vulture capital

Make Your Own J.D. Vance Comic

This entry was posted in comics and tagged 2024 election abortion Donald Trump guns JD Vance racism vulture capital white supremacist on by
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A year of news happened since last week’s comic. I haven’t watched a minute of the Republican National Convention. Trump’s speaking as I type this. No thank you. Recaps and screenshots from folks who subjected themselves to it was enough for me.

Vance was announced as Trump’s VP pick on Monday, and it’s a choice that signals they’re not even trying to win votes that weren’t already in the bag. He’s a Christian nationalist and white supremacist, and anyone who was enthralled by his dumb book is a mark.

As for Saturday’s assassination attempt, you can’t be charged with incitement if you don’t say anything at all.

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2024 Valentines

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Fake valentines are an (almost) annual tradition since I first started drawing weekly cartoons over 22 years ago. The little cut-out dots and scissors are vestigial artifacts from when my comics regularly appeared on paper products called “alt-weeklies.”

While there’s apparently a lot of decent economic news these days, things are pretty grim for tech and especially media jobs. Execs are either hollowing out their staffs to boost dividends, or simply getting bored with their media toys and moving on to the next big grift.

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Boeing’s Blueprints for Success

This entry was posted in comics and tagged 737Max aviation Boeing climate change NTSB transportation vulture capital on by
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Almost five years after Boeing’s cost-cutting grounded 737 Maxes, a plugged door failed on one on its way out of Portland. They nearly avoided charges for the first round of negligence, but this latest incident reset the clock.

These disasters, or near-disasters, happen because passengers aren’t Boeing’s or the airlines’ customers. Their shareholders are. It’s the same reason why only masochists fly Southwest. Extracting profit from us rubes to churn out dividends or worsening the product to claim write-offs isn’t unique to aviation; it’s a symptom of late-stage capitalism.

Can’t think of a clever segue to carbon offsets, so I’ll just say they’re a scam. Unless investments in true transit alternatives are made, our reliance on air travel remains bad news for the climate. No one, not even me, a bike-riding transit pinko, would opt to take Amtrak instead of a plane to anywhere further from Boston than DC. And that’s before even taking costs into consideration.

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D.I.Y. Halloween Costumes

This entry was posted in comics and tagged border wall Federalist Society gerrymandering Halloween immigration Leonard Leo refugees SCOTUS transit vulture capital on by
(Title on a Spirit Halloween generic costume bag.) D.I.Y. Halloween Costumes
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I’m firmly against topical Halloween costumes in real life, but it’s a decent premise for a cartoon where you don’t have to spend an entire evening stuck inside your one-note joke that only news nerds might get.

While the final panel is about Biden deciding to build more border walls, it applies to everywhere refugees are being denied their right to seek asylum. A wall refusing desperate people entry is the opposite side of one locking them into a miserable fate.

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Silicon Valley Bailout Package Contents

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To celebrate the 3rd anniversary of COVID, and the Iraq War’s 20th, we’re being treated to a celebration of the 2008 economic collapse’s 15th with the government’s response to Silicon Valley Bank’s failure.

FDIC normally only insures deposits up to $250,000, but since SVB was the preferred bank of the economy’s whiniest libertarians, they’re getting a full bailout. Even the ones so opposed to diversity, they refused to diversify their accounts.

Printing money out of thin air is considered a laughable and juvenile response to the debt ceiling, yet it was done throughout the the post-2008 recovery by minting money to keep banks afloat and saying the magic/obfuscating words, “quantitative easing.”

The regulations that could’ve prevented this current wave of bank failures were rolled back during the Trump administration, but not without the help of many greedy/shortsighted Democrats.

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Big Business Brain, CEO

This entry was posted in comics and tagged capitalism corporations economics jobs labor layoffs vulture capital on by
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Hedge fund managers REALLY want a recession. They particularly want high unemployment to reduce the pressure of raising wages which cuts into their primary function of pumping out dividends and stock buybacks to rich assholes.

I hated drawing this brain. My sympathies to anyone who had to draw Krang for any length of time for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

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