I'm Shocked - Shocked...

Why does this come as some kinda news to anybody?  I think the real story here is probably that somebody decided that somebody needed to take a fall and Cramer's the lucky winner.

From The Daily Beast.
Jim Cramer single-handedly created the concept of Dykstra-as-financial genius. Known mostly for his willingness to crash his body into walls or his cars into trees (nickname: "Nails"), the former New York Met and Philadelphia Phillie became an investment columnist for TheStreet.com in 2005, after sending Cramer an unsolicited email. For the next four years, Dykstra made stock picks, focusing on "deep-in-the-money calls"—a way to buy leveraged options—for tens of thousands of followers on Cramer's website.

Here's the basics of how "The Stock Market" works.
1) Some Wall Street guys get together and buy a bunch of shares in some company they really don't give a damn about - and sometimes one that nobody's ever really heard of - and they pay a nice low price.

2) Their networks of Brokers and Dealers spend the next several days on the phones pimping "this hot new issue" to the rubes, saying (essentially) the price of the stock is going to make real progress.

3) Meanwhile, they tip off their buddies in "The Financial Press" that something pretty big might be about to happen - and guess what?  The Money Bunnies on CNBC and Bloomburg et al go on TV and feed the rubes a load of crap about how they've uncovered this possibly fantastic opportunity that the rubes then take as confirmation that the broker guy was right.

4) If it works this time the way it's worked every other time for the last century or so, the rubes rush in; they buy lots of shares; and surprise surprise - the price of the stock goes up.  Wow.  Whooda thunk dem guys was so smart?

This is obviously a very crude sketch, and with the rise of Day Trading and the preponderance of Institutional Investors and Mutual Funds and Hedge Funds, etc, there are now many more layers of complexity, as well as a lot more complicity.  It becomes not just a corrupt system, but a system of legalized corruption.  So when everybody's in on the scam, how do you tell who the bad guys are?

And BTW: It's not possible to practice Free Market Capitalism when the markets are all captive to a few very powerful controlling interests.  What we have here now is called Oligarchy.

Pic Of The Day

Technology can give us a productivity boost. For communities struggling with budget problems, a few surveillance cameras have a force mutiplier effect by putting eyeballs in more places than they can afford to put actual cops.  Generally, I don't have any problem with passive surveillance - Red Light Cameras, Speeder Cams, Street Watch Cams, etc.  It's within the reasonable limits and expectations of government power for the police to see what I'm up to when I'm out in public.  If you don't like getting ticketed, maybe you should try following the rules instead of bitchin' about getting caught.

I do worry a little about the infamous slippery slope tho'.  I don't know if the rest of the world has this trouble, but Americans have a great knack for misunderstanding certain things.  Vince Lombardi says, "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing", and we end up with an attitude that we can get away with anything as long as we're winning.  Maybe it's just the natural inclination for humans to rationalize - I dunno.  I do know that there's a big bunch of people who don't quite get it when it comes to our system of justice.  These folks will tell you, "If you're not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide; so it's OK for government to know everything".  And what's really weird is that most of the people who'd say that are the same ones who'll make all the noise about how you can't trust the government.

So anyway, I saw this picture and it reminded me that's it a good idea to think about what I think about things, and then decide where I should draw this particular line, and then to write it all down.

Ten Years Of Hell

Here it comes, boys and girls.  We have a bad combination of things working against us - like Af-Iraq-Pak (plus the bonus of Israel prob'ly moving against Iran's nuke program soon), Gusher in the Gulf, allowing Unemployment Bennies to lapse, opposition politics, etc - this is all more than we need for the big slide into a real live depression.

From Calculated Risk:
Consumer Confidence Plummets In June

-and-

The Guardian:
Michael Tomasky

I think I understand a few things about what worked in the past to get us out of other tough spots, and while I certainly don't know exactly what'll work this time, I do know this one abiding universal truth:  An economy can spend its way to oblivion, but it can't save its way back to prosperity.

Repubs will insist on cutting spending, but I'll bet dollars to donuts they won't be raising any taxes (unless of course they can do it as regressively as possible).  Anyway, once you take away the huge chunk of demand that government spending creates, the cascade effect should kick in nicely and we'll be circling the drain in no time at all.

The reality of all this austerity talk.

World Cup

Climate Change Denial Crock Of The Week

Wingnut Welfare

From John Amato at Crooks and Liars:

As you know, many right wing hacks receive their wingnut welfare checks whenever they publish their books. They are commonly devoid of facts or any type of intellectual honesty, but are always supported by the right wing infrastructure that passes on book bailout money to help support their wingnuttery to the masses. There is no bigger recipient of the wingnut welfare system than Ann Coulter. You can call it TWERP. 'Troubled Wingnuts Effective Relief Program.' There's plenty of money to be passed around to undeserving conservatives and she's there to collect it with open arms.


BTW - I don't subscribe to the basic notion coming from "the left, &/or Dems" that they need to match the Repubs in terms of sleazy lockstep party doctrine and tricksterism.  So I'm not endorsing any kind of effort "to support liberal authors".  If your book is worth reading, then eventually it reaches an audience - of course, that presumes you have some kind of marketing effort that's at least minimally competent. But that brings us back around to a valid criticism of Cluster Fox as not much more than a booster club for Republican Party dogma.  Sometimes, it all just seems to go 'round and 'round in circles.

Just Wondering

So Obama cans McChrystal, and of course, we need a quick refresher on what our Afghanistan strategy actually is.  And that goes kinda like this: we have to fight off the Taliban while training up the Afghan Security Forces, and we have to try to root out the corruption in Karzai's government; because the Afghan people can only be expected to fight for themselves if they have faith in their government.

Really?

Why does it seem that all the "conservatives" here in the US are going along with this?  What am I missing here?  Why do we have to have Free Market Solutions for everything here, but we have to have Government Solutions in other places?

Could it be that we just call it 'the government' in other places because it provides some convenient cover for the fact that several Mega-Corp companies are actually calling the shots?

And why aren't the know-nothing rubes outraged by all this very expensive nation building stuff?  Couldn't we solve the whole problem over there just by building a couple of Wal-Marts or somethin'?

Ten Years Of Hell

In a previous post (this one), I talked a little about the probability  of seeing a lot more trouble with debt and default, and that it's likely to come from smaller counties and cities that got themselves sucked into the swirl of borrowing loads of cheap money as a way to avoid having to make some tough calls on collecting enough revenue to keep their joints going.

Here it comes.

Harrisburg is among an increasing number of municipalities showing signs of extreme fiscal stress. Squeezed by rising unemployment, plummeting tax revenue and growing employee costs, Vallejo, Calif., filed for bankruptcy two years ago. Jefferson County, Alabama's largest county, teeters on the edge of bankruptcy after a complex interest rate swap on a $3 billion sewer project went awry.

Last month, Central Falls, R.I., an impoverished city not far from Providence, put its finances in the hands of a receiver, who might have to rewrite contracts, cut pensions and restructure debt. Meanwhile, the nation's leading debt-rating agencies have relegated seven cities -- including Detroit, Harvey, Ill., and Woonsocket, R.I. -- to junk bond status, vastly increasing their borrowing costs.

This is just gonna get worse for a while.

From Nil Doctrine

This guy is a new find for me. I think he does it really well - even if I can't quite say exactly what it is he does - vlogging?

We'll Have To Sell Our Way Out Of It