moe tkacik
@moetkacik
Followers
14,293
Following
2,949
Media
1,221
Statuses
14,605
investigations editor @TheProspect senior fellow @econliberties maureent at
Brookland, Washington
Joined March 2009
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
Vance
• 2609932 Tweets
Walz
• 2271521 Tweets
Wizkid
• 160457 Tweets
महात्मा गांधी
• 116979 Tweets
गांधी जयंती
• 108336 Tweets
लाल बहादुर शास्त्री
• 98482 Tweets
#GandhiJayanti
• 97756 Tweets
からくりサーカス
• 80296 Tweets
ケンタッキー
• 69265 Tweets
ニンテンドーミュージアム
• 53003 Tweets
リネット
• 45482 Tweets
宮崎空港
• 33494 Tweets
#BIFF2024xBILLKIN
• 28240 Tweets
#YUTA_OffTheMask
• 27908 Tweets
原神コラボ
• 25407 Tweets
青木選手
• 19414 Tweets
青木の引退試合
• 15923 Tweets
OFF THE MASK COMING SOON
• 15428 Tweets
フォーエバーヤング
• 10446 Tweets
Pinned Tweet
on the occasion of Diddy's long-awaited racketeering & sex sadism arrest, perhaps you found yourself contemplating how all the pop icons of the Clinton/Bush cultural landscape seem to be the products and/or arbiters of sprawling child sex abuse networks...
15
374
1K
So, the origin of the baby formula pocalypse was Abbott management's refusal to repair dilapidated and failure-prone drying machines turning the plant into proverbial petri dishes for cronobacter, because...
They needed that $5.73 billion for stock buybacks, obvs
317
11K
29K
Would Boeing murder a whistleblower? Before this month I'd have said it depends. I didn't think Boeing would kill a middle manager who never worked on the 737 Max & left in 2017.
What surprised me was how many more informed observers felt Boeing...might
107
3K
18K
Parallels with the Boeing murders are too numerous to list but as u can imagine
-Total breakdown in basic quality control protocols
-Rampant record falsification
-Fired whistleblowers
-Culture of insouciance re duping regulators who
-did not exactly display a sense of urgency
25
997
5K
The other big Boeing parallel is, 2 companies control 80% of market for absolutely essential product.
But! Airplanes have like 1.6 million parts so, yeah, not so many companies can do that.
With baby formula, the only excuse for that degree of concentration is Mafia shit.
15
626
4K
You systematically falsified records you kept on virtually every aspect of formula QA, stopped testing batches when samples came back + for micros, engaged in a massive coverup when FDA came & refused to repair machinery known to be hastening bacteria growth for nearly 10 years
The facts, however, are critical: A comprehensive investigation by Abbott, FDA and CDC found no evidence that our formulas caused infant illnesses. Specifically... [2/11]
121
609
2K
15
716
4K
Still wrapping my mind around the news that supermarket behemoths Albertsons & Kroger are planning to merge. If this deal goes through we should all just go Amish.
A thread about how private equity made:
-food deserts
-food hyperinflation
-$$$$
41
1K
4K
"I don't think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys," said a longtime exec.
He told me to open Maps & find the airport 180 miles east of the 737 factory where Boeing stores "finished" jets that are too fucked to deliver. "The engines alone are worth billions."
12
449
3K
btw, the source of most of this info is Food Safety News, an awesome resource that appears to have been following this story for years
10
797
3K
3 days ago this man performed a 🔥 guitar solo at a deserted strip mall to draw attention to the atrocities committed by an outfit called Western Dental. He got FOUR MILLION views, because even the algorithm believes private equity in health care is bad.
18
668
3K
Might as well also bring up this classy move: laying off 2,000 assembly plant workers with a couple day's notice last summer when demand for their rapid test kits diminished.
A spokesman promised workers would get paid out for the remainder of the..week.
7
456
3K
The dead/assassinated(?) Boeing whistleblower's amended complaint just dropped. In a 2014 performance review, Swampy's bosses explained that his problem was that he was overly "knowledgeable." The man literally knew too much
14
787
3K
holy shit: a childhood friend of dead Boeing whistleblower Swampy Barnett said he told her straight up: "If anything happens to me, it's not suicide."
44
835
3K
So no shit: building airplanes is complicated. I feel dirty even tweeting about it, it's so complex. But Boeing's problem is not: it's the same jargon-infatuated dumbshit MBAs that ru(i)n everything else in this country, like former CEO Jim McNerney, who paid himself $250 million
6
281
3K
This shocks even me: Rite Aid just clawed back already-paid severance payments from the bank accounts of thousands of laid-off workers, literally the same day Bloomberg reported its CEO is slated to receive $20 MILLION when the co emerges from Chap 11.
44
1K
3K
Killer Mike just told Skip Bayless he should "listen to old speeches by Eugene Debs"
23
193
2K
Is this a generation gap, he is so fucking dead to me he is more dead than Joe Biden
47
79
2K
Since y'all are going there anyway, Boeing's lead criminal attorney *does* happen to be the former deputy AG who was the highest official to explicitly sign off on Epstein's insane 2008 plea deal
12
526
2K
Newsflash: experience is undervalued. A Boeing mgr actually proved this in a 67-page 1997 analysis of unprofitable programs. As it turned out, the ability of a workforce to move efficiently enough to profitably build planes was almost entirely a product of the worker seniority
6
199
2K
On Boeing, which held a board of directors meeting in 2019 after the first Max crash & instead of grounding the plane, authorized something like $20 billion in new buybacks. Spoiler alert, 146 more people died
4
331
2K
In 2017 J Crew's PE owners transferred its "intellectual property" -- logos, designs -- to a Cayman Islands LLC & licensed it back to the parent leaving it with billions of $ in gratuitous debt but actually it went bankrupt today bc some NYT writer wanted to type "netherland"
18
474
2K
Airlines won't accept the 737s until Boeing fixes their problems. As the dead whistleblower's lawsuit explains, jets coming off Boeing assembly lines have a lot
Bosses pressured workers to push 787s out with 100s of dangerous defects even after the FAA grounded 787s in 2013
5
176
2K
And HCA, which did more than $8 billion in buybacks last year but is now raising prices 15% to fund "nurse pay" lololololol
-HCA lobbying to raise prices 15% "to offset nurse pay"
-HCA employs 81,000 nurses
-HCA spent $8.1 billion on stock buybacks in 2021
3
93
235
20
367
2K
official AIPAC talking points include: "Reports that people are starving in Gaza are false."
and to believe otherwise is to "fall into Hamas' trap."
1K
828
2K
Like most vain, narcissistic MBAs, McNerney could not stand people who didn't pretend to not be smarter than him. He set about purging them all, on grounds of either being "assholes" or because he believed "experience" was "overvalued."
6
138
2K
After the 737 Max crashes, the FAA realized Swampy's 787 plant in South Carolina was perhaps even more dysfunctional than Renton. Boeing halted deliveries in 2020 for nearly 2 years after a QA found approx 40 gazillion flaws. Aviation Week heroically mapped the most significant:
8
155
2K
Maybe you've heard Sysco
@Teamsters
are on strike in 3 cities. But unless you work in a commercial kitchen, you probably don't know what Sysco even is, or why so many chefs & small restaurants are *rooting* for the strikers.
13
564
2K
I'm sure the insatiable Hellfire caused by this Ohio freight train derailment had nothing to do with the sadistic understaffing policies funding Norfolk Southern's $10 billion stock buyback program
Prayers for this East Palestine, Ohio and all the 1st responders, battling this massive fire caused by a train derailment in the late hours of Friday night.
6
52
147
9
319
2K
But Boeing didn't listen. Instead Boeing moved its 787 plant to South Carolina, where they hired fast food workers to build 787s & there were no experienced aerospace workers whatsoever to challenge bosses like the one who told Swampy that "knowledge" was holding him back.
3
157
2K
this was not at all depressing to write
40
415
1K
This is a story about how the rich get richer. It ate months of my life, because rich folks don't return my calls. The original headline was "Eat, Pray, Spend"
28
223
1K
Most of my tweets about restaurants are total misery porn, sorry. But did you know pizza is totally KILLING it right now? Because kids dictate literally everything in life these days.
58
108
1K
@BobPfalzgraf
I called FBI criminal profiler James Fitzgerald. "If the goal was to stop him from testifying, it sounds like they failed. But sometimes the goal is to send a message to anyone else who might be thinking of doing what he did." He wanted to see the note
2
68
1K
so nice to hear that Barack Obama found "Empire of Pain" a worthy beach read, now can someone ask why he put Purdue Pharma attorneys in charge of both the Justice Department AND the SEC
11
156
1K
I talked to forensic pathologist
@BobPfalzgraf
about Swampy's mysterious "suicide." He sympathized with Swampy and his coroner, saying medical examiners are under tremendous pressure not to rule police custody deaths "homicides" & outsource suicide cases to pathology assistants
2
71
1K
The numbers tell the story of a company that has done everything it can to alienate loyal veterans. The avg 737 worker has been there 5 years. The % of workers with 5 years or less has doubled. 100s of long-timers with an average 23 years at Boeing retired early in 2022.
2
91
1K
at any rate, if you want to know what happens when the guy who used to run the (improbably not defunct) nielsen television ratings company gets appointed to run the company that builds fucking airplanes, the wholly predictable (except for the possible assassintion part) story is
14
78
1K
Aaaand, the guy every single respectable media outlet has nominated to replace Boeing's current CEO sociopath David Calhoun is...
Larry Culp, a Harvard Business School alumnus who currently helms fucking GE! Because the kind of inimitable genius required to "sell off assets &
14
81
1K
Swampy's coworkers don't seem to think so. He was "high on life", one pointed out.
Another to whom I spoke on the phone for several hours repeatedly told me they weren't suicidal, and that Swampy was not the first "outspoken" Boeing employee to die mysteriously in recent years
1
82
982
"I would hope the police are interviewing [Swampy's former boss] right now," added
@BobPfalzgraf
As
@matthewstoller
pointed out here, if there's one thing we've learned about Boeing, it's that it "does not deserve the benefit of the doubt"
2
83
975
Tim Walz's biggest donor in 2006 was Al Franken. He raised like 450K and scared the incumbent so much they sent GWB himself to Minnesota to come raise $ for him.
Key to remember Howard Dean recruited more winning candidates than DCCC in 2006, and nearly all Rahm's lost in 2010
Rahm Emanuel on Tim Walz in 2006
"No, he has no money, no nothing."
136
711
11K
4
148
935
This is the Friar Professional Building of Van Nuys, headquarters of no fewer than 161 of Los Angeles's 1,841 licensed hospice agencies.
Last year Medicare sent roughly $23 billion to entities like these, ostensibly to care for terminally ill seniors.
18
300
890
Earlier this month an Illinois physician learned her ER as getting a new boss. He called himself "Doctor George." And he was *deeply* unhappy with her failure to do Medicare fraud.
A thread on the chaotic collapse of a(nother) private equity ER operator
30
304
851
An earth shattering thing just happened: a law enforcement official successfully stopped a gang of private equity goons from looting $4 billion out of a supermarket chain
I'd never heard of anything like this in late capitalism so I had to write it down
10
262
835
You already know a company called RealPage orchestrated a vast 15-year conspiracy to eternally inflate American rents.
But it gets worse:
14
301
796
This month a busy hospital shut down in Texas
Pondered the National Review:
If Health Care Is So Expensive, Why Do Hospitals Close?
The explanation,
@nro
warned, was "not sexy"
TLDR—it's poor people. How sick they all are, etc
But what if the problem is actually..rich people?🧵
16
198
742
I wrote 8K words on Boeing's Self Hijacking Planes. Spoiler alert: I don't end up blaming dead pilots for crashing them.
26
286
718
Here's how the Western Dental business model works
-reel in lower income parents at daycare/preschool w/ the promise of free care
-tell them kids' teeth are fucked
-fill their little mouths w crowns
-bill Medicaid
A perfect crime, bc the evidence falls out with the baby teeth
7
125
679
I cannot tell you why there's a tampon shortage.
But last year Procter & Gamble
-controlled 50% of the US tampon market
-generated $17.8 billion operating profit
-spent $13.5B on stock buybacks
-spent $8.4B on dividends
-ran out of cash before they paid the cotton guy?
13
197
680
This is a deep dive on Signature, the "other" bank failure of March 2023. Barney Frank & the WSJ editorial board have called it an "Execution"
Appropriately, Signature's origins date back to an assassination.
The year was 1999, dateline Monte Carlo
17
208
630
On the "suicide" of Swampy Barnett, whose attorney of 7 years & family insist he was NOT suicidal
10
199
606
@girlziplocked
@maddestscience
Omg this. And higher education was way cheaper (but still unthinkably, implausibly expensive) when I went in the late 90s. My parents weren't working class, they just had us young & didn't have money to pay for college & I had to work at Starbucks (30 hrs/ week) to pay rent &
7
17
555
This is the story of a corrupt judge in Texas who conspired with his girlfriend, Kirkland & Ellis, and its 450 private equity firm clients to make Houston the Global Capital of Legalized Stealing, and the very weird math teacher who ended his career
10
143
543
Since getting Covid I've had frequent bouts of what feels like "worst hangover of all time."
Last month a neurologist told me he'd learned at an "NIH panel" that "Long Covid is psychological."
Somehow, NIH spent $1.2 billion arriving at this conclusion.
26
134
529
BREAKING: GOP Senator Cassidy announces the HELP committee is asking the committee to authorize holding gazillionaire hospital looter Ralph de la Torre IN CRIMINAL CONTEMPT OF CONGRESS
13
149
519
Some context: as we know from yesterday's CPI # the gap between the 13% inflation inflicted by grocery stores vs 8.5% imposed by restaurants is a staggering 4.5 points.
That is 100% because restuarants are a competitive business, and supermarkets are a depraved racket
1
92
486
Because of all that, even if you hunt down the "real murderer" of these particular kids, it's immaterial. Deaths got someone at FDA to do their job, when they finally inspected they determined plant was unsafe, & now infants are going hungry because u control the market
4
37
445
Good afternoon music fans! In honor of all the chumps over 40 camping out in online Hell to score concert tickets today, a thread on all the times your (least?) favorite musician crossed paths with the omnipotent empire known as Ticketmaster/Live Nation.
11
206
447
Jack Welch is dead, but his legacy of exterminating American manufacturing out of spite toward workers lives on all around us
8
116
405
Kroger fwiw
-has done $4 billion stock buybacks since Covid started
-closed 5 CA supermarkets solely to get out of paying $4-5 an hour "hero pay" bonus
-just narrowly avoided a strike in OH by conceding to raise cashier wages $1
-is somehow substantially LESS evil than Albertsons
1
82
397
Albertsons
-is a heaping pile of junk debt
-controlled by a cabal of private equity firms
-chiefly Cerberus, a fund named after a mythological three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades
-that is also chaired by... Dan Quayle
2
72
394
If you shop at Albertsons, Safeway or any of the other brands owned by this psycho grocer, you know what it means to be in ("hybrid") debt to Apollo.
The food CPI may have risen 13% YTD; at Safeway that number is more like 76%
Here are the literal receipts
1
89
370
Whistleblower suits against another New Mountain pediatric dental chain, Benevis dba Kool Smiles aka Kids Smiles/Pine Dentistry, are filled with stories of kids who needed cleaning but instead got 4-10 baby root canals & stainless steel crowns.
2
40
361
The latest Boeing 787 whistleblower Sam Salehpour had his tires slashed according to
@SenBlumenthal
5
114
367
Have you ever tried to so much as *brush* a toddler's teeth? It takes forever & feels like war crime.
But KoolSmiles capped cleanings at 15 mins so they'd have time to meet the minimum quota of 14 SURGERIES PER DENTIST PER DAY.
Their secret weapon: the "papoose board"
4
36
345
Western Dental is owned by New Mountain Capital, a "socially responsible" PE firm with $30 billion under mgt founded by a former protege of the late Teddy Forstmann, renowned as the "nicest" & most "ethical" Milken-era corporate raider. A low bar, then & now
1
25
338
The oversight governing all this $$ calls to mind Paul Bremer's Iraq:
-When regulators suspect fraud in a hospice application, they approve it anyway
-When patients complain of abuse, they "investigate" w/o actually investigating
-then throw the file away & never look at it again
2
45
336
Barriers to entry aren't high: in CA it just takes $3K, the license # of some doctor no one will even call to check, and a business address, which Friar sells for $25/mo
Rustle up the SSNs of some seniors & you too can start billing CMS between $203 and $1463 per patient per DAY
1
62
334
And everyone was too distracted to notice the baby's heart had stopped.
They were not, however, too preoccupied to bill Medicaid for all the work they had done on the dead toddler's teeth.
3
51
324
I'm never not surprised by this pope, go straight to hell haters
The Pope subtweeting the hell out of Amy Comey Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.
100
2K
14K
4
60
328
oh my god I am sobbing: Ellen MacInnis, a nurse at St. Elizabeth's hospital, said the nurses had to pool their own funds to buy bereavement boxes for newborn babies who died in the nicu because STEWARD ADMIN EXPECTED THEM TO FUCKING PUT THE BABIES IN CARDBOARD BOXES
5
65
335
Financialization scholars
@EileenAppelbaum
& Rose Batt began studying hospice bc private equity has infested the business.
But as they started digging, they realized the real story was the breathtaking laxity of regulation
2
78
317
this is a story about how Boeing killing a whistleblower was part of a larger project of Boeing systematically ostracizing & purging itself of employees who possessed too much "knowledge"
4
122
320
while it is an honor to appear in the NEW YORKER, some critical points were cut from my interview. Namely: Uber & DoorDash are both conceptually and habitually illegal; the contrast between restaurants & the Broader Suckscape shows Why We Need Antitrust
5
105
305
The DOJ is acknowledging that Boeing has fucked up so bad this year their conduct actually violates the weakest sweetheart deal in the history of sweetheart deals. Progress.
8
70
299
Boeing needs to be nationalized, CEO sacked, board dissolved. Corporate welfare opponents in congress should resist the temptation to throw them to the vultures & take this chance to save a once-great institution from its murderously bad rulers. My paper:
TODAY, as Congress works to address
#COVID
ー19 and
@boeing
begs for a $60 billion bailout, we’re releasing a new paper by
@econliberties
Fellow Maureen Tkacik:
“Rescue Mission: Bailing Out Boeing and Rebuilding it to Thrive”
1/
4
20
51
2
69
281
Safeway has more workers on food stamps than any other employer in Washington state.
Gut-wrenching how terrified these folks are about the impending Albertsons-Kroger merger & associated $4 billion cash grab, "heading into a gratuitous recession" etc
5
115
279
Papoose boards terrified kids, who'd piss themselves so often Kool Smiles hygenists all had hairdryers for drying their clothes. Undercover TV news probes ensued.
So Kool Smiles changed its protocol & got into the anesthesia business. What could go wrong, etc.
1
28
274
Earlier this year I met with a confidential source & 1/2 a dozen staffers of another prominent Democratic senator & pleaded with them to subpoena Steward to obtain specific documents proving the hospital system had been a ponzi since before 2020. The staffers were all, "yeah, we
.
@SenSanders
going off on Steward Health, detailing CEO Ralph De la Torre robbing the hospital network, showing his yachts & "backup private jet." His committee will subpoena De la Torre to testify.
@moetkacik
has written repeatedly about Steward:
2
47
187
7
70
286
It is just hard to believe xi jinping is a bigger threat to america than this guy with $28 billion who wants to crush all unions & eliminate the income tax & no day job ruling a faraway country with 1.4 billion people in it
For
@thenation
, I wrote about Jeffrey Yass, the billionaire financier whose TikTok stake and top GOP donor ranking make him the moneyman of the moment.
4
67
123
1
71
275
It is not hyperbole to say that CMS pays hospice providers $203/patient/day to literally do *nothing.*
It pays $1400 for them to send a care worker -- any worker -- to a patient's house for the day.
The primary mode of policing fraud is whistleblower lawsuits.
2
34
267
I mean I get the Dividend King logic. How many 1000s of babies consumed tainted Similac & no one knows because 50% of infants vomit 900 times a day? I used to pump in the wine cellar, store milk in the patio kegorator & metro home w/ leaky bottles. Similac seems a lot cleaner!
0
22
260
Tfw your exterminator discovers 700 pounds of acorns a single annoying woodpecker has been storing in your walls
3
5
271
But the most sinister thing is that signing up for hospice involves signing *away* your right to Medicare.
There are no accepted treatment protocols.
They'll slip you a bunch of drugs & hope something sticks.
There won't be an autopsy.
There's no such thing as wrongful death.
2
56
263
Desiring to "help the growth of the entire asset class" when the asset is fake money used for crimes, is braindead
6
55
273
This wld all be creepy if hospices were merely admitting ppl expected to die w/in 60 days
In Van Nuys the avg hospice patient bills 103 days.
51% are discharged alive.
Hospices avoid terminal patients bc they're not $$ enough.
They prey on the living.
2
82
259
when neolibs say they like cabinet officials w/ "private sector experience" they do not mean ppl who've worked real jobs in the real economy they exclusively mean unregistered de facto lobbyists for entrenched monopolies whose sole economic purpose is to facilitate corruption
1
62
271
Trump fundraiser
@davidsacks
is the financial backer of a "straight-up pill mill" that caused at least one overdose death
”This idea that somehow Reagan is to blame, who hasn’t been in office for 50 years, as opposed to the politicians who’ve been in office for the last 20 years, it’s letting them off the hook.”
@DavidSacks
blames
@GavinNewsom
and fentanyl on California’s increasing homeless. 2/3
3
2
15
8
98
265
@Mx_Defying
Poor Britney was billed nearly $6 million by the Israeli counterterrorism firm that intercepted her every email, text message & social media post, & even launched an operation to infiltrate the
#FreeBritney
movement.
3
59
262
The history of US healthcare reform is in many ways a story of bad docs performing unnecessary treatments on clueless patients to bilk insurers
HMOs were invented to liberate us frm the ethical minefield by paying docs flat salaries to promote the best outcomes the budget wld buy
1
31
248
Cerberus & Co
-sold Albertsons buildings to pay themselves dividends & now the stores owe $10 billion in rent
-tried to IPO but no one wanted the rotten stock
-until Covid; yay IPO!
-But $800m wasn't enough so they sold $1.75B "hybrid" stock to Apollo
-which now needs to get PAID
1
46
245
the "Ivy League antisemitism crisis" is a nihilist mafia plot orchestrated by the owner of the University of Phoenix (and no i do not mean in a "figure of speech" sense)
my latest on the year's most insufferable saga
10
72
244
Well this little change in protocol here seems like it could be relevant to the question of why Boeing has no record of who removed & reinstalled the 1282 door plug
1
33
246
-HCA lobbying to raise prices 15% "to offset nurse pay"
-HCA employs 81,000 nurses
-HCA spent $8.1 billion on stock buybacks in 2021
3
93
235
Whistleblower lawsuits are themselves a fraud. Judges be corrupt; recent rulings have almost defined "fraud" out of existence; they're invariably settled for pennies on the dollar
@avakofman
chronicled how a judge drove 1 hospice prosecutor to the brink of insanity
1
33
233
Swampy was found with his finger on the trigger of a silver pistol. A physician who is a regular contributor to the indespensable site
#NakedCapitalism
says this is a major red flag
4
51
242
Dentists told Zion's mom he needed 3 root canals & crowns for decay caused by...breast milk. But last minute they did 6 root canals 6 crowns & 3 enamelplasties, for which they administered 6 forms of anesthesia, including PROPOPHOL
Clinic was shortstaffed; oxygen malfunctioned..
2
30
229
Anyway, in closing I'll return to the viral Guitar Hero at hand, whose son's mouth was somehow butchered by our friends at New Mountain Capital. He is
@PokelaneYT
& he needs an affordable pediatric dentist who isn't owned by private equity.
1
35
226
Kool Smiles was, incidentally, founded by veterans of the Colorado dental clinic chain Small Smiles, a similar Medicaid kiddie crown assembly line cofounded by a guy whose day job literally consisted of teaching public school systems how to extract more $$ from COKE MACHINE SALES
1
26
224