Chris Collins (D) New York.

Chris Collins was arrested last week for passing along insider information related to stock he and his family owned.  The information he passed along was that a clinical trial of the drug the company produced had failed and the stock was going to plummet.  Collins was warning his family to sell quickly before the information became public.

One of the reporters who broke the story said that this was a classic “pump and dump scheme.”  Most of the coverage, however, has centered around the “dump” part of the scene, that is, the getting rid of the stock before the price tanked.

According to Investopedia, a “Pump and Dump” scheme is a “scheme that attempts to boost the price of a stock through recommendations based on false, misleading or really exaggerated statements.  The perpetrators of this scheme, who already have an established position in the company’s stock, sell their positions after the hype has led to a higher share price.  This practice is illegal based on securities law and can lead to heavy fines.”

Pump and Dump schemes usually involve what are called “micro’ and small-cap stocks, since they are the easy to manipulate.  It only requires a few buyers to push a stock higher.

According to Invesopedia: “Through huge volume selling, they pump up the price of the stock.  Once the selling volume reaches critical mass with no more buyers, the firm dumps its shares for a huge profit.  This drives the stock price down, often below the original selling price, resulting in huge losses for the customers because they can not sell their shares in time.

This can be done by anybody who has access to an online trading account and “the ability to convince other investors to buy a stock that is supposedly ready to take off.”  The schemer buys heavily into a stock that trades on low volume which pumps up the price.

The stock is usually promoted as a “hot tip” or “the next big thing” with details of an upcoming news announcement that will “send the stock through the roof”. The details of each individual pump and dump scam tend to be different but the scheme always boils down to a basic principal: shifting supply and demand. Pump and dump scams tend to only work on small and micro-cap stocks that are traded over the counter. These companies tend to be highly liquid and can have sharp price movements when volume increases. The group behind the scam increases the demand and trading volume in the stock and this new inflow of investors leads to a sharp rise in its price. Once the price rise has formulated, the group will sell their position to make a large short-term gain.

(Two movies use the pump and dump schemes as a central theme: The wolf of Wall Street and Boiler room.)

 

Gustavo Petro won over 41% of the vote in Colombia’s most recent presidential election.  This was called by Miguel Salazar of the Nation Magazine, “an unprecented electoral feat for Colombia’s left after decades of isolation and political assassinations – his candidacy became the most successful leftist campaign in modern Colombian history.”

“There is no defeat here,” Petro tweeted shortly after the election results were announced.

But, the election of Ivan Duque, the candidate hand-picked by former President Alvaro Uribe and described by some as a political nobody a short time ago, is no cause for celebration.  Duque, according to Salazar, “…supports a return to harsher measures for combating drug production and consumption in Colombia, including the recriminalization of minor drug offenses and a return to aerial spraying of coca crops, a hazardous practice that was halted under president Santos despite pressure from Washington. Over the past few months, Duque has also supported partnerships between the private sector and the government’s educational branch, and he has vowed to continue the mining and oil drilling operations that have contributed to global warming and perpetuated violence across the country. He’s allied with ultra-conservative politicians such as Alejandro Ordoñez, a former seminarian who opposes LGBT rights, and Marta Lucía Ramírez, a staunch opponent of women’s reproductive rights who will serve as the first female vice president in Colombian history.”

The election of Duque demonstrates once again the strength of Colombia’s conservative elite.

“Politically, Iván Duque is a nobody,” said Sandra Borda, a political scientist at Los Andes University in Bogotá and quoted by Salazar. “He owes every single vote to (former president) Álvaro Uribe.”

See:  Salazar, Miguel (6/20/18) Once again, the right wing wins in Colombia, Amid divisions on the left.  The Nation Magazine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can read the full indictment of Chris Collins and his co-defendants.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4639631-U-S-v-Christopher-Collins-Et-Al-Indictment-18-Cr.html

As Richard Painter tweeted this morning: You can either be a public servant or you can play the stock market.  You can’t do both.  We must have laws that prevent those in public service from profiting off their positions.  Donald Trump and his family are primary offenders.

 

 

 

“Porn is about reducing women to corpses.  It is about necrophilia.”

 

“The cult of self dominates our cultural landscape.  This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt.  This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations.  It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism.”

    “Functional illiteracy in North Ameria is epidemic.  There are 7 million illiterate Americans. Another 27 million are unable to read well enough to complete a job application, and 30 million can’t read a simple sentence.  There are some 50 million who read at a fourth-or fifth-grade level.  Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate – a figure that is growing by more than 2 million a year.  A third of high-school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates.  In 2007, 80 percent of the families in the United States did not buy or read a book.”

Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion.

IN 2007, 80 PERCENT OF THE FAMILIES IN THE UNITED STATES DID NOT BUY OR READ A BOOK.

 

This photograph doesn’t begin to give you an impression of what is happening on 2,200 miles of Georgia roadway.

The Department of Transportation is in the midst of a clear cutting project that is only half-way through.  We noticed it around our house in Coastal Georgia.  Trees were being clear cut off land that formerly was wooded and beautiful.  What was left was a hideous swamp.  I can’t imagine the effect this had on wildlife.  And, land that previously only had to be maintained by keeping the undergrowth out of the highway, now has to be completely maintained, costing God knows how much money.  This project to make Georgia hideous, hazardous to wildlife, and expensive, is most certainly a boondoggle for the company who has the contract to clear land that didn’t need clearing and the Congress members who no doubt were paid back with favors and deals.  This little project is going to cost Georgians $62.5 million dollars.

Now, you want me to tell you what the DOT and the Federal Highway Administration have to say about this?

Quote, Doug Hecox, spokesman for the Federal Highway Administration:  “Trees are pretty and aesthetically pleasing, we understand that, but there are a variety of reasons why they’re an unsafe choice.”

And, according to the Riverkeeper in Savannah, Simona Perry, the state ignored the impact this little project would have on erosion.  One of the first things we noticed was that what had formerly been a lovely wooded area was turned into a muddy swamp.

“The state disregarded…good environmental practice by doing it this say…There wasn’t a barrier to stop sediment from running into those waterways and that was alarming,” Said Perry in an Associated Press story.

Oh, and Department of Transportation officials quoted to the Associated Press, statistics that 472 people died over the past three years from hitting trees.

I think we should get rid of them all.  After all, how many children get hurt every year from falling from trees and elderly people tripping over their roots.  Clear cut the state.

According to figures from the CDC, 96 people are killed every DAY with guns.  In Georgia, between 2014 and 2016, 4,413 people were killed with guns (Atlanta Journal Constitution).

Here are the rankings for Georgia compared to the rest of the country.

• In 2014, Georgia ranked the 4th highest state with a total of 1,394 deaths.
• In 2015, Georgia ranked 5th highest state with a total of 1,448 deaths.
• In 2016, Georgia ranked 4th highest state with a total of 1,571 deaths.

Your Republican Legislature at work for you in Georgia.

 

Sarah Kenzior

  This is the best, the very best tweet of the day, the week, maybe forever.

“There are parallels to past authoritarianism, but what’s happening with Trump, in the digital age, is new and transnational.  The president’s loyalty is not necessarily to a state, but to foreign leaders and multinational criminal alliances.  The state is just something to sell.”

Sarah Kenzior, author of Flyover Country

 

 

The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh is as Robert Reich just tweeted a “huge win for corporations and the GOP’s donor class – the culmination of decades of corporate efforts to stack the courts in their favor. We must make a ruckus to block his nomination.”  Tweet 7/9/18

I would argue that we have to make more than a “ruckus.”

Scott Pruitt is out at the EPA, but he may well show up somewhere else.  There have even been rumblings that he has campaigned to be made Attorney General.

And, Pruitt’s replacement is actually worse than Pruitt.      He will continue the work of dismantling environmental regulations easily and quickly since he won’t attract the attention and scrutiny Pruitt did.  The people Trump picks to head agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency are there to cater to industry and destroy the agency itself.

A year ago, a year ago, Andrew Wheeler was a coal industry lobbyist.  He is a climate change denier and he will in the words of Alexander Kaufman, writing in Huffpost, continue the “radical plan to dismantle the nation’s leading public health agency at the behest of the industries it regulates…” (Kaufman, 7/518).

Wheeler is sure to continue Pruitt’s work reshaping the agency’s science advisory boards to make them less scientific.  His tenure will most likely spark the continued exodus of talented professionals who refuse to help cripple the EPA and “put the environment on an ever accelerating train of destruction” (Kaufman, 7/5/18).  Pruitt’s efforts to gut auto emissions standards and limit the use of public health studies in writing regulations will not stop just because Pruitt is gone.  Pruitt’s proposed regulation “to replace a landmark Obama-era rule protecting drinking water for 117 million Americans” (Kaufman, 7/5/18) will be pursued.  And these measures are only a sample of the path of destruction Pruitt has started.

The Sierra Club called for Wheeler’s confirmation to be delayed and an investigation opened after The Intercept reported on irregularities in his fund raising activities.  But, the Republicans ignored the request.  Wheeler dodged questions at his confirmation hearing about climate change and critical environmental policies (Kaufman, 7/5/18).

Once again, I’d like to point out that SUSAN COLLINS voted to confirm this coal industry lobbyist as deputy administrator of the EPA.  Pruitt’s scandalous and criminal behavior as head of the EPA had already hit the press, so Collins knew damn well that she was voting for somebody who was likely to become the administrator.  SUSAN COLLINS IS A SHAM.  And Scott Pruitt’s work is ongoing.

What happened in Flint, Michigan can happen in any town, any city in the country.  We must act now, we must mobilize, we must resist.  We must not let this country become the site for a free-for-all among big business interests.

 

 

 

 

  So refreshing.  So forceful.  Chris Coons is on Morning Joe with the new Democratic strategy for preventing the Supreme Court from being taken over completely by Right-wing ideologues.  What is it?

“There’s very little we can do.”  “Elections have consequences.”

And the Democrats wonder why people don’t turn out to vote for them.  They fight like hell to prevent anybody like Bernie Sanders from bringing integrity, democracy and backbone to the party.  “There’s very little we can do.”  It’s pathetic.

  Lawrence B. Wilkerson

is a retired U.S. Army Colonel.  He is also the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.  Wilkerson was part of the preparation of Colin Powell for his February 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council which helped pave the way for the invasion of Iraq.

Subsequently, Wilkerson has stated that the information on which this presentation was based was false.  Powel, he has said, was not made aware of doubts about the source of the information at the time.  Wilkerson has also publicly spoken out about the poor planning and execution of the Iraq War.  He is a strong critic of the decision-making process of the Bush Administration largely taken over by Vice President Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Wilkerson has appeared on Bill Mahrer several times, most recently in June 2018 with Jennifer Rubin.  On that show, Wilkerson pointed out that the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement is in danger of collapse.  We should, he argued, be talking with the Russians.

As the Guardian (Borger, 4/17/2018) has pointed out: “the 2010 New Start treaty limiting the deployed strategic warheads and delivery systems of the US and Russia, will expire in February 2021, unless urgent steps are taken to extend it.”

Wilkerson, however, has very little confidence that this president at this time could cope with these issues.

Wilkerson and Powell were profoundly disillusioned by their experiences within the Bush Administration.   Wilkerson can always be counted on to speak his mind and speak truth to power.

See:

Borger, Julian (4/17/18) “US and Russian nuclear arsenals set to be uchecked for first time since 1972.”  The Guardian.

Mayer, Jane (2008) The Dark Side.  Doubleday.

New York Times Op-Ed 2018 by Lawrence Wilkerson

 

 

 

 

    Susan Collins made this statement yesterday:

“I’ve done a lot of work on the list and, I have told the White House counsel individuals that to me appear to meet the criteria of accepting that Row v. wade is settled law and who have extraordinarily good backgrounds.”

In 2016, she wrote in the Washington Post that Trump was “unworthy of being our president.”  Now, she’s willing to allow him to appoint a justice to the Supreme Court.

Susan Collins is not a moderate and she’s not an ally.

Jennifer Rubin was once accused of being such a fawning supporter of Mitt Romney even the right thought she was trying to get a job in a future Romney administration.  Nevertheless, she has become a forceful voice against the Trump administration and all it stands for.

Jennifer Rubin, former Republican writer for the Washington Post :

On the Democrats: “Don’t play defense, play offense.”

On the White House Press Corps: “They sit there, they take it, they record it…”  “Get up and leave.”  “Your lives are in danger.”  “That’s incitement to violence too.”

On Sarah Huckleberry Sanders: “These people should be made uncomfortable.”  And it should be a “life sentence.”

(Joy Reid Show, 71/18)

On the Republican Party, it “has become the caricature the left always said it was…” (Politico, 4/17/2018)