Two Americas

         Doesn’t take a whole lot of thought to figure out that realization of the Democratic Party agenda is intended to be achieved through the destruction of capitalism.  Inescapably, the Federal Government would end up holding the nation’s economic assets, not the likes of you and us. 

         Their tactics toward this end change like the wind.  What’s going on with that today is nuanced by a depraved community activist POTUS in ways that are odious to the sentient mind.  In a blog brought to the Post’s attention by two valued subscribers, Bob Lonsberry nails that part better than we ever could.  Here’s what Bob has to say:

http://www.lonsberry.com/writings.cfm?story=3651&go=4

The Elephant in the Room

         One source defines the healthcare sector as “a category of stocks relating to medical and healthcare goods or services,” including “hospital management firms, health maintenance organizations (HMOs), biotechnology and a variety of medical products”.  Insurance providers, health care real estate investment trusts, and medical equipment manufacturers are three industries warranting specific mention, and it should be noted that pharmaceutical companies generally dominate the holdings of health care mutual funds.

         Lately, anytime we start pondering investment decisions in this arena, Obamacare stops us dead.  This abomination is an insurance plan right now, but how will nationalization impact the rest of the healthcare sector once their antiestablishment ball gains momentum?  Tackling insurance benefits suggests across-the-board price control to us.  That places everything from Band-Aids to physician compensation on the table, and all seem likely to be targeted by a proven pack of fools who have no idea what they’re dealing with.

         Remember, this is a President with absolutely zero business experience who drew 92% of his closest advisors, by one apparently reliable count anyway, from outside the business world.

         A cursory review of what’s next with government intervention into healthcare indicates that nobody knows what’s next.  The silence is deafening.

         Clearly, this is not a future our subscribers should be invested in.

         Time and time again, we keep coming up with the same conclusion.  Hold large cap multinationals.  Especially in this particular sector, now is no time to be buying American.

Offshoring Your Portfolio

         Between 1) lavish, politically motivated, "welfare" payola rewarding people in this country for not working and 2) widespread disdain, particularly among our youth, for those who do, what used to be the American labor force has been rendered unemployable in the new world economy.

         Given the quality of motivation, enthusiasm, effort, focus, and loyalty large employers can expect from wage earners elsewhere across the globe, there's no reason to expect jobs will ever return to these shores in significant number.  After the financial apocalypse our President declined to pull us up by our bootstraps with a public works initiative making people work because his lazy, good-for-nothing, fat-a$$ constituency would've run him out of office if he did.

         Offshoring employers noticed.

         Precisely what part Obama’s stranglehold on the nation’s indolent psyche has played in all this remains to be understood.  Clearly, policies designed to buy the votes of idle riffraff, malcontents, and welfare cheats have done more to make our people contemptible in the eyes of others than anything else we’ve read about around here.

         In any event, its resulting devastation to the demand side of our economy appears permanent.  MacDougal continues to recommend that subscribers stick with large cap American multinationals enjoying extensive footprints beyond our borders. These days, buying domestic is like shooting yourself in the financial quality foot.

         And please avoid direct investments in the securities of foreign corporations.  Overseas stock markets have a long history of sopping up American Greenbacks and then pulling the plug.

Feds Look the Other Way Again

         Yesterday, the United States Attorney in Manhattan announced that Washington has accepted $1.7 billion from Fallutin National to keep that bank’s staff out of jail for their part in Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.  The bribe, labeled a “fine for felony violations of the Bank Secrecy Act”, shows just how far Federal officials will go to protect Wall Street racketeers, whose political payola greases the machinery that places our Government at the apex of the boundless official corruption running today’s misbegotten sociopolitical culture into the ground.  At least this payola, or what's left of it anyway after legal fees and whatever, will be paid to the victims, who wouldn't have been victimized had someone at Fallutin National told authorities what was really going on at Bernie's house of horrors.  No one did, according to media accounts, because Fallutin was collecting hundreds of millions of dollars from Bernie to help keep the swindler swindling.

         We grieve for all of us who have to live here.

Lobbying Goes Undercover

         Coming on the heels of the 2006 Abramoff scandal, The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 threatened registered lobbyists with prison time and other criminal punishment for newly enacted statutory misdoings.  The result?  Some of the more artful dodgers simply reworded their job descriptions and stopped registering as lobbyists.

         In a recent op-ed article entitled The Unlobbyists, New York Times writer Thomas B. Edsall explained what such “former” lobbyists claim they do now.  If any of our valued subscribers can figure out what that is, please let someone at The MacDougal Post know.

         It smells a whole lot like influence peddling* to us.

         Here’s the link to Edsall's piece:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/01/opinion/edsall-the-unlobbyists.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=thomasbedsall


* Brokering a legislator's vote.