Boeing is sponsoring Trump's Freedom 250 birthday party for America. Boeing builds planes that occasionally forget how to stay in the air. The company has received more than $100 billion in federal contracts over the past decade. Now they're cutting a check to celebrate the nation's founding while simultaneously billing that same nation for defense hardware that may or may not function as advertised.
Lockheed Martin joined in. Oracle too. Three companies with billions in pending federal business decided the best way to honor America's 250th birthday was to sponsor an event run by the guy who controls their contract renewals. Revolutionary War veterans died face-down in frozen mud so that 250 years later a database company could buy a table at a Mar-a-Lago gala.
The sponsorship model works like this: Write a check to the birthday party. Wait three months. Receive a contract worth eight hundred times the check amount. Historians will call this the Invisible Hand. Economists will call it rent-seeking. Boeing calls it Tuesday.
Retail traders saw this headline and immediately started searching for a Freedom 250 ticker symbol. They found a penny stock mining company in Nevada that went up 40% before the SEC halted trading. None of them thought to short Boeing. None of them ever do.
The party celebrates America turning 250. America was founded on the principle that taxation without representation was tyranny. Now we have representation and the corporations just skip the middle part and hand the cash directly to the guy signing the checks. The Founders would be so proud they'd probably start a defense contractor.
Your July 4th cookout will not be sponsored by Lockheed Martin, which means you'll have to pay for your own hamburger meat like some kind of peasant who doesn't build fighter jets.
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