Month: July 2010

Ladies and gentlemen, gold is the only investment to safeguard your livelihoods.

This is about gold, currency, the end of the USA. Everybody needs gold. Glenn Beck is an upstanding man for selling us gold. We need it so badly to protect us from Obama, Pelosi, Bernanke and the Trilateral Commission.

click for ginormous chart of deceit

“Obviously all these new boiler room high pressure sales groups that used to be pushing sub-prime financing are now trying to convince the unsophisticated listeners of right wing talk that they better buy gold before the dollar becomes worthless because of Obama’s reckless spending.”

The Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection will investigate the business practices, fraud, deceit and aggressive sales tactics of Goldline International and Fox News’ Glenn Beck (including Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson) to sell overpriced gold coins.

Broadcasting to millions to prey upon nest eggs, how do firms like Goldline make money? The average Goldline markup was 90% above the melt value of the coin. The largest markup was 208% above the melt value. The average markup is 47% higher than competitors.

By selling gold at twice the melt value, the price of gold would need to double for suckers to break even on their so-called ‘investment’.

Requiring reasonable behavior is an interesting task. Milton Friedman assumed we would all learn by trial and error. But under an assault of false choices, not one of us will live long enough to learn how to filter out all the crap. (Can we prove that? See pdf here: “Individual Learning About Consumption”).

Education is good. Con requires restraints.

The top 10%

Mountains of cash.
Hyperactive speculation.
Ponzi finance.
Captured government.

Column B – 90% of us

Anemic spending power.
Huge household debt.
Declining real wages.
Fewer jobs, more hours.

Some say laissez-faire markets are a good thing. It’s the ideology we’re sold and the hype we’ve bought.

Some say the economy is better served through pure competition. Here’s a small example, one of thousands, where leaving the marketplace alone is said to be good for the country. A case of corporate fine-print, a clause on the back of a cruise ship ticket says that if you want to sue, you have to sue in Florida. Of course, this is good for consumers!

Forcing people to sue in Florida deters frivolous lawsuits and lowers costs for the company. It can pass those savings onto consumers. Because if Alpha Cruise Lines doesn’t, then Beta Cruise Lines will.

Unhindered by consumer protection, why didn’t the cruise lines pass those savings onto consumers? Because they put that cash into shareholders’ pockets.

What did people at the top do with their money prize?

People at the top – high net worth individuals, investment funds, pension funds and the like – greatly increased the demand for complex financial products as they searched for ways to store their wealth.

The proliferating billionaires around the world pressured organizations like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan to supply them with complex financial securities.

As long as this external pressure to supply complex financial securities for the super-rich to store their wealth continues, the financial system will remain prone to generate bubbles, followed by crashes.

You’d think we’d have reams of data describing the habits of the top 10%, 1%, .5%, .1%. So what’s the problem? By merely seeking preservation in a frenzy of packaged finance and global leverage, the wealthy and their wealth are significantly under-performing.

Our country’s oldest continually operating family farm is up for sale.

New Hampshire’s Tuttle Farm was founded by English settler John Tuttle with a 1632 land grant from King Charles II. The landmark property has passed from father to son for 11 generations.

“A lot of people won’t drive a few extra miles for fresh vegetables. They are going to Wal-Mart and Target and trying to save whatever they can, and we don’t have the buying power to compete.’’

“Our bodies are just basically worn out. It’s hard to conduct a farm and a business at the same time. It’s more than we can handle at this time.”

The farm was turning a small profit until the recession.

There’s 4 million acres of family farmland in use between 2002 and 2007, an area roughly the size of Massachusetts. After 1982 the nation has lost more than 41 million acres of rural land.

The effects of global warming on water supply in the United States.

More than 1,100 counties — one-third of all counties in the lower 48 — will face higher risks of water shortages by mid-century as the result of global warming. More than 400 of these counties will face extremely high risks of water shortages. – Natural Resources Defense Council

We can argue the accuracy of various models of temperature and precipitation, that likelihood is never science. Or we can agree that business-as-usual is a risk to water supplies.

The net worth of housing has fallen to 1980s levels. Seems as if forty years of free markets, tax jiggering and game theory is a mere Republican frenzy. Hyped and over-generalized ideology has returned us to where we were.

“If I had a machine gun I’d shoot every one of them white sons of bitches.”

Henry Makarka was talking about the executives who came to him and his tribe 40 years ago to purchase their land at Valdez.

They were from the companies now known as Exxon and BP. The Tatitlek were paid the handsome price of $1 for Valdez, which the companies knew was worth billions.

How does BP get away with it? The same way the Godfather got away with it:

BP’s CEO of Alaskan operations hired a former CIA expert to break into the home of a whistleblower, Chuck Hamel, who had complained of conditions at the pipe’s tanker facility. BP tapped his phone calls with a US congressman and ran a surveillance and smear campaign against him.

When caught, a US federal judge said BP’s acts were “reminiscent of Nazi Germany.”

This was not an isolated case.

There was a leaking control pod. Equipment to secure the well wasn’t used. Test results indicating danger were ignored. Routine tests weren’t even run. The alarms were jiggered.

Jarvis DeBerry at Times Pecayune:

If the allegations are true, and rampant rule-breaking by BP led to the fatal and ecologically destructive explosion, it doesn’t necessarily follow that every safety rule that’s needed is already in place. But if reports … are true and BP and Transocean were cutting corners on a well with evident problems, then it’s right to ask if those 11 men wouldn’t still be alive if the companies had played it by the book.

Accidents happen. Weather events are acts of God. But greed and recklessness are vices.

Combine that with a seeming disregard for the lives of the workers and the sanctity of the Gulf, and you get a more fitting explanation.

Adjacent comment:

It is the universal greed that we all share. And by the way, the profit motive built America. Individuals working as hard as they can to make as much as they can to enjoy the good life as well as they can.

And we are all greedy: ‘If there is one place in heaven remaining I want God to give it to me not you. If there are only two, I want it to go to my dog. I am greedy that way.’

…the problem is that a great deal of the established media is made up of people who believe very strongly that our wealthy betters really are morally superior…

Alex Pareene at Salon:

It may surprise you to learn that these wealthy elites think the biggest problem facing America today is that the wealthy elite have to pay taxes, while the poor and unemployed sit around collecting Social Security and food stamps and unemployment benefits.

Is there anything — anything! — worse than a bunch of rich idiots telling a bunch of other rich idiots how hard rich idiots like them have it these days, and how everything would be better if only we just put these rich idiots in charge?

More on gross abuse from the rich and mean-hearted:

Specifically, we claim that higher income inequality between executives and ordinary workers results in executives perceiving themselves as being all-powerful and this perception of power leads them to maltreat rank and file workers.

We present findings from two studies – an archival study and a laboratory experiment – that show that increasing executive compensation results in executives behaving meanly toward those lower down the hierarchy.

Jim Harrison said:

I wish there were a hypocrisy index to go along with measurements of cruelty since a huge contradiction is built into a system where the sociopaths who control companies depend on the integrity of their employees…

Maxine Udall asks:

There is more at stake here than our economy. We must, as a nation, decide whether we want to continue on the path we have been on since roughly 1980.

Do we want to continue to reward disproportionately a small fraction of the population that (based on recent performance) seems better at misallocating financial, physical, and human capital through speculative endeavors?

Do we want to continue the trickle down of meanness?

Roger Gathman stomps:

I think, as you trace the amazing split between the income gains of the wealthiest 10 percent and the other 90 percent since the eighties, you will find that the more disposable money the wealthiest have, the more they will use it to ensure their positions. I don’t find this very puzzling.

And a rant from Mick Arran:

We are locked down, locked into a system which gives rights to the rich, the powerful, and the corporate.

And it doesn’t seem to matter to anyone that this only makes things worse and worse.

Believing that giving the rich control of the society will lead to economic prosperity for everyone is now dogma for the Religion of $$$.  We’ve decided to take that on faith because the rich told us to.

The largest tent in the world is the Khan Shatyr residential and entertainment center, an indoor city for 20,000 recently opened in Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan.

Covered in layers of translucent fabric, it’s 650 feet across, over 2 football fields, and 500 feet high.

“We are beginning to see the rise of the mega-building —climatic enclosures enveloping small towns—mainly because they are being built in unpleasant climates.” The roof support is 192 radial 3 inch cables with 16 wrapped restraints. How many cables for Buckminster Fuller’s dome over Manhattan?

Read it and weep.

•    1% own nearly twice as much as they did 15 years ago.
•    66% income growth after 2001 went to top 1%.
•    83% of all stocks are in the hands of 1%.
•    10% extract 50% of all national income.
•    50% of us own less than 1% of all income.
•    80% of us have only 7% of all cashable assets.
•    Banks own more housing than all Americans put together.
•    Only 5% of incomes matched rising housing costs since 1975.
•    Executive pay jumped to 500 to 1 since 2000.
•    Wall Street bonuses were up 17% over 2008.
•    %16 more millionaires in 2009, to 7.8 million.
•    61% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
•    36% have no retirement savings.
•    43% have less than $10,000 for retirement.
•    24% postponed retirement in the past year.
•    ~1.4 million filed bankruptcy in 2009, up 32% over 2008.
•    Finding a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
•    40% are employed in low pay service jobs.
•    Only federal pay is more than crushed private sector.
•    40 million are on food stamps; up to 43 million in 2011.
•    21% of children live below the poverty line – highest in 20 years.

“We all hate the moratorium, because its going to hurt us badly, but if anyone needs a reason to understand why its been put in place, this is it. This was not a freak accident and the widespread disabling of safety systems was not unusual.” – Mike Williams, Transocean

The rig’s one danger alarm never sounded, was disabled, could not be heard. If it had, workers in the drilling area — the shaker room, the mud room, the pit and pump room — would have immediately evacuated. The rig’s general alarm and indicator lights were set to ‘inhibited’ meaning they would record high gas levels or fire in a computer, but wouldn’t trigger any warning signals.

Experts have said it was a mistake to displace the mud before the well was completely plugged, because the mud weight is the first defense against natural gas or oil kicking up and blowing out the well.

“Maybe they were trying to save time. At the end of the well sometimes they think about speeding up.”

Underwater plumes of oil have been confirmed.

Generally 0.8 miles deep and up to 15 miles from the wellhead, the white dot in this Joint Analysis Group screen shot.

The 50-mile drive to work and 5-mile drive to the supermarket. a crisis in the boomtown mentality of cheap energy, unlimited water, and effortless credit.

Beleaguered communities are now left holding the bag of an economic house of cards come crashing – harbingers of the consequences of an unsustainable economic, energy and development model.

Too often efforts toward sustainability remain just as nebulous and hard to define as the very word itself. Many aspire toward “sustainability,” but most need help in achieving it, especially at municipal or regional scale.

The banks’ contribution to the economy has been overstated.

There’s terrific error that crashed huge engines. Folks are hurting, economists babble, politicians cheek, and we oscillate between suspicion and credulity—blame on one edge, blindness on the other.

Good Grief. Why doesn’t anyone talk about the corruption that’s behind all of this?

Governments are supposed to regulate a whole range of activity to ensure that the public get a fair deal and are protected from naked greed. The problem is that many of the ‘regulated’ industries have so much money behind them that companies simply bribe their way around the regulators.

In this case the financial industry pumped billions into politicians and regulators to buy a regulatory regime that suited them. Look at donations to political parties and individual politicians. Look at regulators and politicians becoming employees of regulated companies, politicians becoming lobbyists, bankers becoming regulators…. Corporate insiders wrote their own legislation. It goes on and on.

What about companies that step out of line? Fines for misbehavior are a joke. Goldman’s fine is equivalent to a couple days profit. Why? That’s the financial industry. Look at oil, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, retail, media, real estate…  goes on and on.

Corruption and greed.

The whole thing stinks to high heaven. What is being done about it?

The chief financial regulators of Britain are in the news recently more for their candor than their policy. Andrew Haldane, executive director for financial stability at the Bank of England, says the banking industry is “as much mirage as miracle”.  There is something wrong with the calculations.

The financial industry has done so well for itself, in short, because it has been given the license to make a leveraged bet on property.

The riskiness of that bet was underestimated because almost everyone from bankers through regulators to politicians missed one simple truth: that property prices cannot keep rising faster than the economy or the ability to service property-related debts.

The cost of that lesson is now being borne by the developed world’s taxpayers.

Banks increased risk-taking by selling ‘insurance policies’… offered steady returns in good times but disastrous losses in especially difficult times, but these greater risks brought little economic benefit.

And oversold: