Bernie Sanders: Saint or Sinner? Hero or Destroyer?

Bernie Sanders wrote a very erudite piece for the Washington Post about what he and his followers want for America. You would think that they're the only ones who care. I guess if you buy the story that Hillary Clinton is a Nazi-loving, corrupt oligarch slash Wall Street whore it must seem as if her supporters love Nazis, oligarchs and whores and positively salivate over the idea of the 1% getting richer.

It's a lovely, dramatic picture, one that gives anybody with unprocessed frustration and anger plenty to vent on. And naturally Sanders' opening paragraph talks about political revolution.

Boy, does Sanders love that word 'revolution'. And he has extraordinary skill in making it look as if he's the only politician in America with these aims. What about Barack Obama's almost eight years worth of contributions, that brought the country back from recession faster than any of the other countries affected by that recession? What about how hard and tirelessly he worked and still works towards building up the middle class and correcting the inequality?

For that matter, what about the work that Hillary Clinton has done in her political career? It's the easiest thing in the world to pick out the failures or mis-steps, grossly magnify them, and conveniently ignore when they've been corrected and when her steps achieved positive things for the country.

It's harder to go looking for truth. It's not so much fun, definitely; how can you vent on inconvenient truth?

And how, I wonder, does Bernie Sanders plan to turn any of his grand vision into reality when he openly refuses to endorse Hillary Clinton, unequivocally sending the message to his supporters not to vote for her? The more successful he is in that, the more likely it is that Donald Trump will be president and Congress will be in control of Republicans. That means the Supreme Court will be, too. It's pure logic. Unless Sanders has something else up his sleeve. Maybe he's hoping Hillary Clinton will be arrested.

I have a Facebook friend who was convinced about ten days ago that she was going to be arrested the next day, on the authority of an opinion blog. This is the same person who posted this meme:

The truth, which took me a few seconds to find via snopes.com, is that the photo is not of the girl, and that in 1975 Hillary Clinton was a young lawyer and had to take the case.

She did so reluctantly; successfully challenged the mismanaged evidence and the case didn't go to trial. Clinton didn't claim that the complainant fantasized about being raped by older men and she allegedly 'laughed' about the unreliable nature of polygraphs.

So Hillary Clinton is not an advocate for rapists. She is, however, and has always been, an advocate for women and children.

Even if she is arrested for something that Jeb Bush also did while Governor but isn't even being questioned on, why should Sanders be given her place when he didn't get the majority vote? And Clinton she isn't arrested? It's quite a gamble Sanders is taking. And he sure isn't being upfront about it. One minute he's standing next to Barack Obama, smiling and looking friendly and saying he will work with Hillary Clinton. Then the next thing he's giving a speech to his followers without mentioning her name.

He had a window of opportunity there and he chose to shut it. The fire of rage that he has fed and the  misinformation about Hillary Clinton that he's helped to grow like a cancer were already both getting dangerously close to being out of control.

And Bernie is still talking about revolution. I think back to an interview when he gushed about Castro and said sure, there are problems but... Problems like mass murders, lock-down on the press, a society reduced to its lowest common denominator with that denominator in constant plummet. I wonder if his followers realize that that's what he's looking for; the revolution that destroys everything.

So he can be the hero who rebuilds? Talk about unprocessed frustration and anger. If he carries on down this road, refusing to help his followers get their head around Hillary Clinton, Trump could become president, and everybody, not just Sanders and his followers,  can kiss everything that's good about America goodbye and say hello to a Congress even more dominated by Republicans, a conservative Supreme Court that will roll back all the social progress on equality, American going back into economic disaster, and a world of more recession and ghastly wars.

It's your choice, Bernie Sanders. 

Honor Amongst Thieves? Bloomberg News Reporters Cross the Line

 

It’s not often that something happens on Wall Street that should and could make news but gets mentioned casually in passing instead of being thoroughly investigated. But that seems to have happened in the reporting about the latest accusations leveled at Bloomberg financial data and news by public relation chiefs Jake Siewert of Goldman Sachs and Joe Evangelista of JP Morgan Chase.

The accusations are that Bloomberg reporters have been crossing the line drawn in the contract that states they may not use information gleaned from the terminals for reporting. Accusations surfaced when a Bloomberg reporter noticed that a Goldman executive hadn’t logged in for a few days. He called the Hong Kong office to ask what had happened to the executive. When news of it got to Siewert he called Evangelista, who said the same thing had been happening to JP Morgan’s execs.

Bloomberg investigated, admitted that reporters were crossing the line and breaching the terminals contract and agreed to put a stop to it. One would imagine lawsuits and huge press would have ensued but nothing seems to have really happened. It’s a bit of a damp squib, news-wise.

What hasn’t been explained is that the contract allowed reporters a limited period during which they could access help desks and log ins. If they couldn’t use that information why were they allowed to access it?

Much more interesting, though, is that this isn’t the first time executives have complained about reporters crossing the line. So when Siewert took the latest complaint seriously, some executives – reported on by the New York Times on condition of anonymity – admitted to having tried to use the breach to bargain down the price of the terminals! It’s blackmail. Soft blackmail, maybe, no threats, no bad guys, no anonymous notes, but blackmail nevertheless. In a country where people sue for the most tenuous reasons and even win, that nothing came of this is pretty extraordinary. Honor amongst thieves, I guess.

That anybody in Wall Street would be accusing anybody else of crossing the line is amusing. That execs would even openly admit to indulging in blackmail is testament to how much Wall Street believes itself to be above the law. That’s still amusing but in a rather sinister kind of way. 

What’s puzzling is that these two aspects of the same company exist as bedfellows. There are many complaints that Bloomberg News reports destructively on Wall Street goings on, yet Bloomberg financial data terminals are everywhere. And this despite that they’re by far the most expensive at $20,000 apiece. 

Maybe it’s explained by the fact that Bloomberg News is part of Bloomberg L.P., a multinational mass media limited partnership that’s based in the city of New York. Revenue in 2011 was $7.6 billion. Global revenue for the financial data market was $16 billion. No wonder nobody really challenges Bloomberg. And with all those connections, why would they have to bother reducing the price of their terminals? For once Wall Street is on the receiving end. Of a corporation that  probably controls Wall Street. Which pretty much boils down to one man. Michael Bloomberg, the 7th wealthiest man in the US, owns 88% of Bloomberg L.P.

 

Snapchat Fills the Facebook Gap and Silicon Valley Invests in Privacy

Imagine a world where companies listed on the stock exchange didn’t make any money at all, but investors bought and sold according to the companies’ popularity. A monetary value would be attached to non-tangibles and creativity would be directly rewarded for its own sake. Nothing would have to be bought or sold; it would just have to be created, requiring investment.

It’s not such a wild idea. Snapchat, an app that lets you share photos and videos for a couple of seconds before they self-destruct, attracted the attention of Silicon Valley investors after its popularity started going through the roof. It was created 2 years ago by Evan Spiegel, 22, and Bobby Murphy, 24, from Venice Beach, responding to a need they saw for better privacy, especially in their own age bracket and younger. The app now has 60 million users a month, most of them between the ages of 13 and 25.

Users see it as a way to be more real with friends – which of course includes sexting, but that isn’t its exclusive use. This is really about a younger generation wanting to be able to express itself freely but valuing its privacy above everything else. And it’s about investors rewarding creativity for its own sake, not requiring the artist to sell their product. Not much different from artists getting sponsorship just to produce art. Except that Snapchat’s value isn’t tangible.

A successful entrepreneur and investor, Scott. D. Cook, founder of Intuit, put his weight behind Snapchat, valuing it at $60 - $70 million – without it having made a cent and not even really having a capacity for making money – which resulted in Snapchat raising $13.5 million recently for development.  

Unfortunately, as Dominique Mosbergen points out in huffingtonpost.com, it’s really easy to take a screenshot of images and videos before they disappear, without the original sender being aware, so its privacy isn’t really privacy after all, but it is a notch better than Facebook. When Katie Notopoulos asked the founder Evan Spiegel about this vulnerability, he said, rather cryptically, “The people who most enjoy using Snapchat are those who embrace the spirit and intent of the service. There will always be ways to reverse engineer technology products — but that spoils the fun!” (Buzzfeed)

Snapchat has moved in where Facebook failed, by recognizing the most important thing to users – privacy - and finding a way to capitalize on it without compromising it. So far, anyway. It will take a creative investor to understand where the real value lies and that they also need to join in the creativity and find a way to create profit without destroying the most important component. It’s hard to imagine that investors will be that creative. They seem hard-wired and utterly insensitive to where real value lies. Advertising seems to be all they know as a means of creating revenue. 

But it’s not really working on Facebook, and in any case, advertising is finite; there’s only so much space on a page and people either get inured to it or they get annoyed and stop opening up that page.
Whether what’s happening with Snapchat is really creativity being valued for its own sake is hard to say. All successful companies have an eye on Wall Street, and even though most trading does seem to be controlled by prediction, to think that pure speculation based on popularity but no income stream is enough to trade off is kind of like science fiction. 

Some kind of change is in the wind, though. Snapchat has competitors, including Poke on Facebook, all a response to market demands. Maybe individuals and companies will find it harder and harder to earn megabucks in an advertising-saturated world; maybe eventually they’ll run out of options, particularly as people become better informed and demand what’s important to them. Maybe founders of apps like Snapchat won’t enjoy the idea of world dominance, like Mark Zuckerberg did, and kill their own birthchild.

Frankly, I’ve never understood why anybody would want to have so much financial power. What on earth can a single person do with it? Absolutely nothing. How many cars can you drive, how many houses can you live in at one time? How many places can you fly to in a year? How much stimulation can you take in?

That lust for more and more is a beast. Eventually you run out of ways to feed it. I think the world would be a much more peaceful and better place if these giant corps and super-wealthy individuals were brought down to earth a bit. And imagine a world where you weren’t besieged by advertising at every turn.

Zuckerberg and Facebook; a Tale of Ingenuity, Vision, Power and Greed

The story of Facebook is more and more looking like a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. Once upon a time a country was created out of virtually nothing by an idealistic young man who thought it would be a good idea if friends could meet up in cyberspace and share their lives.  Share their friends, even, meet new people. Everything was rosy as first. His subjects didn’t realize they were his subjects at all, and they got free connection to all their friends. Fun was had by all in this land of plenty. 

But of course the creator realized he could make money out of it – and who could blame him? Even creators have to live. He was clever about it, and money started to flow as the country grew beyond even his wildest dreams. Soon it had a gigantic monthly population – close to a billion, or so its PR machine said.

But by then the beauty of the original dream had begun to significantly dim as the money and the power went to the creator’s head. World dominance is a seductive thing, so is a giant bank account, and who doesn’t dream of Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange? But the subjects realized this country wasn’t any longer so much about connecting friends, it was about how to use friends – anybody’s friends - to sell something, or shove something down your throat, whether you wanted to hear about it or not.

And it sure wasn’t free at all, they paid with their privacy. The homepages got busier and busier, with targeted ads, whether you wanted them or not. Imposters flourished because there was inadequate security; the country became a breeding ground for exploitation. 

And those figures of almost a billion daily users a month – convenient for drawing advertisers and thus investors - well, they turned out not to be totally provable, as anybody can have as many accounts as they want and the creator hadn’t set up a monitoring system. Strange, considering how creative he was. You’d think he’d have known how to put that in place. There was no system to differentiate between real, active users and automatic updates happening, either.

Apart from that, subjects began to be disillusioned, and the exponential growth of the country began to slip. Rumors abounded about the creator once saying at college that anybody who trusted him with their personal information was a “dumb fuck”. And a film was made about a young kid in college who he allegedly stole the idea from in the first place. Who in real life he paid out millions in a settlement. 

One subject allegedly said of him that he “…turned out to be a great entrepreneur, a visionary, and an incredible altruist." (Wiki) Well, that subject won a Golden Globes best screenplay award for the abovementioned film, so perhaps a little bias is understandable. Perhaps he really meant it, even though his script portrayed the creator in not such a great light. Hindsight is easy when you’re clutching an award. But other subjects were saddened at the loss of the real opportunity for the creator, to make plenty money for himself, as he deserved for his ingenuity, but never to lose sight of his original goal, that this would be about friends connecting, and thus to become an icon for his generation and generations to come in a world where exploitation is so easy. To be happy with some money and not want to dominate the world. 

The story doesn’t have an ending yet. But the moral – a kind of double-edged thing - is pretty clear. Power corrupts, and people don’t like being exploited. You can’t start something with a philanthropic idea and, when it attracts millions because of its inherent philanthropy, turn it into something where you use everybody, and think that people aren’t going to notice and object. We’re not all dumb fucks.

For other opinions, read Janet Tavakoli at the huffingtonpost.com, and Somini Sengupta at nytimes.com.

Dow Jones hits the 14,000 Mark – Richard Quest is Wrong Again

People will believe what they want to believe. After President Obama was re-elected, the Dow Jones fell by 313 points to below 13,000 and a lot of analysts said that whilst ordinary Americans wanted Obama, Wall Street wanted Mitt Romney. Did all of Wall Street want that? Possibly not. 

Some individual in securities and investment had dished out almost $20 million support Romney, while Obama only got a measly $6 million. (Center for Responsive Politics). So they certainly were in a snit. There were dire predictions of the further negative impact of President Obama having the power for the next four years.  Happily, the sensible voice of journalism could still be heard. 

On Nov. 7 2012 Mark Gongloff of The Huffpost pointed out that the Dow rose 1% on news of Obama’s success, and the fall was a response to Europe’s situation. Turns out that Wall Street, apart from the snitty guys, was quite happy with President Obama, because they knew where they stood with him.

The same silly scenario has recently been playing out. I know I’m on a Richard Quest bashing quest, and soon I’ll stop. A couple of days ago, the Dow Jones dropped a few points after having risen significantly for quite a while post to President Obama’s win. Well, Richard Quest and all the doomy gloomies had a field day. Ken Polcari, Financial analyst, speaking to CNN Business correspondent Alison Kosik, on Quest Means Business Jan 30 2013, said:

“Listen, I think -- I don't think we're going to see the Dow hit 14,000 any time soon right now, just because not that we're going to crash, either. I don't expect a crash. But I suspect that we're going to test 1,475 on the S&P, which is down, you know, 25 points from here before we make another move higher. It's going to come back and test that level of support.

So we're going to go low before (inaudible) 2,000. And I got to tell you, with March 1st coming and the discussion of sequestration, I think that's going to keep it capped. So I think we're going to struggle with 14,000 for a while.”

Alison Kosik replied “…We won't be having a 14,000 party, Richard.

Richard Quest’s dramatic, solemn and authoritative closing comment was “One of the fascinating things about markets, just look at the Dow. It gets within 30 or 40 points of the 14,000. But it just can't do it. That's one of the fascinating parts about the markets, the way in which they get so close and yet just cannot get there in the end. And in fact, as Ken Polcari seems to suggest, it is coming back down again.

You'd have thought it was easy, 30 points. Not a bit of it.” (CNN Transcripts)

With that he rang the bell.  

On Friday afternoon, the Dow was up 152 points to 14,013, and it closed on 14,009. The Standard & Poor's 500 rose 15 to 1,513. The Dow has only reached 14,000 15 times in its history, the last time being 5 years ago; it’s been climbing steadily since Richard Quest brought out his traffic lights, allegedly with huge regret, but clearly licking his chops. Longing for the day he could press the Disaster! red light button?

That’s how it looked to me. It never got beyond the amber light, of course, and pretty soon he tucked it away. This is the man supposedly with perhaps the most market information at his fingertips. I used to wonder how much the markets were affected by experts who play up the worst case scenario, but I’m glad to see that they don’t have the influence I feared. 

The US is on the mend whether people like Richard Quest, business correspondents and financial analysts want to acknowledge it or not. Still, I’m sure he and they have some influence. Why would it hurt them to be realistic? It’s clearly the drama that Richard Quest loves. He just doesn’t seem to have realized there’s just as much drama in triumph as there is in disaster. 

Fear-mongering for the sake of drama gets old very quickly.