Mammon category archive

They get the cool, clean water.

Via Atrios.

Warning: Language.

There’s no substitute for it.

Public functions should be handled by public entities.

Public entities may from time to time perform in a less than optimal manner, but so too do private ones. Any one who thinks private companies don’t make mistakes and waste money has never worked for a private company.

When private companies screw up, though, it is seldom news unless someone dies, maybe lots of someones, and maybe not even then, because it’s a “proprietary situation” being “dealt with internally” by “application of improved processes and controls.”

When private companies screw up and make a profit from it, though, that’s a whole nother thing. That is “privatization,” which is a good thing because someone’s country club membership is being paid by private profit made from screwing the public up a public function.

Pfui.

Empty gestures.

From Santa Claus, meet Santa Crass.

Addendum, Later That Same Day:

The Mall caved.

Uber uber alles.

When you watch all those commercials for prescription medicines–the ones that tend to cluster in the early evening and instruct you to “ask your doctor about . . . “–do you ever ask why, a six months later, you start seeing commercials for law firms saying, “Did you ever use . . . ; call us now!“?

There are allegations that city officials in a resort city somewhere on the east coast might just possibly have shown favoritism to their pet real estate developer.

Oh, the shock.

Oh, the horror.

Richmond must be under the influence (emphasis added).

Richmond will sell bonds next week to build a brewery for Escondido, Calif.-based Stone Brewing Co., the ninth-largest U.S. craft-beermaker, on property that’s been vacant for four decades. Stone will pay the 218,000-person city to lease the facility and won’t be on the hook to repay investors. Taxpayers will.

American businesspersons may talk about creativity, initiative, and individual effort, but what they really care about is free stuff from the government, that is, from you and me.

There’s no escape.

Nearly all states require Realtors representing sellers to disclose legitimately scary material facts to buying agents and their clients that could cause them to reconsider, such as a cracked foundation, a leaking roof or toxic mold or the federally-required disclosure of lead paint. But don’t bother trying to get out of your contract if you discover there was a murder, or a suicide, or even a violent crime committed in the home after you bought it — it’s a dead end.

In July 2014, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a murder-suicide that occurred in a Thornton, Penn. home in February 2006 wasn’t a material defect when a seller who bought the home at an auction, remodeled it and sold it to a buyer in 2007 — without disclosing the crime that occurred inside.

“Purely psychological stigmas are not material defects of property that sellers must disclose to buyers,” the court said.