Celebrities like Taylor Swift have long used a little-known Federal Aviation Administration program to shield their private jets’ flight records from public view. Now ICE is using the program to hide information about its deportation flights.
FAA’s Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed list — LADD — a specialized program developed by the private jet lobby decades ago to keep aircraft data off of public aggregator sites like FlightAware.
In case you don’t want to read 4 pages of clickbaity “little known program” speak to find the name.
Jacobin must pay writers by the word.
You know who else ran unlisted trains of deportees - or listed under some euphemistic name like “special train” or “resettlement to the east”? Can you guess?
Hint: if ICE feels the need to conceal what they’re doing, it’s because they know what they’re doing is not right. Just like the SS.
Thought this was going Epstein, but instead went
Tap for spoiler
Hitler, because of course it’s a fucking fascists move.
Two things can be true at the same time. Someone can be a fascist and a pedo.
In fact, other interesting historical parallel, there are strong suspicions that Hitler was a pedo.
How uncanny… It’s like the US was an almost perfect historical reenactment of early 3rd Reich.
Super rich celebrities and cops being the only ones not subject to public scrutiny is TRAGICOMICALLY on brand for 2025 US 🤦
The party so reliant on their beloved loopholes are cunts, what a weird bunch of morons.
But Taylor Swift doesn’t want people to know how she takes a private jet to the mailbox.
Taylor Swift obviously can’t do any wrong and she single-handedly saved the election by endorsing Harris. Because Taylor Swift is one of the good billionaires.
In the scope of things, she is. She could certainly distribute more money to her employees and go on a massive charity spree like Mackenzie Bezos, but she did gain her wealth mostly through her own work and flying a private jet is hardly the core sin of “bad” billionaires.
but she did gain her wealth mostly through her own work
When there is a large music event at a stadium or similar venue, there is hundreds of people working there for the preparations and during the event. If you claim that it was still “mostly her own work”, you could make that argument for any other billionaire too. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos… They all put in a lot of work and brought the “ideas”. I fail to see how a stage performer should be seen different.
Sure, but do you have any evidence she’s underpaying the staff? Maybe her songwriters deserve a significant share of the money, but everyone else is just doing a job, the same job they do for other acts on other nights, so just because Swift is a big name doesn’t mean they should all be rich. If she’s abusing them or demanding extra work and not compensating them for it, then yeah, she’s a villain, but just because her lights guy isn’t getting $10M for his work isn’t evidence of wrongdoing.
The other rich guys you try to compare her to did small work themselves and then just rode the work of others. Most of their wealth came about long after they were doing any work critical to the result, so they’re basically just investors extracting value from others contributing more effort and talent to the success than they do. Swift on the other hand is practically the whole reason anyone is paying anything. Whether you appreciate her music or not, Swift is actually irreplaceable and the primary driver of its value.
“I defend the billionaire’s right to pay peanuts to the peasants because I see myself as a future billionaire, even though there is significantly more chance of me winning the lottery at nearly 1 in 300million than becoming a billionaire & that’s how I justify the ludicrously disproportionate distribution of the wealth generated by a Taylor Swift concert. There’s literally no benefit to me in holding this opinion, LOL”
do you have any evidence she’s underpaying the staff?
Swift on the other hand is practically the whole reason anyone is paying anything. Whether you appreciate her music or not, Swift is actually irreplaceable and the primary driver of its value.
Because she owns the IP and is the brand. This isn’t different from Bill Gates owning the IP to DOS/Windows in the beginning and Steve Jobs being the face of the brand of Apple. And your argument also fails to address the opposite direction. Without security guards, waiters, stage riggers, stage technicians, event organizers and many more workers, none of her shows would work and people would never have started to want to pay in the first place.
The core principles of people becoming billionaires is that they own something that other people don’t own and the billionaires can extract rent from. Swift is just the brand. She doesn’t produce the music. She doesn’t organize the events. She doesn’t do anything except for singing somewhat well and looking pretty in public. The idea that his should make her a billionaire, while the security guards at her venues can’t afford to buy a house for their family from their salary is part of the ideological problem. There is no good billionaires. “Stars” are the same capitalists engaging in the same exploitation. And unlike people like Ed Sheeran who started as street musicians, or heck even Justin Bieber who started with youtube videios, Swift got the golden ticket as her father broke her into the industry thanks to his existing wealth and connections.
You’re literally talking about herself and her past creations as some illegitimate ownership. Tax her wealth away, criticize her insufficient philanthropy, but saying she has not earned the money generated from her own personal brand and performances is nonsense. Even if you think she’s due less of a percentage of the profit that the Swift brand has produced, the lights guys, the ticket takers, and the producers aren’t such a large percentage of that brand that she’s not still a billionaire. Individual people can be popular enough for millions of people to give them money and simply doing a job for them doesn’t make you a partial owner of that person’s personal brand.
Again, where is the difference to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos?
Actually talking about personal brand, we need to add Elon Musk to the mix. We see that Tesla is strongly dependent on the brand of Musk, while not providing anything unique in their products. Thereby by your logic Musk deserves all his billions and the workers at Tesla got compensated the same way that the people at Swifts brand got compensated.
You retain the logic that the capital owner is right to be the billionaire, because he or she generates the billions off what they own with minimal work put in, while the workers are compensated much less for what they work.
You cannot criticize the US oligarchy without including people like Taylor Swift. It is the same oligarchs working in the same way, favored by the same system and exploiting workers in the same way.
Most of the links I clicked on in that article are invalid.
