I THOUGHT CHARITIES WERE SUPPOSED TO GIVE
Tag: fraud
Welfare is the new work
Guest Post by Stephen Moore
Two recent news stories highlight how pernicious the welfare state has become in America today.
The first was an announcement by the feds that food stamps can be used to have groceries delivered right to a recipient’s door. Service with a smile. The Obama administration says it is too much of a hardship for those on welfare to actually travel to the grocery store. What’s next? Cooking the meal for them? If only the DMV would do home deliveries for drivers The second story was about the hullabaloo over a proposal by Maine governor Paul LePage to prohibit food stamp recipients from using their food aid to purchase junk foods like sugary soft drinks and candy bars.
Mucks’ Minute #31
ALERT! ALERT! Right now, in my opinion, you should put a few $thou in ABX, AEM, SSRI, CDE, PAAS or any other combination of Silver or gold/silver miners that have efficient operations and lots of reserves of your choice and watch them. FULL DISCLOSURE: I have positions in all of them and more.. Silver gapped up 2.5% TODAY alone and has been in a new Bull Market since last February. Gold, not so much but since last February, it too has been strengthening. Get them both and trade the paper, and buy the real thing with the proceeds of the trade. Another Muck’s Minute will be along in a bit that will cover the subject in more depth than this ALERT..
We return you now to regular programming!
The Clinton – Lynch Connection
Let’s see: the husband and former President met with the current Attorney General on an airport tarmac in Phoenix. The meeting was a completely random event, occasioned by the odd chance that they were both at the same place at the same time.
Anyone who believes this is credulous and gullible to a fault. A secret meeting between a Presidential candidate’s husband, who is being investigated for criminal behavior, and the boss of those doing the investigating, is held where no records are kept or recorded. They were just making small talk, pleasantries to pass the time between flights; no transcript is made or available. It is done in a small, private plane away from staff, reporters or observers.
Why did Bill Clinton tamper with a Federal investigation? Why did Lynch allow it? Post your guesses in the comments, please, and I’ll lead off:
(1) Bill is worried that the Clinton Foundation foreign donations are getting too “hot”, and wanted to make sure Loretta Lynch was going to step on the investigation before too many details are released to the public. Loretta agreed, and filed a motion Wednesday (the meeting took place Monday afternoon) to delay any release of information on the Foundation donors until fifteen months after the election. Bill agreed to destroy half of those embarrassing photos of Lynch now, and half after the election.
(2) ……
Muck’s Minute #29
Inflation in all its’ wondrous glory! (and side effects therefrom)
I know all about inflation. I’ve been studying it since I heard the word (about 60 years ago).
Mr. Milton Friedmanns’ definition that all inflation stems from printing to much money is absolutely correct except that with new skill and dexterity, our Federal Fools and the Banks that own them now include DEBT at part of the money supply. Debt (i.e. money NOW, spend it NOW and pay it back NEVER) is the exact same thing as printing dollar bills.
The sad part is that the rest of the world is still stupid enough to keep holding part of the debt! Even China has almost a $trillion bucks of Treasury debt they can threaten us with anytime they wish to. (Like now – when the U.S. Government Fools start thinking out loud about tariffs and such on Chinese junk)..
Weather Channel Founder Slams Global Warming: “The Theory Has Failed”
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/22/2016 22:30 -0400
If Bill Nye had his way, Weather Channel founder John Coleman would be heading for jail. Having spent more than 60 years as a meteorologist, Coleman penned a pointed rebuke to “the science guy’s” vehement faith in the ‘science’ of climate change, exclaiming that “science has taken a back seat at The UN… get politics out of the climate debate.”
On this Earth Day 2016, there is a great deal of frenzy about how our Earth is going to become uninhabitable, as the civilized activities of man allegedly trigger unstoppable global warming and climate change.
With the Obama administration set to commit the U.S. to the Paris climate agreement by signing our nation onto the document Friday, it is obvious that science has taken a back seat at the United Nations.
The environmentalists, bureaucrats and politicians who make up the U.N.’s climate panel recruit scientists to research the climate issue. And they place only those who will produce the desired results. Money, politics and ideology have replaced science.
U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres has called for a “centralized transformation” that is “going to make the life of everyone on the planet very different” to combat the alleged global warming threat. How many Americans are looking forward to the U.N. transforming their lives?
Another U.N. official has admitted that the U.N. seeks to “redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.” The former head of the U.N. climate panel also recently declared that global warming “is my religion.”
When all the scare talk is pushed aside, it is the science that should be the basis for the debate. And the hard cold truth is that the basic theory has failed. Many notable scientists reject man-made global warming fears. And several of them, including a Nobel Prize winner, are in the new Climate Hustle movie. The film is an informative and even humorous new feature length movie that is the ultimate answer to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. It will be shown one day only in theaters nationwide on May 2.
As a skeptic of man-made global warming, I love our environment as much as anyone. I share the deepest commitment to protecting our planet for our children and grandchildren. However, I desperately want to get politics out of the climate debate. The Paris climate agreement is all about empowering the U.N. and has nothing to do with the climate.
The Entire Status Quo Is A Fraud
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
Fraud as a way of life caters an extravagant banquet of consequences.
This can’t be said politely: the entire status quo in America is a fraud.
The financial system is a fraud.
The political system is a fraud.
National Defense is a fraud.
The healthcare system is a fraud.
Higher education is a fraud.
The mainstream corporate media is a fraud.
Culture–from high to pop–is a fraud.
Need I go on?
We have come to accept fraud as standard operating practice in America, to the detriment of everything that was once worthy. why is this so?
ONE NATION UNDER FRAUD
HILLARY’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS
THE GREAT STUDENT LOAN SCAM
Doug Short quantifies the amount owed to the government for student loans, but he doesn’t discuss the absolute fact that hundreds of billions will never be repaid. The Obama administration is solely responsible for this disaster and they don’t give a shit. Keeping millions of morons in school artificially lowers the already fake unemployment figures. Doling out billions in loans to functionally illiterate dumbasses is a perfectly acceptable liberal solution.
The government is hiding the true disaster in plain sight. Obama has the balls to declare that “only” 11.6% of student loans are in default. Now that’s funny. Here are the facts:
- Total student loan debt outstanding of $1.32 trillion.
- The Federal government is owed $972 billion, up from the $945.6 billion in Doug’s article.
- Loans in official default of $51 billion.
- Loans officially in repayment of $400 billion – the other $500 billion isn’t due because the students are still in school or the government says they don’t have to pay because they have a good excuse (like the dog ate their homework).
According to the government that makes the default rate a high, but reasonable 11.6%. One problem. The total amount of debt that should be in repayment is $600 billion, not $400 billion. There is $200 billion of student loan deb that should be being paid back, but the government has either allowed forbearance or deferment. The reasons allowed for these categories are unemployment, non-full time job, or the ever popular financial hardship.
So in layman terms, that means that $200 billion is in DEFAULT. They aren’t paying because they can’t pay. Therefore, the true default rate is 38%, not 11.6%. Obama and his minions prefer the BIG LIE when reporting any statistic. And what’s worse, this is after shifting $200 billion of debt to their new and improved repayment programs with Orwellian names like: Income-contingent plan, Income-based plan, Pay As You Earn.
Obama and his Keynesian acolytes are doing everything in their power to shift hundreds of billions in bad loans onto the backs of taxpayers. Every time one of these fraudulent for profit diploma mills goes bankrupt or is charged with fraud by the government, they relieve the debt of the morons who were stupid enough to enroll in these criminal institutions. Relieving their debt means you pay. Easy peasy. Who could have possibly figured out the University of Phoenix, Corinthian, Devry, ITT, and the rest of the for profits were a fraud?
Obama continues to dole out over $100 billion per year in future bad debt to people intellectually incapable of succeeding in college, with no oversight, no realistic chance of getting repaid, and no concern for the massive budget implications. The losses to taxpayers will be in excess of $300 billion. So it goes.
Guest Post by Doug Short
Pop Quiz! Without recourse to your text, your notes or a Google search, what line item is the largest asset in Uncle Sam’s financial accounts?
- A) U.S. Official Reserve Assets
- B) Total Mortgages
- C)Taxes Receivable
- D) Student Loans
The correct answer, as of the latest quarterly data, is … Student Loans.
A First-Hand Account Of What’s Really Happening In Subprime Auto
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/17/2016 21:41 -0400
“Originate-to-sell practices are not and have never been prevalent.”
That’s a quote from Citi’s Mary Kane who, in a note out in late January, sought to dispel the notion that subprime auto was the next “Big Short.”
While it may be true that ABS as a percentage of total auto loan origination has been range-bound between 15% and 30% for more than a decade, there’s almost no question that the ability to securitize certain loans is helping to fuel subprime auto.
Just have a look at Skopos Financial and Santander Consumer for instance. No lender in their right mind would make some of the loans that show up in the collateral pools behind their ABS deals if they had to hold them on their own books. For example, 14% of the loans backing a $154 million Skopos deal last year were made to borrowers with no credit score at all. If you need a visual, take a look at this winner from Skopos:
Of course, the real test will come when, amid jitters about the economy, demand for auto ABS (as well as marketplace ABS and any other paper that isn’t backed by something rock solid) dries up. If subprime lending dries up at the same, well, correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation but…
In any event, you don’t have to believe us, just ask someone who works in the industry. Below, find a first-hand account from a reader who says that when you’re in the subprime auto business and the securitization window slams shut, it’s all downhill from there.
Retail Sales Suffer Biggest 2-Month Drop In A Year After Huge Negative Revision
Retail sales always fall two months in a row when jobs are growing strongly – according to Obama and his minions. Right? Last month’s positive report was “adjusted” to a decline. Do you need any more proof that government reported numbers are complete and utter bullshit? The purpose of seasonally adjusting bad retail sales numbers to a strong gain last month, was to stop the stock market from falling, which it was doing at the time. Mission accomplished. You just bury the lies in the next press release.
If you strip out the subprime debt goosed auto sales (rentals), you have retail sales up an entire 2.1% over last February. As the MSM mouthpieces fail to mention, last February was bitterly cold with huge snowstorms across the nation. This year was mild, with virtually no bad storms. This makes the year over year change even more pitiful. With real inflation above 2.1%, real retail sales are actually falling year over year. That always happens during an economic recovery. Right?
We are in the midst of a recession for the average person. Any gas savings have been siphoned off by the Obamacare abortion. The government also reports virtually no medical expense related inflation. That’s a hoot. The lies will keep coming because the government thinks the ignorant masses won’t figure it out. It seems the increasing throngs of Trump voters have figured it out. This sucker is going down.
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/15/2016 08:42 -0400
Thanks to dramatic downward revisions (from “resilient” historical data which we pointed out were entirely anomalous at the time and due entirely to seasonal adjustments) retail sales have dropped 0.54% in the last two months – the biggest sequential drop in a year.
While the YoY change rose from +3.0% to +3.1%, it remains below historically-recessionary levels and given the revisions suggests Q1 GDP growth markdowns are on their way with sales down MoM for every cohort from gas stations to furniture.
Retail Sales down most in a year:
Continue reading “Retail Sales Suffer Biggest 2-Month Drop In A Year After Huge Negative Revision”
LIES, DAMN LIES, & BLS STATISTICS
“There are three types of lies — lies, damn lies, and statistics.” ― Benjamin Disraeli
It’s my favorite day of the month. The Bureau of Lies & Scams issues their double seasonally adjusted, massaged to provide a happy ending, birth death adjusted unemployment propaganda, designed to keep the masses in the dark about their own dire financial circumstances. Even though the equally manipulated GDP is at 1% or below, retail sales are plunging, corporate profits plummeted by 15% in the 4th quarter and Challenger & Grey corporate layoff announcements were up 42% in January versus last year, our fraudulent friends at the BLS announced glorious employment figures this morning.
The Establishment data that gets all the headlines blared that 242,000 net new jobs were created in February. Of course, 129,000 fake birth/death jobs were factored into that number. Anyone with a functioning brain (excludes Wall Street economists, CNBC shills, and any government apparatchik) knows that more businesses have been closing than opening for the last four years as Obamacare and government solutions destroy the economy. Rather than adding 129,000 jobs, small businesses likely subtracted 50,000 jobs in February. That would put the true number at about 60,000.
In a shocking coincidence, Trim Tabs, a privately run independent company that monitors actual real time payroll withholding tax info issued a report two days ago which said the number of new jobs created in February was between 55,000 and 85,000, based on actual withholding tax data. If you are employed, payroll taxes are automatically extracted. This data cannot be manipulated by the government propagandists. It reveals the truth. No seasonal adjustments, tweaks or phantom jobs added. It’s pure tax data.
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.
In Biggest Victory For Saudi Arabia, North Dakota’s Largest Oil Producer Suspends All Fracking
But, but, but Wall Street shysters, CNBC, and dozens of oil company cheerleaders all told me shale oil was still profitable at $30 a barrel. WTF??? Why would the biggest Bakken fracker stop fracking? Was someone telling fibs? Those Wall Street and MSM jokesters!!!
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/24/2016 21:48 -0500
Yesterday, during his speech at CERAWeek in Houston, Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi made it explicitly clear that Saudi Arabia would not cut production, instead saying that it is high-cost producers that would need to either “lower costs, borrow cash or liquidate” adding that there is “no need for cuts as marginal barrel will get out of the market.” He was right.
Today his wish is slowly coming true after news that North Dakota’s largest producer, Whiting Petroleum, would suspend all fracking, and that Continental Resources has effectively done the same after reporting that it no longer has any fracking crews working in the Bakken shale.
As Reuters reports, Whiting said it would “suspend all fracking and spend 80 percent less this year, the biggest cutback to date by a major U.S. shale company reacting to the plunge in crude prices.”
It was also confirmation that the Saudi plan to put high-cost producers on ice is working, if only temporarily.
After sliding 5.6% to $3.72, Whiting stock jumped 8% to over $4 per share in after-hours trading as investors cheered the decision to preserve capital, even if it means generating far less revenue.
Whiting’s cut is one of the largest so far this year in an energy industry crippled by oil prices at 10-year lows. The cuts will have a big impact in North Dakota, where Whiting is the largest producer.The Denver-based company said it would stop fracking and completing wells as of April 1. Most of its $500 million budget will be spent to mothball drilling and fracking operations in the first half of the year. After June, Whiting said it plans to spend only $160 million, mostly on maintenance.
Truman Show USA – “Concerned Citizens” At Townhall Meetings Exposed As Paid Actors
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Here’s a bothersome trend that seems quite fitting for the smoke and mirrors driven, celebrity obsessed, hologram society that America has become. A company known as Crowds on Demand is actually in the business of providing fake protesters for causes, fake entourages for wanna be celebrities and seemingly even fake supporters for unpopular corporate activities.
This just furthers my feeling that action is far more important than traditional protests in the 21st Century. They key to getting out of the mess we are in is to actively create a parallel economy and even monetary system adjacent to the current terminal one. That way, when this one blows up, we already have the infrastructure in place to move to another paradigm. One characterized by peaceful, voluntary human interaction and dominated by decentralization in virtually all aspects of human existence.
– From the 2013 post: Protesters for Hire: For a Few Thousand Dollars We’ll Buy You a Small Entourage
I first highlighted the company Crowds on Demand over two years ago in the above post. Turns out it’s much worse than I could have imagined.
From NBC News: