RealRickRule

Congratulations to Mayor Mamdani. He inherited a huge budget deficit, brought it down to zero, and still invested in childcare, housing and city infrastructure. When municipal governments stand with working families, not billionaires, there is nothing they cannot accomplish.

The single largest form of theft in America is wage theft. $50 billion a year are stolen from American workers. If a billionaire amasses their wealth by underpaying their full-time workers so severely that they must rely on food assistance and government programs to survive, then no, that wealth was not earned by one individual - it was a wealth transfer subsidized by underpaid American workers and the public who get stuck with the bill for large corporations free-riding off our systems. The point is less about individual morality. It’s more about how our current economic reality of shattering inequality rewards screwing over workers and exploiting essential systems at scale. We’re talking monopoly power. Rent-seeking. Wage theft. Profiteering. Stock buybacks. Destabilizing housing markets. Companies using SNAP/EBT to underwrite their wages. Massive government subsidies or contracts to corporations following lobbying and dark money in politics with little to no oversight or accountability. Some people get enraged that I draw attention to this. That’s on them. Let them call me shrill, dumb, inexperienced, girly, uneducated - these folks will say anything to distract from or undercut the truth that working people are getting screwed, and giving people a fair shake means we must have a grown conversation about reigning in abuse of power.

Agree or disagree???

Not a single purchaser of crude oil in the world asks nor cares about the carbon footprint of the barrel, instead is 100% focused on accessibility, affordability, and reliability. I do not see how we overcome this massive misunderstanding which underpins all ongoing negotiations.

Canada has what the world wants.

AOC says no one can earn $1 billion honestly. She says Billionaires build their wealth from exploitation and abusing workers. Do you Agree or Disagree?

Peter Lynch: "People are very careful — they spend hours to get $50 off an airplane flight. They look at everything. And [then] they'll put $10,000 in some crazy stock they heard about on the bus."

Ken Griffin says he's scaling down in NYC: "What the mayor of New York has made clear to us, is that we need to double down on Miami."

Interesting commentary from Friday's Exxon earnings call on both current oil prices and how they think things will settle out at when Strait reopens: “So I think it’s obvious to most that if you look at the unprecedented disruption and the world’s supply of oil and natural gas, the market hasn’t seen the full impact of that yet. And you only have to look at the ranges that oil prices have moved at, which are very consistent with the last 10 years versus historically unprecedented disruption. So there’s more to come if the Strait remains closed.” “Why haven’t we seen those impacts manifest themselves fully in the market yet? Well, I think we all know there was a lot of oil in transit on the water, a lot of inventory on the water that has been deployed in the first month of the conflict. Strategic petroleum reserves have been released. Commercial inventories have been drawn down. And so we’ve seen that play itself off and mitigate the impact as we move through March and then here through April.” “As you get to kind of minimum working levels of inventory on the commercial side, you’re going to lose one of these sources of supply. And so we anticipate as that happens and the Strait remains closed, that we will continue to see increased prices in the marketplace.” “Once the Strait opens back up again, it’ll take some time for, frankly, to get back to a stable flow rate that was consistent with what we’ve historically seen. Ships got to reposition themselves. We’ve got to work through the backlog. Then there’s obviously the transit time to get the product to market. And so we’re thinking there’s going to be a one to two month time lag between the Strait opening up and the market seeing normal flow.” “And then depending on how long this goes and how far strategic petroleum reserves are drawn, how low commercial inventories go, there will be a period of time where players, markets, governments, countries try to refill and replenish those inventories. And so that’s going to bring an additional level of demand into the marketplace, which we think is going to put upward pressure on prices. I would also anticipate that many countries around the world will look at if they don’t have strategic petroleum reserves, start thinking about whether they need those. That may bring some additional demand into the marketplace.” Something I’ve been arguing. “And then obviously people are going to reassess their energy security and how they ensure that going forward that they don’t have the same exposure that many of them have realized here in the short term.”

Nobody wants any of this Data Center stuff…

Oil prices today: $105.25 a barrel Gas prices today: $4.46 a gallon Oil prices in March 2011: $105.06 a barrel Gas prices in March 2011: $3.51 a gallon Big Oil is using the Iran War to rip off Americans at the gas pump. Let’s end the Iran War & pass a windfall profits tax-NOW.