Corruption

What if Syriza were not just a particularly fluffy breed of miniature Europoodle but actual honest-to-goodness revolutionaries, ready to do whatever it takes? How would they act differently? And what would be the result? Given that the price is so high, perhaps it would be better after all if we just sat quietly, allowed the rich get richer as the poor get poorer, watched listlessly as the environment got completely destroyed by capitalist industrialists in blind pursuit of profit, and eventually curled up, kissed our sweet asses good-bye and died? Good luck selling that idea to young radicalized hotheads who have nothing to lose - except maybe you, if you happen to stand in their way as they change the world!

While Abenomics has been an unmitigated disaster for Japan's ordinary population, where the soaring stock market has benefited the top decile of the population while everyone has been slammed by a record 25 consecutive months of declining real wages and soaring input costs, there had been one bright spot: corporate earnings. Then on Friday, a report out of Reuters caught our attention when news hit that 140 year old electronics conglomerate, and "pillar of Japan Inc", Toshiba had inflated profits by a stunning $1.2 billion for a whopping 7 years, with fabricated figures amounting to 30% of the company's "profits" since 2008!

Capital controls imposed by the Greek government are taking a heavy toll on Greek businesses, according to a new report from Endeavour Greece. With over two-thirds of respondents reporting a "significant drop in revenues," and 1 in 9 firms forced to suspend production due to shortages of raw materials (unable to buy due to capital controls), the problems created by The Greek government's action seem asymmetric as almost a quarter (23%) of firms are now "planning to transfer their headquarters abroad for security, cashflow, and stability reasons."

It’s not too interesting to say that Donald Trump is a nationalist and aspiring despot who is manipulating bourgeois resentment, nativism, and ignorance to feed his power lust. It’s uninteresting because it is obviously true. It’s so true that stating it sounds more like an observation than a criticism. However, 'Trumpism' is an ideology that is very much present in American life, though hardly acknowledged. It lives mostly hidden in dark corners, and we don’t even have a name for it. You bump into it at neighborhood barbecues, at Thanksgiving dinner when Uncle Harry has the floor, at the hardware store when two old friends in line to checkout mutter about the state of the country. The ideology is a 21st century version of right fascism - one of the most politically successful ideological strains of 20th century politics. Though hardly anyone talks about it today, we really should.

What have the bailouts achieved? Well, the Greek economy is doing worse than ever, and the people are poorer than ever; and both have a lot more bad ‘news’ to come. The bailouts needed to be as big as they were to 1) successfully make the international banks ‘whole’ that had lent as much as they had into the Greek economy, 2) get the IMF involved, 3) and absolve the notorious -and cooperative- domestic oligarchy from any pain. And make all the usual suspects a lot more money in the process. It therefore doesn’t look at all unlikely that Greece was saddled with an artificially raised deficit, and that the intention behind that, all along, was to get the Troika ‘inside’ for the long run. So the country could be stripped of all its assets.

One senior UK bank director said: “The problem with Martin was that he made so many enemies, partly for good reason because banks did rightly need firm treatment after the crisis. But he seemed to have a mindset that all bankers were evil.”

Greece’s and the European Union’s economic and political crisis will not be resolved through a new debt deal between the government in Athens and the European authorities. It will be merely one more stop-gag “solution” to a problem whose nature is endemic to the current ideology and politics of State-Power and collectivism. Its real solution requires something deeper and more comprehensive: a revival of the classical liberal ideal of individualism and the economics of free market capitalism. This, unfortunately, is not likely to occur any time soon.

One of the reasons we write is rooted in our deep fear of what might emerge after the current paradigm collapses. We have no doubt something very different is coming, we just desperately want that thing to be freedom, free markets and prosperity as opposed to the disaster that a $2 despot like Trump would bring. His ascension in the polls is very troubling, and makes us wonder whether the public will ultimately choose to rally behind some statist-demagogue wrapped in an American flag when things get bad enough, as opposed to something far more difficult: Liberty. We fear they may eventually choose someone like Donald Trump.

Our boots-on-the-ground coverage from the Greek 'frontline': what do normal Greek citizens think of all this mess?

While the Ukraine civil war, which just last summer was the biggest market-moving event and media discussion topic, has faded into the collective subconsciousness, for residents on both sides of the proxy conflict it continues to be an all too real and tragic event, and none more so perhaps than for Anatoliy Lyubimov, a resident of central Ukraine's Kozyatinskiy district, who recently received a draft notice mobilizing him to join the Ukraine army in its ongoing war with the Donetsk separatists. The reason: Anatoliy is disabled and has no arms.

Hyperinflation in the U.S. is coming sometime in the next 20 years or so, and this isn't a cry from a Chicken Little, but a conclusion that the analysis strongly suggests. It is possible hyperinflation could happen during the next few years, but that seems unlikely since it would require a series of major crises and political blunders – events unprecedented in the history of the United States. If this led to a corruption of Constitutional rights in the midst of an exaltation of the Executive Branch that resulted in loss of the rule of law, hyperinflation might result. It is much more probable that hyperinflation will be preceded by a long slow decline that will include a protracted period of high inflation, and that the crash of the dollar and hyperinflation will be the final tumble off a looming, steep cliff.

Piling on more debt is the worst possible way to correct structural trade and productivity imbalances, yet that is the Eurozone's "solution" to Greece's debt/ trade/ productivity/ corruption crisis.

In the wake of so many wasteful, inhumane and disastrous foreign policy failures, the U.S. government has been desperate to highlight some significant successes in order to justify all of these tragic foreign imperial blunders. One such supposed success relates to education in Afghanistan, an area into which some $1 billion in taxpayer money has been spent to build schools and pay teachers according to Buzzfeed. U.S. Government officials have consistently trumpeted all of the good work that has been done in this regard, but there’s one slight problem. Not only are most of the statistics complete bogus, but in many cases, a lot of this U.S. wealth that was meant to be targeted for education, has gone straight to the coffers of some of the most ruthless warlords in the county. How could this happen you ask?

Since 1982, the entire market has been nothing but one massive slow-motion leveraged buyout. This places the SEC right up there with the Federal Reserve in market manipulation credentials.

Patrick Liu Chunning, the head of Alibaba Digital Entertainment Group, has been arrested over bribery allegations during his tenure as vice president of digital entertainment at Tencent Holdings.  Five other former employees of Tencent are being held by authorities as part of the investigation.