WOULD YOU PLEASE… NO MORE ALL CAPS!!

I LOATHE ALL CAPS.

ALWAYS HAVE.

ALL CAPS emerged in the teletype era, when ONLY CAPITAL LETTERS WERE ON THE MACHINES, which emerged in the early-to-mid 1800s, i.e., c.1835-1850.

That is now approaching 200 years ago — 188, to be exact. They’re a close relative to Morse code. It’s a modern-day dinosaur.

I’ve seen a few teletype machines. They’re ogres of monstrosity. My now-late father used ‘em in the Navy during the Korean War. I recollect seeing one being used in a small hometown FM radio station that broadcast in monoaural using a block format.

Yeah… THAT OLD.

By the way, the term “teletype” used to describe a teleprinter, first came from the Teletype Corporation in 1928, which trademarked the term, and as with xerography, now called photocopying, early copiers were Xerox brand, and people “xeroxed” papers, instead of making printed copies. Both terms, teletype, and xerox, became ubiquitously associated with both firm’s products, and in turn, became widely used generic descriptors.

The first station where I worked had one collecting dust in an unused corner near the rear entrance by the tube transmitter. Fortunately, the station’s owner had wisely transitioned to a dot-matrix printer for the AP news copy, using tractor-fed, acordion-folded paper.

The 2nd station where I worked used satellite dishes, and computers.

Digitization through the computer and Internet has changed EVERYTHING. LITERALLY, EVERY THING — including broadcast. On the whole, in my considered opinion, it’s been a blessing, but every rose has its thorn, as the saying goes (unless you buy ‘em from a florist, but then they have no fragrance, either), and that thorn in many cases is human behavior, which historically has almost always been problematic, somebodies wanting to get over on (take unfair advantage of) others, resistance to change, etc.

Now, many shows, including radio, are

Criticizing Modern “Journalism”

The writing style of the majority of bodies of work (especially and particularly “news”) found online is abysmally poor, and uninformative. It’s a problem that I bitch about with seeming regularity. Doubtlessly, there are numerous contributing factors, but it is my opinion that a predominate role has been, and continues to be, played by corporate-profit-driven, Wall-$treet-controlled “media outlets,” whose exclusive concern is… MONEY.

Nothing else.

No concern for truth, no concern for veracity, for authenticity, no concern for quality, no concern for anything but MONEY.

And nowhere is that more excruciatingly shown than at Fox News, which stinking putrid pot has had the purifying and sanitizing light of day shown upon it brought by the MULTI-BILLION dollar defamation lawsuit against it by Dominion Voting Systems of Denver, CO, charging that Fox deliberately spread malicious lies about the November 2020 General Election, falsely claiming that Dominion’s voting machines were part and parcel of a giant conspiracy and fraud to alter the outcome of the election.

They were not.

And as tranche after tranche, raft after raft of documents and communications of myriad kind have shown, and continue to show, not even Fox’s lying talking heads believed the bullshit espoused by the crazies of the Party of Trump.

But more to the point.

Today’s journalists (I use that term loosely) are piss poor writers, uninformative, and more… and worse.

Here’s an example that occurs with calculable regularity.

A person is quoted, or mentioned, in some story, but

The stock market retracted 1% yesterday and THE SKY IS FALLING!

 The way some of those clowns write, one would think the sock… er, stock market had crashed, that Mount Vesuvius had become active once again, and that nuclear war had broken out all over.

 

This is just so MUCH BULLSHIT. (Or instead, perhaps that should that be bullshittery?)

 

I mean, seriously… a 1% and a 1.6% decline?

 

Are you kidding me!?!

 

That’s a “plunge”?

It’d be like dipping the very tip of your little finger in a finger bowl moistened with a few drops of water and then claiming that you went swimming in the Pacific Ocean. 

 

If anyone went to any store anywhere and saw a sign reading “HUGE SALE! Up to 1.6% off EVERYTHING!” they’d laugh the store to shame for promoting such an asininely ludicrous bit of blatantly fraudulent puffery and nonsense.

 

The stock market is that store.

And yet,

Cancer-Causing Sunscreen Sold In America

Summer just doesn’t get any better, does it?

First, the COVID-19, and then, just when you think it’s safe to go in the water… delta variant emerges.

Back to square one.

And now, as if sunburn wasn’t enough, there’s cancer-causing sunscreen.

It’s almost like the bizarre reducēs in the 1993 Bill Murray movie “Groundhog Day.” By the way, the word “reducēs” (pronounced ree – doo – sees), is the nominative, accusative, and vocative masculine and feminine plural cases of “redux.” So now, you know.

Surely, by now, you’ve heard, or read, the news:

Carcinogenic substances, including benzene – a highly flammable industrial chemical – have been found in independent laboratory analyses performed upon 294 unique batches of sun care products from 69 different companies by Valisure a privately held New Haven, CT-based pharmaceutical analytical services company.

On May 25, 2021, Valisure published the laboratory findings that 78 sun screen and after-sun skin care products in which they found benzene, and in part, wrote that,

“Valisure LLC has tested and detected high levels of benzene, a known human carcinogen, in several brands and batches of sunscreen, which are

GameStop? GameOn? Face It: The United States Has Two Sets Of Rules

Unless you’ve been in a cave in Tora Bora for the past week, or so, by now, you’ve probably heard of the Reddit/GameStop/Robinhood ordeal.

Here are the “players”:
• Vlad Tenev, CEO of the trading app Robinhood
• National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC)
• Day traders using the Robinhood app who also were participants in a Reddit group Wall Street Bets (properly as “r/wallstreetbets” – a forum called a “subreddit” on the popular website Reddit, which is a social platform and discussion group that also rates web content.)
• GameStop, a electronics/video game retailer

Robinhood (the company) became the target of widespread outrage last week after it stopped users from purchasing shares of GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry, and other so-called meme stocks that had significantly increased in price over the past week, which was fueled by WallStreetBets Reddit users.

The long and short of it (a most befitting pun, wouldn’t you say?) is that a no-fees stock brokrage company named Robinhood, which uses an app for a mobile device to effectuate trades, had ceased processing orders on a company named GameStop, which raised the hackles of some observers, including Elon Musk, and other news reporting groups.

The reason why Robinhood ceased activity on trades for GameStop, and other companies was because a loose-knit group of day trader investors in the subReddit forum WallStreetBets – which totals over 4 million strong, and describe themselves as “degenerates” – decided to take on the abuses of Wall Street power players, most typically as hedge funds.

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A NOTE ABOUT HEDGE FUNDS:

Investopedia writes this about hedge funds:

Hedge funds are alternative investments using pooled funds that employ different strategies to earn active returns, or alpha, for their investors. Hedge funds may be aggressively managed or make use of derivatives and leverage in both domestic and international markets with the goal of generating high returns (either in an absolute sense or over a specified market benchmark).

It is important to note that hedge funds are generally only accessible to accredited investors as they require less SEC regulations than other funds. One aspect that has set the hedge fund industry apart is the fact that hedge funds face less regulation than mutual funds and other investment vehicles.

Each hedge fund is constructed to take advantage of certain identifiable market opportunities. Hedge funds use different investment strategies and thus are often classified according to investment style. There is substantial diversity in risk attributes and investments among styles.

Legally, hedge funds are most often set up as private investment limited partnerships that are open to a limited number of accredited investors and require a large initial minimum investment. Investments in hedge funds are illiquid as they often require investors to keep their money in the fund for at least one year, a time known as the lock-up period. Withdrawals may also only happen at certain intervals such as quarterly or bi-annually.

A former writer and sociologist Alfred Winslow Jones’s company, A.W. Jones & Co. launched the first hedge fund in 1949. It was while writing an article about current investment trends for Fortune in 1948 that Jones was inspired to try his hand at managing money. He raised $100,000 (including $40,000 out of his own pocket) and set forth to try to minimize the risk in holding long-term stock positions by short selling other stocks. This investing innovation is now referred to as the classic long/short equities model. Jones also employed leverage to enhance returns.

In 1952, Jones altered the structure of his investment vehicle, converting it from a general partnership to a limited partnership and adding a 20% incentive fee as compensation for the managing partner. As the first money manager to combine short selling, the use of leverage shared risk through a partnership with other investors and a compensation system based on investment performance, Jones earned his place in investing history as the father of the hedge fund.

Hedge funds went on to dramatically outperform most mutual funds in the 1960s and gained further popularity when a 1966 article in Fortune highlighted an obscure investment that outperformed every mutual fund on the market by double-digit figures over the previous year and by high double-digits over the previous five years.

High-profile money managers deserted the traditional mutual fund industry in droves in the early 1990s, seeking fame and fortune as hedge fund managers. Unfortunately, history repeated itself in the late 1990s and into the early 2000s as a number of high-profile hedge funds, including Robertson’s, failed in spectacular fashion.

Since that era, the hedge fund industry has grown substantially. Today the hedge fund industry is massive—total assets under management in the industry are valued at more than $3.2 trillion according to the 2018 Preqin Global Hedge Fund Report. Based on statistics from research firm Barclays hedge, the total number of assets under management for hedge funds jumped by 2335% between 1997 and 2018.

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The hedge funds had all “shorted” GameStop, which is well-known tactic to make money by the failure of a stock – “failure,” defined as a reduced price. In this case, Wall Street hedge fund managers had all “shorted” GameStop, and others, waiting for the price to drop before they sold the shares they were holding.

In a “short” sale (as it pertains to Wall Street trading), an entity “borrows” a stock from its owner, and holds it for a period of time, in anticipation that its price will drop enough so that they can then sell it (return its purchase price to the owner), and pocket the difference. It’s not illegal, and has been done for quite some time.

As you might imagine, by so doing (shorting), a stock can significantly, and adversely be affected.

But… a short sale can “go bad,” and that’s what the 4 million+ members of the subReddit group WallStreetBets did – ruin the day (or even longer) of many vulture capitalists hedge fund managers by driving up the price per share of GameStop.

GameStop, which has the ticker symbol GME, and is traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), has faced a decline in sales, 7 brokerages have issued twelve-month price objectives for GameStop’s shares which range from $3.50 to $33.00 per share. And on average, they expect GameStop’s per share stock price to be $11.93 in the next twelve months. That suggests that the stock has a possible downside of 96.3%.

For the last 5 years, GameStop stock price has been relatively stable, and only minimally changed, and has ranged from the lower $30 range to slightly over $4 per share. Their last dividend payment was March 14, 2019, which was $0.38 per share, which represented an increase from 2012 when it was $0.12 per share. Aside from the most recent price fluctuations, over its lifespan, GameStop’s price per share has ranged from $3.91 to $63.68 from February 2002 though August 2020.

At its highest, GameStop was valued at $483 per share on January 25, 2021. That’s where the Wall Street Bets Redditors (participants in Reddit) come into play. Their trading of the stock – specifically as purchases – drove up the stock to terrific heights, which in turn, caused problems with the hedge funds that held a short position on the stock – SIGNIFICANT problems.

In effect, the Redditors caused what’s called a “short squeeze” which is a market condition that occurs when investors who are betting against the stock (thinking it will fall in price) are forced to close out their position by buying the stock, which in turn, adds fuel to the fire.

So far this year, the Redditors have cost short-sellers over $19 billion in losses on GameStop alone. Much of Wall Street’s trades are now done by computer algorithm, which almost completely eliminates human involvement. So day traders, and others who may use apps to trade, are an anomaly in an otherwise almost-wholly automated market.

Melvin Capital, a roughly $12 billion hedge fund has suffered a more than 30% decline largely due to its short position in GameStop.

Maplelane Capital, another New York-based hedge fund, similarly faced a decline of about 30%, accoring to The Wall Street Journal’s report.

Andrew Left, a famed short-seller with Citron, also felt the heat from Reddit investors after he predicted last week that the stock would fall by 50%. He ultimately closed out his short in GameStop for a loss, as did Melvin Capital.

The epic short-squeeze in shares of GameStop last week focused attention upon the common practice of Payment For Order Flow by brokerage firms after Robinhood restricted trading in a handful of volatile stocks.

Payment For Order Flow (PFOF) is a practice in which brokerage firms are compensated to route their customers’ trading orders to certain market makers to execute the trades rather than directly to an exchange, which creates a potential conflict of interest between the brokerage and the customer.

The PFOF practice has enabled $0 commission trading, which was jump started by Robinhood’s launch in 2015, and was considered groundbreaking at the time when most investors had to pay upwards of $10 for every buy or sell order.

According to a SEC filing by Robinhood, they make a bulk of their money from the PFOF practice, and generated upwards of $100 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2020 from a number of market makers, including Citadel Securities.

Now, another free-trading brokerage firm is bucking the PFOF practice and shifting its business model to tipping.

In a blog post on Monday, Public.com said it would end the practice of selling its customers’ order flow to market makers, and would instead route them directly to exchanges like the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange.

The company issued a press release which stated in part that they would remove that inherent conflict of interest from their business model, “To align our incentives with those of our members, we will stop participating in the practice of PFOF and instead introduce a tipping feature on trades. Trades will remain commission-free and tipping is entirely optional.”

APEX, which is Public.com’s clearinghouse firm, was notified on January 30 of their intent to be taken off the “PFOF rails,” according to a blog post by the company, noting that all trade orders at the brokerage firm will be directly routed to exchanges for execution. The company said that transition away from PFOF and towards tipping could take a few weeks, but that “Transparency is a core pillar of building trust, and we think it’s important that we live up to our name. Direct routing to the exchanges is more expensive, and therefore we’re turning what used to be a revenue stream (PFOF) into a cost center and we’re optimistic that the difference will be offset by the optional tipping feature.”

Now, nearly every brokerage firm offers $0 commission trading.

But the PFOF practice is facing backlash from many, including venture capital investor Bill Gurley, who tweeted on Sunday, “If the SEC/government wants to ‘fix the plumbing’ the number one thing they should do is ban Payment for Order Flow.”

Gurley said that the practice “smells bad” and is already outlawed in the United Kingdom, and in Canada.

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businessinsider.com

We’ve Seen This Before: The Current GameStop Drama Has Grassroots In The 2008 Housing Crash

by Liam O’Hara

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• Main Street played by the rules, but Wall Street changed them mid-game.

• Retail traders on Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets had a simple buy-and-hold strategy for an overleveraged short position on GameStop held by Melvin Capital — until Wall Street shut it down.

• The game has been rigged all along and now it’s out in the open for all to see.

It’s been only a few days since news about the feud between Main Street and Wall Street entered the public’s awareness and the internet is already filled with more articles and stories about it than one could realistically hope to keep up with.

As a retail investor who bought a long position in GameStop (I am not a financial advisor, I just like the stock) only hours before its historic ascent, I only have my limited perspective and experience to offer. But, as a millennial who came of age during the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 — and decided to study finance and accounting specifically because of it — I believe I have a somewhat unique, but relatable viewpoint.

For many retail traders, GameStop was a chance to get in on the ground floor of an arguably undervalued stock with the added benefit of watching the high and mighty of Wall Street squirm after being caught in an embarrassing position.

We’ve been through this type of thing before.

It is impossible to escape the fact that many of these small-time traders have vivid memories of the financial equivalent of an atomic bomb that Wall Street and government regulators dropped on the world in 2008. In the fallout of the housing crisis, hundreds of millions of people’s lives were upended.

Save for a few, like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, many Wall Street banks came out ahead because of obscure and convoluted financial derivatives that left regular people holding the bag.

Unemployment skyrocketed, families’ houses were foreclosed on, pensions were decimated, and the middle class was suddenly forced to scrape by just to feed their families. To add insult to injury, the federal government awarded these same banks $700 billion dollars of taxpayer money because they were “too big to fail.”

I was only 18 years old then and didn’t understand much about what was happening, but seeing my family suffer motivated me to learn more, and I’ve learned much since then. In many ways I’ve been waiting 13 years to write about it.

I was raised in a working class family in the suburbs of middle America.

My parents both worked hard to provide the best upbringing and educationavailable to us. Both are college educated and have worked in a variety of jobs, with my mother eventually settling into a role working for the county, and my father working in mortgage lending until the subprime mortgage crisis when he was forced to look for work elsewhere which he found at a large manufacturing company.

As the dust of the crisis settled and the recession loomed on the horizon, my dad was eventually let go during one of the multiple rounds of layoffs by his employer. We were fortunate enough to keep our house, but had little more to spend since most of the jobs available at that point were minimum wage. Between meager wages, intermittent unemployment benefits, and trips to the food banks, we managed to make it through one of the deepest recessions in decades.

In October 2008, two months after I began my freshman year at university (only made possible by generous scholarships), the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, was

Arrogant Kelly Loeffler

Loeffler: “Not dropping out” of Georgia US Senate race after stock trade controversy law violation

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/499116-loeffler-says-she-wont-drop-out-of-georgia-senate-race-after-stock-trade

Kelly Loeffler was appointed by narrow-margin-of-victory Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp to fill the unexpired term of three-term Georgia Republican US Senator Johnny Isakson who resigned from office at the end of 2019 due to Parkinson’s disease.

The gubernatorially-appointed temporary fill-in “Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler told Politico she is not dropping out of the Georgia Senate special election despite facing scrutiny over $20 million in stock sales she made following a closed-door Senate briefing in January about the coronavirus.

““Not only am I not dropping out, but I’m gonna win,” Loeffler told the news outlet Thursday.

“Loeffler, who is married to New York Stock Exchange CEO Jeff Sprecher, has said she does not control her own stock portfolio and that she was unaware of the exchanges. She has submitted documents to the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, both of which are investigating trading action among senators around the coronavirus pandemic.”

Loeffloer’s net worth is reportedly well over $500,000,000, and is being investigted by the FBI and the Senate for suspicious stock sales timing in response to insider knowledge of the coronavirus obtained in the Senate.

Republican Coronavirus Bullshittery Abounds

Lawmakers’ Stock Trades and Other Virus Outrages

Some lawmakers have a lot of explaining to do. Plus, punishing poor people and shaping up the cruise-ship industry.

By Joe Nocera 3/20/2020, 10:47:09 AM

Joe Nocera is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. His latest project is the Bloomberg-Wondery podcast “The Shrink Next Door.”

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Of the many things taking place in Washington that make your blood boil, the — how should I put this? — timely stock trades by senators during the coronavirus outbreak has to go right to the top of the list. Two of them have tried to explain them away, but the details are just so… suspicious.

At least three Republicans and one Democrat 1 sold stock before the country got serious about Covid-19, but let’s focus on one: Kelly Loeffler.

A Republican from Georgia, Loeffler has been in the Senate for less than three months; she was appointed to fill the seat of Senator Johnny Isakson, who retired early for health reasons. She has a Wall Street background — she was in investor relations at the New York Stock Exchange, where she married the boss, Jeffrey Sprecher, the Chief Executive Cfficer of Intercontinental Exchange Inc., which owns NYSE

On Jan. 24, Loeffler attended a Senate briefing on the coronavirus, which she tweeted about. That same day, she and her husband began selling stock. By the time they were finished, they had dumped 27 companies, including Exxon Mobil and AutoZone, saving millions of dollars when the market later tanked. (Senate financial disclosure forms don’t give exact numbers.)

A month later, she sent out this tweet:

Merry F’n Christmas… there’s not enough love on the borderline, or anywhere else.

Musicians and artists are the voices of the prophets.

They ARE our prophets.

Their consciences are often our nation’s collective voice of conscience. For many radio stations, the only profit they care about is traded on Wall Street, and their consciences are not tethered to trouble, or pricked by care for others’ problems. Their profit is all that matters, for their god is green and cold, and easily fits into any wallet. It has crowded out natural love in the calculi of their now-inhuman hearts.

And, for one reason, or another, it seems that these days, there are very few voices “crying in the wilderness,” or elsewhere, about social injustice.

But three years ago – in 2015 – musician/artist Chip Taylor wrote a song entitled “Refugee Children.” It should be heard by everyone, though it certainly hasn’t.

Whether one is a believer in the story of the virgin birth, or any god, the basic fundamental element of that ageless story is that a small family with a young pregnant bride were refugees, homeless, with only the clothes on their backs.

Any well-read person, regardless of any religious belief, or not, should be familiar with the story told in

Does This Trump-Caused Market Slump Foretell Recession?

Of course, the Stock Market is NOT the economy, but for many, it’s the easiest touchstone to consider approximating the economy. And because most Americans are NOT heavily invested in Wall Street, its performance only nominally and indirectly affects them.

However, for those traders whose livelihood depends upon its gains or losses, such as corporate and investment banks, and brokerage houses, speculators, derivatives traders, hedge and other type funds, and the like, it doesn’t portend well.

And then, Steve Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury, while vacationing in Mexico, decided to call on Sunday the CEOs of 6 of the largest banks in America (Brian Moynihan of Bank of America; Michael Corbat of Citi; David Solomon of Goldman Sachs; Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase; James Gorman of Morgan Stanley; and Tim Sloan of Wells Fargo), and then Twitterized it ex post facto. The media managers at Treasury decided to inform the public that… “The CEOs confirmed that they have ample liquidity available for lending to consumer, business markets, and all other market operations. He also confirmed that they have not experienced any clearance or margin issues, and that the markets continue to function properly.”

The Current White House Occupant is Mad at Mnuchin, and wants to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell, ostensibly because Mnuchin told POS45 that Powell would be a good choice for Fed Chairman. That’s according to four anonymous people, who were described by Bloomberg News as being “four people familiar with the matter” and speak “on condition of anonymity.” Where I come from, and live, that’s called cowardice. It might be called something else in Trumpanzeeville.

In the days ahead, POS45 will

A Guide To Increasing Company Value

Almost everyone who has worked in sales has heard the mantras “the customer is always right,” and “the customer is your most important person.”

And as anyone who has worked in healthcare can attest, neither of those statements are true.

For example, consider the patient who, arriving at the ED (Emergency Department) said to the physician, “My doc says my sugar is high so he gave me this medicine for diabetes.”

Naturally, the physician asked, “Do you take it?”

The patient replied saying, “No, ’cause I don’t have diabetes, just high sugar.”

And then, another Physician who explained to the patient’s mother her child’s diagnosis and therapeutic interventions saying, “She has a concussion, she needs to rest in bed in a quiet dark room until she is better.”

The mother then asked, “Can she go to the fair?”

Conventional wisdom often monikered as “common sense,” sometimes follows the pithy axiom that “common sense isn’t so common anymore.”

For years, I’ve maintained that the customer is NOT “always right,” nor are they the “most important person” in any business.

Instead, the most important person in any business are the employees.

Some CEOs have gotten a bad rap, often justifiably, because while seeking to return corporate profit and shareholder return, they’ve cut resources and employees. Like the abusive Pharaoh of the Exodus account in the Old Testament, they demand to “make more bricks with less hay.” Of course, we know how that story ended – not well.

So naturally, it delighted me to read some time ago that Sir Richard Branson, a renown entrepreneur and philanthropist, has similarly long held that thought and said, “Put your staff first, customers second, and shareholders third.”

In a 2014 interview with Inc. magazine, Sir Richard said,

BIG INSURANCE Companies Fear Single Payer For ONE Reason

A friend had shared the opening paragraph, upon which I remarked.

My response follows.

“At the risk of stating the obvious, I feel compelled to note that insurance companies do not exist to provide health care. They exist to make money. Big money. Big money at your time of greatest vulnerability. This happens by raising income as much as possible and limiting “risk” as much as possible. Now go ponder the implications.”

—/—

And that is the single greatest reason why a

End ObamaCare’s Health Insurance Monopoly

Fact is, “ObamaCare” – which is properly known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or ACA for short – though it’s monikered with POTUS Obama’s name, was largely a Republican brainchild from the über-conservative Heritage Institution.

The cornerstone of the act is predicated upon two items which are the very heart of the act: 1.) Guaranteed Coverage, and; 2.) Community Rating.

In was, in essence

Your Tax Dollars At Work: Taxpayers Subsidize CEO Pay, Here’s How #BonusLoophole

Executive Excess 2016: The Wall Street CEO Bonus Loophole

This 23rd annual report reveals how taxpayers are subsidizing financial crisis windfalls.

By Sarah Anderson and Sam Pizzigati, August 31, 2016

This report is the first to calculate how much taxpayers have been subsidizing executive bonuses at the nation’s largest banks.

The study focuses on a 1993 Clinton administration reform that was intended to rein in runaway CEO pay by capping the tax deductibility of executive compensation at $1 million. But the new rule included a huge loophole for stock options and other “performance” pay. As a result, the more corporations hand out in executive bonuses, the lower their tax bill. This perverse incentive for excessive compensation has been a major factor in the explosion of CEO pay.

The financial bailout program closed this loophole for recipients, but only until

To What Extent is the American Economy Propped Up by Arms Sales?

What should one expect when the whole damn defense industry has been whored out to arm the krazees of the world?

In a very prophetic manner, in his Farewell Address to the nation, January 17, 1961, then-President Dwight David Eisenhower warned about the “military industrial complex,” saying:

“We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

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US sells $11 BILLION worth of arms to Qatar

Published time: July 15, 2014 09:46
Edited time: July 16, 2014 12:55

US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel (L) and Qatar’s Minister of State for Defense Affairs Hamad bin Ali al-Atiyah (C) arrive for a weapons sales signing ceremony at the Pentagon on July 14, 2014 in Washington, DC. (AFP Photo / Mandel Ngan)

US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel (L) and Qatar’s Minister of State for Defense Affairs Hamad bin Ali al-Atiyah (C) arrive for a weapons sales signing ceremony at the Pentagon on July 14, 2014 in Washington, DC. (AFP Photo / Mandel Ngan)

Washington and Doha have signed the largest arms deal of the year, preparing to enhance Qatar’s military capabilities with $11 billion-worth of Apache assault helicopters, PAC-2 missile defense complexes and Javelin man-portable anti-tank missiles.

The deal has been signed on Monday in Pentagon by US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Qatari Defense Minister Hamad bin Ali al-Attiyah. Altogether Qatar is buying 10 batteries of Patriot missile defense systems and 500 Javelin anti-tank missiles manufactured by US defense industry giants Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, and 24 Apache helicopters made by Boeing, an anonymous US official told the AFP.

Is a college education ~really~ all it’s cracked up to be… anymore? Or, why has tuition increased 300% in 30 years?

College costs expose the false meritocracy of the American dream

The cost of an education in America has risen so much that only the wealthy and indebted can attend. The system doesn’t work

Post by Chris Arnade Photography.

Chris Arnade received his PhD in physics from Johns Hopkins University in 1992. He spent the next 20 years working as a trader on Wall Street. He left trading in 2012 to focus on photography. His “Faces of Addiction” series explores addiction in the south Bronx neighbourhood in New York City. Follow him on Twitter: @Chris_arnade

Chris Arnade

theguardian.com, Wednesday 18 June 2014 07.30 EDT

As a college student, Chris Arnade picked Florida watermelons to pay for school. His daughter can’t do the same.
Photograph: Alamy

When I entered Wall Street in 1993 with a PhD, I was an anomaly. One of my bosses was a failed baseball player, another a frustrated jazz musician. One of the guys running one of the most profitable businesses, in both my firm and all of Wall Street, was a former elevator repairman. Their college degrees – if they even had them – were from all sorts of schools, not simply the Ivy leagues.

By the time I left Wall Street a few years ago, the only people being hired were the “play it safe kids”. The ones with degrees from Princetons and Harvards. You know, the ones who had organized a soup kitchen in eighth grade (meaning, really their parents had) to load their resumes. The ones who had gone to the state science fair (meaning their parents or nannies had spent many weekends and nights helping with a science project).

 Few of these hires where rags-to-riches stories. Most had parents very much like those already working on Wall Street – wealthy and dedicated to getting their children whatever they needed, regardless of cost. Many were in fact the children of Wall Street parents.

It is not just Wall Street. Most of the best paying jobs now require a college degree, or post-college degree, and still rarely hire from state schools. They want Ivy schools, or similar. That feels safe.

This is a problem. Businesses have abdicated their primary role in hiring, handing it over to colleges, which have gladly accepted that role, and now charge a shit-load for it. Want a job kid? Pay $60,000 a year for four years. Then maybe pay for another two to get a MBA.

Yet, those best schools do not teach kids anything radically different from what the average colleges do. They do not prepare them better for the day-to-day work of Wall Street. Those finance skills are learned with experience and instinct after two years of training – on the job.

Rather, a prestigious education is a badge given to students who can follow the established rules, run through the maze, jump through hoops, color between the lines, and sit quietly. It shows that they really, really want to be a grown-up. For that, they pay $60,000 per year.

It has become a test. Are you part of the meritocracy?

It also has become a barrier of entry to professionalism – a very costly barrier of entry.

A rigid system of ‘feeder’ schools is in place for parents who want their children to attend schools like Harvard, which have a reputation for then ‘feeding’ major Wall Street firms. Photograph: Porter Gifford/Corbis

Who Pays Unskilled Labor US $80,000/year?!

“For Scripture says, “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain,” and “The worker deserves his wages.”“
-1Tim5:18

Lately, much has been made of raising the Minimum Wage, which does nothing more than establish a minimum standard.

But who cares about minimums?

We should strive to exceed!

Some well-known, publicly-traded, highly profitable firms, however, revel in greed, and wallow in the slop, when they can do far better for the employees who operate their businesses.

The question is often asked “why pay unskilled workers $10 or even more per hour?”

It’s a valid question, and deserves a genuinely thoughtful response.

So, let’s pose that question to BIG OIL COMPANIES in Williston, North Dakota, where…

“oilfield companies pay unskilled 19 year-olds $80,000 a year.”

 

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/mall-middle-what-used-be-nowhere

by Dan Weissmann
Monday, June 16, 2014 – 15:21

Williston, North Dakota, has the nation’s highest rents. Thanks to the fracking boom, a basic apartment in Williston costs more than something similar in New York or San Francisco. And it comes with a lot fewer amenities.

For instance, shopping. If Walmart doesn’t have it, the nearest outlet is at least two hours away. Now, a Swiss investment firm has announced plans to

Analysis – Examining the Record: Is Alabama Governor Bentley a “Jobs Creator” or a Drag on the State Economy?

When campaigning for the office of Alabama’s Governor, Robert Bentley – a retired dermatologist physician who at the time was an elected representative from Tuscaloosa County – promised if elected governor that, “I will forgo a salary as state representative for the rest of my term and will not accept a salary as Governor until Alabama reaches full employment.”
ref: http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2010/06/robert_bentley_extends_no-sala.html

When pressed on the matter, he later defined “full employment” as having state unemployment somewhere around 5%. It is a promise to which, as of the date of this entry – 12 April 2014 – he has kept. In other words, Alabama has NOT reached “full employment,” and he has not been paid a salary. He has, however, been compensated for out-of-pocket expenses (the governor’s office has a budget, so why would he personally have any such expenses for work in an official capacity?), though he has received – as legislator, a legally-mandated $1.00 per month salary. Since his election to the governorship, he has not received a salary.

Let’s examine Governor Bentley‘s employment record.

During Governor Robert Bentley’s watch, International Paper – the large paper mill formerly known as Champion Paper, in Courtland, and the largest employer in Lawrence County – closed and cost the area economy & state 1100 jobs. Those jobs were

BIG OIL’s Corrupting Influence in American Politics: Propping up Corrupt Regimes to Prop Up Profits

Report

Slick Moves

The SEC could help tackle corruption in resource-rich countries around the world — but the oil industry is getting in the way.

• BY Zorka Milin , Barnaby Pace
• MARCH 7, 2014

Angola, Africa’s second-largest oil producer, is regarded as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. And American oil lobbyists are only making the situation worse: They are exploiting Angola by seeking to delay and weaken the implementation of a crucial U.S. transparency law.

That law, Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Act, also known as the Cardin-Lugar amendment, promises a breakthrough in preventing dirty deals and illicit payments being made for natural resources around the world, similar to the shady transaction recently uncovered by Foreign Policy. If implemented fully, the law would make U.S. oil and mining companies disclose the payments they make to governments across the world, including in Angola. However, oil lobbyists have been making misguided arguments that laws in Angola and three other countries prevent the required disclosures.

Off Shore Oil Drilling Rig – MARTIN BUREAU/AFP/Getty Images

Angolan officials secretly profiting from the country’s oil riches is not a surprise. It is only the latest episode in a sad history that goes back for decades. Global Witness, where we work, began exposing the complicity of the international oil and banking industries in the plundering of state assets during Angola’s 40-year civil war in our 1999 report A Crude Awakening. This was followed by our 2002 report All the Presidents’ Men, which called on the oil companies operating in Angola to “Publish What You Pay” (PWYP). Under this rallying call, Global Witness co-launched the PWYP campaign, which is now an international coalition of more than 790 civil society organizations in over 60 countries, including Angola, advocating for transparency laws such as Section 1504.

These efforts are intended to prevent scandals similar to the Trafigura deal covered in Foreign Policy, which provide a glimpse of the endemic corruption in Angola‘s oil industry. Only a few days before Foreign Policy published its story, media reports about leaked documents relating to other corruption claims caused the share price of SBM Offshore, a Dutch oil services company operating in Angola, to plummet 17.9 percent when markets opened. SBM released a statement challenging the validity of the leaked documents, saying that they are partial, taken out of context, contain outdated information, and are not representative of the facts. SBM had also already disclosed to its investors that it was conducting an internal investigation into questionable payments in Angola. However, the dramatic stock drop suggests that SBM investors had not anticipated the scale of the corruption risk exposure.

Another oil services company active in Angola, Weatherford International, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and headquartered in Switzerland, has recently pleaded guilty to violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), including bribery of the executives of Sonangol, Angola’s state oil company. It has agreed to pay fines of $253 million to settle the case, one of the largest FCPA settlements ever.

These cases illustrate the urgent need for transparency in Angola’s oil sector. The successful implementation of

In Defense of #Infrastructure Spending

At the federal level, TEApublican types have decried our national deficit, much – if not most – of which came about as a result of placing the price of a decade of warfare on a proverbial credit card. I refer, of course, to the Persian Gulf War, Gulf War II, Operation Desert Shield/Storm and the invasion of Afghanistan, etc., all of which occurred during the previous administration.

Compounding that problem was that corporate and personal income tax rates upon the wealthiest was cut, while simultaneously, the veritable house of cards was crumbling, having been built upon the miry, sinking sands of Wall Street deregulation & greed gone wild.

Nevertheless, as our nation has struggled and clawed its way back to some semblance of fiscal sanity, there have been voices arising whom assert that the federal government’s “bailout” of banks & other large, corporate enterprise has been a gross mistake, and that such a bailout should have never occurred. And, while there will doubtless be volumes written, and debates held about the good and the bad of the ordeal, what’s been done, has been done, and it’s practically all over, but the crying. So the only thing we can do now, is live & learn, and move on.

And yet, respecting one underlying problem which arose corollary to the matter, is the loss of jobs here at home. Again, it was complicated by ‘globalization,’ which – good, bad, or indifferent – is

Research: WalMart’s Low Wages Burden Taxpayers

The high cost of low living…

“Walmart’s employees receive $2.66 billion in government help every year, or about $420,000 per store.
They are also the top recipients of Medicaid in numerous states.
Why does this occur?
Walmart fails to provide a livable wage and decent healthcare benefits, costing U.S. taxpayers an annual average of $1.02 billion in healthcare costs.
This direct public subsidy is being given to offset the failures of an international corporate giant who shouldn’t be shifting part of its labor costs onto the American taxpayers.”

You’re the life of the party, everybody’s host
Still you need somewhere you can hide
All your good time friends
And your farewell to has-beens
Lord knows, just along for the ride

You think you’re a survivor
But boy, you better think twice
No one rides for nothin’
So, step up and pay the price

Dedicated to the GOP & other radical TEApublicans who worship the “almighty” dollar, tax cuts for the über wealthy, and their multinational corporate prophets.

---

Hidden Taxpayer Costs

Disclosures of Employers Whose Workers and Their Dependents are Using State Health Insurance Programs

Updated January 18, 2012

Since the mid-20th Century, most Americans have obtained health insurance through workplace-based coverage. In recent years there has been a decline in such coverage caused by a rise in the number of jobs that do not provide coverage at all and growth in the number of workers who decline coverage because it is too expensive.

Faced with the unavailability or unaffordability of health coverage on the job, growing numbers of lower-income workers are turning to taxpayer-funded healthcare programs such as Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

This trend is putting an added burden on programs that are already under stress because of fiscal constraints caused by medical inflation and federal cutbacks. Many states are curtailing benefits and tightening eligibility requirements.

It also raises the issue of whether states are being put in a position of subsidizing the cost-cutting measures of private sector employers.

Across the country, policymakers and others concerned about the healthcare system are pressing for disclosure of information on those employers whose workers (and their dependents) end up in taxpayer-funded programs.

The following is a summary of the employer disclosure that has come to light so far. It includes two cases (Massachusetts and Missouri) in which the information was produced as a result of legislation. The other cases involved requests by legislators or reporters. The latter situations have sometimes resulted in data that are incomplete or imprecise, which suggests that only legislatively mandated, systematic disclosure will tell the whole story.

This compilation was originally produced by Good Jobs First as part of its preparation of testimony given before the Maryland legislature on an employer disclosure bill. A version of that testimony can be found here [1].

Alabama
In April 2005 the Mobile Register published an article citing data from the Alabama Medicaid Agency on companies in the state with employees whose children are participating in Medicaid. The newspaper obtained a list from the agency of 63 companies whose employees had 100 or more children in the program as of mid-March 2005. At the top of the list was Wal-Mart, whose employees had 4,700 children in the program. Following it were McDonald’s (1,931), Hardee’s (884) and Burger King (861). The data were similar to information obtained from the same agency by the Montgomery Advertiser two months earlier.

Sources: Sean Reilly, “Medicaid Providing Health Care for Kids of Working Families,” Mobile Register, April 17, 2005 and John Davis and Jannell McGrew, “Health Plans Not Family Friendly,” Montgomery Advertiser, February 22, 2005, p.B6.

Arizona
In July 2005 the state Department of Economic Security issued data on the largest private employers with workers receiving taxpayer-financed medical insurance through the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System. At the top of the list was Wal-Mart, with about 2,700 workers–or 9.6 percent of its Arizona workforce–participating in the program. It was followed by

Hostess Twinkies go Bye-Bye… for now. But why? Who’s to blame?

Who’s to Blame for the Hostess Bankruptcy: Wall Street, Unions, or Carbs?

By Jordan Weissmann

Try all of the above.

There are two important things to realize about this rather sad situation. First: Twinkie, Wonder, and all the other high-calorie marvels of culinary science Hostess sells aren’t going to disappear from shelves for good. One of its competitors will likely swoop in, buy them up, and restart production. So you can stop bidding on $100 boxes of Sno Balls on eBay.

Hostess Brands, the maker of Twinkie and Wonder Bread, is getting ready to bake its last corn-syrupy snack cake. After failing to win major contract concessions from one of its key labor unions, the beleaguered 82-year-old company has asked a federal bankruptcy court for permission to start liquidating its assets — or, in real person speak, begin the process of selling off pieces of the company to the highest bidder while laying off most of its 18,500 workers. (Reuters)

Second: This is not a simple story that anybody should try to slot neatly into their political talking points. It’s not just about Wall Street preying on Main Street, or big bad labor unions sucking a wholesome American company dry. It’s about an entire galaxy of bad decisions that will cost many people their jobs and money.

As David Kaplan chronicled at length for Fortune earlier this year, the roots of this debacle go back to when Hostess entered its first bankruptcy in 2004. Not unlike the situation automakers would find themselves in a few years later, the company was collapsing under the weight of flagging sales, overly generous union contracts replete with ridiculous work rules, and gobs of debt. But unlike the automakers, the five years Hostess spent trying to fix itself in Chapter 11 didn’t fix its fundamental problems.

Instead, they set the stage for its eventual demise. A private equity company, Ripplewood Holdings, paid about $130 million dollars to take Hostess private, and the company’s two major unions, the Teamsters and the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, sacrificed about $110 million in annual wages and benefits. But

The Oracle at Delphi: Mitt Romney’s direct tie to increased unemployment in North Alabama

The average reader may not be aware that there was once a huge Delphi plant in Limestone county, Alabama, which facility was located directly across from Calhoun Community College.

Mitt Romney owned a significant interest in a firm that profited by laying off workers, dumping their pensions, moving to China, and then profiting rapaciously from the TARP bailout. That large plant – one among many, with the largest one being in Alabama – was the Delphi Steering Gear facility in Tanner, near Decatur, in Limestone County.

It was one of North Alabama‘s LARGEST employers – with emphasis on “was.”

The men & women who made careers there, whose labors enabled their children to attend college, provided their families’ clothing, groceries, housing & healthcare, and provided for their own retirement, and which was a union shop, was shuttered several years ago.

Most of what news I recall about it centered around how corporate traders, not unions, were wanting even more & more profit when they were already profitable. Time and time again, the workers took cuts in benefits & pay to keep their jobs for as long as they could… all to no avail.

Like a gazelle savaged on the plains of the Kalahari Desert in Africa, that once prosperous plant has been laid to waste, and there are only industrial skeletal remains. Even the human buzzards, scavenging metal for recycling from the industrial carcass, have left. For many years now, the hollow exterior hulk, instead of employees, materials & labor, has been drawing cobwebs, dust & rust. And soon, like all things left unattended, it too will crumble.

There are no taxes paid to Limestone county, or to nearby Decatur, Athens or Huntsville, or to Alabama for roads, schools, police & fire protection. But there is an even greater issue, one which is exceedingly more weighty and sorrowful. As a result of it all, there is no hope, there are no jobs, and there is no future.

Here’s the even more disturbing part: Mitt Romney had his hand in that pie.

And yet the saddest and most perplexing part is, that most Alabamians will vote for the GOP nominee/candidate.

Following the economic investigative report are historical local news reports that show the progression about the issue (which validate the economic investigative report by Greg Palast), from the:
• Decatur Daily,
• Huntsville Times,
• Associated Press,
• Athens-Limestone News Courier,
• Saginaw News (via MLive.com), and
• Wall Street Journal,
dating 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009 & 2010.

For the benefit of the reader, Greg Palast is an economist and financial investigator turned journalist whose series on vulture funds appeared on BBC Television’s Newsnight. He is the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin) and, most recently, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps (Seven Stories). For additional information about him, his website is: http://www.gregpalast.com.

—

Mitt Romney’s Bailout Bonanza

Greg Palast, October 17, 2012   |    This article appeared in the November 5, 2012 edition of The Nation.

This investigation was supported by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute and by the Puffin Foundation. Elements of it appear in Palast’s new book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps (Seven Stories). Research assistance by Zach D. Roberts, Ari Paul, Nader Atassi and Eric Wuestewald.

2012 GOP Presidential Nominee Mitt Romney (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Mitt Romney’s opposition to the auto bailout has haunted him on the campaign trail, especially in Rust Belt states like Ohio. There, in September, the Obama campaign launched television ads blasting Romney’s November 2008 New York Times op-ed, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” But Romney has done a good job of concealing, until now, the fact that he and his wife, Ann, personally gained at least $15.3 million from the bailout—and a few of Romney’s most important Wall Street donors made more than $4 billion. Their gains, and the Romneys’, were astronomical—more than 3,000 percent on their investment.

It all starts with Delphi Automotive, a former General Motors subsidiary whose auto parts remain essential to GM’s production lines. No bailout of GM—or Chrysler, for that matter—could have been successful without saving Delphi. So, in addition to making massive loans to automakers in 2009, the federal government sent, directly or indirectly, more than $12.9 billion to Delphi—and to the hedge funds that had gained control over it.

One of the hedge funds profiting from that bailout—
$1.28 billion so far—is Elliott Management, directed by 
Paul Singer. According to TheWall Street Journal, Singer has given more to support GOP candidates—$2.3 million—than anyone else on Wall Street this election season. His personal giving is matched by that of his colleagues at Elliott; collectively, they have donated $3.4 million to help elect Republicans this season, while giving only $1,650 to Democrats. And Singer is influential with the GOP presidential candidate; he’s not only an informal adviser but, according to theJournal, his support was critical in helping push Representative Paul Ryan onto the ticket.

Singer, whom Fortune magazine calls a “passionate defender of the 1%,” has carved out a specialty investing in distressed firms and distressed nations, which he does by buying up their debt for pennies on the dollar and then demanding payment in full. This so-called “vulture investor” received $58 million on Peruvian debt that he snapped up for $11.4 million, and $90 million on Congolese debt that he bought for a mere $20 million. In the process, he’s built one of the largest private equity firms in the nation, and over decades he’s racked up an unusually high average return on investments of 14 percent.

Other GOP presidential hopefuls chased Singer’s endorsement, but Mitt chased Singer with his own checkbook, investing at least $1 million with Elliott through Ann Romney’s blind trust (it could be far more, but the Romneys have declined to disclose exactly how much). Along the way, Singer gained a reputation, according to Fortune, “for strong-arming his way to profit.” That is certainly what happened at Delphi.

* * *

Delphi, once the Delco unit of General Motors, was spun off into a separate company in 1999.

U.S. Attorney General Charges 530 in Mortgage Probe With $1 Billion in Fraud Losses

U.S. Charges 530 in Mortgage Probe With $1 Billion in Losses

The U.S. brought charges against 530 people over mortgage schemes that cost homeowners more than $1 billion, Attorney General Eric Holder said today.

More than 73,000 homeowners were victims of various frauds for which charges were filed during a year-long crackdown, including “foreclosure rescue schemes” that take advantage of those who have fallen behind on payments, the Justice Department said in a statement.

“These comprehensive efforts represent

The Theory of Everything

I’m elated to learn that there is a “Theory of Everything.”

As I delved further into it, I found that

Taxpayers’ $182B TARP bailout of AIG Now Fully Recovered

As the president and others – nonpartisan and partisan alike – have noted, BIG BUSINESS should NOT need a bailout. They should be operated in such a manner as to allow the Free Market to decide how, to what extent, and if they prosper. As part of that process, ironclad and strong regulation to prevent fraud and abuse should be vigorously enforced. And chief executives

The Biggest Economic Challenge of Obama’s Second Term

Investing in economic infrastructure is ALWAYS a sound decision because
1.) Materials and Manpower ALWAYS comes from the private sector (and always will), and;
2.) Economic capacity and economic opportunity expands.

Note also these two remarks:

“Corporations won’t hire more workers just because their tax bill is lower and they spend less on regulations. In case you hadn’t noticed, corporate profits are up. Most companies don’t even know what to do with the profits they’re already making. Not incidentally, much of those profits have come from replacing jobs with computer software or outsourcing them abroad.

“Meanwhile, the wealthy don’t create jobs, and giving them additional tax cuts won’t bring unemployment down. America’s rich are already garnering a bigger share of American income than they have in eighty years. They’re using much of it to speculate in the stock market. All this has done is drive stock prices higher.”

—

Monday, September 10, 2012

The question at the core of America’s upcoming election isn’t merely whose story most voting Americans believe to be true – Mitt Romney’s claim that the economy is in a stall and Obama’s policies haven’t worked, or Barack Obama’s that it’s slowly mending and his approach is working.

If that were all there was to it, last Friday’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing the economy added only 96,000 jobs in August – below what’s needed merely to keep up with the growth in the number of eligible workers — would seem to bolster Romney’s claim.

But, of course, congressional Republicans have never even given Obama a chance to try his approach. They’ve blocked everything he’s tried to do – including his proposed Jobs Act that would help state and local governments replace many of the teachers, police officers, social workers, and fire fighters they’ve had to let go over the last several years.

The deeper question is what should be done starting in January to boost a recovery that by anyone’s measure is still anemic. In truth, not even the Jobs Act will be enough.

At the Republican convention in Tampa, Florida, Romney produced

Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital

How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill

by: Matt Taibbi

Mitt Romney illustration / Illustration by Robert Grossman

The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn’t stand for anything. He’s a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who’ll say anything to get elected.

The critics couldn’t be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man. He’s closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His legendary flip-flops aren’t the lies of a bumbling opportunist – they’re the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has a vision, and he’s trying for something big: We’ve just been too slow to sort out what it is, just as we’ve been slow to grasp the roots of the radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last generation.

The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is that Romney’s run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy, which he’s somehow managed to keep hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every move. And the drama of this rhetorical high-wire act was ratcheted up even further when Romney chose his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – like himself, a self-righteously anal, thin-lipped, Whitest Kids U Know penny pincher who’d be honored to tell Oliver Twist there’s no more soup left. By selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic champion of a disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially succeeded in moving the battle lines in the 2012 presidential race.

Like John McCain four years before, Romney desperately needed a vice-presidential pick that would change the game. But where McCain bet on a combustive mix of clueless novelty and suburban sexual tension named Sarah Palin, Romney bet on an idea. He said as much when he unveiled his choice of Ryan, the author of a hair-raising budget-cutting plan best known for its willingness to slash the sacred cows of Medicare and Medicaid. “Paul Ryan has become an intellectual leader of the Republican Party,” Romney told frenzied Republican supporters in Norfolk, Virginia, standing before the reliably jingoistic backdrop of a floating warship. “He understands the fiscal challenges facing America: our exploding deficits and crushing debt.”

Debt, debt, debt. If the Republican Party had a James Carville, this is what he would have said to win Mitt over, in whatever late-night war room session led to the Ryan pick: “It’s the debt, stupid.” This is the way to defeat Barack Obama: to recast the race as a jeremiad against debt, something just about everybody who’s ever gotten a bill in the mail hates on a primal level.

Last May, in a much-touted speech in Iowa, Romney

Bain Capital among firms subpoenaed by NY AG – suspected of tax evasion

The noose tightens.

—

UPDATE 2-New York probes private equity tax strategy – source

Sun Sep 2, 2012 8:00am IST

* NY AG subpoenas at least 12 private equity firms
* AG probing conversion of fees into fund investments
* Bain, Romney’s former firm, among those subpoenaed
* KKR, Apollo, Silver Lake, TPG also get subpoenas

By Karen Freifeld and Greg Roumeliotis

Sept 1 (Reuters) – At least a dozen U.S. private equity firms have been subpoenaed by the New York state attorney general as part of a probe into whether a widely used tax strategy that saved these firms hundreds of millions of dollars is proper, a source familiar with the situation said on Saturday.

Among the firms that were subpoenaed are Bain Capital LLC, KKR & Co LP, TPG Capital LP, Apollo Global Management LLC and Silver Lake Partners LP, the source said.

Bain was once headed by Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate who hopes to unseat President Barack Obama in the Nov. 6 election.

The subpoenas, which were sent out in July, seek documents related to

Today Mitt Romney spoke out of the _?_ side of his mouth, and said:

“And you know what he did with it? He’s used it to pay for Obamacare, a risky, unproven, federal takeover of health care.” –Mitt Romney

Government estimates say that more than 6,000 jobs statewide and 20 percent of Iowa‘s electricity needs come from wind power, and the state’s senior GOP leaders all support renewing an extension of a wind tax credit that Romney opposes.

Romney’s campaign did not respond to repeated quests for his position on the other portions of the bill, which includes items such as a tax break for developers of NASCAR facilities and purchasers of electric motorcycles.

—
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-08-14/gop-ticket-faces-growing-pains-as-dems-attack
—

FACT: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has determined that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is fully paid for,

Oil prices crashed and Chevron still made nearly $24 a barrel

Must be something to what those kooky Occupy Wall Street type folks, and the evil Democrats are saying.

—

By Ronald D. White; July 27, 2012, 1:32 p.m.

Take just about any business situation in which the value of a company’s primary product suddenly falls by more than 29% and it could be time to panic. Then there is the oil patch, where billions of dollars in profits are possible even after that kind of collapse in crude prices. Chevron Corp. of San Ramon, Calif., is just such an example.

Even with the sharp drop in oil prices that began in the first quarter and ran through the end of the second quarter — a decline from $109.41 a barrel to $77.69 a barrel — Chevron had a positive margin of $23.53 on every barrel of crude it produced, according to analysts. Chevron said its margin was actually $26 a barrel.

Something Stinks in Denmark: “TOO BIG TO FAIL,” Bank Corruption, LIBOR, and the Federal Reserve

No… no… no…

Banks don’t need to be regulated.

They’re doing quite fine with all the money they’ve stolen from you already.

No, they don’t need regulation.

And no, we don’t need to re-enact the Glass-Steagall Act – the federal law that kept Wall Street Brokerage Houses, Insurance Companies, and Banks separate and out of each other’s business. Right now, as things stand with them, they’re enjoying an incestuous fiscal orgy. And that’s good. We need more incest. We need more orgies. They’re all good. In fact, the more mammon… er, money you have, the more holy you are, the more the Almighty has blessed you – and not someone else (those lazy slobs who don’t deserve anything). {/sarcasm}

But there’s really no reason to worry… the banks will get what’s comin’ to ’em – and the ‘what’ is NOT your money. They have that already.

Come a-courtin’ time (that’d be in the court room), the Banksters be ruled against in a BIG way.

Just wait.

It’s coming.

Next thing you’ll hear in the news are the BIG BANKSTERS wanting legal protection from Congress for the wrongdoing they’ve done.

Just wait.

—

Losing With LIBOR: One Trader’s Story

by David Kestenbaum

Listen to the Story All Things Considered [3 min 18 sec] Download

We’ve been talking a lot lately about what’s been dubbed the “LIBOR rate fixing scandal,” where some of the biggest banks in the world have been accused of manipulating a key global interest rate.

London-based Barclays Bank agreed to pay a $453 million fine over charges it manipulated the London Interbank Offered Rate — LIBOR — a key global interest rate. Oli Scarff/Getty Images

If those words — “manipulation of a key interest rate” — leave you wondering what the big deal is, and who would be harmed, meet Dan Sullivan. He says the manipulation of LIBOR cost him a million dollars, in just 24 hours.

Dan Sullivan used to work

TARP: They got the Gold Mine, you got the shaft. -OR- Where’s MY f*ckin’ Bailout?

Surely this doesn’t surprise anyone.

The expressed sentiment of many American citizens.

There were voices decrying bailing out WALL STREET STOCK BROKERAGE HOUSES, BIG INSURANCE, BIG BUSINESS, “TOO BIG TO FAIL” BANKS, to the disadvantage of the American people.

From one perspective, TARP was a “good deal” because most of the money loaned has been repaid on time.

However, from another perspective (or two), the people (who make the economy run) were NOT “bailed out” and continue to suffer. That is, the objective (economic recovery) did not occur – at least to the extent it was hoped would occur. And their input into the economy continues to be abysmal, which in turn means that our national economy at large remains significantly unrecovered.

There are some who argue that the “bailout money” should have gone directly into the hands & pockets of American citizens & consumers because their spending would have stimulated the economy.

However, as it has been, the “bailout money” has gone to WALL STREET STOCK BROKERAGE HOUSES, BIG INSURANCE, BIG BUSINESS, “TOO BIG TO FAIL” BANKS, and the results have been – to put it politely – less then stellar.

—

Behind the scenes of the bank bailouts

Tess Vigeland: It’s been almost four years since Lehman Brothers went under and the world’s financial system started to spin out of control. The fall of 2008 was all about Henry Paulson‘s bazooka, the Troubled Asset Relief Program — TARP — a $700 billion bailout for the banks. The bailout legislation created a special inspector general at the Treasury Department to oversee where all that money was going.

Neil Barofsky performed the job until he resigned early in 2011. Now he’s out with a tell-all book of his experiences in Washington, including the time he was pretty sure Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was about to haul off and punch him. It’s called

“TOO BIG TO FAIL” is just BIG enough to rob you blind: How Goldman Sachs robbed an American entrepreneur of $580 Million, and screwed over the American economy in the process

Honestly (and some use that word lightly), is there any reason why Banks should NOT be heavily regulated?

Is there any reason why Stock Brokerage Houses should not be similarly heavily regulated?

Is there any legitimate reason why Insurance Companies should not be regulated?

Finally, is there any compelling reason why those BIG THREE financial businesses should be allowed to be in each other’s business?

Why do people NOT see these horrible things?

Where is the disconnect that they’re not able to put 1 + 1 together and come up with 2?

This is FRAUD – FRAUD – FRAUD!!!

And we’re just gonna’ let it slide by?

Please!

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July 14, 2012

Goldman Sachs and the $580 Million Black Hole

By LOREN FELDMAN

THE business deal from hell began to crumble even before the Champagne corks were popped.

The deal, the $580 million sale of a highflying technology company, Dragon Systems, had just been approved by its board and congratulations were being exchanged. But even then, at that moment of celebration, there was a sense that something was amiss.

The chief executive of Dragon had received a congratulatory bottle from the investment bankers representing the acquiring company, a Belgian competitor called Lernout & Hauspie. But he hadn’t heard from Dragon’s own bankers at Goldman Sachs.

Janet and Jim Baker at home. They are fighting Goldman Sachs over its work in 2000 on the all-stock sale of their business, Dragon Systems, to a company that later collapsed, leaving them shut out. / Photo: Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

“I still have not received anything from Goldman,” the executive wrote in an e-mail to the other bank. “Do they know something I should know?”

More than a decade later, that question is still reverberating in a brutal legal battle between Goldman and the founders of Dragon Systems — along with a host of other questions that go to the heart of how financial giants like Goldman operate and what exactly they owe their clients.

James and Janet Baker spent nearly two decades building Dragon, a voice technology company, into a successful, multimillion-dollar enterprise. It was, they say, their “third child.” So in late 1999, when offers to buy Dragon began rolling in, the couple made what seemed a smart decision: they turned to Goldman Sachs for advice. And why not? Goldman, after all, was the leading dealmaker on Wall Street. The Bakers wanted the best.

This, of course, was before the scandals of the subprime mortgage era. It was before the bailouts, before Occupy Wall Street, before ordinary Americans began complaining about “banksters” and “muppets” and “the vampire squid.” In short, before Goldman Sachs became, for many, synonymous with Wall Street greed.

And yet, even today what happened next to the Bakers seems remarkable. With Goldman Sachs on the job, the corporate takeover of Dragon Systems in an all-stock deal went terribly wrong. Goldman collected millions of dollars in fees — and the Bakers lost everything when

Inspector General uncovers Fraud, Waste & Abuse in Treasury Department

Now that the Wall Street fox is watching the financial hen house, is it any wonder?

Cases like these continue to demonstrate the NEED for fiscal 1.) Transparency; 2.) Accountability, and 3.) Ongoing publicly available agency reports.

It’s Fraud, Waste and Abuse – pure & simple.

And, it’s time to prosecute.

Not because of what it was used for – they could’ve bought jelly doughnuts – but for whose trust was betrayed, and who was abused.

The people.

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Treasury staffer solicited prostitutes: report

1:47pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A Treasury Department employee used government resources to solicit prostitutes and another employee accepted gifts from a bank he supervised in violation of conflict of interest rules, reports from Treasury’s internal watchdog said.

A Treasury staffer with the now defunct Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) used his government email to arrange sexual encounters with women advertised on Craigslist, viewed websites offering erotic services and met with prostitutes on three separate occasions, a report by Treasury’s inspector general said.

The OTS has since merged with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The OTS official, who

Congratulations, Mark Zuckerberg! And welcome to the 1% of the 1% class!

Is it clear enough that Wall Street denizens like neither FaceBook or Mr. Zuckerberg?

They bitched, moaned, groaned, griped, carped and complained about his attire.

Now, the stock of his company is tanking, and readers will recall the title of an earlier post which asked “How is FaceBook’s IPO like Erectile Dysfunction?”

To be certain, this is not a reflection upon Mr. Zuckerberg’s character, but rather a form of criticism of his company’s business model. More specifically, it is the demonstrated lack of a concrete, long-term profit-making revenue stream which has many analysts concerned about the firm’s long-term viability.

By the way, based on 2009 tax year filing data, the Internal Revenue Service says an Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) of $343,927 or more, will put you in the top 1 percent of taxpayers.

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Mark Zuckerberg earns $1.1 billion from selling Facebook shares

By Salvador Rodriguez

May 22, 2012, 5:35 p.m.

Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday completed the transaction of the 30.2 million shares he sold in Facebook’s IPO Friday.

The shares he disposed of sold for $37.58 a piece, bringing him a cool $1.1 billion. But despite all that money, the Facebook CEO will be

Tim Geithner is out as Secretary of Treasury. Who’s in?

Good bye, and good riddance.

Robert Reich would do a good job, and he’s been tested and served in other areas in the present, and previous administrations.

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Guessing game begins over next Treasury chief

1:05am EDT

By Glenn Somerville

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner takes a tour of the Marlin Steel Wire Products factory in Baltimore, Maryland, May 17, 2012. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Wanted for the Treasury Department: a new boss who can fix trillion-dollar-plus budget deficits, overhaul the tax system and spur a reluctant Europe into fixing its debt crisis.

It’s a tall order, especially when the new Treasury chief also must deal with a fractious Congress – and all for a salary lower than that paid to many junior Wall Street bankers.

Economists, investors and veterans of past administrations are appraising potential successors to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, either in a new Obama administration, if President Barack Obama is re-elected, or under Mitt Romney.

Geithner has made it clear that he is leaving the post he has held since January 2009 even if Obama, a Democrat, beats Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, in the November 6 election.

Lots of names are making the rounds. Among Democrats, they include finance leaders like Larry Fink of asset management firm BlackRock and politically connected Washington insiders like fiscal expert Erskine Bowles.

If the White House goes to the Republicans,

Remember: Do NOT tax the rich, because they’re sacred cow “job creators” masters.

Life is more than money.

“Those who love money will never have enough. How meaningless to think that wealth brings true happiness!” Ecclesiastes 5:10 (NLT)

“But if any one has this world’s wealth and sees that his brother man is in need, and yet hardens his heart against him–how can such a one continue to love God?” 1 John 3:17 (WNT)

“But godliness with contentment is great gain.” 1 Timothy 6:6 (NIV)

“Then he said, “Beware! Guard against every kind of greed. Life is not measured by how much you own.”” Luke 12:15 (NLT)

“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Matthew 19:24 (NIV)

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Nurses (yes, nurses) lead charge for Wall Street ‘sin’ tax

By Miranda Leitsinger, msnbc.com

Friday, May 18, 2012

A coalition of nurses’ unions is calling for a “Robin Hood” tax on Wall Street, which they say could generate up to $350 billion a year, in the first major protest ahead of this weekend’s NATO summit in Chicago.

Their pitch: impose a tax of 50 cents on every $100 of trades of stocks, bonds, dividends and other financial transactions, which are not currently taxed. The U.S. would join more than a dozen other nations that already have a financial transaction tax, according to National Nurses United (NNU).

“I’ve been asked many, many times … ‘What are you doing here as nurses? … What do you have to do with the economy?'” Karen Higgins, a registered nurse and co-president of NNU, said to the crowd in Chicago’s Daley Plaza.

“We’re watching this every day. We’re watching patients suffer,” she said, noting that nurses were seeing people without insurance or others who can’t afford their co-pays, as well as a spike in the number of children with adult diseases due to eating poorly because their parents can’t afford healthy food. “This is serious and in some cases it is actually deadly.”

Members of National Nurses United rally in Daley Plaza on Friday, ahead of the NATO Summit in Chicago. Tannen Maury / EPA

“We know the solution .. we are watching and seeing Wall Street throwing our money away as we see people suffer and die. It will not continue,” she said. “We pay sales tax. It is time for Wall Street to start paying back what they owe the rest of the country and they need to pay sales tax.”

The nurses’ call echoes last fall’s outcry by

How is FaceBook’s IPO like Erectile Dysfunction?

{UPDATE: Tuesday, 22 May 2012 – 2d story added}

Read on, to find out why.

(Oh, and please, dear reader, don’t make me spell it out why.)

And, as an interesting note aside, Mr. Zuckerberg was married yesterday.

Here’s wishing him and his bride all the best.

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Nasdaq ‘embarrassed’ over Facebook IPO

By Telis Demos in New York, May 20, 2012 10:12 pm

Nasdaq OMX‘s chief executive admitted he was “embarrassed” by the delay in the opening trade of Facebook’s initial public offering and revealed that the exchange was in talks with regulators over potentially millions of dollars of customer claims.

Bob Greifeld said on Sunday that the 20-minute delay in trading of Facebook’s $16bn offering on Friday had been caused by a millisecond systems blip due to the largest IPO auction “in the history of mankind”.

The exchange has found itself in the spotlight after Facebook failed to deliver a first-day “pop” to investors, instead almost falling below its issuing price of $38. The shares, having risen briefly, quickly fell away to close the day with a gain of just 0.6 per cent, at $38.23.

As a result of the trading delay, Nasdaq was left with a position in Facebook shares that it was forced to liquidate, according to its own rules, generating $10m for the group. It plans to use that money, plus potentially more, to resolve disputes related to 30m shares that may have received improper trades.

It has requested approval from

JPMorgan Chase CEO blames “Errors, Sloppiness & Bad Judgement” for $2B Credit Default Swap & Derivatives loss

Give particular attention to this sentence, which is found later in the article: “Bank executives, including Dimon, have argued for weaker rules and broader exemptions.”

Give attention also to the last paragraph of the second story: “Of course, this loss only goes to show how weak the Volcker Rule is: Dimon is adamant, and probably correct, in saying that Iksil’s bets were Volcker-compliant, despite the fact that they clearly violate the spirit of the rule. Now that we’ve entered election season, Congress isn’t going to step in to tighten things up — but maybe the SEC will pay more attention to Occupy’s letter, now. JP Morgan more or less invented risk management. If they can’t do it, no bank can. And no sensible regulator can ever trust the banks to self-regulate.”

Is there any remaining argument against deregulating banks?

Is there any remaining argument against re-instituting the Glass-Steagall Act (which separated Banks, Insurance & Wall Street and forbade them from commingling in each others’ businesses)?

Ahead of the Greek financial crisis – in which Goldman Sachs had a direct and unscrupulous role by hiding sales of financial vehicles from Greek, European & American regulators – German chancellor Angela Merkel said this at a March 5, 2010 press conference in Berlin with Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, (ref: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a26n.U6qS6cU):

“Credit-default swaps, where you insure your neighbor’s house just to destroy it and make money from it, that’s exactly what we have to curb.”  

Now, I wouldn’t expect you or the average reader to be knowledgeable about these things. Honestly, most folks aren’t. But that’s not a condemnation of you, dear reader. Rather, it is a statement acknowledging that banks, bankers, Wall Street types, and Insurance firms do not want to be regulated, and would rather operate free-willy-nilly – without any rules. You and I must  abide by rules. Why shouldn’t they? And as they have consistently demonstrated, they cannot be trusted to do the right thing.

For additional information on Goldman Sachs involvement in the Greek Debt Crisis, I refer you to this 02/08/2010 news item from German news magazine, Der Spiegel: “Greek Debt Crisis How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt,” By Beat Balzli.

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JPMorgan Chase acknowledges $2 billion trading loss and ‘many errors’

By Associated Press, Updated: Thursday, May 10, 6:05 PM

JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, said Thursday that it lost $2 billion in the past six weeks in a trading portfolio designed to hedge against risks the company takes with its own money.

The company’s stock plunged almost 7 percent in after-hours trading after the loss was announced. Other bank stocks, including Citigroup and Bank of America, suffered heavy losses as well.

“The portfolio has proved to be riskier, more volatile and less effective as an economic hedge than we thought,” CEO Jamie Dimon told reporters. “There were many errors, sloppiness and bad judgment.”

The trading loss is an embarrassment for a bank that came through the 2008 financial crisis in much better health than its peers. It kept clear of risky investments that hurt many other banks.

The loss came in a portfolio of the complex financial instruments known as derivatives, and in a division of JPMorgan designed to help control its exposure to risk in the financial markets and invest excess money in its corporate treasury.

Bloomberg News reported in April that

American Corporate Corruption: Wal-Mart Bribed Mexico Government Officials

Sam Walton spins in his grave.

It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before the eventual or inevitable happened.

Since the United States Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are persons, there should be no reasonable argument against arresting the corporation.

The problem is, how to do that?

The Chief Executives are not the corporation, so ostensibly, they couldn’t be arrested.

But then, could those Chief Executives be charged with criminal behavior for the actions of the corporation?

However, if we consider the The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 (FCPA) (15 U.S.C. §§ 78dd-1, et seq.) which is part of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and the elimination of some of the most important provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act, we might wonder if Republicans would have any problem eliminating the FCPA, since it addresses accounting transparency requirements under the and bribery of foreign officials.

It will definitely be interesting to see how Congress decides to handle this case.

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Wal-Mart Hushed Up a Vast Mexican Bribery Case

April 21, 2012

By DAVID BARSTOW

MEXICO CITY — In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country.

The former executive gave names, dates and bribe amounts. He knew so much, he explained, because for years he had been the lawyer in charge of obtaining construction permits for Wal-Mart de Mexico.

Wal-Mart dispatched investigators to Mexico City, and within days they unearthed evidence of widespread bribery. They found a paper trail of hundreds of suspect payments totaling more than $24 million. They also found documents showing that Wal-Mart de Mexico’s top executives not only knew about the payments, but had taken steps to conceal them from Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. In a confidential report to his superiors, Wal-Mart’s lead investigator, a former F.B.I. special agent, summed up their initial findings this way: “There is reasonable suspicion to believe that Mexican and USA laws have been violated.”

The lead investigator recommended that Wal-Mart expand the investigation.

Instead, an examination by The New York Times found, Wal-Mart’s leaders shut it down.

Neither American nor Mexican law enforcement officials were notified. None of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s leaders were disciplined. Indeed, its chief executive, Eduardo Castro-Wright, identified by the former executive as the driving force behind years of bribery, was promoted to vice chairman of Wal-Mart in 2008. Until this article, the allegations and Wal-Mart’s investigation had never been publicly disclosed.

Peter Schiff exposes a TEA Party fatal flaw at Occupy Wall Street

In a YouTube video entitled “Peter Schiff nails Wall Street Protesters,” Peter Schiff asks one of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators the following question – verbatim: “Wouldn’t you like to get in the 1%? You don’t want more money?”

By asking that question, Mr. Schiff makes a very critical error. In fact, it’s a very simple one to understand. Not everyone will be the 1%. By adding more to the category identified as “the 1%,” it suddenly becomes more than 1%.

As the video progresses, Mr. Schiff continues rhetorically down that deeply and fundamentally flawed path, so that by the end of the video, the conclusions he infers from the statements he makes seem to make reasonable, rational and logical sense. They are, however, founded upon logically flawed premises.

I posit that most viewers would not even casually consider such a blatant problem.

Video follows the break.

Video Shows Oakland Police Throwing Flashbang Grenades Onto Wounded Scott Olsen

Be certain you read the related story, and see the pics – the ones that news media will NOT show you.

Video follows the break…

Re-examining Global Economics, Occupy Wall Street, and National Security

Doubtless, if you’ve been paying any attention to news – either online, broadcast or print – you’ve had to at least heard something about the Occupy Wall Street movement. And no matter where you fall along the political spectrum – arch-conservative, neo-conservative, raging liberal, classical liberal, Austrian liberal, middle of the road, pragmatist, mash-up, federalist, states rights, moderate, or any conglomeration of the above, or even none at all – you certainly have some opinion – good, bad, or indifferent – about the message, the messengers, and the movement – no matter what you may hold to be true about it.

The movement has also spread to various cities throughout the United States, including Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and other areas. None, however, have had as much action and publicity as the New York City movement.

The movement is innervated by

Was the Wall Street Bailout Socialist?

Having viewed an interview on MSNBC by Martin Bashir with Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, I was taken with a question Mr. Bashir asked Sen. Sanders toward the conclusion of the interview.

Martin Bashir: Mr. Sanders, how is it possible that people like Eric Cantor appear to encourage capitalism for everyone until a bank fails, and then socialism is acceptable because ‘we have to bail out the banks… we have to support them.’ But all of us – individual citizens in this society – well, if capitalism swipes us aside, we have to accept that?

Because it’s always good to be certain, I doubled checked a couple resources to be certain of what I was hearing.

Here’s what I found:

Wall Street Executives Drink Champagne during Occupy Wall Street Protest

Is this not the height of arrogance?

Wall Street executives, tell show us how you ~REALLY~ feel!

Riches, Wealth, Avarice, Power, Abuse and Vice: An Occupy Wall Street redux

John Adams, 1823–24, Second President of the US. Painting by Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828).

Perhaps you’ve read the previous entry in this blog. If not, I encourage you do so.

Why?

For several reasons, not the least of which are that what you’ll read in the conclusion of this entry speak overwhelmingly to the issue addressed by the protestors.

Following is an entry I made in another forum, the content of which – as I considered it – was worthy of a separate post.

Your thoughtful commentary is encouraged.

I particularly like your earlier remark, and found it quite erudite. To wit, and to clarify, it is this one: “I believe in capitalism,

Occupy Wall Street

The MainStream Media CANNOT ignore this!

What is Occupy Wall Street?

Twitter hash tag: #OccupyWallStreet

OccupyWallStreet.org

If you’re tired of the lies, the deception, the failed mortgages, bail-outs, TARP, jobs shipped overseas, inferior imported goods,

Banks encourage “short” sales to invigorate economy, public not enthused

Our nation’s economy has for years rested upon manufacturing, which has been the “backbone” of any industrialized nation. (Note the phrase “industrialized nation.”) Now that industry has been “out-sourced” to China, India, and other nations with emerging economies, not only has America become dependent upon other nations (not independent), but our national security and standard of living has been compromised.

Thus, banks, insurance companies and stock brokerage houses – who have again been allowed to enjoy their incestuous fiscal orgies because the Glass-Stegall Act was repealed – are forced to invent artificial commercial paper (derivatives, etc., which no one can thoroughly explain) to increase profits. In conjunction with the computer-driven algorithms of auto-traders and futures markets, the risks Wall Street and banks make (upon the backs of the people) are increasingly becoming a veritable “house of cards” built upon shifting sands.

The uncertainty of our economic future is even more precarious, and is no more clearly demonstrated than in this instance, when banks can’t sell houses they own, even after taking significant reductions (losses), and providing incentives for private buyers.

After reading the following news story, consider the implications for our economy.

Rand Paul, Conscription, Slavery, & Health Insurance Reform

Recently, U.S. Senator Rand Paul, a “TEA Party” Republican from Kentucky, and ophthalmologist specializing in cataract and glaucoma surgeries, LASIK procedures, and corneal transplants, was quoted as saying that “a right to healthcare… means you believe in slavery.”

Dr. Paul is the ranking member of the Senate HELP Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging subcommittee, and made his comments at a Wednesday, May 11, 2011 hearing about emergency room use in American hospitals.

He said that, “With regard to the idea whether or not you have a right to health care you have to realize what that implies. I am a physician. You have a right to

Insurance costs and health-care reform: Are health insurers making huge profits?

Are health insurers making huge profits?

Mar 5th 2010, 14:15 by M.S.

YESTERDAY Barack Obama dropped in on Kathleen Sibelius‘s meeting with executives of America’s top five health insurers and read a letter from a constituent. Natoma Canfield, a self-employed house cleaner, had carcinoma 16 years ago; it has been in remission for 11 years. Last year Anthem Blue Cross, who provide her with a high-deductible ($2,500) individual plan, raised her premiums 25%, to $6,075. This year they’re raising them another 40%, to $8,500. Ms Canfield  closes her letter, “Please stay focused in your reform attempts as I and many others are in desperate need of your help.”

There’s no doubt that the Obama health-care reform bill would