From Bloomberg, some bad news for small farmers fighting agribusiness giant, Monsanto. Libertarians shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that adoption of the precautionary principle is anti-libertarian. It’s not. How can any company give an assurance that it won’t do substantial, irreversible damage to other people’s property through pollination of other alfalfa strains? It cannot. Thus, any assurance that it can is patently fraudulent. Besides, Monsanto, like BP and Goldman Sachs, is a state-created, state-subsidized crony-capitalist outfit and not a product of the free market anyway. Continue reading
Tag Archives: corporatism
Socialist Social Conservatives Want Big Government
16 Burning Questions About The BP Oil Spill
From The Economic Collapse Blog, 16 burning questions about the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:
#1) Barack Obama has authorized the deployment of more than 17,000 National Guard members along the Gulf coast to be used “as needed” by state governors. So what are all of these National Guard troops going to be doing exactly? Are the troops going to be used to stop the oil or to control the public? Continue reading
Oil Spill, Possibly Worst Ever, May Continue For Years
“The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the world’s worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe. Senior researchers tell us that the BP drilling hit one of the oil migration channels and that the leakage could continue for years unless decisive steps are undertaken, something that seems far from the present strategy.
In a recent discussion, Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Russian State University of Oil and Gas, predicted that the present oil spill flooding the Gulf Coast shores of the United States “could go on for years and years … many years.” [1]
According to Kutcherov, a leading specialist in the theory of abiogenic deep origin of petroleum, “What BP drilled into was what we call a ‘migration channel,’ a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of our planet migrate to the crust and are accumulated in rocks, something like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia.” [2] Ghawar, the world’s most prolific oilfield has been producing millions of barrels daily for almost 70 years with no end in sight. According to the abiotic science, Ghawar like all elephant and giant oil and gas deposits all over the world, is located on a migration channel similar to that in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico. Continue reading
BP: Corporatist Couch Potato Or Market Hero?
“Corporatist System
But BP’s defenders and statist critics both have it wrong. This is not the story of a well-meaning or negligent firm operating in the free market. Negligent or not, BP is a player in a corporatist system that for generations has featured a close relationship between government and major business firms. (It wouldn’t have surprised Adam Smith.) Prominent companies have always been influential at all levels of government — and no industry more so than oil, which has long been a top concern of the national policy elite, most particularly the foreign-policy establishment. Continue reading
Karl Hess: Corporate Capitalism Is Grand Larceny
“What I have learned about corporate capitalism, roughly, is that it is an act of theft, by and large, through which a very few live very high off the work, invention, and creativity of very many others. It is the Grand Larceny of our particular time in history, the Grand Larceny in which a future of freedom which could have followed the collapse of feudalism was stolen from under our noses by a new bunch of bosses doing the same old things.”
— Karl Hess
JP Morgan Gets $3.4 Billion For Buying Wa-Mu; Shareholders Get Zip
At Seeking Alpha, Troy Racki writes about the second rape of Washington Mutual stock-holders and US tax-payers by JP Morgan:
“In the settlement offer WaMu will relinquish all claims against JP Morgan and the FDIC. In return WaMu will be allowed to keep a $3.9 billion dollar deposit it held in its own bank. Most of the $3.9 billion deposit was generated from the sale of preferred securities in 2006 and 2007. Additionally WaMu will be allowed to keep $1.8 to $2.0 billion of its own tax return created from huge losses in 2008. The rest of the projected $5.6 billion return will be split between the FDIC and JP Morgan.
According to the settlement terms JP Morgan will receive $5 billion in HELOC backed securities valued on the open market at 60% of par, $193 million in Visa class B securities, $2.1 billion in cash, and a $20 million wind farm, all from WaMu. Given the initial purchase price of WaMu for $1.9 billion in 2008, these additional assets received means that JP Morgan will pay a negative $3.4 billion for their purchase of the bank.
The loss of these assets will heavily impact WaMu’s balance sheet which now stands to make only the bondholders whole, according to the settlement’s disclosure statement. Currently senior WaMu holding company debt trades at 106 cents on the dollar.
Under the terms of the settlement WaMu shareholders will receive nothing.
In the disclosure statement WaMu’s attorneys stated that the proposed settlement will net the most for all creditors and that further legal dispute would only financially harm the estate. This comes in stark contrast to prior statements by WaMu’s equity counsel that a protracted legal battle with JP Morgan and the FDIC may have returned up to $20 billion to the estate.
Currently the settlement is awaiting the approval of the FDIC, Washington Mutual bank bondholders, WaMu unsecured creditors, WaMu preferred shareholders, and the bankruptcy judge. An incomplete plan of reorganization was also filed on Friday along with the disclosure statement. The incomplete POR lacks a balance sheet meaning that WaMu’s unsecured creditors are left only to guess at what they may eventually recover, if anything.
Despite the negative purchase price, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan has indicated that the purchase of WaMu could have been closed for less, much less. In July 2009 he stated that JP Morgan “could have bought WaMu for a dollar” because of the projected losses that would have been taken on the deal.
The losses never materialized. In May 2009, JP Morgan wrote up its WaMu loan portfolio by $25 billion.
Had the $1 purchase price gone through JP Morgan would have eventually been paid $5.1 billion by WaMu and the FDIC to assume the bank.
While the deal may be good for JP Morgan, former WaMu customers are not so fortunate. Nationally many WaMu Providian credit card customers have since experienced dramatic rate increases. In Oregon, WaMu checking clients report that deposits are being held for fourteen days prior to being accredited to accounts. This abnormally long waiting period means that many checking customers are now being hit by multiple $35-a-peice overdraft charges for having insufficient funds. In northern California, out-the-door waiting lines for teller service at one branch sparked verbal outrage and multiple client threats to move deposits to a community bank branch. The branch responded after twenty minutes by temporarily adding a teller.
Meanwhile FDIC chairwoman Sheila Bair is continuing to push for additional powers that would allow the FDIC to not only shutter banks but their holding companies. This authority would allow for the FDIC to avoid future conflicts when it closes a bank but is unable to force a holding company to capitulate, as is in the case with WaMu. It has come under scrutiny after internal JP Morgan e-mails and PowerPoint presentations revealed that as early as March 2008 regulators were in negotiations with JP Morgan on the closure of Washington Mutual, termed “Project West”, six months prior to the bank’s seizure.”
More later…
The Over-Medicated and the Under-Medicated
From Dissident Voice, a piece by Joseph Grosso on the drug companies’ recreation of the definition of disease:
“This year will see the publication of the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), the field bible for mental health professionals. If earlier editions are any indication the latest one will feature and slew of newly established disorders all to be treated with the latest anti-depressants or anti-psychotics……
Other disorders, both mental and physical, conjured up or legitimized in recent years include Social Anxiety Disorder, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, Irritable Bowl Syndrome, Estrogen Deficiency disease, Osteoporosis, not to mention the always stretching boundaries of ADD (see Adult ADD) and ADHD to include more and more drug takers. It can’t be said that the effort of branding new disorders and expanding the very concept of what disease is has been a failure for the drug companies. Prescription drug use has skyrocketed over the past two decades. Americans now spend money on prescription drugs in amounts that equal or surpass the amount spent on higher education and automobiles. Their profits enable to have a death lock over the country’s political process. The predictable flipside being that, according to a 2005 survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse the number of Americans who admitted to abusing prescription drugs doubled from 1992-2003.
While American children living in the suburbs get pumped with medication for all sorts of overstated or marketed illnesses, children living in the planet’s rapidly expanding slums perish of preventable digestive-tract diseases rooted in contaminated drinking water and overall polluted conditions. In sub-Saharan Africa alone neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are the most common conditions affecting the region’s poorest 500 million people. A recent assessment published in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases estimates that hookworm, an infection that weakens immune systems and causes anemia, occurs in 40-50 million school aged children. Schistosomiasis, the second most prevalent NTD claims 192 million victims and is ‘possibly associated with increased horizontal transmission of HIV/AIDS.’ There are many others (Lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, roundworm) often overlapping in the same individuals. Why put all of them under the banner of ‘Neglected’? The WHO webpage puts it thusly:
The misery caused by neglected tropical diseases is largely hidden. Affected people live almost exclusively in remote rural areas and sprawling shantytowns, where lack of safe drinking water, poor education, poor sanitation, substandard housing and where access to health care may be virtually non-existent… Neglect also occurs at the level of research and development. The incentive to develop new diagnostic tools, drugs, and vaccines is low for diseases with a market that cannot pay…”