They are at it again !!!

Soon there will be an election in Chile, BTW this country is doing quite well, once again the “left” is running a sale, free education, high minmmum wage, welfare system, and the usual “vote buying” strategies, what is really dissapointing is that the “right” is talking about a “fair” society. In the US war has not stopped, in Europe nothing has been fixed, in fact, Europeans are worse off than the inhabitants of some emerging economies. Both sides say that the other has failed, the “left” saya that the free market has failed, the “Right” says Socialsm has failed, So, would you like a diagnosis ? It seems democracy has failed.

So, here’s the result

After WW2, two ways to run things remained, the left and the right, (not Cuba and Bahamas left and right), a more subtle difference, more like Canada and the US, while Europe became a little more socialist (and I don`t mean this in a bad way), some emerging economies were almost forced into not doing so. so the spaniards, french, and socialists around the world complained that workers worked too much, had no rights, had no benefits, and started funding parties in these coutries to give hem the benefit of a “developed” society. Today, european countries (which what they actually had was a lot of credit) are broke, and what is their solution ?

Spanish government workers are getting stripped of their rights, their benefits, they have health cuts, free days taken from them, their working hours are now longer, and their retirement is postponed, all over Europe, working conditions are becoming worse than in underdeveloped countires, immigrants are leaving, and citizens too.

Now, when a parent is irresponsible with family finances (gives everybody in the family what they want just to be liked) there comes a time when bills and loans must be paid, then you see that (as our parents and grandparents told us), our responsible neighbors are better off than us, they saved to be better off in the future, they did not buy unnecessary stuff and did not get in debt, therefore today they are buying our house at auction.

Well, the only reason you do not see rafts leaving Miami headed to Cuba is because Cuba is an economic  s***hole and no matter how bad things get nobody would like to go there. So, If you have a father or grandfather in a nursing home, or he’s retired to Florida, make it a point to go visit soon, ask them about life, how is it they actually left you money or a house to sell, then compare the way you live with the way they lived theirs, it will surprise you to find out that you will get another “I told you so, but you wouldn`t listen”,

Your parents kept a car for 10 years not because they are old, but because they knew they couldn’t afford one, just like you can`t (even if a bank is willing to lend you the money to buy one), and rest assured your grandparents and parents had better credit than you do. And sadly this applies to governments also, it’s time to pay the bills, social expenditure in the case of Europe, and wars in the case of the US, and it’s not Shell or Exxon who are gong to pay for the gulf wars, it’s you, why is canada better off than the U.S. and has more social benefits ? Because they have not been at war !!!!

Shooting at someone has a cost, you have to train a soldier, send him/her there, buy him a gun, buy bullets, missiles, airplanes, food, etc. and let me tell you how empires worked: Spain invaded a place, they took all the gold and wealth back to Spain, and then  the king spent the money in Spain, therefore the economy bloomed.

Let me tell you how the U.S. works: The U.S. invades Iraq, destroys almost everything, the oil companies keep the oil, and the american people pay for the cost of the war.

Europe gives benefits to the workforce, has the US fight their wars for them, overtax the people and businesses, people and businesses go broke, they lay off the people, the government cannot pay for the benefits because they have fewer people and businesses to tax, therefore you have a lot of unemployment, the worforce loses their benefits, and the US goes broke and cannot afford to fight their wars for them.

France raised income tax to 75%, well, that didn`t do it either, the wealthy french simply left, so back to square one.

Now, the U.S. is following the european roadmap, just look at Europe today.

Here’s the result.

Fracking, a rising concern

Hello Again:

First let me point out that I am not an enviromentalist, I really don’t care much about the issue and I go through my life like a normal citizen; having said this, I want to explain myself befoe you freak out on me. I buy fuel, buy electricity as well as products and don`t concern myself about what these companies do with the environment because I have elected officials who are my representatives in congress and are supposed to take care of these things.

This is basically the way life is organized, I go to work, make money, then go buy bread, I assume my baker makes bread with clean water and raw materials which will not kill me (at least not poison me). So we have a sort of hierarchy in life, my responsibility is to send my kids to school, I assume the school does a good job, I am not a teacher, therefore I must trust the teacher does a good job, that is where my responsibiliy ends, I have elected officials who get paid part of my wages to monitor schools and teachers.

Today, I found out on the news that fracking pollutes (WAIT, actually poisons the water table) and leaks methane (100 times stronger as a greenhouse gas than CO2) into the atmosphere, well, that is not really  my problem (in fact it is, but there is nothing I can do about it). There is a group of people in government who charge me to prevent this, there is a whole bureaucratic system which, if it did it’s job, this problem wouldn`t exist.

You have an EPA, or a ministry of the environment, or wahtever this agency is called in your country who are supposed to say to these companies: You are going to do WHAT ?

The same thing with education, if you have kids, (teenagers) turn around and ask them: where is Finland, or Bolivia for that matter, if he/she can’t answer, or tell you Bolivia is a province in Mexico, you must be concerned, there are less than 300 countries, and if your kid doesn’t know where these are, he is in trouble, and of course there is a group of bureaucrats who have not been doing their jobs for the last 15 years.

So, fracking is dangerous, horribly polluting, has a higher carbon footprint than burning coal (even before burning the gas), so simply, our governments should not allow it, no matter how much these companies contribute to their campaigns, because at the end of the day, their salaries are paid by us, and please gentlemen, we woul really appreciate you did your jobs for a change.

Have a nice day

Should President Obama Buy a Dictionary ?

Well, it seems the US government is suffering of a word mixup problem,  the US has an inflated  “defense” budget, but if you keep in mind what the US does, the budget is not inflated, because it is an “attack” budget, attacking other countries and you own citizens is expensive, and covering it up is even more expensive. I don`t want to judge the most powerful country in the world, specially  because to judge, not only you need to have all the information, but also be able to process it, and since the information is too much and unfortunately classified, then us, the “common people” cannot evaluate if the actions are really necessary. I remeber after september 11, everybody was wondering why the US did not nuke Iraq, well thank God (as a figure of speech) they didn`t, because at the end of the day Iraq had nothing to do with Al Quaeda and they weren’t even there in the first place. But returning to the budget issue… A defense budget should not include preemptive strikes (those are attacks BTW), as I already said, in the twisted logic of the security agencies, these strikes may be justified, but most certainly are not defense. So, let’s buy the presidency a dictionary:

Definition of:

ATTACK – transitive verb = To set upon or work against forcefully

DEFENSE –

a : the act or action of defending <the defense of our country>
b : a defendant’s denial, answer, or plea
2
a : capability of resisting attack

If the cost of the attacks is removed from the budget, the amount will be a lot more logical, and then we just call the attacks or agressions by their name and make a separate budget for them, so the US should have a defense and an attack budget.

Have a nice day.

Rules of Investment

Hello again, I was wondering if posting this or not, for some of you this will be investment 101, fairly simple stuff, but for others it could be at least a bit instructive. Well, I decided to go ahead, so bear with me a little while.

First of all, sometimes we think of investors as Wall Street millionaires and brokers, but as Danny De Vito said once it really is “Other people’s money”. Investors place money in commodities, shares, foreign debt, private loans, government bonds, etc., now, this money comes from pension funds, savings account in banks, mutual funds, and the sort, so the fact is that you may be an investor and not even be aware of it.

My grandfather (who happened to be quite wealthy) used to say the stockmarket was a casino where you went to play with a little beter odds, he died bankrupt BTW. So, if you are looking for profit, what you essentially need is a company which is profitable, financially sound and is issuing shares to gather funds to expand, the cost for the company is selling part of itself (that is what the shares are, little bits of companies).

Now, you can also buy loans, let’s say someone bought a house for 250.000 US$, after interest and costs, the 30 year loan will add up to (let’s say) 450.000 US$, that loan may be sold in the market for 380.000 US$, you buy it and when the person pays you will have made 70.000 US$, of course, to buy the loan you have to make sure that the person can pay it, if you don’t, you will lose money.

Countries also issue debt, government guaranteed bonds, these are valued at (again let’s say) US$ 1.000 and the government will sewll them to you at 920 US$, when the bond reaches its expiration date, you can collect your 920 + your 80 US$.

Commodiites are a bet on the future price of something, as an example, gold or coper, even rice, you buy a paper worth x amount of tons and sell it when the price goes up (if it does).

Now, the problem is that we do not do this directly, there are people which do this for us, in banks, investment firms, etc. An investment firm is basically a desk and a phone, and the net worth of a bank is virtually nothing, the money they use is not theirs, It’s usually yours.

Regarding shres, a company is appraised based on it’s accounting, and accountants are really clever people, so when a company needs a loan, they can overvalue assets, and with creative accounting you can make a bankrupt company look heathy, and if the auditors are not good (or corrupt for that matter), the company may be cleared for trading and sell shares for more than the value of the company.

So in the last crisis, the people whose loans were sold could not paid them, becuae the banks lied about their financial worth, essentially they loaned money to people who could not pay specifically to sell them, get rid of them fast and make money.

Also, the deteriorating economy caused that several companies which were beeing made up to look healthy go bankrupt, less sales simply pushed them over the edge. Even banks which lost about 10 to 15% of their net worth due to bad loans went bankrupt, so we can see that if your business can`t take a 15% loss, it wasn’t very sound in the first place. You can see this on the fact that (as an example) some car manufacturers around the world had to sell some assets and some cutbacks but simply survived, GM and Chrysler didn`t. (they got a bailout paid by all of us), let’s keep in mind that millions were evicted from their homes and got no bailout.

Countries were doing the same thing, once the crisis was over, the mess was out, Greece, Spain, France, Portugal, Ireland, simply called an structural issue. Now what is a structural Issue ? It’s when a country spends more than it can (what it’s getting from taxes) and are getting loans to be passed to their successors in government. Actually mortgaging the country. This was so bad that some countries have defaulted on the interest payments of their debts.

Well, back to investing, if you are desperate for money, you go to a loanshark and accept the higher interest because you need it now to survive and the future is not important. So iyou can see a pattern here, if you desperately need money you raise the interest rate. Of course, when countries need to halt growth, they do this, but this is not what we are talking about. It’s when a financial investment firm start paying a lot of interest for your money, it means DANGER, the higher the profit, the higher the risk.

Someone who does not need money, does not ask for loans, much less pay interest, therefore, the lower the profit, less risk there is.

So if you want to gamble money, bet on risky investment and hope your investments pay off, but don’t complain if you lose money.

If you want to safeguard your life savings, you can buy gold or houses, or esentially physical things you can sell to recover your money, it doesn`t mean you will not lose money, if you buy gold or houses now, it is actually possible these will be less valuable in the future, but you will still have the gold or the house, either you wait for a bette moment ot sell, and even if whatever you bought is worth less, you can sell and save some of the money, but if you buy papers, of course you know that paper is worth about 50 cents a pound, that is all you get, those papers are valuable if the company or government that backs them up actually exists, if it doesnt, they are worthless.

Please keep in mind this when your broker tells you about a certain deal, remeber they operate on a commission and they will sell you dung if the commission is good enough.

Have a nice day

Little Kim

Well, it’s sabre rattling time in the world once Again, the world got rid of Gaddaffi, personally I kinda liked the guy, religious freak, semi-psychopath, he was one of the textbook psychos, with his uniform, kind of like a hollywod third world dictator, he’s not in the picture anymore, now keeping up the Hollywood tradition, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears, you will ask who is he ?, the president of Iran (old Persia, the descendants of Xerxes from the movie 300),If your thing is Hollywood, or if you are a little behind in your bad guys, the Ayatollah’s place. That’s quite a big country and they want  an atom bomb bad, I don`t know if the atom bomb is for their negihbors or for the US, but they want one. Maybe they want it because the US will even invade Grenada if it’s a slow week. Who knows.

Now Little Kim is asking for a slap in the mouth, the other day I was watching the news and he had a parade (a military one of course), and among the dangerous “weapons of mass destruction” (Does that sound familiar ?) they had some bombs which looked suspiciously like V1’s, not the same  but the same principle. As well as some farming equipment, you can see in the picture the “Farming war division”.

Please remeber that this is actually Chinese machinery, if you ever have the chance, go drive a chinese car to a dealer, now think how that  will actually do if shot at.

Little Kim does not understand that not only the US likes war (at least the military industrial complex which runs the presidency does), they may not really be good at it, but they can even multitask, that means that it’s no problem for the US to be fighting a war, and start another one half way around the world. Remeber that  “Fifth” fleet, means there are “at least” another four.

Well, let this be a warning to little Kim, if you go to war with the US, you have some “minor details” which are against you.

1) The US is currently fighting two wars, so the military indurstrial complex are making their money already.

2) If the US spends any more money in weapons and militry contractors there is a possibility these will not be paid.

3) As it is, the US has been dragging their feet in Iraq and Afghanistan to help the weapons industry and contractors make money, and war 2.0 is still a possibility with Iran.

So, you might actually go to war with the real United States, the most powerful army humanity has ever seen, and the conditions are ripe for them to use all of it on you AT ONCE !

I believe the last time the US actually entered a war with the purpose of winning it was in 1941, and we all know how that one ended.

So little Kim, ask the chinese for some picks and shovels and get digging, because at least in my opinion, if you go to war with the US in this political and economic context, your people are going to develop night vision from staying in the tunnels and shelters, and we will at last have an actual wasteland where to make movies like Mad Max and the sort.

Please buddy, keep in mind that the phrase “they don`t make them like they used to” is actually true, there are no ICBM’s which are “as small” as the Hiroshima bomb anymore.

BTW, one last tip, when you YOURSELF!!!!!  tell the world “I have nukes and I am willing tu use them”, the CIA and MI6 don`t even need to make up an excuse to have the US and Britain bomb the shit out of you, Bush might come out of his hole and say “I told y’all those Ayrabs had nucular weapons”, and if in your schizophrenic dreams you really believe you can actually make a dent in the US, let me do the math for you.

BIG country nukes little country, = you die out, (notice I did not say die, i actually meant “die out”).

This is not going to be a war, it’s going to be an extintion event.

Have a nice day !

Gay Marriage ?

Today there will be a supreme court ruling, can people of the same sex marry ?

Well, regardless of the supreme court, one of the arguments of gay haters is that they are promiscuous, but if they want to marry they will cease being it, so then conservatism should approve.

On the other hand, a democracy has to obey the opinion of the majority, and unfortunately there are more people who hate gays than gays.

There is another point of view, even if a democracy means that the majority gets its way, is the majority entitled to the right of ruling over other people’s lives ?

It’s a hot issue, Personally I believe that if gays want to be married and unhappy, let them, sometimes it is really enlightening to get what you want, in fact, we will have to see how the gay divorce rate goes if gay marriage becomes legal in all states.

Now, if the divorce rate among gay couples is less by (let’s say) 50% than in heterosexual couples, then should we all become gay ?

 

have a nice day

Cyprus – The Standard Solution

So, the financial system in Cyprus was about 4 times its GDP, and nobody asked anything about it, he bankers and brokers kept on piling up phony figures until it all collapsed, then the government decided to tax anyone who had deposits over 100.000 Euro.

This hurt small business owners, peple who had sold goods to buy other goods, people who had their life savings in the bank, and all of those who actually produced something in Cyprus.

Most certainly the government didn’t ask the bankers and brokers to fund their measuers or the bailout, it’s always those people who produce, save and do things who end up paying for the felonies of the loansharks and stock exchange criminals.

It’s about time people start hitting them where it hurts the most, and I don`t mean go out in the streets to yell waving signs, all that has to be done is to go, buy some gold or silver and pull out, just take your money out of the system; if you have your life savings in banks take them out, acually, do it slowly, one at a time, close your credit cards, take your savings out, buy gold or diamonds and stash them under your matress, pay your loans and do what needs to be done.

Since our governments have been bought and paid for by them, just leave the table, do not play their game, banks are and have been a cancer for several years, living on the reputation and achievement of last century banks, those banks aimed at production and profit by generating value, today banks are a tumor, If you have a tumor in your body, do not feed it, simply starve the tumor to death,

Have a Nice day

I’m Scared, Hunger is Coming

Honest, I am really scared with the future, Let me explain myself. I was thinking about the situation in the world today; while one kind of people study, work while they study, plan their lives for the future, others just finish high school. One kind of people graduate to become medium or high income citizens while others just coast along with “around minimum wage” jobs. The time comes to have children, and one kind has one, or maybe two (because they simply cannot afford to feed and educate any more), while the other, which lives on government handouts has six kids. Then, one kind supports their families, mortgages, and pay up to 50% income tax, this money goes to support the other family and their six kids, their medical care, schooling, subsidies for their home, etc.

This is working now, the “less privileged” are supported by “the privileged”, but in time, the “less privileged” population grows on a ratio of 3 to 1 when comnpared to the “privileged”, so the crisis is coming faster than you think.

It is said by protestors that the 1% has all the money, but let’s be kind with the economt and let’s imagine that of a total amount of money (for a country’s economy) of 1.000 US$ (remeber this is an example), “the privileged 10%” has 90% of the money, and the “less privileged” hs the remaining 10%, in one generation, the “less privileged” will triple their population when compared to “the privileged”

What this implies is that the needs of “the needy” will triple in one generation, but also these people will have three times the children “the privileged” will have, so they will only manage to survive on 70% income tax on “the privileged”.

Remeber that “the privileged” have a lot of money, so this system might last another generation, and “the privileged” might take it, but two generations from now, “the needy” will outpopulate “the privileged” 12 to 1, so on that day, the 1% will have the same 90% of the money, but need to support subsidies to 12 times their population, so the government will tax them over 80% on their income.

We are now another generation away, and simply, the money is not enough, “the needy” now need “the privileged” taxed on 100% of their income to get by, but “the privileged” are not privileged anymore, they have themselves been taxed into poverty, there has been no growth in the economy (because “the privileged” simply cannot afford to invest).

The Govennment is bankrupt, there is simply nobody else to tax, there are no “privileged”, and now the cuts have to come, but the economy simply cannot afford it, no matter how much you cut in expenses, the government will still be broke, and the general population is simply semi illiterate and used to living on handouts.

So, this is the picture I fear, I hope I am wrong, but sadly I don`t thik I am.

Have a nice day.

Chinese Farmers Demanding Democracy

It has been said several times “There can`t be political freedom without economic freedom” but it seems to work both ways, yesterday there were riots in rural China (Wukan) because it seems that government officials have been selling land to install a factory without the consent of the farmers, this would have been unopposable in “communist China”, but today, the farmers rioted, overturned cars, started fires and set up checkpoints and are not allowing any outsiders into their district. Huge banners demand democratic elections.

It seems “There can`t be economic freedom without political freedom”, China has been polluted with the “freedom germ”.

Capitalism does that, you first want money and things, when your basic needs are met, then you want freedom, it’s a standard behavior.

“The protest that has erupted in a village in China’s Guangdong province has grabbed headlines around the world, but the issues at the heart of the dispute are alarmingly commonplace.” (BBC news)

Find out more about this at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-16193089

have a nice day.