Johnson, Michels, Musk - why CEOs shouldn't be running bigger things

The last few days have given us quite a bit on how mediocre mega-rich white guys roll, haven't they?

Elon Musk bought Twitter, fired about 60% of the employees and lets hate speech run wild and is wondering why its losing revenue at an alarming clip pic.twitter.com/7RcA0rkF4u

— Pezell56x (@Pezell56x) November 4, 2022

Elon Musk tweeted a homophobic conspiracy theory that defamed an 82 year old man who was nearly murdered with a hammer…to his 110 million followers and is now blaming “activist groups” for Twitter losing ad revenue. pic.twitter.com/8ez7XO418Z

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) November 4, 2022

Musk threatens to go “thermonuclear” against companies who choose to stop advertising on Twitter with a “name and shame” campaign.
Authoritarians think they can lie and punish their way to power.
Aren’t companies “free” to decide where they put their paid speech?

— Duty To Warn 🔉 (@duty2warn) November 5, 2022

the world’s richest man* paid 2x what twitter was worth to spend his first week in charge getting grievously pantsed every single second of every day in full view of every single other important person in the entire world.

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) November 5, 2022

Back here in Wisconsin, the rich guy scumminess is more of the good old-fashioned corruption kind, where they take care of their own.

Patrick Michels, president of Michels Corp., gave @wisgop $1 million on Sept. 28, same day Kevin Michels, the vice president of fleet and equipment, donated $500,000.

Next day, @michelsforgov listed a transfer from the state GOP of $800k. He got $600k a week later.

1/ https://t.co/jWFupRKVtZ

— JR Ross (@jrrosswrites) November 1, 2022

They're not thinking of getting any taxpayer-funded contracts kicked back to their business, are they? Noooo, I'm sure this is all in good faith, Just like that Building a Better Wisconsin ad I've seen that is nothing but a 1-miniute infomercial for Michels Corp.

Michels isn't any cleaner in his own personal financial reporting to the public.

NEW: GOP nominee for Wisconsin governor Tim Michels may have failed to report connections to 25 companies in his personal financial disclosure:

“It would appear that Tim Michels is exploiting some confusion surrounding LLCs and campaign finance laws.”https://t.co/NNgekD2X4K

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) November 3, 2022

Funny how these rich folks all have these money-laundering ops that they won't entangle when the conflicts are asked about. Speakin

Ron Johnson fought for a tax cut as his family was amassing luxury real estate around the country https://t.co/Z3HLoZuiZe — via ⁦@DanielBice⁩, ⁦@MSpicuzzaMJS⁩ and ⁦@ndrewhahn⁩

— Patrick Marley (@patrickdmarley) November 4, 2022

The Johnson story falls under "call me if this one sounds familiar."

The Johnson family's real estate investments include two waterfront homes with sweeping views worth a combined $3 million on the picturesque San Juan Islands in the state of Washington; four condominiums near a ski resort in Park City, Utah; three Florida houses worth a total of $4 million; a $1.5 million Washington, D.C., townhouse on Constitution Avenue; and two Fish Creek condominiums in Door County.

Johnson and his wife also have an LLC that owns the building and property for Pacur LLC, the Oshkosh plastics firm he sold in 2020. On his U.S. Senate financial disclosure form, Johnson said he receives between $100,000 and $1 million annually in rent on the property valued from $5 million to $25 million. The two Johnson family companies that own the most properties are JFT Investments and Atlas Capital RE....

In 2017, Johnson held up passage of Trump's tax bill by objecting to the plan's already generous tax break for pass-through businesses. Originally, the Trump administration proposed allowing business owners to deduct up to 17.4% of their profits. Johnson fought to increase that to 23%. The figure ended up at 20%.

Under the plan, a business owner who had $600,000 in profits in a year could deduct up to 20% of that sum, or $120,000, depending on the company's payroll and property holdings. There was no such deduction before 2017.

It gets pretty easy to do tax-advantaged investments when you write the tax code that allows you to get bigger write-offs for things you already do, eh? Meanwhile, we haven't been able to write off the mortgage interest on our one home for the last 5 years because of the same Tax Scam.

Maybe we shouldn't trust rich mediocre white guy CEOs to do anything beyond take care of themselves and their companies. They don't care about anything else, and in a lot of cases don't KNOW SHIT ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE.

Those are the last type of people that should be making the decisions that affect hundreds of millions of other Americans. Let's have less of them in charge of things after Tuesday, OK?