Naked Capitalism has the article Marshall Auerback: Apple Has an Early Case of GE’s Disease.

To be fair to Apple, it is hardly unique. As early as 2010, market analyst Rob Parenteau noted that company managements, “ostensibly under the guise of maximizing shareholder value, would much rather pay themselves handsome bonuses, or pay out special dividends to their shareholders, or play casino games with all sorts of financial engineering thrown into obfuscate the nature of their financial speculation, than fulfill the traditional roles of capitalist, which is to use profits as both a signal to invest in expanding the productive capital stock, as well as a source of financing the widening and upgrading of productive plant and equipment.” Likewise, Professor William Lazonick noted in his work, “Profits Without Prosperity,” that the 449 companies that were publicly listed between 2003 and 2012 “used 54% of their earnings—a total of $2.4 trillion—to buy back their own stock, almost all through purchases on the open market.”

Share buybacks were effectively illegal under SEC rules until 1982, in the midst of the Reagan deregulation wave, when SEC Rule 10b-18 was introduced. Until that time, buybacks had been considered a form of stock manipulation. As early as the mid-1980s, more and more companies have resorted to them, and the practice has grown exponentially.

In one sense stock buy backs are effectively shrinking the size of the company to match the shrinking demand for its products. That may be wise policy, but the stock buyback masks what is going on from investors who only look at the per share numbers. Of course, turning cash into debt is not the smartest thing one could do if you cared about the longevity of the company.

Here are the unofficial 2018 Sturbridge Election Results from the town’s website. It is probably easier to view if you click on the previous link than trying to view it from the included frame. There are two sheets in the spreadsheet. The kinks to the sheets are in the bottom left hand corner of the frame below.

Ars Technica has the article Strange snafu misroutes domestic US Internet traffic through China Telecom.

Telecom with ties to China’s government misdirected traffic for two and a half years.

China Telecom, the large international communications carrier with close ties to the Chinese government, misdirected big chunks of Internet traffic through a roundabout path that threatened the security and integrity of data passing between various providers’ backbones for two and a half years, a security expert said Monday. It remained unclear if the highly circuitous paths were intentional hijackings of the Internet’s Border Gateway Protocol or were caused by accidental mishandling.

I don’t want to scare anybody, but … I have been meaning to write about a recent incident where I received a blackmail email with my email password in it. I realized that my email account, which I had set up many years ago, was not set up to use even minimal password security (and it had a weak password). I fixed both problems, and ignored the blackmail threat.

If you use a password over the internet and the destination uses an unencrypted protocol (http) instead of the encrypted protocol (https), then your password can easily be stolen. This rerouting gimmick mentioned in this article would be an ideal way to carry out this theft. Many browsers show a green padlock in the address area to show that the trip to the destination is secure.

If you think https is totally secure, then read the ars technica article Why you probably shouldn’t be doing work on that in-flight Wi-Fi

Until last year, Gogo was also issuing its own certificates for some secure websites—including Google. That allowed them to perform content screening even in apparently secure Google searches.

I just found the Mozilla article What do the security warning codes mean?, It explains some messages I have received from Firefox, but did not fully understand the significance until preparing this post.

YouTube has a discussion of the midterm elections LIVE: The Midterms in REAL Terms

Join host Marc Steiner with Paul Jay, Danny Glover, Abby Martin, Thomas Frank, Khalilah Harris, Robert Scheer, Eugene Puryear, Howie Klein, Phyllis Bennis, and more on election night from 11:00 PM – 1:00 AM (EST)

They are talking in language that I feel for.

I have been wondering why I am almost the only person in the world to notice this. When it takes, on average, two jobs per adult worker to make a living in the USA, does it make sense to call it full employment when each working adult has, on average, one job?

In the days when it only required one paid job per family to survive, it made sense to measure how many people were totally without work to understand how the economy was doing for the average person. Nowadays, every person could have one job, and we would have 0% unemployment by traditional measures but 50% underemployment when measuring how many people had enough work to make a living.

When was the last time you heard a news report on what percentage of the people did not have enough work to make a living?

Nobody wanted to tell people that creating 100s of thousands of low wage jobs per month during Obama’s term was not really a good record. Just shows that when you tell lies when you are in power, your opponents are given free reign to tell the same lies during their term. I always opposed the neo-liberals like Clinton and Obama when they used deception to brag about what they were doing. There is a reason why my parents always told me that honesty is the best policy.

The Atlantic has the article
My Grandfather Thought He Solved a Cosmic Mystery: His career as an eminent physicist was derailed by an obsession. Was he a genius or a crackpot?

In essence, what he thought he’d found was a way in which probabilities arose naturally, a way in which they could be derived from the basic laws of the physical world rather than deduced from experiments. And he thought this should apply in the quantum world as well. It was both as simple, and as grandiose, as that. All the other papers, down through the years, involve elaborations of this main idea.

This paragraph is as tantalizing close as the author gets to explaining the idea.

This makes me think some more about a tantalizing paradox that physicists are talking about these days. That is called quantum entanglement. Two particles are entangled in such a way that the two have opposite values of a physical quantity. You don’t know (can’t know) the value that either particle has until you measure one particle. As soon as you know the value one particle has, you know the value that the other particle must have. If you don’t make the measurement until the two particles are separated by large distances, it leads to the question of how the remote particle can instantly take on a known value when you make a mearuremment on the particle you have close access to. The special theory of relativity tells you that no particle, and no information, can travel faster than the speed of light. Quantum mechanics tells you that the answer to what value each particle has doesn’t even exist when the particles were separated and sent on their different paths. It does not seem possible that both of these physical laws can both be right, and yet the entangled particles have been shown by experiment to behave the way I described. It seems obvious that something we can’t explain is exactly what is happening. I have no idea what the answer is, but it is just interesting to think of what has to happen for someone to figure it out.

Maybe Francis Perey had the kind of insight that will be needed.

Common Dreams has the article Sanders and Varoufakis Announce Alliance to Craft ‘Common Blueprint for an International New Deal’.

The pair hopes to promote a “progressive, ecological, feminist, humanist, rational program” for not only Europe, but the entire world.

If the oligarchs can get together to create international trade agreements that benefit them and screw the rest of us, it is about time people woke up to the fact that we need progressive international agreements to protect the 99% of the people in the world.

The rallying cry started by Marx and Engels was “Workers of the World Unite“. The oligarchs certainly understood the power of the rich to unite around the world. It is about time that workers woke up to what is necessary.

The only way we can fight the trade agreements created by the rich to make workers compete for jobs by offering to work for the least amount of money is to unite world-wide to get trade agreements that protect workers from the oligarchs.

I have been waiting for some USA politician to realize that we have to get progressive political leaders from around the world to unite to protect the workers. I am not surprised that Bernie Sanders would be the first one with national standing to promote this idea.

For those who would like to know more about Yanis Varoufakis, start with this search on The Real News Network,

I often think of this quote that finally I found in a YouTube video clip, Bridge of spies – “Would it help?” quote.

YouTube has the video A Discussion with Michael Hudson, Ellen Brown, & Walt McRee about the public banking option.

Before you swallow this discussion hook, line, and sinker, you might want to look at my dissent below,

On Thursday April 6, 2017 two world-renowned economic thinkers came to Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA to discuss how a public banking option can affect governmental effectiveness.

This discussion focused on the key differences between government’s unquestioned reliance on private capital markets and how an entirely new, more productive arrangement could be devised.

I’d say there is a fair amount of hogwash in this presentation. If you really understand the relation between Federal Reserve Bank and private banks you can supply enough of your own knowledge to justify some of the words that are being said, but if you don’t, I think you might be bamboozled by what Ellen Brown in particular has to say. I watched about 20 minutes of this, and expected Michael Hudson to correct what Brown said, but he did not. I have read Hudson’s book “Killing the Host”, and the truth is more subtle than they are making out here.

I think a good way to understand private banks is that they get money wholesale and lend it at retail. They get the wholesale money from many places including depositors, investors, and the Federal Reserve Bank. I haven’t been able to find a reference that explains the percentages that the many wholesale suppliers are responsible for. To pretend or give the impression that private banks only have one source of wholesale money is to give you a very distorted picture.

Fractional reserve banking allows banks to lend more money than they have, but if they run into trouble, they have the Federal Reserve Bank to provide them whatever money they need (at a cost of course).

Investopedia has the article Wholesale Money that gives a hint at what I mean by wholesale money. I do not know what Fraction of the wholesale money comes from the Fed at any particular moment in history, but when the system runs short, only the Fed has an infinite supply (in the USA) to fill in whatever is needed. The excerpt from Investopedia talks about a situation in England that has close parallels to what would happen in the USA with the Fed instead of the Bank of England.

A defining moment of the subprime crisis happened in 2007, when Northern Rock, a British bank which had relied on wholesale markets for most of its finance, was no longer able to fund its lending activities and had to ask the Bank of England for emergency funding.

I have now watched the entire video beyond the initial 20 minutes that aggravated me so. There is lots of good information and ideas buried in this manure pile.

I do think that Ellen Brown is close to an idiot in understanding all the issues. Poo-pooing the need to watch out for fraud in a public bank is too naive to believe she could actually believe that. Michael Hudson was correct that their need to be stiff penalties including jail time for cheaters. There will always be cheaters and attempts at corruption. Read William K Black’s book, “The Best Way o Rob a Bank Is To Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry”

Her introduction of the idea of using block chain for the Federal Reserve to serve the banking needs of the public is a complete red herring. Block chain is merely a computer security method which has nothing to do with the fundamentals of running a bank. None of the large and small financial institutions that serve the people at the retail level, use block chain to deal with USA money.

YouTube has the video How Democratic Establishment Is Squeezing Andrew Gillum.

Andrew Gillum ran as a Bernie endorsed-Med4All-Progressive and now is being squeezed by the Party to prop up the enemies of progressives like Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

I have been wondering why I have started to become disappointed with Andrew Gillum and even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lately. This explains what is going on. Voting Blue just won’t do.