Ireland's middle class sells out

There's a story by David McWilliams, a guy
who's pretty sharp with the Punk Economics
stories. He has the nous to back up his theories
and some good cartoonists too.

However, on this story, he's way off the mark.
He sees how retail in Ireland has shifted radically
to a kind of Emerald E-bay site for selling
household wares.
He sees this as a good omen, because it will
undercut the retail magnates, domestic and foreign.
I don't know, but I wish it would undercut the
Irish bankers who have robbed the country blind.

I think it's a sign that the middle class has woken up
and said,

"why the feck do I have so much crap in my house?"

"times must have been good, before 2010"

"what the feck was I thinking?"

"let's get some more liquidity in our finances"

"sell the whole shed, contents and all"

"and buy Guinness"

They've seen that they "bought" a bigger house

cuz they had bought too much STUFF:

They'll sell up their stuff. But that's the first step to 

selling their house, if they "own" it, and downsizing

because they're essentially broke. Also, they'll

tolerate second-hand tat, which the middle class

never had to do, except for me. I have no pride.

I'm not the only one who has said that the middle 

class is being squeezed, after so much studying and working hard,
for the Man, but in the ever-positive

Ireland, they see the bright side of it. 

You decide:

the Sociopath Assholes' democratic rights

The US has convinced us that corporations are people.
Here's more proof that these Corporate People
are a bunch of sociopathic assholes

["I'll believe a corporation is a person
when Texas executes one"]

1 The assholes know they can always pay off the smart kids-

checkit: Salon

This is why Piketty matters: Davos 

and the real story about economists and the 1 percent

Economists take heat for failing to predict crises, but not disclosing financial ties is a bigger problem

Janine R. Wedel

Davos, that yearly exercise in cognitive dissonance formally known as the World Economic Forum, is over, as is the time-honored, and highly entertaining tradition of Davos-bashing. Jon Stewart rarely lets Davos pass, railing last week at the hypocrisies of “Wealthstock,” where the super-elite wax on about sustainability, but use a reported 1,700 private jets to get to the Swiss ski mecca. Economic blogger Felix Salmon calls it the “sybaritic alpine gabfest.” One of my favorite takedowns is Salon’s simple headline from a year ago: “Welcome to Davos, Where Rich People Talk About Poor People.”

Beyond some of the contradictions that Davos offers are real questions of relevance. Should Davos provide some geo-econo-political crystal ball for the year ahead? As the New York Times put it last week: “Longtime participants of the forum noted that for all the brainpower there in past years, those at the event did not predict significant upheavals in recent years — like the financial crisis or the Arab Spring or the Russian takeover of Crimea.”

Among the attendees at Davos are some of the world’s most elite economists and they, too, have been lambasted since 2008 over the same question: Should they have been able to predict the crisis? This was an issue taken up by one of the most famous among them just as Davos began last week.

I am loath to take issue with much that Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller has to say because his crystal ball seemed to be working very well a decade ago, when his colleagues’ were not. In warning that real estate and stock prices might indeed be “irrationally exuberant” when so many others shrugged, he stood outside the consensus.

But as I read his recent piece defending the work of fellow economists, I thought there was something very much missing. He wonders in part why the public expects economists to have predicted the 2008 crash, when they had never foreseen crises in the past. And he is puzzled by the enormous public anger toward economists this time around, where there was little evidence of such ire in past crises.

Shiller writes:

    One reason may be the perception that many economists were smugly promoting the ‘efficient markets hypothesis’—a view that seemed to rule out a collapse in asset prices. Believing that markets always know best, they dismissed warnings by a few mere mortals (including me) about overpricing of equities and housing. After both markets crashed spectacularly, the profession’s credibility took a direct hit.

But that credibility has also taken a direct hit from another perception. It comes not from what economists were prognosticating, per se, but rather what they were not saying when making those prognostications.

Namely, they were not consistently disclosing their own affiliations outside academe that could compromise their impartiality. And this, as I argue in my book “Unaccountable,” is a violation of public trust that has helped sour the public on the economics profession. Davos, too, has this element: We, the public, get to receive that group’s public pronouncements, but we hardly know what motives might be at play in making those pronouncements.

…

2 The assholes will always try to pay off the rulers-
checkit: Zerohedge

"QE Benefits Mostly The Wealthy" JPMorgan Admits, 

And Lists 8 Ways ECB's QE Will Hurt Everyone Else

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/24/2015 15:21 -0500

Over the past 48 hours, the world has been bombarded with a relentless array of soundbites, originating either at the ECB, or - inexplicably - out of Greece, the place which has been explicitly isolated by Frankfurt, that the European Central Bank's QE will benefit everyone.

Setting the record straight: it won't, and not just in our own words which most are familiar with as we have been repeating them since 2009, but those of JPM's Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, who just said what has been painfully clear to all but the 99% ever since the start of QE, namely this: "The wealth effects that come with QE are not evenly distributing. The boost in equity and housing wealth is mostly benefiting their major owners, i.e. the wealthy."

Thank you JPM. Now if only the central banks will also admit what we have been saying for 6 years, then there will be one less reason for us to continue existing.

And of course, even the benefits to those who stand to gain the most from QE are only temporary. Because the same asset prices which rise thanks to money printing are only transitory, and ultimately mean reverting. To wit: "It potentially creates asset bubbles by lowering asset yields by so much relative to historical norms, that an eventual return to normality will be accompanied with sharp price declines."

So enjoy your music while it lasts dear 0.1%. Collateral eligible for monetization is becoming increasingly scarce and by our calculations there is about 2 years worth of runway left for G3 assets before central bank interventions in the private market result in a complete paralysis of virtually every asset class, and the end of capital markets as we know them.

As for everyone else, here is a list of 8 ways that the ECB's QE will hurt, not help, by way of JP Morgan.

…

more soon

Epidemic of gunshot victims

I'm not interested in US politics, especially the right
to bear/bare arms without the right to a hospital, but
it seems that things are getting way out of control.

I don't want to moralise about the Memorial Day
weekend "festivities" of gang rivalries and crimes
of passion, but I just want to add up the two sides
of this balance sheet and see where it gets us.

If you have a society where the the middle class
is shrinking due to the Oligarch Wars (banking crises,
banking crimes, the Banking Supremacy, TTIP etc),
while being told "the economy is doing just fine"
and "GDP is growing", all bullshit, you tend to
get down on yourself, like it's your fault that you've
sold everything off.

That leads to some rash decision-making and more
than a little frustration. ergo-gunplay!

Next factor, weakening police coverage. I get the
impression that police numbers are down, while
police have shifted to safe work like shaking down
citizens with petty fines (see my other stories),
such that crime is not being reported, then if reported,
is not being chased up and solved.
Then the victimisation of young black males ends
up as the result of citizenry being frustrated at
being shaken down.
Frustration meets no-fear-of-police-investigation

and BOOM.

UPDATE: Now even the courts are screaming for mercy.
As the NY banks have stolen from city, state and country,
including pension money, there is little money for
jailing and trying people in the way we are accustomed to
seeing on television on "Law and Order". It's gonna be:

Lawless & Disorderly

see the story below from Zerohedge

In previous stories, I have expressed the belief
that this will reach crisis point. And it might
even shift to a civil war, on the slightest of
pretexts.
My hope is that it leads to political changes and
the end of the Oligarch Wars with bankers
heads rolling. That's the only way to bring peace. 

Here's the Baltimore policing side, on
The Real News (support them, please, by donating $)
visit: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13921



Here's a news report on the "festivities"
and a ZH story on the jammed up "penile" system:
1
checkit: Guardian
At least 108 people shot over three days in Chicago, Baltimore and New York

American cities reach violent new highs over warm Memorial Day weekend as Baltimore city councilman says: ‘I’ve never seen anything like it’
New York shooting
Police conduct an investigation at the scene of a shooting in Brooklyn’s East New York section on Tuesday. Photograph: Seth Wenig/AP
Lauren Gambino in New York
Tuesday 26 May 2015 17.43 BST
Last modified on Wednesday 27 May 2015 19.57 BST
Shares 3,781
Comments 588
At least 108 people were shot across three of America’s most crime-plagued cities during the holiday weekend, as violent new highs from a nationwide gun epidemic intersected with outcries over police violence in Chicago, Baltimore and New York.

Chicago, which tends to see a dramatic annual increase in firearm-related homicides beginning with warm weather at the Memorial Day holiday, experienced the worst violence. At least 56 people, including a four-year-old girl and three teenagers, were shot between Friday afternoon and early Tuesday morning, according to the Chicago Tribune. Twelve people were killed over the three-day weekend, twice as many as during the same period last year.

In Baltimore, a city still reeling from the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who suffered a spinal injury while in police custody just six weeks ago, Baltimore police said 28 people were shot, nine fatally, over the weekend. The latest spate of shootings makes May the city’s deadliest month since 1999, according to the Baltimore Sun. Since late Sunday, two people were killed and eight injured in shootings across the city.

“It’s deplorable,” city councilman William “Pete” Welch was quoted as saying in the Sun. “The shootings and killings are all over the city. I don’t think any part of the city is immune to this. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The city erupted in protests over Gray’s death, which was the latest in a spate of shootings involving the death of a black resident at the hand of police. Six police officers have been indicted in the incident.
One year after the Isla Vista massacre, a father's gun control mission is personal
Read more

In New York City, 23 people were killed or injured in 16 separate shooting incidents across the city over the long weekend, according to the New York police department. There were five reported homicides over the holiday, including one stabbing. The number of shootings had mostly stayed the same year over year, dipping slightly from 17 incidents reported over the weekend in 2014.
Advertisement

Last year, Memorial Day weekend in the US was marred by a mass killing in Isla Vista, California, when 22-year-old Elliot Rodger stabbed his two roommates and one of their friends to death; shot and killed three people on the University of California, Santa Barbara campus; and injured 14 more before killing himself.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, 9,366 people have been injured by gun violence in America since 1 January 2015, up from 7,145 last year. A total of 4,868 people have been killed since the first of the year, up from 4,123 last year.

That number includes 1,155 children and teens injured or killed and 486 instances of defensive gun use.

In total, there have been 18,935 incidents of gun violence reported in 2015; among them, according to the gun-violence site, 1,705 were officer-involved shootings.

2
checkthis:  Zerohedge
Biker Breastaurant Shootout Arrests Threaten To Blow Hole In County Budget
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/29/2015 15:20 -0400
On Thursday evening we outlined what we called the “pension ponzi”, whereby state and local governments resort to the issuance of pension obligation bonds to plug underfunded pension liabilities. The idea is to arbitrage the spread between coupon payments and what the pension funds can presumably expect to make by investing the proceeds from the bond issue. Here’s a refresher:

Much like transferring a balance on a high interest credit card onto a new card with a teaser rate, this gimmick only works if you do not max out the original card again, because if you do, all you've done is doubled your debt burden. As it relates to pension liabilities, this means that what you absolutely cannot do is use the cash infusion as an excuse to get lax when it comes to pension funding because after all, that's what caused the problem in the first place.
Aside from the rather obvious fact that borrowing huge sums of money to paper over problems has a tendency to promote the very same type of irresponsible behavior that got the borrower into trouble in the first place thus setting the stage for a scenario that ends up being twice as bad as it was initially, there's also the fact that, as documented in these pages extensively, investment return assumptions for public pension plans are often at odds with reality. That is, projecting a 7% return in a world governed by ZIRP and NIRP means that in the best case scenario you are being absurdly optimistic and in a worst case scenario you're likely taking greater risks in an effort to maximize returns.

The reason why officials are resorting to pension obligation bonds is that state and local governments in the US are finding themselves mired in fiscal crises, some of which are the result of poor policy decisions and others stem primarily from exogenous factors such as slumping oil prices. Compounding the problem was an Illinois Supreme Court decision which struck down a pension reform bid. That effectively set a legal precedent and left states and municipalities with fewer options when it comes to closing funding gaps.

We’ve covered all of this extensively and we thought we had likely seen it all when it comes to excuses for state and local budget gaps but in fact we have discovered yet another way for local governments to find themselves fiscally challenged: “true biker shootouts.”

The now infamous biker breastaurant shootout that unfolded two Sundays ago in the parking lot of a Waco, Texas Twin Peaks Sports Bar And Grill led to the arrest of more than 170 bikers and as you might imagine, that type of influx into the prison and legal system doesn’t come cheap. Here’s The Waco Tribune-Herald with more:

As lawyers threaten civil rights lawsuits, seek bond reductions and clamor that their biker clients have done nothing wrong, McLennan County is spending $7,958 a day to house those jailed in the May 17 Twin Peaks shootout.

According to county records, 173 of the 175 people who were arrested in the wake of the deadly brawl, which left nine dead and 18 wounded, remain jailed. Two bonded out with ankle monitors.

The mass arrests are presenting unprecedented challenges to the county’s criminal justice system and have McLennan County officials keeping a close eye on the potential devastating budgetary fallout from the incident. A week and a half after the shooting, the county has spent upward of $80,000 just to house the inmates.

“We’ve never had an issue of this magnitude, but another thing is all the other business here at the courthouse is still going on,” said 19th State District Judge Ralph Strother, the county’s senior judge who presides over one of McLennan County’s two primary felony courts.

It's not just the cost of jailing the bikers that's taking a toll, but the cost of litigation as at least 63 bikers have requested court-appointed attorneys:

Cathy Edwards, the county’s indigent defense coordinator, said of the 175 bikers at the county jail she interviewed, 63 have requested court-appointed attorneys. Edwards said she appointed 14 attorneys Wednesday to represent the bikers, including attorneys from Waco, Corsicana, Temple and Copperas Cove...


Court-appointed defense attorneys are paid $750 for a guilty plea in a first-degree felony case, $500 for a second-degree felony and $400 for third-degree and state jail felonies. They are paid the same fee if cases are dismissed.

If they itemize their time and prefer to be paid hourly, they are paid $75 for out-of-court preparation and $80 an hour while in court.


With the influx of new cases, county officials are keeping a close eye on how the cases are affecting budgets.

And although officials believe the current budget can withstand the pressure, country commissioner Ben Perry admits that "adjustments" may be necessary:

Stan Chambers, the McLennan County auditor, said if many of the bikers are released in coming days or weeks, the current county budget should be sufficient to handle the increased costs

“The commissioners court obviously has to support the decisions that law enforcement and the district attorney’s office make, and any adjustments that need to be made to the budget, we will do so," Perry said.

So, in a hilariously absurd twist of fiscal fate, we can now add "incarcerated bikers" to the list of things which are imperiling state and local government finances in America.

It should also be noted that this serves to validate an important point we made earlier this month. Namely, that when it comes to true biker shootouts, accurately assessing the fallout ahead of time is virtually impossible.

the William Wallace Effect in the British elections

I'm going to oversimplify the recent UK elections
a bit, to make a point about the British electorate.

It seems that a couple of Tory cons actually worked
on enough voters to give the Tory Gang a slim
majority without their lap-dogs the Lib Dems,
the party that spent all its political capital being
used by the admittedly stoopid Tory Gang.

In the world I live in, the Tory Gang had made
far far too many mistakes to be allowed to rule
again, but I couldn't vote, only being a resident.

Although we are living through the death of the two
old Left & Right parties (after the Centrist Left-Right
Twins period of the Naughties), it is not progressing
fast enough in the UK, for a few reasons:

they're not poor enough yet

they're not under the Troika

they're politically meek

they're (often) easily fooled

How they were fooled (but first, the biggest fools):

Tory trick 1: Labour party are tools
Let's first look at how the Labour (sorta "Left")

Party was used like a bunch of blow-up sex dolls,

with stupid smiles around their face holes.

The Scottish Referendum on Independence was 

run about 6 months ago, so that the disaster (either way)

would be fresh in everybody's mind at Election time.

In the campaign to "Save" Scotland and the Union, the 

Tory Gang used various Labour people, like Ed the 

leader, and Gordon Brown, the Leader of the Banking

Crisis (partly caused by himself), to use all their 

Scottish political capital telling the Scots :

Stay

We love you

the Union is a great thing

We'll give you more powers/devolution

Gordon Brown gave a grand political speech,
and then he was chucked in the broom closet.

So, the Union side won 55 to 45%.

What should have happened the next day?

More powers for the Regions, including Scotland, right?

WRONG

London politicians went right back to London, 

doing London political things and 

Returned Scotland to the 

"IGNORE" cabinet

As a result, the Scottish National Party won 

almost every square inch of Scotland in the 

April General (Iconic Democracy) Elections.

The Labour Party lost 40-something seats, but
those wouldn't have been enough to win the
UK anyway.
The rest of the seats that they could have won
were in the real Seat of Power- England. But,
here's how that was stopped:

Tory trick 2: UKIP
UKIP was used to keep everybody's eyes
off the thieving bankers who are STILL stealing
everything in sight, and onto foreigners,
making Labour look weak.
I believe that the Tory Gang used the BBC to
promote UKIP. Just check any official stats.
The Tory spin-meisters in the media also
cooked up a Labour -is- anti-working-class meme,
 giving UKIP most of the
drooling "always voted Labour" working/
welfare class votes. UKIP also gets us
the great chance to chuck out the EU:

the promise of an EU Referendum

The Refrndm to save the London Banks from Tax

Tory trick 3: Fear of a Scottish nation
Their negative attack line was :

Vote for Labour and they'll split the UK

with the help of the SNP

This should piss off all but the most
blinkered Scots. Get ready for Ref #2
and Scottish Freedom.

EU- (UK- Scotland)=

EU (incl. Scotland) without London Banks

winning, if you're not in Rump-UK!

So, all the soul searching in the Labour

Party, after the loss, was not able to 

bring them to admit that most voters

were too stupid to see through all 3

of these ruses. 

This is the one time where I'll actually agree that:

you get the f%^&king moron Gang that you deserve

Now, the election from a Scottish perspective:

Check Frankie Boyle's Election Autopsy 

"the next 5 years will be like the Hunger Games,
without the games"

Fear this nation, okay?

checkit: [a funny review, but they also miss my point]
Guardian

Unpredictably, Dave saw off Ed, Nick and Nige but here comes Boris...

John Crace

On a day when self-sacrifice in the second world war was recognised, three political leaders fell on their swords; the fourth can’t believe his good luck

In a dramatic day for British politics, three political leaders resigned after the Conservative party won an overall majority in the general election

Friday 8 May 2015 17.52 BST

Last modified on Saturday 9 May 2015 00.01 BST

The playbill had to be ripped up overnight. We had been promised a month-long improvised variations of Three Weddings and a Funeral. Instead, we got a straight 90-minute version of Three Funerals and an Astonishment. Or possibly two and a half funerals. At his South Thanet count, Nigel Farage had said he was standing down as Ukip’s party leader, only to almost immediately suggest he would take the summer off and then could be open to offers.

Nick Clegg’s funeral was, confusingly, more of a woodland burial held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, one of London’s more hip and cutting edge venues. In the foyer, were two sculptures of half-eaten scarecrows called Don’t Touch Me; the third was upstairs in the Nash Room. The Lib Dem leader’s extraordinary zen-like calm of the past six weeks had at last deserted him as he announced his resignation. He was back to looking pale, vulnerable and red-eyed.

“History will judge us kindly,” he declared hopefully. It could hardly judge him more harshly than the voters had. The long road to recovery would now be travelled in a minibus. He did have some fight left, though. “Fear and grievance has won,” he said. By the time he finished, he was struggling to hold back the tears. Many of his supporters had less reserve.

Ed Miliband’s resignation was an altogether more polished and formal affair. He arrived at the wood-panelled Institute of Chartered Surveyors with a professional politician’s wave and his wife, Justine, by his side. He even managed to fit in an early gag about finding himself at the epicentre of the most unlikely cult of the 21st century – Milifandom – as he took total responsibility for his party’s failure. Much of the time he sounded as if he was on autopilot, though that was still more impassioned than much of his campaigning had been.

Nor was there any mention of the Ed Stone: a fitting end for it might be to carve the names of those MPs who lost their seats as a result of such an idiotic stunt on the back and stick it outside Labour HQ. Ed wound up by hoping that the battle for his succession would be conducted with decency. Not like the last leadership contest, then. First his brother, then the leadership – Ed had lost two of the things he had loved most dearly. The pathos was impossible to miss.

At Downing Street, David Cameron didn’t even try to conceal his amazement. He had been taken as much by surprise as everyone else. His speech was gracious, decidedly unpumped and hostage to fortune. It’s one he may come to regret in the months ahead. Having campaigned for the past few weeks on the perils of the evil Scots taking over England, he was now promoting himself as the One Britain prime minister. There will be a lot of people both north and south of the border who might find that hard to believe.

But Dave is Dave, and Dave can’t help making things up as he goes along. He just gets a bit carried away. “Having won an overall majority, I will now implement everything in our election manifesto,” he declared. He did get one thing right, by calling the British a good-humoured bunch. We must be. We had just elected the party whose manifesto had been dismissed by the Institute for Fiscal Studies as the most innumerate and un-costed of them all. It was a manifesto predicated on negotiating a coalition rather than enactment. Even as he was speaking, George Osborne was rummaging down the back of the sofa for money he didn’t have, and the poorest and most vulnerable were considering feeding themselves to the dogs before the Tories got there first.

It was a day on which self-sacrifice was not to be dismissed. To compound the surreality of a day that had already turned out to be even more hallucinatory than the hi-vis psychedelic dress that Sam Cam had worn to accompany Dave to the the palace, the last post rang out over Whitehall at 3pm to mark the 70th anniversary of VE Day. There they all were, lined up for a final encore. Nick and Ed had little trouble keeping their heads bowed in solemnity. Dave looked to his right and clocked the SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon.

But his biggest threat was standing just behind him. Boris Johnson is the one Tory who is not quite so thrilled by Dave’s success as the others. Boris hasn’t come back to Westminster just to run some two-bit government department. Dave looked pensive. Strange as it may seem, it was slowly dawning on him that winning an overall majority might just turn out to have been the easy bit.