Wednesday Worries – Ireland “Fixed” – Who’s Next?
Courtesy of Phil at Phil's Stock World
So many things are pissing me off today.
I got my political outrage out of the way in my earlier post: "Thanks for the Gas Money, Mr. President," so we don't need to talk about that again. Ireland, as of 7:45, has not actually voted to accept the EU's deal, which will pull $20,000 per Irish family directly from national pension funds to pay for the speculative mistakes of Irish Banks. Additionally, the Irish people are being asked to borrow another $75,000 per family from the EU at about 6% interest, also to pay for the speculative mistakes made by the Irish Banks. While this may seem insane - it's only a drop in the bucket compared to what Americans are spending to bail out our own speculators so why shouldn't they join the club?
At least Ireland gets to vote for their obligations, we have a Federal Reserve System where a single man, known as "The Bernank" is able to spend what is now heading towards $3.5Tn of OUR MONEY to bail out his banking buddies. That's $31,818 per American family spent over two years IN ADDITION to the stuff I complained about Obama and our spineless Government spending in the last post.
As I said, things are pissing me off today! I should be in a better mood - we had a fabulous day trading in Member Chat yesterday. In yesterday's post, I closed with "One last stab at making some bearish profits for us (see Morning Alert)" and you can click on that Alert, which was posted on Seeking Alpha and check out our trade ideas for the $10,000 to $50,000 Portfolio which included (at 7:22 am yesterday) QID Jan $10 calls, which opened at $1.80 and finished at $2 (up 11%), DIA Dec $114 puts, which opened at .80 and finished at $1.33 (up 66%), XRT Jan $44 puts, which opened at .35 and finished at .55 (up 57%), USO Jan $36 puts, which opened at .66 and finished at .90 (up 36%), PCLN weekly $400 puts, which opened at $.50 and finished at $1.40 (up 180%) and NFLX Jan $155 puts, which opened at $1.70 and finished at $2.30 (up 35%) but should look much better this morning, where we will exit.
Of course I featured the idea to short NFLX last Thursday in the Morning Post (which you would get at 8:30 every morning in progress if you subscribed!) and we talked about shorting oil in the Weekend Post and I mentioned XRT last week as well so it's not like these are even our "super-secret" trade ideas - this is just the stuff that looked obvious enough to risk our small portfolio plays on (as you don't want to take too much risk in a small portfolio, even when it is aggressive like our virtual $10,000 Portfolio). Once we got into Member Chat for the morning we went with more aggressive trade ideas like PCLN weekly $410 puts at $1.60, which finished the day at $4.20 (up 162%) and 6 other plays that we're not done with yet plus shorts on the oil futures at $90 that worked out very well.
So why am I angry? You can't really have a better day than we had yesterday. Yesterday is the reason we have sat patiently (well kind of patiently) in cash for a month as we finally got an opportunity to commit to a whole bunch of very obvious trades, the most trade ideas I've had in a single day since early September, when we jumped on Uncle Ben's bullish bandwagon. Sure we find things to trade every day but these are the opportunities we wait for. I guess I'm pissed because we had to pull our December short plays off the table because the cartoon bears have warned us that they will be "Buying the F'ing Dips" and we know better than to argue with cartoon bears because it's simplistic little BS premises like that that rule this market. Ah, that's why I'm angry!
As I keep saying, I don't enjoy day trading - it's not satisfying but it's what we do while we wait for real investment opportunities to come along. While it may be exciting to make 100% on a trade in a single day - it's small money and a tedious (and stressful) way to build up a portfolio. I suppose at heart, I'm a long-term investing coupon-clipper but those kind of investors are being chewed up and spit out in this market and, while we found many, many things to buy earlier in the year, now we're down to one or two long-term opportunities a day while most of the rest of the market looks better as a short.
But you can't even stay short past the closing bell. Even as I write this post our paranoia in taking the money and running (our usual strategy) on our quick gains is looking justified as the dollar is, as usual, being shoved off it's overnight highs (used to prop up the Nikkei in our famous "3am Trade") during the slower EU lunch break in order to now goose the US futures to give US markets the best possible open on the least possible amount of volume (ergo cost to the Gang of 12). Despite debasement efforts by Obama and The Bernank yesterday, the dollar still rose back to 80.81 in overnight trading and that sent the Dow futures all the way down to 11,285 but don't despair - they've already been goosed back to 11,350 - just 5 points shy of yesterday's weak close.
See, in a "normal" market we would have simply stayed short because clearly the momentum was down and the fundamentals indicate that all the efforts of Obama, The Bernank, the BOJ, the BOC, the ECB... are "too little, too late" to put the Humpty Dumpty global economy back together again. Some of the fundamentals we're watching:
- German exports declined in October
- Machinery orders fell in Japan for October.
- Speculators are holding the largest commodity positions on record, up 13% from 2008 highs.
- Oil is in a GLUT, with demand off a cliff.
- Mortgage Applications are falling again.
- 15 US States face a $26.7Bn mid-year budget gap.
- The EU is passing tough banking regulations.
- Our Government is expanding the insider trading investigation.
- China is likely to hike interest rates.
- Mortgage Bond yields have leaped to 6-month highs.
- Italy's budget plan is forcing a "no-confidence" vote for Berlusconi.
- US Retailers are cutting earnings forecasts and sitting on big inventories.
These are just TODAY'S headlines and they all add up to RISK. Lack of risk recognition by the markets was the primary reason I called for cash in early November. We are approaching 2008 pre-crash market highs with many stock trading higher than they were then on LESS revenues than they had at the time. Meanwhile, 10% of our population is unemployed, consumer credit is down by over $1,000,000,000 (15%), household wealth is down 20% and income is down while the CPI, even by BS Government measures, is up 5% since then, effectively giving those people who still have jobs 5% less to spend anyway.
And when you consider that discretionary income is just 20% of income - if the 80% they HAVE to spend went up 5%, then that's 4% of discretionary income gone, which is 20% of discretionary income out the window - FOR THE PEOPLE WHO ARE STILL WORKING. The other 10% have ZERO to spend and that's not good either. All of this is being ignored as "investors" buy stocks on the hopes that they will expand sales internationally and keep cutting costs despite the same inflation the speculators are using to justify their very high valuations. We're effectively writing off the US economy and placing all of our bullish eggs in the global basket - even though they have 20% unemployment "over there." - that's kind of nuts, don't you think?
I'm not even going to ask if the above
chart (from Calculated Risk) disturbs you
. Clearly, from the results of the last election, it does not. We are over 6M jobs away from recovery and we added less than 40,000 last month. At least in Ireland, their population is shrinking, with 65,500 people (1.5%) abandoning the sinking ship as of April of this year. That's less likely to happen in America as Mexico is not that attractive and Canada doesn't want us and most people can't afford to move anyway as they are upside down on their mortgages so we, as a people, sit and wait. We sit and wait for something good to happen. Any minute now... Something good is bound to happen... NOW! OK, maybe not now but really soon - something good has got to happen, right?
That pretty much sums up our national policy - we don't actually do anything to create jobs but if we sprinkle enough magical fairy money on the rich, we're sure they'll start hiring people real soon! Maybe as soon as they are done merging and acquiring smaller companies with all that money where they then create efficiencies by laying off 50,000 people a month (Challenger Job Cut Report) while more and more jobs are outsourced every day ($6Tn worth of jobs are currently outsourced). And why not? There are huge tax advantages to outsourcing US jobs - tax advantages that our President is perpetuating as he bends over and accepts the massive Republican tax cuts for the wealthy on behalf of the American people.
Did I mention I was pissed? Good, then moving along...
So we kept our Jan shorts and didn't add any longs because we expect a bounce on the usual opening nonsense but I don't see enough dry powder left for the bulls to take us over that critical Dow 11,500 mark. Meanwhile, CAT is way too high and they are a Dow component, as are XOM, CVX, IBM and MCD - all stocks that are major components in the price-weighted Dow and are more likely to pull back than move higher.
EU money printing will not inflate our stocks - it may even boost the Buck and that would be bad for commodities, who had a pretty rough day yesterday (and we shorted a few). I wish it were easier and I wish we could just say "CAT is overbought so we're going short" but the fundamentals of the stock are trumped by rumors of infinite Chinese demand and inflation expectations that somehow ignore the negative impact of rising steel prices and increasing borrowing costs on the company. Of course the weak-dollar expectations have everyone moving into stocks, which are just another form of commodity to trade and, even as I write this, the dollar is being jammed back below 80.50 to goose the US open.
At least we know how this game is rigged and we can have lots of fun betting the suckers never do find that red queen but what a shame that this is what the global economy has been reduced to - a shell game - and it's an empty shell at that!
The openness and transparency WikiLeaks has given us is invaluable—which is why I’m donating $20,000 to get its founder out of jail.
Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.
Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.
We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.
So why is WikiLeaks, after performing such an important public service, under such vicious attack? Because they have outed and embarrassed those who have covered up the truth. The assault on them has been over the top:
**Sen. Joe Lieberman says WikiLeaks "has violated the Espionage Act."
**The New Yorker's George Packer calls Assange "super-secretive, thin-skinned, [and] megalomaniacal."
**Sarah Palin claims he's "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands" whom we should pursue "with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders."
**Democrat Bob Beckel (Walter Mondale's 1984 campaign manager) said about Assange on Fox: "A dead man can't leak stuff... there's only one way to do it: Illegally shoot the son of a bitch."
**Republican Mary Matalin says "he's a psychopath, a sociopath ... He's a terrorist."
**Rep. Peter A. King calls WikiLeaks a "terrorist organization."
And indeed they are! They exist to terrorize the liars and warmongers who have brought ruin to our nation and to others. Perhaps the next war won't be so easy because the tables have been turned—and now it's Big Brother who's being watched… by us!
WikiLeaks deserves our thanks for shining a huge spotlight on all this. But some in the corporate-owned press have dismissed the importance of WikiLeaks ("they've released little that's new!") or have painted them as simple anarchists ("WikiLeaks just releases everything without any editorial control!"). WikiLeaks exists, in part, because the mainstream media has failed to live up to its responsibility. The corporate owners have decimated newsrooms, making it impossible for good journalists to do their job. There's no time or money anymore for investigative journalism. Simply put, investors don't want those stories exposed. They like their secrets kept… as secrets.
I ask you to imagine how much different our world would be if WikiLeaks had existed 10 years ago. Take a look at this photo. That's Mr. Bush about to be handed a "secret" document on August 6th, 2001. Its heading read: "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." And on those pages it said the FBI had discovered "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings." Bush decided to ignore it and went fishing for the next four weeks.
Supporters of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, hold posters during a protest in front of the British Embassy in Madrid, Spain on Dec. 11, 2010. (Photo: Stringer / AP Photo)
But if that document had been leaked, how would you or I have reacted? What would Congress or the FAA have done? Was there not a greater chance that someone, somewhere would have done something if all of us knew about bin Laden's impending attack using hijacked planes?
robert shumake
Oprah began her new cable television network -- OWN -- at noon on New Year's Day, a network dedicated to the total and complete absence of mean-spiritedness.
In this week's News and Notes, a celebrity spotting at a Timberwolves game and what's ahead for the Vikes during their off season.
John Roberts, the veteran newsman who co-hosted CNN's American Morning for three years, is joining the competition. “We are excited to welcome Jo...
robert shumake detroitOprah began her new cable television network -- OWN -- at noon on New Year's Day, a network dedicated to the total and complete absence of mean-spiritedness.
In this week's News and Notes, a celebrity spotting at a Timberwolves game and what's ahead for the Vikes during their off season.
John Roberts, the veteran newsman who co-hosted CNN's American Morning for three years, is joining the competition. “We are excited to welcome Jo...
robert shumake detroitWednesday Worries – Ireland “Fixed” – Who’s Next?
Courtesy of Phil at Phil's Stock World
So many things are pissing me off today.
I got my political outrage out of the way in my earlier post: "Thanks for the Gas Money, Mr. President," so we don't need to talk about that again. Ireland, as of 7:45, has not actually voted to accept the EU's deal, which will pull $20,000 per Irish family directly from national pension funds to pay for the speculative mistakes of Irish Banks. Additionally, the Irish people are being asked to borrow another $75,000 per family from the EU at about 6% interest, also to pay for the speculative mistakes made by the Irish Banks. While this may seem insane - it's only a drop in the bucket compared to what Americans are spending to bail out our own speculators so why shouldn't they join the club?
At least Ireland gets to vote for their obligations, we have a Federal Reserve System where a single man, known as "The Bernank" is able to spend what is now heading towards $3.5Tn of OUR MONEY to bail out his banking buddies. That's $31,818 per American family spent over two years IN ADDITION to the stuff I complained about Obama and our spineless Government spending in the last post.
As I said, things are pissing me off today! I should be in a better mood - we had a fabulous day trading in Member Chat yesterday. In yesterday's post, I closed with "One last stab at making some bearish profits for us (see Morning Alert)" and you can click on that Alert, which was posted on Seeking Alpha and check out our trade ideas for the $10,000 to $50,000 Portfolio which included (at 7:22 am yesterday) QID Jan $10 calls, which opened at $1.80 and finished at $2 (up 11%), DIA Dec $114 puts, which opened at .80 and finished at $1.33 (up 66%), XRT Jan $44 puts, which opened at .35 and finished at .55 (up 57%), USO Jan $36 puts, which opened at .66 and finished at .90 (up 36%), PCLN weekly $400 puts, which opened at $.50 and finished at $1.40 (up 180%) and NFLX Jan $155 puts, which opened at $1.70 and finished at $2.30 (up 35%) but should look much better this morning, where we will exit.
Of course I featured the idea to short NFLX last Thursday in the Morning Post (which you would get at 8:30 every morning in progress if you subscribed!) and we talked about shorting oil in the Weekend Post and I mentioned XRT last week as well so it's not like these are even our "super-secret" trade ideas - this is just the stuff that looked obvious enough to risk our small portfolio plays on (as you don't want to take too much risk in a small portfolio, even when it is aggressive like our virtual $10,000 Portfolio). Once we got into Member Chat for the morning we went with more aggressive trade ideas like PCLN weekly $410 puts at $1.60, which finished the day at $4.20 (up 162%) and 6 other plays that we're not done with yet plus shorts on the oil futures at $90 that worked out very well.
So why am I angry? You can't really have a better day than we had yesterday. Yesterday is the reason we have sat patiently (well kind of patiently) in cash for a month as we finally got an opportunity to commit to a whole bunch of very obvious trades, the most trade ideas I've had in a single day since early September, when we jumped on Uncle Ben's bullish bandwagon. Sure we find things to trade every day but these are the opportunities we wait for. I guess I'm pissed because we had to pull our December short plays off the table because the cartoon bears have warned us that they will be "Buying the F'ing Dips" and we know better than to argue with cartoon bears because it's simplistic little BS premises like that that rule this market. Ah, that's why I'm angry!
As I keep saying, I don't enjoy day trading - it's not satisfying but it's what we do while we wait for real investment opportunities to come along. While it may be exciting to make 100% on a trade in a single day - it's small money and a tedious (and stressful) way to build up a portfolio. I suppose at heart, I'm a long-term investing coupon-clipper but those kind of investors are being chewed up and spit out in this market and, while we found many, many things to buy earlier in the year, now we're down to one or two long-term opportunities a day while most of the rest of the market looks better as a short.
But you can't even stay short past the closing bell. Even as I write this post our paranoia in taking the money and running (our usual strategy) on our quick gains is looking justified as the dollar is, as usual, being shoved off it's overnight highs (used to prop up the Nikkei in our famous "3am Trade") during the slower EU lunch break in order to now goose the US futures to give US markets the best possible open on the least possible amount of volume (ergo cost to the Gang of 12). Despite debasement efforts by Obama and The Bernank yesterday, the dollar still rose back to 80.81 in overnight trading and that sent the Dow futures all the way down to 11,285 but don't despair - they've already been goosed back to 11,350 - just 5 points shy of yesterday's weak close.
See, in a "normal" market we would have simply stayed short because clearly the momentum was down and the fundamentals indicate that all the efforts of Obama, The Bernank, the BOJ, the BOC, the ECB... are "too little, too late" to put the Humpty Dumpty global economy back together again. Some of the fundamentals we're watching:
- German exports declined in October
- Machinery orders fell in Japan for October.
- Speculators are holding the largest commodity positions on record, up 13% from 2008 highs.
- Oil is in a GLUT, with demand off a cliff.
- Mortgage Applications are falling again.
- 15 US States face a $26.7Bn mid-year budget gap.
- The EU is passing tough banking regulations.
- Our Government is expanding the insider trading investigation.
- China is likely to hike interest rates.
- Mortgage Bond yields have leaped to 6-month highs.
- Italy's budget plan is forcing a "no-confidence" vote for Berlusconi.
- US Retailers are cutting earnings forecasts and sitting on big inventories.
These are just TODAY'S headlines and they all add up to RISK. Lack of risk recognition by the markets was the primary reason I called for cash in early November. We are approaching 2008 pre-crash market highs with many stock trading higher than they were then on LESS revenues than they had at the time. Meanwhile, 10% of our population is unemployed, consumer credit is down by over $1,000,000,000 (15%), household wealth is down 20% and income is down while the CPI, even by BS Government measures, is up 5% since then, effectively giving those people who still have jobs 5% less to spend anyway.
And when you consider that discretionary income is just 20% of income - if the 80% they HAVE to spend went up 5%, then that's 4% of discretionary income gone, which is 20% of discretionary income out the window - FOR THE PEOPLE WHO ARE STILL WORKING. The other 10% have ZERO to spend and that's not good either. All of this is being ignored as "investors" buy stocks on the hopes that they will expand sales internationally and keep cutting costs despite the same inflation the speculators are using to justify their very high valuations. We're effectively writing off the US economy and placing all of our bullish eggs in the global basket - even though they have 20% unemployment "over there." - that's kind of nuts, don't you think?
I'm not even going to ask if the above
chart (from Calculated Risk) disturbs you
. Clearly, from the results of the last election, it does not. We are over 6M jobs away from recovery and we added less than 40,000 last month. At least in Ireland, their population is shrinking, with 65,500 people (1.5%) abandoning the sinking ship as of April of this year. That's less likely to happen in America as Mexico is not that attractive and Canada doesn't want us and most people can't afford to move anyway as they are upside down on their mortgages so we, as a people, sit and wait. We sit and wait for something good to happen. Any minute now... Something good is bound to happen... NOW! OK, maybe not now but really soon - something good has got to happen, right?
That pretty much sums up our national policy - we don't actually do anything to create jobs but if we sprinkle enough magical fairy money on the rich, we're sure they'll start hiring people real soon! Maybe as soon as they are done merging and acquiring smaller companies with all that money where they then create efficiencies by laying off 50,000 people a month (Challenger Job Cut Report) while more and more jobs are outsourced every day ($6Tn worth of jobs are currently outsourced). And why not? There are huge tax advantages to outsourcing US jobs - tax advantages that our President is perpetuating as he bends over and accepts the massive Republican tax cuts for the wealthy on behalf of the American people.
Did I mention I was pissed? Good, then moving along...
So we kept our Jan shorts and didn't add any longs because we expect a bounce on the usual opening nonsense but I don't see enough dry powder left for the bulls to take us over that critical Dow 11,500 mark. Meanwhile, CAT is way too high and they are a Dow component, as are XOM, CVX, IBM and MCD - all stocks that are major components in the price-weighted Dow and are more likely to pull back than move higher.
EU money printing will not inflate our stocks - it may even boost the Buck and that would be bad for commodities, who had a pretty rough day yesterday (and we shorted a few). I wish it were easier and I wish we could just say "CAT is overbought so we're going short" but the fundamentals of the stock are trumped by rumors of infinite Chinese demand and inflation expectations that somehow ignore the negative impact of rising steel prices and increasing borrowing costs on the company. Of course the weak-dollar expectations have everyone moving into stocks, which are just another form of commodity to trade and, even as I write this, the dollar is being jammed back below 80.50 to goose the US open.
At least we know how this game is rigged and we can have lots of fun betting the suckers never do find that red queen but what a shame that this is what the global economy has been reduced to - a shell game - and it's an empty shell at that!
The openness and transparency WikiLeaks has given us is invaluable—which is why I’m donating $20,000 to get its founder out of jail.
Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.
Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.
We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.
So why is WikiLeaks, after performing such an important public service, under such vicious attack? Because they have outed and embarrassed those who have covered up the truth. The assault on them has been over the top:
**Sen. Joe Lieberman says WikiLeaks "has violated the Espionage Act."
**The New Yorker's George Packer calls Assange "super-secretive, thin-skinned, [and] megalomaniacal."
**Sarah Palin claims he's "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands" whom we should pursue "with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders."
**Democrat Bob Beckel (Walter Mondale's 1984 campaign manager) said about Assange on Fox: "A dead man can't leak stuff... there's only one way to do it: Illegally shoot the son of a bitch."
**Republican Mary Matalin says "he's a psychopath, a sociopath ... He's a terrorist."
**Rep. Peter A. King calls WikiLeaks a "terrorist organization."
And indeed they are! They exist to terrorize the liars and warmongers who have brought ruin to our nation and to others. Perhaps the next war won't be so easy because the tables have been turned—and now it's Big Brother who's being watched… by us!
WikiLeaks deserves our thanks for shining a huge spotlight on all this. But some in the corporate-owned press have dismissed the importance of WikiLeaks ("they've released little that's new!") or have painted them as simple anarchists ("WikiLeaks just releases everything without any editorial control!"). WikiLeaks exists, in part, because the mainstream media has failed to live up to its responsibility. The corporate owners have decimated newsrooms, making it impossible for good journalists to do their job. There's no time or money anymore for investigative journalism. Simply put, investors don't want those stories exposed. They like their secrets kept… as secrets.
I ask you to imagine how much different our world would be if WikiLeaks had existed 10 years ago. Take a look at this photo. That's Mr. Bush about to be handed a "secret" document on August 6th, 2001. Its heading read: "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." And on those pages it said the FBI had discovered "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings." Bush decided to ignore it and went fishing for the next four weeks.
Supporters of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, hold posters during a protest in front of the British Embassy in Madrid, Spain on Dec. 11, 2010. (Photo: Stringer / AP Photo)
But if that document had been leaked, how would you or I have reacted? What would Congress or the FAA have done? Was there not a greater chance that someone, somewhere would have done something if all of us knew about bin Laden's impending attack using hijacked planes?
robert shumake detroit
robert shumakeOprah began her new cable television network -- OWN -- at noon on New Year's Day, a network dedicated to the total and complete absence of mean-spiritedness.
In this week's News and Notes, a celebrity spotting at a Timberwolves game and what's ahead for the Vikes during their off season.
John Roberts, the veteran newsman who co-hosted CNN's American Morning for three years, is joining the competition. “We are excited to welcome Jo...
robert shumakeOprah began her new cable television network -- OWN -- at noon on New Year's Day, a network dedicated to the total and complete absence of mean-spiritedness.
In this week's News and Notes, a celebrity spotting at a Timberwolves game and what's ahead for the Vikes during their off season.
John Roberts, the veteran newsman who co-hosted CNN's American Morning for three years, is joining the competition. “We are excited to welcome Jo...
robert shumake Despite contentions by its most ardent fans, we all know that professional wrestling is not a real sport. It is instead a highly choreographed imitation of competitive wrestling designed to elicit strong emotional reactions through compelling enactments of real violence between two combatants. But as true competition, pro wrestling is indeed an enterprise, but ultimately a fake.
Professional wrestling has parallels in the world of political commentary. The main feature is Rush Limbaugh, whose brand of entertainment like professional wrestling is designed to elicit strong emotional reactions from his equally ardent fans. Rush Limbaugh is to real, responsible journalism what professional wrestlers are to real sport. His act is calculatedly constructed to deceive the public into thinking there is real meaning and substance behind the doctrines he communicates, but it is a ruse. His fans do however buy the exaggerations and lies as truth. Similarly, fans of professional wrestling regularly claim the sport is "real" like the blogger listed as a link on this article who says that professional wrestlers are the best athletes in the world. People apparently love to be deceived when it affirms their vicarious need to feel empowered in support of their own beliefs and interests.
But of course we must consider that even professional wrestlers themselves do not consider the sport real. On March 3, 2009, David Asman on foxbusiness.com wrote: "We all know that professional wrestling isn't real. I once interviewed "The Rock" and asked him how much of what happens in the ring is rigged. He looked at me like I was an idiot and said: "All of it!"
Another professional wrestler had this to say about fans: "The only thing that scares me about my fans is that they can vote and breed." But he was still willing to take their money. The intelligence of his fan base was no reason to decline the profit he made from a fake sport.
The exact same thing can be said of Limbaugh, whose fan legions call themselves "dittoheads" while fancying themselves the independent thinkers of our generation. Rush insists his dogmatic peregrinations somehow represent America's validated best interests. This willing self-deception is the foundation for the professional sport of political partisanship. If patriotism really is the last refuge of scoundrels, then we should ask why Limbaugh is so regularly seen charging out the back of the wrestling cage in an effort to prove himself the King of all patriots. He is the scoundrel of all scoundrels, the kind of overblown personality pro wrestling fans just love. Hulk Hogan. Stone Cold Steve Austin. These invented personalities have mass appeal to the disenchanted.
His fans do not appear to notice either that Limbaugh has pursued his success selfishly and with an almost disdainful attitude toward his listening audience. He often appears not to trust his own listeners to give an opinion unless they first fawn and grovel before his media throne. At the slightest hint of on-air resistance, Limbaugh's engineer flips the dump button or else Rush begins talking over his callers with disrespectful glee. On the rare occasions when he feels listeners do have a valid point, it is usually to confirm one of his own, self-centered Rush-isms. "You are absolutely correct!" he will bluster, then use the caller's pseudo-wisdom to create more of his own self-aggrandizing propaganda. Thus the wrestler is also ringmaster.
Limbaugh is not above lifting a verbal chair or two to bash heads when the occasional liberal caller is allowed to enter the Limbaugh ring. The topics of these wicked interventions are always chosen carefully to allow Rush to sneak up on the unsuspecting caller halfway through the conversation and smack him in the back with a snappy comment before an impending break in the show. The whole production is choreographed for impact and does not reflect any sort of real dialogue on any subject of consequence. Mostly the show features gross exaggerations of public statements by politicians Limbaugh does not like. Some--in fact most--of these exaggerations qualify as outright lies about the nature and context of what has been said.
Limbaugh's twisted practice of misappropriating quotes and shading truths is so convoluted it almost defies qualitative analysis. But we can see how Limbaugh plays his game in what he had to say about a speech given in Egypt by President Barack Obama, who was seeking to impress upon Muslims around the world that America does not having anything against the Muslim religion as a faith. This is what the President said: "[I]f you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."
This is how Limbaugh characterized that statement: "Well, that's what Obama said. He went over there and he said that the United States is a Muslim country."
This is a lie. That is not at all what Barack Obama said or what he meant in noting the population of Muslims in America. Obama was fairly representing a fact about the population of Muslims in America as compared to other nations around the world. But Limbaugh ignored that fact in favor of misrepresenting the President's real meaning as a scare tactic to incite his listeners who are coaxed to view all Muslims as potential terrorists. This is not only irresponsible, it is bigoted, dangerous and potentially libelous behavior. Let us note that definition of libel is "anything that is defamatory or that maliciously or damagingly misrepresents." Limbaugh's many distortions of this order are not only potentially libelous, they might even be characterized as a form of treason, which is defined thus, "a violation of allegiance to one's sovereign or to one's state." Of course Limbaugh's criticisms of Obama and others he despises are generally protected the right to free speech as guaranteed under the Consitution. But when free speech damages the legitimate and documented intent of a public official, then the parties responsible should be held legally accountable. Limbaugh regularly and frequently crosses this line.
Limbaugh has also built his career on periodic vicious personal attacks on public figures. These include a very public ridicule of then pre-teenager Chelsea Clinton's physical appearance. That takes real courage and character, does it not? But we cannot legislate good taste, nor is it enforceable in any real sense.
Ironically, Limbaugh claims to be taking the high ground on matters personal and political. He apparently fancies himself a real judge of good character. That would include fawning over former Vice President Dick Cheney. Yet Cheney's support for torture interrogation methods actually qualify him as a potential war criminal. Limbaugh himself dismissed torture methods like waterboarding as harmless, joking that treatments like these were no worse than a fraternity prank. Yet when conservative radio personality Mancow Mueller of Chicago actually subjected himself to waterboarding, he quickly pronounced it a very real form of torture. Limbaugh has shown no such willingness to test his lighthearted theories. He prefers to avoid having any of his ideas or opinions subjected to the scrutiny of truth.
Limbaugh's ugly approach to entertainment includes a barely disguised racist streak and misogyny toward women (especially feminists). Limbaugh reserves particular disdain with anything to do with environmental justice and conservation, no surprise since he seems unable to connect any dots between cause and effect because he appears to doubt the verity of scientific principles such as evolution as well. Limbaugh's world is constructed from a literalistic ether, floating above the real world as if it were deigned to form the upper atmosphere our our collective intellect.
What brings Limbaugh's worldview down to earth is the fact that he is a clownish bigot who does genuine harm in this world by attacking the downtrodden and fawning over the rich. His audience appears to embrace this worldview as the solution to the world's problems. Most cynically, Limbaugh regularly plays the pity card over how difficult his job can be fighting for supposedly conservative politics in the Washington arena. Call it trickle-down cynicism. In that regard he has a truckload of fellow wastrels begging for attention.
Fellow political wrestlers Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham all enjoy the bloodsport of heckle-nomics while they make a closeted fortune preaching "woe is me" politics when they run into any real criticism of their views.
This is an age-old ploy of villains everywhere. They would all fit right in with the personality-driven soap opera of professional wrestling where empathy for the bad guys is dispensed along with mercy for the good.
The conservative medial cabal has a knack for packaging mean-spiritedness as an independent voice for justice. Their carefully orchestrated attempts to win public opinion helps them sell books and get rich. That's what they apparently care most about. The supremely vicious and creepily angry Ann Coulter emerges every six months with a new hate book bearing the world "liberal" in its title. She makes the round of talk shows to please herself and her publishers while the public has to put up with her shrewishly incisive comments. Yet what good has she done for society? Can we point to one positive change proposed by Ann Coulter? Will she conceive of something on the order of the geodesic dome in the manner of Buckminster Fuller, who famously said "You do not belong to you, you belong to the universe," before devoting himself to making the world a better place. One cannot conceive of someone so selfishly mean as Ann Coulter saying anything of such selfless or universal consequence. Coulter would call Fuller a full of crap liberal for such a statement. In truth she's just a mean bitch who fascinates people with her tragically overwrought persona. She'd be perfect for women's professional wrestling, that's for sure.
All these hardscrabble conservative personalities know the most important thing in their careers is to never, ever get into a real, fair fight. Yakker Sean Hannity used the emasculated Alan Colmes as a liberal patsy for his Fox News broadcasts. Colmes played his role all too willingly and no doubt pleased the almost exclusively conservative audience that tuned into Hannity's regular lashing of his hapless rival.
That's how Fox News approaches all its intended subjects. When it comes to real news, Fox News is a fake, just like professional wrestling is fake. Fox News was invented for one purpose only: to market the slanted news of conservatives as "fair and balanced" when in actuality Fox News repackages Republican talking points and snarky conservative opinions as actual news.
Like his brothers and sisters in crime, Rush Limbaugh also hates a fair fight. His methods indicate a genuinely fearful man who would rather stab a man in the back than enter the ring to defend his positions in a real contest of will, wit and truth.
He has not entirely gotten away with this act. Limbaugh's worst nemesis over the years has been political author, comedian and former Air American radio host who regularly skewered Limbaugh's lack of truthfulness in every form of media he could throw at him. Limbaugh and Franken's other frequent target Bill O'Reilly probably heaved a sigh or relief when Franken quit his media gig to run for Senator in Minnesota. And won.
Franken quit the media to actually put his money where his mouth was and run for public office. Unlike Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken really does care what happens to America. Running for Senator in Minnesota was a genuine career risk. Yet Franken, humorist though he be, has ever been a truth-seeker. His liberal credentials flow from wanting to know why things work, and how.
Limbaugh by comparison is decidedly incurious in this area of intellectual endeavor. He thinks he already knows how everything works. But to paraphrase Francis Bacon, "If you should always begin with certainties, you will most often end in doubt." No wonder Rush Limbaugh was a fan of George W. Bush, another man known for his incurably incurious approach to governance.
Limbaugh does not seem like a man who will ever run for election. Instead he seems to prefer his role as political professional wrestler where his ideas are part of the scripted fight against liberalism. Like Ann Coulter and the rest of the conservative cabal, the spoutings of Rush Limbaugh have never produced any real, positive social change. He lives in apparent fear that he should ever have to reconcile his carelessly constructed web of lies to reality.
Secretly he seems embittered by this fact, apparently aware he has already been exposed as a charlatan and fake. His personal life turned out to be a massive mess of illegal drugs and deception. That is why he clings to his fans in a love/hate relationship that seems to drive him increasingly mad with fervor. He is like an amalgam of the opium-smoking worm and Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. Supremely self-possessed and crazy as a loon.
For these reasons Limbaugh can no longer even afford to try represent the truth. It is not in his nature. Instead he blathers on about his political prejudices even as he struggles with an off-the scale insecurity.
Limbaugh is a professional wrestler past his prime and pitifully adorned in royal robes, thick in the middle and even thicker in the head. He knows is time is short, and that is why he yells so loud. There is a fine line between demanding attention and expressing your worst fears in public. In Limbaugh's case those fears center on being discredited and ultimately ignored.
From there it is a short trip to the B circuit of political pro wrestling, where even the winners are losers once they leave the ring.
robert shumakeOprah began her new cable television network -- OWN -- at noon on New Year's Day, a network dedicated to the total and complete absence of mean-spiritedness.
In this week's News and Notes, a celebrity spotting at a Timberwolves game and what's ahead for the Vikes during their off season.
John Roberts, the veteran newsman who co-hosted CNN's American Morning for three years, is joining the competition. “We are excited to welcome Jo...
robert shumake
robert shumake detroitWednesday Worries – Ireland “Fixed” – Who’s Next?
Courtesy of Phil at Phil's Stock World
So many things are pissing me off today.
I got my political outrage out of the way in my earlier post: "Thanks for the Gas Money, Mr. President," so we don't need to talk about that again. Ireland, as of 7:45, has not actually voted to accept the EU's deal, which will pull $20,000 per Irish family directly from national pension funds to pay for the speculative mistakes of Irish Banks. Additionally, the Irish people are being asked to borrow another $75,000 per family from the EU at about 6% interest, also to pay for the speculative mistakes made by the Irish Banks. While this may seem insane - it's only a drop in the bucket compared to what Americans are spending to bail out our own speculators so why shouldn't they join the club?
At least Ireland gets to vote for their obligations, we have a Federal Reserve System where a single man, known as "The Bernank" is able to spend what is now heading towards $3.5Tn of OUR MONEY to bail out his banking buddies. That's $31,818 per American family spent over two years IN ADDITION to the stuff I complained about Obama and our spineless Government spending in the last post.
As I said, things are pissing me off today! I should be in a better mood - we had a fabulous day trading in Member Chat yesterday. In yesterday's post, I closed with "One last stab at making some bearish profits for us (see Morning Alert)" and you can click on that Alert, which was posted on Seeking Alpha and check out our trade ideas for the $10,000 to $50,000 Portfolio which included (at 7:22 am yesterday) QID Jan $10 calls, which opened at $1.80 and finished at $2 (up 11%), DIA Dec $114 puts, which opened at .80 and finished at $1.33 (up 66%), XRT Jan $44 puts, which opened at .35 and finished at .55 (up 57%), USO Jan $36 puts, which opened at .66 and finished at .90 (up 36%), PCLN weekly $400 puts, which opened at $.50 and finished at $1.40 (up 180%) and NFLX Jan $155 puts, which opened at $1.70 and finished at $2.30 (up 35%) but should look much better this morning, where we will exit.
Of course I featured the idea to short NFLX last Thursday in the Morning Post (which you would get at 8:30 every morning in progress if you subscribed!) and we talked about shorting oil in the Weekend Post and I mentioned XRT last week as well so it's not like these are even our "super-secret" trade ideas - this is just the stuff that looked obvious enough to risk our small portfolio plays on (as you don't want to take too much risk in a small portfolio, even when it is aggressive like our virtual $10,000 Portfolio). Once we got into Member Chat for the morning we went with more aggressive trade ideas like PCLN weekly $410 puts at $1.60, which finished the day at $4.20 (up 162%) and 6 other plays that we're not done with yet plus shorts on the oil futures at $90 that worked out very well.
So why am I angry? You can't really have a better day than we had yesterday. Yesterday is the reason we have sat patiently (well kind of patiently) in cash for a month as we finally got an opportunity to commit to a whole bunch of very obvious trades, the most trade ideas I've had in a single day since early September, when we jumped on Uncle Ben's bullish bandwagon. Sure we find things to trade every day but these are the opportunities we wait for. I guess I'm pissed because we had to pull our December short plays off the table because the cartoon bears have warned us that they will be "Buying the F'ing Dips" and we know better than to argue with cartoon bears because it's simplistic little BS premises like that that rule this market. Ah, that's why I'm angry!
As I keep saying, I don't enjoy day trading - it's not satisfying but it's what we do while we wait for real investment opportunities to come along. While it may be exciting to make 100% on a trade in a single day - it's small money and a tedious (and stressful) way to build up a portfolio. I suppose at heart, I'm a long-term investing coupon-clipper but those kind of investors are being chewed up and spit out in this market and, while we found many, many things to buy earlier in the year, now we're down to one or two long-term opportunities a day while most of the rest of the market looks better as a short.
But you can't even stay short past the closing bell. Even as I write this post our paranoia in taking the money and running (our usual strategy) on our quick gains is looking justified as the dollar is, as usual, being shoved off it's overnight highs (used to prop up the Nikkei in our famous "3am Trade") during the slower EU lunch break in order to now goose the US futures to give US markets the best possible open on the least possible amount of volume (ergo cost to the Gang of 12). Despite debasement efforts by Obama and The Bernank yesterday, the dollar still rose back to 80.81 in overnight trading and that sent the Dow futures all the way down to 11,285 but don't despair - they've already been goosed back to 11,350 - just 5 points shy of yesterday's weak close.
See, in a "normal" market we would have simply stayed short because clearly the momentum was down and the fundamentals indicate that all the efforts of Obama, The Bernank, the BOJ, the BOC, the ECB... are "too little, too late" to put the Humpty Dumpty global economy back together again. Some of the fundamentals we're watching:
- German exports declined in October
- Machinery orders fell in Japan for October.
- Speculators are holding the largest commodity positions on record, up 13% from 2008 highs.
- Oil is in a GLUT, with demand off a cliff.
- Mortgage Applications are falling again.
- 15 US States face a $26.7Bn mid-year budget gap.
- The EU is passing tough banking regulations.
- Our Government is expanding the insider trading investigation.
- China is likely to hike interest rates.
- Mortgage Bond yields have leaped to 6-month highs.
- Italy's budget plan is forcing a "no-confidence" vote for Berlusconi.
- US Retailers are cutting earnings forecasts and sitting on big inventories.
These are just TODAY'S headlines and they all add up to RISK. Lack of risk recognition by the markets was the primary reason I called for cash in early November. We are approaching 2008 pre-crash market highs with many stock trading higher than they were then on LESS revenues than they had at the time. Meanwhile, 10% of our population is unemployed, consumer credit is down by over $1,000,000,000 (15%), household wealth is down 20% and income is down while the CPI, even by BS Government measures, is up 5% since then, effectively giving those people who still have jobs 5% less to spend anyway.
And when you consider that discretionary income is just 20% of income - if the 80% they HAVE to spend went up 5%, then that's 4% of discretionary income gone, which is 20% of discretionary income out the window - FOR THE PEOPLE WHO ARE STILL WORKING. The other 10% have ZERO to spend and that's not good either. All of this is being ignored as "investors" buy stocks on the hopes that they will expand sales internationally and keep cutting costs despite the same inflation the speculators are using to justify their very high valuations. We're effectively writing off the US economy and placing all of our bullish eggs in the global basket - even though they have 20% unemployment "over there." - that's kind of nuts, don't you think?
I'm not even going to ask if the above
chart (from Calculated Risk) disturbs you
. Clearly, from the results of the last election, it does not. We are over 6M jobs away from recovery and we added less than 40,000 last month. At least in Ireland, their population is shrinking, with 65,500 people (1.5%) abandoning the sinking ship as of April of this year. That's less likely to happen in America as Mexico is not that attractive and Canada doesn't want us and most people can't afford to move anyway as they are upside down on their mortgages so we, as a people, sit and wait. We sit and wait for something good to happen. Any minute now... Something good is bound to happen... NOW! OK, maybe not now but really soon - something good has got to happen, right?
That pretty much sums up our national policy - we don't actually do anything to create jobs but if we sprinkle enough magical fairy money on the rich, we're sure they'll start hiring people real soon! Maybe as soon as they are done merging and acquiring smaller companies with all that money where they then create efficiencies by laying off 50,000 people a month (Challenger Job Cut Report) while more and more jobs are outsourced every day ($6Tn worth of jobs are currently outsourced). And why not? There are huge tax advantages to outsourcing US jobs - tax advantages that our President is perpetuating as he bends over and accepts the massive Republican tax cuts for the wealthy on behalf of the American people.
Did I mention I was pissed? Good, then moving along...
So we kept our Jan shorts and didn't add any longs because we expect a bounce on the usual opening nonsense but I don't see enough dry powder left for the bulls to take us over that critical Dow 11,500 mark. Meanwhile, CAT is way too high and they are a Dow component, as are XOM, CVX, IBM and MCD - all stocks that are major components in the price-weighted Dow and are more likely to pull back than move higher.
EU money printing will not inflate our stocks - it may even boost the Buck and that would be bad for commodities, who had a pretty rough day yesterday (and we shorted a few). I wish it were easier and I wish we could just say "CAT is overbought so we're going short" but the fundamentals of the stock are trumped by rumors of infinite Chinese demand and inflation expectations that somehow ignore the negative impact of rising steel prices and increasing borrowing costs on the company. Of course the weak-dollar expectations have everyone moving into stocks, which are just another form of commodity to trade and, even as I write this, the dollar is being jammed back below 80.50 to goose the US open.
At least we know how this game is rigged and we can have lots of fun betting the suckers never do find that red queen but what a shame that this is what the global economy has been reduced to - a shell game - and it's an empty shell at that!
The openness and transparency WikiLeaks has given us is invaluable—which is why I’m donating $20,000 to get its founder out of jail.
Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.
Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.
We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.
So why is WikiLeaks, after performing such an important public service, under such vicious attack? Because they have outed and embarrassed those who have covered up the truth. The assault on them has been over the top:
**Sen. Joe Lieberman says WikiLeaks "has violated the Espionage Act."
**The New Yorker's George Packer calls Assange "super-secretive, thin-skinned, [and] megalomaniacal."
**Sarah Palin claims he's "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands" whom we should pursue "with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders."
**Democrat Bob Beckel (Walter Mondale's 1984 campaign manager) said about Assange on Fox: "A dead man can't leak stuff... there's only one way to do it: Illegally shoot the son of a bitch."
**Republican Mary Matalin says "he's a psychopath, a sociopath ... He's a terrorist."
**Rep. Peter A. King calls WikiLeaks a "terrorist organization."
And indeed they are! They exist to terrorize the liars and warmongers who have brought ruin to our nation and to others. Perhaps the next war won't be so easy because the tables have been turned—and now it's Big Brother who's being watched… by us!
WikiLeaks deserves our thanks for shining a huge spotlight on all this. But some in the corporate-owned press have dismissed the importance of WikiLeaks ("they've released little that's new!") or have painted them as simple anarchists ("WikiLeaks just releases everything without any editorial control!"). WikiLeaks exists, in part, because the mainstream media has failed to live up to its responsibility. The corporate owners have decimated newsrooms, making it impossible for good journalists to do their job. There's no time or money anymore for investigative journalism. Simply put, investors don't want those stories exposed. They like their secrets kept… as secrets.
I ask you to imagine how much different our world would be if WikiLeaks had existed 10 years ago. Take a look at this photo. That's Mr. Bush about to be handed a "secret" document on August 6th, 2001. Its heading read: "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." And on those pages it said the FBI had discovered "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings." Bush decided to ignore it and went fishing for the next four weeks.
Supporters of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, hold posters during a protest in front of the British Embassy in Madrid, Spain on Dec. 11, 2010. (Photo: Stringer / AP Photo)
But if that document had been leaked, how would you or I have reacted? What would Congress or the FAA have done? Was there not a greater chance that someone, somewhere would have done something if all of us knew about bin Laden's impending attack using hijacked planes?
robert shumake detroit
Oprah began her new cable television network -- OWN -- at noon on New Year's Day, a network dedicated to the total and complete absence of mean-spiritedness.
In this week's News and Notes, a celebrity spotting at a Timberwolves game and what's ahead for the Vikes during their off season.
John Roberts, the veteran newsman who co-hosted CNN's American Morning for three years, is joining the competition. “We are excited to welcome Jo...
robert shumake detroit
robert shumake detroit
