Patrick Connors

Under Bernie’s 5% billionaire wealth tax, Jamie Dimon would owe $135 million in taxes, he’d still have $2.57 billion in wealth & every senior would get dental, vision & hearing benefits. Seems pretty fair for the CEO of a bank fined $27B for fraud & $290M for the Epstein scandal.

One of the main things that led me astray and away from the Church as a teenager was the hypocrisy of people who called themselves Christians but supported clear moral evils, such as the Iraq War. This is like if Dick Cheney published a book about his conversion story in 2003.

@sostalksmoney The ratio 🤣. Adam is dumber than a box of rocks

I DEBATED THE MOST UNFUNNY UNPATRIOTIC “COMIC” IN AMERICA “Dave Smith”

In February, Iran offered Trump unlimited inspections (beyond Obama deal w/sunsets), down-blending its enriched uranium stockpile & U.S. corporations to run Iran's nuclear energy. Israel launched this war to prevent a permanent peace deal. The most insane war in modern history.

Private equity firms bought 500 hospitals. Death rates in their emergency rooms went up 13%. They fired 12% of the staff. Then they paid themselves billions in dividends. A Harvard study just confirmed what doctors already knew: people are dying so investors can hit quarterly targets. Exactly what happens. A PE firm buys a hospital using debt. The debt gets placed on the hospital's balance sheet, not the firm's. Now the hospital owes hundreds of millions it never borrowed. To service that debt, the hospital cuts costs. Costs mean nurses. The numbers from the Harvard/University of Chicago study are horrifying. After PE acquisition, emergency department salary spending dropped 18.2%. ICU salary spending dropped 15.9%. Hospital-wide employees were cut 11.6%. Emergency department deaths rose 13%, seven additional deaths per 10,000 visits. A separate study found patients undergoing surgery at PE-acquired hospitals had 17% higher odds of dying within 90 days. Steward Health Care, owned by Cerberus Capital, filed bankruptcy with $9 billion in debt after closing hospitals across Massachusetts. The CEO lived on a $40 million yacht while emergency rooms went dark. Eight hospitals serving 2 million people nearly disappeared because a PE fund extracted more cash than the system could survive. The private equity industry has poured over $1 trillion into healthcare. They operate a quarter of ERs nationwide. This isn't going away. The investing angle nobody talks about. Non-PE hospital operators like HCA Healthcare (HCA) and Tenet (THC) are the direct beneficiaries. Every time a PE hospital closes or deteriorates, patients flow to the nearest competitor. HCA has returned 1,200% since 2011. Patient volume from PE closures is a structural tailwind nobody's pricing in. Medical staffing firms (AMN Healthcare, Cross Country) charge premium rates specifically because PE hospitals cut staff. The staffing shortage IS the business model for these companies. The disruption play: outpatient surgical centers (SCA Health, now part of UnitedHealth) are pulling profitable procedures out of hospitals entirely. PE-owned hospitals lose their highest-margin surgeries to outpatient, and the death spiral accelerates. Pull up tradevision and monitor healthcare M&A alerts, hospital closure filings, and patient volume migration data. When a PE-owned hospital announces "restructuring," the patient volume shift to competitors like HCA starts within 30 days. That 30-day window is when the competitor's earnings revisions haven't updated yet. Free to try. (a private equity firm bought your local hospital. borrowed $500 million in the hospital's name. fired 12% of the nurses. emergency room deaths rose 13%. then they paid themselves dividends. nobody went to prison. they're currently buying another hospital.)

Two Ticketmaster execs chatting privately: "Robbing them blind baby" "That's how we do it." Trump gave this company a pardon. assets.bwbx.io/documents/user…

US: “It was a preemptive attack on Iran” Pentagon: “No sign that Iran was going to attack first” US: “No but if Israel attacked Iran, then Iran would have attacked us, so we preemptively attacked them first” 🤡 This is beyond satire.

the only bigger farce than this is the idea that Dems are an opposition party, while its leadership has been quietly hoping and praying for this

Vote the pro-peace ticket. Vote Trump-Vance 🇺🇸

If, after all this, America goes into the 2028 election and doesn’t break the two party system by voting in an independent, then there’s no way out

The propensity for the left to stab at the eyes of others on the left with virtually identical but slightly diff views while they are utterly powerless and on the verge of potential annihilation is incredible, never fails to repeat. Would be very funny if things weren’t so dark.

The same people who demanded a crackdown on student protest — got Deans fired, defunded schools, whipped up the DOJ to reshape entire institutions to stop kids from protesting — now want students protesting again. (This is beside the point that the students were protesting their universities’ direct complicity in Israeli genocide. Universities have zero links with Iran so what would the protest demand be?)

Trump wants taxpayers to feed another half a trillion dollars into the agency which has never passed an audit and can’t track 60% of its assets. What happened to concerns about fraud? What about Elon and the chainsaw and the performative deficit concerns? Palantir will feast while you pay for your groceries with Klarna.

We're back in the business of bringing freedom and democracy to the world's oppressed peoples! 🇺🇸 Yes, the people of Ohio and Pennsylvania or whatever they are have problems. Blah blah blah. Boring. We'll get to them after we "fix" Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.

RT @davidsirota: Romney made his fortune off the carried interest tax loophole that lets Wall Street moguls avoid regular taxes. He never…

“Unless, that is, we decide to install you as the new leader of Syria.”

So the CIA sponsored Venezuelan opposition is planning to sabotage infrastructure and their US spokesmen are preemptively blaming Maduro

On Fox: Zohran Mamdani -- a standard young professional pro-LGBT NYC leftist with a campaign filled with Jews -- is a "jihadist" who wants sharia law. But long-time AQ leader al-Jolani -- I mean, Ahmad al-Sharaa -- is an honored statesman with a few youthful indiscretions.

Since 1975, when the top marginal tax rate was reduced from 70% to 37%, $79 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, according to that bastion of socialism the RAND Corporation. Trickle down economics is a total scam.

Everyone on the left wants to see this monster taken down. Also weird flex when your side is now the ones covering up for Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. Release the Epstein files and let every single politician and billionaire pedophile be jailed