YOU’VE BEEN HAD

“The corporations use their new windfall profits from the tax breaks to buyback shares to jack up prices (and bonuses). Since Fed gov cannot cover with lost revenue, it increase debt. Ergo, the share buybacks were leveraged buybacks funded by suckers…YOU!”

Dave Collum

Image result for then we told them it would trickle down trump

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality.

It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

“For the last 40 years, the United States has pursued a ruthless form of neoliberalism that has stripped economic activity from ethical considerations and social costs. One consequence has been the emergence of a culture of cruelty in which the financial elite produce inhuman policies that treat the most vulnerable with contempt, relegating them to zones of social abandonment and forcing them to inhabit a society increasingly indifferent to human suffering.”

Henry Giroux


The Future Stinks

Guest Post by The Zman

Try to imagine living as a hunter-gatherer 25 thousand years ago. Naturally, you’ll think about the cavemen you recall seeing on TV or in movies. Museums used to have life sized figures of early humans in their exhibits to give visitors an idea of what it was like to be a person in the Stone Age. Maybe it sounds appealing, maybe not, but most people focus on the material differences. Living in a cave, wearing a loincloth or bearskin, depending upon your locale, would not be fun after a few days. Modern man likes his modern things.

If you think not having cell service would be terrible, imagine a total lack of privacy. Humans in that period did everything in full view of everyone else. They ate together, slept together and did all the other things together. Of course, the lack of complicated shelters made this necessary. It’s hard to have privacy when you don’t have walls. But, there was also the fact that people had no concept of privacy. They did not think of it because it had never existed.

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NATION OF LAND WHALES

You just had to know that picture is from a K-Mart.

Via Goodbye America (in a photo)

Pass the fries and let’s have some Cheetos for dessert. Corporate processed toxic shit marketed as food to the ignorant masses with no self control mechanism has done wonders. Mega-corporations make billions poisoning you and then other Mega-corporations sell you drugs to “treat” the poisoning. They wouldn’t possibly stop selling the poison or curing the disease. That would drastically reduce profits.

Adult obesity now exceeds 30% of the population in 20 U.S. states. In 2014, the rates of obesity surpassed 35% in three states — Arkansas (35.9%), West Virginia (35.7%) and Mississippi (35.5%) — 22 states have rates above 30%, 45 states are above 25%, and every state is above 20%. Arkansas has the highest adult obesity rate at 36%, while Colorado has the lowest at 21%, according to an annual report, “The State of Obesity,” released by Trust for America’s Health, a Washington, D.C. health policy group, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to public health. The data show that 23 of 25 states with the highest rates of obesity are in the South and Midwest.

This is a dramatic shift from previous generations. In 1980, no state had a rate above 15%, and in 1991, no state had a rate above 20%. Today, more than 30% of adults, nearly 17% of 2- to 19-year-olds, are obese.

Suck it fat asses. Pennsylvania didn’t make the top ten.

This story is making me hungry.


 

The Social Cost of Capitalism

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

Few, if any, corporations absorb the full cost of their operations. Corporations shove many of their costs onto the environment, the public sector, and distant third parties. For example, currently 3 million gallons of toxic waste water from a Colorado mine has escaped and is working its way down two rivers into Utah and Lake Powell. At least seven city water systems dependent on the rivers have been shut down. The waste was left by private enterprise, and the waste was accidentally released by the Environmental Protection Agency, which might be true or might be a coverup for the mine. If the Lake Powell reservoir ends up polluted, it is likely that the cost of the mine imposed on third parties exceeds the total value of the mine’s output over its entire life.

Economists call these costs “external costs” or “social costs.” The mine made its profits by creating pollutants, the cost of which is born by those who had no share in the profits.

As this is the way regulated capitalism works, you can imagine how bad unregulated capitalism would be. Just think about the unregulated financial system, the consequences we are still suffering with more to come.

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LIES, DAMNED LIES & STATISTICS

The government released their monthly CPI report this week. Even though it came in at an annualized rate of 3.6%, they and their mouthpieces in the corporate mainstream media dutifully downplayed the uptrend. They can’t let the plebs know the truth. That might upend their economic recovery storyline and put a crimp into their artificial free money, zero interest rate, stock market rally. If they were to admit inflation is rising, the Fed would be forced to raise rates. That is unacceptable in our rigged .01% economy. There are banker bonuses, CEO stock options, corporate stock buyback earnings per share goals and captured politician elections at stake.

The corporate MSM immediately shifted the focus to the annual CPI figure of 0.1%. That’s right. Your government keepers expect you to believe the prices you pay to live your everyday life have been essentially flat in the last year. Anyone who lives in the real world, not the BLS Bizarro world of models, seasonal adjustments, hedonic adjustments, and substitution adjustments, knows this is a lie. The original concept of CPI was to measure the true cost of maintaining a constant standard of living. It should reflect your true inflation of out of pocket costs to live a daily existence in this country.

Instead, it has become a manipulated statistic using academic theories as a cover to systematically under-report the true level of inflation. The purpose has been to cut annual cost of living adjustments to Social Security and other government benefits, while over-estimating the true level of GDP. Artificially low inflation figures allow the mega-corporations who control the country to keep wage increases to workers low. Under-reporting the true level of inflation also allows the Federal Reserve to keep their discount rate far lower than it would be in an honest free market. The Wall Street banks, who own and control the Federal Reserve, are free to charge 18% on credit card balances while paying .25% to savers. The manipulation of the CPI benefits the vested interests, impoverishes the masses, and slowly but surely contributes to the destruction of our economic system.

A deep dive into Table 2 from the BLS reveals some truth and uncovers more lies. Their weighting of everyday living expenditures is warped and purposefully misleading. Let’s look at the annual increases in some food items we might consume in the course of a month, living in this empire of lies:

  • Ground Beef – 10.1%
  • Roast Beef – 11.8%
  • Steak – 11.1%
  • Eggs – 21.8%
  • Chicken – 3.7%
  • Coffee – 3.4%
  • Sugar – 4.2%
  • Candy – 4.6%
  • Snacks – 3.5%
  • Salt & Seasonings – 5.3%
  • Food Away From Home – 3.0%

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I KNEW I WAS ABOVE AVERAGE

The average woman now weighs what an average man weighed in 1960. Who says women don’t have equal rights?

I find it fascinating that our weight started soaring at the exact same time that consumer debt began soaring in the early 1980’s. Corporate fascism and the banking cabal captured our economic system and used their propaganda machine to sell toxic processed chemicals, disguised as food, to the increasingly dumbed down and sedated masses. TV, iGadgets, carbohydrate rich corporate carb enriched crap, and suburban sprawl requiring autos to get anywhere have combined to create the Obese States of America.

Who benefits?

The mega-corporations peddling toxic faux food.

The medical industrial complex peddling pills to treat all the ailments created by the toxic faux food.

The bankers supplying the debt to consume the faux food and pay for the pills to treat the symptoms.

He ain’t heavy, he’s your obese brother.

Via Zero Hedge


Rule By The Corporations

TTIP: The Corporate Empowerment Act

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

The Transatlantic and Transpacific Trade and Investment Partnerships have nothing to do with free trade. “Free trade” is used as a disguise to hide the power these agreements give to corporations to use law suits to overturn sovereign laws of nations that regulate pollution, food safety, GMOs, and minimum wages.

The first thing to understand is that these so-called “partnerships” are not laws written by Congress. The US Constitution gives Congress the authority to legislate, but these laws are being written without the participation of Congress. The laws are being written by corporations solely in the interest of their power and profit. The office of US Trade Representative was created in order to permit corporations to write law that serves only their interests. This fraud on the Constitution and the people is covered up by calling trade laws “treaties.”

Indeed, Congress is not even permitted to know what is in the laws and is limited to the ability to accept or refuse what is handed to Congress for a vote. Normally, Congress accepts, because “so much work has been done” and “free trade will benefit us all.”

The presstitutes have diverted attention from the content of the laws to “fast track.” When Congress votes “fast track,” it means Congress accepts that corporations can write the trade laws without the participation of Congress. Even criticisms of the “partnerships” are a smoke screen. Countries accused of slave labor could be excluded but won’t be. Super patriots complain that US sovereignty is violated by “foreign interests,” but US sovereignty is violated by US corporations. Others claim yet more US jobs will be offshored. In actual fact, the “partnerships” are unnecessary to advance the loss of American jobs as there is nothing that inhibits jobs offshoring now.

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A Multinational Trojan Horse: The Trans-Pacific Partnership

Guest Post by Dave Pruett

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” James Madison in The Federalist Papers.

2015-05-05-1430860012-7431421-trojanhorse.jpg

(Image source: Wikimedia)

You don’t have to know much about the “trade” deal called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to be more than a little suspicious.

First, there are the very peculiar bedfellows. Supporting the TPP are President Obama and most Congressional Republicans, the same Republicans who’ve vehemently opposed his every initiative for the past six and one-half years.

Against the TPP are most (but not all) Congressional Democrats, Ford Motor Company, virtually all trade unions and environmental groups, watchdog groups such as Public Citizen, and usual Obama allies such as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who, in a testy open letter to the President on April 25, called for greater transparency on the TPP.

Furthermore, when asked to lend his support for so-called “Fast Track” authority for the TPP, Obama water-carrier and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid chafed, “So the answer is not only no, but hell no.”

Also opposed: liberal icon Noam Chomsky, Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, Republican hopeful Mike Huckabee, many Tea-Party groups, and conservative Republican editorialist and former presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan. Conspicuous by silence: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

What’s going on here? Why the strange alliances?

Peel back the layers of the TPP and you’ll find what some believe to be a “corporate Trojan horse.” Disguised as “free trade,” the TPP’s provisions and tactics undermine Constitutional safeguards and national sovereignty. But there’s also a silver lining. The TPP exposes who, in the marbled halls of political power, is working for whom. It forces politicians to put their cards on the table, and by their hands you will know them.

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Ultra-Secrecy Surrounds Barack Obama’s New Global Economic Treaty

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Barack Obama is secretly negotiating a global economic treaty which would destroy thousands of American businesses and millions of good paying American jobs.  In other words, it would be the final nail in the coffin for America’s economic infrastructure.  Obama knows that if the American people actually knew what was in this treaty that they would be screaming mad, so the negotiations are being done in secret.  The only people that are allowed to look at the treaty are members of Congress, and even they are being banned from saying anything to the public.  American workers are about to be brutally stabbed in the back, and thanks to all of this secrecy and paranoia they won’t even see it coming.

The name of this new treaty is “the Trans-Pacific Partnership”, and it is being touted as perhaps the most important trade agreement in history.  But very few people in this country are talking about it, because none of us are allowed to see it.  An article that was just released by Politico detailed the extreme secrecy that is surrounding this trade agreement…

If you want to hear the details of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal the Obama administration is hoping to pass, you’ve got to be a member of Congress, and you’ve got to go to classified briefings and leave your staff and cellphone at the door.

 

If you’re a member who wants to read the text, you’ve got to go to a room in the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center and be handed it one section at a time, watched over as you read, and forced to hand over any notes you make before leaving.

 

And no matter what, you can’t discuss the details of what you’ve read.

This treaty is going to affect the lives of every man, woman and child living in this nation, and yet it is deemed so “important” that none of us can know what is in it?

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