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How Racist Is Your State’s War on Weed? Compare!

A new interactive website from
the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) highlights how many lives
are derailed and billions of dollars wasted fighting a racially
biased war on drugs in America.

The site, called The
Uncovery, offers state-by-state statistics on U.S. marijuana
arrests, emphasizing racial disparities and the cost of enforcing
drug laws.

The stats are based on data from the
ACLU’s “War on Marijuana” report. For the U.S. overall, someone
is arrested for marijuana every 0.01 hours and this person is 3.73
times more likely to be black than white. The site notes that the
U.S. spent more than $3.6 billion enforcing marijuana laws in 2010
and that 88 percent of marijuana arrests are for possession (in New
York and Texas, that figure is 97 percent). The Uncovery also
breaks down marijuana arrest and spending stats by state. Let’s
take a look.

The 10 states spending the most on marijuana law
enforcement:

1. New York: $678,450,560
2. California: $490,966,080
3. Texas: $251,648,800
4. Florida: $228,635,840
5. Illinois: $221,431,776
6. New Jersey: $127,342,512
7. Georgia: $121,898,152
8. Ohio: $120,148,064
9. Maryland: $106,702,784
10. Pennsylvania: $100,748,528

Staggering, no? And the disparities in black-to-white arrest
ratios are equally horrifying.

The 10 worst states for racially biased marijuana
arrests:

In ___, a black person is ___
times more likely to be arrested than a white
person for having marijuana.

1. Iowa – 8.33
2. D.C. – 8.05
3. Minnesota – 7.81
4. Illinois – 7.56
5. Wisconsin – 5.98
6. Kentucky – 5.95
7. Pennsylvania – 5.19
8. South Dakota – 4.78
9. Nebraska – 4.65
10. New York – 4.52

States with the smallest racial disparities in marijuana arrests
were Hawaii (where blacks were only 0.99 times as likely as whites
to be arrested for marijuana), Alaska (1.6 times more likely), New
Mexico (1.86), Oregon (2.08), and Maine (2.13). All five of these
states have very small African American populations
overall.

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The Changing Face Of The Low-Wage Worker In America

Climbing above the poverty line has become more daunting in recent years. NY Times reports that the composition of the nation’s low-wage work force has been transformed by the Great Recession, shifting demographics and other factors.

Via NYTimes,

More than half of those who make $9 or less an hour are 25 or older, while the proportion who are teenagers has declined to just 17 percent from 28 percent in 2000, after adjusting for inflation, according to Janelle Jones and John Schmitt of the Center for Economic Policy Research.

Today’s low-wage workers are also more educated, with 41 percent having at least some college, up from 29 percent in 2000. “Minimum-wage and low-wage workers are older and more educated than 10 or 20 years ago, yet they’re making wages below where they were 10 or 20 years ago after inflation,” said Mr. Schmitt, senior economist at the research center.

"If you look back several decades, workers near the minimum wage were more likely to be teenagers — that’s the stereotype people had. It’s definitely not accurate anymore.”

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1eS9aU1 Tyler Durden

How Corporations Are Masking Inflation… Without the CPI Moving

Since 2007, the world’s Central Banks have collectively put more than $10 trillion into the financial system since 2008. To put that number into perspective, it’s equal to roughly 15% of global GDP.

This kind of money printing is literally unheard of in modern history. And it has set the stage for a roaring wave of inflation to hit the financial system. Indeed, the first signs are already showing up… not in the “official” Government data (which is bogus) but in how those who run businesses around the globe are acting.

Most people believe that when inflation hits, prices have to go higher. This is true, but higher prices can be manifested in multiple ways. Firms usually do not simply raise prices in nominal terms as price elasticity can kill revenues because it would hurt sales.

Instead, companies resort to a number of strategies to maintain profit margins without hurting their sales. One of them is to simply leave part of a package EMPTY, thereby selling LESS product for the SAME price (a hidden price hike).

Food manufacturers, like the politicians currently debating health reform, may have a solution to the obesity crisis: Feed Americans a lot of hot air. But this heated air is not just a figure of speech for packaged goods companies including Ralcorp Holdings' (RAH) Post Foods and PepsiCo (PEP) subsidiaries Frito-Lay and Quaker.

In many packaged products, as much as 50% of the contents is just empty space, an investigation by Consumer Reports reveals. And we consumers are buying that nothingness every day.

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Another tactic corporation use is to simply sell smaller packages for the SAME price (another means of selling less for MORE= a price hike).

U.S. Companies Shrink Packages as Food Prices Rise

Large food companies have recently announced that they will raise the prices they charge grocery retailers for commodities-based products. For example, a chocolate bar will cost more soon: Hershey last week announced a 10% increase for most of its confectionery goods.

Of course, straightforward price hikes could cause consumers to buy less of those products or to choose less costly store brands. So in many cases, food companies are trying a different tactic: Keeping the price of an item the same while decreasing the amount of food in the package. The company recoups the costs of the rise in commodities and hopes consumers don't notice that they're getting less of the product for the same price.

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However, perhaps the most scandalous policy employed by companies looking to engage in stealth price hikes is to swap out higher quality ingredients for lower quality/ lower cost alternatives. One bigname coffee maker was caught doing this just a few years ago.

Reuters is reporting that many of America's major brands have been quietly tweaking their coffee blends. While most coffee companies consider their blends trade secrets, and are loath to disclose exactly what goes into them, both circumstantial and direct evidence suggests they're now substituting lower-grade Robusta beans for some of their pricier Arabica, and degrading the quality of our coffee…

At least one coffee roaster has admitted it. In November, Massimo Zanetti USA, which roasts for both Chock full o'Nuts and Hills Bros., publicly confirmed upping its Robusta usage by 25% this year.

Why the switcheroo? Prepare to not be shocked. The answer is: price.

Last year, a shortage of Arabica caused prices of the premium bean to spike as high as $3 a pound — $2 more than what a pound of Robusta would cost. This compares to a five-year historical trend of Arabica costing closer to 70 cents more than Robusta. In recent weeks, the trend has reversed, with Arabica prices falling to just a 62-cent premium over Robusta.

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In simple terms, inflation is already around us, though it’s not yet showing up in LITERAL price hikes. Instead, we’re all paying MORE for LESS. And this won’t show up in the official numbers for some time.

For a FREE Special Report on how to protect your portfolio from inflation, swing by

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Best Regards

Phoenix Capital Research

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Crimea Wastes No Time – Mints New Coinage Already

With the ink still wet on the referendum vote slips and the Duma’s agreement to accept Crimea into Mother Russia, the Crimean Mint (since we pre-suppose there is one) has wasted no time in creating the new coinage for the nation. As Crimea transitions quickly to the Russian Ruble, they have created their own “Crimea-styled” currency… perhaps to be named the ‘cruble’?

h/t @abunin

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John Stossel Says Spring Clean Government

Spring cleaning is a healthy tradition. If only
politicians did it! The clutter of complex laws and ridiculous
regulations gets worse every day. We could move about so much more
freely if our lives weren’t buried in government’s junk!

It’s time we give government that overdue cleaning, says John
Stossel, who suggests the best way to clean house would be to pass
“the Stossel Rule.” It’s simple: For every new regulation
bureaucrats pass, they must repeal five old ones.

View this article.

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Democrats’ Empty Obamacare Fix-It Strategy

Democrats can’t run on Obamacare. And they can’t
run on repealing it. So they’ve settled on a middle ground—keep
Obamacare, but fix it!

The problem is that most of the Democrats running on fixing
Obamacare have little if anything to say about how they would fix
it. And the few tweaks they have proposed wouldn’t fundamentally
change the law, or what people dislike about it. It’s a sort of
turnabout for Democrats who have long complained about the GOP’s
shallow health policy.

You can see how well the fix-it strategy worked for Florida
congressional candidate Alex Sink, who, despite better funding,
name recognition, and an early lead, lost to a trouble-plagued
Republican campaign by lobbyist David Jolly. The race was
about more than Obamacare, but Jolly hit Sink with ads bashing her
for supporting the health law, and Sink, who wasn’t in Congress
when the law passed, responded by distancing herself from President
Obama’s implementation and promising to fix what
was broken about the law. How? That was never quite clear.

Embattled Democratic senator Mary Landrieu, who is facing an

extremely tough race in Louisiana, is taking a
similar approach with her ad campaign. Landrieu at least has a
fix in mind—a bill she sponsored to let people with cancelled
individual insurance coverage keep their plans. But it’s basically
been made moot by President Obama’s
administrative tweaks to the same effect. And it wouldn’t solve
the law’s more enduring political problems; opposition to Obamacare
predates last year’s wave of plan cancellations.

Even if Democrats wanted to go further, what could they do? As
the Washington Examiner’s Byron York
argued recently, the more meaningful the changes, the more
those changes undermine the law. This is a problem that is already
plaguing the administration, which has attempted to
salvage the law’s short-term political prospects in ways that
are likely to undermine its policy mechanisms—and thus, eventually,
create longer term political headaches. Indeed, the
administration’s run of tweaks suggests the limits of the fix-it
strategy: Despite a series of highly political alterations to the
law, approval remains shaky.

The faux fix-it campaign turns the tables on Democrats, who have
(not entirely unreasonably) made much out of the GOP’s lack of
alternative health policy solutions. Now it is Democrats who have
no meaningful alternative to their own unpopular law. They are
hoping that since some polls show more of the public would rather
fix the law than repeal it, this will pay off. But in some ways
that puts Democrats in a worse place than their opponents. The
public may not be happy with the Republican Party’s unwillingness
to propose a replacement, but at least there’s the possibility that
one will emerge, and be acceptable, at some point in the future.
The public knows full well what Democrats support, however, and
they have been consistently clear that they do not like it.

Fundamentally, what Democrats are hoping is that opposition to
Obamacare is only surface-level fixation. But years of steady
opposition, and rough poll numbers following the rollout of what
were supposed to be the law’s biggest and more crowd-pleasing
benefits, make that a tough proposition to support. Despite endless
predictions that a shift was right around the corner—just as soon
as the public found out about the law’s benefits—public disapproval
of the health law has remained strong.

Partisans are now advising Democrats to more fully embrace
Obamacare, in hopes that a more aggressive strategy will work where
the timid fix-it dance has failed. But that only shows how few
options the party has with regard to the law, for it amounts to
little more than the continued hope that public opinion on the law
will flip, and that what is now a liability for Democrats in tight
races will somehow become a help. Embracing Obamacare would require
Democrats to talk about Obamacare, but years of
unsuccessful messaging reboots have proven that they have no
idea how to do that in a way that moves people to like it.

The fix-it line is not a meaningful campaign to fix the health
law, it’s a messaging strategy designed to help struggling
Democrats defend themselves in the face of an unpopular law. But
Obamacare’s problems are not a messaging problems. They are policy
problem. And despite their desperate insistence that the law can be
fixed, if you only give them one more shot, Democrats have no real
policy fixes to offer.

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What a surprise– it turns out they lied about the deficit last year

March 19, 2014
Santiago, Chile

Truth can be a damn difficult thing to digest sometimes.

Some of us have been there. You get that news from the doctor that you, or a loved one, has just been diagnosed with a serious disease, and it hits you like a ton of bricks.

Several years ago my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor known as a Glioblastoma (GBM). A GBM diagnosis is essentially a death sentence– it’s one of the most aggressive tumors in existence, and it grows in the part of the body that modern medicine understands the least.

I clearly remember the neurosurgeon telling us, “There have been some miraculous advances in medicine over the last 20-years related to the treatment of cancerous tumors. Unfortunately, this tumor is not one of them.”

It was a tough pill for everyone to swallow… especially my father.

Our natural defense mechanism as human beings is to deny reality. These sorts of things happen to other people, not to us.

It’s this same defense mechanism that leads people to ignore the obvious fiscal realities of their home country despite overwhelming objective evidence.

After all, debt-fueled collapse happens to other countries. Not to us.

We go our entire lives being told that our country is different. We’re special.

We have televised ‘experts’ going on TV explaining why our debts and deficits don’t matter. And Nobel Prize-winning pseduoscientists complaining that our debts and deficits aren’t big enough.

But deep down you know the truth.

In the Land of the Free, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released its 2013 Financial Report of the United States government.

This is the government’s best attempt at an honest accounting of its books. And even though they use a different accounting system that gives them special advantages, the picture is still remarkably bleak.

We all know that the US government has racked up a substantial debt; as of this morning, total outstanding public debt is $17,546,814,482,078.90. ($17.5 trillion)

But it’s not all about the debt. Debt is not necessarily evil… and it’s important to look at the situation qualitatively in addition to quantitatively.

Let’s drop a few zeros and consider this in terms of personal finance.

Assume you had $1.75 million in total debt. That sounds like a lot to most people.

But if you had $3 million in liquid assets to offset the debt, plus $500,000 in annual income to pay interest, living expenses, and just about any contingency that could come your way, you’d be in great shape.

It would be even better if that $1.75 million in debt financed a lucrative real estate investment which was generating a 25% cash-on-cash return for you.

But that’s not the case for the US government.

Despite the Obama administration touting a budget deficit of “only” $680 billion in 2013, the GAO’s more accurate accounting shows a total government cost of $3.8 trillion on total revenue of $2.8 trillion.

In other words– the administration wasn’t exactly honest with the American people– the deficit was more like $1 trillion, not $680 billion. But it gets worse.

The GAO added up ALL the US government’s assets in 2013. Aircraft carriers. The highway system. Land. Cash and financial assets. The total is $2.97 trillion.

The liabilities, on the other hand, total $19.88 trillion. This includes the official public debt, plus all sorts of IOUs and loan guarantees.

This means the net EQUITY of the US government is minus $16.9 trillion.

Moreover, the US government’s cash position is a mere $206 billion… roughly 1.1% of its public debt. This isn’t enough to cover net interest payments for the next year.

Unlike a savvy investor who borrows cheap money to purchase productive assets, the US government borrows money to pay interest.

Quantitatively AND qualitatively, the data point to an inevitable conclusion: despite all the propaganda, this is NOT a risk free environment.

And understanding these trends and consequences is absolutely critical to your long-term financial survival.

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China’s Housing Problem In One Chart

The one problem with every Ponzi scheme is that it must constantly grow, in both demand and supply terms, for the mass delusion to continue. The other problem, of course, is that every Ponzi scheme always comes to an end…. which may have just happened in China where as the chart below shows, as of this moment at least, the supply side to the Chinese housing ponzi (and recall that in China the bubble is not in the stock market like in the US, but in housing) has slammed shut.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1hBiTAg Tyler Durden

Chris Christie Worried About “Profit Motive” of Medical Marijuana Dispensaries

let him guvsplain it to you At a town hall in South River, New Jersey,
yesterday, Gov. Chris Christie (R) was asked by a
mother about the the lack of availability of edible medical
marijuana for her child. “The medical marijuana program that exists
in New Jersey right now isn’t really helpful,” the mother told
Christie, blaming a lack of communication on the program not
working the way it should. Christie finally
signed a law last summer permitting edible medical
marijuana only after spending several months
mulling it over and then
conditionally vetoing it.

In the course of a long and winding answer, Christie indirectly
addressed the
recent bill submitted in the state legislature to legalize
possession of marijuana of up to an ounce. While insisting he was
willing to make changes to the state medical marijuana law, he
said:

“What I’m not willing to do is legalize it or permit
recreational use or things that will lead to that, and so that’s
the line that I’ve drawn in the sand that I’m not willing to
do.”

As for the supply of edible medical marijuana not meeting the
demand, it’s largely due to the regulatory burdens imposed by the
state. But Christie doesn’t see it that way:

“Part of the problem with this is what I originally proposed
with the medical marijuana program…was that it be a hospital-based
program, that way the profit motive is drained out a lot from
it.”

Christie said the Democrat-controlled legislature wasn’t
interested in his idea. “What I want in this state is a
medically-based program,” the governor told the town hall. “If
we’re going to have a medical marijuana program, that’s what it
should be.” He noted places like Colorado and California—where
medical marijuana programs have been increasingly broadened—and
said he didn’t want to go there.

h/t Stephanie on
Twitter

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Netanyahu Orders Israel Army To Prepare For Possible Military Strike Against Iran In 2014

Back in 2013 it was Syria where the world was gearing for imminent military action after a relentless series of false flag provocations by the United States (intent on securing a Qatar gas pipeline to Europe) which in the last minute was deftly diffused by Vladimir Putin. In 2014, it was the Ukraine’s turn, and after a prolonged campaign orchestrated by Victoria Nuland and the US State Department (again) which succeeded in the now traditional violent coup (see Egypt and Libya), once again saw Putin victorious, after yesterday’s annexation of the all important Crimean peninsula, achieved without the firing of one shot. So now that Putin has succeeded in trouncing the US twice in a row, it is time to poke some old, well-known geopolitical wounds, such as Iran. And who better to do it than Israel, where as Haaretz reports, “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon have ordered the army to continue preparing for a possible military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities at a cost of at least 10 billion shekels ($2.89 billion) this year, despite the talks between Iran and the West, according to recent statements by senior military officers.”

To be sure there is a tangible benefit for all those involved: moar war means more military spending means more “broken windows” means more “GDP.”

Three Knesset members who were present at Knesset joint committee hearings on Israel Defense Forces plans that were held in January and February say they learned during the hearings that 10 billion shekels to 12 billion shekels of the defense budget would be allocated this year for preparations for a strike on Iran, approximately the same amount that was allocated in 2013.

Yet unlike the US where warmongering has become an art, if not a science, in Israel these things are taken far more seriously:

The IDF representatives said the army had received a clear directive from government officials from the political echelon – meaning Netanyahu and Ya’alon – to continue readying for a possible independent strike by Israel on the Iranian nuclear sites, regardless of the talks now happening between Iran and the West, the three MKs said.

As for the diplomatic cover for a potential attack, it is well-known, and the same one used for the past 3 years – attack Iran before it can nuke Israel and obliterate it from the face of the earth.

Ever since the interim accord between Iran and the six powers was reached, Netanyahu has stressed that Israel will not consider itself bound by it. In the last few weeks, as talks on a permanent accord have resumed, Netanyahu has upped his rhetoric on the Iranian issue, and is again making implied threats about a possible unilateral Israeli strike on the Iranian nuclear sites.

“My friends, I believe that letting Iran enrich uranium would open up the floodgates,” Netanyahu said at the AIPAC conference earlier this month. “That must not happen. And we will make sure it does not happen.”

Ironically, this time Israel may see pushback from none other than the US itself, which mysteriously over the past 6 months has transformed itself from Iran’s most hated enemy to a willing partner who sees Iran as nothing short of a frontier market (not to mention source of natural resources).

However, the US too realizes that it needs “military outs” with Ukraine seemingly diffused for the time being. Which is why yesterday, a few hours after Russia peacefully annexed Crimea, the US made its feeble response known, when it suspended operations of the Syrian Embassy in Washington and its consulates and told diplomats and staff who are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents to leave the country. The justification of this oddly timed move came from the U.S. special envoy for Syria Daniel Rubinstein who said that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had refused to step down and was responsible for atrocities against Syrians.

And this was news to the US? More from Reuters:

“We have determined it is unacceptable for individuals appointed by that regime to conduct diplomatic or consular operations in the United States,” said Rubinstein, whose appointment was announced by the State Department on Monday.

“Consequently, the United States notified the Syrian government today that it must immediately suspend operations of its embassy in Washington, D.C., and its honorary consulates in Troy, Michigan, and Houston, Texas,” he said in a statement.

In other words, the US tried to impose its “moral superiority” codex on yet another country, which for all intents and purposes was a proxy of Russian strength in the middle east, i.e., punish the Kremlin by kicking out Syria. Surely Putin was in tears.

The only problem is that it is now beyond obvious to virtually everyone in the world that the framework of Pax Americana is only applicable to the increasingly self-deluded United States, and of course the Group of 7 most insolvent nations, whose debt ponzi schemes are ever more reliant on a centrally planned regime of low interest rates and free money. For everyone else it is now just as obvious that when provoked, the best the US can do is simply impose some sanctions, and shut down embassies… while it prints trillions of dollars in “paper wealth” each year of course.

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