financial

Financial Predators And Parasites Want To Live, Regardless Of The Cost

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financialCharles Hugh Smith – The problem with optimizing private gain by any means available is you also optimize financial predators and parasites. The problem with optimizing a system for centralized power (i.e. the federal government and Federal Reserve) is that you also optimize regulatory capture, influence-peddling and the unholy marriage of wealth and power.

Optimization is a key principle of all technologies. Though the political class claims perfection is possible (with just a few more regulations and laws, heh), engineers understand every system is a series of trade-offs. If you want to optimize one output, everything else in the system is rendered secondary.

The master narrative of the status quo is that maximizing private gain by any means available is good because to get rich is glorious: the goal of getting rich motivates entrepreneurs to do wonderful things that benefit humanity while they amass vast fortunes.

This is the happy propaganda story, and we all know the few outliers who are endlessly trotted out to “prove” its truth: Steve Jobs, the Larrys (Ellison and Page) Bill Gates, et al. Nice, but the handful who fulfill the propaganda version of optimizing private gain by any means available only succeeded because there were no powerful vested interests in their way.

What our system actually optimizes is the assembly of vested interests that buy protection of their racket from the state. These vested interests include wealthy individuals, corporations, cartels and public unions.

Want to earn a 1,000% return on your investment? It’s very difficult to do so by producing a good or service. By any measure, the easiest, lowest-risk way to earn a 1,000% return on your investment is to buy political protection with lobbying and campaign contributions. Continue reading →

Court Upholds $50 Million Award For Girl Whose Life Was Destroyed By Johnson & Johnson’s Children’s Motrin

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JohnsonDavid Gutierrez – The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld a lower court’s judgment that pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson should be required to pay $50 million to a girl who suffered a rare but devastating side effect from Children’s Motrin when she was seven years old. The judgment took more than a decade to be reached.

Samantha Reckis experienced toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN), which burned off 90 percent of her skin, destroyed 80 percent of her lung capacity and left her blind. Only luck and the efforts of her doctors prevented her from dying or suffering permanent brain damage.

Johnson & Johnson will also be required to pay $6.5 million to each of Reckis’ parents. On top of that, the company will owe interest on all three payments, bringing the total owed to more than $109 million.

Widespread organ failure

TEN is a severe form of Stevens-Johnson syndrome, which occurs most commonly as a side effect of drugs including nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs, which includes ibuprofen/Motrin), penicillin, anticonvulsants and anti-gout drugs.

Reckis’s case was triggered in 2003, when her father gave her two doses of Children’s Motrin for a fever and sinus congestion. The next morning, her symptoms were no better, and she had also developed a rash and a sore throat. Her father gave her more Motrin and took her to a pediatrician, who told her parents to give her the drug three times per day. Continue reading →

China: The Key To The New World Order [Audio]

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worldInvestigative Journalist James Corbett of the Corbett Report joins me with some very bad news about the New World Order. James says that despite the formation of the BRICS Banks, the Shanghai Gold Exchange and the new Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the International Banker’s plans to usher in their New World Order remain firmly in place and on track. How could that be when the evidence suggest that the world is moving away from the Dollar as wealth moves from West to East? Because, James says, “At the very top of this Bankster pyramid, the Chinese elite is connected directly in with the U.S. Western elite.”

[youtube=https://youtu.be/tLlDVpPhROU]

James has carefully documented the “8 Immortal Families” in his report on China and the New World Order which shows how the 8 Immortals are totally connected to Henry Kissinger and the Rockefeller-Rothschikld banking elite. This is the way they will lead us into a New WORLD Order. Continue reading →

Silver Jumps…Is A Reverse Of JP Morgan’s “Operation Silver Slam” Coming?

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Bix Weir – The action in the price of silver on April 27th was very predictable. Ted Butler has pointed to the very favorable change in the Commitment of Trader reports from the COMEX showing that the commercial traders (ie the riggers) have significantly covered their short positions and are ready to allow the market to move up. Yes – it’s all run off computer programs and it’s all done to both control the price and allow them to make vast amounts of money going up and going down.

silverThe big question now is: “Will the commercials, like JP Morgan, short on the way up to cap any significant silver price rises?” That alone will determine how high the price of silver will go from here and whether or not they maintain control.

I’d give it a 50/50 chance of breaking to new highs in the next few months since JP Morgan holds the lowest short position they have held in years and a massively long physical position according to Ted.

And there may be something else going on here.

On May 1, 2011 the price of silver was artificially slammed down as it approached $50/oz with more force and violence than ever witnessed in a commodity. This was on NO NEWS and left recent buyers of silver regretting their decisions. To date, four years later, the price has continued to be artificially depressed to such a degree that all positive sentiment has been extracted from silver. Continue reading →

The Old Models of Work Are Broken

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workCharles Hugh Smith – Though we are still in the early stages of web-enabled automation, it’s already evident that the old models of work are broken–though few are willing to admit it. The primary model of work is being an employee in a hierarchy–Corporate America or the state (government) or a government-funded industry (defense, higher education, R&D, Medicare, etc.)

The foundation of employee financial security is the paycheck, which is earned for 1) showing up and 2) following orders.

In the employee model, ownership is generally limited to those with stock options. Those working for start-ups that successfully go public can cash in their options for extraordinary profits; those working for start-ups that fizzle can use their expired options as bathroom wallpaper.

The conventional employee gets no ownership of their work, and this disconnect between the employee and the value created by the employee’s labor is the source of Marx’s definition of alienation: the worker is alienated from the output of his/her labor, which is owned by others.
In the new model of work, the worker has ownership of his/her work and human capital. Security in the new model flows not from dependence on an employer but on ownership of the entire process of value creation which includes the social and human capital of skills, collaboration, accountability and creativity.

I explain this process in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

As Gordon Long and I discuss in this program on the changing nature of work, in the new model Continue reading →