It's not
about being liberal or conservative anymore y'all. That is a hype offered by the fascist whores who want to confuse the people with lies while they turn this country into an aristocratic police state. Some people will say anything to attain power and money. There is no such thing as the Liberal Media, but the Corporate media is very real.
These guys who shoot these guns at public officials , going back to Ronald Reagan, are all nut bags.
Using violence against authority is counter-productive because it always produces a different
series of events other than anticipated, and once the desecration occurs the shame will be
inescapable. Adherents to the cause diminish. Violence is a tool for utterly impoverished
civilizations suffering underneath massive dictatorial regimes; but it is nevertheless is poor
choice. Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi must be the way forward if any meaningful change is
to evolve. Minds do not change when sensibilities of the national institutions are desecrated.
But the fact still remains, crazy violence against public officials has been a fact in American
History going back to 1881 when James Garfield was shot outside a train station by a nut bag
supposedly upset because he thought he should be appointed consul to Paris despite lacking any
qualifications for the role.
Theodore Roosevelt became President when McKinley got it from another crazed moron. The
contemporary newspapers carried a speculation that the nut bag was angry about the Phillipines
occupation, but it is hard to know for sure. Myths do however at least say something about how a
sizable minority saw the event.
The duel between Alexander Hamilton and a sitting Vice President Aaron Burr involved a dispute stemming from the
1800 election when Burr and Jefferson tied and the election got thrown to the House for the deciding
vote, controlled by Hamilton's Federalists. Jefferson became President.
Burr was a very aggressively egoistic fellow who rubbed Hamilton the wrong way and Burr saw Hamilton
in particular as a foe and adversary. Jefferson was going to drop Burr as Vice President in the
1804 election, and Burr became sore after Burr failed in his bid for Governor because of what he
felt was a smear campaign organized by Hamilton. On July 11, 1804 the two met on a duel and
Hamilton was fatally wounded. A sitting Vice President had just shot and killed not only a
civilian, but also a very well regarded American and historically important figure in the creation
of the Republic, as well as political competitor.
This reminds me of when Dick Cheney once shot at de-winged pheasants in rural Texas and accidentally
wounded a friend of his who joined him. Cheney waited until the next day to break the news to the
press. Rumor was that Cheney was drunk.
But what happened in July of 1804:
Burr immediately fled to South Carolina, "where his daughter lived with her family, but soon
returned to Philadelphia and then on to Washington to complete his term as Vice President. He
avoided New York and New Jersey for a time, but all the charges against him were eventually
dropped."
Can you imagine that?
Friday, 11 November 2011 at 17h 42m 48s
The Robots are Coming
Thursday, 10 November 2011 at 3h 25m 38s
It is so sad
Watch.
Watch as Herman Cain earns the pay he gets for pretending to run for President. He looks so pathetic
being the hired Uncle Tom to make the Republicans look non-racist. He will probably net more than 10
million for his efforts, and now that the secrets of this man's dysfunctional predation rise to the
surface, we begin to learn of how this man was blackmailed and used to serve the purposes of his
benefactors.
The top 0.5% are not all of the same mindset. Some are enlightened and willing to spend time trying
to understand other people and the best interconnected system between people. Others have seriously
deranged personality issues and detachment disorders, and prefer to spend significant sums of money
trying to take over the media, spread propaganda, and corrupt all democratic institutions. Some are
also oblivious.
The system runs because the power struggle evolves and goes to the default position absent any
active resistence. It does not take a lot of persons with billions of dollars to influence society
and the political culture. If there is nothing standing in the way, those who try to influence the
movement to aristocracy will succeed.
Tuesday, 8 November 2011 at 3h 21m 25s
That was Then
This ad was before they over-leveraged their capital assets and took bad bets on sovereign debts.
If you put a down payment of 10% on a loan, you can essentially get 9 times more money instantly.
Use this money to purchase some security or something marketable, make some money, keep the down
payment, and pay off the loan with whats left plus interest.
For example: with a $10 down payment you get $90 more dollars for $100 total, and must pay 0.25%
weekly interest rate on the $90 at the end of the week. Buy a series of stocks with the $100 that
result in a net gain of 2% and you have $102. Subtract the $90 loan and the 0.25% of $90 (0.225).
You made $11.775 that week on $100. Now in the real world, you actually had $10 million, which is
100,000 more, and you made $1,177,500. A whooping 11.7% gain in funds.
And this is a low-end. Quite often money managers can get more than 2% gain if they are
knowledgeable, have a large supply of funds and ample time, and also lucky. Of course, they lose
two or more percent as well. But losing $1,177,500 for 20 weeks and making $1,177,500 or more the
other 32 weeks is still a minimum of $14,130,000 a year for flipping assets worth $10 million.
That's a 41% increase for the year. The banks will roll-over the loans, no problem, if they are
confident of a 41% yearly gain..
Now consider that the FED begin to limit downpayment requirements to 2% or less. Thus enabling this
skimming of froth to remain profitable longer. The banks and large asset funds like MF Global had
their geniuses flipping assets and marketable paper with hordes of cash reserves chasing these
profits. And the the Price got so far above the actual profitable value of the asset, or the
dividends per share.
Would you want an asset that paid you $1 every 3 months, if the asset was $150? At $4 a year, you
are getting less than 3% a year. Or would you want an asset that had no dividends? What if the
stock tanks or the business goes bankrupt? You might as well buy bonds, which are loans made by
governments and various large businesses. Bonds are safer because governments and large businesses
defaulting on their loans occurs much less often than the general population of various businesses
that sell stock on the various stock exchanges.
Instead of insisting on the down payment regulations, however, they lowered them, because all the
big boys were loving the game, and started to justify their foolish speculative mania, and thereby
threw kerosine on the fire.
A bond is a loan that is sold to various investors who trust that institution receiving the loan
will pay off the debt. Say you need $100 and are willing to pay $5 for the use of the $100 at the
end of the week. This is 5%. So you divide the $100 into 20 bonds at $5 a piece, with a promise
that you will pay a extra quarter at the end of the week, or 5.25. In the real world this is
actually relected against the initial value. Hence a $5 bond is worth $5 when redeemable after a
week, but you only pay $4.75.
A stock is a business's initial method of raising funds to pursue a certain business operation.
Once the business is in operation, the business can obtain loans against capital or against revenue
streams. The business might also sell commercial bonds, rather than getting funding from a bank,
because they might get a favorable interest rate. After the initial offering, the value of a stock
is that it allows you an income stream based upon dividends. Stocks that don't yield dividends are
only valuable if the stock goes up in value over time. In these cases, there might be valid reasons
to believe a stock is solid because the company is solid; but still without dividends, the only
point of owning a stock can be that you expect it will gain in value over time.
Now what if it becomes overly difficult for all of these brokers at computers to generate 1% gains
and more often to get 3% loses. Then it becomes difficult for banks to roll-over loans, because
everyone is doing it. And then all of the inflated assets begin to slide. The whole house of
puffed up assets begins to fall, exacerbated by the vast 35 to 1 loan to asset ratios coexisting
with decreasing asset prices.
Now why did the tax payers bail-out these morons? So they could do it again? Have we learned a
lesson at all?
The lesson : you can only skim the froth from the investment dollars of the nation and misallocate
investment for so long before the system crashes. When the various markets of asset classes and
marketable paper become valued for the price more than their profitability, the market becomes a
time bomb that will burst beyond the containable bounds of man's making.
Sunday, 6 November 2011 at 1h 32m 37s
Government did not cause the Mortgage crisis ...
THE FINANCIAL SECTOR DID !!!
Sigh.
Mayor Bloomberg:“It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and
simple, Congress, who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp… But
they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if
you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody.”
It seems there are people who can’t accept that some markets, particularly financial ones, are
disastrous when completely unregulated — and thus find any far-fetched excuse to blame the
government instead. Since this line of argument continues to pop up, how should one respond to the
idea that Congress and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac caused the housing crisis? Here are six facts to back
you up:
[SOURCE:Mike Konczal | BigPicture
blog | 5 November 2011]
The rest of the story is awesome. Click here for the exemplary and irrefutable analysis. (If you go to the link,
make sure you also read the comments. Even the idiots and propagandista of the commentariat are
amusing, and well worth the poignant awesome points made by various other responses.)
~~~~
In the comments, Barry Ritholtz, proprietor of the Big Picture blog, himself weighs in on the matter:
Some pesky details worth considering:
-The origination of subprime loans came primarily from non bank lenders not covered by the CRA;
-The majority of the underwriting, at least for the first few years of the boom (2001-05), were by
these same non-bank lenders
-When the big banks began chasing subprime, it was due to the profit motive, not any mandate from
the President (a Republican) or the the Congress (Republican controlled) or the GSEs they oversaw.
-Prior to late 2005, nearly all of these sub-prime loans were bought by Wall Street — NOT Fannie &
Freddie. Why? Because prior to 2005, the GSEs were not permitted to purchase non-conforming mortgages.
-After 2005, Fannie & Freddie changed their own rules to start buying these non-conforming mortgages
— in order to maintain market share and compete with Wall Street for profits.
-The change in FNM/FRE conforming mortgage purchases in 2005 was not due to any legislation or
marching orders from the President (a Republican) or the the Congress (Republican controlled). It
was the profit motive that led them to this action.
Saturday, 29 October 2011 at 23h 20m 35s
The Human Assumption about Systems
“The human being, striving for rationality and restricted within the limits of his knowledge, has
developed some working procedures that partially overcome these difficulties. These procedures
consist in assuming that he can isolate from the rest of the world a closed system containing a
limited number of variables and a limited range of consequences.”
[SOURCE:David Cay Johnston | reuters |28
October 2011 ]
In Illinois, many big corporations (Motorola, Chrysler, etc.) are being allowed to keep the state
taxes their workers pay, rather than transmit those taxes to the state government. The idea is to
incentivize the companies to stay in Illinois.
This will probably spread like wildfire across the United States. Workers are going to be taxed by
the companies they work for, no different then the Roman Catholic church used to tax all citizens in
the parishes before the French Revolution.
Saturday, 29 October 2011 at 4h 3m 4s
The apostasy of hope
The more I bother to witness this Republican progression towards the official nomination ... the
more I think that it is all just stage show for what has already been determined. No different than
the Democratic party, to be quite honest. That is very sad for me to say, but the establishment has
taken over both parties.
Romney, the corporate patsy and ex-corporate merger/bond salesman, appears to be the set up for the
Rethuglican nomination. Versus Obama the water carrier.
Can I say how excited I am about the coming election? That's a rhetorical question.
Saturday, 29 October 2011 at 0h 40m 58s
Occupy DC
Thursday, 27 October 2011 at 4h 34m 12s
Intense exponential regression
Between 2002 and 2007, for instance, the bottom ninety-nine per cent of incomes grew 1.3 per cent a
year in real terms—while the incomes of the top one per cent grew ten per cent a year. That one per
cent accounted for two-thirds of all income growth in those years. People in the ninety-fifth to the
ninety-ninth percentiles of income have represented a fairly constant share of the national income
for twenty-five years now. But in that period the top one per cent has seen its share of national
income double; in 2007, it captured twenty-three per cent of the nation’s total income. Even within
the top one per cent, income is getting more concentrated: the top 0.1 per cent of earners have seen
their share of national income triple over the same period. All by themselves, they now earn as much
as the bottom hundred and twenty million people. So at the same time that the rich have been pulling
away from the middle class, the very rich have been pulling away from the pretty rich, and the very,
very rich have been pulling away from the very rich.
-- James Surowiecki, New Yorker Magazine, 16 August 2010.