Monkey business

Let’s have a break from local copperheads and Rams; time for a commercial break. So I’ll give you a couple of bits of business news.

This week, General Electric—that erstwhile powerhouse of American blue-chip manufacturing—was tossed out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Its place on the exchange will be taken by Walgreen’s.

GE was a founding member of the Dow, so this has got to bite. As recently as the 90s, under CEO Jack Welch, the company was held up as an example of how to company. One of their divisions once flew me up to Connecticut for an interview; I wasn’t offered the job but I never held it against them. However, in recent years, they’ve pretty much screwed the pooch and last year it was the worst-performing stock in the Dow.

They put out a “things are going to plan” statement after the banishment was announced, but the plan involves a lot of pulling in of horns and selling off of businesses, from the railroad to the lightbulb divisions. Sad times.

And at the other end of the business weird-shit-o-meter, yesterday the Kleptocrat might have overdosed on Ambien, causing him to accuse those wily Canadians of…well, I’ll let him speak for himself, in his own word salad:

(I'm not even going to comment on #SpaceCadetBoneSpurs' announcement that he's creating another branch of the military—separate but equal—to conquer and occupy space. And he's calling it Space Force. Because of course.)

It took GE 120 years to screw the pooch as badly as the stable genius Chaos Monkey. God help us all.