Background

There is a very interesting segment on a Frontline episode called The Warning which is on the precursors to the financial meltdown. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan is discussed admonishing the Chairman of the Over the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, that he was against the the criminalization of fraud. His statement was something to the effect..

Brooksley, we are never going to agree on fraud, you probably think their should be rules against it, I think the market will figure it out. – Alan Greenspan

Brooksley Born, Chairman of the CFTC was pressured and unethically intimidated by Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers not to regulate the derivatives market. Greenspan, Rubin and Summers proposed the cockamamie idea that the CFTC had no authority to regulate derivatives, which is strange because that is exactly its charter. In fact they have the exclusive authority. Amazingly Rubin is still a power broker and Larry Summers is a very senior advisor to Obama.

Alan Greenspan was in the pocket of the industry he was supposed to have regulated. Imagine if Ivan Boesky or Gordon Gekko were head of the Fed, and you have a good approximation for the moral character of Alan Greenspan. He was also a follower of Ayn Rand, a faux philosopher who believed that the only morality was self interest, and consequentially is the patron saint of egotistical and greedy types and half of Wall Street (the half that can read). I have a write up of Ayn Rand here…

http://onhumannature.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/how-ayn-rand-wrote-books-for-the-selfish/

Alan Greenspan’s Argument: Let the Market Work it Out

Conservatives have a very strong tendency to rely upon the market for all things in life….except they don’t. So conservatives enjoy the protections of the government when it suits them and is in their interests, such as when they want no-bid contracts from the government, or if they want government subsidies. In these cases they remove the word “market” and use words like strategic, competitive, building a future. However, when the less powerful ask not for preferential treatment, but simply justice, very quickly the work market comes out. Another word which is very popular and often used with the word market is the word shareholder. Shareholders would be in favor of this and that, and the company can not be concerned with society in general because they must listen to their shareholders. Often what is missed in this is the structure of a corporation itself, and the fact that it has shareholders at all is a legal creation, which is of course based upon the legal authority of the state. The state could very quickly eliminate all of these circular discussions on shareholders by removing stock ownership from the corporate form. Now we could begin speaking about how the corporation can be directed in ways than benefit society rather than the shareholders. This would have the positive effect of reducing the incidence of sweatshops globally, as well as reduce the pollution of the environment. Degrading the environment is certainly in the interests of shareholders, but not in the interests of society.

Applying Conservative Ideology to Rape

Conservatives have sort of a flexible view on rape, which matches their flexible standards on everything. So most conservatives during slavery were in favor of the rights of masters to rape their slaves. However, they were less in favor of whites being raped, although their protests varied depending upon the wealth level of the white in question. They were strenuously opposed to a wealthy woman being raped by someone from the lower class. If we apply Alan Greenspan’s approach to fraud to rape we come to an interesting model. Alan Greenspan’s philosophy, which is not actually his but borrowed from conservative thought, is that things like fraud can be worked out in the marketplace. The logic goes something like this; if someone begins defrauding people, that eventually the market will figure it out and people will no longer do business with that person. Applied to a rape, this would mean that police should not prosecute or even investigate charges of rape, because once the rapist began raping enough people, eventually enough women would find out, tell their women friends, and nobody would go on dates with this rapist any longer. Case closed.

Conclusion

Like most of conservative thought the idea of the market working it out is completely ridiculous. It should go without saying that legal protections are necessary to prevent individuals from exploiting other individuals. This is why there are police, why there are regulators and why there are officials at sports games. This is because the law of the jungle is not just and leads to exploitation and suffering. Let us not allow conservatives to talk us out of the fact that we all deserve protection against the exploitation of others. This is as true of violent crime as it is of while collar crime.

Adam Smith understood the unequal treatment between when companies combine to keep wages low vs. when labor combines to keep wages high.

Cherry Picking Adam Smith’s Work

In our post below, we noted that Adam Smith is almost never read by people that quote him, and that what quotes do come from him are cherry picked by elitist institutions such as The Hoover Institute, and The Heritage Foundation to support their pro-corporate agendas.

http://counterecon.com/2009/03/27/nobody-actually-reads-adam-smith-and-a-wealth-of-nations/

Adam Smith Fashioned as an Amoral Wall Street Trader

Adam Smith is presented to us by conservatives as something like a Wall Street trader constantly extolling the virtues of the “free market” (free market should always be in quotes, as very few free markets actually exist or are allowed to exist by the monopolies that control the economy), and being divorced of all morality. Undiscussed by the elites is Adam Smith’s consistent moral discussions in all of his works, but in particular his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Being immoral, The Hoover Institute, Exxon and Goldman Sacks don’t seem to acknowledge that that this book exists because it describes how people naturally empathize with those in need, and that it could lead people to strive to maintain good relations with their fellow human beings, and how this can serve as the basis to structure a system to benefit the most people. How inconvenient it must be that Adam Smith’s position at the University of Glasgow was not Professor of Economics, but Professor of Logic and Moral Philosophy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments

Adam Smith and Labor

Another view of Adam Smith which is not discussed is his view on labor. Elite institutions have not brought Adam Smith’s statements on labor to the masses, because it does not fit with their interests. In the US, the current understanding of labor is that when companies use HR, manipulation and intimidation of employees to keep wages low, that this is the company’s right, is “good business” and is just what companies do. Therefore when Wal-Mart or McDonald’s flies crack union-busting teams around the US in a private jet to wherever there is possible union activity, this is considered within their rights. However, when workers attempt to combine, this is considered a form of socialism, leading towards a slippery slope to communism.

According to current US thinking, labor unions are a slippery slope to communism. However, there is a problem with this. Mainly that the Soviet Union nor China never had the type of unions designed to negotiate higher pay for workers.

In the case of the Soviet Union, the unions they did have, called Soviet Trade Unions “were government organizations whose chief aim was not to represent workers but to further the goals of management, government and the CPSU. As such they were partners of management in attempting to promote labor discipline, worker morale, and productivity. Although they were also empowered to protect workers against bureaucratic and managerial arbitrariness. – Wikipedia

Thus, this thing which is a slippery slope to communism, did not in fact exist under communism. However, the fact that this is historically inaccurate does not bother the people that say it or repeat it, because they are not historians, but propagandists by trade. So far the propaganda has worked.

So, in addition to being completely inconsistent (praising corporation’s efforts against workers, while criticizing workers), corporate America’s god, i.e. Adam Smith, did not agree with this. Adam Smith clearly saw no difference between companies “combining” to reduce wages vs. employees “combining’ to increase wages. And he did note that the activities were treated very differently during the time that he lived in the 1800s.

“We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate…Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy till the moment of execution; and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people” In contrast, when workers combine, “the masters..never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combination of servants, labourers, and journeymen.” - A Wealth of Nations

There are many anti-monopoly and collusion quotes in Adam Smith’s works such as the following:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” - A Wealth of Nations

Conclusion

The more one reads Adam Smith, the more one sees a many areas to criticize conservative business policies. For instance, Adam Smith was vehemently opposed to monopolies as “Monopoly is a great enemy to good management,” however many of the companies that quote Adam Smith are…..you guessed it, monopolies. The fact that elites have been able to get away with misappropriating Adam Smith’s work demonstrates how weak the forces against corporate power are, and how ineffectual academics is in contradicting false statements made by corporations and their think tanks, and how little Americans seem to read, and how easily they are propagandized.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments

Oil Details

What is interesting is how little investigation there is into where the money that goes to oil goes. We decided to do this by starting from the retail price of oil, and then using high level percentages. The percentage that goes to countries that we have either invaded or (Iraq) or utterly control (Ecuador) is taken from books that cover both these countries. The percentage of oil revenues that is taken by oil companies is well known, as it was part of the legislation that was passed by the Iraq puppet government (75% of the value of a barrel of oil goes to the US oil company). In Ecuador, something like 4/5s of the revenues that get to the country go to either debt service or to the kleptocracy and often end up in capital flight to Switzerland. The government or “people” get around 1/5 of the money that gets to the country.

Speculative Take

Once the money is brought into the US there is a tremendous take by speculators, which include the major investment banks. We provide reference material that demonstrates that the oil markets have been significantly corrupted and that major concentrated power sources such as Goldman Sachs and the Harvard Endowment are using insider information to maximize their trading profits by creating speculative bubbles. This was encouraged by the Bush Administration’s reduction of marketplace regulation.

Retail Take

At the retail level, most gas stations do not get a piece of oil; instead they sell at very close to their cost, but are expected to make money off of their mini mart by selling alcohol, and food items. So the retail location is not part of the cost of oil to any important degree.

The Game, and How it is Played

The profiteering is so extreme, that we have decided to develop a game. This game attempts to see how low the intermediaries can get the money to be that actually goes to the people of the country that the oil is extracted from. It also gives a good impression why attacking oil rich country is so beneficial. Especially when one considers that the companies that benefit do not have their taxes increased to cover the war costs. The war and reconstruction costs are passed to the US taxpayer, while the benefits accrue to the oil company (and the construction companies and security companies, etc..). So war is extremely profitable and is an attempt by companies to gain a permanent or at least long term concession greatly increasing their monopoly power. One strong reason for attacking Iraq was the sanctions were coming to an end. Once these came to an end, European oil companies would have been allowed into Iraq and American oil companies would have had to compete for business. This way, they simply get the oil with no competition and are able to enforce conqueror terms upon the country. See our estimates below and see who gets what.

The Assumptions

These numbers are estimates. They are not perfect, but then again, these types of numbers are not published for the obvious reason that they look very bad. Oil companies are destabilizing countries around the globe. In the case of Nigeria, Shell is supporting the military junta which massacres its people in order to control them and keep them from receiving anything but a pittance for the oil revenue. Shell lies when they say “they don’t get involved in local politics,” they are deeply involved with turning Nigeria into an apocalyptic state. They have also loaned their tractors to the Nigerian military, which returned them to Shell with blood on them, and this was from using the equipment for the digging of mass graves for citizens which it had killed en mass.

The Nigeria Army periodically burns towns to the ground that they suspect of fighting, being “terrorists” or generally disagreeing with Shell Oil policies of extraction. By being ignorant and supporting Shell Oil we in the west are complicit. It brings up the topic, would we ever have fought the Nazis if they had given us very low prices on oil?

References

It appears that a combination of stripping away oil trading regulation by the Bush Administration as well as the vertical integration into trading by major investment banks have deeply corrupted the oil trading markets. The level of greed here is amazing. In cases like Iraq, Nigeria and Ecuador the standard practice is for the oil company to pull out 75% of the value of the oil (that is the value as pulled out of the ground). The country gets the other 25%, of which 4/5s is used to pay off World Bank and IMF loans and or be taken by the corrupt elites and moved over to off shore Swiss bank accounts. 5% is left over for the people of that country, but who also inherit many negative environmental and health effects. Then on the other side the investment banks take a huge cut through corrupt lending. It would be interesting to see, of a barrel of oil, how much goes to which groups across the supply chain. The estimate by F. William Engdahl is that roughly 60% of oil prices are pure speculation. This must be added onto the cost of the oil pulled out of the ground, (which must then be transported to its final destination (we will not include the price of refinement as that is the oil company’s job, and therefore their cost)). This is one reason the entire logic for Iraq using its oil resources for reconstruction was so false. The oil companies are taking 75% of the value of the oil and much of the rest is lost to the corrupt elites that the US has installed in Iraq. Therefore the US taxpayer has and will pay for the construction of Iraq, while the major oil companies and Wall Street reap the benefits. This is why it was never the plan to have any Democracy in Iraq.

Coverage on CBS on oil speculation profits.

CBS)  Dan Gilligan of the Petroleum Marketers Association agreed. “Are you saying that companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and Barclays have as much to do with the price of oil going up as Exxon? Or…Shell?” Kroft asked. “Yes,” Gilligan said. “I tease people sometimes that, you know, people say, ‘Well, who’s the largest oil company in America?’ and they’ll always say, ‘Well, Exxon Mobil or Chevron, or BP.’ But I’ll say, ‘No. Morgan Stanley.’” Morgan Stanley isn’t an oil company in the traditional sense of the word – it doesn’t own or control oil wells or refineries, or gas stations. But according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Morgan Stanley is a significant player in the wholesale market through various entities controlled by the corporation. It not only buys and sells the physical product through subsidiaries and companies that it controls, Morgan Stanley has the capacity to store and hold 20 million barrels. For example, some storage tanks in New Haven, Conn. hold Morgan Stanley heating oil bound for homes in New England, where it controls nearly 15 percent of the market. The Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs also has huge stakes in companies that own a refinery in Coffeyville, Kan., and control 43,000 miles of pipeline and more than 150 storage terminals. And analysts at both investment banks contributed to the oil frenzy that drove prices to record highs: Goldman’s top oil analyst predicted last March that the price of a barrel was going to $200; Morgan Stanley predicted $150 a barrel. Both companies declined 60 Minutes’ requests for an interview, but maintain that their oil businesses are completely separate from their trading activities, and that neither influence the independent opinions of their analysts. There is no evidence that either company has done anything illegal. Asked if there is price manipulation going on, Dan Gilligan told Kroft, “I can’t say. And the reason I can’t say it, is because nobody knows. Our federal regulators don’t have access to the data. They don’t know who holds what positions.” “Why don’t they know?” Kroft asked. “Because federal law doesn’t give them the jurisdiction to find out,” Gilligan said. It’s impossible to tell exactly who was buying and selling all those oil contracts because most of the trading is now conducted in secret, with no public scrutiny or government oversight. Over time, the big Wall Street banks were allowed to buy and sell as many oil contracts as they wanted for their clients, circumventing regulations intended to limit speculation. And in 2000, Congress effectively deregulated the futures market, granting exemptions for complicated derivative investments called oil swaps, as well as electronic trading on private exchanges. (CBS)  “Who was responsible for deregulating the oil future market?” Kroft asked Michael Greenberger. “You’d have to say Enron,” he replied. “This was something they desperately wanted, and they got.” Greenberger, who wanted more regulation while he was at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, not less, says it all happened when Enron was the seventh largest corporation in the United States. “This was when Enron was riding high. And what Enron wanted, Enron got.” Asked why they wanted a deregulated market in oil futures, Greenberger said, “Because they wanted to establish their own little energy futures exchange through computerized trading. They knew that if they could get this trading engine established without the controls that had been placed on speculators, they would have the ability to drive the price of energy products in any way they wanted to take it.” “When Enron failed, we learned that Enron, and its conspirators who used their trading engine, were able to drive the price of electricity up, some say, by as much as 300 percent on the West Coast,” he added. “Is the same thing going on right now in the oil business?” Kroft asked. “Every Enron trader, who knew how to do these manipulations, became the most valuable employee on Wall Street,” Greenberger said. But some of them may now be looking for work. The oil bubble began to deflate early last fall when Congress threatened new regulations and federal agencies announced they were beginning major investigations. It finally popped with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the near collapse of AIG, who were both heavily invested in the oil markets. With hedge funds and investment houses facing margin calls, the speculators headed for the exits. “From July 15th until the end of November, roughly $70 billion came out of commodities futures from these index funds,” Masters explained. “In fact, gasoline demand went down by roughly five percent over that same period of time. Yet the price of crude oil dropped more than $100 a barrel. It dropped 75 percent.” Asked how he explains that, Masters said, “By looking at investors, that’s the only way you can explain it.” Masters believes the investor demand for commodities, and oil futures in particular, was created on Wall Street by hedge funds and the big Wall Street investment banks like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, and J.P. Morgan, who made billions investing hundreds of billions of dollars of their clients’ money. “The investment banks facilitated it,” Masters said. “You know, they found folks to write papers espousing the benefits of investing in commodities. And then they promoted commodities as a, quote/unquote, ‘asset class.’ Like, you could invest in commodities just like you could in stocks or bonds or anything else, like they were suitable for long-term investment.” http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/08/60minutes/main4707770_page4.shtml Persons within the United States seeking to trade key US energy commodities – US crude oil, gasoline, and heating oil futures – are able to avoid all US market oversight or reporting requirements by routing their trades through the ICE Futures exchange in London instead of the NYMEX in New York. Is that not elegant? The US Government energy futures regulator, CFTC opened the way to the present unregulated and highly opaque oil futures speculation. It may just be coincidence that the present CEO of NYMEX, James Newsome, who also sits on the Dubai Exchange, is a former chairman of the US CFTC. In Washington doors revolve quite smoothly between private and public posts. A glance at the price for Brent and WTI futures prices since January 2006 indicates the remarkable correlation between skyrocketing oil prices and the unregulated trade in ICE oil futures in US markets. Keep in mind that ICE Futures in London is owned and controlled by a USA company based in Atlanta Georgia. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8878 Remember last year.  Oil went from $60 to $150 in the space of a few months.  Why? Because it was no longer profitable to buy CDOs and RMBS, as they were imploding.  The money has to go somewhere, and so traders bet in front of what they believed Bernanke would do – crank down interest rates at an insanely-accelerated rate, which would spike prices in commodities, as the economic slowdown had not yet occurred – and wouldn’t for several months.[1]

[1] The Idiocy of Bernanke’s Bubbles and CNBS

Unfortunately for us – and for reformers trying to rescue our post-bubble economy – the history of economic thought has been rewritten in infantile caricature,  to give an impression that today’s stripped-down, largely trivialized junk economics is the apex of Western social history. One would not realize from the present discussion that for the past few centuries a different canon of logic existed. Classical economists distinguished between earned income (wages and profits) and unearned income (land rent, monopoly rent and interest). The effect was to distinguish between wealth earned through capital and enterprise that reflects labor effort, and unearned wealth stemming from appropriation of land and other natural resources, monopoly privileges (including banking and money management) and inflationary asset-price “capital” gains. But even the Progressive Era did not go much beyond seeking to purify industrial capitalism from the carry-overs of feudalism: land rent and monopoly rent stemming from military conquest, and financial exploitation by banks and (in America) Wall Street as the “mother of trusts.” – Michael Hudson

So when one analyzes how the wealthy make their money, it is clear so much of it is stolen. Examples include:

1. Underpaying workers (domestically, but also international companies paying slave wages to women in sweat shops who receive around .3% of the retail price of the garments they sow.)
2. Cheating on taxes with offshore banking
3. Receiving money from monopolies (such as Bill Gates and Larry Ellison’s money, as well as all the income from the investment banking industry which is little more than a government granted concession)
4. Landlords (collecting rent from an apartment complex gifted by your parents is not very hard or innovative work)
5. Extending patents on drugs through litigation or re-patenting old drugs (i.e. Prilosec vs. Nexium)
6. Resource extraction on public lands, which companies have bribed the Department of Interior not to provide agreed upon compensation.

There are so many of examples of non-value added income that is raked off by the ultra-wealthy it’s hard to make a complete list. The old statement is that the rich make the economy dynamic and therefore they must be compensated. However, an analysis of where the rich get their money shows that in fact the rich in most cases do very little for their money, and also reduce the efficiency and size of the economy through erecting barriers to change, and cutting off areas of the commons to privatize it for themselves.

The Unethical Tax

There is much truth to the statement behind every great fortune is a great crime. Rich people are rich because of a combination of luck and because they value material wealth over all other things, and in addition to that, they cheat. The rich would have everyone believe that it is because of their immense talent that they accumulate so much money. However, Einstein was not rich and neither was Newton. I will let reader decide whether Einstein’s contribution was more important than Bill Gates, Larry Ellison or Donald Trump. So the proposition by the rich simply does not square with the facts. Even if Bill Gates and Larry Ellison are immensely talented (which is a tough call as we have never heard either of them say anything remotely interesting, or even true. Larry Ellison habitually makes false statements about his software), they are far and away over compensated for their limited talent. For this reason, we propose that the rich should have their taxes doubled and that they should pay at least twice the proportional rate on their income that they do. This we call this the sleaze tax.  If anyone is opposed to the term “sleazy,” or unethical spend some time hanging around the rich, pretty much all they care about and all they talk about is money (although they throw in a few references to art and wine in order to appeared cultured.). This is a bit like Genghis Khan taking about the latest ballet at the Met.

Money for Nothing

Wanting to make money from essentially matching supply and demand is a hallmark of the unethical person. These types of jobs do little else but match supply and demand.

• Stock Brokers
• Real Estate Agents
• Recruiters
• Automotive Dealerships

Education

The logic many of them use to justify their existence is that they educate their clients. However, what type of education can a client expect to get from someone who’s only objective is to sell them something that they have access to?

Free Markets

The issue is that even with the arrival of computers, intermediaries strive to do business “the old fashioned way.” A the same time they speak about the importance of free markets. Here are some ways intermediaries interfere with markets:

• For years you could not trade stocks (which you should not be doing in any case see the post why http://counterecon.com/2009/05/04/the-case-against-stock-compendium/) online, but had to go through brokers.
• Real estate agents have fought transparency in their market through controlling the Multiple Listing Service and pretending its a public database. See this link for more details http://counterecon.com/2008/01/11/real-estate-information-control-and-the-multiple-listing-service/)
• Recruiters insist on keeping a database of resumes and in communicating resumes in document format rather than simply pointing their clients to LinkedIn which keeps updated databases online.
• Automotive dealerships have used lawyers to make buying cars over the internet illegal. They want you to come in so they can go to work on you in a controlled environment. See this link for more details (http://spplan.wordpress.com/2009/05/18/automotive-dealers-mostly-useles/)

Conclusion

People who are attracted to intermediary roles are looking for easy money and are essentially dishonest. If real economics were applied then we would actually use technology to reduce the need for intermediaries and create more efficient economy. The rule is simple, the money that is given to intermediaries above and beyond their contribution is both taken from the individuals who actually work, and decreases the efficiency and increases the costs of buyers and sellers coming to mutually agreeable transactions. If people are curious how to improve any economy, the answer is simple – reduce the costs of intermediaries through  the creation of public on-line databases. Place the important information in the public domain, so that no one owns it.

This is the supposed chart that all stock buyers want, but few will ever receive – unless you have inside information.

We have written extensively on the ways in which stocks are both unnecessary for capitalism, misrepresented by the stock pushing industry and actually counterproductive to the competent management of companies. We thought we would create a compendium which lists our work on this topic.

Stock Market Falling

In this post we discuss the seeming inability of the population to see that the stock market is a rigged system which transfers returns from the average investor to the wealthy, and how the stock market distorts the marketplace by concentrating economic power. It also provides a remedy to the situation.

http://counterecon.com/2008/09/18/stock-market-falling/

What is the Real Purpose of the SEC?

Here we discuss how the SEC, far from being an instrument to protect investors is actually a false front. The SEC investigates people rarely, and when it does, it tends to be those unconnected with the system (new money) and its main interest is keeping “the illusion” of an honest market.

http://counterecon.com/2008/01/11/what-is-the-real-purpose-of-the-sec/

How Stocks Promote Monopolies

In this article we discuss why stocks concentrate economic power making the overall economy more monopolistic and less efficient.

http://counterecon.com/2008/01/11/how-stocks-promote-monopolies/

Do You Have Enough Assets to Get “A” Advice

Explains how investment advisers tier their advice. Wealthy clients get better tips, and the investors lower down on the totem pole get burned by being pitched stocks that the investment bank thinks will go down.

http://counterecon.com/2008/01/11/do-you-have-enough-assets-to-get-a-advice/

Inaccuracy of Average Return

Some people are interested in the higher macroeconomic reasons why stocks are bad for the economy. However, for those with a more personal focus, this article describes why the often repeated “average return” of the stock market is a complete lie and misrepresentation of stock market statistics.

http://counterecon.com/2008/01/11/the-inaccuracy-of-average-return/

Yield Disparity

We first found this on PBS’s Frontline and decided to write it up. It is highly related to the previous article on the inaccuracy of average return and references the main researcher in this area who maintains the database of returns for people of all different income levels. What he found seriously calls in to question the entire concept of the 401k program.

http://counterecon.com/2008/01/11/yield-disparity/

Stocks and Unnecessary Illusion

This is our explanation of what a stock actually is, and how valueless is it and why it makes little sense to buy or hold them.

http://counterecon.com/2008/01/11/stock-an-unnecessary-illusion/

Conservatives are always supporting different forms of slavery. Read more how everyone seems to want a slave.

http://onhumannature.wordpress.com/2008/04/02/everyone-wants-a-slave/