Wow. The Fed government is really taking this austerity thing too far. The October deficit was only up 34% over last October. I wonder if the 16% spike in Federal spending had anything to do with the mid-term elections? Obama wouldn’t do such a thing. Would he? After one month the Federal government has already increased the national debt by $122 billion. That is a rate of $3.9 billion PER DAY. The Feds will spend $3.9 TRILLION of your money and your unborn grandchildren’s money this year. It looks like those years of declining deficits are over. We’ve got wars to wage and illegal immigrants to support. When a politician of either party talks about cutting spending, the way you know he or she is lying is if they are talking. The national debt will rise by $1 trillion this year. It is already about to break through the $18 trillion level. Yippee!!!
U.S. October budget deficit widens to $122 billion: Treasury
By Robert Schroeder
Published: Nov 13, 2014 2:00 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The U.S. government ran a budget deficit of $122 billion in October, the Treasury Department said Thursday. The shortfall is $31 billion, or 34%, more than in the same month a year ago. The government spent $334 billion in October, an increase of 16% from last October. Receipts totaled $213 billion in October, an increase of 7%. October is the first month of the 2015 fiscal year, which runs through September.
This tyrant needs to be stopped. These executive orders are circumventing the U.S. Constitution. The people have to stop these corrupt politicians from imposing their will unilaterally on the citizens of this country. The majority of Americans do not want illegal immigrants to be made legal by some executive order mandate so Obama can create 5 million new Democrat voters. The Republicans who control Congress need to stop him.
Obama Set To Infuriate Republicans, Give 5 Million Illegal Immigrants “Executive Amnesty”, Work Permits
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/13/2014 12:58 -0500
The “compromise” refrain from last week’s devastating, for the democrats, midterm election result lasted about one week. Because according to the NYT, here comes Obama with a package of executive actions which will assure Congress full of furious Republicans, which will result in a broad overhaul of the nation’s immigration enforcement system but more importantly, will result in up to five million potential democrat voter illegal immigrants “from the threat of deportation and provide many of them with work permits, according to administration officials who have direct knowledge of the plan.”
Here are the key details of the latest set of Obama executive orders, which are assured to throw the nation into another politial crisis:
One key piece of the order, officials said, will allow many parents of children who are American citizens or legal residents to obtain legal work documents and no longer worry about being discovered, separated from their families and sent away.
That part of Mr. Obama’s plan alone could affect as many as 3.3 million people who have been living in the United States illegally for at least five years, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration research organization in Washington. But the White House is also considering a stricter policy that would limit the benefits to people who have lived in the country for at least 10 years, or about 2.5 million people
Extending protections to more undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, and to their parents, could affect an additional one million or more if they are included in the final plan that the president announces.
So are deportations about to become thing of the past? Not exactly: “A new enforcement memorandum, which will direct the actions of Border Patrol agents and judges at the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and other federal law enforcement and judicial agencies, will make clear that deportations should still proceed for convicted criminals, foreigners who pose national security risks and recent border crossers, officials said.”
So for the tens of millions of illegals currently in the US, as well as their extended families residing abroad, you are in luck, and soon to be in possession of a green card providing you with all the benefits of America’s insolvent welfare state. And not to mention a fair chance at those 4.7 million job openings that the BLS’ JOLTS report revealed earlier today.
For US citizens who were born here, and who did not illegally cross the border to get inside the country: better luck next time.
White House officials declined to comment publicly before a formal announcement by Mr. Obama, who will return from an eight-day trip to Asia on Sunday. Administration officials said details about the package of executive actions were still being finished and could change. An announcement could be pushed off until next month but will not be delayed into next year, officials said.
As for the US, which is supposedly expected to grow at a above trendline 3% growth rate, through the harsh polar vortex 2.0 winter and in a world in which all major economies are rapidly crashing, what appears to be on the horizong is yet another constitutional crisis, and perhaps, finally, the dreader “impeachment” word:
The decision to move forward sets in motion a political confrontation between Mr. Obama and his Republican adversaries that is likely to affect budget negotiations and debate about Loretta E. Lynch, the president’s nominee to be attorney general, during the lame-duck session of Congress that began this week. It is certain to further enrage Republicans as they take control of both chambers of Congress early next year.
A group of Republicans — led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama — is already planning to thwart any executive action by the president on immigration. The senators are hoping to rally their fellow Republicans to oppose efforts to pass a budget next month unless it explicitly prohibits the president from enacting what they call “executive amnesty” for people in the country illegally.
“Our office stands ready to use any procedural means available to make sure the president can’t enact his illegal executive amnesty,” said Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cruz.
But the president and his top aides have concluded that acting unilaterally is in the interest of the country and the only way to increase political pressure on Republicans to eventually support a legislative overhaul that could put millions of illegal immigrants on a path to legal status and perhaps citizenship. Mr. Obama has told lawmakers privately and publicly that he will reverse his executive orders if they pass a comprehensive bill that he agrees to sign.
***
“I think it will create a backlash in the country that could actually set the cause back and inflame our politics in a way that I don’t think will be conducive to solving the problem,” said Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and supports an immigration overhaul.
Hispanics disagree:
Many pro-immigration groups and advocates — as well as the Hispanic voters who could be crucial for Democrats’ hopes of winning the White House in 2016 — are expecting bold action, having grown increasingly frustrated after watching a sweeping bipartisan immigration bill fall prey to a gridlocked Congress last year.
Some groups, like the United We Dream network, the largest organization of young undocumented immigrants, are preparing to deploy teams to early 2016 states like Iowa and New Hampshire to hold presidential candidates accountable and press for more action.
“From our perspective, the president has the power, the precedent and the priority for action on his side,” said Clarissa Martínez-De-Castro, deputy vice president of the National Council of La Raza. The opportunity “to go big and bold is what will allow the country to derive the biggest benefit on both the economic side and the national security side.”
And if that fails, America’s not so smart voters (according to the creator of Obamacare of course), can always just go back to staring at Kim Kardashian’ass.
Most impotantly, all of the above is bullish for stocks, as is everything else.
The robots and day traders greeted last Tuesday’s Republican election sweep with another kneejerk rally because the GOP’s new Capitol Hill dominance will allegedly be good for investors. Would that there were any real investors left—-but, in any event, what the election really did was populate the Imperial City with a huge new phalanx of neocons and hawks.
In a word, the War Party won. This means that the Warfare State will prosper, the budget deficit will again soar, more government shutdowns will materialize and the day of fiscal reckoning will come that much sooner.
How that is good for investors is hard to fathom. But never mind. The casino previously known as the stock market trades one day at a time based on the monetary juice and word clouds emitted by the world’s central banks. This new Wall Street casino anticipates no future, remembers no history, discounts no risks and discovers no honest prices. It is a hothouse colony of the central banks.
To be sure, once upon a time the prospect of escalating war and blood in the trenches caused markets to tank. Investors knew that cranking up the war machine meant higher taxes, currency inflation, capital market dislocations, economic regimentation, trade disruptions and productive asset destruction. They down-rated the value of current profits accordingly.
But we are in a different world today—–an unreal one where government debts are massively monetized and wars are fought on the far side of the earth with high altitude bombers, sea-launched cruise missiles and drones piloted from the Nevada desert. When boots are needed on the ground, they are worn by mercenary soldiers who are hired from an underclass that has been discarded by a failing economy. And when it comes to funding such remote and antiseptic warfare, Washington extracts heavy payroll levies (income and social security taxes) from the diminishing share of citizens still employed, and places enormous liens on unborn taxpayers (i.e. borrowing) to cover the rest.
The fast money traders sweat none of this, however. The blowback from aboard and the payback of public debt is about tomorrow. The stock averages are about today’s ECB leak to Reuters or the latest Hilsenramp missive from the Fed.
Likewise, the hard-pressed main street masses take their tax-shrunken paychecks to the grocery store and the mall, hoping to get by for another week. So doing they remain utterly disconnected from the strum and drang of the beltway war rooms. They encounter Washington’s costly and destructive foreign excursions only as war game videos on CNN and as defense jobs and other military pork spread widely among the provinces.
The War Party thus has no political burden in making its case. Money politics, remote control warfare, and anti-Islamic hysteria have been more than enough to purge opposition from both the left and the right.
The anti-war left, which brought the folly of Vietnam to an end and sent the most power-hungry President in American history, Lyndon Johnson, to early retirement, is no more. Instead of courageous dissenters like Fulbright, Church and McGovern, the Senate Democrats are led by intellectually challenged war-mongers such as foreign affairs committee chairman, Robert Menendez, and intelligence committee chair, Diane Feinstein. On the Republican side, instead of fearless doves like Mark Hatfield and George Aiken, we have AIPAC water boys like Senator Mark Kirk.
And forget the anti-interventionist right. That died with Senator Robert Taft and had been dormant for 50 years until Rand Paul showed up in the Senate. But thanks to Black Tuesday the GOP establishment and neocon mafia will surely launch a ferocious new campaign to isolate and destroy him as an “isolationist”. Undoubtedly, in an effort to escape the big smear and complete marginalization, Senator Paul has already begun to trim his anti-interventionist sails, and has regrettably even endorsed the bombing campaign in Syria-Iraq.
That’s sad, but its also indicative of the overwhelming dominance of the War party inside the beltway. And the emphasis is on the beltway part. By contrast, during the congressional election campaign there was no Republican more in demand out in the provinces than Rand Paul—–and we are talking about real Republican rallies and fund-raising events, not the Dartmouth libertarian club.
Stated differently, the rule of the War Party is embedded within the beltway which encircles the Imperial City. The striking prosperity there has been fueled overwhelmingly by the vast expansion of the Warfare State and the homeland security and spying apparatus that has mushroomed since 9/11. It amounts to the epitome of Big Government, and the irony is that it has been ushered in by the neocon-dominated GOP.
Needless to say, the big government of the Welfare State and the Warfare State share a common defect. Namely, an inexorable impulse to justify their existence and expand their missions and resources. In the process, facts and objectivity are lost within the self-serving frameworks and narratives that emanate from the machinery. And in the case of the Warfare State, especially, this includes the massive network of military, intelligence and homeland security contractors which supply the system.
The Warfare State has been around for decades, of course, and was presciently warned about by President Eisenhower in his farewell address on the dangers of the military-industrial complex. In fact, his original hand-written version had included reference to the dangers of a tripartite complex that included Congress, which he was persuaded to drop for reasons of comity between the branches. But Ike was right to include the capitol hill component—–and not only because of its traditional function as a dispenser of military pork.
In a manner which he could never have anticipated, Congress has become an integral component and leading edge of Washington’s global interventionism, not merely a secondary distributor of military pork. That has happened for two principle reasons.
The first is that wars don’t have to be financed with taxes any more—–the debt is just monetized by the nation’s central bank. But that has removed a powerful legislative braking mechanism on the Warfare State bureaucracy.
The Korean War was shutdown in a ragged truce, for example, because of the vast unpopularity of the heavy war taxes which, to his credit, President Harry Truman had insisted upon at the war’s onset. Likewise, what ultimately turned the mainstream democrats on Capitol Hill against Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam invasion was the 10% surtax on every individual and corporate income taxpayer in America that LBJ was forced into in 1968 in order to staunch the massive red ink emanating from his “guns and butter” budget.
Compare that to the George W. Bush wars. The latter were financed, on the margin, by Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke. Had Washington not been knee deep in the regime of central bank interest rate pegging, the huge Bush war deficits would have driven interest rates sky high in an honest free market.
Stated differently, Congress would have been dragooned into the unpleasant business of cutting domestic spending and raising taxes in order to finance the $2 trillion cost of the Bush wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and numerous less places. And that’s to say nothing of also financing the massive ballooning of the spying apparatus and so-called homeland security budgets. The latter alone soared from less than $25 billion to more than $100 billion.
Exempted from their constitutional duty to take the cost of war home to their voters, the Incumbents Club which resides on Capitol Hill had unlimited discretion to succumb to the anti-terrorist hysteria and islamophobia that was cranked up after 9/11. And that suggests the second reason why the historical aversion to foreign wars which long resonated on Capitol Hill has been transformed into enthusiastic complicity.
Divorced from the voters back home, Washington has taken on the mindset and mores of an imperial capital. The time has long passed since there was a real debate about how to define the “national interest” and how to determine among the unpleasantries, upheavals and out-cropping’s of evil which constantly arise around the world—-which ones truly jeopardize the safety and security of the citizens of Springfield MA and Lincoln NE.
And we are here talking about physical safety in their homes and public places—-not their ire, disgust, pride, paranoia, idealism or voyeuristic appetites. Needless to say, those kinds of distinctions are not even broached in Washington these days because in an imperial capital the reasons of state are plenary. There is not an event, development, conflict or situation anywhere on the globe that does not necessitate urgent assessment and raise the possibility of actions, orchestrations or interventions by one or another arm of Washington’s vast imperial machinery.
Stated differently, the urge to meddle, manage and manipulate the affairs of the world is now so deeply embedded that it has become the preponderant business of Washington. The alternative regime of non-intervention which led even Woodrow Wilson’s democratic Speaker of the House to oppose his call for war in April 1917 has been thoroughly and decisively extinguished by a century of world wars, cold wars and wars on terror.
Indeed, it is not far-fetched at all to compare today’s Washington with Imperial Rome. Crystalized in the following excerpt from the great Joseph Schumpeter’s astute observations about the plenary impulses which animated the latter is an apt descriptions of today’s atmosphere in our nation’s capital:
Here is the classic example … of that policy which pretends to aspire to peace but unerringly generates war, the policy of continual preparation for war, the policy of meddlesome interventionism. There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest — why, then it was national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs.
So this is the context in which to understand Tuesday’s election results. They mean that the most eager and enthusiastic backers of Washington’s imperial enterprises will move front and center.
Foremost among these is Senator John McCain, who will now become chairman of what used to be the Senate Armed Services Committee. From now on, however, it might as well be called the just plan “War Committee”.
And folks don’t be confused. The Senator from Arizona has truly lost his marbles. He has strutted around the Imperial City for so long that he fancies himself a Roman Emperor—–commanding the legions and bringing swift and brutal justice to any tribe or nation that does not genuflect to Washington’s rule.
Wednesday morning’s missive from the neocon polemicist, Eli Lake, leaves nothing to the imagination as to what McCain and his War Party confederates have in mind:
The Republican victory in the 2014 midterms is less than 24 hours old. But already, the hawkish wing of the GOP is planning an ambitious battle plan to revamp American foreign policy: everything from arming Ukraine’s military to reviewing the ISIS war to investigating the U.S. intelligence community’s role in warming relations with Iran.
In an interview Wednesday, Sen. John McCain, the incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he has already discussed a new national-security agenda with fellow Republicans Bob Corker and Richard Burr, the likely incoming chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
“Burr and Corker and I will be working closely together on everything,” McCain said. “For example, arms for Ukraine’s [government], examination of our strategy in the Middle East, our assets with regard to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin in the region, China’s continued encroachment in the South China Sea.”
McCain said his first order of business as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee will be to end the budget rule known as sequestration, which requires the U.S. military to cut its budget across the board.
This agenda is such madness that you hardly know where to begin. But start with the present moment’s leading hysteria about the kind of foreign “threat” that was always animating the Romans rulers in their time. That is, the purported threat far from America’s borders of the Islamic State and ISIS.
The obvious fact of the matter is that this band of a few ten thousand butchers and jihadist fanatics does not have an even remote capacity to pose a military threat to the American homeland. Indeed, if it were not for the prior stupidity of arming and equipping proxies like the so-called Iraqi army and the purported “Syrian moderates”, ISIS would not even be in a position to control the lands—-mostly desert surrounding the Sunni towns and villages of the Euphrates valley—now under their bloody sway.
Their rise to power was not owing to fanaticism, superior military strategy and leadership or vast popular support; it happened because they had the most lethal tanks, armored vehicles, heavy artillery and advanced weaponry that Washington could provide.
But is it really possible that Washington will go the next step and provide its local proxies with long-range aircraft, intercontental missiles and modern warships that could fall into ISIS’ hands and be used to actually launch an attack on US soil? Surely, even Senator McCain, missing marbles and all, could not come up with a scheme that preposterous. Yet how else would such truly threatening weapons be obtained by the Islamic State?
Indeed, there is no plausible basis for believing that this rag-tag crypto-state could come up with the economic resources needed to fund even a 10th rate military. The alleged 30,000 barrels of oil per day which they once controlled amounts to tiny economic beans, not a meaningful state budget. In fact, ISIS does not have the technical capacity to keep these fields in production for a sustained period of time, and even less so in today’s world of rapidly sinking oil prices.
As to other sources of revenue, does any one in their right mind believe that the proceeds from hostage-taking could support the apparatus of a militarized state capable of threatening America’s security? Likewise, can the taxes extracted from the bedraggled citizens of the several hundred major towns and villages within the Islamic State even cover the cost of internal administration and control needed to subjugate the involuntary inhabitants of this medievalist “caliphate”?
Not only is America not militarily threatened by the Islamic State, but neither are most of its neighbors. Certainly Turkey, which posses a modern military force of more than 400,000 professional soldiers, 1,000 war planes and helicopters and 3,000 tanks and armored vehicles, is not. Nor are the Iranians or even Saudi’s for that matter.
And the fact is, the nations of the so-called Shiite Crescent—consisting of Iran, the regions of Syria still controlled by Assad, the Shiite heartland of southern Iraq and Hezbollah Lebanon—–can also take care of themselves. As can the incipient state of Kurdistan in northeast Iraq. And surely Israel can deal with any real threat that the Islamic State might be foolish enough to actually bring to bear on its citizens.
In short, the only threat that ISIS posses to the citizens of America is the ultra-remote chance that terrorists operating from its territory might penetrate the considerable homeland security protections of one or more American cities. But there is absolutely nothing new about that remote possibility—-it is an endemic condition of the modern world. And it probably does not even equal the continuous threat to civilized society posed by homegrown malcontents and misanthropes of the variety that keeps CNN’s viewership ratings alive and its finances marginally safe from the bankruptcy court.
In any event, we have 20 years of proof that bombing and droning does not eliminate the generic terrorist threat that abides in today’s world; it just breeds more of them.
The truth is, Washington’s anti-ISIS strategy is in complete disarray because it is meddling in tribal and religious conflagrations in Syria and Iraq which have nothing to do with the safety and security of the American people in the farms, towns and cities where they live.
Only in an imperial city like Washington DC do the rulers claim that every square inch of planet Earth must be safe for their citizens. Only in a modern day Imperial City, like ancient Rome, does a breach of that dictum—including the despicable act of beheading several Americans who wandered into harms way in a self-evident zone of barbarism and war previously known as the state of Syria— amount to a casus belli.
Yet with the War party firmly in the saddle owing to last week’s election results, and the “peace President” in utter retreat and capitulation owing to the oppressive bipartisan consensus in the Imperial City on the Potomac, that is exactly what we have.
That is the ultimate irony. In a world where America has no remaining industrial state enemies capable of doing it military harm, Washington is now locked in a state of perpetual war. That ultimately bankrupted Rome. Why should this time be any different?
It would be unreasonable to expect a student with the reading, writing and computing abilities of an eighth-grader to do well in college. If such a student were admitted, his retention would require that the college create dumbed-downed or phantom courses. The University of North Carolina made this accommodation; many athletes were enrolled in phantom courses in the department of African and African-American studies. The discovery and resulting scandal are simply the tip of the iceberg and a symptom of a much larger problem.
A UNC learning specialist hired to help athletes found that during the years 2004 to 2012, 60 percent of 183 members of the football and basketball teams read between fourth- and eighth-grade levels. Eight to 10 percent read below a third-grade level. These were black high-school graduates, and their high-school diplomas were clearly fraudulent. How cruel is it for UNC to admit students who have little chance of academically competing on the same basis as its other students? Black students so ill-equipped run the risk of ridicule and reinforcing white stereotypes of black mental incompetence. If these students are to retain their athletic eligibility or minimum GPA requirements, universities must engage in academic fraud.
Academic fraud benefits the entire university community except the black students. If universities can maintain the scholar-athlete charade, they earn tens of millions of dollars in sports revenue. Other than as a pretense, academics can be ignored. The university just has to create academic slums, where weak students can “succeed.” Stronger academic departments benefit because they do not have to compromise their standards and bear the burden of having to deal with weak students. Then there’s that feather in the diversity hat upon which university administrators are fixated. I guarantee you that academic fraud is by no means unique to UNC. As such, it represents gross dereliction and dishonesty on the parts of university administrators and faculty members.
Unfortunately, and to the detriment of black people, there is broad support among black members of the academic community for practices that lead to academic fraud. In the wake of the UNC scandal, the Carolina Black Caucus — a campus group of administrators, staff and faculty — rushed to the defense of the black athletes and the department of African and African-American studies, claiming an unfair investigation and unfair public and media attack. One campus student group said that the student-athlete fraud scandal is actually a result of “white supremacist, heteropatriarchal capitalism.”
Focusing solely on the academic problems of blacks at the college level misses the point. It is virtually impossible to repair 12 years of rotten primary and secondary education in the space of four or five years of college. Proof of that is black student performance on postgraduate tests, such as the GRE, LSAT and MCAT. The black-white achievement gap on those tests is just as wide as it is on the SAT or ACT, which high schoolers take. That’s evidence that primary and secondary education deficiencies have not been repaired during undergraduate years.
The academic achievement level for white students is nothing to write home about. Only 25 percent of white high-school graduates taking the 2011 ACT met its benchmarks for college readiness in all subjects for which it tests. Only 4 percent of black students were college-ready in all subjects, according to their scores on the ACT.
The high academic failure rate among blacks means one of two things. Either black students cannot learn or primary and secondary schools, parental choices, black student attitudes, and cultural values regarding education are not conducive to what young blacks need for academic excellence. Colleges admitting underperforming black students conceal, foster and perpetuate the educational damages done to these youngsters in their earlier education.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.
We have frequently noted in these pages that the environmental movement has a number of extremist elements that are anti-civilization in their outlook and have a very mean authoritarian streak. Among other things we have frequently cited the fact that many from the authoritarian Left have drifted into this (and other) movements after their sugar daddy in Moscow expired with the fall of the Soviet Union. However, this extremism is now increasingly going mainstream. After the earth’s climate has stopped warming for 18 years running (plus one month) in spite of atmospheric CO2 rising by one third over the same period, many apparently think the best course would be to shut up critics by force.
Let us first define the people who are on the receiving end of the derogatory “denier” term (it is derogatory because it reminds of the term “holocaust denier” and it is clear that this is the reason it was picked). None of them “deny” that the climate is changing. It would be a foolish thing to assert, given that the climate has always changed and always will. The scientists who try to debunk climate alarmism are simply not alarmist.
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The vast bulk of them concedes that human activity likely has some influence on the planet’s climate, but they believe that there is no certainty about the size of this influence, and whether CO2 (which the alarmists have declared to be the main “climate forcing” agent) really has all that much to do with it. The paleoclimate record clearly suggests that this is not the case, as CO2 increases in the atmosphere have always followed warming periods with a considerable lag and not led them in a single instance. Moreover, the historical climate record – almost regardless of how far back one looks – shows that the earth’s climate has frequently been far warmer than today, long before anyone thought of burning fossil fuels.
In short, the skeptical argument boils down to: we do not know enough to indict human activity. Much of what we observe could simply be natural variation. Therefore, we should think twice before we take actions that threaten to destroy economic growth and ultimately industrial civilization. By now a powerful record of evidence is backing the skeptics up. Alarmists have invented 52 different excuses over just the past half year or so as to why their “predictive computer models” have failed to predict the “pause” – or why, indeed, they have failed to predict anything at all (the latest, and probably funniest excuse yet, is that they “could have predicted it if they had a time machine and could go back into the past”).
Again, it is important to remember here: not a single alarmist prediction made since the late 1970s has come true – not one. However, alarmism sells: it sells newspapers, it is loved by the political class, as it justifies ever greater government interference in the economy, and it is therefore the source of a huge gravy train of scientific grants. Many scientists try to be as alarmist as possible for this very reason: it keeps the grant money flowing. When they think no-one’s looking, they admit to each other what a “travesty” it all is (their words, from the “Climategate” e-mails).
It’s official: no global warming in 18 years 1 month, according to satellite data.
Indeed, there is travesty galore. For instance, supposedly scientifically neutral government-owned agencies have repeatedly been caught falsifying past temperature records (here is a recent example, but there are many more as a quick Google search reveals) – and always with the same outcome: to make the most recent warming period look much worse than it really was.
Meet the soon-to-be-excised Holocene. Allegedly human-induced “catastrophic warming” is in the tiny green box to the right so as to help you spot it – click to enlarge.
It should be pointed out that not even the alarmists deny any of the data we mention above (otherwise there wouldn’t be a scramble to explain and if possible downplay the significance of the “pause”). We would also like to stress that just because someone is a member of what could be broadly termed the “alarmist camp”, it certainly doesn’t mean they are not doing serious scientific work. Skeptics spend a great deal of time studying everything that is published by the mainstream and there are many areas of agreement. The problem as we see it is only that the worst of the alarmists have developed a “gatekeeper” function at scientific journals, trying to suppress all research that contradicts their claims and that they enjoy a monopoly on the media echo chamber, which is incessantly used to propagate the most ludicrous claims. Even worse, the government-mandated switch to “green energy” already has serious negative economic ramifications in several European countries, most notably Germany (a “disaster”) and Great Britain (a “fiasco”).
However, in light of the fact that the “global warming” meme appears to be collapsing on the hard rocks of reality, authoritarians apparently feel the time to hold back is over and are frequently coming out of the closet of late.
Skeptics Must be Silenced by All Means – Killing Them is OK Too
We all know that skeptics have been smeared for many years as being in the employ of industrial polluters. This was always a lie, but it is clear that skeptics are largely excluded from government funding (i.e., they do not receive money that is forcibly extracted from tax payers), so much of the little funding they get presumably does come from the private sector – but the claim that they are funded by ‘polluters’ is a lie. What we didn’t know is that the smear campaign is a coordinated project that was started in 1991 by Al Gore’s senate office; a recent paper reviews the damning evidence.
Smears about funding are one thing though – demands to jail or kill skeptics are a significant step up in rhetoric. First we came across something that we thought reflects the authoritarian mindset of the Left quite nicely. Australia’s government bureaucracy in the capital territory (ACT) has just approved government funding for a theater project with the rather unsubtle title “Kill Climate Deniers”. Here is an excerpt from the list of successful Arts Fund applicants:
2015 ACT Arts Fund successful applicants – Project Funding
The Project Funding round is offered once a year and presents the ACT community with the opportunity to propose one-off arts activities.
Successful 2015 Project Funding applicants were announced in September 2014. Below is a list of successful applicants by name in alphabetical order.
A Chorus of Women: $24,990 to assist with costs of performances of a community oratorio ‘A Passion for Peace’.
Art Song Canberra Inc: $6,713 to assist with costs of presenting art song concerts, classes and events.
Art Space: $15,600 to assist with costs of a creative development project with artists living with disability.
Aspen Island Theatre Company: $18,793 to assist with costs of the creative development of a new theatre work, ‘Kill Climate Deniers’.
“The Left is the natural home of the modern totalitarian – and of all those who feel entitled by their superior morality to act as savages. How does the ACT Government justify spending taxpayers’ money on a theater work entitled ”Kill Climate Deniers”? What sane Government donates to a project urging others to kill fellow citizens, even as a “joke”? Are these people mad? The theater company says it’s not into actual killing, just “exploring” ways to get political change:
“We are not advocating the murder of carbon lobbyists!We are instead seeking to explore the question: What does it take to achieve political change in this society?” the company said.
You know, like killing. If I were thug enough to write a play with the title “Kill Climate Scientists” would I get a grant? Would the ABC rush to present my defense?”
However, the Left’s search for a “final solution” to the problem of skeptics is continuing. In March an article by Adam Weinstein was posted at “Gawker”, entitled “Arrest Climate Change Deniers”, in support of a previous jeremiad along similar lines by a professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, one Lawrence Toricello. So if you say that 18 years of zero warming and 36 years of failing predictions by alarmists should give us pause and represent a good reason to rethink the entire alarmist argument, you are “criminally negligent” and should be jailed for daring to air your dissent. Interestingly, already the first two sentences of the article are baseless assertions/lies:
“Man-made climate change happens . Man-made climate change kills a lot of people. It’s going to kill a lot more. We have laws on the books to punish anyone whose lies contribute to people’s deaths. It’s time to punish the climate-change liars.”
Even though, for rather obvious reasons, they don’t call it “global warming” anymore, that is what they mean by “man-made climate change”. The fact of the matter is however that regardless of what caused the most recent warming period, it has stopped. So it would be correct to write: “if there actually is man-made climate change, it isn’t happening anymore”.
The claim that it “kills a lot of people” is so ludicrous it seems hardly deserving of comment, but allow us just to point out here the obvious basic fact that something that is not happening cannot “kill” anyone. Even if the warming period had continued, this claim would be nonsense. It seems very difficult to assert that the Roman and medieval warm periods (both were much warmer than today) “killed a lot of people”, as they were actually periods when human civilization flourished nicely. By contrast, it is an apodictic certainty that the “little ice age” after the medieval warming period did kill a lot of people, as there were serious harvest failures all over the world.
Anyway, who cares about such pesky facts? We must arrest and jail the “deniers”! But you are graciously allowed to remain a “simple skeptic”. Adam Weinstein will presumably draw up a plan of how to distinguish between “simple skeptics” and “harmless men in the street” and those he thinks are “dangerous deniers” that need to be jailed. Note his condescension toward the common man who is evidently too stupid to understand the Weinstein-approved truth. Such condescension is a typical attribute of leftist authoritarians:
“Those denialists should face jail. They should face fines. They should face lawsuits from the classes of people whose lives and livelihoods are most threatened by denialist tactics.
Let’s make a clear distinction here: I’m not talking about the man on the street who thinks Rush Limbaugh is right, and climate change is a socialist United Nations conspiracy foisted by a Muslim U.S. president on an unwitting public to erode its civil liberties.
You all know that man. That man is an idiot. He is too stupid to do anything other than choke the earth’s atmosphere a little more with his Mr. Pibb burps and his F-150’s gassy exhaust. Few of us believers in climate change can do much more—or less—than he can.
Nor am I talking about simple skeptics, particularly the scientists who must constantly hypo-test our existing assumptions about the world in order to check their accuracy. That is part and parcel of the important public policy discussion about what we do next.
But there is scientific skepticism… and there is a malicious, profiteering quietist agenda posturing as skepticism. There is uncertainty about whether man-made climate change can be stopped or reversed… and there is the body of purulent pundits, paid sponsors, and corporate grifters who exploit the smallest uncertainty at the edges of a settled science.
I’m talking about Rush and his multi-million-dollar ilk in the disinformation business. I’m talking about Americans for Prosperity and the businesses and billionaires who back its obfuscatory propaganda. I’m talking about public persons and organizations and corporations for whom denying a fundamental scientific fact is profitable, who encourage the acceleration of an anti-environment course of unregulated consumption and production that, frankly, will screw my son and your children and whatever progeny they manage to have. Those malcontents must be punished and stopped.”
(emphasis added)
So is it OK if we call Adam Weinstein and his ilk Climate Nazis? We actually think it is. As an aside, Weinstein also dredges up the “97% consensus” claim, which has been debunked so completely one should really be embarrassed to even mention it. Needless to say, science has never advanced by “consensus” anyway. Nearly all scientific discoveries in the history of mankind that have revolutionized our understanding of the world have faced massive resistance from the establishment status quo (from Galileo to the discoverer of plate tectonics, Alfred Wegener, who was disbelieved and denounced by the scientific community for a full 50 years).
Mr. Weinstein is by far not the only authoritarian Leftist who wants to jail climate skeptics. We have previously reported on humanity-hating eco-fascists like Finnish radial “activist” Pennti Linkola or UK scientist James Lovelock. The former simply wants to depopulate the planet and put all his surviving enemies into concentration camps and “re-education” gulags, while the latter thinks it is “time to put democracy on hold”, so that governments can cram his vision of what should be done down our throats by force. It is actually proper to call the leftist radicals advocating such tactics “eco-fascists” as well, because that is precisely what they are. After all, the socialist and fascist ideologies are really only two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
In late September, prominent environmental attorney Robert Kennedy jr. (a member of the Kennedy clan that is one of the “political dynasties” in the Land of the Free) also let his mask slip. As Charles W. Cooke reports on this “aspiring tyrant”:
“Blissfully unaware of how hot the irony burned, Robert Kennedy Jr. yesterday took to a public protest to rail avidly in favor of censorship. The United States government, Kennedy lamented in an interview with Climate Depot, is not permitted by law to “punish” or to imprison those who disagree with him — and this, he proposed, is a problem of existential proportions. Were he to have his way, Kennedy admitted, he would cheer the prosecution of a host of “treasonous” figures — among them a number of unspecified “politicians”; those bêtes noires of the global Left, Kansas’s own Koch Brothers; “the oil industry and the Republican echo chamber”; and, for good measure, anybody else whose estimation of the threat posed by fossil fuels has provoked them into “selling out the public trust.” Those who contend that global warming “does not exist,” Kennedy claimed, are guilty of “a criminal offense — and they ought to be serving time for it.”
(emphasis added)
Cooke’s entire article is well worth reading. Here is one more excerpt in which he reminds Mr. Kennedy that once one decides to prohibit free speech in one area, there will soon no longer be any area that will be off-limits in justifying more such prohibitions.
“When Robert Kennedy contends that there ought to be “a law” with which the state “could punish” nonconformists, he is in effect inviting Washington, D.C., to establish itself as an oracle, to ensconce in aspic a set of approved facts, and to cast those who refuse to accede as heretics who must be hunted down and burned in the interest of the greater good.
As the blood-spattered history of the human race shows us in appalling and graphic detail, the wise response to the man who insists that the Holocaust did not happen, or that 2 + 2 = 5, or that the United States is geographically smaller than Sweden is to gently correct him — and, if one must, to mock or ignore or berate him, too. It is never — under any circumstances — to push him through the criminal-justice system. The cry “but this is different” remains in the case of climate change precisely what it has always been: the cry of the ambitious and the despotic. Once the principle of free speech is subordinated to expedience, circumstances can always be found to justify its suppression.”
(emphasis added)
We would note to this that not a single skeptic has as of yet called for the jailing or extermination of members of the Church of Global Warming – so even if we knew nothing about the underlying issues, we would find it easy to decide which group we’d rather support. Since we do know a little about the issues, it is an even easier decision.
Robert F. Kenndy jr.: wants to shut up “climate change deniers” by jailing them
(Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris / WireImage)
Mr. Cooke also notes in passing that academics tend to be curiously silent when authoritarians like Mr. Kennedy are letting their inner Stalin hang out for all to see. We would add to this that there is at least one academic who has a worse fate in mind for “global warming deniers” – like putting them to death:
“Richard Parncutt, Professor of Systematic Musicology, University of Graz, Austria, reckons people like Watts, Tallbloke, Singer, Michaels, Monckton, McIntyre and me (there are too many to list) should be executed. He’s gone full barking mad, and though he says these are his “personal opinions” they are listed on his university web site.
For all the bleating of those who say they’ve had real “death threats“, we get discussions about executing skeptics from Professors, wielding the tyrannical power of the state. Was he paid by the state to write these simplistic, immature, “solutions”? Do taxpayers fund his web expenses? (And what the heck is systematic musicology?)
Prof Richard Parncutt says:
“I have always been opposed to the death penalty in all cases…”
“Even mass murderers [like Breivik] should not be executed, in my opinion.”
“GW deniers fall into a completely different category from Behring Breivik. They are already causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of future people. We could be speaking of billions, but I am making a conservative estimate.”
“If a jury of suitably qualified scientists estimated that a given GW denier had already, with high probability (say 95%), caused the deaths of over one million future people, then s/he would be sentenced to death. The sentence would then be commuted to life imprisonment if the accused admitted their mistake, demonstrated genuine regret, AND participated significantly and positively over a long period in programs to reduce the effects of GW (from jail) – using much the same means that were previously used to spread the message of denial. At the end of that process, some GW deniers would never admit their mistake and as a result they would be executed. Perhaps that would be the only way to stop the rest of them. The death penalty would have been justified in terms of the enormous numbers of saved future lives.”
Recant you foolish deniers or we’ll kill you! Yeah. Welcome to modern scientific debate. Who should die? Anyone named on Desmog:
“Much more would have happened by now if not for the GW deniers. An amazing number of people still believe that GW is a story made up by scientists with ulterior motives. For a long list of climate change deniers and their stories see desmogblog.”
So the denier database becomes the “death list”. The list decided by PR experts on a funded smear site, who profit from marketing Green corporations. But it’s ok, he includes a caveat where he says he didn’t say what I quoted above, so he can later pretend he isn’t discussing real deaths of real people:
“Please note that I am not directly suggesting that the threat of execution be carried out. I am simply presenting a logical argument. I am neither a politician nor a lawyer. I am just thinking aloud about an important problem.”
And we all feel so much better don’t we? But seriously, Global warming deniers are the worst vermin on the face of the Earth, worse than holocaust deniers, tobacco deniers and worse than someone who bombs buildings and shoots children en masse:
“I don’t think that mass murderers of the usual kind, such Breivik, should face the death penalty. Nor do I think tobacco denialists are guilty enough to warrant the death penalty, in spite of the enormous number of deaths that resulted more or less directly from tobacco denialism. GW is different. With high probability it will cause hundreds of millions of deaths. For this reason I propose that the death penalty is appropriate for influential GW deniers.”
(emphasis added)
The only thing we would commend Dr. Parncutt for is that he calls it “global warming” instead of “climate change”. This term is on the verge of becoming politically incorrect these days, since we urgently need to leave the possibility open to blame human activity for any putative future cooling, as well as for catastrophically unchanging temperatures.
Professor Richard Parncutt – mass murderers like Andre Brejvik (who killed almost 80 defenseless students to “send a signal” about Norwegian policies he disagreed with) should not be subject to capital punishment, but an exception should be made for “global warming deniers” (the people who think that the barely visible blip of warming at the end of the Holocene poses no urgent problem). It is only “logical” that they need to be put to death.
“When apocalyptic cults turn murderous, they become a danger to the public. The warmist cult, frustrated by the failure of nature to back-up their prophecies of doom, apparently is turning to homicidal fantasies, and venting them in the pages of the New York Times. A truly shocking cartoon was published in the pages of that formerly august newspaper, brought to our attention by wattsupwiththat.com and climatedepot.com. In it, the frustrations of warmists over the unusually cold winter (which US Government climatologists completely failed to predict) are channeled into the suggestion that they use “the 2014 icicle surplus” as “Self destructing sabers for climate change change deniers”
(emphasis added)
Here is the cartoon in question:
Cartoon published in the NYT – if it gets so cold that there is a surplus of icicles, use them to kill global warming “deniers”.
Conclusion:
One probably shouldn’t be terribly surprised by this. After all, the alarmist cult is inherently statist – even its more harmless members all want the State to impose vast restrictions on economic freedom to deal with what increasingly looks like a complete non-problem.
The State, as Ludwig von Mises remind us, “…is the opposite of liberty. It is beating, imprisoning, hanging. Whatever a government does it is ultimately supported by the actions of armed constables.”
A few more quotes by Mises on the topic of government seem highly apposite in the above context:
“Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of what is called economic freedom.
[…]
Once the principle is admitted that it is duty of government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.
[…]
The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.
[…]
The state is a human institution, not a superhuman being.He who says state means coercion and compulsion. He who says: There should be a law concerning this matter, means: The armed men of the government should force people to do what they do not want to do, or not to do what they like.He who says: This law should be better enforced, means: the police should force people to obey this law. He who says: The state is God, deifies arms and prisons.
[…]
We see that as soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching of the individuals mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest detail. The personal freedom of the individual is abrogated.He becomes a slave of the community bound to obey the dictates of the majority.
[…]
Most of the tyrants, despots, and dictators are sincerely convinced that their rule is beneficial for the people,that theirs is government for the people.
[…]
Nobody ever recommended a dictatorship aiming at ends other than those he himself approved. He who advocates dictatorship always advocates the unrestricted rule of his own will.”
The last quote is conveying an especially important truth: those who demand the government introduce dictatorial decrees to achieve by force whatever they believe needs to be achieved, always want to see their own plans put into practice. In their mind, people are simply not capable of knowing what is good for them, for lack of intelligence or some other inherent defect. They want to correct the perceived errors of others by force in the name of a “greater good” only they can properly discern.
Usually when revolutions bring such people to power, they quickly fall out among themselves, because they soon start fighting over whose plan should be supreme. Thus the French Revolution began to “devour its own children” and Stalin’s comrades from the time of the Bolshevik revolution soon found themselves at the wrong end of a purge.
The extremists in the global warming cult are no different. We are calling it a cult, because it has all the attributes of one, such as the almost religious faith of members in the righteousness of their stance even in the face of a growing mountain of countervailing evidence. By its very nature this cult is authoritarian – it cannot be otherwise, since its demands can only be fulfilled by force. This defining characteristic is recently becoming ever more obvious. Calls to silence critics by applying the force of government speak for themselves in this regard. This incidentally also reveals another “inconvenient truth”: if there are critics that need to be jailed or killed, it obviously means that the debate is not over.
Addendum:
Video of Robert Kennedy Calling for “Deniers” to be Jailed:
R. Kennedy: put climate skeptics in jail together with “all the other war criminals”.
Gold dropped to new lows of $1,130 per ounce last week. This is surprising because it doesn’t square with the fundamentals. China and India continue to exert strong demand on gold, and interest in bullion coins remains high.
I explained in my October article in The Casey Report that the Comex futures market structure allows a few big banks to supply gold to keep its price contained. I call the gold futures market the “paper gold” market because very little gold actually changes hands. $360 billion of paper gold is traded per month, but only $279 million of physical gold is delivered. That’s a 1,000-to-1 ratio:
Market Statistics for the 100-oz Gold Futures Contract on Comex
Value ($M)
Monthly volume (Paper Trade)
$360,000
Open Interest All Contracts
$45,600
Warehouse-Registered Gold (oz)
$1,140
Physical Delivery per Month
$279
House Account Net Delivery, monthly
$41
We know that huge orders for paper gold can move the price by $20 in a second. These orders often exceed the CME stated limit of 6,000 contracts. Here’s a close view from October 31, when the sale of 2,365 contracts caused the gold price to plummet and forced the exchange to close for 20 seconds:
Many argue that the net long-term effect of such orders is neutral, because every position taken must be removed before expiration. But that’s actually not true. The big players can hold hundreds of contracts into expiration and deliver the gold instead of unwinding the trade. Net, big banks can drive down the price by delivering relatively small amounts of gold.
A few large banks dominate the delivery process. I grouped the seven biggest players below to show that all the other sources are very small. Those seven banks have the opportunity to manage the gold price:
After gold’s big drop in October, I analyzed the October delivery numbers. The concentration was even more severe than I expected:
This chart shows that an amazing 98.5% of the gold delivered to the Comex in October came from just three banks: Barclays; Bank of Nova Scotia; and HSBC. They delivered this gold from their in-house trading accounts.
The concentration was even worse on the other side of the trade—the side taking delivery. Barclays took 98% of all deliveries for customers. It could be all one customer, but it’s more likely that several customers used Barclays to clear their trades. Either way, notice that Barclays delivered 455 of those contracts from its house account to its own customers.
The opportunity for distorting the price of gold in an environment with so few players is obvious. Barclays knows 98% of the buyers and is supplying 35% of the gold. That’s highly concentrated, to say the least. And the amounts of gold we’re talking about are small—a bank could tip the supply by 10% by adding just 100 contracts. That amounts to only 10,000 ounces, which is worth a little over $11 million—a rounding error to any of these banks. These numbers are trivial.
Note that the big banks were delivering gold from their house accounts, meaning they were selling their own gold outright. In other words, they were not acting neutrally. These banks accounted for all but 19 of the contracts sold. That’s a position of complete dominance. Actually, it’s beyond dominance. These banks are the market.
My point is that this market is much too easily rigged , and that the warnings about manipulation are valid. At some point, too many customers will demand physical delivery and there will be a big crash. Long contracts will be liquidated with cash payouts because there won’t be enough gold to deliver. I saw a few squeezes in my 20 years trading futures, including gold. In my opinion, the futures market is not safe.
The tougher question is: for how long will big banks’ dominance continue to pressure gold down? Unfortunately, I don’t know the answer. Vigilant regulators would help, but “futures market regulators” is almost an oxymoron. The actions of the CFTC and the Comex, not to mention how MF Global was handled, suggest that there has been little pressure on regulators to fix this obvious problem.
This quote from a recent Financial Times article does give some reason for optimism, however:
UBS is expected to strike a settlement over alleged trader misbehaviour at its precious metals desks with at least one authority as part of a group deal over forex with multiple regulators this week, two people close to the situation said. … The head of UBS’s gold desk in Zurich, André Flotron, has been on leave since January for reasons unspecified by the lender….
The FCA fined Barclays £26m in May after an options trader was found to have manipulated the London gold fix.
Germany’s financial regulator BaFin has launched a formal investigation into the gold market and is probing Deutsche Bank, one of the former members of a tarnished gold fix panel that will soon be replaced by an electronic fixing.
The latter two banks are involved with the Comex.
Eventually, the physical gold market could overwhelm the smaller but more closely watched US futures delivery market. Traders are already moving to other markets like Shanghai, which could accelerate that process. You might recall that I wrote about JP Morgan (JPM) exiting the commodities business, which I thought might help bring some normalcy back to the gold futures markets. Unfortunately, other banks moved right in to pick up JPM’s slack.
Banks can’t suppress gold forever. They need physical gold bullion to continue the scheme, and there’s just not as much gold around as there used to be. Some big sources, like the Fed’s stash and the London Bullion Market, are not available. The GLD inventory is declining.
If a big player like a central bank started to use the Comex to expand its gold holdings, it could overwhelm the Comex’s relatively small inventories. Warehouse stocks registered for delivery on the Comex exchange have declined to only 870,000 ounces (8,700 contracts). Almost that much can be demanded in one month: 6,281 contracts were delivered in August.
The big banks aren’t stupid. They will see these problems coming and can probably induce some holders to add to the supplies, so I’m not predicting a crisis from too many speculators taking delivery. But a short squeeze could definitely lead to huge price spikes. It could even lead to a collapse in the confidence in the futures system, which would drive gold much higher.
Signs of high physical demand from China, India, and small investors buying coins from the mint indicate that gold prices should be rising. The GOFO rate (London Gold Forward Offered rate) went negative, indicating tightness in the gold market. Concerns about China’s central bank wanting to de-dollarize its holdings should be adding to the interest in gold.
In other words, it doesn’t add up. I fully expect currency debasement to drive gold higher, and I continue to own gold. I’m very confident that the fundamentals will drive gold much higher in the long term. But for now, I don’t know when big banks will lose their ability to manage the futures market.
Oddities in the gold market have been alleged by many for quite some time, but few know where to start looking, and even fewer have the patience to dig out the meaningful bits from the mountain of market data available. Casey Research Chief Economist Bud Conrad is one of those few—and he turns his keen eye to every sector in order to find the smart way to play it. This is the kind of analysis that’s especially important in this period of uncertainty and volatility… and you can put Bud’s expertise—along with the other skilled analysts’ talents—to work for you by taking a risk-free test-drive of The Casey Report right now.
Paul Simon sang — “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school it’s a wonder I can think at all. And though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none I can read the writing on the wall.”
I’m not exaggerating when I say my high school years were the worst four years of my life. Most everything I needed to learn I learned in kindergarten, picked up a thing or two as late as 8th grade, but I didn’t learn Jack Shit in grades 9 through 12. I had few friends. It was so bad, as you will see in the pictures below, not even Da Gooberment tried to protect me!
What they tried to teach me was mostly a Big Pile Of Bullshit. Here, let Pete Seeger ‘splain it to you in under two minutes.
It’s not that I wanted a lot of government protection. Eddie Billian (actual name), a wannabe jockfuk, picked on me almost every single day. I used to daydream about cutting off his hands in shop class. I would have been happy if they let me get away with just that, a Justifiable Amputation. Even after all these years … Eddie, if you’re reading this just know that if I ever run into you, I’m going to kick you in the fuck.
Unfortunately, we now have laws governing ………. everything. Laws we couldn’t even have imagined back in my day. Somewhere along the line we gave up our right to choose even simple things, and allowed the government to impose their standards upon us. As you read this, just ask yourself one question: —–“When will we tell the government we would rather die, than continue to be their mindless slaves?”
WHEN did we say, “To hell with this?”
We need to REVIVE this attitude!
OK, let’s get started.
“Be careful, Stucky, that can put your eye out!”
That was the extent of the warning my mom gave me. Back in my day, there were well over 200 activities that could put your eye out! But, virtually none that could kill you. How much fun can a game be if there isn’t at least a small chance of death?
So, the kids on our block played an interesting version; each of us would get one jart and at the same we’d throw it straight up in the air as high as we could, and then we’d dodge the incoming hail of plastic and steel … the idea being to wait to dodge the missile until the very last possible second. One time a jart buried itself into Angelo Falcone’s foot, and he started to cry when blood oozed through his white Converse sneakers …. not because it hurt, but because his father was gonna kill him for messing up his sneakers!
It’s been shown that the business end of a jart can land with a force of several thousand pounds of pressure per square inch. Seriously. We Boomers may have ruined America, but we surely weren’t pussies.
By my own estimate, I believe jarts were thrown about 138.4 Billion times by 1987. In April 1987, seven-year-old Michelle Snow was killed by a lawn dart thrown by one of her brothers’ playmates in the backyard of their home in Riverside, California. She should have ducked. Previously, only two other children died. So, 138.4 Billion throws … 3 dead … do the math. Mr. Snow went on a crusade and by 1989 Congress banned jarts, again, but this time forever.
In one respect, I suppose it’s nice that in America one person can still make a difference. On the other hand, one person gets their way almost always at the expense of thousands of others. Isn’t this tyranny by the few?
In the news today the town of Westminster, MA (pop: 7,000) banned the sale of any and all tobacco products ….. a decision made by a THREE MEMBER Board Of Health. Three people who don’t give a damn that the overwhelming majority of the town does not support this action. Why …. that’s almost as bad as 317 million Americans being ruled by 535 criminals in Congress.
“Mind if I smoke?” “Yes?” “Tough shit!”
Back in my day, it seemed like everyone smoked. Watch an old episode of Perry Mason; Perry and Paul Drake smoked constantly … murderers smoked while murdering. Doctors smoked while delivering babies. You could smoke in a supermarket, in an airplane, or any restaurant. Teachers smoked. Students smoked in the bathroom. Doctors smoked Lucky Strikes. Even Father Joseph at my Catholic school, St Peter’s, smoked while greeting Sunday parishioners.
Asking “Mind if I light up?” was a mere formality. No one dared say, “No!” for fear of being labeled a pussy. Smokers smoked and there was zero lack of concern for those who didn’t smoke. Smokers weren’t forced outside …. non-smokers were! Those were the good old days of ‘IN YOUR FACE!’. It was a world full of adults who didn’t have anxiety attacks over a thousand different “safety” issues.
Normal kids didn’t wear helmets!
Whether riding a bike, or roller skating, or skateboarding …. NO ONE wore a helmet. If you did, your social life would have been over, kaput, finito … an outcast, destined for humiliation and abuse … especially in gym class. There were only two groups that wore helmets; football players and the mentally retarded. (Our own poster, bb, wore a helmet … and he wasn’t a football player.)
“Seat-belt? What’s a seat-belt?”
My dad’s first two cars didn’t have seat-belts. My first car, a 1958 Pontiac Chieftain, didn’t have seat-belts. When we did get cars with seat-belts, we didn’t wear them. They were a pain in the ass. Belts were made to hold up your pants, not bind you up in a seat. Child seats? Never heard of them. When we brought my new baby sister home from the hospital, my mom just threw her in the back seat … with me. I did put a Teddy Bear on the edge of the seat to keep her from falling off.
Sure, I’ll agree that seat-belts save lives. But, that’s not the point. It should be a PERSONAL decision … not one forced upon you. Besides, the gooberment doesn’t give a rats ass about your life …. otherwise they wouldn’t have sent 100,000+ young men to their deaths in various adventurous wars since WWII. Nosiree. “Click-it or ticket” is all about extracting more money from your wallet into theirs.
“Let the sunshine in!!”
In case you didn’t read the ad … you must;
“Tanfastic lets the sunshine in. It’s not loaded up with sunburn protection like old folks and kids want. Tanfastic’s for you 15-to-25 year olds who can take the sun. Especially if you want to get superdark. Superfast.”
Got that? Back in my day we did NOT try to BLOCK the sun. Oh, no!! The goal was to AMPLIFY the sun’s rays. Get dark, baby .. real, real dark!! Screw that sun-screen shit. The only people who went the sunscreen route were those with medical conditions … like, albinos. My sister (I swear!) used to smear herself with butter. Other women (like, Nancy Pelosi) used Crisco. I swear that’s true. Back then few ever asked, “What could go wrong?” If it feels good, do it, and being a Darkie felt reeeeal good.
YOU MUST WATCH YOUR CHILD AT ALL TIMES OR HE/SHE WILL …..…. DIE!!!!
Sadly, that’s the world we live in today. I’ve seen parents hook up their children with what looks like a dog leash. A few weeks ago we went out to eat with Ms. Freud’s son and family. It was a nice day, so we ate outside in the patio area. As it so happened her grandson, Andrew, wandered off …. a few feet behind another table … when his mommie started freaking the fuck out … “WHERE’S ANDREW!! WHERE’S ANDREW!!!!!!”. It was so goddamn embarrassing, you have no idea.
During summer vacation from school, somewhere around 9AM I would proudly announce, “I’m going out to play!” Mom’s only response, “You better be home by dinner!” …. which was 6PM. Yeah, nine hours of unsupervised activity. Oh, you should know … I lived in Newark, NJ. I would wander literally MILES from home … either to Weequahic Park (a two mile walk), or to my best friend’s house in Irvington (a five mile bike ride … no helmet). Sometimes my dad would take me shopping to the lumber yard, hardware store, etc., and if I was a pain in the ass, meaning, I’d pester him to buy me shit, well … he would just leave me in the car once we arrived at the destination. Sometimes that happened during 100 degree weather. BOTH my parents would have been arrested, dozens of times, in today’s environment. I think it was Pogo who said, “We have met the enemy, and it’s us.”
“QUIT BEING A BABY!!”
That’s what my dad said when he was teaching me to ride a bicycle, and I was doing just fine, and then the sumvabitch let go, and then I freaked out, and then I fell, and then I scraped my elbow and hand badly enough to draw blood, and then I cried, and then yeah he said “Quit being a baby!”, and then mom came running and spit (yes, spit) in a hanky and then tied it around my arm with her kerchief (yes, kerchief), and then I got my (then) skinny ass back on the bike and then learned to ride it THAT very day. Our “first aid” kit consisted of Band-Aids and a bottle of iodine.
See the kid in the picture? He’s about to have his nuts rammed by a goat. See the adults? They think that’s funny as shit. We were tough back then.
“mm-mm Good! Crap food builds strong bones!!”
Do you know the nutritional value of white bread? I’ll tell you. Less than zero. In other words, eating it actually extracts needed minerals and vitamins from your body. Wilson’s Mor was originally named Wilson’s Moron … cuz you gotta be a retard to eat it; pig’s head, snout, cheek meat, and even tongue. Their motto is “everything but the squeal” Yummy!!
As a child, I did not know one single adult, ever, who was concerned about getting this or that vitamin, or this or that mineral … except in commercials. We ate some of the crappiest “food” ever invented. Yet, we survived, and even thrived.
Compare yesteryear to Moochelle’s Mandated gooberment lunch. Below is a picture taken earlier this week by Darrel Bunch, a senior at Haskell High School in Oklahoma. WTF???
You call THIS progress?? Gimme some Wilson’s Mor!!!
And Lastly …
There were no homos in the Boy Scouts
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It was better that way. And that’s all I have to say about that.
The mind boggling aspect of this chart is how poor the vast majority of people in the world are. If you have net worth of $10,000, you are richer than 4.8 billion people on the planet. If you have net worth of $100,000, you are richer than 6.4 billion people on the planet. If and when things go south, there are going to be a lot more have nots looking to skewer the haves. It should be interesting.
Financial inequality is steadily rising alongside global wealth, which reached a grand total of $263 trillion in 2014. According to Crédit Suisse, people with a net worth of over $1 million represent just 0.7 percent of the planet’s population, but they control 41 percent of its wealth.
69 percent of the world’s population have a net worth of under $10,000 – they account for a mere 3 percent of global wealth. Meanwhile, 23 percent fall into the $10,000-$100,000 bracket and they control 14 percent of worldwide wealth. In order to be counted among the wealthiest half of the world’s citizens, a person requires a net worth of $3,650.
With the US stock market on yet another vertical tear amidst a backdrop of news that Japan’s central bankers openly admit to debasing the Yen, it seems necessary to reconsider all this in light of Bastiat’s brilliant insight.
The visible effects of central bank actions are obvious. It is the unseen effects that interest me, and I’ll describe the U.S. system as I understand it.
First, by purchasing government IOU’s (bonds) with credit created from nowhere, the Fed has given Congress the ability to spend vast sums of money they didn’t need to tax or borrow from someone else who actually produced something previously. This is the Keynesian “helicopter drop” of cash in every sense of the word, but that cash obviously fell on things for which the Federal government is the dominant payer: the medical-industrial-complex, the military-industrial-complex (including the new money-pit, “Homeland Security”) and the higher-ed-industrial-complex.
Sure, “the poor” have gotten a share of this swag, but most of it went to well-paid “middle income” people like doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, engineers, missile production technicians, employees of firms with military supply contracts, university instructors and administrators, etc. QE was clearly “middle class welfare” for those engaged in industries monopolized or semi-monopolized by Washington DC.
This has long-lived subsidiary effects, e.g., rendering unnaturally attractive the prospect of employment in one of these government-favored sectors and pumping up foreign interventionism.
How often have we heard someone tell their 18 year old kid to study medicine, nursing, or enroll in one of the numerous medical “technician” fields of study? How much might we attribute the USA’s “police the world” intervention to armies of military supplier lobbyists who, as de facto salesmen with sales quotas to meet, warp the worldview of elected and professional “officials” in Washington DC (and the public at large) with endless tales of boogeymen on every continent?
The second effect of central bank action is largely to temporarily amplify collective perception of wealth. A review of axiom is needed:
Money does not flow into or out of asset markets. For every buyer there is a seller, so every buyer’s money that comes into the market leaves with the seller. In terms of money, every single transaction is a wash, including IPO’s (because the firm selling shares still “walks away” with the buyers’ money.) The Fed’s money “printing” does not ramp up stocks.
Markets rise and fall based on shared belief and nothing more. In the aggregate, bull markets occur when participants simply agree that the value (in terms of dollars, or yen, or quatloos) is higher now for something than it was before. Nothing physical needs to have occurred for this to take place.
This shared belief is in the realm of crowd psychology and not physics or even economics. All attribution of cause and effect in markets is post hoc rationalization and nothing more.
Optimistic people gamble (because they just feel lucky; everything is awesome and nothing can go wrong.)
Higher levels of perceived wealth embolden already optimistic people to gamble even more. About once every few centuries this feedback loop goes orbital and an asset mania occurs. Few people recognize it when it’s occurring.
So what do these axioms mean for what is unseen in central bank actions?
Modern central banks have simply expanded the rationalization for rapid increases in perception of wealth, which translated into a means for people to exercise the greatest rationalization for gambling ever. The path to great riches appears to be those who have gambled with the longest odds (by taking on the highest leverage in asset market trading) and central banks have encouraged the shared belief that borrowing for speculation is the path to riches. From people “investing” their 401(k)’s in stock mutual funds to Wall Street’s celebrity asset managers, the message has been a monotone: speculators win, savers are chumps. Borrow money (AKA “access the credit we offer”) because it expands wealth.
The FOMC and its brethren didn’t create the casino. They simply provided a positive feedback loop to optimism, enabling the pyramiding of agreed valuations higher and higher. People behaved like drunken gamblers in a casino, where every win on every gaming table was amplified and broadcast to every player, increasing his or her desire to roll the dice again while ordering another free scotch on the rocks.
What could encourage a gambler more than the perception that his bank account is bulging with assets? The unseen rub is that his “assets” are in fact nothing but the IOU’s (the markers) of other gamblers. In a vast echo chamber of group-think, optimistic people gamble ever higher because they are emboldened in their euphoria by wealth that exists only in the minds of their fellow gamblers.
This is not a change from any prior time, it is only in the magnitude of the pyramid so constructed that our experience differs.
Are there natural limits to this phenomenon? I submit that there are, but that the limits are governed not by physics or economics but by mass psychology. All attempts at “calling the top” so far have been fruitless, just as they were in early 2000 during the vertical ascent of the tech stock bubble. This is because there are no fixed signposts in a complex system characterized by the intersection of emotion and reason among many millions of people. We’re trying to guess “how high is up?”
What we know is that the wealth underpinning the urge to gamble is nothing but an ocean of IOU’s. From US Treasury Bonds to Corporate debt instruments and sub-prime car loans, the world’s balance sheet is stacked to the moon and back with IOU’s on the asset side of the ledger. This perception of unprecedented wealth rationalizes actions that have long term (occupation choices) and short term (stock speculation) consequences.
When (not if, when) the social psychology turns from optimism to pessimism the collective valuation of all assets (including the IOU’s everyone, including central banks, holds) will drop. Decreasing shared opinions about stock value have obvious effects, but recall that a decreasing shared opinion of the value of IOU’s that are part of a freely-trading bond market is the same as a rising interest rate environment. An ocean of existing debt at near 0% interest will birth a Godzilla when rates turn up due to the hive-mind’s about-face.
Ironically, nothing central bankers do can or will alter this. Even if they were inclined to issue more credit, we already know that today’s credit-money production simply circles back as “investment” in the debt so created. It’s a zero-effect activity, with only temporary mass psychological effects. When the social mood turns down, the “added wealth” of the new credit will simply evaporate, as though it never existed…except for the embedded, long-lived misery listed above. Whether it’s legions of medical-industry people made freshly unemployed by the collapse of Medicare/Medicaid or vast destruction of perceived wealth as oceans of bond and stock value simply disappear, what people were taught to depend upon will turn out to be pyramids of self-deception and group-think illusion.
We face a future where every feedback loop will be engaged in (psychological) asset value (wealth) destruction. Treasury bonds, corporate junk bonds, stocks, real estate and virtually everything else must erode in money value because the mental state required to sustain their subjective value will be reversed from the rising trend of the last 30 years. The gamblers will simultaneously eschew the gaming tables while their markers are called and their bank accounts (figuratively) evaporate. Central bankers didn’t initiate all this, but they enabled it to grow vast and last long enough to insure that every American booked passage on this SS Titanic. Like collectivists everywhere, they insured that when the consequences of their folly arrived, they would be catastrophic instead of limited.
Sobriety after a 32 year (and counting) casino-enabled bender will come with a hangover no one now can imagine.
Do you want to know why Millennials seem so angry? We promised them that if they worked hard, stayed out of trouble and got good grades that they would be able to achieve the “American Dream”. We told them not to worry about accumulating very high levels of student loan debt because there would be good jobs waiting for them at the end of the rainbow once they graduated. Well, it turns out that we lied to them. Nearly half of all Millennials are spending at least half of their paychecks to pay off debt, more than 30 percent of them are living with their parents because they can’t find decent jobs, and this year the homeownership rate for Millennials sunk to a brand new all-time low. When you break U.S. adults down by age, our long-term economic decline has hit the Millennials the hardest by far. And yet somehow we expect them to bear the burden of providing Medicare, Social Security and other social welfare benefits to the rest of us as we get older. No wonder there is so much anger and frustration among our young people. The following are 24 reasons why Millennials are screaming mad about our unfair economy…
#1 The current savings rate for Millennials is negative 2 percent. Yes, you read that correctly. Not only aren’t Millennials saving any money, they are actually spending a good bit more than they are earning every month.
#2 A survey conducted earlier this year found that 47 percent of all Millennials are using at least half of their paychecks to pay off debt.
#3 For U.S. households that are headed up by someone under the age of 40, average wealth is still about 30 percent below where it was back in 2007.
#4 In 2005, the homeownership rate for U.S. households headed up by someone under the age of 35 was approximately 43 percent. Today, it is sitting at about 36 percent.
#5 One recent survey discovered that an astounding 31.1 percent of all U.S. adults in the 18 to 34-year-old age bracket are currently living with their parents.
#6 At this point, the top 0.1 percent of all Americans have about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of all Americans combined. Needless to say, there aren’t very many Millennials in that top 0.1 percent.
#7 Since Barack Obama has been in the White House, close to 40 percent of all 27-year-olds have spent at least some time unemployed.
#8 Only about one out of every five 27-year-olds owns a home at this point, and an astounding 80 percent of all 27-year-olds are paying off debt.
#9 In 2013, the ratio of what men in the 18 to 29-year-old age bracket were earning compared to what the general population was earning reached an all-time low.
#10 Back in the year 2000, 80 percent of all men in their late twenties had a full-time job. Today, only 65 percent do.
#11 In 2012, one study found that U.S. families that have a head of household that is under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
#12 Another study released back in 2011 discovered that U.S. households led by someone 65 years of age or older are 47 times wealthier than U.S. households led by someone 35 years of age or younger.
#14 In 1994, less than half of all college graduates left school with student loan debt. Today, it is over 70 percent.
#15 At this point, student loan debt has hit a grand total of 1.2 trillion dollars in the United States. That number has grown by about 84 percent just since 2008.
#16 According to the Pew Research Center, nearly four out of every ten U.S. households that are led by someone under the age of 40 are currently paying off student loan debt.
#17 In 2008, approximately 29 million Americans were paying off student loan debt. Today, that number has ballooned to 40 million.
#18 Since 2005, student loan debt burdens have absolutely exploded while salaries for young college graduates have actually declined…
The problem developing is that earnings and debt aren’t moving in the same direction. From 2005 to 2012, average student loan debt has jumped 35%, adjusting for inflation, while the median salary has actually dropped by 2.2%.
#19 According to CNN, 260,000 Americans with a college or professional degree made at or below the federal minimum wage last year.
#20 Even after accounting for inflation, the cost of college tuition increased by 275 percent between 1970 and 2013.
#21 In the years to come, much of the burden of paying for Medicare for our aging population will fall on Millennials. It is being projected that the number of Americans on Medicare will grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 73.2 million in 2025. In addition, it has been estimated that Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars over the next 75 years. That comes to approximately $328,404 for every single household in the United States.
#22 In the years to come, much of the burden of paying for our exploding Medicaid system will fall on Millennials. Today, more than 70 million Americans are on Medicaid, and it is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.
#23 In the years to come, much of the burden of paying for our massive Ponzi scheme known as Social Security will fall on Millennials. Right now, there are more than 63 million Americans collecting Social Security benefits. By 2035, that number is projected to soar to an astounding 91 million. In 1945, there were 42 workers for every retiree receiving Social Security benefits. Today, that number has fallen to 2.5 workers, and if you eliminate all government workers, that leaves only 1.6 private sector workers for every retiree receiving Social Security benefits.
#24 Our national debt is currently sitting at a grand total of $17,937,617,036,693.09. It is on pace to roughly double during the Obama years, and Millennials are expected to service that debt for the rest of their lives.
Yes, there are certainly some Millennials that are flat broke because they are lazy and irresponsible.
But there are many others that have tried to do everything right and still find that they can’t get any breaks. For example, Bloomberg recently shared the story of a young couple named Jason and Jessica Alinen…
The damage inflicted on U.S. households by the collapse of the housing market and recession wasn’t evenly distributed. Just ask Jason and Jessica Alinen.
The couple, who live near Seattle, declared bankruptcy in 2011 when the value of the house they then owned plunged to less than $200,000 from the $349,000 they paid for it four years earlier, just as the economic slump was about to start. Jason even stopped getting haircuts to save money.
“We thought we’d have a white picket fence, two kids, two dogs, and we’d have $100,000 in equity,” said Jason, 33, who does have two children. “It’s just really frustrating.”
Can you identify with them?
Most young Americans just want to work hard, buy a home and start a family.
But for millions of them, that dream might as well be a million miles away right now.
Unfortunately, most of them have absolutely no idea why this has happened.
Many of them end up blaming themselves. Many of them think that they are not talented enough or that they didn’t work hard enough or that they don’t know the right people.
What they don’t know is that the truth is that decades of incredibly foolish decisions are starting to catch up with us in a major way, and they just happen to be caught in the crossfire.
Sadly, instead of becoming informed about what is happening to our country, a very large percentage of our young people are absolutely addicted to entertainment instead.
Below, I want to share with you a video that I recently came across. You can find it on YouTube right here. A student at Texas Tech University recently asked some of her classmates a series of questions. When they were asked about Brad Pitt or Jersey Shore they knew the answers right away. But when they were asked who won the Civil War or who the current Vice-President of the United States is, they deeply struggled. I think that this video says a lot about where we are as a society today…
I love reading the spin that passes for earnings releases these days. Remember earlier in the year when the CEO of JC Penney was predicting a glorious turnaround and the Wall Street shysters drove the stock up from $5 to $11?
It’s back under $8 and still headed to $0.
The faux journalists are doing their usual bullshit pump job, but here are the facts:
Even though they were predicting same store sales increases in the 5% to 10% range early in the year, quarterly same store sales were up 0%. This is after a 4% decline last year and 20% declines in the year before that. Sounds awesome.
They lost another $188 million, bringing the 9 month loss to over $700 million. This is after losing over $2 billion last year.
They had a negative cash flow from operations of $320 million for the quarter.
Their long-term debt has increased by $500 million in the last year, while their equity has declined by $200 million.
There is no recovery here. They slowed the bleeding, but they are still dying. They will lose over $500 million in the 4th quarter. Book it dano. Their sales will be negative again. The CEO will lie and Wall Street will pump and dump. But, JC Penney is still on a path to bankruptcy.
JCPENNEY REPORTS FISCAL 2014 THIRD QUARTER RESULTS
PLANO, Texas – (Nov. 12, 2014) – J. C. Penney Company, Inc. (NYSE: JCP) today announced financial results for the quarter ended Nov. 1, 2014.
Myron E. (Mike) Ullman, III, Chief Executive Officer, said, “This quarter shows the progress we are making in the final phase of JCPenney’s turnaround. We continued to significantly improve the profitability of our business with gross margin expansion of 710 basis points, a $342 million improvement in EBITDA and bottom-line financial results that exceeded even our own expectations. Like most retailers, following a strong start to the back-to-school season, sales did slow in September and October as unseasonably warm weather hindered the sale of fall goods.”
Mr. Ullman continued, “During appointment shopping periods like Back to School and Holiday, JCPenney is the customer’s preferred destination for discovering great style, quality and value. This year, we are confident customers will once again choose JCPenney for meaningful holiday gifts that fit their family’s budget. We are well positioned to compete this holiday season and I would like to thank our associates for their hard work, warrior spirit and commitment to delivering an exceptional customer experience every day.”
Financial Results
For the third quarter, JCPenney reported net sales of $2.764 billion compared to $2.779 billion in the third quarter of 2013, with same store sales flat for the quarter.
Home and Fine Jewelry were among the Company’s top performing merchandise divisions in the quarter. Sephora inside JCPenney also continued its strong performance. Geographically, the western and northeastern regions of the country delivered the best performance.
For the third quarter, gross margin was 36.6 % of sales, compared to 29.5 % in the same quarter last year, representing a 710 basis point improvement. Gross margin was positively impacted by a significant improvement in the Company’s mix and margin on clearance sales over the prior year quarter.
Inventory was $3.358 billion, down 10.4 % compared to the same quarter last year. The Company noted it is pleased with the level and content of its inventory heading into the holiday season.
SG&A expenses for the quarter were down $18 million to $988 million, 35.7 % of sales. These savings were primarily driven by lower store expenses and corporate overhead costs.
Operating income for the quarter was a loss of $54 million which represents a $347 million or 87 % improvement over last year. EBITDA was $102 million, a $342 million improvement from the same period last year. EBITDA for the quarter included a gain of $88 million related to the sale of certain store assets. For the third quarter, the Company incurred a net loss of $188 million or ($0.62) per share. A reconciliation of EBITDA to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure is included with this release.
Financial Position
During the quarter, the Company completed a $400 million offering of senior unsecured notes. The net proceeds of the offering of 8.125 % Senior Notes due 2019 were used to pay the tender consideration and related transaction fees and expenses for the Company’s cash tender offers for approximately $327 million aggregate principal amount of its outstanding 6.875 % Medium-Term Notes due 2015, 7.65 % Debentures due 2016 and 7.95 % Debentures due 2017. Subsequent to the completion of the tender offers, the Company used approximately $64 million of available cash to effect a legal defeasance of the remaining outstanding principal amount of Medium-Term Notes due 2015 by depositing funds with the Trustee for the Notes sufficient to make all payments of interest and principal on the outstanding Notes to October 15, 2015, the stated maturity of the Notes. Through the notes offering, tender offer and defeasance, the Company was able to proactively address its near-term debt maturities. As a result, the Company’s next debt maturity will be approximately $78 million in August 2016.
The Company ended the quarter with over $1.9 billion in total available liquidity.
Outlook
The Company’s guidance for the fourth quarter of 2014 is as follows:
•Comparable store sales: expected to increase 2 % to 4 %;
•Gross margin: expected to increase 500 to 600 basis points versus last year; and
•SG&A expenses: expected to be slightly above last year’s levels.
The Company’s updated 2014 full-year guidance is as follows:
•Comparable store sales: expected to be 3.5 % to 4.5 %;
•Gross margin: expected to be 500 to 600 basis points above last year;
•Free cash flow: expected to be positive;
•Liquidity: expected to be approximately $2.1 billion at year-end;
•Capital expenditures: expected to be approximately $250 million; and
•Depreciation and amortization: expected to be approximately $640 million.
T
It’s undeniable that the window of opportunity is getting smaller… especially when you connect all the dots and see the big picture.
To help connect those dots, it’s important to understand the things that make being an American citizen uniquely burdensome.
First, Americans are the only people in the entire world who effectively suffer under an inescapable, worldwide system of taxation.
For example, if an American and an Italian both moved to Singapore (or any foreign country) and earned income there, the American would still have to file and pay US income taxes. The Italian would have no tax liability to Italy. That’s how it works for citizens of virtually all countries… except American citizens.
The obligation for US citizens to file a stack of complex and almost incomprehensible forms each year usually requires the assistance of an expensive tax preparer. This is because even an honest mistake can lead to truly draconian penalties that can only be described as a form of cruel and unusual punishment.
Of course, the same is true for US corporations, which pay the highest effective corporate income tax rate in the entire developed world.
Then there are the prohibitively costly rules and regulations—like FATCA—that foreign firms have to comply with if they wish to do business with Americans. Because of the costs of FATCA compliance—and the huge potential penalties for mistakes—many foreign companies have come to the logical conclusion that it’s better to kick their existing American clients to the curb and refuse to take on any new ones.
Similarly, the costs of complying with the SEC’s regulations have effectively closed off many global investment opportunities for Americans.
And then there’s the requirements for the Dodd-Frank Act.
These are but a few examples of the unique burdens American citizens have to deal with, and the list of them never gets smaller.
Taken together, these ever-growing and aggressively enforced regulations with draconian penalties are causing record numbers of Americans to head for the exits and renounce their citizenship—a completely logical outcome that should shock no one.
Blocking the Exits
In 2010, it came as a surprise when the US government introduced a $450 fee for Americans who were seeking to renounce their citizenship. Prior to 2010, there had never been any fee to give up your citizenship in the history of the US.
Then in late 2014 there was another surprise. The US government announced that it was drastically increasing the fee from $450 to $2,350—a more than fivefold jump.
The new fee represents a cost that is over 20 times higher than the average cost to renounce one’s citizenship in other developed countries.
I think the fee increase represents another incremental step in restricting your options as the window of opportunity is without a doubt closing.
The US State Department, in justifying the increase, claimed that the number of renunciations has “increased dramatically, consuming far more consular time and resources.”
I believe the latest 422% renunciation fee hike is just the beginning—it’s going to get a lot more expensive.
Here’s why.
The political dynamics in the US guarantee more welfare and more warfare, so government spending has nowhere to go but up, even though the government is already effectively bankrupt. That means we should only expect the politicians to come up with more and more insidious ways to try to squeeze blood out of the taxpayer turnip—which of course will create more incentive and demand for renunciations. With more demand for renunciations, expect the costs to go up.
That’s why I think the $2,350 fee is as cheap as it’s ever going to be going forward. So you might as well renounce sooner than later if you’re considering it.
Speaking of the renunciation fee, here is another, more accurate way to think of it.
Think of it like the price of buying your freedom from the byzantine US Tax Code and an out-of-control government.
It’s not all that dissimilar to how in the past slaves in certain parts of the world were able to purchase their freedom.
Today, US tax slaves can purchase freedom for themselves—and their posterity—from an insolvent government that views its citizens as cows to be milked by paying the $2,350 renunciation fee and a potential exit tax.
Peter Schiff Was Right
One person who gets the big picture and predicted this fee increase was Peter Schiff.
I interviewed Peter back in in early 2013—about a year and a half before the 2014 fee increase—and here’s what he had to say:
You have to fill out a form if you want to renounce your citizenship—which, by the way, you can only get from a foreign embassy or consulate. Those forms used to be free. Now they’re about $500 apiece. So think about that. If they can charge you $500 for that form, they could charge $5,000, they could charge $5,000,000. They could basically make it impossible for you to leave. And they’re trying to make it more difficult ever since Eduardo Saverin from Facebook went to Singapore. Now the government is trying to come up with all sorts of ways to punish Americans who try to give up their citizenship, and this really is the sign of a nation in decay. 50 years ago, nobody would want to give up American citizenship. They would cherish it. The fact that so many people are paying tremendous amounts of money to get this albatross off their neck shows you how much times have changed, that an American passport is not an asset to be cherished but a liability that people are willing to pay to get rid of.
The Tax Benefits of Renunciation Without Renunciation
But fortunately there’s an incredible solution—one that doesn’t require you to give up your US citizenship or even leave the US. It’s like obtaining the tax benefits of renunciation without actually having to do so.
That solution has been dubbed “America’s Tax-Free Zone.”
I know it sounds too good to be true, but I assure you it’s most certainly not. It’s 100% real and legal.
Peter Schiff has already moved one of his businesses to America’s Tax-Free Zone.
But it’s not just Peter Schiff: many regular people of average means—business owners, individual investors, and entrepreneurs—are legally minimizing most federal and state taxes thanks to America’s Tax-Free Zone. And it’s no surprise that their numbers are constantly growing.
This amazing opportunity is exactly why we’ve teamed up with Peter to create a free video that explains it all.
It’s official: no global warming in 18 years 1 month, according to satellite data.
Robert F. Kenndy jr.: wants to shut up “climate change deniers” by jailing them
