Bye Bye Privacy: Personal Data are Being Extracted and Refined to Power Big Business/Big Government

You for Sale: Mapping, and Sharing, the Consumer Genome

By Natasha Singer | June 16, 2012 | New York Times

Justin Bolle for The New York Times
Acxiom’s headquarters in Little Rock, Ark. Analysts say the company has amassed the world’s largest commercial database on consumers.

IT knows who you are. It knows where you live. It knows what you do.

Steve Keesee/Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Scott E. Howe, the chief executive of Acxiom since last summer, has said he sees the company as a new-millennium “data refinery,” rather than a data miner.

It peers deeper into American life than the F.B.I. or the I.R.S., or those prying digital eyes at Facebook and Google. If you are an American adult, the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on.

Right now in Conway, Ark., north of Little Rock, more than 23,000 computer servers are collecting, collating and analyzing consumer data for a company that, unlike Silicon Valley’s marquee names, rarely makes headlines. It’s called the Acxiom Corporation, and it’s the quiet giant of a multibillion-dollar industry known as database marketing.

Few consumers have ever heard of Acxiom. But analysts say it has amassed the world’s largest commercial database on consumers — and that it wants to know much, much more. Its servers process more than 50 trillion data “transactions” a year. Company executives have said its database contains information about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person. That includes a majority of adults in the United States.

Stefan Molyneux: Statism is Dead (Parts 1-5) [Video]

Obama the Reactionary

By James Lewis | June 18, 2012 | American Thinker

In a perverse way this is the most utopian administration in American history. That’s after all what Marxism comes down to, a stubborn fantasy that the world will flip into utopian perfection as soon as all the evil capitalists are in Siberian labor camps. The Soviet Union spent seven decades trying to eradicate capitalism at home and abroad, along with religion, family values and individualism. As a natural consequence, they ended up destroying hard work and agriculture, and every five years the Kremlin kept wondering what could have gone wrong with their “scientific” policies this time around.

Today Vladimir Putin kneels down with the Patriarch of Moscow in the Kremlin Chapel, surrounded by magnificent bling going back to the Byzantine Empire.

So much for eradicating human nature.

Stefan Molyneux: The Matrix [Video]

“The Matrix” Transcript:

Obama’s Big Economy Speech: No Hope, No Change

By Ben Shapiro | June 14, 2012 |  Breitbart News

President Obama’s campaign speech on the economy today was an utter disaster for him. It was a bromide of tired old arguments, pathetic blame-placing, and shopworn con tricks. And even liberals like Jonathan Alter had to admit that it was, overall, a dramatic failure.

Left in Panic Over Bain Attack Backfire

By Rush Limbaugh | May 25, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’ll tell you what, folks, I really, really hope the Republicans, the Republicans in Congress, the RNC, anybody, super PACs, I hope they are writing down everything Obama is saying about how he has cut spending, how he wants to cut spending, how he has not spent it all, because when the next debt deal comes up, guess who is not going to be talking about cutting spending?  That’s right.  Barry Obama.  Barack Hussein Obama, mmm, mmm, mmm, is gonna be moving for the debt limit to be expanded, be raised, be elevated.  Why?  So he can spend more money.

I’ll tell you, there is panic out there, folks.  I’ve been telling you I don’t know how many months now, there’s real panic.  There is panic over two things. The Bain attack on Romney isn’t working.  And all of these Democrat consultants and all of the Democrat cable TV hosts and the Democrat media people, they are beside themselves.  It isn’t working.  They are also very worried that Obama is doubling down on it now in the midst of it not working. He’s doubling down on it, amidst stories we’ve now got a private equity Democrat backer for Obama who’s leaving him.  We’ve got the audio sound bites.

The Laughable Economic Fallacies Embraced By Progressives

By Peter Ferrara | April 19, 2012 | Forbes

Persistent economic fallacies hurt working people and the poor the most.  They are the ones most in need of the new jobs and higher wages that capital investment and economic growth produce.  And they suffer the most from unemployment and declining wages and incomes when the economy falters.  Self-styled Progressives are the source of the economic fallacies that are hurting working people and the poor today.

One common fallacy popular among self-proclaimed Progressives is to reply to the point that America now has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world at nearly 40% with the counter that the average effective corporate tax rate is only around 25%.  But it is the marginal tax rate on the next dollar earned, not the average rate, that influences new investment, business expansion, and hiring.

Pro-growth tax reform would involve reducing that top rate in return for closing many of the loopholes that make the average rate so much lower.  The average rate would rise as a result.  But the lower marginal rate would increase incentives for more capital investment, business expansion and job creation.

Another fallacy among Progressives is to argue that America has enjoyed historically low taxes under President Obama with federal revenues around 15% of GDP compared to the long-term, postwar average of 18.3%.  But that is due to the persistent weakness of the economy under Obama, which lowers federal revenues as a percent of  GDP, as bankrupt businesses and unemployed workers pay little or nothing in taxes.

Again, what influences the capital investment, business start ups, and business expansion that creates jobs and bids up wages for working people and the poor are the marginal tax rates, not taxes as a percent of GDP.  Obama has persistently focused on raising those marginal tax rates across the board, the exact opposite of what Reagan did with so much success, which is a main reason Obama is getting the opposite results of Reagan.  Obama has recently taken to citing Reagan for the opposite of what he believed and implemented as President, in claiming his support for the so-called Buffett Rule.  But the real economy will not be fooled, and working people and the poor will not benefit from dishonest rhetoric.

When the economy recovers, with more businesses making more profits, and more workers earning more in income, federal revenues as a percent of GDP will rise.  That is how Paul Ryan’s budget is scored by CBO as restoring federal revenues to their long term postwar historical average at 18.3% even while cutting corporate and personal income tax rates sharply.  Cutting those rates as Ryan proposes will lead to stronger recovery sooner because of the incentive effects of those lower rates, an effect not even counted by CBO.

Progressives also purport not to understand the multiple taxation of capital.  Under our tax system the earnings from capital investment are taxed not once, but multiple times.  First, by the corporate income tax, then again by the individual income tax through the tax on dividends, then if you sell the capital investment, through the capital gains tax, then when you die, by the death tax.  When Progressives like Obama complain that the rich are not paying their fair share, they are just looking at the rate on any one of these taxes, and not considering all of the others.

The tax on capital gains is especially egregious because the market price of any capital asset just reflects the present discounted value of the future income stream to be produced by that asset, which will be taxed when it is earned.  Progressives claim that they can’t understand all that math, but it means the capital gains tax itself is inherently a double tax.  It is like taxing an orchard not only by taking some of the apples it produces, but also taking some of the trees in taxes as well.

Moreover, it is worse, because some of the gain taxed is just inflation and not real.  It is like assessing a tax on some imaginary apples as well.  These are all reasons why there should not be any tax on capital gains at all.  It is enough to take some of the apples.  Taking some of the trees as well is just abusive, multiple, overtaxation.  That means not just unfair tax piracy, but the squelching of the capital investment at the root of jobs and rising wages and incomes for working people and the poor.

These are the reasons why fourteen out of thirty OECD countries, plus China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and others, already enjoy zero capital gains taxes.  They can understand it, but America’s “Progressives” cannot.  This is part of the reason why these countries have been booming, while America is stagnating.  “Progressives” seem to think of economic growth and prosperity as just occurring naturally, like trees growing in the forest.  They don’t see the decisions made by investors to put their capital at risk, the decisions by entrepreneurs to start or expand businesses, the decisions by employers to hire new workers, and how incentives affect those decisions.  When “Progressives” hold governing power, their blindness becomes America’s blindness, and the American Dream recedes.

Read the full article here.

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Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world

By Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie | October 24, 2011 | New Scientist

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs).

“Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says James Glattfelder. “Our analysis is reality-based.”

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world’s economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy – whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company’s operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

Read the full article here.

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The Ryan Test: Demagoguery Versus Ideas

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Jonathan S. Tobin | August 11, 2012 | Commentary Magazine As John wrote earlier today, liberals are convinced that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate offers them a golden opportunity to savage the Republicans about the Wisconsin congressman’s budget plans. Predictably, the New York Times delivered one of the first such salvos in its editorial posted […]

Smoking Obama’s Crack and Yearning for the Mud

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Vanderleun | August 10, 2012 | American Digest [From 2008. Only the names have been changed because the target has changed.] This downward flight of intellectuals has been going on ever since the Romantic movement began its counter-revolution a couple hundred years ago. No matter how much they flap their lips it’s a fall, not […]