another site
A Loudon County, Virginia, school bus took students to and from various locations for two days with explosive material in its engine compartment. The CIA accidentally left the explosive material in the bus after using it for a training exercise. Mechanics for the school system discovered the material during routine maintenance.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1PVMnbi
via IFTTT
Submitted by Michael Krieger of LibertyBlitzkrieg
Blast From the Past – Hillary Clinton vs. Bernie Sanders on Panama
Unlike most politicians, Bernie Sanders becomes increasingly impressive the more you learn about him. Forget for a moment whether you think the tax dodging strategies popularized by the Panama Papers are ethical or not, it’s important to note that Bernie Sanders publicly warned about an expansion in such behavior all the way back in 2011. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama pushed for legislation that made such controversial strategies easier, under the guise of “free trade” with Panama.
First, here’s what Senator Sanders had to say on the matter in 2011:
The man’s prescience is remarkable. As his votes against the Patriot Act, Iraq War and banker bailouts demonstrate, Bernie Sanders has been on the right side of history on all the major issues of the 21st century. In contrast, Hillary Clinton has been on the wrong side of history on pretty much everything.
For some additional insight on the Panama situation, let’s turn to the International Business Times:
Years before more than a hundred media outlets around the world released stories Sunday exposing a massive network of global tax evasion detailed in the Panama Papers, U.S. President Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed for a Bush administration-negotiated free trade agreement that watchdogs warned would only make the situation worse.
Soon after taking office in 2009, Obama and his secretary of state — who is currently the Democratic presidential front-runner — began pushing for the passage of stalled free trade agreements (FTAs) with Panama, Colombia and South Korea that opponents said would make it more difficult to crack down on Panama’s very low income tax rate, banking secrecy laws and history of noncooperation with foreign partners.
Even while Obama championed his commitment to raise taxes on the wealthy, he pursued and eventually signed the Panama agreement in 2011. Upon Congress ratifying the pact, Clinton issued a statement lauding the agreement, saying it and other deals with Colombia and South Korea “will make it easier for American companies to sell their products.” She added: “The Obama administration is constantly working to deepen our economic engagement throughout the world, and these agreements are an example of that commitment.”
Critics, however, said the pact would make it easier for rich Americans and corporations to set up offshore corporations and bank accounts and avoid paying many taxes altogether.
“The FTA would undermine existing U.S. policy tools against tax haven activity,” warned consumer watchdog group Public Citizen at the time, saying the agreement would encourage corporations to thwart any U.S. efforts to combat financial secrecy. The group also noted that U.S. government contractors, as well as major financial firms supported by taxpayer bailouts, stood to gain from the trade deal’s provisions that could make it harder to crack down on financial secrecy.
Despite the warnings from watchdog groups, some Democratic lawmakers urged the Obama administration to aggressively push for the Panama agreement. According to a 2009 email sent to Clinton by her top State Department aide, high-ranking then-Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., was pushing for passage of the Panama and Colombia free trade pacts, and Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said “the president had to lend his star power to pushing them through.” Obama ultimately did just that, hosting Panama’s president at a 2011 Oval Office event touting the proposed trade pact.
Beyond once again illuminating stark differences between Hillary and Bernie, this episode also demonstrates how dishonest politicians like Obama and Clinton frequently use “free trade” language to push forward crony legislation that has little to do with trade.
You’ve been warned.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1VaoYLe Tyler Durden
Yesterday we first reported something unexpected: when looking at the constituents of the record short squeeze that started two months ago, and still continues, traders had largely maintained kept single-name shorts, and instead covered short ETF exposure.
This followed a previous observation showing that when it comes to NYSE short interest, it is near the record highs (in absolute terms, if not as a % of market cap) reached during the financial crisis.
Furthermore, as we have been reporting for the past 2 months, the “smart money” clients of BofA have been consistently selling this rally, and as of this last week, have sold shares for 10 consecutive weeks,with the selling actually accelerating, and in the last week, during which the S&P 500 was up 1.8%, BofA clients sold a total of $4 billion, the largest since September, and the fifth-largest in BofA history.
Bloomberg summarized all of this overnight in a note discussing the well-known short overhang, amounting to $1 trillion in total short interest.
Amid its biggest about-face in nine decades, a funny thing has happened in the U.S. stock market, where rather than loosen their grip bears have grown ever-more impassioned. They’ve sent short interest to an eight-year high and above $1 trillion, by one analyst’s math. Position reports from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission show mutual fund managers are more skeptical now than any time since at least 2010.
“There’s an enormous demand coming,” said Thomas J. Lee, managing partner at Fundstrat Global Advisors LLC., in an interview with Bloomberg TV . “Retail investors are about to put a lot of money into the equity markets because they’re trend followers and the S&P has had two positive quarters in a row. Funds can’t keep a trillion short position, larger than March ’09.”
It started in August, when bearish investors sent bets against U.S. stocks above 4 percent of available shares for the first time in six years. They haven’t backed off since. By the end of February, the ratio climbed to 4.4 percent, the highest since 2008, according to exchange data compiled by Bloomberg. As of March 15, that level was 4.3 percent, equivalent to a short position just under $1 trillion.
So, supposedly the market is the most short since 2008.
Which is odd because according to a report released this morning by UBS, while there are allegedly record shorts, the market is somehow, at the very same time, the most overbought since 2009. Here are technicians Michael Riesner and Marc Muller:
With the SPX hitting a new reaction high on Wednesday we were obviously too early in expecting the SPX to top out last week. However, our base case has not changed. The SPX continues to trade in the time window of our late March/early April top projection. The market is still in its most overbought position since 2009 and together with the internal momentum starting to deteriorate we see the SPX in a final extension instead of starting a new breakout, and in this context we are sticking to our recent comment and would not chase the market on current levels.
So, at the very same time, this market is the “most overbought since 2009” and “most shorted since 2008“…
No Wonder Morgan Stanley chief equity strategist Adam Parker lost it this week, and is seeing nothing but cockroaches.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/2098T84 Tyler Durden
The following research was jointly produced by: J. Brett Freeze, CFA of Global Technical Analysis and 720 Global
Buying Dollar Bills For $1.10
720 Global has written four articles to date on stock buybacks and the harm these actions will likely have on future corporate growth rates and the economy. To better gauge the effect of buybacks we join forces with Brett Freeze to present a unique analysis on the S&P 100.
As we have previously noted, a large majority of companies, including 94 of the S&P 100, have actively repurchased shares since 2011. These companies often announce and execute share repurchases without providing a rationale to shareholders. As a fiduciary of shareholder’s capital, managements’ core responsibility is to act in the best interest of its shareholders. Unfortunately, we believe the majority of current repurchase activity is dictated by management’s self-serving desire – temporarily inflating the current market-value of company stock, while enriching themselves through the exercise and sale of equity-based incentive compensation.
There are two conditions that should be met when a company engages in a stock buyback. 1) The shares should be trading below intrinsic value 2) there are no investment opportunities available that would allow the company to continue to grow at a desirable rate. If both conditions can be met a case may be made for share buybacks.
This article solely focuses on the first aforementioned condition– intrinsic value. For more information on the second condition, please read “In Yahoo, Another Example of the Buyback Mirage” by Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times. In her recent article, which quoted 720 Global, she demonstrates how Yahoo weakened future earnings growth rates and corporate value through questionable stock buybacks.
Intrinsic value is not the market price or market capitalization of a company or its stock, but a theoretical value formulated through analysis of the balance sheet and income statement of the company. Conceptually, investors should seek companies whose share prices trade below intrinsic value and shun those trading above intrinsic value. This logic equally applies to corporate management executing buybacks.
When shares are purchased below intrinsic value, the company has added value. It is equivalent to buying a dollar bill for fifty cents. Conversely, share repurchases executed at a premium to intrinsic value destroy intrinsic value. Existing shareholders who sell are rewarded by the share-repurchase program, but those who hold are irreparably damaged. In the words of Warren Buffett from his assault on buybacks – “Buying dollar bills for $1.10 is not good business for those who stick around.”
For this analysis we evaluate share repurchase activity and intrinsic values for the companies in the S&P 100 Index. Our measure of intrinsic value for non-financial companies was calculated using Global Technical Analysis’s proprietary discounted cash-flow model. For each non-financial company, 20-years of estimated forward cash flows were discounted by the weighted-average cost of capital (energy company data was normalized, when necessary). For financial companies, our measure of intrinsic value was calculated using Global Technical Analysis’s proprietary residual income model.
The following table provides a glimpse of the value being reduced by share buybacks of five widely-held companies.
The entire analysis is presented below by S&P Sector. Within each sector, companies are ranked by cumulative share repurchases relative to Q1 2011 outstanding shares. The final column of data shows the effect of share repurchase activity on intrinsic value. This column reveals the positive or negative effect that buybacks have had on the intrinsic value of each respective company.
The results of our analysis confirm our beliefs regarding share repurchases. Approximately two-thirds of the S&P 100 destroyed intrinsic value, by an average amount of 12.03%, as a result of their share-repurchase programs.
***Corporate names have been withheld from this presentation. A full analysis can be acquired by contacting the authors.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1UXzIgs Tyler Durden
Recently, we’ve shown you where wealthy people reside within the US, and where they’re fleeing from (here, and here). We now present to you the US city that is winning the race to drive out their wealthiest taxpayers.
As the Chicago Tribune reports, that city is none other than Chicago, Illinois.
Millionaires are leaving Chicago more than any other city in the United States on a net basis, according to a report by New World Wealth.
About 3,000 individuals with net assets of $1 million or more (not including their primary residence) moved from the city last year, representing about 2% of the city’s high net worth individuals. It is unclear where they went: cities in the United States that saw a net inflow of millionaires included Seattle and San Francisco. One thing is certain: they couldn’t wait to get out.
Among the reasons cited for leaving their former home town, many said rising racial tensions and worries about crime as factors in the decision.
The gun violence part we get. Over the weekend, when we penned that “Chicago Disintegrates – Gun Shootings Soar An Unprecedented 89%: “It’s The Struggling Economy” we broke out the stunning statistics within America’s very own warzone:
“Gun violence in the windy city is on track to post its worst year in the 21st century, the result of an unprecedented surge in gun deaths in the first three months of the year. By March 31, 141 people had been killed, according to the Chicago Police Department.
The 141 deaths in the first three months of the year mark a 71.9% jump from the same period in 2015, when 82 people were killed. It’s the worst start to a year since 1999, when 136 people died in the first three months the year, according to the Chicago Tribune.
At that pace – an average of three killings every two days – Chicago would have 564 homicides by the end of the year. That would eclipse the 468 killings recorded in 2015 and 416 in 2014.“
Still, at least for the time being, these mass shooting sprees are largely isolated to poor neighborhoods of the windy city. As such, it is difficult to see millionaires be directly impacted by what happens in inner city ghettos.
Which probably explains why while the article touches on crime and racial tensions as reasons people are leaving, there is also another little, or rather big, matter that is driving the people away: taxes.
According to the Tribune, Illinois Comptroller Leslie Munger recently had this to say about the mounting unpaid bills and budget concerns that the state continues to face.
“We can’t go bankrupt and we can’t print money. Taxpayers are going to have to pay this bill.”
Actually it can go bankrupt.
Recall that just two weeks ago we reported that the “Countdown To Insolvency Begins For Chicago Pensions As State Supreme Court Rejects Reform Bid“, in which we wrote that following a controversial Supreme Court decision, “there will be no legislating away pension benefits – even if doing so is the only realistic way for officials to ensure that state and local governments can continue to pay out any benefits at all going forward. That is, even if long-run insolvency is certain, benefits will be paid out in full up to and until the day of reckoning finally comes and it will be up to lawmakers to figure out how to rescue the system in the meantime. If that means raising taxes and/or going into further debt, then that’s what it means.”
And although they may not be able to print money, we can’t help but wonder if the organization that can, will begin to take on the state insolvency issue in the future to prevent that from happening. After all, the bailout tour must continue to roll on.
For now however, Chicago’s future is bleak, and when the hammer finally does hit, it will do so without Chicago’s wealthiest present.
Finally, it may not come as a surprise that of all cities around the globe, Chicago was only third in millionaire exodus rankings.
Which was first? Paris, France.
A Rolls-Royce is displayed Feb. 11, 2016, at the Chicago Auto Show. 3,000
millionaires moved out of Chicago in 2015, it is unclear what cars they drove
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/2091hTf Tyler Durden
By Ben Hunt of Salient Partners
“My Passion Is Puppetry“
We are supposedly living in the Golden Age of television. Maybe yes, maybe no (my view: every decade is a Golden Age of television!), but there’s no doubt that today we’re living in the Golden Age of insurance commercials. Sure, you had the GEICO gecko back in 1999 and the caveman in 2004, and the Aflac duck has been around almost as long, but it’s really the Flo campaign for Progressive Insurance in 2008 that marks a sea change in how financial risk products are marketed by property and casualty insurers. Today every major P&C carrier spends big bucks (about $7 billion per year in the aggregate) on these little theatrical gems.
This will strike some as a silly argument, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the modern focus on entertainment marketing for financial risk products began in the Great Recession and its aftermath. When the financial ground isn’t steady underneath your feet, fundamentals don’t matter nearly as much as a fresh narrative. Why? Because the fundamentals are scary. Because you don’t buy when you’re scared. So you need a new perspective from the puppet masters to get you to buy, a new “conversation”, to use Don Draper’s words of advertising wisdom from Mad Men. Maybe that’s describing the price quote process as a “name your price tool” if you’re Flo, and maybe that’s describing Lucky Strikes tobacco as “toasted!” if you’re Don Draper. Maybe that’s a chuckle at the Mayhem guy or the Hump Day Camel if you’re Allstate or GEICO. Maybe, since equity markets are no less a financial risk product than auto insurance, it’s the installation of a cargo cult around Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and Mario Draghi, such that their occasional manifestations on a TV screen, no less common than the GEICO gecko, become objects of adoration and propitiation.
For P&C insurers, the payoff from their marketing effort is clear: dollars spent on advertising drive faster and more profitable premium growth than dollars spent on agents. For central bankers, the payoff from their marketing effort is equally clear. As the Great One himself, Ben Bernanke, said in his August 31, 2012 Jackson Hole speech: “It is probably not a coincidence that the sustained recovery in U.S. equity prices began in March 2009, shortly after the FOMC’s decision to greatly expand securities purchases.” Probably not a coincidence, indeed.
Here’s what this marketing success looks like, and here’s why you should care.
This is a chart of the S&P 500 index (green line) and the Deutsche Bank Quality index (white line) from February 2000 to the market lows of March 2009.
Source: Bloomberg Finance L.P., as of 3/6/2009. For illustrative purposes only.
Now I chose this particular factor index (which I understand to be principally a measure of return on invested capital, such that it’s long stocks with a high ROIC, i.e. high quality, and short stocks with a low ROIC, all in a sector neutral/equal-weighted construction across a wide range of global stocks in order to isolate this factor) because Quality is the embedded bias of almost every stock-picker in the world. As stock-pickers, we are trained to look for quality management teams, quality earnings, quality cash flows, quality balance sheets, etc. The precise definition of quality will differ from person to person and process to process (Deutsche Bank is using return on invested capital as a rough proxy for all of these disparate conceptions of quality, which makes good sense to me), but virtually all stock-pickers believe, largely as an article of faith, that the stock price of a high quality company will outperform the stock price of a low quality company over time. And for the nine years shown on this chart, that faith was well-rewarded, with the Quality index up 78% and the S&P 500 down 51%, a stark difference, to be sure.
But now let’s look at what’s happened with these two indices over the last seven years.
Source: Bloomberg Finance L.P., as of 3/28/2016. For illustrative purposes only.
The S&P 500 index has tripled (!) from the March 2009 bottom. The Deutsche Bank Quality index? It’s up a grand total of 10%. Over seven years. Why? Because the Fed couldn’t care less about promoting high quality companies and dissing low quality companies with its concerted marketing campaign — what Bernanke and Yellen call “communication policy”, the functional equivalent of advertising. The Fed couldn’t care less about promoting value or promoting growth or promoting any traditional factor that requires an investor judgment between this company and that company. No, the Fed wants to promote ALL financial assets, and their communication policies are intentionally designed to push and cajole us to pay up for financial risk in our investments, in EXACTLY the same way that a P&C insurance company’s communication policies are intentionally designed to push and cajole us to pay up for financial risk in our cars and homes. The Fed uses Janet Yellen and forward guidance; Nationwide uses Peyton Manning and a catchy jingle. From a game theory perspective it’s the same thing.
Where do the Fed’s policies most prominently insure against financial risk? In low quality stocks, of course. It’s precisely the companies with weak balance sheets and bumbling management teams and sketchy non-GAAP earnings that are more likely to be bailed out by the tsunami of liquidity and the most accommodating monetary policy of this or any other lifetime, because companies with fortress balance sheets and competent management teams and sterling earnings don’t need bailing out under any circumstances. It’s not just that a quality bias fails to be rewarded in a policy-driven market, it’s that a bias against quality does particularly well! The result is that any long-term expected return from quality stocks is muted at best and close to zero in the current policy regime. There is no “margin of safety” in quality-driven stock-picking today, so that it only takes one idiosyncratic stock-picking mistake to wipe out a year’s worth of otherwise solid research and returns.
So how has that stock-picking mutual fund worked out for you? Probably not so well. Here’s the 2015 S&P scorecard for actively managed US equity funds, showing the percentage of funds that failed to beat their benchmarks over the last 1, 5, and 10 year periods. I mean … these are just jaw-droppingly bad numbers. And they’d be even worse if you included survivorship bias.
Small wonder, then, that assets have fled actively managed stock funds over the past 10 years in favor of passively managed ETFs and indices. It’s a Hobson’s Choice for investors and advisors, where a choice between interesting but under-performing active funds and boring but safe passive funds is no choice at all from a business perspective. The mantra in IT for decades was that no one ever got fired for buying IBM; today, no financial advisor ever gets fired for buying an S&P 500 index fund.
But surely, Ben, this, too, shall pass. Surely at some point central banks will back away from their massive marketing campaign based on forward guidance and celebrity spokespeople. Surely as interest rates “normalize”, we will return to those halcyon days of yore, when stock-picking on quality actually mattered.
Sorry, but I don’t see it. The mistake that most market observers make is to think that if the Fed is talking about normalizing rates, then we must be moving towards normalized markets, i.e. non-policy-driven markets. That’s not it. To steal a line from the Esurance commercials, that’s not how any of this works. So long as we’re paying attention to the Missionary’s act of communication, whether that’s a Mario Draghi press conference or a Mayhem Guy TV commercial, then behaviorally-focused advertising — aka the Common Knowledge Game — works. Common Knowledge is created simply by paying attention to a Missionary. It really doesn’t matter what specific message the Missionary is actually communicating, so long as it holds our attention. It really doesn’t matter whether the Fed hikes rates four times this year or twice this year or not at all this year. I mean, of course it matters in terms of mortgage rates and bank profits and a whole host of factors in the real economy. But for the only question that matters for investors — what do I do with my money? — nothing changes. Stock-picking still won’t work. Quality still won’t work. So long as we hang on every word, uttered or unuttered, by our monetary policy Missionaries, so long as we compel ourselves to pay attention to Monetary Policy Theatre, then we will still be at sea in a policy-driven market where our traditional landmarks are barely visible and highly suspect.
Here’s my metaphor for investors and central bankers today — the brilliant Cars.com commercial where a woman is stuck on a date with an incredibly creepy guy who declares that “my passion is puppetry” and proceeds to make out with a replica of the woman.
What we have to do as investors is exactly what this woman has to do: get out of this date and distance ourselves from this guy as quickly as humanly possible. For some of us that means leaving the restaurant entirely, reducing or eliminating our exposure to public markets by going to cash or moving to private markets. For others of us that means changing tables and eating our meal as far away as we possibly can from Creepy Puppet Guy. So long as we stay in the restaurant of public markets there’s no way to eliminate our interaction with Creepy Puppet Guy entirely. No doubt he will try to follow us around from table to table. But we don’t have to engage with him directly. We don’t have participate in his insane conversation. No one is forcing you keep a TV in your office so that you can watch CNBC all day long!
Look … I understand the appeal of a good marketing campaign. I live for this stuff. And I understand that we all operate under business and personal imperatives to beat our public market benchmarks, whatever that means in whatever corner of the investing world we live in. But I also believe that much of our business and personal discomfort with public markets today is a self-inflicted wound, driven by our biological craving for Narrative and our social craving for comfortable conversations with others and ourselves, no matter how wrong-headed those conversations might be.
Case in point: if your conversation around actively managed stock-picking strategies — and this might be a conversation with managers, it might be a conversation with clients, it might be a conversation with an Investment Board, it might be a conversation with yourself — focuses on the strategy’s ability to deliver “alpha” in this puppeted market, then you’re having a losing conversation. You are, in effect, having a conversation with Creepy Puppet Guy.
There is a role for actively managed stock-picking strategies in a puppeted market, but it’s not to “beat” the market. It’s to survive this puppeted market by getting as close to a real fractional ownership of real assets and real cash flows as possible. It’s recognizing that owning indices and ETFs is owning a casino chip, a totally different thing from a fractional ownership share of a real world thing. Sure, I want my portfolio to have some casino chips, but I ALSO want to own quality real assets and quality real cash flows, regardless of the game that’s going on all around me in the casino.
Do ALL actively managed strategies or stock-picking strategies see markets through this lens, as an effort to forego the casino chip and purchase a fractional ownership in something real? Of course not. Nor am I using the term “stock-picking” literally, as in only equity strategies are part of this conversation. What I’m saying is that a conversation focused on quality real asset and quality real cash flow ownership is the right criterion for choosing between intentional security selection strategies, and that this is the right role for these strategies in a portfolio.
Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. If you want market returns, buy the market through passive indices and ETFs. If you want better than market returns … well, good luck with that. My advice is to look to private markets, where fundamental research and private information still matter. But there’s more to public markets than playing the returns game. There’s also the opportunity to exchange capital for an ownership share in a real world asset or cash flow. It’s the meaning that public markets originally had. It’s a beautiful thing. But you’ll never see it if you’re devoting all your attention to CNBC or Creepy Puppet Guy.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/208Z1LG Tyler Durden
While the furious rally that proppeled gold higher in the first quarter – by the most in 25 years – appears to have fizzled, it is hardly over. So for those wondering when they should add to their position, or start a new one, here is some advice from Geneva Swiss Bank, which believes that $1,180-$1,190 “may be a good level to buy gold.”
The bull case is known to everyone by now, but here it is again, from the source:
The result: the following chart.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1S3rJ0G Tyler Durden
Submitted by Douglas Herman
“The majority of men are not capable of thinking, but only of believing and are not accessible to reason but only to authority.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer
Voting is like bungee jumping: it’s for people who like big jerks. If the 2016 US Presidential election seems like a manufactured media circus, perhaps we can blame Hollywood. More precisely, we can blame fictional Senator Jay Billington Bulworth and his bluster for providing the blueprint.
In books and movies, Life often imitates Art. I know from personal experience, having penned a historical fiction novel, The Guns of Dallas, that apparently came true two years after publication. When an old CIA operative named E. Howard Hunt made a deathbed confession to Rolling Stone magazine about the JFK Assassination, he echoes a similar confession my protagonist made in my novel a couple years before.
But they give no prizes for such prescience. Instead they give Pulitzer Prizes and Nobel Prizes to liars and war criminals. They give Presidential Medals of Freedom to corrupt, incompetent or deceitful career public servants who do a huge disservice to the public and endanger the Republic. They give Oscars and Emmys and glowing accolades to filmmakers who create violent movies based on fantasies and fabrications that prop up the deep state. But they give no awards for speaking truth to power. Often only a bullet awaits those who do.
Long before Donald Trump uttered his first shocking statement, a fictional Hollywood politico named Senator Bulworth spoke truth to power and shocked a nation. So much so that the movie lost money, was critically panned and may have gotten the iconic actor and producer, Warren Beatty, blacklisted from Hollywood.
Why? Truth is a dangerous weapon. More dangerous than a thousand light sabers. But sadly, Truth is the First & Last Casualty in America’s Penultimate War.
* * *
Some people think that truth is relative. At least my relatives do. Try telling your friends and family that all truth passes through Three Stages, from ridicule to violent opposition to eventual acceptance, according to that guy Schopenhauer again, who must have been a lot of fun at parties. My friends and family remain at stage one.
In an essay called Bulworth In 2013, artist Jim Kirwan remarked: “Warren Beatty made Bulworth in 1998 to warn America about what this country had become . . . The film is about a disillusioned Senator who tires of the lies and begins to tell it like it is. No other major filmmaker has dared to produce, much less chosen to put these topics before the public.”
Bulworth quickly insults or provokes everyone he meets, from Black civic leaders to Jewish movie moguls to a roomful of the Senator’s corrupt corporate donors. While on a fundraiser, Senator Bulworth visits the home of some Hollywood heavyweights and is asked bluntly by one of them: “Senator, do you think those of us in the entertainment business need government help in determining limits on sex and violence in today’s films and television programs?”
Bulworth replies: “You know the funny thing is, how lousy most of your stuff is. You make violent films, you make dirty films, you make family films, but just most of them are not very good, are they? Funny that so many smart people could work so hard on them and spend so much money on them and, I mean, what do you think it is? It must be the money, huh. It must be the money, it turns everything to crap you know. Jesus Christ how much money do you guys really need?”
And that is how you get black-listed from Hollywood, despite all the Oscars you have won in the past. Talk truth to power and damn if they don’t try to ruin you.
Bulworth continues on in his suicidal mission. Warren Beatty is masterful and marvelous, like Trump on truth serum or steroids. Intoxicated with his candor, Senator Bulworth begins to rhyme, to a roomful of stunned corporate backers. “And over here, we got our friends from oil/ They don’t give a shit how much wilderness they spoil/ They tell us they are careful, we know that it’s a lie/ As long as we keep driving cars, they’ll let the planet die/ Exxon, Mobil, the Saudis and Kuwait, if we still got the Middle East, the atmosphere can wait/ The Arabs got the oil, we buy everything they sell/ But if the brothers raise the price, we’ll blow them all to hell.”
Imagine Trump saying something like THAT?
So ask yourself this, dear reader: When has ONE candidate managed to provoke and then UNITE the hysterical Left liberals and the entrenched, super rich & powerful oligarchs of the Extreme Right against him? Not to mention uniting the puppets and pundits of the mainstream media? Has that ever happened in American history? Before Bulworth? Before Trump?
Consider the growing list of powerful, special interests arrayed against Donald Trump. Billionaire corporate heads oppose Trump. Dozens of them flew down to Sea Island, Georgia to devise ways to remove Trump from the Republican ticket. “”What we see at Sea Island is that, despite all their babble about bringing the blessings of democracy to the world’s benighted, AEI, Neocon Central, believe less in democracy than in perpetual control of the American nation by the ruling Beltway elites,” wrote Patrick Buchanan. “If an outsider like Trump imperils that control . . . the elites will come together to bring him down, because behind party lines, they’re soul brothers in pursuit of power.”
Speaking of soul brothers, another billionaire, and self-confessed Nazi collaborator, George Soros backs BlackLivesMatters. Soros provided in excess of $30 million in “seed” money to BLM. Tweeted top BLM activist and rapper Tef Poe: “ If Trump wins, young niggas such as myself are fully hell bent on inciting riots everywhere we go.”
Billionaires bankrolling ghetto brothers to burn and riot? And NO outcry from the American media, naturally.
Soros also backs unlimited immigration with his Open Borders group, the same people responsible for blocking a state highway in Arizona. Again not a peep from the mainstream media. But a cabal of connected newspaper columnists, who style themselves “National Security Leaders,” many who pimped for the endless wars in the Middle East, including such aptly named warmongers as Max Boot, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Chertoff and Robert Kagan oppose Trump. Likewise billionaire Jewish movie moguls, many of whom have donated millions to Hillary Clinton, oppose Trump. Billionaire Chinese oligarchs and manufacturers, with factories filled with low-paid workers and fearful that tariffs may curtail their obscene profits, oppose Trump. Pop political celebs such as Elizabeth Warren and RINO relics Mitt Romney and John McCain oppose Trump and urge voters to reject him.
Every one of these outspoken opponents of Trump was represented in the Bulworth movie in some fashion, especially the network talking heads. In the movie, Bulworth finally confronts the media. The American mainstream media hates and fears Trump, I mean Bulworth. He knows exactly what kind of prostitutes they are. But the media realizes Bulworth is hot news. So they have to cover him. They are forced to cover him, against their will. Exactly as they are forced to cover Trump.
* * *
“You know the guy in the booth who’s talking to you in that tiny little earphone,” says Bulworth to some bimbo who reminds me of Meagan Kelly. “He’s afraid the guys at network are gonna tell him that he’s through/ If he lets a guy keep talking like I’m talking to you/ Cause the corporations got the networks and they get to say who gets to talk about the country and who’s crazy today/ I would cut to a commercial if you still want this job/ Because you may not be back tomorrow with this corporate mob/ Cut to commercial, cut to commercial, cut to commercial. Okay Okay I got a simple question that I’d like to ask of this network/ That pays you for performing this task/ How come they got the airwaves? They’re the peoples aren’t they?/ Wouldn’t they be worth 70 billion to the public today?/ If some money-grubbin Congress didn’t give them away?”
Bulworth, like Trump nearly 20 years later, seems to present the people, the voters, with a fresh perspective. Even if the apparent fresh perspective is a fraud or a mirage. But to the Powers-That-Be, any courageous man who speaks truth to power presents a fearful challenge: How to rein in this dangerous man, before he does any more damage? Easy enough. Whether a Bulworth or a Trump, similar wild card candidates who have suddenly become the newest darling of the public, they must be taught to toe the party line, or be removed from the picture. Simple.
How? Assassination or electoral fraud.
In the movie, Bulworth is eventually removed, at the height of his fame and popularity with the voters. In reality, so is anyone else who dares to challenge the status quo. JFK and RFK most recently. I imagine the powerbrokers are devising a scenario as I write this. Perhaps a disgruntled bus boy with three names, a troubled sort who keeps a diary and owns a handgun will ambush Trump. Naturally the media presstitutes will gloat in private but pretend a somber sorrow. And Hillary will be selected, or someone suitable to Wall Street and the police state. Hardly matters who.
As our empire erodes, and overseas tyranny evolves into full moral meltdown at home, and the economy becomes a series of bubbles, the sociopaths in charge resort to more inventive and draconian measures. Trump is neither the solution nor the answer but more like another symptom. A long simmering effect of a longer lingering cause. The cause and effect of bad governance, of corruption without any consequences.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/22dy7le Tyler Durden
Fifty-nine years ago, two men and a woman sat around a table in Bakersfield, drinking red wine and cursing the state of the union. “Ain’t no jobs to be had,” one man said.
“I know it, I know it,” said the other. “An honest man might’s well quit trying.” And then he added: “I know where there’s a bunch of money. It wouldn’t be no trouble to get it.”
The trio, now thoroughly drunk, decided to break into a restaurant on Highway 99. No one would catch them, they reasoned, because it was 3 in the morning. And so they headed out to the roadhouse with a baby in tow, and they started trying to pry their way in through the back door.
Unfortunately for the crooks, they had been too drunk to read the clock correctly: It was actually 10 p.m., and the joint was still open. And that was how Merle Haggard, who had already spent more than a little time behind bars for a variety of petty offenses, got a ticket to San Quentin.
It was in that prison, inspired by one of Johnny Cash’s concerts-behind-bars, that Haggard the inept burglar decided to turn his life around. We’re all fortunate that he did. In the time since he left San Quentin in 1960, Haggard—who died today on his 79th birthday—built one of the richest bodies of work in the history of American popular music. A country singer, Haggard was always happy to draw as well from other genres: blues, rock, gospel, and especially jazz. (The next time you watch that famous clip of Bing Crosby and David Bowie singing an odd-couple duet, remind yourself that Haggard was a professed fan of both.) He was an excellent vocalist, a capable guitarist and fiddler, and the leader of an expert band. But he wasn’t just a musical giant. His finest songs are tightly compressed stories and character sketches that belong in the canon of American literature.
How much do his best records stand out? Country music is full of songs about truck drivers, but I can’t think of any as world-weary and bleak as “White Line Fever,” with its aging narrator’s lament: “I’ve been from coast to coast a hundred times or more/And I ain’t found one single place where I ain’t been before.”
The song treats truck driving as an addiction, and when you combine that with the phrase “white line” you may suspect the verses have a hidden second subject. Decades later, Haggard would begin another world-weary song—”Wishing All These Old Things Were New”—with a more explicit reference to that other sort of white line: “Watching while some old friends do a line/Holding back the want-to in my own addicted mind.” And then, in the second verse, a moment with more than a hint of autobiography: “Watching while some young men go to jail/And they show it all on TV, just to see somebody fail.” Listen:
It’s both nostalgic and anti-nostalgic—a song for someone who misses the old times but also knows damn well they weren’t as good as he remembers them. This was a recurring theme for Haggard. (It should be no surprise that he recorded a version of Dolly Parton’s “In the Good Old Days When Times Were Bad.”) His most poetic expression of the idea may be a line from “They’re Tearing the Labor Camps Down,” a song about a man returning to his hometown and seeing that the camp where he used to work isn’t there anymore. “I feel a little sentimental shame,” he sings.
Haggard’s most famous record—or infamous, in some circles—is “Okie from Muskogee,” the Silent Majority’s great culture-war anthem of 1968. At the time, people took it as a song for hardhats who hated hippies: Spiro Agnew mashed up with the Grand Ol’ Opry. Years later, it became common to claim the tune was intended as a joke. When a man who smokes pot starts a song with the words “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee,” you have to wonder whether he was speaking for himself. And Haggard undeniably smoked pot. “Son,” he told one interviewer, “Muskogee’s just about the only place I don’t smoke it.”
Haggard himself was always cagey about what he meant by the song, and the answers he gave to interviewers weren’t always consistent with one another. But the best way to understand the record, I’ve long thought, is to take it as a dramatic monologue. “Okie” reports how a conservative character feels about the counterculture, and whether you take his views as inspiring or hilarious is up to you. The fact that it can work either way is a tribute to Haggard’s skills.
It could be hard to get a bead on Haggard’s politics. After “Okie from Muskogee” was a smash hit, Haggard wanted his next single to be “Irma Jackson,” an anti-racist story about interracial love. His label rejected the idea—indeed, it refused to release the song at all for several years—and his follow-up instead was “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” a ditty about wanting to beat up anti-American protesters. That one could’ve been the soundtrack to the Hard Hat Riot of 1970, when rampaging construction workers in New York attacked hippies and demanded that City Hall raise the American flag. (Though even here, the politics aren’t as simple as you might assume: The singer stresses that “I don’t mind them switching sides and standing up for things that they believe in” before explaining that it’s “when they’re running down our country” that “they’re walking on the fighting side of me.”)
Haggard’s politics got only more unpredictable as he grew older. By the late ’90s he was spouting militia-style conspiracy theories and calling for the legalization of weed. In the Bush years he took to denouncing the president as one of “the top three assholes of all time” (along with Nixon and Hitler) and harshly criticizing the Iraq war. (“Why don’t we liberate these United States?/We’re the ones who need it the worst,” he sang in 2005. The track was called “America First.”) In 2008, he wrote a number endorsing Hillary Clinton for president—not one of his most accomplished compositions, though I can’t admiring his ability to fit the line “What we need’s a big switch of genders” into a country song. Or maybe I should say he seemed to endorse Hillary: Not long after he wrote it, he went on the Bill Maher show and defied common sense by denying that the song—which builds to the line “let’s put a woman in charge”—had been an endorsement. (“I simply wrote a song that said she would be the best buy,” he grinned, prompting Maher to comment that Haggard was “parsing it closer than Bill.”) Haggard was large. He contained multitudes.
And so did his catalog. It’s not just that he wrote so many wonderful hits, from “Mama Tried” to “Silver Wings” to “Big City.” Even his obscure compositions could be gems, from the delicate, Blackbirdesque beauty of “The Day the Rains Came” to the blunt paranoia of “Lonesome Day.” He was a master interpreter of other people’s words too: It was Hank Cochran and Red Lane who wrote “I’ll Be a Hero When I Strike,” a haunting portrait of an assassin, but the skittish, apprehensive delivery here is all Haggard:
With so many brilliant entries in the Haggard songbook, I’m not sure I could pick a single favorite. But if I had to choose one, it would probably be “Sing Me Back Home,” a superficially simple account of a prisoner singing one last song to another convict before the latter is led to the execution chamber. There are no inspired metaphors or bursts of clever wordplay here, but the song feels infinitely complex; we hear a memory within another memory, and somehow, in the spaces between the chorus and the song’s two verses, we feel the weight of a man’s entire life. If it isn’t Haggard’s best song, it’s surely the one with which to mourn him:
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Yesterday, in the latest plot twist surrounding the inevitable Puerto Rico default, we observed that after the commonwealth island’s Senate passed a surprising bill to impose a debt moratorium on any future debt repayment, its bonds – predictably – tumbled.
We also noted that the legislation addressed the Government Development Bank, or GDB, which is facing speculation that it’ll lapse into insolvency. The bank’s receivership process, liquidity and reserve requirements and payment obligations would be suspended indefinitely, according to an analyst’s read of the bill, which also seeks to split the entity into a “good bank” and “bad bank.”
Hedge funds holding debt in the GDB sued on Monday to stop the bank from returning deposits to local government agencies as it faces a growing cash shortage. The funds, which include affiliates of Brigade Capital Management, Claren Road Asset Management and Solus Alternative Asset Management, accused the bank of seeking to “prop up” local agencies at the expense of other creditors. The GDB has a $422 million debt-service payment due May 1.
The Government Development Bank serves the dual purpose of providing financial support to local governments and acting as a financial adviser to the commonwealth. The funds, which say they hold a “substantial amount” of almost $3.75 billion in the bank’s outstanding debt, blamed the entity’s deteriorating condition on a “hopeless conflict” between loyalties to Puerto Rico and to creditors.
Fast forward to today, when Puerto Rico Governor Alejandro García Padilla signed a measure into law Wednesday that would enable him to declare a moratorium on the commonwealth’s debt payments, mere hours after it cleared the Legislature amid concerns of securing enough support in the lower chamber and a full-court press by creditor lobbyists demanding changes to the bill.
What was more troubling is that in a move similar to what we have seen in Greece, only this time a voluntary one on behalf of the island and not its vassal owners (as happened with Greece), the newly signed Puerto Rico Emergency Moratorium & Financial Rehabilitation Act also empowers the governor to order the financially battered Government Development Bank (GDB) to restrict the outflow of cash in a bid to stabilize its dwindling liquidity levels, which stood at roughly $560 million as of April 1, according to the bill.
In other words, capital controls.
This, incidentally, confirms what we said yesterday, when we concluded that “the situation is getting messier by the day with a compromise deal now seemingly impossible – absent a US government bailout – and meanwhile Puerto Rico’s money is running out, which will ultimately be the decisive catalyst that leads to the next step in the crisis.“
That moment may have just arrived.
As Caribbean Business writes, García Padilla plans to sign an executive order to this effect immediately following the enactment of the moratorium legislation, sources said.
Several sources told Caribbean Business the urgency to enact the bill stems from concerns that municipalities and other public entities will request the withdrawal of funds each entity holds in the bank, which would further jeopardize the GDB’s operations.
Acting under the Puerto Rico Constitution’s police powers, the law allows the governor to declare a moratorium on the commonwealth’s entire debt, as well as a stay against any litigation that may result. The measure amends, or “modernizes,” the receivership process of not only the GDB, but also of the Economic Development Bank. If the GDB is placed under the new receivership process, a temporary “bridge” bank could be created to carry out some of the GDB’s functions and honor deposits.
The law also creates a new entity, called the Puerto Rico Fiscal Agency & Financial Authority, that essentially takes over the GDB’s roles as the island’s fiscal agent and financial adviser. The entity’s board consists of only one member, and in addition to its fiscal agent duties, will take charge of the commonwealth’s debt-restructuring efforts.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1TCJNhm Tyler Durden