Saturday, September 14, 2013

The Level Playing Field Myth

We are told USA billionaires need subsidies to "level the playing field."  Therefore we fork over tax money to help that 1% to be in the market without fear of competition, or more to the point, without having to compete.

The argument is companies overseas get some sort of subsidy or regulatory advantage, which must be matched.  No doubt subsidies and regulatory advantage is manifest, but why would anyone think, say the Chinese government, get any regulation or subsidy right, that is to say, effective, efficacious for the intended goal.  The idea is delusional to begin with.

But let us allow the impossible, that the Chinese Government is capable of getting a policy right when it comes to distorting markets to Chinese advantage.  So what is the USA response?  We have many. To name a few:

1.  Statutory restrictions.

      a. tariff rate quota

      b. absolute quota

2. Subsidies

OK, so we now have these to help "level the playing field."

What makes us think these means in fact level the playing field, whatever that means?

What makes us think that for whom the field is thus leveled, this treatment is efficacious toward the goal.  Do we have any evidence field leveling works?

Have we tried not responding, assuming playing fields might be tilted,  to unleveled playing fields?

In fact we have a long and rich history of not leveling playing fields, in which USA traders have played the hand dealt, and crushed the advantaged foreigners, with no help from Uncle Sam, since once upon a time  leveling the playing field was ever contemplated.

Now, the conceit we can level the playing field occasions much allocation of resources, resources starved from opportunities where funding would yield better results.  So we have misallocation resulting in malinvestment when we try to "level the playing field."

Those who claim to need a playing field leveled would no doubt fail if not given some advantage.  That does not mean others in the field, unadvantaged, would not develop means to cope with disadvantage (if it was possible to ever formulate anyway). We in fact have seen those skilled at working in unlevel playing fields can do quite well.

And because we subsidize those who should simply go about of business, we have far more people in the 1% than we would otherwise.  It is such policies that give us the ever widening gap between rich and poor.

Leveling the playing field is a tactic that has no good effect in the market.

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Friday, September 13, 2013

How To Turn A Fad Into Bankruptcy

Larry sends in an article from the WSJ with yet another example of someone starting to make money and then heading off into lawsuit loserville.
In August, the founder of three-year-old Rainbow Loom—a rubber-band jewelry-making kit that is a blockbuster seller this fall—sued rival Zenacon LLC, claiming it copied the "distinctive trade dress" of Rainbow Loom's "unique" C-shaped clips with its competing FunLoom product.
An observation:  given all of the successful products out there, these stories are actually quite rare.  But nonetheless, this is typical of a long succession of such stories, and I can predict where this one will be in three years:  bankrupt.
"I made this famous," says Mr. Ng, who says he's sold more than 1.2 million Rainbow Loom kits so far. "I worked on it for three years and now everyone wants to come in."
Hear the entitlement?  Where is the customer in that argument?
Rainbow Loom also filed a lawsuit last month against another rival kit maker and Toys "R" Us Inc., which sells the competing kits. That same month, Rainbow Loom inked an exclusive contract to sell its products through national crafts chain Michaels Stores Inc. for one year.
Wait, what?  Suing ANOTHER competitor AND the largest potential customer out there?  He signed a contract to give one business an exclusive on his product?  (And what will the world look like in one year, when his exclusive is up and everyone else has cheaper better products?) Every industry is a village, and everyone will know the fact he initiates lawsuits without provocation and sues customers. That alone the kiss of death.  With a Michael's exclusive, he guaranteed his competitors would be successful.

Here is the heart of why Rainbow Loom attracted competitors:
Furthermore, the C-clip in FunLoom's kit is superior, Mr. Verona says, given that it is larger and therefore easier for children to handle, plus it can hold more elastic bands.
Rainbow Loom came out with a product that needed improvement.  With the sunk costs of a patent, he is defending the product as it is, when he needs to be constantly improving it (making a patent pointless.)
The allegations of copycatting and patent infringement illustrate a growing challenge for entrepreneurs with a sudden blockbuster in the era of 3-D printing technology, fast manufacturing capabilities and more affordable e-commerce technology, all of which enable rivals to capitalize on nascent trends while they're still hot.
There is nothing to support this, I've been watching knock-off artists for 40 years, and the process may have speeded up slightly, but the problem is not "growing."  The increase in lawsuits is the result of the change in the patent law in 2011, which was designed to increase lawsuits.
"In this day and age you have to be so vigilant," says James White, an intellectual-property lawyer in Chicago who delivered more than 50 preliminary injunctions against knockoff products on behalf of Oakbrook, Ill.-based Ty Inc., the maker of Beanie Babies. "If you have a fad product that's easy to copy, the more tightly you have to regulate your enforcement program."
Ka-ching!

Lawyers know nothing about business.  Patent lawyers sell access to taxpayer-backed state violence, which is not appropriate in the market.  If you have a fad product, it is not going to last long, so why put any money into it?  Ty Warner made the business decision to turn a fad into a mania by killing off his designs and creating new ones constantly.  Mr. White seems unaware of this distinction.  If Ty Warner had 50 preliminary injunctions processed it was no doubt solely to keep his customers satisfied that the customers would not find themselves competing against fakes, most likely trade mark issues.  (And a preliminary injunction is not very far in the process, I wonder if Ty knew that someone, somewhere in his org was causing them to be issued.)  In any event Ty did not make exclusives, and Ty did change his products constantly.  Ty was a private company so sales figures are elusive, but that Ty made billions is not in doubt, given his purchases in which he paid cash.  Billions in sales and only fifty preliminary injunctions?  It does not sound like Ty did much in the way of vigilance or tightly regulate enforcement.  In what way is Beany Baby's analogous to Rainbow Loom, a company that esteems exclusives and design rigidity?
Retailers don't seem picky about the brand either. "It's about who can get it to you fast enough," said a spokeswoman for Berlin, N.J.-retail chain A.C. Moore.
Trademarks?  Who cares?  How does an exclusive with Michael's help this retailer?  Instead of figuring out how to serve the market, Rainbow Loom in essence wants taxpayers to come up with the money to control the market.
Instead of taking victory laps, however, Mr. Ng says he is suing to protect his product against sellers of copycat items and because he intends to expand his business. He now has 12 employees who work out of a 7,500-square-foot warehouse 3 miles from his home. "I can make this company become popular for longer," he says.
False dilemma:  Victory laps or lawsuits.  How about serve your customers or lawsuits? Clearly Rainbow Loom intends to go the way of lawsuits.  How does suing potential customers, and restraining trade make one popular and grow the business?

Two terrible ideas: exclusives and patents.  I give it three years before bankruptcy.  Never bet you can make something popular with 12 year old girls for longer.

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Mercedes New Model: The Hastings 500

How come Mercedes is not aggressively offering answers as to how and why Michael Hastings' Mercedes seemed to drive itself to his death.  What an odd event, what a curious silence.

Mercedes must have mountains of evidence and information to share, and ought to create an interactive website that confirms and denies rumors.  The LA Coroner has ruled Hasting's death an accident (and they are as alone as USA on Syria regarding that.).  That must worry Mercedes.

For Mercedes to announce a self-driving car when one of its customer went carbon in a self-driving Mercedes.
With the aid of its highly automated 'Route Pilot', the vehicle was able to negotiate its own way through dense urban and rural traffic.
What?  Did Hastings get a test model, or was he murdered?  Or what?  Come on Mercedes, Hastings trusted you.

Mercedes is depending on the LAPD to come up with facts.  There is a mountain of data Mercedes must have already analyzed that no doubt much contradicts what little LAPD has said.  Mercedes ought to pose important questions and drive this mystery to clarity.

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Thursday, September 12, 2013

Pirating Tabasco Sauce

We all know and love Tabasco Sauce, and its well known label.  Apparently it has a patented anti-spill cap, as well, although I cannot find any mention of it, by google.  But I heard a curious report.

http://thingsthatfizz.wordpress.com/tag/fruit/
To me the source was credible, but unverifiable, so I will not name names.  The question was: would a USA hot sauce supplier knock-off Tabasco sauce, down to the special cap, and then export it to a certain country for sale.

The USA person of course pointed out the problems:

1. Not a good business practice.

2. Probably could not get the special caps if the USA citizen wanted to.

3. Unlikely to get the product out of USA if the USA citizen tried.

The buyer went away unsatisfied.  For now.

Why knock it off in USA?  (I don't use the word "piracy" because piracy is a violent capital crime, and copying hot sauce is neither.)  If you are going to knock something off, why not do so in your own country?  So you can genuinely state "Made in USA" in spite of the fact the brand is fake?

It is a curious event, and I hope to come across it myself sometime so I can learn how come.  If anyone else knows, I'd like to hear.

Now, Tabasco might be inclined to follow-up and protest to the authorities in the home country of the knock-off artist.  Not that much could or would be done.  So I would advise Tabasco saves its breath.

A far better way, and a means that trumps "piracy" is to simply add a traceability element to the bottle, so the end-user in knockoffistan can simply qwery the label with a smart phone and be taken to the USA Tabasco site where that serial number is listed as being sold (via the chain) to that retailer.

Now that sounds like quite a database!  Yes, but that is now cheap.  Much cheaper and more effective at defending "trade marks." I think we'll see law regarding trademarks wither on the vine as traceability trumps trademarks.

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Yahoo & Facebook NSA Cooperation

Now read this carefully:
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, struck back on Wednesday at critics who have charged tech companies with doing too little to fight off NSA surveillance. Mayer said executives faced jail if they revealed government secrets.
Ok... walk through this.   You wake up one morning and you find the CEOs of yahoo, Facebook and Google arrested and disappeared.  Why they have been arrested is top secret.  (We now know they would have been arrested for revealing that the NSA was snooping on USA citizens without warrant.)

What would you do if those top executives were disappeared?  Perhaps shudder with fear?

Demand they be brought before a judge?

These people are already tied into great money flows, so a Federal Prosecutor would be slow to act no matter what.  These people have pretty extensive security teams, with lawyers on call.  Certainly a standoff might occur, if an arrest were attempted.

So, it seems "going to jail" was unlikely, and if they had gone to jail, that may be a bit more problematic.  There is the unknown.  If they had been afforded rights as Americans, then they would have the best Lawyers in the world getting them out.

Also, Snowden revealed NSA wrongdoing on the face of wrongdoing.  How much sooner would he have revealed the wrongdoing, in the face of executives disappearing?  how much more safe he would be if the information had led to a defense of Zuckerberg and Mayer.  How many more would have revealed if USA citizens were actually being arrested over revealing wrong-done activities.

The most interesting aspect to me in all of this is how neither China nor Russia particularly cared about what Snowden had in his files?  How come?  It would seem that whatever the NSA gets, China and Russia are cc'd on it anyway.  Only we USA citizens are not to know what our country is up to.

Yes, Zuckerberg and Mayer may have gone to jail for revealing government secrets, but the secrets were regarding acts of wrongdoing.  At any point they may have simply refused to cooperate, and then face that music, whatever it is.  And at some point, forced the issue by taking the arrest.

They owed at least that much to the USA people who have given them so much.  They should think first about their customers, and not so much about experiencing some discomfort.

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Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Autism And Profits

Like GMO, science on Autism is actively suppressed so we don't really know.  Like cigarettes, we think the reason science is suppressed is because the science might show something that threatens profits.

Or worse, threatens the agenda of the Nation that introduced The Tuskegee Experiments which were copied and expanded by the Nazi and Japanese War regimes.

Here is an essay on autism that is worth a read.
I’ve been investigating the medical establishment for a decade. I’ve seen many people – many children – murdered, coldly, by the pressing hands of the pharmaceutical establishment. I’ve met doctors too frightened, anxious or self-important to take the two hours (or two minutes) required to understand a few points on vaccine or drug toxicity. Indeed, I’ve met them many times.
What this essay leaves out is the argument that we need these vaccinations and inoculations to keep us from going back to the times of polio, Spanish flu, mass tuberculosis, smallpox, etc.  The argument is we need herd vaccination or the lone non-vaccinated may introduce the disease.   Anyone who is not vaccinated is a "free-rider" and a threat to the community.  Submit!

This and any other argument the "doctors" offer is sheer nonsense.    We vaccinate for what, a dozen?, possible diseases, and some of the vaccines are known to be scientifically pointless, no question about it, such as Gardasil.

The reality is there are a billion wicked little things that can kill us if our immune systems are weakened.  This is usually dealt with by drugs or whatever, but a crisis occurs when there is mass immuno-deficiency, most particularly at times of war.  Wars, among so many other problems, generally degrades trade, and consumes resources for the warriors.  Slowly but surely all immune systems degrade.  Yes, the vaccinations work, on that for which we are vaccinated.  But in times of peace we do not need them, and in times of war something else, besides the dozen for which we were vaccinated, will get us, if we do not starve to death or are bombed first.  All those kids in Africa who were innoculated for malaria died of dysentary.  How about we be a little slower in making war, and not so fast in selling drugs.

Although war is the problem, not the bugs that can kill us, we cannot hope that there will be no more war.  But we should not pretend that vaccinations are the solution to a problem.  Those who subscribe to vaccination hold onto a false hope, so desperate that they want violence brought on those who do not also vaccinate.  (And of course there are those who want the money from the vaccination, and then the money for the autism drugs.)

I love the discovery of inoculation, and the science behind it.  If and when an epidemic breaks out, I'll be the first to dip my needle in your sore and stick myself (variolation), and take my chances.  I like my whiskey neat, too.  What I think is crazy is the cocktail of wild, uncontrolled and dangerous ingredients floating in what BigPharma sells.  Not for me or mine.

Force the Gardasil on your kids if you want, which is ignorantly cruel, but it goes too far when it is forced on everyone.  Better than the regime we have now would be deregulation of medicine.  With a little freedom and competition, we'd see more, better, cheaper, faster disease control.

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An Essential Geography Course In Ten Minutes

There will be a test!   You'll be fascinated.

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Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Dr. Chan in Concord

Dr. James Chan, who concurs (agrees with different reasons) with me about IPR in international trade, is offering a seminar if you are in the Concord, NH area.  Check it out!

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Chemical Attacks and Competition

Chemical attacks are hated and condemned even in war because their killing is indiscriminate, not to mention horrible.  In spite of that, this is how the game is played:

Say there are 100 poison chemicals that are effective in war, we in the West make all 100.

50 of these are "red line" warrants for regime change.  We sell all 50 of these forbidden chemicals to countries (well, they are dual use, you know they can be used in low dosage for killing bugs, high dosage for killing people.)  For example, Sarin.

The other 50 are not on any list, and we do not sell those.  We make them and use those in battle, but we do not sell them to the other side.
Technically speaking, napalm is “a mixture of naphthenic and aliphatic carboxylic acid”. I don’t know about you, but “a mixture of naphthenic and aliphatic carboxylic acid” sounds awfully “chemical” to me, and yet this weapon has been liberally used by the US army to incinerate soldiers (and luckless civilians) in many recent wars, including Gulf War 1.
Get it?  When we use our nasty, indiscriminate 50 chemicals in an attack, no problem.  If any else uses the 50 that happen to be banned, regime change.  It all depends which list of chemicals you draw from.  The ones we sell you, that you cannot use, or the ones we will not sell you, that we can and do use.

We have chemicals we use that we are not supposed to, but hey, mistakes were made, time to move on.  Here is Razia, whose village was not obedient enough to the USMilitary.  The situation called for phosphorus, both illegal and not sold to the other side.  The lucky ones were the other villagers who died.



Don't worry.  Our military hospitals have given her the very best care.  But the lesson to learn is if you just submit absolutely to American Authority, you have nothing to worry about.  Razia's injuries are all Razia's fault, you see, if you believe the USA politicians.

The USA is an active user of deadly banned-in-military-use chemicals, on our own people.  But it is always the fault of those who suffer the consequences, never the fault of those deploying the gas.
Although described as a non-lethal weapon for crowd control, many studies have raised doubts about this classification. As well as creating severe pulmonary damage, CS can also significantly damage the heart and liver.[11]Domestic police use of CS is legal in many countries, however, as the Chemical Weapons Convention prohibits only military use.
This technique of banning one thing for others while allowing its equivalent for ourselves is a technique we see time and again. In USA there is crack and cocaine, both used for purposes of self-medication, and each starts out from the coca leaf.  But in USA, Crack is distributed almost exclusively in the poor inner cities. Cocaine is almost exclusively sold in the wealthier neighborhoods.

As an aside, a Narc friend of mine surmised Crack was designed for the inner cities and welfare: highly addictive, fairly cheap ($10 a hit), with the curious effect that crack heads can go comatose for three days and not die.  They arise from the dead to take another hit.  From his experience, it did not matter if you were a welfare mom or a billionaire, it took every cent you have, and then your welfare payments forever. His hypothesis could be tested forensically because under ex-CIA director  and then Drug Czar VP George Bush, Crack showed up in late 1984 in New York and Los Angeles ghettos simultaneously.  It was an instant hit.   Arrest records and tracing back to the origin could be found out. But that is an aside...

So, given how popular the drug is in the ghetto....
The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 increased penalties for crack cocaine possession and usage. It mandated a mandatory minimum sentence of five years without parole for possession of five grams of crack; to receive the same sentence with powder cocaine one had to have 500 grams.[26]
One form bad, one form acceptable.  "They" must be punished for using what we sell them, "we" give ourselves a pass.  So if you are a "black" inner city dweller, the penalties for self-medicating are 100 to 1 times more severe with crack than coke.   So the wealthy can go on to be president of the USA after a coke bust, but an inner city "black" will go pick cotton on a Texas Prison farm after a crack bust.

cotton-field-prisoners
http://www.motherjones.com/photoessays/2013/04/bruce-jackson-prison-farm/cotton-field-prisoners
Or, another way of looking at it, a personal quantity of Crack can earn you a mandatory spot in the picture above, while a dealer's quantity of coke can be pled away.   And you'd always been told the reason the "black" population of prisons was so high was because the "blacks" did a higher percentage of crimes.  No!  They are in prison because you believe "blacks" do a higher percentage of crime.

In a way, this is still a chemical attack on a population, isn't it?

"They" shop at Safeway and get stuffed with GMO and chemical-laden foods, "we" shop at Whole Foods and get gmo-free organics.  They get sick and have Obamacare inflicted upon them, we get an exception to RomneyObamacare, which is just the Tuskegee Experiments on steroids.

See the pattern?

None of this is secret.  Problem is we have competition,  Thirty-five years ago under Deng Xiaoping, China decided to compete with USA.  Jimmy Carter was president, and said bring it on.  Then came Reagan, George Bush as Vice-president. Then it all changed. We were once excellent competitors, but it seems we've elected to go into a downward spiral.

Today, USA tends to sell weapons to the bad guys, while China tends not to do so.  Part of competition is to develop moral authority, and that is expressed from the commanding heights.  Name a single instance of anyone in the commanding heights of the USA calling for restraint in the USA plans for an attack on Syria.  Not in media.  Not in Medicine.  Not in religion.  Not in labor.  Not in academia.  Not in politics.  No, we had to hear it from Communist China.  Former Communist Russia.  The Vatican.

Our foreign policy for the last 35 years has been isolationist, and it actually unified Communist China and the Vatican!  When a USA president says he will attack another country alone if he has to, to the applause of all in the commanding heights, then that is the apotheosis of isolationism.

Time for USA to do self-criticism, as the Communists would call it, or repent, as the Vatican would call it.  But we need to stop making war on other people, and stop making war in the form of chemical attacks on our own people.

Then we can get back to being competitive, and no longer isolationist.  I want to trade with Syrians, not the al-Qaeda terrorists USA wants to put in power.  I think the Christian churches established by Apostles should be unmolested as they have been under al Assad, not exterminated as they are under the USA allies.  I want to trade with Razia's father, not set his daughter on fire.

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Monday, September 9, 2013

Islam Is The Religion of Peace

Forty years ago, in New York's Attica State Prison, forty people were killed in an uprising that saw many "corrections officers" taken hostage.    Those corrections officers were protected largely by the Muslim inmates.

It was believed that a group of Muslims were responsible for the uprising and the harm of the hostages, when in fact the group of Muslims was protecting the hostages from other inmates. The leader of the Muslims even told the other inmates that if any of the inmates tried to hurt the hostages, that they would "kill [the inmates involved] or die protecting the hostages." The court in Al Jundi v. Mancusi, 113 F.Supp.2d 441 wrote:[20][21]

A number of former Muslim inmates testified that they had been singled out for "special" brutal treatment by troopers and prison officers because they had played an active role in protecting the hostages during the four days before the retaking. Because a number of militant inmates were prepared to do harm to the hostages, Frank "Big Black" Smith, in conjunction with the Muslim leadership, implemented a plan to secure the safety of the hostages during negotiations.[22]

The corrections officers who did die died at the hands of the State Troopers and other Corrections Officers who stormed the prison and retook it it, not allowing negotiations to resolved the crisis.

Imagine that, Muslims who want peace, and the powerful who would rather shoot first, negotiate later.

But then Muslims are adherents to the religion of peace, and they are good at bringing order out of chaos.  History is full of such examples, if anyone wants to look for it.

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The Business of the War in Syria

USA now borrows 55 cents out of every dollar it spends.  Those doing the lending will only do so if there is a reasonable chance of getting paid back.

The war in Syria is about the USA ability to pay back loans.  USA wants North Africa and the Middle East for cheap oil and Afghanistan minerals to have as assets against which to continue borrowing.    China and Russia have said, no, you'll need to come up with something else.  China and Russia will have the Middle East and North Africa.  One problem is the borrowing, another is the debt.
We have had a century of false prosperity based on printed money and credit. In the last 100 years we have seen the creation of the Fed in the US (a central bank owned, created and controlled by private bankers) combined with fractional reserve banking (allowing banks to leverage 10 to 50 times), exploding government debt and a derivatives market of $1.4+ quadrillion. These are the principal reasons why the world economy has expanded in the last century and particularly in the last 40 years. These four extremely shaky legs, Central bank printing, Bank leverage, Government borrowing and Derivatives manufacturing have created a world of delusional wealth and illusory prosperity. Also, there is a total absence of moral and ethical values. We are in the final stages of an era of extreme decadence, an era that sadly cannot and will not have a happy ending.
Now the Middle East is low hanging fruit.  Maybe we'll find something else, like invade Mexico or Brazil.  I hope not, I hope we are at the high water mark for the USA empire, and and back down over Syria ends the isolation USA is now experiencing worldwide due to the neocon policies, and we can re-engage the world in free trade.

Sometimes I listen to Ray Luccia who has had a popular investment-advice radio show for forty years.  he tells people how to handle their situation with 401K and Roth-IRA, etc.  We have a large segment of our population counting credit, and advising people on managing their credit.  Now they use the word "money" but almost no one has any money.

All of those financial assets are credits of some sort, with no asset backing the credit.  Money flows ponzi-style, from newest contributors to first contributors.  In a ponzi-scheme, it folds when someone decides not to play anymore.  In USA, it is a criminal act not to play.

But we have been borrowing the money to pay the first-contributors.  We can go to war with China if they stop lending, but we cannot force them to lend.  So this can end.

Wars have the benefit of the victor takes over and decides the allocation of the spoils.  If we had won in Iraq, we'd be deciding how much Cheney gets, how much Bush gets, etc.  Cheney has oil interests in Syria right now,  and we are risking world war for that.

But back to the sheer time it takes to account for all those trillions in "assets."  Businesses, banks, employees, employers, CPAs, tax collectors policy planners, all going to work every day and spending their lives accounting for.... nothing.  There are no assets backing the numbers on the page.  The only asset is a number on the page.  It is worse than nothing being produced, all of the people who believe they are "set" based on numbers on a page are not producing anything.  We have one army of number pushers assuring another army of non-performers that they are wealthy.  This cannot end well.

But it can.  There is somewhere USA can go without war and neocon destabilization plans and crazy left and right wing political solutions.  We can go back to where we got off track.  Split USA back into 50 countries, with a strictly limited Federal Government.  Return to the rule of law that once protected the environment before the progressives destroyed it.  Return to the peace and prosperity and security we had before the conservatives and the military destroyed it.

How?  Deregulate something.  Anything.  What matches our deficits in scale is the potential of our economy freed of our suppression of USA creativity.  If we were to deregulate money and banking, or medicine, or education, or national defense or the internet, or home building.... anything, we'd come roaring back and leave the rest of the world astonished.  And scrambling to organize around the USAs astonishing success.

Because deregulation is a good thing the powers that be have conditioned you to hate the word.    But in reality freedom leads to peace and prosperity.

Instead, we have yet another war pending because Dick Cheney and his crew want the oil around Syria, and it's pipeline potential.  We'd need truth commissions to show the crazies who now staff the commanding heights just what Bush and Clinton, etc have been up to, but we may now have a prosecutors office ready willing and able to handle this task.    The Vatican, with Pope "who am I to judge" Francis as chief judge.  Let Cheney face a truth commission, and when the facts are out, let him go.  If he finds a million right wing Christians realize they have been had by him, well his protection is his problem.

But it is not really so.  When the crazy fighting stops, good will floods in.  I was in Saigon in April 2010.  I was often asked if I had been there before (as in, as a soldier) by the older folk, but the younger, now the majority of the population, have no experience of the war, and desire to get on with peace and prosperity as they have known it.    Let's get out of Syria and the middle east and get busy with the greatest opportunity we face, making USA free again.

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Sunday, September 8, 2013

Chaos: Landbanking

There is a perfectly good method of property redistribution in USA law called "adverse possession."  In essence, if you use a piece of property belonging to someone else for a fixed time it becomes yours, against the will of the rightful owner.  That time can be anywhere from 7 to 10 years depending on the jurisdiction.  It comes out of common law.

The idea is if someone is simply not using real estate, then someone else can put it to productive use and keep it.  It's a great idea.  Sharia law has the same thing, but a mere three years of non-use means the property is up for grabs.

If Flint Michigan has 40,000 empty lots, then the owners really have abandoned those properties and the adverse possession, from common law, can take care of the problem.  But those whose ideas led to the economic bust have a "neat idea" for the rest of us, they call it lank banking, but I think they mean land banking:
One notable strategy being used nationwide to contest property abandonment is lank banking. Land banks are public authorities created to acquire, hold, manage and develop vacant properties. Land banks aim to convert vacant properties that have been neglected by the open market into productive use, thereby transforming neighborhood liabilities into assets.
"Public authorities" are then in position to reward cronies with prime property without having to mix their labor with the property, which is the entire point.  Their ideas bring more chaos when anarchy would bring order out of chaos.

But the land banks are late to the game, because land banking is what is driving the new housing bubble.  Here is what is happening: pay cash for the house, rent it out, use the equity to get a loan to buy the next, when interest rates are near free.  Can't go wrong.  In 2013, Sixty percent of home sales were all cash.

Except, if you are the poor fool who does it with 2 or 3 houses, when the bust comes, you are sunk.  The  Goldman Sachs folks who are doing it with billions of dollars are doing it with other people's money, and when it goes bust, they will keep the profits, and the taxpayers will cover the losses.  Since no one went to jail before, it will happen again.  Count on it.

Rent, and wait.

Update:  We want to bring democracy to the Middle East.  Here is an example why they fight us... who wants this in their country?
The retired Marine sergeant lost his house on that summer day two years ago through a tax lien sale — an obscure program run by D.C. government that enlists private investors to help the city recover unpaid taxes.
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War Profiteering

Curiouser and Curiouser:  Costco must assiduously avoid letting any Iranian officials buy from Costco anywhere in the world.  So when Iranian diplomats try to stock up on yogurt in Tokyo, sorry, none for you!

And not only yogurt pushing Costco, but a small software biz got into hot water when a Canadian subsidiary sold software to a Ukrainian company that had flights into Iran.
Esterline acknowledged Aug. 30 that back in March, its Canadian subsidiary CMC Electronics sold an $8,814, one-year subscription for a navigation database to a customer called Ukrainian-Mediterranean Airlines.
Book 'em Danno!

But when Western warmongers want to sell poison gas and weapons of mass destruction to Syria-Iran, laissez les bon temps rouler!

In another case, an unidentified U.S. company sold potassium cyanide to a Syrian pediatric hospital in 2006, but made no effort to check whether it was used for treating patients, as the Syrians claimed, or was diverted for making chemical weapons.
According to another leaked cable, the Netherlands discussed how monoethylene glycol, used to manufacture urethane and antifreeze, was shipped by a Dutch concern to the Syrian Ministry of Industry, considered a front for the Syrian military. The Dutch outlined how the chemical could also be used as a precursor for sulfur mustard, and possibly for VX and sarin.

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Internet Tax - Market Fairness Act

A retired police officer and friend of mine talked about the good old days when the decision to handcuff anyone was up to the officer dealing with the situation.  Problem was, white folk were rarely handcuffed, black folk were usually handcuffed.  That was unfair.

So new rules, now everyone gets handcuffed.  There.  Better.

Today we have some states require sales taxes on internet sales, some do not.  So Amazon.com, only to avoid the constant lawsuits from States over taxes, is calling for something Congress is calling Marketplace Fairness Act which of course is a misleading title.  An act has winners and losers, the only question is who wins and who loses.

In this one, small businesses and some consumers lose because the cost of collecting the taxes and comparison shopping will combine to end an advantage, and run people out of business.

For my part I have no real dog in this fight, for small businesses who compete on design have no fear from taxes or amazon, but in principal, whenever we extend a bad idea that vexes some to everyone, the results just make things worse.

Instead of handcuffing everyone, who about we stop picking on blacks?  Instead of taxing everyone, we make all internet sales tax-exempt?  More taxes in the hands of the State just means more of the problems the states foist upon us.

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