How Can He Trust Them?

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Former President and current President-elect Donald Trump (R) is being inundated with visits from CEOs who in the past have castigated him, his policies, his character, his integrity, even censoring him outrageously (excuse the redundancy). Some are even throwing millions of dollars at him his inaugural fund.

Titans of the business world are rushing to make inroads with the president-elect, gambling that personal relationships with the next occupant of the Oval Office will help their bottom lines and spare them from Trump’s wrath.
In the weeks since the election, Trump and his advisers have been flooded with calls from C-suite executives who are eager to get face time with the President-elect and his team at Mar-a-Lago, the private Florida club where the transition team conducts much of its planning for the second term.

Even as they smile in his face, though, they’ve already shown their true colors with their prior attacks. They’re only mouthing words of approbation today in hopes of avoiding the consequences of their disingenuosity.

How can Trump trust them? He can’t. He can use them, but he should keep in mind an old maxim: keep his friends close and his enemies closer.

At bottom,

Il capo d’azienda e mobile, qual piuma al vento
In pianto o in riso è mensognero

Cancel the Contract

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And award it to another manufacturer. Former President and current President-elect Donald Trump (R) has long wanted a better aircraft for Air Force One, correctly identifying the current iteration as woefully limited in capability and badly obsolescent. Boeing has long had the contract for Air Force Ones, and they have the current contract to build a new, fully capable model.

Boeing is badly failing at this, too, even as it continues to fail at producing commercial aircraft, it fails at producing vehicles that can reach the ISS and return safely, its moon rocket is over budget and behind schedule, and on and on.

The long-delayed [Air Force One replacement] project has fallen so far behind schedule that Boeing has told the Air Force that it expects to deliver the new jets after Trump leaves the White House, according to people familiar with the matter. That means the airplanes wouldn’t be ready until 2029 or later.

And:

Boeing has booked more than $2 billion of charges tied to the fixed-price contract, which has gone over budget and been troubled by production glitches and management issues.
…
The delay is startling given that Boeing isn’t building the planes from scratch. During Trump’s first term, Boeing started to overhaul two 747s that were built for a Russian airline that never took the jets.

Such sloth is wholly unacceptable. It’s time to cancel the Boeing contract altogether and award it to a reputable company that will take seriously the task of building and outfitting a modern, fully capable Air Force One aircraft. The delay associated with the changeover, even if it involves building a new airplane from scratch, won’t be materially different from the delay Boeing presently is inflicting. Does anyone really have any confidence that Boeing would deliver soon after 2029?

Bad Deal

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As I write on 12 December, Hamas appears to have agreed to a deal, put together by the Egyptians and supported by the Biden administration, that would see a 60-day cease-fire in Gaza, Israeli troops remain in Gaza “temporarily,” and that would release 30 hostages, including some Americans. In addition, Israel would release an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners and allow greater humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza. Israel has not agreed, so far.

That last bit regarding humanitarian aid is a clear red flag regarding this…proposal. Any agreement by Israel to this condition would be an Israeli admission that they are the ones doing the restricting. Israel isn’t the one restricting aid flow, though; the terrorists are stealing the aid and deliberately endangering aid deliverers by using them as shields against IDF responses. Hamas is restricting aid flow.

There’s also this bit of Hamas disingenuosity:

Hostages could be freed shortly after signing the deal, and more time would be given to Hamas to establish the names of remaining hostages, their whereabouts, and their state of health[.]

The terrorists don’t need any time for that: they know full well where they’re holding all of the hostages and all of the murdered hostage bodies: the terrorists are the ones who grabbed them, and the terrorists are the ones who’ve been moving them around.

This is a bad deal. Any “cease-fire” must include Israeli forces remaining in Gaza for as long as the Israelis deem necessary along with the release of all of the hostages, including the bodies of the dead hostages. Anything less than all of the hostages, by itself, must be a deal breaker. Beyond that, while there might be a cease fire, the war Hamas has been inflicting on Israel cannot end short of the utter destruction of the terrorist entity. As long as Hamas exists, it will be a terrorist threat to Israel.

Blame Someone Else

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Safeway is closing one of its San Francisco stores due to concerns about high crime rates and employee and customer safety in that store’s neighborhood. Oh, the hue and cry.

The Reverand Erris Edgerly, for instance, is crying foul.

It’s obvious the community has been struggling, but to just up and leave without calling a meeting, with no alternative for groceries, is upsetting. There was no community outreach at all.

It’s obvious that the crime rate in Edgerly’s community has been out of control for quite some time and the safety of his community members has been in the wind for all that time. From that, it’s just as obvious that community “leaders,” like the good Reverand, have contributed nothing useful to mitigating the situation (in truth, the city has done nothing, also, but that doesn’t excuse the community’s “leaders”).

Outreach would have been just more chit-chat and worse than pointless: advance notice of the store’s closing would have been too likely to trigger an accelerated spate of break-ins and lootings, exposing the store’s employees and customers to even more danger in that end game.

Maybe the Edgerlys of the neighborhood should look in a mirror to find some of the folks with whom to…outreach.

Not Entirely Alone

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Recall the Macy’s case where an employee succeeded in covering up, for a long time, more than $150 million in bookkeeping mistakes. Now Macy’s has finished its internal investigation and decided that the employee had been acting alone, making all those mistakes all by himself.

The employee told investigators about having mistakenly understated the amount of small parcel delivery expenses in late 2021, the person briefed on the probe said. Macy’s has said that the employee had responsibility for small package delivery expense accounting….
To hide the error, the employee continued to intentionally make erroneous accounting entries and falsify underlying documentation until the misstatement was discovered this fall….

Furthermore [emphasis added],

Macy’s didn’t say how it uncovered the erroneous entries or how they went undetected by the company’s auditor, KPMG.

Maybe the employee wasn’t acting entirely alone. He had the functionally ineffective assistance of too-inattentive supervisors, too-inattentive checkers of his work, and that auditor which maybe was just rubberstamping company books and collecting fees.

Macy’s management might want to expand its investigation and address those inadequacies.