Yeah no

 

LOL, supply shortage hits reporting: CNBC relies on Reuters, a blog, and FOX Business for shipping container transportation costs data

 

On Oct. 7, there were reportedly around 60 container ships waiting in open water outside Los Angeles and Long Beach for berths to dock in and unload their goods. Before the pandemic, it was unusual to see even one vessel waiting for a slip. ...

Skyrocketing costs are also part of the problem. Over the past year, the cost to have one container shipped by freighter from China to the West Coast has soared from around $3,000 in Aug. 2020 to more than $20,000 in September of this year.

More.

You can now by-pass the entire medical bureaucracy and test yourself for COVID-19 easily, cheaply, and quickly right at home

 

Newsweek's communist spin machine calls Bernie Sanders' cutting the hours of staff in order to pay $15 an hour "better hours"

Bernie Sanders Campaign Responds to $15 Minimum Wage Controversy with Better Hours for Staff:

Bernie Sanders will limit the amount of time his organizers can work to guarantee that no one is making less than $15 per hour

Tucker Carlson says there's nothing free about this market, falls short of calling it an expression of global fascism

But who knows, maybe his forthcoming book connects the dots between the multinational corporations and their revolving door governments, and the central banking system which mediates the operation.

Here:

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: 

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is worth about $150 billion. That’s enough to make him the richest man in the world, by far, and possibly the richest person in human history. It’s certainly enough to pay his employees well. But he doesn’t. A huge number of Amazon workers are so poorly paid, they qualify for federal welfare benefits. According to data from the nonprofit group New Food Economy, nearly one in three Amazon employees in Arizona, for example, was on food stamps last year. Jeff Bezos isn’t paying his workers enough to eat, so you made up the difference with your tax dollars. Next time you see Bezos, make sure he says thank you.

Same with the Waltons. The Walton family founded Walmart. Collectively they’re worth about $175 billion. That’s more than the entire gross domestic product of Qatar, the oil-rich Gulf state. The Waltons could certainly afford to be generous with their workers. Instead, they count on you to take up the slack. In 2013, taxpayers sent more than $6 billion to Walmart’s workers, for food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance.

And if you think that’s shocking, meet Travis Kalanick. He’s the youthful founder of Uber. His personal fortune is close to $5 billion. His drivers, by contrast, often make less than minimum wage. One recent study showed that many Uber drivers lose money working for the company. That’s not a sustainable business model. The only reason it continues is because of your generosity. Because you’re paying the welfare benefits for Uber’s impoverished drivers, child billionaires like Travis get to keep buying bigger houses and more airplanes. He’s someone else who definitely owes you a thank you note.

If you can think of a less fair system than that, send us an email. We’d love to hear it. It’s indefensible. Yet almost nobody ever complains about it. How come? Conservatives, like us, support the free market, and for good reason. Free markets work. But there’s nothing free about this market. A lot of these companies operate as monopolies. They hate markets. They use government regulation to crush competition. There’s nothing conservative about that, just as there’s nothing conservative about most big corporations. Just the opposite. They’re the backbone of the left. Pick a leftwing cause that you think is hurting the country. Check the donor list, and you’ll find the name of some corporation. Often many corporations. Corporate America enables the progressive lunacy you see every night on this show. They’re funding the revolution now in progress.

That’s why liberals say nothing as oligarchs amass billions by soaking the middle class. Because they’ve been paid off. For example, you probably assumed the people who founded Walmart were conservative. Most of their customers certainly are. Yet the bulk of the Walton family backed Hillary Clinton in the last election. They gave the Democratic Party more than $700,000 during the 2016 cycle. Almost every billionaire in Silicon Valley did the same. In return, they got immunity from criticism, and you got to keep paying their employees. Not a bad deal for them.

There is one person in Washington who’s offended by this arrangement, and we’re sorry to say he’s wrong on pretty much everything else. But this is a weird moment, so you take allies where you can find them. Bernie Sanders, of all people, is trying to get your money back from Jeff Bezos. This is especially amazing since Bezos is on Bernie’s side on most things. They’re both leftwing activists. But on this question, Bernie’s right. He’s planning legislation that would force big corporations to return the taxpayer-funded welfare benefits you’ve paid to their workers. It’s not a perfect solution, and it probably won’t pass. No matter what they claim in public, liberals in Congress would never support something like that. Their loyalty isn’t to you. It’s to Uber and Jeff Bezos. But at the very least it might awaken a sleepy population to the new reality of activist corporate America. And that’s a good thing.

America has changed enormously in the last 20 years. A lot of people you thought were your allies are in fact working against your interests. They have contempt for you and your family, your customs and your faith. Included in this group, I’m sorry to say, are a lot of big corporations. They have no use for you or the country you grew up in. Stand in their way, and they’ll crush you. It’s all shocking enough that I recently wrote a book about it. It’s called “Ship of Fools,” and it explains what happened and who did it. The book is out in a month, the first week of October, but you can preorder a copy now, and I hope you will.

Surprise, the tax cuts are showing up in, not your wallet, but enormous stock buy-backs by large corporations, which explains the rising stock market

In other words, so-called sideline cash coming into the market is really nothing more than taxcut cash reallocated to stock buy-backs by corporate America.

Marketwatch reports here:

But now, courtesy of Goldman Sachs, we know where the tax cut is really going. Surprise! It’s paying for stock repurchases by corporations, as Corporate America despairs of investing in much other than dividing the pie provided by near-record profitability into fewer and larger pieces.

Buyback announcements are up 22% this year to $67 billion in just six weeks, Goldman said in a note to clients. This follows a report by benefits consulting firm Aon Hewitt finding that 83% of large companies don’t expect the tax cut to boost salaries at all — just help pay for small bonuses companies like WalMart and AT&T gave workers, which reporters soon discovered were, themselves, skewed toward higher-paid, longer-tenured employees in many cases.

Walmart bathrooms evidently don't get a very thorough daily cleaning

John Kasich's Ohio miracle is totally phony and depended entirely on federal money through Medicaid expansion under Obamacare

No wonder John Kasich took the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.

John Kasich has been bad for Ohioans, is already poison for the presidential race, and will be terrible for the country if allowed anywhere near the Oval.

From the story here:

Wal-Mart is a perennial leader, and at the time had nearly 18,000 Ohio employees covered by Medicaid, followed by McDonald’s with over 14,000 jobs. Next in line, respectively, came Kroger, Wendy’s and Bob Evans with a combined 17,000 plus workers using Medicaid.

So when Gov. Kasich went around his very right-wing legislature, which didn’t want to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, he was thinking about more than the normal people “living in the shadows.” He saw $2.5 billion a year in federal money and knew he could both shed state expenses and give aid and support to a few of Ohio’s biggest corporations, which are too cheap to pay their workers a living wage, defined by enough income to pay their expenses without being “dependent” on government safety net programs like Medicaid. John Kasich loves to talk about personal responsibility for individuals, but has nothing to say about the same responsibility to the biggest, richest corporations.

This observation on what Gov. Kasich was doing came from a progressive economic think tank that gets little attention at the legislature. Zach Schiller, a spokesman for Policy Matters Ohio, said Ohio’s safety-net services, including Medicaid, food stamps and cash assistance, “shouldn’t have to be used in significant ways by multimillion-dollar companies getting tax breaks. They should be able to adequately pay their employees.”

Ross Douthat is insane, doesn't say a word about millions of dollars in damage done by rioters in Ferguson, MO

Ross Douthat in The New York Times calls for taking away the militarized components of police departments, here.

But Ferguson, MO, police effectively watched on the sidelines as millions of dollars in damages were inflicted on property owners by rioters there, and didn't use their hardware to stop it. They should have.

It would have sent a message across this country to cease and desist, or suffer the consequences. Law-abiding people everywhere want this in their hearts, but are afraid to speak up because of the intimidation they would suffer from an insane media allied with the race hucksters of this country. It's too bad Ross Douthat has joined them.

From the St. Louis Business Journal, here:

"QuikTrip, which saw its store at 9420 West Florrisant Ave. looted and burned, estimated Monday the damage total to be in the seven figures.

"More than a dozen other businesses along West Florissant Avenue were damaged and looted, including Zisser Tire & Auto, Wal-Mart, Taco Bell, St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store, and Toys R Us. Nu Fashion Beauty, Party City and Boost Mobile were also affected. The unrest spread beyond Ferguson Monday night, as a Shoe Carnival on Gravois near Grand was vandalized and looted."

In America, unfortunately, some property is more unequal than others.

Barry Ritholtz Is Against The World Religion Of Gold

Barry Ritholtz here recently had some fun with the goldbugs, whom he ridicules as devotees of a "religious cult".

The piece is regrettably inflammatory. Doesn't he know he's writing off the whole world as a bunch of religious kooks in this temper tantrum? That's pretty much what ideologues do when reality won't cooperate with their theories, but surely he must know that sovereigns and central banks the world over continue to build their hoardes of gold year upon year, now approaching 32,000 tonnes and 20% of all the stuff ever pulled out of the ground. That's quite the foundation for the edifice of the worldwide church of gold.

In fact, many of the central banks in particular have been on a tear recently, acquiring the stuff in quantities not seen in 30 years. Evidently they are to a man possessed by the Oracle of Au (pronounced "Ow"). But try as they may to acquire new gold reserves, no one of them yet even comes close to the chief priest bowing and scraping before the barbarous relic, namely the USA, the number one holder of gold in reserve to the tune of 8,134 tonnes (not to be confused with tons). 

That even the USA with all its fiat money still considers this gold to be the most sublime of all currencies can be seen in its own gold issues. Gold Eagles, in one ounce sizes down to tenth ounce, are denominated from $50 down to $5. It says so right on the coins. (I understand if you don't believe me because you haven't seen one. They are expensive these days.) I myself haven't seen one of these things in my change at Walmart recently, or anywhere else, but theoretically you could. In various places around the country they are in fact found in Salvation Army kettles from time to time, usually around the time of a holiday formerly known as "Christmas".

There is a reason for what appears on a Gold Eagle: The US government has decreed that gold is money, and that the price of gold cannot fall. It has fixed the price at $42.22 per troy ounce since 1973, and it hasn't fallen since. The one ounce $50 Gold Eagle thus closely approximates this valuation, as it should if America wants to maintain its credibility as the leader of the free world and the spokesman for truth, justice and the, well, American way. The excess, in case you were wondering, is simply a small bonus in exchange for providing the world with both its security and its reserve currency, both of which are quite costly to the inhabitants of the land of the free.

Over our long history, the price of gold has indeed risen despite the best efforts of "manipulators" to stop it from doing so. For a long time the price of gold had been ruthlessly kept down at $20.67, from the War Between the States to FDR, but suddenly became $35 when the greatest Democrat ever saved us from the bad old ways. Not to be outdone, however, the great Republican Richard Nixon managed to make gold higher still, at $42.22, where it has stood ever since.

See, the price of gold hasn't ever fallen in America, it's only risen, just like Jesus. It's God's will. It is our manifest destiny.

That said, more people these days do need to come to accept the reality of this defacto gold standard to which our benevolent government all too secretly adheres. Younger generations of mockers actually have arisen among us who need to repent of their intemperate outbursts against gold and believe in the Gold Gospel once again. Instead of denying the reality of this kingdom of gold, which is really present here and now in the sacramental dollar, they need to wake up and consider the future possibilities of our great civilization and its gold religion.

Perhaps then there would be more public support for all these central bankers who print funny money to drive gold prices higher, especially for our own Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve who far excells all others at this. What he really needs most right now is more public encouragement to use that funny money like our competitors do in the world. Like them, we need to start augmenting our gold reserves once again using funny dollars to buy gold just as they are doing using, say, funny yuans. After all, this is actually a divinely sanctioned practice, what the Bible calls making use of "unrighteous mammon". You can look it up, it's right in there. Ben really needs to get on this right away. It should be a matter of his monetary policy to drive up the price of gold by hoarding it. Who knows, maybe we can even get our tonnage back up where it used to be after WWII, around 20,000 tonnes, and just think, all it will cost us is some paper and ink.

Meanwhile gold continues to work for us in season and out of season, in good times and in bad. Our reserves have seen us through thick and thin, whether it's been the boom times under Reagan/Bush/Clinton or the misery index years of Jimmy Carter or the new depression years of Barack Obama. Our gold is still there, just like the flag. It hasn't rusted, shrunk in the rain, or even tarnished. Good as gold as they say. Things might be even better if we had more of it, but you've got to be thankful for your blessings, thankful for what you do have.

The truth is, even in the very worst of circumstances imaginable gold has performed miracles for people. A few well-placed gold coins not that long ago meant the difference between some of our fellow countrymen coming here or going to the gas chambers. Ask them and their progeny if escaping an apocalypse wasn't "just fine", even if they were penniless afterward.

No, the only suckers when it comes to gold have been those who let theirs go when misguided government came looking for it. Some of those babies confiscated in 1933 now fetch $300,000. The rest appreciated in value in their melted down form in the government's vault, but only 6600%. You could go to Harvard today with just 120 of those ounces. In the present banks and governments across the globe are finding the collateral gold provides rather more reliable than US Treasuries in a pinch, which is why they keep acquiring it. Evidently we haven't yet understood the message that this sends. 

It's true in a sense that gold is a rejection of government control, but only in the sense of its opposite, self-control, which is what in America is the unique basis of our form of government. It was an idea bequeathed to us by Protestantism, and also by Plato, both of which are unhappily out of favor. But seeking to control your own destiny, which is what many foreigners are doing by acquiring gold, is actually the sincerest form of flattery of what the United States used to stand for. Free from the control of a reserve currency, there's no telling what others in the world may accomplish without us. But under a universal currency, there's no telling what we could still accomplish together. 

Blame Walmart For The Part-Timing Of America, And ObamaCare For Ramping It Up

From a very good story by the New York Times, reproduced here:

The rise of big-box retailers like Walmart . . . with their long operating hours and complex staffing needs, has contributed to the increase in part-timers.

Mr. Flickinger, the retail consultant, said when Walmart spread nationwide and opened hundreds of 24-hour stores in the 1990s, that created intense competitive pressures and prompted many retailers to copy the company’s cost-cutting practices, including its heavy reliance on part-timers.

Susan J. Lambert, an expert on part-time work and a professor of organizational theory at the University of Chicago, said the use of part-timers had also escalated because of the declining power of labor unions. “They set a standard for what a real job was — Monday through Friday with full-time hours,” she said. “We’ve moved away from that.”

ObamaCare will now put this part-timing trend into high gear as more and more employers seek to avoid ObamaCare's 30 hour rule, at which employers must provide a healthcare benefit. More and more employers are going to schedule people for up to 29 hours per week, and not one more.

If you read the full story excerpted above you'll wonder to yourself how $15,000 per year part-time earners are going to be able to afford to purchase healthcare at Obama's healthcare exchanges, especially since holding two part-time jobs is already impossible in the experience of most part-timers. The answer is they won't be able to afford to purchase insurance, and will be shuffled off to crappy care under Medicaid, which is going bust already.

The healthcare debacle in America is only just beginning, thanks to Obama and the Democrats.

James Altucher Talks Up Optimism, and Five Stocks He Doesn't Own!

Here.

Give me a break! Put your money where your mouth is, bro!

Apple, Exxon Mobil, Walmart, Amazon and Google: This year's dinosaurs are next year's tank of gas. It's happened before, and it will happen again. Maybe not right away, but Steve Jobs will die. The Arabs will try another embargo over Israel. Companies depending on relatively cheap transportation and distribution will experience tighter margins. And we can't predict the future, but a world where energy costs more is a world where electricity usage puts free operations like Google between a rock and a hard place.

On the macro side James Altucher really shows his colors: securitization without mark-to-market. You can't have the one without the other. He must be reading too much Steve Forbes.

Have fun stormin' the castle!

Wal-Mart Moms Think Obama is Overwhelmed by the Presidency

Pretty stupid when you consider that he's finally having the time of his life. Golf every Sunday. Parties every Wednesday. The world is his oyster.

Call it female projection syndrome. They are the ones who are overwhelmed, so he must be too.

They don't know the truth, don't see it, don't have time for it, don't have the money to find out about it, nor the inclination. And if the truth breaks through occasionally, they think "If it could only be me."

And that is precisely what the Democrats continue to count on. The effeminate party is an easily distracted party.

The story is here, in USA Away.