Reuters reports that US manufacturers are returning jobs back home from China due to some ridiculous doubletalk about inflation there, burying mention of the real reason, automation, further down in the article. After transferring the bulk of its work force overseas, Master Lock retooled their Wisconsin facilities so that the average worker in Milwaukee now oversees the operation of six high-speed machines, producing locks with a work force one-sixth the size of that required in manual production.
General Electric and Boeing were mentioned as part of a small group of companies boosting domestic output lately too, but Reuters didn‘t say how.
Effective immediately, the MacDougal Post will stop grousing about outsourcing and try to figure out what to say about these new robots that are taking all our manufacturing jobs away.
June 30, 2011
June 29, 2011
Beans and Corn
Here on our street in Middle Tennessee, where MacDougal Post World Headquarters is located, production of beans and corn has tripled this season, up from no production before last year. Beans are soybeans, but people look at you funny when you call them that, so we stopped and just say “beans” like everybody else.
The earth-moving equipment used to tear down and haul off the 100 year-old house and accompanying shade trees one morning this Spring was so impressive that, coupled with the equally astonishing 30 yard wide farm equipment used to clear and plant the 100 acre patch it stood on the next morning, got us thinking, and now that rows and rows of beans are turning all that brown dirt into shoulder to shoulder greenery, we‘ve got to key it into written word.
There are similar patches of land all over this part of Tennessee, and with the technology these people have today, what’s to stop bean and corn production from tripling on everybody’s street? And that’s just in this part of Tennessee. We don’t understand why bean and corn prices should ever stay up if new production can be added so quickly and massively once their prices spike. Three quarters of our crops are growing on previously idle land, the rest on what used to be a hay field right next door.
Maybe two years ago the guy with the farm equipment told us he can lease all the land people want to give him. There’s no capacity problem these days, unless Monsanto and them haven’t bagged enough seed.
We know nothing about any of this stuff, just what you can see with your own eyes. And that’s how fast this unbelievable equipment ramped up bean and corn production kind of out of nowhere all along our street.
Now pears, apples, and walnuts, that’s another story. We grow them right here at World Headquarters. On trees. Forget adding new crops overnight. But beans and corn, how can price hikes there have any chance of sticking? The way farming seems to be done these days, we‘ll be up to our ears in beans and corn by next year latest.
The earth-moving equipment used to tear down and haul off the 100 year-old house and accompanying shade trees one morning this Spring was so impressive that, coupled with the equally astonishing 30 yard wide farm equipment used to clear and plant the 100 acre patch it stood on the next morning, got us thinking, and now that rows and rows of beans are turning all that brown dirt into shoulder to shoulder greenery, we‘ve got to key it into written word.
There are similar patches of land all over this part of Tennessee, and with the technology these people have today, what’s to stop bean and corn production from tripling on everybody’s street? And that’s just in this part of Tennessee. We don’t understand why bean and corn prices should ever stay up if new production can be added so quickly and massively once their prices spike. Three quarters of our crops are growing on previously idle land, the rest on what used to be a hay field right next door.
Maybe two years ago the guy with the farm equipment told us he can lease all the land people want to give him. There’s no capacity problem these days, unless Monsanto and them haven’t bagged enough seed.
We know nothing about any of this stuff, just what you can see with your own eyes. And that’s how fast this unbelievable equipment ramped up bean and corn production kind of out of nowhere all along our street.
Now pears, apples, and walnuts, that’s another story. We grow them right here at World Headquarters. On trees. Forget adding new crops overnight. But beans and corn, how can price hikes there have any chance of sticking? The way farming seems to be done these days, we‘ll be up to our ears in beans and corn by next year latest.
June 23, 2011
Runaway Bus
When the arm of Government that sells its debt goes and transfers some of that paper onto the books of the arm printing money, in exchange for some of that crisp new printed money, it’s called printing money, and no new debt, in fact exists, nor will any unless and until those specific certificates are sold to an outsider. (Substitute “electronically creating” for “printing” if you’ve graduated from college recently enough to mess with us over it.) Transactions between brother entities wash each other out on daddy’s books. Execs at corporate multinationals could get nabbed for money laundering if they reported the same kind of nonsense the way Washington has been characterizing quantitative easing (QE1 and QE2).
Print money foolishly enough, and prices skyrocket. If the country comes down with a terminal dose of hyperinflation, look for Fed Charlatan Bernanke to replace Alan Greenspan as The Great Enabler, the most hated financial dumbass in the land.
Clearly, the wiseacre would deserve it, for misleading the American people as much as anything. As the prospect of runaway inflation rolls on down the road, closer and closer most every day now, is he throwing us under the seemingly unstoppable bus?
Unstoppable, at least, by the likes of him. Fed Charlatans aren’t hired to help a fiscally irresponsible Congress get reelected. Should the worst happen, he'll go down in History as the man with the spine of a jellyfish.
June 30 will mark the end of his latest round of printing money, a.k.a. quantitative easing, or so he says and if you don't count reinvesting maturing QE bonds, as he let on yesterday.
July 1 will mark the first day of the next round of printing money, but the Charlatan likes to pretend nobody knows that he's printing money and won't tell us what that a.k.a. is going to be until he gets scared we'll find out about the printing money and figures he has to lie to us fools all over again.
Today the Government announced it was releasing 5% of our strategic oil reserve, as if oil prices somehow cause the Fed to print the money that causes the inflation that makes oil prices shoot up about as fast as everything else, only earlier. We're almost wishing for hyperinflation to happen now just to watch that one blow up in the Administration's face.
Print money foolishly enough, and prices skyrocket. If the country comes down with a terminal dose of hyperinflation, look for Fed Charlatan Bernanke to replace Alan Greenspan as The Great Enabler, the most hated financial dumbass in the land.
Clearly, the wiseacre would deserve it, for misleading the American people as much as anything. As the prospect of runaway inflation rolls on down the road, closer and closer most every day now, is he throwing us under the seemingly unstoppable bus?
Unstoppable, at least, by the likes of him. Fed Charlatans aren’t hired to help a fiscally irresponsible Congress get reelected. Should the worst happen, he'll go down in History as the man with the spine of a jellyfish.
June 30 will mark the end of his latest round of printing money, a.k.a. quantitative easing, or so he says and if you don't count reinvesting maturing QE bonds, as he let on yesterday.
July 1 will mark the first day of the next round of printing money, but the Charlatan likes to pretend nobody knows that he's printing money and won't tell us what that a.k.a. is going to be until he gets scared we'll find out about the printing money and figures he has to lie to us fools all over again.
Today the Government announced it was releasing 5% of our strategic oil reserve, as if oil prices somehow cause the Fed to print the money that causes the inflation that makes oil prices shoot up about as fast as everything else, only earlier. We're almost wishing for hyperinflation to happen now just to watch that one blow up in the Administration's face.
The Morning Odds
According to press reports, credit default swaps protecting investors against a default on $10 billion of Greek Government bonds cost $1.9 billion this morning. At the track, they’d call it $2 billion, and start that pony off at 5 to 1.
Nobody knows how many bets have been placed, or if anyone does, he’s not talking, so we’ve no idea how much money would be lost if that country failed to make an interest payment. There are no regulations controlling derivatives, and the transactions are hidden from public scrutiny, but in the worst case, a bunch of financial institutions are in over their heads for way more dough than the bonds are worth, so half of them would fail and the other half would pay out big fat year end bonuses.
These particular bets, all of them, collect once the odds makers determine a single default on any Greek bond has occurred.
It’s 5 to 1 that this scenario will actually play out. Most of our readers have some personal knowledge of these odds. It’s all you really need to remember to understand what’s going on in the markets with this one right now.
Nobody knows how many bets have been placed, or if anyone does, he’s not talking, so we’ve no idea how much money would be lost if that country failed to make an interest payment. There are no regulations controlling derivatives, and the transactions are hidden from public scrutiny, but in the worst case, a bunch of financial institutions are in over their heads for way more dough than the bonds are worth, so half of them would fail and the other half would pay out big fat year end bonuses.
These particular bets, all of them, collect once the odds makers determine a single default on any Greek bond has occurred.
It’s 5 to 1 that this scenario will actually play out. Most of our readers have some personal knowledge of these odds. It’s all you really need to remember to understand what’s going on in the markets with this one right now.
June 21, 2011
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
Should the common stock of a public corporation earning $10 billion a year sell at a price earnings multiple of 25x, the shareholders’ aggregate investment would be worth $250 billion. If half the earnings were paid out as dividends, stockholders would get $5 billion a year cash money. If “stock options” amounted to 4% of the issue, however, the CEO and them would be skimming $10 billion a year in paper money from shareholder savings, pilfering twice as much as the dumb suckers think they’re raking in as dividends from this blatantly criminal enterprise.
Every single year. None of that is ever reported in a meaningful way in company financials. All we know about our investments for sure is, whatever the real numbers are, it’s all theft of the family savings.
Keith Olbermann, the self-acclaimed populist, didn’t mention this on his brand new populist show last night. This populist never mentioned it on his old populist show either. How a populist can miss the elephantine transfer of wealth from the populus is beyond us, especially since this has been going on for 3 decades now, resulting in 1) the embezzlement of the entire amount of public savings invested in the stock market on Dec 31, 1980, the day before equity compensation racketeering became exempted from prosecution by Congress and Jimmy Carter, and 2) the establishment of a brand new aristocracy, wealthy corporate mobsters.
Whatever Keith Olbermann thinks he's doing, the populist exists to offer up banal distractions to the victims of the biggest swindle in the history of mankind, a con that is still ongoing. He helps make sure the populus never finds out it's being ripped off by pointing it somewhere else.
Michael Moore was the populist’s first populist guest. That populist is supposed to be all over this kind of populist thing too. He isn't. Who knows, maybe these are just the two dumbest people in the world.
We live in a land of complete morons. Viewing the new show last night, it seemed fitting that this would be the pair showing us the answers without referencing anything even remotely close to the problem.
You might as well watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann anyway. Nobody does whatever the hell it is that he does, any better.
Every single year. None of that is ever reported in a meaningful way in company financials. All we know about our investments for sure is, whatever the real numbers are, it’s all theft of the family savings.
Keith Olbermann, the self-acclaimed populist, didn’t mention this on his brand new populist show last night. This populist never mentioned it on his old populist show either. How a populist can miss the elephantine transfer of wealth from the populus is beyond us, especially since this has been going on for 3 decades now, resulting in 1) the embezzlement of the entire amount of public savings invested in the stock market on Dec 31, 1980, the day before equity compensation racketeering became exempted from prosecution by Congress and Jimmy Carter, and 2) the establishment of a brand new aristocracy, wealthy corporate mobsters.
Whatever Keith Olbermann thinks he's doing, the populist exists to offer up banal distractions to the victims of the biggest swindle in the history of mankind, a con that is still ongoing. He helps make sure the populus never finds out it's being ripped off by pointing it somewhere else.
Michael Moore was the populist’s first populist guest. That populist is supposed to be all over this kind of populist thing too. He isn't. Who knows, maybe these are just the two dumbest people in the world.
We live in a land of complete morons. Viewing the new show last night, it seemed fitting that this would be the pair showing us the answers without referencing anything even remotely close to the problem.
You might as well watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann anyway. Nobody does whatever the hell it is that he does, any better.
June 19, 2011
The New York Times
An article in today’s online edition of this financially oblivious fish wrapper informs us that lawyers and accountants, due to a changed business model structured to maximize partner income, have tossed aside the ethical standards of prior generations and run amuck for a couple of decades now. Also under question in the same edition are the ethical standards of the Supreme Court, which apparently doesn’t have any. Written ones anyway. Justice Thomas seems to be on the loose with that one.
We wait with baited breath to see if the Times itself will pick up its own story. The modern business model used in journalism since Jan 1, 1981, maximizes a pilfering of middle class wealth through “stock option” racketeering that has skimmed shareholders’ savings into senior executive pockets, little by little, every single year since then, turning America into the most corrupt banana republic in the history of mankind.
Near as one can tell, the Times has been spearheading that effort. And we note that this is apparently the first mention of the lawyer/accountant business model issue in that unethical rag during the couple of decades that this particular criminality has raged.
It isn't that journalism is part of the problem. To anyone with a reverent handle on the historic role our media has played in keeping this Plutocracy .... well, let's say afraid of being found out, if never actually honest ....
Journalism is the problem.
We wait with baited breath to see if the Times itself will pick up its own story. The modern business model used in journalism since Jan 1, 1981, maximizes a pilfering of middle class wealth through “stock option” racketeering that has skimmed shareholders’ savings into senior executive pockets, little by little, every single year since then, turning America into the most corrupt banana republic in the history of mankind.
Near as one can tell, the Times has been spearheading that effort. And we note that this is apparently the first mention of the lawyer/accountant business model issue in that unethical rag during the couple of decades that this particular criminality has raged.
It isn't that journalism is part of the problem. To anyone with a reverent handle on the historic role our media has played in keeping this Plutocracy .... well, let's say afraid of being found out, if never actually honest ....
Journalism is the problem.
June 14, 2011
Mob Layoffs
There’s been a spate of layoffs at Wall Street trading desks lately, and the talking financial airheads won't shut up about it, so our readers are probably wondering what’s up.
Lets go back a few years and get a handle on this.
Our mob connection had close matrimonial ties to our mother, who was a Saint. At the nadir of the Great Depression, he and his sister were the only two employees on the 19th floor of the Filch & Finagle Building at 14 ½ Wall, and she was getting paid out of his salary. It was either that, or move in with the Saint, and nobody wanted to go there, believe me. Whew. Anyway, the 19th floor was the F&F back office, and there were so few trades, our mob connection processed them himself, walking certificates back and forth to the back offices of firms they were doing business with as well. Most days he worked a handful of trades. Some days there were none. This in a space that housed two hundred employees in the best of times.
In the depths, Filch & Finagle only had one trader, the Consigliore. There was nothing for anybody else to do. He traded with the other Consigliores, who didn’t need anyone else either because they were only trading with each other too. Then business picked up, and the son-in-law got hired back, and there were two traders at Filch & Finagle, and the son-in-law traded with the other sons-in-law because everybody on the Street needed a son-in-law to trade with the other sons-in-law now, and soon business started to grow a little more.
Real handsome types have no problem getting hired on Wall Street. I don’t know if it’s a gay thing, or what, but financial insiders have reason to think that financial meltdowns occur because too many financiers are looking at themselves in the mirror instead of reading their financials like financial players should. Anyway the second round of hirings at the trading desk is always the guy who’d be the Consigliore’s gay lover if the Consigliore were gay, and all the firms on the street hire them next so they can handle phone calls with one another like the son-in-laws are doing.
Thing is, at Filch & Finagle, the Consigliore was still calling all the shots. By himself, he’d place the one round of orders with his counterparts. With the son-in-law in tow, he’d add the exact same transaction, but to be done with all the other sons-in-laws this time. And once the absolutely exquisite facial lines climbed on board, they’d add a third layer of the very same thing, so he could do whatever it was with all the other new absolutely exquisite facial lines in the rackets.
People think that Wall Street trading is quite the occupation, glamorous and teeming with excitement, especially since one of the guys is so good-looking, but all these crew soldiers do is take and then place orders, and try to remember what orders they’re supposed to be placing over the course of maybe 20 phone calls, except for the fabulously contoured chin, and one of the other traders just keeps reminding him about what’s going on, so he keeps up too.
The fourth trader is always a nephew, then neighbor’s sons get in, and finally they hit the Ivy Leaguers, who are the last hired and first fired because they’re Ivy Leaguers and entitled, but haven’t worked through the entitled part yet, and don‘t see sons-in-laws, pretty boys, nephews and neighbors in there too.
Thing is, all this new business comes from you and me because big money swindles can’t work unless swindlers have some big money to swindle, and collectively we've got big money until they swindle it from us, and the number of trading levels they need depends on how much of our big money we’re willing to let them swindle at any given point in the upcoming stock market meltdown. So when we pull back, their business slacks off, and the layoffs start, in reverse order, of course.
Right now, they’re just handing some Ivy Leaguers pink slips, and there are plenty more Ivy Leaguers to go, so the Street is nowhere near getting rid of any of the neighbor’s sons yet, let alone nephews, potential movie stars, or the sons-ins-laws, so we wouldn’t worry about the recent firings at all.
Unless you’re down there because you went to the wrong dang school, I suppose.
Lets go back a few years and get a handle on this.
Our mob connection had close matrimonial ties to our mother, who was a Saint. At the nadir of the Great Depression, he and his sister were the only two employees on the 19th floor of the Filch & Finagle Building at 14 ½ Wall, and she was getting paid out of his salary. It was either that, or move in with the Saint, and nobody wanted to go there, believe me. Whew. Anyway, the 19th floor was the F&F back office, and there were so few trades, our mob connection processed them himself, walking certificates back and forth to the back offices of firms they were doing business with as well. Most days he worked a handful of trades. Some days there were none. This in a space that housed two hundred employees in the best of times.
In the depths, Filch & Finagle only had one trader, the Consigliore. There was nothing for anybody else to do. He traded with the other Consigliores, who didn’t need anyone else either because they were only trading with each other too. Then business picked up, and the son-in-law got hired back, and there were two traders at Filch & Finagle, and the son-in-law traded with the other sons-in-law because everybody on the Street needed a son-in-law to trade with the other sons-in-law now, and soon business started to grow a little more.
Real handsome types have no problem getting hired on Wall Street. I don’t know if it’s a gay thing, or what, but financial insiders have reason to think that financial meltdowns occur because too many financiers are looking at themselves in the mirror instead of reading their financials like financial players should. Anyway the second round of hirings at the trading desk is always the guy who’d be the Consigliore’s gay lover if the Consigliore were gay, and all the firms on the street hire them next so they can handle phone calls with one another like the son-in-laws are doing.
Thing is, at Filch & Finagle, the Consigliore was still calling all the shots. By himself, he’d place the one round of orders with his counterparts. With the son-in-law in tow, he’d add the exact same transaction, but to be done with all the other sons-in-laws this time. And once the absolutely exquisite facial lines climbed on board, they’d add a third layer of the very same thing, so he could do whatever it was with all the other new absolutely exquisite facial lines in the rackets.
People think that Wall Street trading is quite the occupation, glamorous and teeming with excitement, especially since one of the guys is so good-looking, but all these crew soldiers do is take and then place orders, and try to remember what orders they’re supposed to be placing over the course of maybe 20 phone calls, except for the fabulously contoured chin, and one of the other traders just keeps reminding him about what’s going on, so he keeps up too.
The fourth trader is always a nephew, then neighbor’s sons get in, and finally they hit the Ivy Leaguers, who are the last hired and first fired because they’re Ivy Leaguers and entitled, but haven’t worked through the entitled part yet, and don‘t see sons-in-laws, pretty boys, nephews and neighbors in there too.
Thing is, all this new business comes from you and me because big money swindles can’t work unless swindlers have some big money to swindle, and collectively we've got big money until they swindle it from us, and the number of trading levels they need depends on how much of our big money we’re willing to let them swindle at any given point in the upcoming stock market meltdown. So when we pull back, their business slacks off, and the layoffs start, in reverse order, of course.
Right now, they’re just handing some Ivy Leaguers pink slips, and there are plenty more Ivy Leaguers to go, so the Street is nowhere near getting rid of any of the neighbor’s sons yet, let alone nephews, potential movie stars, or the sons-ins-laws, so we wouldn’t worry about the recent firings at all.
Unless you’re down there because you went to the wrong dang school, I suppose.
June 10, 2011
Summer 2011
Whale Wars is a TV series about a bunch of save-the-whales types throwing stink bombs at the Japanese whaling fleet down in the Southern Ocean. Stink bombs ruin meat. The whalers could have a perfectly good dead whale on deck, and one stink bomb later, nobody wants to eat it. The Japanese whaling fleet consists of a factory ship, a few harpoon vessels and two cruisers there to intimidate the do-gooders. The do-good attack task force is manned by modern day hippies scowling in a remarkably polite way who smell like gerbils because you don’t shower when you’re running out of water, and the Japanese whaling fleet won‘t slow down long enough to let you chop up icebergs for any. Their fleet includes one ship, the Stu Erwin, which is rated for some ice, another, the Bob Barker, that isn’t rated for any, and this totally awesome new trimaran with a fiberglass hull that probably belongs in Biscayne Bay and will surely sink if the cruisers have their way. Last year’s equally breathtaking trimaran got rammed, and now lies on the bottom of the Southern Ocean, God rest her fiberglass soul. The whalers also have a helicopter and two big Zodiacs.
Bob Barker likes the show so much he gave the gerbils money, and they bought the other ship last season and named it after him, which should serve as a warning to philanthropists everywhere.
The gerbils started out tossing their stink bombs by hand, and boarding the factory ship like in capture-the-flag, but the whalers responded by zinging sizeable metal objects back at them and installed water cannons, so this season the gerbils have a stink bomb cannon which they smuggled past Australian customs, taking it along unassembled as miscellaneous naval parts. The whalers keep the rubber boaters at bay with their water cannons and this sonic device that gives you headaches unless you go back to your Stu Erwin or Bob Barker and pronto. The war keeps escalating.
The do-good operation is run by Paul Watson, this Greenpeace founder who quit them because everybody disagreed with his tactics. Paul got shot in the badge one season, and the Japanese whalers said they didn’t do it, and I never figured out who did because there’s nobody else down there in the Southern Ocean other than the Japanese whalers and Paul and his gerbils. I don’t remember what the badge was for. He is Marshall in those parts, or acts like he is anyway, so maybe that was it.
The gerbils keep saying they want to die for one whale, or something like that, but after last years ramming when it looked like six trimaraners had gotten their wish, the do-gooders were about ready to split back to Australia, only the six lived, and they were the only gerbils who actually wanted off the boat after all was said and done with the ramming, so the gerbils will to die for one whale wasn't really tested, and hasn't been yet.
One good kamikaze attack ought to do it, but we haven't seen a single Jap Zero on the show so far.
Over the winter the Japanese announced that they gave up whaling, but Whale Wars hasn’t said anything about winning the whale wars yet, so we’ll have to wait and see. Last year the guy who owned and captained the sunken trimaran boarded the factory ship and got arrested, which was pretty cool, but another Japanese surrender sounds better, especially if they hold in on the deck of this season's trimaran out in the middle of Tokyo Bay like last time. The trimaran owner captain spent three months in jail until some pro anti-whaling group in Japan sprung him. He had two daughters and a wife who were really proud of him for sinking the family trimaran and going to jail, but he isn’t back this year for some reason.
I hope 2011 isn’t going to be the final season. Maybe Paul can throw stink bombs at rhinoceros poachers or something in 2012. There was a picture of a baby seal in this season’s premier, so maybe that‘s who they’ll be saving next year. I don’t know how that’s going to go over with the P.C. police though, throwing stink bombs at Eskimos, or Inuits or whoever they are these days. Seem like there’d be some serious affirmative action issues with throwing stink bombs at Eskimos.
Finding Bigfoot just aired, and I watch every Loch Ness Bigfoot Bermuda Triangle Area 51 show that makes it to my TV screen. Nobody ever found anything, but that must be what’s so much fun about these shows because I can‘t seem to get enough of the stuff. Anyway the latest is pretty good. They had this Georgia woodsman on who went fishing with his buddy, but before they even got there, Squatch threw a tree at them. That’s how cool the guys on this show are. They call Bigfoot, Squatch, and themselves, bigfooters. One bigfooter is named Bo-Bo, and he’s six foot six and they ask eyewitnesses to look at Bo-Bo holding up a yardstick at the site and eyeball how big their Squatch was, and the first one came in at nine foot six or whatever.
That was our Georgia, by the way. Not Russia’s. The one next to Alabama. I drive through both of them on the way to Florida from Tennessee, or used to before I heard about bigfoots throwing trees at people in our Georgia. Diameter of that tree was the size of a truck tire, the woodsman demonstrated
On the first show, the bigfooters found two right footprints with toes on them, and one guy said it was the greatest thing that ever happened to him, and that was only the first show. You could see where Squatch didn’t have any insteps, so we knew they were real Bigfoot right feet. A lady on the second show said Squatch came up and started banging on her house with a tree, but I haven’t seen that episode yet. Finding Bigfoot airs right at my bedtime, so I catch the following week’s rerun an hour or so before the new one comes on.
We truckers (see Ford F-150) love Ice Road Truckers because it’s all about trucks and ice, which means skidding and going off the road and sometimes there aren’t any roads at all on this show, which makes it more than you can even hope for from the title. These truckers haul pipe and heavy equipment and like that right across frozen rivers and lakes and actually drive for miles and miles on the open frozen Arctic sea. It’s always been set in Alaska, but this year two of their star truckers are down in Manitoba trucking over a couple hundred miles of Canadian marshland. From all the bouncing you can tell there really isn’t any road there. Just Canadian marshland, like they say.
This girl trucker, Lisa, has been so popular they hired another girl trucker, and we’ll have to see how that works out for them. The two females have been cordial so far, but the guy who came up with this idea must’ve been in the Bush Administration. About the time we’re going to find out how you really pay for three wars with tax cuts, TV is turning my Ice Road Truckers into Icy Trucker Girl Catfight, and I find myself watching another formerly great show with remote in hand.
Anyway, these three shows started their new seasons last week, and I'm in, so if you don’t get any topical financial crime news in these pages for a couple of months, this is why. Between Herman’s Gym and the summer TV season we’re pretty well booked down here.
Give us an email if the market tanks or whatever, and we miss it, and we’ll try to get back to you as soon as we can. In the meantime, get ready for stuff we've already written but didn't get in because something else came up.
Something else always keeps coming up with these moneysucking thieves. That's the dang problem.
That and the SEC.
Bob Barker likes the show so much he gave the gerbils money, and they bought the other ship last season and named it after him, which should serve as a warning to philanthropists everywhere.
The gerbils started out tossing their stink bombs by hand, and boarding the factory ship like in capture-the-flag, but the whalers responded by zinging sizeable metal objects back at them and installed water cannons, so this season the gerbils have a stink bomb cannon which they smuggled past Australian customs, taking it along unassembled as miscellaneous naval parts. The whalers keep the rubber boaters at bay with their water cannons and this sonic device that gives you headaches unless you go back to your Stu Erwin or Bob Barker and pronto. The war keeps escalating.
The do-good operation is run by Paul Watson, this Greenpeace founder who quit them because everybody disagreed with his tactics. Paul got shot in the badge one season, and the Japanese whalers said they didn’t do it, and I never figured out who did because there’s nobody else down there in the Southern Ocean other than the Japanese whalers and Paul and his gerbils. I don’t remember what the badge was for. He is Marshall in those parts, or acts like he is anyway, so maybe that was it.
The gerbils keep saying they want to die for one whale, or something like that, but after last years ramming when it looked like six trimaraners had gotten their wish, the do-gooders were about ready to split back to Australia, only the six lived, and they were the only gerbils who actually wanted off the boat after all was said and done with the ramming, so the gerbils will to die for one whale wasn't really tested, and hasn't been yet.
One good kamikaze attack ought to do it, but we haven't seen a single Jap Zero on the show so far.
Over the winter the Japanese announced that they gave up whaling, but Whale Wars hasn’t said anything about winning the whale wars yet, so we’ll have to wait and see. Last year the guy who owned and captained the sunken trimaran boarded the factory ship and got arrested, which was pretty cool, but another Japanese surrender sounds better, especially if they hold in on the deck of this season's trimaran out in the middle of Tokyo Bay like last time. The trimaran owner captain spent three months in jail until some pro anti-whaling group in Japan sprung him. He had two daughters and a wife who were really proud of him for sinking the family trimaran and going to jail, but he isn’t back this year for some reason.
I hope 2011 isn’t going to be the final season. Maybe Paul can throw stink bombs at rhinoceros poachers or something in 2012. There was a picture of a baby seal in this season’s premier, so maybe that‘s who they’ll be saving next year. I don’t know how that’s going to go over with the P.C. police though, throwing stink bombs at Eskimos, or Inuits or whoever they are these days. Seem like there’d be some serious affirmative action issues with throwing stink bombs at Eskimos.
Finding Bigfoot just aired, and I watch every Loch Ness Bigfoot Bermuda Triangle Area 51 show that makes it to my TV screen. Nobody ever found anything, but that must be what’s so much fun about these shows because I can‘t seem to get enough of the stuff. Anyway the latest is pretty good. They had this Georgia woodsman on who went fishing with his buddy, but before they even got there, Squatch threw a tree at them. That’s how cool the guys on this show are. They call Bigfoot, Squatch, and themselves, bigfooters. One bigfooter is named Bo-Bo, and he’s six foot six and they ask eyewitnesses to look at Bo-Bo holding up a yardstick at the site and eyeball how big their Squatch was, and the first one came in at nine foot six or whatever.
That was our Georgia, by the way. Not Russia’s. The one next to Alabama. I drive through both of them on the way to Florida from Tennessee, or used to before I heard about bigfoots throwing trees at people in our Georgia. Diameter of that tree was the size of a truck tire, the woodsman demonstrated
On the first show, the bigfooters found two right footprints with toes on them, and one guy said it was the greatest thing that ever happened to him, and that was only the first show. You could see where Squatch didn’t have any insteps, so we knew they were real Bigfoot right feet. A lady on the second show said Squatch came up and started banging on her house with a tree, but I haven’t seen that episode yet. Finding Bigfoot airs right at my bedtime, so I catch the following week’s rerun an hour or so before the new one comes on.
We truckers (see Ford F-150) love Ice Road Truckers because it’s all about trucks and ice, which means skidding and going off the road and sometimes there aren’t any roads at all on this show, which makes it more than you can even hope for from the title. These truckers haul pipe and heavy equipment and like that right across frozen rivers and lakes and actually drive for miles and miles on the open frozen Arctic sea. It’s always been set in Alaska, but this year two of their star truckers are down in Manitoba trucking over a couple hundred miles of Canadian marshland. From all the bouncing you can tell there really isn’t any road there. Just Canadian marshland, like they say.
This girl trucker, Lisa, has been so popular they hired another girl trucker, and we’ll have to see how that works out for them. The two females have been cordial so far, but the guy who came up with this idea must’ve been in the Bush Administration. About the time we’re going to find out how you really pay for three wars with tax cuts, TV is turning my Ice Road Truckers into Icy Trucker Girl Catfight, and I find myself watching another formerly great show with remote in hand.
Anyway, these three shows started their new seasons last week, and I'm in, so if you don’t get any topical financial crime news in these pages for a couple of months, this is why. Between Herman’s Gym and the summer TV season we’re pretty well booked down here.
Give us an email if the market tanks or whatever, and we miss it, and we’ll try to get back to you as soon as we can. In the meantime, get ready for stuff we've already written but didn't get in because something else came up.
Something else always keeps coming up with these moneysucking thieves. That's the dang problem.
That and the SEC.
June 4, 2011
Who Ya Gonna Vote for?
As some money issue related to John Edwards’ love child resurfaces, we find ourselves wondering what purpose voting serves anymore. Maybe a new kind of Federal Election Commission With Teeth (FECWT) should be established. One that could turn the FBI, or somebody, loose on every candidate, and just go ahead and appoint whoever comes out reasonably unblemished. If Washington only has three sitting Congressmen, or whatever, for a couple of years, so be it. At least we’ll know they’re clean.
Eerily twin scandals brought on by the ex-Governator from one party/coast and this former U.S. Senator from the other have caused us to rethink our own politics. Here’s where your blogger’s vote stands today, and the thought process behind it, not to rule out future changes, possibly as early as tomorrow, depending in part on breaking news later tonight.
We are an Eisenhower Republican. Probably the last one, judging from the recent historical record. A proud supporter of the Party of Lincoln, we embraced the induction of Blacks into the armed forces during WWII and forewarned the nation about the evils of Dick Cheney’s military/industrial complex after the fighting stopped. That Grand Old Party, upended by desegregation, no longer exists anywhere in America, but clinging on anyway means we at least start out Republican, just one who eschews warfare as horrific and understands that military force is only used to destroy an enemy utterly, and then only in response to armed aggression against us. In the ancient tradition, anything else constitutes murder, and for all our sakes, we can only pray that this isn‘t true in God‘s eye as well.
And so, turning first to the Democrats, sizing up what’s wrong with them as any loyal Eisenhower Republican must, we find a sitting, at the very least, Muslim-reared President from some kind of Black Power church whose wife’s decades-long anti-White tirade is evidenced by a college paper too damning to be released for public perusal. Then there’s the Middle East peace debacle. Watching Blatant Umama start talks by taunting Israel with the Islamic demand that her army give up the high ground was the last straw. We no longer have the stomach to watch America getting blindsided by this anti-Who-We-Are freak show.
That leaves the modern day Republican to consider. Here, our gaze falls on Biblically-disoriented Right Wing hate mongers with alternative lifestyle hang-ups. The long-suffering minority these Godless zealots vilify has to vote Democrat. For the victims, it’s a life and limb issue. There simply is no choice. They get beaten and murdered in every other environment dealt to them. Anyone in touch with his own humanity keeps their heartless oppression in mind when considering candidates for public office.
You can’t get away from the arrogant brutality in all of this, bully hounding victim around the governmental schoolyard, because that outrage is going on right inside your own living room. Night after night after night sometimes. No wonder so many Americans have stopped watching network news.
The gay/lesbian culture, nourished by the promise that civil rights legislation can somehow remain in effect for them too, has blossomed for over half a century now, a chillingly tiny window when you consider the context. History has been doggedly harsh on these citizens, and they have every reason to vote as a block. More so, perhaps, than any other special interest group. Their world gets placed on the chopping block by the petulant rhetoric accompanying every contested election.
And in resonance with that ominous beat, so does ours. The most obvious lesson from Nazi Germany applies here: who’s next, and what happens when the vitriol finally gets around to me?
Ignore whatever the theological termites are going on about this time. Join us or die, is what you need to be hearing.
Our union friends are weathering a similar storm blowing in from the cold and barren extreme political climes. The legislated right to collectively bargain, the backbone of our nation’s labor movement for decades now, is currently under attack by the same maniacally wrong-minded cult. Anyone seeing through gamed-market capitalism far enough to catch the ease of our transition from slavery to wage slavery, pretty much overnight, has to be appalled at this thoughtless initiative, understanding how quickly history would revert to yesteryear should American unions get crushed. It’s hard to see how incomes, or quality of life, could ever return to pre-financial holocaust levels if the proactive nut jobs garner enough votes, enough no longer being the majority, as Dubyah, bro Jeb, and daddy’s justices showed us not so very long ago.
The moment you see those old company towns springing up once again, we’re toast. It was the only intermediate step, one that might be called plantation slavery with paychecks. Hopelessly grim paychecks followed by all kinds of fees, kickbacks, and company taxes, and a slave master bearing every kind of repressive weapon but a cat o’ nine tails on his hip.
Management vs. labor is a battle of inane extremes, and balancing that chaotic equation has drawn many an appalled investor back and forth across party lines over the decades. Today we’ve got to be adamantly anti-management lest those psychopaths drag the demand side of our economy into the depths of a delusional self-immolation before the gods of irrational exploitation once again.
In her glory days, pretty much everyone in the Old South was broke except your large slaveholder.
For all these reasons, as well as the millennia of violence, murder, and forced-labor captivity that form such a sinister backdrop to the ecumenically-challenged stone caster agenda, The MacDougal Post cannot in good conscience endorse the way we ourselves intend to vote in the next election, but we’re going to cast our own ballot along the following non-party lines nonetheless: whoever’s in, we’re throwing out. Incumbent Democrat or incumbent Republican, we don’t care.
Whoever you are, we do not want you back. And we’re not waiting around for your love children to show up and prove us right all over again.
Trashing your lives instead of electing you to trash ours is clearly the only way out.
Eerily twin scandals brought on by the ex-Governator from one party/coast and this former U.S. Senator from the other have caused us to rethink our own politics. Here’s where your blogger’s vote stands today, and the thought process behind it, not to rule out future changes, possibly as early as tomorrow, depending in part on breaking news later tonight.
We are an Eisenhower Republican. Probably the last one, judging from the recent historical record. A proud supporter of the Party of Lincoln, we embraced the induction of Blacks into the armed forces during WWII and forewarned the nation about the evils of Dick Cheney’s military/industrial complex after the fighting stopped. That Grand Old Party, upended by desegregation, no longer exists anywhere in America, but clinging on anyway means we at least start out Republican, just one who eschews warfare as horrific and understands that military force is only used to destroy an enemy utterly, and then only in response to armed aggression against us. In the ancient tradition, anything else constitutes murder, and for all our sakes, we can only pray that this isn‘t true in God‘s eye as well.
And so, turning first to the Democrats, sizing up what’s wrong with them as any loyal Eisenhower Republican must, we find a sitting, at the very least, Muslim-reared President from some kind of Black Power church whose wife’s decades-long anti-White tirade is evidenced by a college paper too damning to be released for public perusal. Then there’s the Middle East peace debacle. Watching Blatant Umama start talks by taunting Israel with the Islamic demand that her army give up the high ground was the last straw. We no longer have the stomach to watch America getting blindsided by this anti-Who-We-Are freak show.
That leaves the modern day Republican to consider. Here, our gaze falls on Biblically-disoriented Right Wing hate mongers with alternative lifestyle hang-ups. The long-suffering minority these Godless zealots vilify has to vote Democrat. For the victims, it’s a life and limb issue. There simply is no choice. They get beaten and murdered in every other environment dealt to them. Anyone in touch with his own humanity keeps their heartless oppression in mind when considering candidates for public office.
You can’t get away from the arrogant brutality in all of this, bully hounding victim around the governmental schoolyard, because that outrage is going on right inside your own living room. Night after night after night sometimes. No wonder so many Americans have stopped watching network news.
The gay/lesbian culture, nourished by the promise that civil rights legislation can somehow remain in effect for them too, has blossomed for over half a century now, a chillingly tiny window when you consider the context. History has been doggedly harsh on these citizens, and they have every reason to vote as a block. More so, perhaps, than any other special interest group. Their world gets placed on the chopping block by the petulant rhetoric accompanying every contested election.
And in resonance with that ominous beat, so does ours. The most obvious lesson from Nazi Germany applies here: who’s next, and what happens when the vitriol finally gets around to me?
Ignore whatever the theological termites are going on about this time. Join us or die, is what you need to be hearing.
Our union friends are weathering a similar storm blowing in from the cold and barren extreme political climes. The legislated right to collectively bargain, the backbone of our nation’s labor movement for decades now, is currently under attack by the same maniacally wrong-minded cult. Anyone seeing through gamed-market capitalism far enough to catch the ease of our transition from slavery to wage slavery, pretty much overnight, has to be appalled at this thoughtless initiative, understanding how quickly history would revert to yesteryear should American unions get crushed. It’s hard to see how incomes, or quality of life, could ever return to pre-financial holocaust levels if the proactive nut jobs garner enough votes, enough no longer being the majority, as Dubyah, bro Jeb, and daddy’s justices showed us not so very long ago.
The moment you see those old company towns springing up once again, we’re toast. It was the only intermediate step, one that might be called plantation slavery with paychecks. Hopelessly grim paychecks followed by all kinds of fees, kickbacks, and company taxes, and a slave master bearing every kind of repressive weapon but a cat o’ nine tails on his hip.
Management vs. labor is a battle of inane extremes, and balancing that chaotic equation has drawn many an appalled investor back and forth across party lines over the decades. Today we’ve got to be adamantly anti-management lest those psychopaths drag the demand side of our economy into the depths of a delusional self-immolation before the gods of irrational exploitation once again.
In her glory days, pretty much everyone in the Old South was broke except your large slaveholder.
For all these reasons, as well as the millennia of violence, murder, and forced-labor captivity that form such a sinister backdrop to the ecumenically-challenged stone caster agenda, The MacDougal Post cannot in good conscience endorse the way we ourselves intend to vote in the next election, but we’re going to cast our own ballot along the following non-party lines nonetheless: whoever’s in, we’re throwing out. Incumbent Democrat or incumbent Republican, we don’t care.
Whoever you are, we do not want you back. And we’re not waiting around for your love children to show up and prove us right all over again.
Trashing your lives instead of electing you to trash ours is clearly the only way out.
June 3, 2011
The Little Voice
It’s been a tad more than a year since The MacDougal Post started blogging. The flash crash happened, and we couldn’t take it anymore. Knowing what we know about the Presbyterian Mafia and not telling anybody. That we’ve been at this for so long shows you how aggravated the editorial staff still is.
And so, after the news broke yesterday that Goldberg Styx got subpoenaed over those sub-prime home mortgage-backed bonds we’re all too familiar with by now, and we turned on one of those financial networks and listened to a panel of “experts” enlightening the TV audience at home, and we realized that what we were listening to was mostly ourselves filling in what the “experts” weren’t telling the TV audience at home, we got aggravated all over again and had to write about that too.
"Expert" commentary is reported in normal font below, ours in boldface italics.
Goldberg, long $1 billion in mortgage-backed bonds in 2006, realized these securities were basically worthless and, 1) over maybe 6 months or so liquidated the entire position and 2) by 2007 undertook a massive sales campaign to go short by some other similarly huge amount, sticking their own customers with the losing end of those trades. Some Australian outfit took $100 million of the shorted trash, a week later had to write a check for $5 million to cover their first losses, kept getting hit like that in the ensuing weeks and went out of business two months after making the buy. Morgan Stanley got treated the same way, only more so. These were the two worst cases, and no other names got mentioned. The whole time the firm was switching from humongously long to humongously short by selling customers pure garbage, Goldberg knew the garbage was garbage and didn’t tell them. In fact, that's why they were selling it to them.
Goldberg’s entire short position was in bookkeeping transactions, not actual securities. These suckers were buying thin air. Short-sellers even pay the interest on this phony-baloney stuff themselves, making marks think the actual issuer made the payments. All that ripped-off customers were getting was a contract requiring them to give Goldberg the money the poor b&st&rds who actually owned such bonds were losing, but Goldberg's marks didn’t really own the bonds. Nobody did because there weren’t any bonds. Goldberg made the whole thing up to fleece its customers.
Congress had to pass some whacked-out, crazy a$$ legislation to make this kind of swindle legal, and the Judiciary had to rule that Wall Street racketeers could get away with these obsenities to make their cons stick. The whole crock is a total crock, and everybody in the House, Senate, and on the Supreme Court needs to get thrown in the clinker.
As for the Securities and Excuses Commission, clearly watchdogs who won’t watch the dogs they’re supposed to be watching need a whole other range of punishment. Bloodbath Mary, the piece of work who shuttered the 2008 hearings on short-selling, publicly announcing that short-sellers had nothing to do with the financial holocaust caused by short-selling, is clearly an enemy non-combatant. This unabashed mob stooge needs waterboarding.
There. That’s the story we heard. Now Post readers should have no trouble hearing it too, if they let the little voice inside their own heads join in.
And so, after the news broke yesterday that Goldberg Styx got subpoenaed over those sub-prime home mortgage-backed bonds we’re all too familiar with by now, and we turned on one of those financial networks and listened to a panel of “experts” enlightening the TV audience at home, and we realized that what we were listening to was mostly ourselves filling in what the “experts” weren’t telling the TV audience at home, we got aggravated all over again and had to write about that too.
"Expert" commentary is reported in normal font below, ours in boldface italics.
Goldberg, long $1 billion in mortgage-backed bonds in 2006, realized these securities were basically worthless and, 1) over maybe 6 months or so liquidated the entire position and 2) by 2007 undertook a massive sales campaign to go short by some other similarly huge amount, sticking their own customers with the losing end of those trades. Some Australian outfit took $100 million of the shorted trash, a week later had to write a check for $5 million to cover their first losses, kept getting hit like that in the ensuing weeks and went out of business two months after making the buy. Morgan Stanley got treated the same way, only more so. These were the two worst cases, and no other names got mentioned. The whole time the firm was switching from humongously long to humongously short by selling customers pure garbage, Goldberg knew the garbage was garbage and didn’t tell them. In fact, that's why they were selling it to them.
Goldberg’s entire short position was in bookkeeping transactions, not actual securities. These suckers were buying thin air. Short-sellers even pay the interest on this phony-baloney stuff themselves, making marks think the actual issuer made the payments. All that ripped-off customers were getting was a contract requiring them to give Goldberg the money the poor b&st&rds who actually owned such bonds were losing, but Goldberg's marks didn’t really own the bonds. Nobody did because there weren’t any bonds. Goldberg made the whole thing up to fleece its customers.
Congress had to pass some whacked-out, crazy a$$ legislation to make this kind of swindle legal, and the Judiciary had to rule that Wall Street racketeers could get away with these obsenities to make their cons stick. The whole crock is a total crock, and everybody in the House, Senate, and on the Supreme Court needs to get thrown in the clinker.
As for the Securities and Excuses Commission, clearly watchdogs who won’t watch the dogs they’re supposed to be watching need a whole other range of punishment. Bloodbath Mary, the piece of work who shuttered the 2008 hearings on short-selling, publicly announcing that short-sellers had nothing to do with the financial holocaust caused by short-selling, is clearly an enemy non-combatant. This unabashed mob stooge needs waterboarding.
There. That’s the story we heard. Now Post readers should have no trouble hearing it too, if they let the little voice inside their own heads join in.
June 2, 2011
Staying Ahead of the Crowd
MacDougal Post subscribers have been focused on the nation’s impending hyperinflation for some time now. Currently the senseless debacle is threatening to ramp up this August, a time frame accommodating the interest payment default schedule set by our brand new Tea Partying fiscal adolescents in Washington, who’d rather have fun than jobs, it would seem.
Whatever, to keep loyal Post readers on the cutting edge of catastrophic awareness, we headed over to the Tractor Supply to see what kind of wheelbarrows are available. Once Government starts printing money to finance its operations after investors in Government bonds stop investing in Government bonds, Economics 101 tells us that its citizens cash their paychecks immediately and have to go around carting piles and piles of this new paper currency over to the grocery store in wheelbarrows, Government pumps out so much of it.
There’s a wide selection of labor-saving equipment in the Tractor Supply Groundwork line. To accomodate your weekly shopping needs, we’re recommending the Extra Heavy Duty Utility Trailer for its 1500 lb capacity and four wheels. At $299.99, it’s a bargain compared to the $67,999,999.99 we’re projecting this model will cost by this time next year. If you’re just taking a quick trip to the convenience store, we’d go with the 10 cubic foot mega load wheelbarrow for $119.99. It has two front wheels, and won’t flip flop from side to side like our single wheeler does trying to navigate icy patches with a load of firewood on a bitter winter’s day.
The morning somebody like the NY Times tells the general public about all the paper that’s going to be involved with this Tea Party funny money economy, lawn and garden supply stores will be sold out by noon. The MacDougal Post is running maybe 3 to 7 years ahead of the Times on your typical, run-of-the-mill average financial holocaust news, but a thing like wheelbarrows, now that could be a whole other kettle of hurricane swept oil spill crawfish. We’d get ourselves over to the Tractor Supply a considerably lot sooner than later if we were you.
Whatever, to keep loyal Post readers on the cutting edge of catastrophic awareness, we headed over to the Tractor Supply to see what kind of wheelbarrows are available. Once Government starts printing money to finance its operations after investors in Government bonds stop investing in Government bonds, Economics 101 tells us that its citizens cash their paychecks immediately and have to go around carting piles and piles of this new paper currency over to the grocery store in wheelbarrows, Government pumps out so much of it.
There’s a wide selection of labor-saving equipment in the Tractor Supply Groundwork line. To accomodate your weekly shopping needs, we’re recommending the Extra Heavy Duty Utility Trailer for its 1500 lb capacity and four wheels. At $299.99, it’s a bargain compared to the $67,999,999.99 we’re projecting this model will cost by this time next year. If you’re just taking a quick trip to the convenience store, we’d go with the 10 cubic foot mega load wheelbarrow for $119.99. It has two front wheels, and won’t flip flop from side to side like our single wheeler does trying to navigate icy patches with a load of firewood on a bitter winter’s day.
The morning somebody like the NY Times tells the general public about all the paper that’s going to be involved with this Tea Party funny money economy, lawn and garden supply stores will be sold out by noon. The MacDougal Post is running maybe 3 to 7 years ahead of the Times on your typical, run-of-the-mill average financial holocaust news, but a thing like wheelbarrows, now that could be a whole other kettle of hurricane swept oil spill crawfish. We’d get ourselves over to the Tractor Supply a considerably lot sooner than later if we were you.
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