Tag Archives: deals

A Recently Bankrupt Coal Company Is Being Honored at Mar-a Lago

by HermanHallock Posted on March 22, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort will host the opening reception Wednesday evening for a conference where a recently bankrupt coal company will be a guest of honor. The annual Distressed Investing Summit will bestow one of its “Restructuring Deal of the Year” awards to Arch Coal for clearing $5 billion in debt after it filed for bankruptcy in 2016.

“They emerged from bankruptcy in 2016 after shedding huge amount of debt, obligations to workers, and environmental cleanup,” Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal director Mary Anne Hitt says. “When a company is in bankruptcy, you don’t have a lot of leverage in there with all the lawyers and stakeholders. To have them feted at Mar-a-Lago as a turnaround is salt in the wound for workers and people representing the public interest.”

The summit, hosted by financial company The M&A Advisor, has held its opening cocktail reception at Mar-a-Lago for the past two years, ever since Trump emerged as a serious contender for president. In its invitation email, M&A Advisor names Arch Coal as one of its winners alongside a number of other firms, including energy companies Alpha Natural Resources, Midstates Petroleum Company, and Venoco, an oil and gas development company.

Here’s how the invitation describes Mar-a-Lago, “the new Winter White House”:

The agenda for roundtables that are held at a nearby hotel reads like a laundry list of Trump’s campaign themes: “Making America Great Again,” “Informing and Silencing The Media,” and the “Art of Dealmaking: Getting Deals Done In The New Economic Order.”

Not everyone agrees that Arch Coal’s 2016 bankruptcy deal warrants celebration. During the bankruptcy proceedings, environmental opposition forced the company to abandon its proposal that taxpayers should foot the entire bill to clean up its abandoned mines. The company also laid off hundreds of its miners that same year.

In the years before bankruptcy, United Mine Workers of America complained that Arch Coal moved 40 percent of its employees’ health care coverage to Patriot Coal, a volatile offshoot company. When Patriot went under, those health benefits were at risk and continue to be because of Arch Coal’s bankruptcy. Patriot and Arch Coal are only two examples of a larger problem. The union shop has been pressing Congress for a long-term solution for 22,000 miners’ benefits in jeopardy because of coal bankruptcies—an issue that won’t go away no matter what happens to federal environmental regulations.

The idea that the coal industry can recover is a cherished narrative for Trump. Earlier this week, at a campaign-style rally in Kentucky, the president claimed that he will “save our coal industry” and put miners back to work with executive orders that are expected any day. Trump likes to blame “terrible job-killing” regulations, but there are other pressures beyond federal regulation driving coal out of business, namely competitive natural gas.

Nonetheless, on Wednesday evening, a coal turnaround will be celebrated. Even though it might only be, as the Sierra Club’s Hitt notes, “one of many of the alternative facts they like to celebrate at Mar-a-Lago.”

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A Recently Bankrupt Coal Company Is Being Honored at Mar-a Lago

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Wayne Barrett Exposed The Real Trump. Now There’s Only One Way To Honor Him.

by ShastaTRQqlvqx Posted on January 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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He must have been exhausted. We have all been exhausted, watching America shout down common sense and set ablaze the last few defensible vestiges of circa-1787 political and economic philosophy. But as much as it all weighed on many of us, he carried extra baggage. He had literally written the book on Donald J. Trump’s bent psyche and business. He had forgotten more dirt on Trump than reporters of my generation ever dug up.

But Wayne Barrett, longtime Village Voice investigative political reporter and mentor to hundreds of journalists, wasn’t tired. He wanted to work, man; and work he did, even as he was driven away to the hospital for the last time, dying there at 71 late Thursday. Wayne needed all the time allotted to him, because America needed him.

When it became clear a year ago that Trump actually might ascend to lead the nation’s oldest political party, Wayne’s 1992 investigative biography, Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, got a reprint—and an instant audience among other journalists. Based on digging Wayne had done since the ‘70s, it’s the keel on which a great deal of the best Trump reporting was built.

Trump was only one of the big whales Wayne hunted, though. He wrote two books on Rudy Giuliani, scorching his largely bogus 9/11 heroism, along with his relationship-wrecking and influence-peddling. In 37 years at the Voice, and recently in other fair corners of the internet, Wayne put the screws to Ed Koch, Al D’Amato, Mike Bloomberg, and multiple Cuomos.

Over the past 18 months, Wayne fielded a steady stream of calls and emails. Reporters asked for help with a distant mob name, a defunct company, a disgruntled counterparty. “I got some stuff on it in the basement,” he told me on the phone last year when I ran a very specific bit of ‘80s Trump trivia past him. “Come on up and dig.”

Lots of reporters took him up on similar offers, a steady queue of them making the pilgrimage to the Brooklyn house he shared with his wife, Fran, to chitchat and sift boxes on boxes of notes and clippings downstairs. He was there for all of us, even if it the scheduling occasionally had to be done by one of his research interns.

Ah, the interns. Wayne maintained an army of them to dig through databases, cajole sources, connect dots, and frequently co-author pieces with him. Like the paper’s size, the Voice’s office space shrank over the years, and six of us at a time might pile into Wayne’s cube for a quick confab. I once tried to spread out into the mostly empty next-door cubicle, which worked fine for a week until Nat Hentoff ambled in and cussed me out for a good three minutes, yelling to have his goddamn desk back.

The interns of Barrett Nation. You know them, even if you don’t realize it. They shape Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Politico, ABC News, every major New York paper, and certainly this magazine, as my former colleague Gavin Aronsen and I have written. We are not all journalists now, and those of us in the profession aren’t all investigative reporters—one of my cohort is a book reviewer of some note and another is a fast-paced entertainment reporter, but goddamn, if you are hiding dirt, they will find it.

I loved Wayne, even when he was screaming at me, a rite of passage any of his interns can describe. He pursued truth and exposed sin with the zeal of a young Jesuit, which was fitting, since he’d considered taking up the cloth before a debate scholarship sent him to St. Joe’s College in Philly. I’d had a similar upbringing, joining the military instead of the church, debating in school, and seeking an outlet for my inflamed sense of justice.

Wayne had that fire, and lighting up other people was how it manifested sometimes. We were in a serious business. We had to be thorough, accurate, fairâ&#128;&#145;even when we were breaking shit.

But it was all to an end. If Wayne burned for justice, he practiced it, too, singing his protégés’ praises to recruiters, offering a crash weekend at his beach place down the shore in Jersey, taking a sincere interest in his charges’ spouses, children, money and family issues. “He was a family man” is often a hollow note in these kinds of tributes. But family—his and everybody else’s—truly was Wayne’s greatest pleasure, and the reason he couldn’t not needle the greedy who screwed the rest of us.

For more than a year, we watched Republicans slouching toward Trump Tower, saying that yes, seriously, they believed this debauched tycoon with a rambling sales script and an unadulterated id could handle the nukes. We saw Russia tossing gasoline on the fire, beheld our media colleagues collapsing under the weight of takes and think pieces on how maybe facts don’t matter. Now we watch the Queens-bred Caligula begin to rip up the things that make America an idea worth defending. And Wayne’s illness, exacerbated by his all-consuming work, has chosen this moment to take him from us.

We are allowed to be exhausted and dispirited and fearful. This has all really happened, and the ineptitude and malice of the incoming administration will cost lives and livelihoods. But we are not allowed to stop. Wayne wouldn’t let us.

I worked for Wayne when Rudy Giuliani was making his last serious stab at a presidential bid, and we spent a lot of time running down new stories on the candidate. His campaign had looked formidable early on, but hizzoner flamed out spectacularly and retreated into private consulting.

Was it bittersweet, I asked Wayne? His white whale, the subject of years of his life’s work, was finished and never coming back.

Wayne laughed. It was the laugh of a man who wasn’t about to retire from the truth-digging, shit-kicking business, no matter how good or bad it might get. “He’ll come back, man,” he said. “These guys always come back.”

The fun part, Wayne said, was that the good guys came back, too.

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Wayne Barrett Exposed The Real Trump. Now There’s Only One Way To Honor Him.

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The Clinton Foundation Sure Is a Great Charity

by CaseyYZQswynlze Posted on September 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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When it comes to charity, Dylan Matthews is pretty hardnosed. To earn his approval, a charity better focus on truly important problems and be damn good at it. So how about the Clinton Foundation? After starting out as a skeptic, he says, “I’ve come to the conclusion that the Clinton Foundation is a real charitable enterprise that did enormous good.” In particular, he praises the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which helped lower the cost of HIV drugs and saved untold lives. But there’s a catch:

And—perhaps uncomfortably for liberals and conservatives alike — it is exactly the kind of unsavory-seeming glad-handing and melding of business and politics for which Bill and Hillary Clinton have taken years of criticism that led to its greatest success….The deals made required buy-in from developing governments. The person tasked with getting that buy-in was a former US president with existing relationships with many of those people. Bill Clinton essentially used his chumminess with foreign politicians and pharmaceutical executives, the kind of thing about the Clinton Global Initiative that earns suspicious news coverage, to enlist their help in a scheme to expand access to HIV/AIDS drugs.

I don’t get it. Why should this make anyone feel uncomfortable? Lots of people have star power, but very few have star power with both rich people and foreign leaders. Bill Clinton is one of those few, so he chose a project that (a) could save a lot of lives, (b) required buy-in from both rich people and foreign leaders, and (c) was right at the cusp where an extra push could really make a difference.

I can’t even imagine why anyone would consider this unsavory, unless they’ve lived in a cave all their lives and don’t understand that glad-handing and chumminess are essential parts of how human societies operate. Matthews may be right that many people feel uneasy about this, but I can’t figure out why. It sounds like Clinton chose to do something that his particular mix of experience and character traits made him uncommonly good at. That’s pretty smart.

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The Clinton Foundation Sure Is a Great Charity

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Donald Trump Has No Idea What He Said One Day Ago

by MavisFries43 Posted on April 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump has apparently decided that he’s the master of the long-form interview, so he’s been giving a bunch of them lately. But they raise a question: does Trump really think he’s impressing people in these interviews? Today we got our answer: he does indeed. Here he is in his latest Q&A with Robert Costa and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post:

I do say this: My media coverage is not honest. It really isn’t. And I’m not saying that as a person with some kind of a complex. I’m just saying, I will be saying words that are written totally differently from what I’ve said. And I see it all — in all fairness, the editorial board of The Washington Post. I was killed on that. I left the room, I thought it was fine.

Just as a reminder, this is the interview where his comment on racial disparities in law enforcement was “I’ve read where there are and I’ve read where there aren’t.” On Iran: “We should have gone in and said, ‘release our prisoners,’ they would have said ‘no,’ and we would have said, ‘double up the sanctions.'” On his beef with the Ricketts family: “I’ll start doing ads about their baseball team.” On using nukes against ISIS: “I’ll tell you one thing, this is a very good-looking group of people here.” On his hands: “My hands are fine. You know, my hands are normal. Slightly large, actually. In fact, I buy a slightly smaller than large glove, okay?” On how he’d address racial problems: “I actually think I’d be a great cheerleader for the country.” On taking Iraq’s oil: “For that, I would circle it….I would defend the areas with the oil”—apparently not realizing that the oil is spread throughout nearly the entire country.

That interview was a train wreck. Trump’s ignorance and incoherence was on a Charlie Sheen-esque level—except that Trump didn’t have any pharmaceutical help. But he thought everything went fine. Apparently he can’t read a room quite as well as he thinks.

And he’d better be prepared to get treated badly again. Here he is on the national debt:

DT: We’ve got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt.

BW: How long would that take?

DT: I think I could do it fairly quickly, because of the fact the numbers….

BW: What’s fairly quickly?

DT: Well, I would say over a period of eight years. And I’ll tell you why.

BW: Would you ever be open to tax increases as part of that, to solve the problem?

DT: I don’t think I’ll need to. The power is trade. Our deals are so bad.

So…Trump is somehow going to start running a budget surplus of $2 trillion per year without raising taxes. How? Something to do with trade.

Is this even fact checkable? Or is it, in Wolfgang Pauli’s famous words, so nonsensical that it’s “not even wrong”? In any case, I promise Trump that every quote in this post is a direct quotation. Nobody is making him say words that are totally different from what he’s said. Honestly, there’s no need.

However, the fact that he thinks he’s being constantly misquoted really does make you wonder if he’s all there. He seems awfully sincere about this. He really and truly talks in such a stream of consciousness that he doesn’t even realize what he’s said half the time.

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Donald Trump Has No Idea What He Said One Day Ago

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Why Do So Many People Believe Bernie Sanders?

by WilfredPba Posted on January 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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OK, now for the Democrats. It’s really hard to get excited about the state of the race, isn’t it?

The Clinton campaign’s focus on gun control is absurd. Hillary has an NRA grade of F and Bernie gets a D-. That’s what we’re arguing about? For chrissake. How dispiriting can you get?

On health care, Bernie wants single-payer. Me too. And I’ll bet Hillary does as well. She’s just decided that it’s not politically useful to say so. And since neither one of them is going to get it anytime soon, does it really matter much?

The same is true on nearly every other domestic issue. Bernie is off to Hillary’s left—either genuinely or rhetorically—but in office they’d both be constrained to the same place. Neither one could accomplish even what Hillary wants, let alone what Bernie wants.

The one place where they have real differences and those differences might matter is national security. But for reasons of their own, neither of them really wants to talk much about that. Hillary doesn’t want to highlight her relative hawkishness in a Democratic primary, and Bernie doesn’t really want to highlight what his dovishness would mean in practice. Besides, it just gets in the way of the only message he really cares about: plutocracy and income inequality.

Bottom line: given the realities of American politics, they’d both be highly constrained in what they can accomplish in the White House. It doesn’t matter what’s in their hearts. What matters is (a) whether they can win in November and (b) what kind of deals they can broker with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.

Anybody who’s read my blog for a while can guess where I fall on this. I think Bernie has done a great job of pushing Hillary a bit to the left and demonstrating that she can expect continued pressure on that front. But the truth is that Hillary wins on both points A and B. She’s not the most charismatic politician in the world, but as we all like to say, we’re voting for president, not someone to have a beer with. What’s more, I’ve long admired her tenacity; her ability to withstand decades of crude invective and political destruction derby; and her very obvious, lifelong commitment to using politics as a way of improving people’s lives. There have been a million noxious compromises along the way, but that’s how politics works in the real world. Plus I’d love to see a woman in the White House.

I like Bernie. I like what he says. If I believed he could do all the stuff he talks about, he’d have my vote. But I don’t.

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Why Do So Many People Believe Bernie Sanders?

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People want to frack the hell out of this giant piece of tiramisu

by TiffaniFairbridg Posted on November 16, 2015

People want to frack the hell out of this giant piece of tiramisu

By on 16 Nov 2015commentsShare

The word Permian can mean very different things to very different people. To an evolutionary biologist, it might refer to the tail end of an era of the great animal diversification that began with the famous Cambrian explosion about 542 million years ago. To a brooding teenager who’s really into death right now, it might refer to the Permian-Triassic extinction, aka The Great Dying, that wiped out more than 90 percent of marine species and about 70 percent of land species, the most devastating die-off of all time. And to a modern-day oil tycoon, it might just mean dollar signs (and tiramisu).

It should come as no surprise that Texas, where everything is big and tasty, is home to the largest shale field in the U.S. — and one that people liken to tiramisu, because of its delicious oil- and gas-soaked layers of rock.

What is surprising about the Permian Basin, however, is that its production seems to be on the rise, even as other major basins in the U.S. like the Bakken and Eagle Ford are scaling back due to declining oil prices. Here’s Bloomberg with more on this delicious miracle of a basin:

Oil production in the Permian is forecast by the government to rise 0.6 percent in December to 2.02 million barrels a day, even as drillers have idled 59 percent of the rigs there in the past year. Output in rival shale fields like the Bakken and Eagle Ford has fallen 12% and 25%, respectively, as drillers pulled out after oil prices crashed last year.

… The Permian’s multiple layers of oil- and gas-soaked rocks, in some places stacked 5,000 feet thick, contain plenty of places to drill that will yield 30 percent to 40 percent rates of return with crude prices as low as $40 a barrel, Laird Dyer, a Royal Dutch Shell Plc energy analyst, said at a conference in Toronto Nov. 10.

According to Bloomberg, one layer of the basin in particular holds enough oil to keep the entire world supplied for two years. That layer is known as the Spraberry, which one can only assume, in the context of this tiramisu analogy, has some sort of berry flavoring.

And just as with the decadent Italian dessert, people are going apeshit over this chunk of ancient sediment. Exxon bought 48,000 acres of the stuff, Apache Corp. owns one of the largest shares at 3.2 million acres, and Concho Resources Inc. has 700,000 acres, Bloomberg reports.

At an oil conference in Texas last week, the chief commercial officer for Concho, Will Giraud, told a crowd that $50 billion in private-equity capital had already gone into the basin.

“It’s the last oil basin standing,” Giraud said. “It’s still the last place you can put together a material position. It’s the last place you can drill in this environment and make money. It’s the last place where there’s still a tremendous amount of resources to be discovered.”

If they didn’t serve tiramisu at that conference, somebody really dropped the ball. But more importantly, let’s briefly reflect on the many meanings of “Permian.” First, there was the period of prosperity in diversification of life on Earth. Then, there was the extinction so catastrophic that people call it “The Great Dying.” And now, we’re heading into another period of prosperity with this basin full of liquid and gas gold!

So if the pattern holds, that means we’re in for a devastating turn. Will it be The Great Injustice, The Great False Promise, or The Great Rumbling?

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Photographer: Brittany Sowacke/Bloomberg Oil Producers Hungry for Deals Drool Over West Texas `Tiramisu’

, Bloomberg.

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People want to frack the hell out of this giant piece of tiramisu

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Here’s Why Bank of America’s $17 Billion Settlement Probably Won’t Cost It That Much

by AngelinaLavater Posted on August 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, the Justice Department announced a record $17 billion settlement with Bank of America over accusations that the bank—as well as companies it later bought—intentionally misled investors who purchased financial products backed by toxic subprime mortgages. It’s the largest settlement the US government has reached with any company in history, and it is roughly equal to the bank’s total profits over the past three years. But as is the case with similar settlements involving Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America probably won’t end up paying that much.

Potential tax deductions and tricky accounting techniques in deals like this often hide the real cost to banks. The Associated Press explains:

Bank of America will pay $9.65 billion in cash and provide consumer relief valued at $7 billion…Whether cash payments are structured as penalties or legal settlements can determine whether targeted companies can declare them as tax-deductible business expenses. Also, consumer relief is an amorphous cost category: If Bank of America’s deal resembles the department’s previous settlements with JPMorgan and Citigroup, that part could be less costly to the company than the huge figures suggest.

…Much of the relief will come from modifying loans that the banks have already concluded could not be recovered in full. Reducing the principal on troubled loans often just brings the amount that borrowers owe in line with what the banks already know the loan to be worth.

Settlement math also affects the actual cost of the deals, allowing banks to earn a multiple for each dollar spent on certain forms of relief. Under Citi’s deal, for example, each dollar spent on legal aid counselors is worth $2 in credits, and paper losses on some affordable housing project loans can be credited at as much as four times their actual value.

Banks generally regard the consumer relief portion of settlements as “stuff they’re doing anyway,” banking analyst Moshe Orenbuch told the AP.

The Bank of America settlement resolves more than two dozen investigations by prosecutors around the country.

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Here’s Why Bank of America’s $17 Billion Settlement Probably Won’t Cost It That Much

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Quote of the Day: FCC Chair Pretends to Change Course on Net Neutrality

by TerranceTimperl Posted on May 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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From an anonymous FCC official:

There is a wide feeling on the eighth floor that this is a debacle and I think people would like to see a change of course. We may not agree on the course, but we agree the road we’re on is to disaster.

The debacle in question is the proposal by FCC chair Tom Wheeler that would gut net neutrality by allowing big companies to pay ISPs for faster internet service. Wheeler’s proposal has provoked a massive backlash, and he’s now promising revisions:

The new language by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to be circulated as early as Monday is an attempt to address criticism of his proposal….In the new draft, Mr. Wheeler is sticking to the same basic approach but will include language that would make clear that the FCC will scrutinize the deals to make sure that the broadband providers don’t unfairly put nonpaying companies’ content at a disadvantage, according to an agency official.

….An agency official said the draft would also seek comment on whether such agreements, called “paid prioritization,” should be banned outright, and look to prohibit the big broadband companies, such as Comcast Corp. and AT&T Inc., from doing deals with some content companies on terms that they aren’t offering to others.

Mr. Wheeler’s language will also invite comments on whether broadband Internet service should be considered a public utility, which would subject it to greater regulation. The FCC has so far not reclassified broadband as a utility, and providers have fiercely opposed such a move, saying it would cause innovation and investment to collapse.

Color me unimpressed. A promise that the FCC will “scrutinize” deals is basically worthless, and inviting comments on reclassifying broadband internet service will lead nowhere if Wheeler himself doesn’t support it—which he doesn’t. This looks mostly like smoke and mirrors to me.

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Quote of the Day: FCC Chair Pretends to Change Course on Net Neutrality

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