Regarding Substack's pledges

Just a brief note: I am deeply grateful to readers and a bit taken aback.

I love Substack! It’s proven to be a fantastic platform for authors like me to share their work. I’ve been blogging on WordPress for many years now, and all told, I got to about 200 followers. Then, since my professional focus in trading and investment management, several people advised me to write on SeekingAlpha. I tried that, but after a few years I got to about 220 followers.

I only started writing on Substack last September and in the seven months since, I got to nearly 3,500 subscribers! I’m not exactly sure what the magic sauce is, but it has proven very effective. Recently, Substack has been encouraging me to solicit support (I deserve to be paid for my work, says Substack), and the “Subscribe” buttons that appear in the body of articles have changed to “pledge support” buttons.

I feel a bit ambushed with all this since it comes from Substack and not from me. But I was even more taken aback that many people did respond and pledged their support.

Thank you!

I am genuinely grateful and deeply appreciate the support offered. As I haven’t yet figured out the way to respond to each personally, I wanted to express my gratitude in this way: to all who have pledged support, thank you!

Burnt by Amazon

I have not yet set up to receive payments as Substack and I have not yet been properly introduced. Not so long ago I got burnt by Amazon: for nearly four years they paid me zero in royalties so effectively everyone who purchased my books (and perhaps believed that they supported my work in this way) in fact gave their hard earned cash to Jeff Bezos and paid for his megayacht and that big space phallus. When I finally requested to be paid out, Amazon simply deleted my account and informed me that they wouldn’t pay me a penny.

Clearly, corporations will misbehave when they’re incentivized to misbehave. Amazon’s corporate culture has proven extremely aggressive. They squeeze profits and they don’t hesitate to steal where they feel they can get away with it. In doing so they violate both the content creators and their patrons - a truly ugly conduct, robbing both sides of transactions in their own marketplace.

We’ll see… I’ll think it over; I am planning to produce a documentary film about Russia’s transition from communism to capitalism based on Chapter 5 of my banned book, “Grand Deception,” and this project that might require more funding than I can spare, so I might put out my tip jar after all. But I’ll have to get to know Mr. Substack better.

FYI, in my next article I’ll discuss whether Russia’s intervention in Ukraine could be justified. As I wrote in “This time it’s different…” a few days ago, even in the west, the public sentiment seems to favor Russia, but many still claim that her invasion of Ukraine was not justified, that Russia is an aggressor and that in invading a sovereign neighboring state it had broken international law. But things are not as clear-cut as that.