🪂 The golden parachutes behind Big Everything

🎧 On Lever Time: Should you cancel your flight? Expert Bill McGee weighs in on aviation safety in 2025.

⬇️ Spend four minutes reading this 986-word newsletter to learn about:

• Trump’s latest assault on commercial air travel.
• Democrats’ loosening grip on their base.
• A temporary order saving the CFPB — for now.
• How CEOs’ golden parachutes have changed America for the worse.

✈️ If you like when airlines screw you over, you’ll love this. The Trump administration is delaying the enforcement of a rule providing Americans more compensation when airlines bump ticketed passengers off flights or lose their bags. Though the delay is only for one month, the announcement cites the president’s deregulatory executive order — and says Trump officials are now reviewing whether the rule will ever be implemented. The moves come a week after airlines asked President Donald Trump to abandon an ongoing review of whether mistreated passengers are being compensated fairly.

💵 Yep, they’re preying on the poor. A recent Illinois study on payday lenders found that these predatory services overwhelmingly tend to set up shop in impoverished, nonwhite neighborhoods. More than 80 percent of payday loans, which average $375 each, are rolled over or followed by another loan within 14 days, sending borrowers into cycles of debt where interest rates average nearly 400 percent.

🏚️ Blackstone’s own eviction marshal. Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) introduced a bill last week that would strip away the last pandemic-era protections for tenants and allow landlords to give tenants less than three days’ notice before changing the locks. Hagerty’s top donor is private equity group Blackstone, the country’s largest landlord and serial evictor that has admitted to ramping up evictions to boost its bottom line.

😡 Dems are facing a mutiny. Congressional Democrats’ approval rating among their own base has sunk 63 points since 2023. Less than half of Democrat and Dem-leaning voters say they approve of how the party is handling the second Trump administration. Sidenote: In the 22 years that Democrats have lost electoral ground in the heartland, at least one of their party's two congressional leaders has been from either San Francisco or New York City.

🏠 We are so back (to 2008). The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Trump just retreated on the bureau’s previous efforts to protect Americans from predatory home loans. So-called “home equity contracts,” which court homebuyers and homeowners with an initial lump sum “investment” to be paid back later with a share of the house’s increased value, don’t adhere to the same standards as regular mortgages. 

• The CFPB under Biden was extremely critical of these loans, accusing lenders of evading consumer protection law by “simply slapping a different label on a loan” — but yesterday, the bureau withdrew an amicus brief condemning home equity contracts over concerns its statements may “harm the property interests” of lenders.

The CFPB is safe — for now. A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from instituting mass layoffs, budget cuts, and data wipes at the CFPB last week in a major victory against the new administration’s war on the regulatory state. This temporary stay comes after the union representing CFPB employees sued the government to block acting director Russell Vought from “unlawfully dismantling” the bureau. A judge will hear arguments on March 3.

Art produced with images from Canva.

The golden parachutes behind Big Everything. From much higher prices to fewer consumer choices to worse customer service to mass layoffs, merger mania hasn’t been great for most Americans. In the conventional telling, this era’s merger and acquisition boom that created Big Everything happened because conservative master planners realized right-wing legal activist Robert Bork’s dream of destroying antitrust enforcement. But new data suggests another factor: Contracts that reward CEOs for getting their companies taken over — at huge cost to their own shareholders and workers.

CEOs as investment bankers. The new study from Columbia Law School’s Jeffrey Gordon shows merger-triggered payments are “compensating the CEO like a deal-hunting investment banker.” Indeed, CEOs’ golden “parachutes are positively associated with the likelihood of becoming a target” for acquisition, and “the incentives now on offer have converted target-side CEOs from footdraggers to promoters” of their companies being taken over (and sometimes shut down).

Retiring CEOs looking to burn the house down. The data show a 32 percent increase in companies being a target for acquisition when its CEO approaches age 65 and is looking for a retirement payout. “The retiring CEO outfitted with a golden parachute is in the position of a homeowner occupying a well-insured house who, it turns out, cannot sell the house when they move to Florida on retirement,” Gordon concludes. “The only way to realize value on the house, then, is to burn it down and collect the insurance.”

Shareholders and workers get the shaft. Gordon says CEOs who are promised a merger payout are incentivized to “manage the firm differently and less optimally.” For instance: “The CEO might avoid projects that have highest expected value” in favor of projects aiming to draw a quick acquisition offer — by the time shareholders vote on a merger, they are compelled to take the deal, even at a bad price. The same is true for workers at risk of merger-related firings; rather than aligning a CEO’s interest with worker performance and retention, golden parachutes widen the “disparity of fortune between the laid-off employees and the CEO who walks away with a super-bonus.”

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CEO payout data from Jeffrey Gordon’s new study using data from Mark Siciliano.

🧅 From the 2016 archives of The Onion: DNC Aiming To Reconnect With Working-Class Americans With New Hamilton-Inspired Lena Dunham Web Series. Has anything really changed in nine years?

🏀 Stephen A. Smith is considering a run for president — and the NBA commentator might just get our vote. 

😂 Speaking of payday loans… this surprise Kat Williams appearance outside the cash depot in One of Them Days tickled us.

“[Musical] artists are free — encouraged even — to partner with brands promoting alcohol, gambling, pharmaceuticals, or, as the Black Keys were forced to when [their] canceled tour zeroed out their revenue for the year, crypto.

Yet advocating for something as basic as better health care for fellow artists? That’s where the industry draws the line.” — The American Prospect

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