03 Economy – Page 226 – Public Intelligence Blog

Dylan Ratigan

Anchor of MSNB

Oct. 15, 2009, 5:22 PM

Now this method of “business” is only possible if the government continues to allow these crooked insurance contracts to be written in secret, allows them to hold little or no money in reserve for payment and allows them to sell enough coverage on enough vital national assets that if there is a default — the taxpayer has no choice but to pay.

Needless to say, J.P. Morgan & Co. has never had more revenue and the Goldman Sachs bonus pool has never been bigger.

Considering the $23.7 trillion of taxpayer money being used to support these Corporate Communists one would hope they could at least make a few billion in profits with it. In context, making a few billion risking a few trillion is a rather pathetic return after all.

As we talked about last week – allowing these outdated banks to take control of our government and change the rules so they are protected from the natural competition and reward systems that have created so many innovations in our country, you not only steal from the citizens on behalf of the least worthy but you also doom them by trapping the capital that would have been used to generate new innovation and, most tangibly in our current situation, jobs.

2009/10/142009/10/14

Journal: 100 years of Big Content fearing technology—in its own words

03 Economy, 04 Education, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process

For the last hundred years, rightsholders have fretted about everything from the player piano to the VCR to digital TV to Napster. Here are those objections, in Big Content's own words.

By Nate Anderson | Last updated October 11, 2009 10:00 PM CT

It's almost a truism in the tech world that copyright owners reflexively oppose new inventions that do (or might) disrupt existing business models. But how many techies actually know what rightsholders have said and written for the last hundred years on the subject?

Continue reading “Journal: 100 years of Big Content fearing technology—in its own words”

2009/10/06

Journal: Klepto-Capitalism (Legalized Looting)

03 Economy, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics, Government

Chuck Spinney weighs in today on the manner in which the US citizen is being looted–right now, as this is written–by private equity firms (Allen & Co comes to mind, home to Bill Bradley and George Tenet), and point us to an article in Naked Capitalism worthy of review.

There has been a convergence of inattentive and under-informed citizens (including employees ill-served by labor unions that have themselves sold out); managers lacking in integrity and all too willing to serve as intermediaries in the destruction of public equity in favor of private equity; and of course Wall Street, which bought Congress, owns the Federal Reserve, and has crafted modern legalized looting or “klepto-capitalism.”

Monday, October 5, 2009

Quelle Surprise! New York Times Fails to Call Private Equity Looting by Its Proper Name

The New York Times tonight features a generally very good piece, “Buyout Firms Profited as a Company’s Debt Soared,” by Julie Creswell that falls short in one important respect: it fails to call a prevalent and destructive practice of private equity firms by its proper name.

2009/10/062009/10/06

Journal: The Demise of the Dollar

03 Economy, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics, Government

The demise of the dollar

In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading

By Robert Fisk

Tuesday, 6 October 2009

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Phi Beta Iota: This is what happens when citizens abdicate their role as sovereigns over Congress, and allow Congress to sell out to Wall Street and the Federal Reserve (which is neither Federal nor a Reserve, just a front for Wall Street).

2009/09/192009/09/19

Journal: Regulating Wall Street: Idiocy on Top of Illusion

03 Economy, Commerce, Ethics, True Cost

Full Story Online

A Las Vegas Illusion

Roger Martin is Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the
University of Toronto

Pre-order his forthcoming book

In response to the question: What does Wall Street have to change to produce better leaders, a different culture and a more long-term focus?

Forget about it. Don't even waste time thinking about it. The purpose
of Wall Street firms is to trade value for their own benefit not to
build value for the economy either short-term or long-term. While at
one point in its history, a non-trivial part of Wall Street's activity
involved financing the growth of American companies, that is now a
minor piece of its business. Wall Street is primarily engaged in
encouraging individuals and companies to trade value between one
another and tolling the parties for the service, and trading against
the outside economy for its own account.

Phi Beta Iota: This author not only gets it, he provides a solution. Wall Street, and the Fed, need to be creatively destroyed, and we need to restore bottom-up Human Scale locality-based business. Government “regulation” of financial crime is idiocy on top of illusion.

2009/09/062009/09/06

Worth a Look: The Infrastructurist

03 Economy, 07 Health, Worth A Look

Here is the bit that got our attention:

What’s the financial argument? You reap $7 dollars in economic rewards for every dollar you spend in basic sanitation. That makes it a really, really good investment. In the developing world, it may cost a couple hundred dollars to install a decent latrine, but think of what you save in terms of health costs and what you would otherwise lose when your workers are off with dysentery or whatever. And in developed world we’re learning that if you don’t continue investing in infrastructure you just going to pay a lot more later. It’s that simple.

We have added this site to the Righteous Site blogroll. There are gems–and humor, throughout–that reflect a remarkable public intelligence in relation to national infrastructure.

What is clear is that “the numbers” that are presented to the public for any given public works project are those that favor the decision that has already been made, one based on corporate numbers that seek to spend public funds to create capabilities that extract profit from the public at public expense.

Public intelligence is how we get government back into the business of sserving the public rather than serving as the wealth transfer mechanism from individual taxation to corporate profiteering.

2009/08/312009/08/31

Journal: True Cost of Hybrids, Dumb Government

03 Economy, 05 Energy, Commerce, Earth Intelligence, Government, True Cost Meme

Steve Gorman

Sun Aug 30, 2009

As hybrid cars gobble rare metals, shortage looms

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The Prius hybrid automobile is popular for its fuel efficiency, but its electric motor and battery guzzle rare earth metals, a little-known class of elements found in a wide range of gadgets and consumer goods. . . . . . . .Worldwide demand for rare earths, covering 15 entries on the periodic table of elements, is expected to exceed supply by some 40,000 tonnes annually in several years unless major new production sources are developed.

Phi Beta Iota: The peresistent refusal of the White House and Congress in particular, all governments in general, to create strategic centers that can provide unclassified decision-support in the context of a strategic analytic model that embraces “true cost” accounting and “cross-policy cost harmonization” means that the USA in particular, and all governments generally, are “dumb” and are therefore in automatic betrayal of the public trust. Current references: Intelligence for Everyone; Fixing the White House; Human Intelligence; The Ultimate Hack.

Category: 03 Economy

Journal: Goldman Sachs Is Robbing Us Blind