DL Open Thread: Thursday, April 4, 2024

Truth Social Was Kept Alive By Russian Money Launderer.  Great reporting from The Guardian:

Trump Media almost did not make it to the merger after regulators opened a securities investigation into the merger in 2021 and caused the company to burn through cash at an extraordinary rate as it waited to get the green light for its stock market debut.

The situation led Trump Media to take emergency loans, including from an entity called ES Family Trust, which opened an account with Paxum Bank, a small bank registered on the Caribbean island of Dominica that is best known for providing financial services to the porn industry.

Through leaked documents, the Guardian has learned that ES Family Trust operated like a shell company for a Russian-American businessman named Anton Postolnikov, who co-owns Paxum Bank and has been a subject of a years-long joint federal criminal investigation by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into the Trump Media merger.

The existence of the trust has previously been reported by the Guardian and the Washington Post. However, who controlled the account, how the trust was connected to Paxum Bank, and how the money had been funneled through the trust to Trump Media was unknown.

The concern surrounding the loans to Trump Media is that ES Family Trust may have been used to complete a transaction that Paxum itself could not.

Paxum Bank does not offer loans in the US as it lacks a US banking license and is not regulated by the FDIC. Postolnikov appears to have used the trust to loan money to help save Trump Media – and the Truth Social platform – because his bank itself could not furnish the loan.

Trump doesn’t just need the Presidency to stay out of jail–he needs it to service all of the unsavory enterprises to whom he each owes more than a pound of his not-insubstantial flesh.  Read the entire article.  You’ll understand why Trump wants to jail reporters.

Trump Sues Business Partners.  Why?  Because he wants all the cash to himself:

Donald Trump is suing two co-founders of Trump Media & Technology Group, the newly public parent company of his Truth Social platform, arguing that they should forfeit their stock in the company because they set it up improperly.

The former U.S. president’s lawsuit, which was filed on March 24 in Florida state court, follows a complaint filed in February by those co-founders, Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss. Their lawsuit sought to prevent Trump from taking steps the two said would sharply reduce their combined 8.6% stake in Trump Media. The pair filed their lawsuit in the Delaware Court of Chancery.

Trump’s lawsuit claims that Litinsky and Moss, who were both contestants on Trump’s reality-TV show “The Apprentice,” mishandled an attempt to take Trump Media public several years ago, allegedly putting the whole project “on ice” for more than a year and a half.

But it also targets the pair over their Delaware suit against Trump, saying that it was one of several attempts they made to block Trump Media’s ultimately successful plan to go public. Trump Media accomplished that goal by merging with a publicly traded shell company called Digital World Acquisition in March.

Perhaps it’s just me.  But when you hire former contestants on “The Apprentice” to handle highly-complex legal matters, the onus is on you, not them.

Coral Reef Restoration–It’s Happening!  Hey, not everything I write is apocalyptic:

Out among a scattering of islands spilled like beads into the Indonesian shallows, an extended experiment in coral restoration has revealed something marvelous: With a tender touch and a community to care for it, a reef can fully recover from the devastation of blast fishing in just four years.

The Spermonde Archipelago, which lies a dozen miles off the coast of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, was long home to some of the most dynamic reefs in the world, where schools of fish rainbowed over coral blanketing the seafloor. But dynamite fishing turned swaths of those wonders into wastes.

Promoting this recovery in Sulawesi is particularly important, because the island sits at the center of the Indonesian archipelago and in one corner of the Coral Triangle. This region, and Indonesia in particular, is home to the largest concentration of reefs and coral habitat in the world. Yet many of these vibrant ecosystems were pulverized by decades of fishers dropping explosives into the water to concuss fish they could then scoop out of the sea. With loose rubble then left to tumble in the currents, corals had little hope of recovering on their own. Any coral spawns that might settle and grow were liable to be crushed by errant rocks.

OK, that’s my quota of encouraging words for the day.

The ‘Church-Going Bust’ And A Vast Disconnect?  An interesting read, regardless of your relationship, or (in my case) lack thereof, to a church, mosque, or synagogue:

On an individual basis, people can give any number of valid-sounding reasons for not frequenting a house of worship. But a behavioral shift that is fully understandable on the individual level has coincided with, and even partly exacerbated, a great rewiring of our social relations.

And America didn’t simply lose its religion without finding a communal replacement. Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans developed a new relationship with a technology that, in many ways, is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his new book, The Anxious Generation, to stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to float placelessly in a content cosmos, to skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. The internet is timeless in the best and worst of ways—an everything store with no opening or closing times. “In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things,” Haidt writes. In other words, digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.

Religious rituals are the opposite in almost every respect. They put us in our body, Haidt writes, many of them requiring “some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional.” Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate, and Jews daven. Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. (It’s no surprise that people describe a scheduled break from their digital devices as a “Sabbath.”) Finally, religious ritual often requires that we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people, whether in a church, mosque, synagogue, or over a dinner-table prayer. In other words, the religious ritual is typically embodied, synchronous, deep, and collective.

Baltimore Issues Notwithstanding, Wilmington Port Workers Face Uncertain Future. Great reporting by, wait for it, Karl Baker:

During an early March meeting of the Delaware government board that oversees the port, Enstructure executive Bayard Hogans said a transition toward containers started last year. But, it became more “drastic” during this fruit season, in part, because the Panama Canal gave priority to container ships after a drought reduced the number of allowable passages allowed through the corridor.

Hogans also noted that his company recently purchased new “container handling equipment to the tune of $4 million,” among other infrastructure upgrades.

Following the meeting, Delaware Secretary of State Jeffrey Bullock, who oversees the Port of Wilmington’s contracted lessee, said a transition to containers could mean less work for members of Harrison’s local, but argued that the droughts in Central and South America are the primary reasons for the current downturn.

Still, he contended that the port’s shift to more containerized cargo would open up year-round opportunities for the facility, and relieve it of a dependence on a fruit season that occurs only during the Southern Hemisphere’s summer months.

“It’s a vulnerable place to be,” Bullock said. “What is it? A 12-week or so fruit season. It wasn’t the best situation.”

Such comments have long sparked fear among members of Harrison’s embattled union – today called the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) Local 2076. They also add to additional perceived pressures on the workers from the construction of a state-supported cold storage warehouse that will sit outside the gates of the Port of Wilmington in Claymont.

Last year, officials from Georgia-based Agile Cold Storage, which received millions of dollars in state grants to support the construction of its $170 million project and hire 130 workers, said they intended to draw business from ports across the mid-Atlantic region. They do not intend to use ILA workers. 

“They want to take our jobs from us,” said Malik Davidum, who has worked for three decades within the Port of Wilmington warehouses.

Seems like it.  Somewhere, an Enstructure exec will be buying Jeff Bullock a drink.  Then offering him yet another job for which he is unqualified.

What do you want to talk about?