dropped by two-thirds, and JetBlue has not made enough in pre-tax earnings to pay $717 million in interest over four straight years.

JetBlue said the AP’s way of screening for zombies isn’t accurate for airlines because big purchases of aircraft “are an intrinsic part of the business model” and don’t reflect an airline’s true health. The company added that it’s been shoring up its finances recently by cutting costs and putting off purchases of new planes. JetBlue also hasn’t done a major stock buyback in four years.

In some cases, borrowed cash has gone straight into the pockets of controlling shareholders and wealthy family owners.

In Britain, the Glazer family that owns much of the Premier League’s Manchester United soccer franchise loaded up the company with debt in 2005, then got the team to borrow hundreds of millions a few years later. At the same time, the family had the team pay dividends to shareholders, including $165 million to the Glazers themselves, while its stadium, the Old Trafford, fell into disrepair.

“They’ve papered over the cracks but we’ve been in decline for more than a decade,” fan lobbying group head Chris Rumfitt said after a recent downpour sent water cascading from the upper stands in what spectators dubbed “Trafford Falls.” “There have been zero investments in infrastructure.”

The Glazers, who separately own the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, recently brought in a new part owner at Manchester United who has promised to inject $300 million into the business. The stock is falling anyway, down 20% so far this year to $16.25, no higher than it was a decade ago.

Manchester United declined to comment.

Zombie collapses wouldn’t be so scary if robust spending by governments, consumers and larger, more stable companies could act as a cushion. But they also piled up debt.

The U.S. government is expected to spend $870 billion this year on interest on its debt alone, up a third in a year and more than it spends on defense. In South Korea, consumers are tapped out as credit card and other household debt hit fresh records. In the U.K., homeowners are missing payments on their mortgages at a rate not seen in years.

A real concern among investors is that too many zombies could collapse at the same time because central banks kept them on life support with low interest rates for years instead of allowing failures to sprinkle out over time, similar to the way allowing small forest fires to burn dry brush helps prevent an inferno.

“They’ve created a tinderbox,” said Spitznagel, founder of Universa Investments. “Any wildfire now threatens the entire ecosystem.”
TIME RUNNING OUT?

For the first few months of this year, hundreds of zombies refinanced their loans as lenders opened their wallets in anticipation that the Federal Reserve would start cutting in March. That new money helped stocks of more than 1,000 zombies in AP’s analysis rise 20% or more in the past six months across the dozen countries.

But many did not or could not refinance, and time is running out.

Through the summer and into September, when many investors now expect the first and only Fed cut this year, zombies will have to pay off $1.1 trillion of loans, according to AP’s analysis, two-thirds of the total due by the end of the year.

For its calculations, the AP used pre-tax, pre-interest earnings of publicly-traded companies from the database FactSet for both years it studied, 2023 and 2013. The countries selected were the biggest by gross domestic product: the U.S., China, Japan, India, Germany, the U.K., France, Canada, South Korea, Spain, Italy and Australia.

The study did not take into account cash in the bank that a company could use to pay its bills or assets it could sell to raise money. The results would also vary if other years were used due to economic conditions and interest rate policies. Still, studies by both the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements, an organization for central banks in Switzerland, generally support AP’s findings that zombies have risen sharply.

Most of the publicly traded companies in the countries studied — 80% of 34,000 total — are not zombies. These healthier companies tend to be bigger with more cash, and many have reinvested it in higher-yielding bonds and other assets to make up for the higher interest payments now. Many also took advantage of pandemic-era low rates to refinance, pushing out repayment due dates into the future.

But the debt hasn’t gone away, and could become a problem for these companies as well if rates don’t fall over the next few years. In 2026, $586 billion in debt is coming due for the companies in the S&P 1500.

“They aren’t on anyone’s radar yet, but they are a hurricane. They could be a Category 4 or Category 5 if interest rates don’t go down,” Valens Securities’ Spivey said. “They’re going to lay people off. They’re going to have to cut costs.”

Some zombies aren’t waiting.

Telecom Italia struck a deal last year to sell its landline network but debt fears continue to push down its stock, so it has moved to put its subsea telecom unit and cell tower business up for sale, too.

Radio giant iHeartMedia, after exiting bankruptcy five years ago with less debt, is still struggling to pay what it owes by unloading real estate and radio towers. Its stock has fallen from $16.50 to $1.10 in five years.

Exercise company Peloton Interactive has laid off hundreds of workers to help pay debt that has more than quadrupled to $2.3 billion in just five years even though its pretax earnings before the new borrowing weren’t enough to pay interest. Stock that had soared to more than $170 a share during the pandemic recently closed at $3.74.

“If rates stay at this level in the near future, we’re going to see more bankruptcies,” said George Cipolloni, a fund manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management. “At some point the money comes due and they’re not going to have it. It’s game over.”
___

Local officials in New York have filed a lawsuit against Bark Air, an airline geared to dogs, alleging it violates airport usage restrictions in Westchester County.

The suit alleges that the private terminal at Westchester Airport from which Bark operates its charter flights limits companies to selling seats on aircraft with nine or fewer seats. Larger aircraft must operate out of the airport’s commercial terminal.

Bark indicates on its website that it conveys caninines on Gulfstream G5s, which accommodate 12 to 16 passengers. Bark notes that its planes are designed to fit 15 dogs along with their human companions, but that it never sells more than 10 tickets.

Westchester filed the suit against Bark and Talon Air, the private charter company that Bark contracted to operate its service.

Bark, the maker of BarkBox toy and treat subscriptions for pets, announced its flight service in April. It indicated it would initially operate routes between Westchester County and the Los Angeles area as well as internationally to London.

A Bark spokesperson said the company doesn’t comment on litigation, but added that “we don’t believe this will impact our operations.”

Westchester County attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bark Air’s sold-out maiden voyage departed New York for Los Angeles on May 23. Tickets cost $6,000 for one dog plus a human. Its website indicates that more flights, some of which are sold out, are scheduled to take off later this month.

Swift not only has lore, she embarks on her multi-platform art knowingly, laying a trail of Easter eggs and numerological puzzles. She is also, of course, beyond interview, a “post-media” celebrity who does not have much use for middle-people. But in a rare 2023 exchange with Time magazine (when she was named person of the year) she discussed her emotive and canny album re-recording campaign to gain control of her masters – Taylor’s Versions – being like a mythical quest. “I’m collecting horcruxes,” Swift said, eyebrow only slightly raised. “I’m collecting infinity stones. Gandalf’s voice is in my head every time I put out a new one. For me, it is a movie now.”

In this universe, from news stories about her latest Swiftonomics milestone, to fan theories shared and dissected at light-speed, to university courses and symposia, the mass of Swift exegesis is weighty. This is, yes, yet another op-ed to toss on to a vast pile, but still it remains worth examining the phenomenon of a singer-songwriter who has become far, far more than just that. Swift’s fans cheer so loudly they twice registered as an earthquake on the Richter scale in the US last year. Donald Trump allies have threatened to wage “holy war” against Swift if she endorses Joe Biden for the US presidency. “Biggest gangsta in the music game right now,” Drake recently called her.

Drake considers Swift his only real competition but really, it’s not even close. A number-soup of statistics, of umpteen records broken and most-streamed this, or online reach that, supports Swift’s dominance. Her Eras tour looks set to be the highest-grossing of all time, tilting the financial tectonics of entire cities: Barclays has estimated that her shows here might be worth £1bn to the UK economy. The Swift lift is real: she has made American football, that most popular US sport, even more popular. Her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, plays for the Kansas City Chiefs; it’s been calculated that Swift has generated an additional $331.5m for the NFL between 24 September last year and 22 January this year.

The Swift lift could be political too. “I can’t comment on what Taylor Swift is saying, or not saying,” said a White House spokesperson in March, on whether Swift will endorse Biden this year; hilarious, if the context weren’t so charged. The star did endorse him in 2020 and Swift is, apparently, sky-high on Biden’s team’s wishlist. (She may be reticent to endorse a figure known to Palestinian supporters as “Genocide Joe”.) Fox News, meanwhile, has called Swift “a Pentagon psyop asset” and Trump allies have warned her to stay out of politics. What’s extraordinary is that everyone believes that she can swing the election.

What’s even more remarkable is how Swift manages to be a significant geopolitical and macroeconomic disrupter, while simultaneously cultivating an insightful, sensitive relatability. She is “your billionaire best friend”, according to Georgia Carroll, who spoke at the recent Australian Swiftposium; a star who made her money on the back of her songwriting (not by diversifying her portfolio into drinks, makeup or NFTs) and by leveraging the obsessiveness of her fans to consume multiple formats of her output. “My Pennies Made Your Crown” completes the keynote speech’s title (it’s a Taylor Swift lyric); Carroll’s thesis examined what expenditure does to cultural capital within the fan community.

Swift has been likened to a capitalist role model thanks to endless limited edition releases and merch drops, and her indefatigable work ethic: she has released five studio albums in the past five years, alongside four complete Taylor’s Version re-recordings. (Recently, Billie Eilish called out as “wasteful” unnamed other pop stars releasing multiple colours of the same vinyl record; Eilish’s vinyl is recycled.)

With discussion of Swift’s work and life powering several server farms’ worth of internet fan activity, it becomes harder to get your head around this epically unprecedented state of affairs. If the Kansas City Chiefs are not really in Kansas any more, Toto, then neither are the rest of us.

Swift’s exceptionalism, though, is well founded on both talent and tactics, and in the singular journey she has had through the past couple of high-churn decades. Ironically, given she dominates our age, Swift is actually a profoundly old-fashioned artist who would have made a great Broadway librettist. Unlike a lot of modern pop, her songs tell a story, in succinct, emotive ways that often scan meticulously, a legacy of her country beginnings. But Daddy I Love Him, off The Tortured Poets Department, is a vexed love story complete with meddling onlookers that may have nodded to Swift’s troubled relationship with the 1975’s Matty Healy. She quotes The Little Mermaid, wrongfoots expectations – “I’m having his baby/No I’m not, but you should see your faces” – and nonchalantly tosses off the line “all the wine moms are still holding out/But fuck ’em”.

When we’re repeatedly told that the value of recorded music has never been lower and that it is consumed largely as snippets on TikTok, Swift releases double albums that are events themselves; her body of work is studied as a whole. In a time where people engage with highly individualised content on their phones, Swift’s releases, gigs and pronouncements provide mass moments as stans, lighter-touch fans and onlookers race to digest her latest output, or decode a cryptic post.

But Swift is also profoundly of this era, where fame has significantly altered – especially for female pop artists. It has become more intense, bloodthirsty and fickle. The leftfield singer-songwriter and musician Ethel Cain, in a recent interview with the Guardian, suggested that fans nowadays treat female pop artists “like fantasy football teams”, arguing “about streams and stats and followers and almost using them like Pokémon to fight each other”. Swift knows a little about that.

Her current level of adulation has been hard won; back in 2016, the hashtag #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty trended, after a series of dramas, conflicts and PR nadirs where the Taylor avatar took a drubbing. That all seems very long ago now; you might quip that Swift’s narrative arc has been long, but it has bent towards justice, and – crucial to her ubiquity now – that justice has coded female.

Swift saw off a groping male DJ in court in 2017. A convoluted and ugly multi-part saga involving Kanye West and his former wife, Kim Kardashian, has ended with Swift vindicated, and with Ye losing big brand endorsements after a series of antisemitic statements.

Swift also creatively faced down the controversial pop manager Scooter Braun, who bought the masters of her back catalogue out from under her when he acquired her old label. (He has since sold the label and the masters; Braun’s other crime was being a Ye ally). Many of Braun’s premier clients – Justin Bieber, Demi Lovato and Ariana Grande – are now working with others.

Stars are, to some extent, two-dimensional characters; they are projections. But stars are also mirrors, reflecting back at us what we want – or need – to see. And what Swift’s many fans see is a woman whose songwriting reflects their concerns. She writes about the anticipation and disappointments of romantic love, privileging the intensity of the female experience but also all aspects of her complex story. There is, perhaps, a yawning unmet need now for an avenging angel such as Swift in the wake of the overturn of Roe v Wade – Swift speedily tweeted her “absolutely terrified” reaction – and the anti-choice legislation under way in various states.

But if Swift’s saga skews female, her feminism does have shortcomings: it’s been criticised for its paleness, despite some timely social media action at the time of #BlackLivesMatter, her embrace of Juneteenth and her friendship with Beyoncé. In the Q&A after her opening address to the recent Melbourne Swiftposium, senior Rolling Stone writer Brittany Spanos, a Black Swiftie, expressed some personal discomfort; that Swift had ground to make up.

There is, categorically, more that Swift could do on many fronts. Since her outburst in the Miss Americana documentary (2020), in which she argued with her father and other managers about supporting Democratic candidates in a local Tennessee election in 2018, her public commitments to social justice seem to have dropped off somewhat.

But key to her dominance is her own story: Swift has been cancelled, and risen, phoenix-like; surviving physical, legal and financial assaults. She proves the creeps are beatable, which is news we can use. More than just some idealised gracious Athene, Swift has access to reserves of Boudicca and Joan of Arc. It’s all been a postmodern hero’s quest, with a woman at its heart.

All entertainment is, inherently, distraction from more important things; circuses have traditionally come a close second to bread in the hierarchy of needs to avoid a descent into anarchy. But we need them. A tremendous multi-ring, multi-level circus is coming to town, and Swift is its vindicated ringmaster.

3 Reasons There’s Something Sinister With the Big Push for Electric Vehicles

25 refrigerators.

That’s how much the additional electricity consumption per household would be if the average US home adopted electric vehicles (EVs).

Congressman Thomas Massie—an electrical engineer—revealed this information while discussing with Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, President Biden’s plan to have 50% of cars sold in the US be electric by 2030.

The current and future grid in most places will not be able to support each home running 25 refrigerators—not even close. Just look at California, where the grid is already buckling under the existing load.

Massie claims, correctly, in my view, that the notion of widespread adoption of electric vehicles anytime soon is a dangerous fantasy based on political science, not sound engineering.

Nonetheless, governments, the media, academia, large corporations, and celebrities tout an imminent “transition” to EVs as if it’s preordained from above.

It’s not.

They’re trying to manufacture your consent for a scam of almost unimaginable proportions.

Below are three reasons why something sinister is going on with the big push for EVs.

But first, a necessary clarification.

You no doubt have heard of the term “fossil fuels” before.

When the average person hears “fossil fuels,” they think of a dirty technology that belongs in the 1800s. Many believe they are burning dead dinosaurs to power their cars.

They also think “fossil fuels” will destroy the planet within a decade and run out soon—despite the fact that, after water, oil is the second most abundant liquid on this planet.

None of these ridiculous notions are true, but many people believe them. Using propaganda terms like “fossil fuels” plays a large role.

Orwell was correct when he said that corrupting the language can corrupt people’s thoughts.

I suggest expunging “fossil fuels” from your vocabulary in favor of hydrocarbons—a much better and more precise word.

A hydrocarbon is a molecule made up of carbon and hydrogen atoms. These molecules are the building blocks of many different substances, including energy sources like coal, oil, and gas. These energy sources have been the backbone of the global economy for decades, providing power for industries, transportation, and homes.

Now, on to the three reasons EVs are a giant scam at best and possibly something much worse.

Reason #1: EVs Are Not Green

The central premise for EVs is they help to save the planet from carbon because they use electricity instead of gas.

It’s astounding so few think to ask, what generates the electricity that powers EVs?

Hydrocarbons generate over 60% of the electricity in the US. That means there’s an excellent chance that oil, coal, or gas is behind the electricity charging an EV.

It’s important to emphasize carbon is an essential element for life on this planet. It’s what humans exhale and what plants need to survive.

After decades of propaganda, Malthusian hysterics have created a twisted perception in many people’s minds that carbon is a dangerous substance that must be reduced to save the planet.

Let’s entertain this bogus premise momentarily and assume carbon is bad.

Even by this logic, EVs do not really reduce carbon emissions; they just rearrange them.

Further, extracting and processing the exotic materials needed to make EVs requires tremendous power in remote locations, which only hydrocarbons can provide.

Additionally, EVs require an enormous amount of rare elements and metals—like lithium and cobalt—that companies mine in conditions that couldn’t remotely be considered friendly to the environment.

Analysts estimate that each EV requires around one kilogram of rare earth elements. Extracting and processing these rare elements produces a massive amount of toxic waste. That’s why it mainly occurs in China, which doesn’t care much about environmental concerns.

In short, the notion that EVs are green is laughable.

It’s simply the thin patina of propaganda that governments need as a pretext to justify the astronomical taxpayer subsidies for EVs.

Reason #2: EVs Can’t Compete Without Government Support

For many years, governments have heavily subsidized EVs through rebates, sales tax exemptions, loans, grants, tax credits, and other means.

According to the Wall Street Journal, US taxpayers will subsidize EVs by at least $393 billion in the coming years—more than the GDP of Hong Kong.

To put that in perspective, if you earned $1 a second 24/7/365—about $31 million per year—it would take you over 12,677 YEARS to make $393 billion.

And that’s not even considering the immense subsidies and government support that have occurred in the past.

Furthermore, governments impose burdensome regulations and taxes on gasoline vehicles to make EVs seem relatively more attractive.

Even with this enormous government support, EVs can barely compete with gasoline vehicles.

According to J.D. Power, a consumer research firm, the average EV still costs at least 21% more than the average gasoline vehicle.

Without government support, it’s not hard to see how the market for EVs would evaporate as they would become unaffordable for the vast majority of people.

In other words, the EV market is a giant mirage artificially propped up by extensive government intervention.

It begs the question, why are governments going all out to push an obviously uneconomic scam?

While they are undoubtedly corrupt thieves and simply stupid, something more nefarious could also be at play.

Reason #3: EVs Are About Controlling You

EVs are spying machines.

They collect an unimaginable amount of data on you, which governments can access easily.

Analysts estimate that cars generate about 25 gigabytes of data every hour.

Seeing how governments could integrate EVs into a larger high-tech control grid doesn’t take much imagination. The potential for busybodies—or worse—to abuse such a system is obvious.

Consider this.

The last thing any government wants is an incident like what happened with the Canadian truckers rebelling against vaccine mandates.

Had the Canadian truckers’ vehicles been EVs, the government would have been able to stamp out the resistance much easier.

Here’s the bottom line.

The people really in charge do not want the average person to have genuine freedom of movement or access to independent power sources.

They want to know everything, keep you dependent, and have the ability to control everything, just like how a farmer would with his cattle. They think of you in similar terms.

That’s why gasoline vehicles have to go and why they are trying to herd us into EVs.

Conclusion

To summarize, EVs are not green, cannot compete with gas cars without enormous government support, and are probably a crucial piece of the emerging high-tech control grid.

The solution is simple: eliminate all government subsidies and support and let EVs compete on their own merits in a totally free market.

But that’s unlikely to happen.

Instead, it’s only prudent to expect them to push EVs harder and harder.

If EVs were simply government-subsidized status symbols for wealthy liberals who want to virtue signal how they think they’re saving the planet, that would be bad enough.

But chances are, the big push for EVs represents something much worse.

Along with 15-minute cities, carbon credits, CBDCs, digital IDs, phasing out hydrocarbons and meat, vaccine passports, an ESG social credit system, and the war on farmers, EVs are likely an integral part of the Great Reset—the dystopian future the global elite has envisioned for mankind.

In reality, the so-called Great Reset is a high-tech form of feudalism.

Sadly, most of humanity has no idea what is coming.

Worse, many have become unwitting foot soldiers for this agenda because they have been gaslighted into believing they are saving the planet or acting for the greater good.

This trend is already in motion… and the coming weeks will be pivotal.

Detroit killed the sedan. We may all live to regret it

GM ending production of the Chevy Malibu is the latest sign that the Big Three are done with sedans.  That dummy of a CEO, Mary Barra, overpaid and a financial moron, put another brand in the toilet.But consumers may not flock to expensive SUVs in response.

[Photos: Chevrolet, Getty Images]

The hotel’s owner, Vinay Patel, has noticed this interaction waning.

“People are now literally not wanting to go to the front desk,” he says. “They’ll check in online on the phone similar to the airlines and go straight to [the] room.”

Technology has long been transforming hotels, and the pandemic accelerated that change.

It’s Tuesday, and for this hotel, that used to mean a crush of business travelers. Instead, Patel has been welcoming a new type of guest: here not just for business or leisure, but a combination of both. “Bleisure” is a hot new term in hospitality, the product of remote-work culture.

All this is part of a big post-pandemic reset for the American hotel: It’s shaken up travel habits, erased jobs and put the industry on a circuitous path to recovery.

Getting by with fewer workers

Today almost 200,000 fewer people work in hotels and other lodging than before the pandemic, federal data shows. That’s a 9% drop. Lower employment often implies an industry in trouble — but hotels may actually never need as many workers as they once did.

When travel cratered in 2020, hotels were wiped out and over a million workers lost jobs. Housekeepers, front desk agents, maintenance staff went into construction, food, retail. Those who stayed trained to do new tasks. Hotels that offered extra services, like lunches, scaled them back.

Over time, guests learned to skip daily room cleanings for COVID precautions. Breakfasts got more self-served and automated, with waffles and pancakes tumbling out of machines. And in the long run, operating with fewer workers saves companies money.

“You know, like it or not … the pandemic has kind of taught us a lot,” says Patel, who owns 11 hotels around Virginia. “We’ve become a lot more efficient.”

Less business, more “bleisure”

Vacationers surged back to hotels with “revenge travel,” but foreign tourists and corporate travelers are still not back in force.

“That’s the biggest impact,” says Miraj Patel, the chair of the Asian American Hotel Owners Association, whose members own the majority of U.S. hotels, and Vinay Patel’s nephew. “The full recovery is still not there.”

The “bleisure” travelers make up for some of the losses, says Vinay Patel. They come for meetings, and stay longer to visit the Virginia wineries. And at the Hampton, six miles from the airport, that’s upended the ebb and flow.

Before the pandemic, “you do not mess with Tuesday-Wednesday,” Patel recalls. “Business travelers come down on Tuesday-Wednesday.”

And these days? “It’s spread out a lot more,” he says.

Questions about the industry’s future

Major hotel chains, like Hilton and Marriott, have seen their stock price resurge to record highs this year. That’s partly because luxury hotels have fared much better than the rest.

People stayed more often at upscale brands and less in economy lodging in early 2024 versus 2023, says Jan Freitag, who tracks hospitality analytics at the real estate data firm CoStar.

Overall hotel occupancy neared 64% in March compared to 68% in 2019, CoStar found. That suggests near-recovery from pandemic collapse, though the lag does obscure millions of rooms that got built, opened and not filled.

“We have more rooms available now, and we are selling fewer rooms than we did,” says Freitag.

Price-wise, the average cost has jumped to $155 per room from $129 in 2019, Freitag says. That’s a 20% increase. At the same time, overall U.S. inflation added up to almost 23% over those years. So hotel owners list plenty of higher costs, too: taxes, wages, insurance, coffee, cups, linens, detergent.

Add in high interest rates, plus banks being stingier with loans, and a new concern hovers overs the industry’s future: Fewer people have been buying and building new hotels.

That includes Vinay Patel in Virginia, who keeps delaying construction on a lot where he originally planned to break ground when the pandemic began.

“I just can’t make the numbers work right now,” he says. “I have to wait another year to two years.”

“I’ve seen my share of boiled frogs,” says Sterling Cooper’s CEO, comparing companies in crisis with the metaphorical frog that doesn’t notice the water it’s in is warming up until it’s too late.

As the chief restructuring officer for turnaround situations over nearly four decades, he has witnessed firsthand how managers back right into a crisis without recognizing that their situation is worsening. “They’re not bad managers, but they’re often working under a set of paradigms that no longer apply and letting the power of inertia carry them along.” And if they don’t realize they’re facing a crisis, they won’t know that they need to undertake a turnaround, either.

He’s also heard the regrets: sometimes managers underestimated how critical their situation was—or they were looking at the wrong data. Others took advantage of easy access to cheap capital to stay the course in spite of poor performance, believing they could push through it. Still others got so caught up in the pressure for short-term returns that they neglected to ensure their company’s long-term health—or even willfully sacrificed it.

Rare among them is the executive who stepped back to review his or her own plans objectively, asking “Is this what I thought would happen when I first started going down this road?” That’s a problem,  because acknowledging that your plan isn’t working is a necessary first step.

Here, are some suggestions of ten-ways ailing companies can get started on the turnaround work they need.

1. Throw away your perceptions of a company in distress

It’s next to impossible to come up with one working definition of a company in distress—and dangerous to think that you have one for your own company. Depending on the situation, there are probably many different signs of potential distress. The problem is seldom made up of just one or two of these things, however. Rather, it is the result of a greater number of them interacting together and with other external factors.

There are numerous signs of distress—and a distressed company is typically dealing with multiple signs.

Criticize your own plan

The biggest thing you can do to avoid distress is periodically review your business plans. When you’re creating them, whether at the beginning of the year or the start of a three-year cycle, build in some trigger points. A simple explicit reminder can be enough: “If we don’t have this type of performance by this date or we haven’t gotten the following 12 things done by this date, we’ll step back and decide if we’re going down the right path, given what’s happened since our last review.”

Such trigger points should be oriented both to operational and market performance as well as to basic financial metrics and cash flow. Look at where you are as a company using basic financial and cash milestones, and then look at where you are with respect to your industry and competitors. If you’re not moving with the rest of the industry (or not outpacing it, if the industry is struggling), then your plan may be obsolete. And don’t forget to look back at your performance over past cycles to identify any trends. If you keep missing performance targets, ask why.

3. Expect more from your board

The beauty of a board is that it has enough distance from the company to see the forest for the trees. Managers often treat their board as a necessary evil to placate so they can get on with their business, but that undermines the board’s role as an early-warning system when a company is heading for distress.

It’s also the board’s responsibility to look the CEO, the CFO, and the chief operating officer (COO) in the eye and say, “OK, we like your plan. Now let’s talk about what it would take to cut costs not just by 3 percent but by 20. Let’s talk about all the things that can go wrong—the risks to the business.” Sometimes significant events happen that no one could have foreseen, of course.

But. in a typical distress situation, a company has usually just had 18 to 24 months of poor performance, and the board hasn’t been aware or hasn’t asked the right questions. Independent board members—truly independent ones—can have a big impact here.

The senior team at one company maintains a list of risks to the business, employees, and the plan. They review those risks with the board on a quarterly basis to ensure that they’re staying top of mind. It’s an excellent way to have conversations that you wouldn’t normally otherwise have in a business operation.

4. Focus on cash

A successful turnaround really comes down to one thing, which is a focus on cash and cash returns. That means bringing a business back to its basic element of success. Is it generating cash or burning it? And, even more specifically, which investments in the business are generating or burning cash?

I like to think about this in the same way one would if running a local hardware store. By that, I mean asking fundamental questions, such as whether there is enough cash in the register to pay the utility bill, for example, or to pay for the pallet of house paint that will arrive next week, or how much more cash I can make by investing in a new delivery truck. When you bring a business back to those basic elements, the actions you need to take to get back on track become pretty clear.

In many of the cases I have seen, the management team and board are focused on complex metrics related to earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) and return on investment that exclude major uses of cash. For example, variations on EBIT commonly exclude depreciation and amortization but also exclude things like rents or fuel. These are all fine metrics, but nasty surprises await when no one is focused on cash.

Keeping track of cash isn’t just about watching your bank balance. To avoid surprises, companies also need a good forecast that keeps a midterm and longer view. For example, failing to pay attention to the cash component of capital investments routinely gets companies in trouble.

Projecting net present values can look the same whether the return begins gradually at year two or jumps up dramatically at year five. But if you’re not focusing on the cash that goes out the door while you’re waiting for that year-five infusion, you can suddenly find yourself with very little cash left to run the business, sending you into a spiral you may not recover from.

5. Create a great change story

Companies in distress don’t focus enough on creating a change story that everyone understands—and that creates some sense of urgency.

Here’s an example. I recently did a turnaround as chief restructuring officer of a mining company. It was profitable, returned a decent margin, and was cash positive. But the commodity price was dropping, and the board was worried about generating enough free cash flow to drive the capital needs of the business. The change story we created said, “Yes, we are profitable. But the whole point of profitability is to generate enough cash to expand, grow, and maintain operations. If we can’t do that, then we’re headed for a long, slow decline where equipment breaks down and lower production becomes the new reality.”

If you can tell that story in a paragraph or less, in a way that means something to the average guy on the front line, then people will get on board. In this case, employees wanted to have their children and their grandchildren work for this company in the same remote mining location, and the change story spurred them to action. The key was a simple message, not fancy metrics.

6. Treat every turnaround like a crisis

Without a crisis mind-set, you get a stable company’s response to change: risk is to be avoided, and incrementalism takes over. Your workers are asked to do a little more (or the same) with less. More aggressive ideas will be analyzed ad nauseam, and the implementation will be slow and methodical.

In contrast, a crisis demands significant action, now, which is what a distressed company needs. Managers need to use words like crisis and urgency from the first moment they recognize the need for a turnaround. A company that’s in true crisis will be willing to try some things that it normally wouldn’t consider, and it’s those bold actions that change the trajectory of the company. Crisis drives people to action and opens managers up to consider a full range of options. Consider cash bonuses for positive results based on a successful plan executed.

7. Build traction for change with quick wins

The tendency of most managers is to put all of their focus and resources into three or four big bets to turn a company around. That can be a high-risk approach. Even if big bets are sometimes necessary, they take a lot of time and effort—and they don’t always pay off.

For example, say you decide to change suppliers of raw materials so you can source from a low-cost country, expecting 30 percent lower direct costs. If you realize six months later that the material specifications don’t meet your needs, you’ll have spent time you don’t have, perhaps interrupted your whole production schedule, and probably burned a bunch of cash on something that didn’t pay off.

In addition to going after big bets, managers should focus on getting a series of quick wins to gain traction within the organization. Such quick wins can be cost focused, cutting off demand for some external service they don’t need. Or it could be policy focused, such as introducing a more stringent policy on travel expense.

Not only do such moves improve the bottom line, they also generate support among employees. In any given company, you’re likely to find that a fifth of employees across the organization are almost always supportive. They work hard. And they will change what they’re doing if you just ask them.

These are the people you’ll want to spend most of your time with, and they’re the ones you’ll promote—but you’ll probably spend too much time with the bottom fifth of employees. These are the underachieving ones who actively resist change, look for ways to avoid it, or are simply high maintenance.

What often gets ignored is the remaining 60 percent of the organization. These are the fence-sitters, and they are tuned into action, not just talk. They see the changes going on, and if you proactively work with them, then 80 percent of the organization will be behind you. But if you don’t give them a reason to stand up and be positive about the company, they’ll go negative.

That’s the importance of quick wins. When you quickly take real action, and when those actions affect the management team as well, you send a powerful message.

8. Throw out your old incentive plans

Management incentives are often the most overlooked tool in a turnaround. In stable companies, short-term incentive plans can be a complex assortment of goals related to safety, financial and operational performance, and personal development. Many are so complex that when you ask managers what they need to do to earn their bonus, many just shrug their shoulders and say, “Someone will tell me at the end of the year.”

In a turnaround, take a lesson from the private-equity industry and throw out your old plans. Instead, offer managers incentives tied specifically to what you want them to do. Do you need $10 million of improvement from pricing? Then make it a big part of your sales staff’s incentive plan. Need $150 million from procurement? Give your chief purchasing officer a meet-or-beat target. Be willing to forgo bonus payments for those that don’t achieve 100 percent of their target—and to pay out handsomely for those whose results are beyond expectations.

9. Replace a top-team member—or two

Experience tells me that most successful turnarounds involve changing out one or two top-team members. This isn’t about “bad” managers. In my 40 years of doing this, I’ve only seen a small handful of managers I thought were truly incompetent. But, it’s a practical reality that there are managers who must own the decline.

And more often than not, they are incapable of the shift in mind-set needed to make fundamental changes to the operating philosophy they’ve believed in for years. Whether they realize it or not, they block that change because they’re bent on defending what they believe to be true. Although it’s difficult, removing those people sends another signal to your stakeholders that there will be changes and you’re not afraid to make tough moves.

10. Find and retain talented people

Beyond the leadership team, there are two types of people I look for immediately. First are those that have the institutional knowledge. They may not be your top performers, but they know all the ins and outs of the company—and are vital to understanding the impact of potential changes on the business. Many times they are the disgruntled ones, unhappy with the company’s performance. But you need people who are willing to point out the uncomfortable truths.

A turnaround is also a real opportunity to find the next level of talent in an organization. I’ve been through multiple crises where the people who added the most value and impact weren’t the ones sitting around the table at the beginning. I have often found great leaders two and three levels down who are just waiting for an opportunity—and the fact that they can be part of something bigger than themselves, saving a company, is often enough to attract and retain them.

For both groups, it’s important to realize that retention isn’t always about money and bonuses. It’s also about figuring out the individual’s needs. Good turnaround managers actively look for those people and find a way to get them involved.

Consider hiring the turnaround consultants at WWW.STERLINGCOOPER.INFO