SEASON FOUR OF "THE IMPEACHMENTALIST" STARRING SIMON BAKER AS THE IMPEACHMENTALIST

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But seriously, I'm writing this just after an episode of 60 Minutes broke the news - wait, 60 Minutes broke news? Is this the Eighties again? - that the whistleblower who initially wrote the complaint about Donald Trump blatantly asking the President of Ukraine to interfere in the upcoming election is now under actual federal protection because he is afraid for his life, which is a totally normal thing to need to have to happen when someone has issued a written complaint about the conduct of an elected official through official channels. Shortly thereafter Trump had another emotional breakdown on Twitter, demanding that Adam Schiff (the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee) be "questioned at the highest level for Fraud and Treason" - yes, the capitals are his - and then quoted a pastor who claimed that if Trump were impeached civil war would ensue, which is also a totally normal thing for a President to say in public.

All of this is to say: the case for impeachment of the President is honestly pretty airtight already, likely to get worse very quickly, and he is acting even crazier than his usual shithouse-rat level of crazy. This would all be much more entertaining if he didn't have access to nuclear weapons, of course, but it's still sort of entertaining in a morbid way, not least because I honestly had stopped believing that the Democratic Party would ever begin impeachment proceedings, and then all of a sudden they did, and polls have shown the public steadily growing more used to the idea of impeachment because this time it's so freaking obvious.

This being what it is, everybody and their stepcousin who writes for the Washington Post has opinions about how things have happened and what should happen next, and who's a political genius and who is not, that sort of thing. Most of this is basically politics as fantasy football, and you can and should ignore it. Most political prediction - mine included - is a series of educated guesses based on past events, and most political narratives are after-the-fact rationalizations to explain why whoever came out on top in a political conflict was predestined to win all along.

So I don't know what the best course of action is. I, like everybody else, only have guesses. That said, my guess is that the Democrats should probably take this opportunity to poison the Republican well as thoroughly as possible, simply because Donald Trump never works alone and there is zero chance there aren't more prominent Republicans who can and should have their careers ruined and possibly go to jail. At a minimum, Rudy Guiliani is neck deep in this, as is Bill Barr. Trump has already implied that Mike Pence was involved somehow and the opportunity to politically damage Mike Pence is one that will generally be good for the world as a whole, because fuck that guy. And of course, there's always the Trump kids, who seem to think they should be a political dynasty despite not being, like, good at anything.

(And remember, everybody, it's just "Ukraine," not "the Ukraine," they hate it when you do that, so don't do it unless there's a Ukrainian you really want to annoy I guess.)

LET'S DO A DEEP DIVE ON A RECENT CORPORATE BANKRUPTCY!

Thomas Cook Group, which is the company formed from Thomas Cook AG merging with MyTravel Group in 2007, and Thomas Cook AG is the company which bought out the original Thomas Cook and Son travel company, which started tour and travel arrangement operations in 1841 - I'm sorry, this sentence got away from me because sometimes I get fascinated with tracking how these companies merge and glom into supercorporate-sized monsters. Anyway, it's bankrupt now! And I don't mean your basic "oh we need to restructure some debt and bargain with creditors" bankruptcy. This is a hardcore "sell the office chairs for five bucks a pop" liquidation, although granted they'll probably be selling all their tourism assets before they get to the office chairs.

Thomas Cook was still very large and still generating quite a lot of revenue, although they weren't making any profit. In 2018, their gross income was 9.8 billion pounds, but their net income was a loss of 163 million pounds. So, when a company that is nearly generating ten billion pounds a year in revenue is going broke - and what's more, one that is probably the pre-eminent UK travel agency (it was actually nationalized and became a public service after World War II because the government thought it needed to survive, and that lasted for over twenty years - yes, I am talking about a travel agency here) I ask myself: what the hell happened?

First off, it's a traditional travel agency, which is already a bad start because the majority of people don't organize their travel via traditional travel agencies any more (and the ones that do tend to, ahem, be older than average). Do you need a travel agent to book your vacation flights, or do you just go to Google Flights or Expedia, find the best flight for your needs that costs the least, and then book it yourself? Same again with your hotels and accommodations: do you need a travel agent to go to Expedia or Airbnb or Trivago? If you're anything like me, you just do it yourself most of the time unless you have specific needs that only a travel agent can fulfill or if they have deals you can exploit.

(Aside: I actually used a travel agent in 2016 because I had a voucher from RBC that I had bought with rewards points which only worked at travel agencies, and honestly, our agent was extremely helpful in organizing our flights even more efficiently than I had been able to manage myself and helped us maximize our touring time, and because we had spent enough on flights we were able to get some other vouchers for activities we specifically wanted to do, so if you think I am devotedly anti-travel-agent you are wrong.)

Traditional travel agencies are taking a beating, which means the ones that are successful have found other ways to profit. For example, Flight Centre Group (which owns Flight Centre in most Commonwealth countries, Liberty Travel in the USA and GOGO as their worldwide brand) has networked all of their international travel companies to produce deals via volume sales and packaging - which is just the travel agency model writ large, really - but they also have multiple online portals, money transfer businesses at numerous airports, and an extensive corporate travel business. TUI, the German travel conglomerate, owns numerous hotels and cruise ships - so it can create packages where it directly profits both from the packaging fees and the services they're providing.

Thomas Cook did neither of these things. Instead, it mostly just continued to do what it had always done: operate brick-and-mortar travel agencies. The 2007 merger, which was supposed to create a British super-agency, instead just ended up saddling the company with more debt (mostly because MyTravel group had been losing money for years at that point), and then a decade of a limping British economy only made things gradually worse over time, and their debt steadily grew because they simply weren't earning enough money to remain profitable. Earlier this year it looked like a Chinese investment group was going to bail them out (and their involvement would apparently have encouraged banks to forgive a couple billion pounds' worth of Thomas Cook's debt, because hey it's only money), but Brexit fears contributed to that group pulling out of the proposed deal, because Brexit ruins everything.

This was disastrous, because travel agencies mostly operate on a boom-bust annual cycle: they make most of their money during the summer when people go on fancy holidays and then the lean time of the year is fall and winter. Basically, Thomas Cook got to the lean part of the year and there was simply no more money left and nobody even willing to lend them money, so now it's selling the office chairs time.

No lie, this is fascinating to me, because this is, again, a company that grossed nearly ten billion dollars last year. It has a revenue stream and customers and assets, and for liquidation to happen in this way is mindblowing because our entire financial system is designed to prevent this sort of thing from happening for as long as possible and then a little longer after that. The fact that it couldn't protect Thomas Cook any longer is kind of stunning.

LET'S DO A DEEP DIVE ON A FUTURE CORPORATE BANKRUPTCY!

Adam Neumann stepped down this week as CEO of WeWork, and will have to content himself with still being a billionaire for the time being (although a lot of his net worth is, surprise, tied up in WeWork stock, and WeWork is private so really, "billionaire" needs to be in air quotes here, because the bulk of his wealth is insubstantial and can vanish the moment people decide WeWork isn't worth shit). The likely reason he stepped down is because Vanity Fair published a fairly embarrassing article wherein they found people willing to talk about the crazy bullshit Neumann spouts all day long to make himself seem cool. ("Jamie Dimon is my personal banker" is the sort of thing we're talking about here.) Perhaps, also, there was the inherent conflict of interest in how he uses WeWork to supplement his personal wealth. But I am getting ahead of myself.

WeWork is, all the tech bubble bullshit aside, an office leasing company. It rents properties and then sublets those properties, ostensibly to make profit. This is a very boring and normal sort of company, all things considered, which is why Neumann sells it so hard with bafflegab bullshit about "changing work" and selling the website interface, and also why it's sort of impressive that the company is a massive money-loser: I mean, this isn't rocket science, this is a company that wants to rent space for X dollars and then sublet it for 2X dollars (or more, obviously) and then pocket the profits.

But WeWork is a massive money-loser. It has never been profitable, by its own admission. Last year it made $1.8 billion in gross revenue, and spent $1.9 billion in operating costs, and that was its best year ever - a loss of $100 million. The reason it is valuated at nearly $50 billion is because everybody looks at their business model and says "well, the basic idea makes sense" like I just did above, except that their entire business model is predicated on renting properties on a long-term basis and then subletting those properties to people who are essentially short-term renters, which means the company would be very vulnerable if, for example, a recession or economic downturn happened. It should also be - if run properly - a relatively low-margin company, one that reliably generates its ten percent profit margin and that's it, because office rentals are a competitive market in most cities and, like I already said: these ideas aren't new.

For all of these reasons, WeWork postponed their IPO two weeks ago. This cost everybody involved a lot of money, particularly JP Morgan, the bank that was handling the IPO and which gave Neumann a $500 million credit line in order to get the account. He has used $380 million of that credit line already, and he has used it to purchase properties which he then leased to WeWork, which in any public company would be a conflict of interest but because WeWork is private (for the time being) nobody is worried except anybody who knows how your basic three-card-monte scam works. (Do we know how much of that $1.9 billion in expenses went directly into Neumann's own pockets? We do not! But the answer is "probably some of it.") Of course, given that numerous JP Morgan clients are also leasing properties to WeWork there is a lot of institutional pressure to make sure that the IPO happens sooner rather than later, because the leasors want to be sure that WeWork can continue to pay them.

Bottom line: this company is not profitable, and its IPO will likely be pushed forward despite it not being profitable and despite extremely questionable business practices, because other rich people need it to happen. This would be an excellent time for a business show talking head to say something about "the wisdom of the market."

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

Hustlers (2019, Lorene Scafaria, theatre) - 4/5

The Dead Don't Die (2019, Jim Jarmusch, theatre) - 1.5/5

We also finally got around to watching When They See Us on Netflix, and it is devastatingly well made, even if I did kind of want to watch the second season of Fastest Car instead. It's about cars! Which are fast! It kinda sells itself.

Oh, and we had a coupon to try out GoodFood, Canada's home meal kit company, for a week, so we tried it because, hey, three free meals for two is nothing to sneeze at. I am a fairly experienced home chef and I wouldn't call any of the three recipes I made "easy" per se, but none of them were terribly difficult (one was moderately tricky in places) and the instructions would probably be enough for most people to figure out any parts they weren't quite sure about. They do require you to maintain a supply of a few cooking staples (salt and pepper, olive oil and butter), although I figure most people will already do that. Most of the ingredients were locally sourced (other than the spices and a lemon), and all three of the recipes were both a decent balance of nutritional foods and pretty tasty, although I do note they were all a little heavy on using parsley. (This may be because parsley is in season in Ontario right now, though.) All of this said, though: an average price of just under ten dollars a meal is kind of pricey. But it's cheaper and healthier than eating out, so... I don't have a good conclusion here, other than to say we're doing another week because we forgot to cancel in time.

See you in seven.