STORY 1: Obama worth as much as $10 million

Three things are apparent from President Obama’s annual financial disclosure statement, released today:

He is a wealthy man, with assets of as much as $10 million.

He has a hefty stake in JPMorgan Chase, the megabank that just made a bad $2 billion bet. Obama has an account worth between $500,000 and $1 million.

Despite the nation’s $15.6 trillion debt, he is a believer in government paper. More than half of his assets are in Treasury bills and notes.

The disclosure statement lists assets and liabilities in dollar ranges, so pinpointing the president’s net worth is difficult. His assets appear to tally between $2.6 million and $9.9 million. He holds a mortgage on his Chicago home of $500,000 to $1 million.

As was clear from Obama’s income tax filing, much of his income continues to roll in from book royalties. The disclosure form lists $100,000 to $1 million in royalties from Dreams From My Father, $100,000 to $1 million from Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, and $50,000 to $100,000 from The Audacity of Hope.

Vice President Biden, on the other hand, isn’t all that wealthy. His financial disclosure statement includes less than $1 million in assets — and as much as $1.5 million in liabilities, including between $500,000 and $1 million on his Wilmington home.

Source: USA Today.

STORY 2: Obama has up to $1 million with JPMorgan Chase

US President Barack Obama has up to $1 million in a JPMorgan Chase checking account, the White House said Tuesday as a controversy deepened over the bank’s $2 billion dollar losses.

Public figures in the United States are required by law to publish their assets and investments to avoid conflicts of interest, and the White House releases disclosures for Obama and Vice President Joe Biden each year.

As well as the between $500,000 and $1 million in the JPMorgan Chase Private Client Asset Management checking account, Obama also has millions of dollars in a variety of other accounts and funds, bonds and treasuries.

The largest holding, according to the disclosures, is between one and five million dollars in US Treasury notes.

Most of Obama’s wealth comes from book royalties, including from his best selling autobiography “Dreams From My Father.”

Obama said during a television interview with ABC’s “The View” broadcast Tuesday that the $2 billion in derivatives losses suffered by JPMorgan proved the need for tighter banking regulation.

He also said that JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon was “one of the smartest bankers we got and they still lost money.”

“They still lost $2 billion dollars and counting precisely because they were making bets in these derivative markets. This is why we passed Wall Street reform.”

The US Justice Department has opened an FBI probe into JPMorgan Chase’s more than $2 billion trading loss, a person familiar with the matter told AFP Tuesday.

News of the investigation came as Dimon, JPMorgan’s embattled chief executive, faced criticism at the company’s annual shareholders meeting in Tampa, Florida, over the shock loss.

Source: Yahoo News.

Kony 2012, hyped on the backs of celebrities and do-gooders, is revealed for what it is– a propaganda salvo for a continent wide invasion of Africa. Yes, the mantra War is Peace is once again drumming U.S. soldiers into further conflict.

Research makes clear that KONY is a sophisticated psy-op to muster popular support for what is, in reality, nothing more than a geostrategic positioning vis-a-vis China for oil and mineral resources, as well as an effort to legitimize the U.S. military’s AFRICOM unit in the region through newly-branded “humanitarian” interventions.

It is not only War in the name of “Peace,” but an attempt to empower the International Criminal Courtunder the influence of NGOs and other related globalist corporate interests.

Nobel Peace Prize “winner” Barack Obama has already deployed 100 special forces troops to the central African region back in October 2011, and a resolution in Congress– on the heels of KONY 2012′s viral views of at lest 80 million– seeks to send more forces there for an all out invasion on the pretext of hunting down a shadowy warlord with less blood on his hands than an average African despot.

Top celebrities vying for greater power including CFR member and UN goodwill ambassadorAngelina Jolie, actor George Clooney, media baroness Oprah Winfrey, as well as Africa-obsessed Bill Gates and Bono, have all come out in front of this issue.

CONTINUED at Prison Planet.

According to Jason Russell’s appearance on the Today show several days ago, over 500,000 action kits have been ordered at $30 a piece, meaning this campaign has brought in a minimum of $15M in revenue this week. This is great news: at least 500,000 people are “advocate[s] of awesome” according to the group’s webstore! So where’s that money going? I’ll leave it to Jedidiah Jenkins, Invisible Children’s Director of Ideology:

“Thirty-seven percent of our budget goes directly to central African-related programs, about 20 percent goes to salaries and overhead, and the remaining 43 percent goes to our awareness programs. […] But aside from that, the truth about Invisible Children is that we are not an aid organization, and we don’t intend to be. I think people think we’re over there delivering shoes or food. But we are an advocacy and awareness organization.”

Yes, you heard it from Invisible Children: more money goes to awareness than to Africa.

More detailed breakdown from the Guardian’s Julian Borger, John Vidal, and Rosebell Kagumire in Kampala, Uganda:

“Invisible Children’s accounts show it is a cash rich operation, which more than tripled its income to $9m (£5.68m) in 2011, mainly from personal donations. Of this, nearly 25% was spent on travel and film-making. Most of the money raised has been spent in the US. The accounts show $1.7m went on US employee salaries, $850,000 in film production costs, $244,000 in “professional services” – thought to be Washington lobbyists – and $1.07m in travel expenses. Nearly $400,000 was spent on offices in San Diego.”

Information about how they intend to spend their windfall 2012 revenue of a bare minimum of $15M has not been released, but as I wrote earlier, at least $3000 would’ve gone to flying me to both San Diego and Africa had I allowed them to do so. (Story behind that at the bottom of this post.) If I were Invisible Children, I’d start talking about where this new money’s going. I’m emailing Jason and Ben a link to this post to see if they’re willing to post a financial plan for the year ahead – is there yet another film in store?

RELATED: Kony 2012 charity to release new video addressing criticism of viral campaign

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Kony 2012 Group Supports Uganda’s Brutal Military Dictatorship

The Daily What
Monday, March 12, 2012

On Kony 2012: I honestly wanted to stay as far away as possible from KONY 2012, the latest fauxtivist fad sweeping the web (remember “change your Facebook profile pic to stop child abuse”?), but you clearly won’t stop sending me that damn video until I say something about it, so here goes:

Stop sending me that video.

The organization behind Kony 2012 — Invisible Children Inc. — is an extremely shady nonprofit that has been called ”misleading,” “naive,” and “dangerous” by a Yale political science professor, and has been accused by Foreign Affairs of “manipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes.” They have also been criticized by the Better Business Bureau for refusing to provide information necessary to determine if IC meets the Bureau’s standards.

Additionally, IC has a low two-star rating in accountability from Charity Navigator because they won’t let their financials be independently audited. That’s not a good thing. In fact, it’s a very bad thing, and should make you immediately pause and reflect on where the money you’re sending them is going.

By IC’s own admission, only 31% of all the funds they receive go toward actually helping anyone[pdf]. The rest go to line the pockets of the three people in charge of the organization, to pay for their travel expenses (over $1 million in the last year alone) and to fund their filmmaking business (also over a million) — which is quite an effective way to make more money, as clearly illustrated by the fact that so many can’t seem to stop forwarding their well-engineered emotional blackmail to everyone they’ve ever known.

And as far as what they do with that money:

The group is in favour of direct military intervention, and their money supports the Ugandan government’s army and various other military forces. Here’s a photo of the founders of Invisible Children posing with weapons and personnel of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army are riddled with accusations of rape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission. These books each refer to the rape and sexual assault that are perennial issues with the UPDF, the military group Invisible Children is defending.

Let’s not get our lines crossed: The Lord’s Resistance Army is bad news. And Joseph Kony is a very bad man, and needs to be stopped. But propping up Uganda’s decades-old dictatorship and its military arm, which has been accused by the UN ofcommitting unspeakable atrocities and itself facilitated the recruitment of child soldiers, is not the way to go about it.

The United States is already plenty involved in helping rout Kony and his band of psycho sycophants. Kony is on the run, having been pushed out of Uganda, and it’s likely he will soon be caught, if he isn’t already dead. But killing Kony won’t fix anything, just as killing Osama bin Laden didn’t end terrorism. The LRA might collapse, but, as Foreign Affairs points out, it is “a relatively small player in all of this — as much a symptom as a cause of the endemic violence.”

Myopically placing the blame for all of central Africa’s woes on Kony — even as a starting point — will only imperil many more people than are already in danger.

Sending money to a nonprofit that wants to muck things up by dousing the flames with fuel is not helping. Want to help? Really want to help? Send your money to nonprofits that are putting more than 31% toward rebuilding the region’s medical and educational infrastructure, so that former child soldiers have something worth coming home to.

Here are just a few of those charities. They all have a sparkling four-star rating from Charity Navigator, and, more importantly, no interest in airdropping American troops armed to the teeth into the middle of a multi-nation tribal war to help one madman catch another.

The bottom line is, research your causes thoroughly. Don’t just forward a random video to a stranger because a mass murderer makes a five-year-old “sad.” Learn a little bit about the complexities of the region’s ongoing strife before advocating for direct military intervention.

There is no black and white in the world. And going about solving important problems like there is just serves to make all those equally troubling shades of gray invisible.

All stories linked on Prison Planet.

Kony 2012 propaganda is a crude hoax to legitimize re-colonization of Africa.

While the political left and an army of Hollywood trendies are clamoring for a U.S. Military invasion of Uganda to capture Joseph Kony, a man who has not even been in the country for six years, Ugandan authorities, backed by the World Bank and British carbon trading companies, are slaughtering Ugandan villagers and stealing their land in a brutal new form of neo-colonialism that has gone largely unnoticed.

Following the release of Kony 2012, a film made by a shadowy charity with links to USAID, the Tweetosphere exploded with a deluge of leftist politicos and clueless celebrities jumping on the bandwagon to call for Barack Obama to launch yet another act of “humanitarian” bloodletting to go after Kony, leader the of Lord’s Resistance Army (LRC).

In their haste to appear trendy and in vogue with a viral trend that was all over the social networks like a bad rash within the space of 24 hours, those advocating an increased military intervention on top of the 100 US troops already sent into Uganda last year, most notably habitual “humanitarian” warmonger Angelina Jolie, didn’t concern themselves with the facts.

The propaganda campaign that has put Joseph Kony on a par with Osama Bin Laden and Hitler is a crude hoax to legitimize the US military-industrial complex’s agenda to re-colonize Africa under Africom.

“Not surprisingly, the [film] is seriously misleading, falsely implying there’s war raging in Northern Uganda when there’s not. In fact, Kony has not been in the country for six years; his group is a much-depleted rump, numbering a few hundred people at most,” writes ABC Australia’s Jeff Sparrow.

Ugandan journalist Angelo Izama calls Kony 2012 a “misrepresentation,” noting that the film’s “portrayal of [Kony's] alleged crimes in Northern Uganda are from a bygone era,” and that the problems facing the country in 2012 are AIDS, Hepatitis, prostitution and unemployment, none of which would be alleviated by a U.S. military invasion on the pretext of hunting a man who is not even in the country.

“At the end of the day the Kony2012 campaign will not make Joseph Kony more famous but it will make Invisible Children famous,” writes Izama. “It will also make many, including P.Diddy, feel like they have contributed some good to his capture- assuming Kony is even alive. For many in the conflict prevention community including those who worry about the militarization of it in Central Africa this campaign is just another nightmare that will end soon. Hopefully.”

While a legion of celebrity idiots and political operatives push the Kony 2012 hoax, Ugandan people are currently facing a very real threat of murder and displacement that has nothing to do with the Lord’s Resistance Army. It’s being carried out by the Ugandan government itself in alliance with the World Bank and carbon trading companies.

As we reported last year, armed troops acting on behalf of New Forests Company, an outfit backed by the World Bank whose board includes HSBC Managing Director Sajjad Sabur as well as other former Goldman Sachs investment bankers, burned houses to the ground and killed children to evict Ugandans from their homes in the name of seizing land to protect against “global warming.”

An Oxfam report documents how the British outfit has worked with the Ugandan government to forcibly expel over 20,000 people from their homes using terror and violence as part of a lucrative scramble for arable land that can be used to satisfy the multi-billion dollar carbon trading ponzi scheme, which is worth $1.8 million a year to the company.

Harrowing stories speak of how armed “security forces” stormed Ugandan villages and torched houses, burning children to death as they threatened to murder anyone who resisted while beating and torturing others.

But you won’t see the likes of Angelina Jolie or Bono tweeting about it in protest, because slaughtering people in cold blood and evicting families from their ancestral land in the name of saving the planet is perfectly acceptable.

Forget the manufactured hype surrounding ‘Kony 2012′ – it is nothing more than a cynical ruse designed to manipulate naive do-gooders into legitimizing another US-backed “humanitarian” assault aimed at swallowing up Africa’s resources and land.

While Joseph Kony and his army disappeared six years ago, Ugandans are being killed and evicted in their thousands by western entities right now – but nobody is making ‘viral’ films about the crisis and no celebrities are tweeting their displeasure.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

Source: Prison Planet.

Kony 2012 has gone viral. The documentary film that has literally spread all over the Internet and has received millions of views in a matter of days has many people talking. According to Invisible Children, the group that produced the film, the flick aims to make Joseph Kony famous in hopes of having him brought to justice. Kony is accused of kidnapping thousands of children and making them sex slaves and children soldiers. But are all sides of the story being told or is this just publicity stunt to get the US in Uganda? Keith Harmon Snow, a war correspondent, joins us for more.

In the past couple of days, a charitable campaign called Kony 2012 has spread across the internet with a momentum normally reserved for cats, mostly due to a compelling 30-minute viral videocondemning an unambiguously evil figurehead. It feels good to band together to fight something bad, but before you go handing your money to just any organization, no matter how noble their cause appears to be, it’s worth finding out how they’re going to spend it. Here’s how to do just that.

I’m taking CliffsNotes from Clay Johnson’s previous post on tracking down how your charitable donations will be spent (maybe you’re interested in his book), but applying them directly to Kony 2012. I also asked Clay a handful of questions about it via Twitter while I tried applying his techniques.

Here’s how the money susses out:

Step one: Find Their 990

Charitable organizations are required to fill out an IRS Form 990; this form details how an organization spends its money—a great starting point if you’re thinking of giving them yours. As Johnson points out, this form is “far superior than a charity’s annual report because there’s less marketing inside of it, and more brass tacks.”

To find the 990, normally all you need to do is a minute or two searching your Google or Bing of choice. Doing so for the Kony 2012 campaign—specifically, the Invisible Children organization behind the campaign—will land you at the Financials page of the Invisible Children web site. (If Google’s giving you trouble, you can also use GuideStar; a free registration will get you what you need for almost any non-profit.) Here’s Invisible Children’s 2010 990 form.

Step two: Break down their spending

Now that you’ve got the 990, it’s time to see where the money’s going.

As a first step, Johnson recommends you find out how much a non-profit spends giving grants. The reason:

If the non-profit is giving a substantial amount of its revenues as grants out to other organizations, then taking a look at those organizations and figuring out whether or not to give directly to them is an option worth considering. That may help your dollars get closer to the source of the problem you’re trying to solve with your money, giving them more impact.

In this case, you’ll find that, of $13.7 million in revenue, Invisible Children spent 2.8 million on grants (about 20.4% of their considerable revenue). Already, Johnson suggests that this at this grant amount, you should “start looking for comparables“—i.e., other charities with the same goals, possibly including those Invisible Children gives grant money to.

If you examine their expenses more closely (Part IX of the 990), you’ll see that, beyond grant giving, not much money at all is going to direct services. Let’s break it down a little:

• $2.8 million goes to grants, as noted above
• Over $1 million goes to travel
• $851k goes to production costs
• $357k goes to film costs
• $244k goes to professional services

Essentially, the flush non-profit spends as much on travel, film-making, and lobbying as it does on serving. That’s generally a red flag. They also granted more money in 2009 than 2010, even though their revenue increased by over $4 million between the two years. You can read morefrom the Guardian.

Next, find out how much the organization pays its executives. Again, from Johnson:

If a non-profit is giving a substantial portion of its revenues to its executives, then it’s not for me. I want my dollars going to solve problems not to line pockets.

Page 7 of their 990 shows that Invisible Children spends between $84k and $89k on their three most compensated employees, which, according to Johnson, “looks about right for their funds raised.” So no major strikes there.

Third, Johnson says you should evaluate the practices of a non-profit beyond their accounting, and to do this, he recommends GiveWell, an organization that does in-depth charity research using a rigorous review process to determine the most effective charities. Invisible Children did not pass either of GiveWell’s criteria for evaluation.

That raises a red flag for me, but since Invisible Children has gotten a lot of attention lately, GiveWell actually has weighed in in a blog post titled “The Worst Killer of Invisible Children is Not Joseph Kony”. GiveWell’s critique, like other Kony 2012 criticism, mostly rests on the oversimplification of the problem as presented by Invisible Children, questioning whether money donated to “intervene in a complex, disputed situation that you don’t have the context to fully understand” would be better spent on “a simple situation where all humanitarians really do agree”—namely malaria, which last year “ caused an estimated 655,000 deaths, mostly among African children.

So… What should I do?

Things get complicated quickly when you start making value judgments on how to best help people, but where it is possible to make quantitative comparisons, you can learn a lot. I think most charities would agree that there are few wrong ways to donate, but if your goal is to have the largest impact per dollar donated, these numbers and analyses can be very helpful.

You can certainly donate money to Invisible Children, and despite some criticism, it appears doing so isn’t necessarily a bad thing to do. If your goal is to have as great an impact as possible in the lives of those directly affected by Kony, you may want to instead give to a comparable charity, or one that Invisible Child grants to. If you’ve been moved, as GiveWell puts it, to “care more about Africans”, then maybe giving to a top-rated charity like the Against Malaria Foundation is an even better bet—where 100% of your giving goes to malaria nets.

Either way, giving is good. Hopefully this guide has given you a better idea of how to do so and get your money’s worth.

Image remixed from The Noun Project.

Thanks to Clay Johnson for his previous guide and for answering questions while I was writing this post.

Source: Lifehacker.

A combination of several factors, including a declining dollar and the Federal Reserve’s announcement that it would keep interest rates at virtually zero until late 2014, helped to send gold and silver prices soaring to multi-week highs. Analysts expect the upward trend to continue as paper currencies founder and gloomy news continues to dominate the economic headlines.

The spot price for gold was around $1,725 by 2 p.m. Eastern time after jumping more than $60 since the day before, up almost 30 percent from a year ago and more than 7.5 percent over the last 30 days. It smashed through $1,700 on Wednesday for the first in six weeks.

“At the moment everything points to even higher prices, given the strong risk appetite, the better mood among market players, the strong equity markets and the weak dollar,” Commerzbank analyst Daniel Briesemann told Reuters.

Analysts said the single most important factor behind gold’s strong rally was the Federal Reserve. On Wednesday, the privately owned central bank promised to keep short-term interest rates at rock bottom until late 2014, extending the date from its previous pledge to keep rates down until mid-2013.

Also bullish for gold — and bearish for the U.S. dollar, of course — was Fed boss Ben “helicopter” Bernanke’s veiled threat to unleash more so-called “Quantitative Easing,” known in simpler terms as creating new “money” out of thin air and pumping it into the economy by purchasing bonds. The dollar immediately took a hit against other major currencies.

“The framework makes very clear that we need to be thinking about ways to provide further stimulus if we don’t get improvement in the pace of recovery and a normalization of inflation,” Bernanke said during a quarterly news conference after the Fed’s report was released. Analysts and central bank critics, already concerned about massive monetary “easing” in recent years, lambasted the idea that more money would solve the economic problems plaguing America.

“If the Federal Reserve thought the economy was improving, it wouldn’t need this artificial prop to keep sustaining it,” said Euro Pacific Capital head Peter Schiff, noting that wild money printing was helping to drive the nation and its economy off a cliff. “The President and the Federal Reserve are now conspiring to create a much bigger crisis.”

The Fed claimed it would be targeting a 2-percent rate of annual inflation for 2012. However, few analysts take the government’s “Consumer Price Index” (CPI) measure of inflation seriously — especially as Core CPI, one of the most frequently cited figures, omits price increases in key sectors like food and energy.

According to Schiff, the government’s claim based on CPI that inflation for 2011 was 3 percent is completely bogus. It was actually much higher, he said, noting that officials were using phony measures like the CPI to mask the true rate of inflation. And it is likely to be even higher in 2012 before eventually morphing into a full-blown currency and debt crisis in the coming years.

“The reason they have to keep [interest rates] so low is to artificially support a phony economy,” Schiff explained. “This economy is a disaster waiting to happen — the only thing standing between us and economic Armageddon is zero-percent interest rates.”

But it can’t go on forever, and the longer rates are kept so low, the worse the looming crisis will be. For now, Schiff, whose business trades gold and silver, said investors should protect their assets by purchasing precious metals “before the price goes any higher.”

An analysis by Bloomberg published on Wednesday showed that gold — which has increased every year for more than a decade — provided the best return on investment over the last five years when adjusted for volatility. And heavy-hitting financial firms cited in the report including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are forecasting that gold prices will keep rising to around $2,000 in 2012 or 2013.

“People are still very under-invested in gold, and so there is a huge scope of that increasing,” explained UniCredit analyst Jochen Hitzfeld, the most accurate precious-metals forecaster tracked by Bloomberg over the past two years. Other experts noted that gold is widely and accurately perceived as a safe-haven in times of economic turmoil.

While gold prices have been extraordinarily volatile — spot prices hit $1,923 in September before crashing to $1,523 by the end of 2011 — the longer-term rally has so far been relatively consistent over the past decade. Just 10 years ago, gold was worth less than $300 per ounce.

Silver, which has also seen drastic price fluctuations, was less than $5 per ounce 10 years ago. In 2011, it surged to an all-time high of around $50 before dropping back down to about $33.35 today. The U.S. dollar, meanwhile, has not been doing so well — even when measured against other depreciating paper currencies.

Even billionaire investor George Soros, whose well-publicized sale of some 99 percent of his gold holdings during the first quarter of 2011 spooked precious-metals investors, has jumped back into the market. According to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings cited by Bloomberg, the hedge-fund manager had increased his stake in SPDR Gold Trust, an exchange-traded fund tracking gold prices, to almost 50,000 shares as of September 30.

Central banks around the world were also buying up multi-ton quantities of gold bullion, according to data cited in news reports. And the trend shows no signs of slowing down.

In other bullish news for the precious metal, unconfirmed reports indicate India has started purchasing oil from Iran using gold rather than U.S. dollars. China could follow, too, according to news reports.

“It shows the exodus from the dollar is gaining speed,” noted precious-metals and currency trader Simit Patel on the investment analysis site Seeking Alpha. “With the major economies of the world facing $7.6 trillion in bond payments due this year, I think the tipping point for a shift out of dollars and into a new monetary system backed by gold is not as far off as it may seem.”

With the steep drop in prices during the last few months of 2011, some analysts and traders were reluctant to get back in the precious-metals market before the appearance of a solid bottom had solidified. But the big banks and respected analysts are forecasting that as long as the fundamentals — out-of-control money printing, sovereign-debt crises, wild government spending, and more — remain the same, gold and silver prices could see massive gains in 2012.

Source: New American.

*Taken from Business Insider.

Muammar Qaddafi was three times as rich as Carlos Slim and ten times richer than King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia — easily the richest man in the world.

Qaddafi was supposedly worth over $200 billion with assets in bank accounts, real estate and corporate investments around the world.

This staggering new estimate comes from senior Libyan officials and seems to be legitimate, according to the LA Times.

CONTINUED..

You should probably read this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this to understand where my economic philosophy is coming from. Anyway, apart from reading those, you should probably already see what is wrong with this movement.

*Written by Rob Rimes.

*This is directed at those who wrote these silly demands and anyone who has adopted them as their own personal demands. I know there are good people protesting that get what’s going on. I tip my hat to the few of you.

Over the last few weeks a new movement has risen from the ashes here in America. I guess when the right has the Tea Party, it should be expected that the left would have to answer with their own grassroots movement. And like the Tea Party, this new movement known as Occupy Wall Street isn’t just comprised of one specific group of people. It is full of people from all different walks of life. There is a melting pot of several different political ideologies and I’m sure many of these people, just like the Tea Party, are convinced that they are doing the right thing to help better our country and save us all from economic peril. Unfortunately, like with many movements in this country, there seems to be some confusion between capitalism and corporatism.

Here are some of these OWS idiots that are really confused by their own maroonish doublespeak.

These people, despite their idiocy, are probably good people they are just unable to allow their view of the world to be challenged, even by logic and reason. I guess protesting blindly is easier than dealing with reality and owning up to your own responsibilities and life decisions.

As far as the OWS organization goes, I know that the “demands” of this group, as posted on their website (here) don’t necessarily fit with everyone who is out protesting against Wall Street, however this group is the driving force of this movement. They have organized this thing from the very beginning. This list of demands should scare anyone with their economic wits about them. It should really frighten anyone with a bit of common sense but I understand why these ideas are attractive to the lazy entitled fucks who chose to go to college but now can’t afford it because they are too busy sitting at rallies to go and apply for a damn job. Sitting on their asses smoking hookahs and strumming guitars with their other underachieving buddies while not even being sure what they are protesting can’t be the cause of their undoing. Nope.. it has to be Wall Street’s fault. But at least they feel good about themselves today!

Anyway, this list of demands from Occupy Wall Street is complete bullshit and doesn’t really make a lick of sense, well to a normal hardworking person that has some basic knowledge in economics anyway. So let me break it down for you line by line and explain to the unenlightened why their strategy isn’t just foolhardy, it is laughable and borderline ridiculous. The problem with it is that it reads like a series of random tweets strung together as a blog. I’ll do my best.

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending “Freetrade” by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.

M’kay.. if you can’t see all the things that are wrong with this demand I’m not sure I can help you but I’ll try.

You see, in a nutshell a “living wage” is, according to Wikipedia, “the minimum hourly income necessary for a worker to meet basic needs (for an extended period of time or for a lifetime).” The needs included in this are shelter, food, utilities, transport, health care and even recreation. Essentially, a person working forty hours a week should be able to afford these things without having to get a second job.

A living wage is incredibly problematic. First of all, it doesn’t actually help the impoverished and long-term it will cause more harm than good for everyone. One of the reasons is due to the high-cost of implementing and managing this sort of legislation. Like with everything the government does, where does the money come from? It comes from the taxpayers (that’s you). However, I understand that this movement thinks that there are seemingly unlimited funds that can be ganked from evil corporations.

Truth is, even though you OWS peeps believe that corporations should be contributing to this stupid idea, they don’t have bottomless pits for pockets. To be forced to pay up in an effort to give fair living wages to those who may be less-skilled prevents a corporation from giving more money to incentivize the highly-skilled workers. Eventually, the highly- skilled workers will stop giving a fuck and no one will benefit. You can’t ride on coattails forever and without consequence.

Another problem with living wages is that if you give someone an inch (especially a lazy entitled fucksack) they are going to take seventy miles. How long would it be before lobbying groups start demanding that their products or services are essential for man’s survival. If these lobbyists succeed, which some will, how much will the living wage have to increase? It is a never-ending cycle of shit that we would never be able to shake off. Besides, all this whining about corporations and lobbyists corrupting politicians and empowering Wall Street would become pretty damn hypocritical if this is the route this takes. Just a little bit of common sense should reveal that this IS the route it would take and therefore this is completely counter-productive to what the Occupy Wall Street organizers truly want. And is that inflation that I smell? How else are you going to sustain an unsustainable economic policy?

The first demand also calls for an end to free trade and for the government to re-impose tariffs on ALL foreign goods. This is completely asinine and it is obvious that the author of these demands has never read Friedman, Mises, Rothbard, Hayek or Hazlitt. Tariffs are bad for business, as is an elimination of free trade. Not only is it bad for business but it is bad for foreign policy. It divides us from the rest of the world and builds barriers instead of bridges. When we all cooperate and have the freedom to choose who we do business with, we all win.

Tariffs do not benefit family farming and manufacturing as the above demand states. Keeping it as simple as I can, tariffs make products that reach our shores from foreign lands cost more. Who pays for that cost? You do! So does this force you to buy American? Does that really matter? Either way you are forced to pay more. This fallacy that foreign companies delivering cheap goods is somehow immoral and destructive to our economy is ridiculous. This fear of jobs being shipped overseas has become a regurgitated talking point that represents a lack of understanding of how we all benefit from free trade.

The last thing this enormous first demand calls for is a twenty dollar an hour minimum wage! What the fuck? So do you want the living wage or the minimum wage? A living wage is typically higher than a minimum wage but a twenty dollar an hour wage is insane and well beyond the amount it would take for someone to live. This calls for everyone to make a MINIMUM of $41,600 per year! There are 312,000,000 people in the United States. When you multiply the number of people by the demanded minimum yearly salary you get $12,979,200,000,000 dollars! That’s just under $13 trillion! Our entire national debt that is strangling us is $14.7 trillion! So essentially these idiots want us to somehow magically dish out almost the equivalent to our entire national debt on a yearly basis! Nope, these people are perfectly sane economic wizards.

Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.

Do I even need to tap into this one? Have you paid attention to the criticism of Obamacare over the last few years? If after just these two demands you can’t see the socialist, if not communist, tendencies of this movement, you have to be completely ignorant to the fundamentals of either philosophy. In retrospect, this is just something else that these punk ass parasites want for free without having to really work for it. The people leading this movement are calling for the government to grow exponentially in a way that will take care of absolutely every aspect of their lives. Some people just refuse to be adults and make their own mark in the world. It’s easier to have everyone else wipe your ass apparently.

But I shouldn’t be so insensitive, I shouldn’t come across as so unkind. What I should do is be tolerant of this idiocy, right? I should explain why it is not a good idea to be a complete fucking loser and a burdensome leech.

Truth is, I’ve covered the health care issue already in my article “The Five Developmental Stages of the Progressive Beast, Part V: Barack H. Obama, Hope, Change & Health Care“. I don’t really need to rewrite what I covered there in a whopping 1,900 words. I think I, as well as several dozen other writers or pundits, have been outspoken against the tyranny of universal health care for quite some time. I’m tired of beating a dead horse. Unfortunately, you still unenlightened folks aren’t tired of asking for handouts and welfare that you have no intention of ever paying back because to do so, for you, would be immoral. However, for you, it is morally right to expect others to pick up the tab because you haven’t developed the skills to compete and survive in the real world.

The thing is, universal health care isn’t going to solve anyone’s problem. Medical care is expensive, no one denies that but eliminating competition and forcing people into a poorly-run government alternative is only going to make the problem much worse. Besides, it is government involvement that makes health care expensive right now! So how is more government involvement going to fix the problem? A question I always ask is, “What has the government ever done well?” Apparently to these dreamy OWS organizers the answer is “everything”. If you want to continue down the road of crony capitalism and corporatism, go for universal health care. For this group to not see the hypocrisy of this request boggles my mind.

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

Man oh man, this is really their third demand. Shouldn’t this be part of the first demand that calls for a living wage? It is like the author of these demands jotted down a quick thought and forgot to re-organize this list before publishing it. In any event, I guess we are revisiting the living wage issue.

So just when you thought the living wage demand was crazy, thy are now demanding it regardless of employment! So do they want minimum wage or a living wage? Which is it? Why isn’t this made clear. I assume that the minimum wage is for those working and the living wage is for those who are or aren’t working. Am I to assume that they are calling for a collection of both? Now a living wage is usually more than a minimum wage and I broke down how much it would cost to give out their proposed minimum wage of twenty bucks an hour. So imagine getting the equivalent to twenty bucks and hour (minimum wage) and then more than twice that (living wage)! Wow! There would be no more poverty! Everyone would at least be in the middle class. Too bad no one can afford this and in the end, this would make us all dead broke.

This demand is completely and utterly preposterous! To even entertain the idea that this is somehow possible is fucking ludicrous! They might as well ask for ten bars of gold to be handed to them by leprechauns every morning they wake up and grace us with their presence.

At the end of the day, who the hell is going to work to provide for those who do not want to work? Where is the incentive? How long would it be before everyone quit to milk the living wage regardless of employment status? When no one is working, then who is paying for it? The answer: no one.

Demand four: Free college education.

Oh Jesus, here we go. Yes education is expensive but there is also education that isn’t expensive. Almost anyone can go to community college and get a good education for next to nothing compared to big universities. At the same time, who is to say that we all need college?

College isn’t for everyone but we’re all programed to accept the fact that this is what someone is supposed to do after high school, just as we’re all programed to get married, have kids and buy a house. The reason I am even using this as an example is to point out that if college is free, everyone is probably going to go. Well, maybe not everyone but a lot more people will go to free college than go to college that they’d have to pay for. While it may seem good to encourage more people to expand their education beyond the high school level, it will be our tax dollars paying for all these half-assed students looking for a free lunch.

Apart from all that, why in the hell would you want the government to handle your continued education when they can’t even effectively run the current public education system? While test scores and student performances continue to plummet, you want to introduce this system into universities? Do you really want a surgeon to cut you open that was educated by a public university? Really? You do?

Like health care, part of the reason why education is so expensive is because of government meddling and their involvement. The crony capitalism and corporatism has infiltrated the colleges and driven costs up. Basically OWS calls for an end to these things by calling for more of these things. Why? Because they don’t have a clue how this all works and really, I doubt they care.

Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.

I had a huge article debunking all the bullshit surrounding alternative energy. Read my article “Recycled Myths & Renewable Scams” for an extensive analysis of every major alternative energy source. I’m not going to rehash all my talking points from that massive article but I will give you a brief rundown.

To start, the entire world is currently dependent on fossil fuels for everything. In fact, you can’t even create most of these other alternative energy sources without using fossil fuels in the process. Fast tracking a process to bring fossil fuels to an end makes absolutely no sense if you understand how this stuff works. OWS obviously doesn’t.

Now there is nothing wrong with trying to work towards getting away from fossil fuels but one has to be realistic about it. Every other energy source comes with its own big list of pros and cons. Just because a bag of goods is sold to you as something, doesn’t mean that the sales pitch was accurate. This is the case with most of these green energy alternatives. You have to keep in mind that the green movement has a pretty diabolical agenda but then again so does Occupy Wall Street based off of their list of demands.

Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.

The question I have is that if they want us to use an entire trillion for infrastructure, can we subtract it from their living wage and minimum wage demands? Nope, I doubt they’d go for that. At least they don’t have a problem forcing the rest of us to pay for it.

The fact that they are asking for this makes me realize that they have no idea how much a trillion dollars really is. Do they think that Wall Street or the government can just write a trillion dollar check? They’re aware that we are already trillions in debt right? Oh but the Federal Reserve can just print more money right? Yeah, the problem with this whole movement is they don’t even know who the enemy is, more on the Fed at the end of this article.

Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America’s nuclear power plants.

Awesome, these parasites want us to throw around another magic trillion that we can somehow manifest from thin air. This demand is equally ridiculous as the last one and virtually the same.

Sure we need to take care of our environment but lets be real about it. Where is this money going to come from? I mean the running tab for these demands is insane and we’re only about halfway through this list here! Again, these people just don’t know how the financial system works and their impression of economics is like something from a Narnia book. I guess shit just magically appears! Must be a cool dream.

As far as the nuclear power point, again alternative energy is nowhere where it needs to be to take over.  Nuclear power may seem scary when buying into all the hype but it is an efficient source of energy and pretty damn safe when managed properly and not struck by a combination of earthquakes and tsunamis. I already debunked many of the anti-nuclear arguments in my article “Recycled Myths & Renewable Scams“.

Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.

Actually, everyone should have equal rights if they follow the Constitution. If individual rights are applied to all we would all be able to live equally. However even in the days of the Founding Fathers individual rights were grossly violated as slavery still existed. Point is, if people would respect individual rights we would all be on a level playing field. We don’t need an amendment to legislate this we just need to follow what has already been written.

What OWS is calling for here however is actually a violation of individual rights. Once again doublethink and doublespeak take over and they try to fight against what they perceive as tyranny by employing the same method that they are fighting against. Let me explain their folly.

Essentially, these guys want the government to come in and regulate fairness. This never works, in fact to force people to comply to this “fairness” and “equality” creates an imbalance by having a negative impact on the forced party’s individual and property rights. You can’t force people to play nice and to do business with each other. I mean, you can but at the end of the day it is tyrannical and it violates their constitutional rights.

This is the same argument that Barry Goldwater used, which ultimately didn’t get him elected but just like then, the people today can’t see the forest for the trees. Civil rights laws were tyrannical and monstrous and only made the leviathan bigger. This is just another classic example of how bad consequences can occur as the result of good intentions. Although these OWS shitcocks don’t care, they just want as much free shit as they can get.

Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.

I don’t oppose this demand in theory but I do have my two cents to add. If we were to allow open borders migration, we would have to end the welfare system as it is. In fact, I wrote about this in my article “Conservatives & Aliens“. However, following the track record of this group’s demands can only lead one to the conclusion that they want to implement this with the welfare system still intact. If that were the case, this would be a fiscal nightmare!

People would flock here and our population would explode all because everyone would be trying to get a living wage as well as a job with a minimum wage of twenty bucks an hour. I laid out how horrible this would work out with our current population numbers, well imagine how bad it would be with an explosion in immigration. Again, who would pay for this? These OWS kids haven’t really thought this shit through.

Besides, eventually we would run out of money. It would happen pretty fast mind you and then where would these people go, what would we do? We’d all be poor and trapped in an overpopulated mess with a shattered economy. Wall Street would certainly fall but so would America. There is absolutely no way we could ever sustain these idiotic policies. Even a kindergarten economist should see that!

Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.

Here’s a demand from this group that I fully agree with. In all honesty, the electoral system in this country is corrupt and time and time again these ballot machines have failed. There have been tons of issues over the years, most notably the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore and the 2004 presidential election between George W. Bush and John Kerry. There were also some fishy outcomes during the 2010 midterm elections. Harry Reid’s sketchy victory over Sharron Angle comes to mind.

Essentially, the process we have now is pretty fucked and unreliable. It makes one think that this whole thing is rigged. Not to jump the gun or anything but what is one to think with these closed, secretive electoral processes? We need to control our votes and everything needs to be out in the open. To suggest otherwise is to accept and perpetuate electoral corruption. Why would they want it to be so shadowy if they weren’t tinkering with something? The ruling class is tricky and they will stop at nothing to dictate the direction of government.

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the “Books.” World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the “Books.” And I don’t mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

This is beyond idiotic! In fact, this may be the dumbest damn thing on this list of demands and that’s saying a lot! Did Tyler Durden write this? At least he took the bull by the horns and took out the credit card companies like a champ. However Hollywood heroes are typically just that, Hollywood heroes. These people have obviously watched ‘Fight Club’ too many times and are convinced that this is the morally right thing to do. Ah.. that youthful angst!

So OWS really wants to erase any trace of debt whatsoever? So essentially, what they are saying is that they are unwilling to man up to their responsibilities as human beings and they are unwilling to fulfill their contractual obligations with whomever because fuck it, who wants to be forced to pay for what they use. These people are so weak and deluded that it is disgusting. Don’t give me that evil corporations preying on innocent victims bullshit, you idiots just don’t feel that you are obligated to pay the price for the things you have benefitted from. Everything should be free! So again, who the fuck is going to pay for this? Someone has to pay the debt, you can’t just wipe it out unless you intend for EVERYTHING to collapse. Are these people really this fucking ignorant?

Here’s an example. If I am a bank and a customer comes to me for a loan, I should be able to look at his credit and determine if the person deserves a loan and if they do, what the terms should be based off of their own personal fiscal responsibility. Why would I give a loan to someone who has horrible credit and who obviously doesn’t intend to pay me back?

This whole thing is so ridiculous, trying to even argue against it is pointless because the person who would support such a demand is a helpless weakling whose word is worth dirt. Man the fuck up people you’re embarrassing yourselves!

Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.

Are you shitting me? This really just goes with the last demand and my points are virtually the same with this one. Credit agencies exist for a reason and that reason is to inform us how others we do business with handle their money. Granted credit agencies are in the pocket of Wall Street and help contribute to the corruption of corporatism but to flat out outlaw them is just careless and brainless. The pure and utter stupidity of these demands is mind-boggling!

Man oh man do these fucktards want to absolve themselves of any responsibility whatsoever! Let’s fight for a new America where we can be free of tyranny, responsibility, obligation, tuition and our word! I’m surprised there isn’t a demand for weekly drop-offs of Slim Jims, Djarums, Sno Balls and Red Bull.

Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.

Damn it I’m spent. Do I need to rip this shit apart anymore? Unions are garbage and they stifle productivity, eliminate jobs and do way more harm than good. Not to mention that they are typically full of thugs ready to crack your skull open if you oppose them. Unions shut doors, they certainly don’t open them.

Final Statement: These demands will create so many jobs it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy.

These fuckers are so goddamned delusional that this whole laughable list has lost its charm and the funny is gone. Has a single person involved in organizing this movement and their demands ever read a real book on economics? Maybe they’re just recycling some indoctrinated bullshit that they got from some Marxist professor they don’t intend to pay. That final statement in reference to this list is so nonsensical it gave me a migraine and made me throw up a little bit.

These demands would destroy our economy, cripple our country and cost us countless jobs. We would be in one hell of a shitpickle if these totalitarian stooges had their way. It makes me wonder who is actually behind this movement because there is absolutely no mention of the Federal Reserve, who they should be fighting against instead of Wall Street. There is no mention of our involvement in all these wars: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty. There’s no calling for Obama to be held accountable for his crimes and his involvement in Wall Street-Washington cronyism.

The best place to start looking at is at the author of this list of demands. His name is Lloyd J. Hart. Apparently he intends to go to his own rally but he needs a ride. To me that is hilarious and says so much about the cockpuppets running this show. I’m surprised the list of demands doesn’t call for free Subaru Outbacks. See for yourself in the picture to the right, that was taken from his profile on the Occupy Wall Street website. I hope you found a fucking ride Lloyd. By the way, check out his Facebook (here), which he no longer uses after trolling and spamming people while only acquiring 16 likes.

It has also come out in the last few days that people like George Soros and Van Jones are supporting Occupy Wall Street. Why is this not surprising? While they publicly offer support, I wonder if they themselves are pulling any strings?

You see people, you have to know who and what you are dealing with. I know many of you involved in this movement don’t follow this bullshit philosophy or want these moronic demands, you just want to end the tyranny that exists between Washington and Wall Street. The people organizing this want so much more however. Realistically, they are calling for pure totalitarianism. These people believe that the more the government gets involved in these matters, the better off we’ll be. Yeah, that same government that is owned by Wall Street. Do you see the hypocrisy?

The problem is, for those of you who truly want to end the tyranny of the financial system, you are fighting the wrong battle. Yes Wall Street is corrupt but the real battle that needs to be fought is with the Federal Reserve. I implore all of you that haven’t to read G. Edward Griffin’s book “The Creature From Jekyll Island“. You need to educate yourself on the tyranny and unlimited power of the Federal Reserve. Until we address the real enemy, going after Wall Street is pointless.

To those of you going down there because it just “feels right” and it “feels good”, stop being fucking joiners and spend some of that time sitting around in the park by putting a book in your hands and educating yourself on what it is you think you know. This country breeds too many weak parasites trying to suck the blood of those of us who truly work hard and earn the fruits of our labor. Don’t be one of those vampires, they are the ones who create these problems that they are trying to solve.

Not everyone is a joiner though, there are guys like the dude in the video below that give me hope because not everyone down there can be classified as blind sheep acting on an impulse.

How refreshing. At least someone down there knows the enemy.

*Taken from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Written by Anthony Gregory.

As Obama demonizes the wealthy and pitches a dozen plans to restructure the economy, opponents of this program need a reminder of what exactly we’re fighting for. We are resisting bureaucracy, central planning, and encroachments on our freedom and communities. But this does not get to the heart of the matter. We are not only an opposition movement, countering the president and his partisans’ agenda. More fundamentally, we stand in defense of the greatest engine of material prosperity in human history, the fount of civilization, peace, and modernity: capitalism.

Many regard “capitalism” as a dirty word, and it is tarnished most of all by its supposed guardians. Wall Street giants fancy themselves capitalists even as they live off the taxpayer and thrive on the state’s gifts of privilege, inflation, and barriers to entry. In the military-industrial complex, they champion capitalism by name as they produce devices of murder for the state. In the Republican Party and every conservative institution, they talk it up while making such vast exceptions to the principle as to swallow it whole. When many think of capitalism, they think of the corporatist status quo, leading even some who favor economic freedom to abandon the term.

CONTINUED..