Month: February 2016

THE GREAT CORPORATE EARNINGS FRAUD

“What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions–if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they’re still all wrong.” ― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Corporate earnings reports for the fourth quarter are pretty much in the books. The deception, falsification, accounting manipulation, and propaganda utilized by mega-corporations and their compliant corporate media mouthpieces has been outrageously blatant. It reeks of desperation as the Wall Street shysters attempt to extract the last dollar from their muppet clients before this house of cards collapses.

The CEOs of these mega-corporations accelerated their debt financed stock buybacks in 2015 as stock prices reached all-time highs and are currently so overvalued, they will deliver 0% returns over the next decade. This disgraceful act of pure greed by the Ivy League educated leaders of corporate America to boost their own stock based compensation is reckless and absurd.

It is proof education at our most prestigious universities has produced avaricious MBAs following financial models and each other like lemmings going over the cliff. Proof of their foolishness is self evident after perusing the chart below. These intellectual giants evidently never learned the basic rule of buying low and selling high in order to make a profitable trade.

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Was The U.S. Constitution Really The First Patriot Act

This article — which I personally found thought provoking, at a minimum — got blasted in the comments section of  the “Reason” website.

Wonder how TBPers will react?

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Americans Have Always Been Obsessed With National Security

Since the beginning of the republic, nationalists have warned that because America is exceptional, it faces constant danger.

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The U.S. Constitution can reasonably be seen as a massive tax and mercantilist trade-promotion program. However, there’s a third leg to this stool. It was a national-security program as well—almost a proto-PATRIOT Act. Indeed, these three elements formed an integrated project: it gave the new central government independent power to raise revenue by taxing individuals directly and to establish an army and navy in order to advance, by force if necessary, American trade. This, I submit, was not exactly a libertarian project. It let a terrifying genie out of the bottle ostensibly in order to contain it. Or, as James Madison put it, “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

While the nationalists (that is, the self-identified but misnamed Federalists) saw military power as essential to the development of American commerce, the ability to raise an army and navy was intended to accomplish more than that, namely, continental hegemony and national security in a hostile world. As Madison, chief architect of the political system embodied in the Constitution, told the Virginia ratifying convention, America was surrounded by countries “whose interest is incompatible with an extension of our power and who are jealous of our resources to become powerful and wealthy. [They] must naturally be inclined to exert every means to prevent our becoming formidable.” Thus the nationalists sought a permanent military establishment—albeit initially small—powerful enough that no nation would, as Donald Trump would say, “mess with us.”

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COOL CLIMATE SPEECH DUDE

“Climate change is real, it is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating. We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people out there who would be most affected by this. For our children’s children, and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed … Let us not take this planet for granted. I do not take tonight for granted.” – Leonardo DiCaprio before getting on his private jet to fly to his private yacht, thereby creating more pollution in one day than 1 million indigenous peoples in their lifetimes. The hypocrisy is delicious.

The dude is a high school dropout, but thinks he’s an expert on climate change. That’s rich.


Global Anarchy: Woman Waves Severed Head, Man Stabs 10 Schoolchildren, Burnt Horse Head Found In Box

Tyler Durden's picture

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/29/2016 12:01 -0500

When we reviewed the most popular Zero Hedge posts of 2014, we weren’t entirely surprised to learn that civil unrest was one of the themes readers were most interested in discussing.

Indeed, polite society seems to be breaking down all over the world and in 2015, we got what certainly looks like evidence that anarchy beckons – even in the US, the supposed bastion of modernity and human “advancement”.

There were, for instance, the riots that reduced parts of Baltimore to smoldering ash in April…

In August, an apparently disgruntled news anchor murdered his former colleagues on live television.

That came on the heels of a horrific shooting at an African American church in Charleston perpetrated by a rather angry 17-year-old.

Since then, things have only gotten worse. In fact, the US has seen three mass shootings in the last week alone.

And the trend towards societal disintegration is a global phenomenon. The Paris attacks underscore the extent to which the chaos and outright depravity that characterizes everyday life in the Mid-East has spilled over into Western Europe. That spillover has in turn triggered feelings of intense nationalism in Germany, Sweden, Finland, and Norway (among other countries) where far-right political movements look set to invoke Europe’s troubled past.

On Monday, we got what might well be the surest sign yet that society is rapidly descending into a Hobbesian state of nature. In Moscow, a woman dressed in all black was arrested near a metro station screaming “I am a terrorist.” She also shouted the following:

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Why Democrats Turn Jurisdictions They Control Into Slums

The following is from the Anonymous Conservative. It explains a lot of why the Democrats control large cities and why all the aliens are being sent to small jurisdictions and the countryside.

“The only legitimate consumer is the producer” Ayn Rand

A lone individual cannot consume more than he produces.

The preceding article about Puerto Rico shows the result of “The Curley Effect.”

 

Importing Third World Migrants, Cuckservatives, And The Curley Effect

by Anonymous Conservative

A reader sent a link to this paper:

James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston, used wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston, thereby shaping the electorate in his favor. As a consequence, Boston stagnated, but Curley kept winning elections. We present a model of using redistributive politics to shape the electorate, and how that this model yields a number of predictions opposite from the more standard frameworks of political competition, yet consistent with empirical evidence.

Props to the authors – that took balls. They identified the effect, coined a name for it, characterized it, and got it published. I know some people who are on the fast track to becoming pariahs in academia.

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Going Full Whig

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Hillary’s dumb riposte to Trump’s dumb slogan — make America great again! — was “…America never stopped being great.” I guess she’s been traveling around the strip-mall wastelands of Carolina failing to notice the carnage that lays upon this land like a mortal scrofula. America has been committing suicide by bad choices for decades.

We took the collateral winnings of World War II and poured it into a suburban sprawl alt-universe so depressing that our citizens are the most over-medicated people in the world. That alone might help to explain how Hillary and Trump lumber inevitably toward their respective nominations. The cheering “folks” marshaled out in the Piggly Wiggly parking lots are so buzzed on Klonopin and Zoloft that they can’t tell how these two odious celebrities epitomize the very forces behind their pharmaceutically-masked despair.

A nation sunk in such falsity is sure to suffer life-threatening blowback and it looks like the first thing to go will be the life of the political parties. Both Democrats and Republicans have gone full Whig, riding into the 2016 election on the garbage barge of history. Hillary went on hyper-gloat after last week’s South Carolina primary, where she stuffed her pander-bag with black votes reaped on empty promises to re-boot the Civil Rights era. It was painful to watch that get-me-outa-here smile stretched across her face as she hugged the last selfie-snapper and slouched toward the ordeal of Super-Tuesday.

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MSNBC JOB OPENING – WHITE MALES NEED NOT APPLY

If you are a black transgender liberal race baiter with an IQ of 85 and the ability to blame every ill of society on white males, has MSNBC got a gig for you. I think they fired her because of the lisp.

Via Stilton Jarlsberg

obama, obama jokes, political, humor, cartoon, conservative, hope n' change, hope and change, stilton jarlsberg, melissa harris-perry, MSNBC, bobble head, black history month

After having her show pre-empted two weeks in a row for somethng inconsequential called “election coverage,” MSNBC hostess and tampon fashion model Melissa Harris-Perry walked off her own show and described her mistreatment entirely in racial terms. Which she backed down from shortly after a presumed conversation with MSNBC’s evil, moustache-twirling, whip-wielding legal department.

After a short cooling off period, Ms. Harris-Perry and MSNBC were able to arrive at a new business arrangement based on the network’s appreciation of her unique talents and contributions. Specifically, she has agreed to never again try to enter their studios, in return for which MSNBC won’t release attack dogs on her or blast her with a fire hose.


Advice for Trump

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

I do not advise Trump. If he demonstrated that we need major reform or we are going broke, then he might attract more people who are on the fence. Let’s be realistic. Those supporting Trump distrust government politicians. They really do not care about his message. I at least would prefer Trump not for any policy, but any career politician will bring the same line of thinking to the table. There will be no thinking out of the box and we will be blasted with more regulation and taxes killing the economy.

FamilyObama stuffed Christine Largarde in the IMF and that has been far more devastating than any appointment to the Supreme Court. She has destroyed the global economy threatening countries to hand over info on everyone (except exempt politicians like her of course) so they can hunt money everywhere. They do not look at the net result, and only look at the world through their own eyes. I would hope Trump would look at this as a businessman and say you people are nuts.

The standard of living for families is declining. That is not because the “rich” are making more from investment, it is because of rising taxes and government robbing their savings to fund themselves and pretending they are there for their retirement. In reality, they keep lowering benefits because they stole all the money. Anyone in the private sector who did this would be in jail. We are prosecuted for fraud in the private sector, but fraud in public sector is rewarded and called “politics.”

What advice I would give Trump:

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First They Came For the iPhones…

Guest Post by Ron Paul
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The FBI tells us that its demand for a back door into the iPhone is all about fighting terrorism, and that it is essential to break in just this one time to find out more about the San Bernardino attack last December. But the truth is they had long sought a way to break Apple’s iPhone encryption and, like 9/11 and the PATRIOT Act, a mass murder provided just the pretext needed. After all, they say, if we are going to be protected from terrorism we have to give up a little of our privacy and liberty. Never mind that government spying on us has not prevented one terrorist attack.

Apple has so far stood up to a federal government’s demand that it force its employees to write a computer program to break into its own product. No doubt Apple CEO Tim Cook understands the damage it would do to his company for the world to know that the US government has a key to supposedly secure iPhones. But the principles at stake are even higher. We have a fundamental right to privacy. We have a fundamental right to go about our daily life without the threat of government surveillance of our activities. We are not East Germany.

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