Corporate Finance 101 And The Farce Of Defending Donald Trump’s Finances

ONE. Payroll taxes, exactly as the term implies, are directly attributable to employee pay. I have been both employer and employee. In a perfect world an employee would take 100% of their gross pay and take care of all taxes, healthcare, etc. If you believe that employers are “taking care” of employee taxes above and beyond the employee’s total contribution, then good luck with that bridge you also bought. Same goes for healthcare “benefits”. A business owner is not paying for healthcare or payroll taxes out of his or her own pocket. To state or imply this is either ignorant or manipulative. 

TWO. The vast majority of free enterprise does not operate under the shady practice of serial bankruptcy. About 92% of bankruptcies are a one and done deal. Serial bankruptcy is an obvious pattern of gaming a system. If you don’t like a system then change it. But living under the umbrella of a system, profiting from it, and then vulturing it does not vindicate your contempt for the system: it makes you a con artist and a grifter. 

THREE. Creating jobs as a corporation is only commendable if the jobs are sustainable. Short lived employment caused by a system-gamer is highly destabilizing, wiping out most if not all the short lived value it created. If you add the total amount of contractors stiffed by a system-gamer, including the destabilizing layoffs suffered within each contractor’s organization, plus the direct layoffs within the system-gamer’s organization, you are essentially a net destroyer of value - not a creator of anything. 

FOUR. Siphoning profit first and foremost, knowing that a deal is not sustainable, is admired only by the so-called wolves of Wall Street (an insult to the amazing spirit of wolves). It leaves a wake of destruction behind, perpetually being enabled by a system that hides behind the false flag of “job creation”. These “job creators” regularly hop in bed with politicians, who wave the false flag of job creation for votes, then line their pockets through a wink from their private sector sponsor. 

Very few financial experts, for reasons I cannot quite yet grasp, are working on exposing Donald Trump’s business con game. It’s actually not that difficult. A brain trust from Ivy League academia could easily bring down that house of cards. But just perhaps, Ivy League academia has been in bed one too many times with the big-time grifters. Ivy leaguers already have enough problems with the plethora of buildings and halls named after a gaggle of “robber barons” and “grandpa racists”. This sadly compromises them beyond repair.

The “failing” New York Times is trying, and hopefully they might just succeed. It’s been done before, back when the Washington Post had the good fortune of having Michael Jordan AND Scottie Pippen on their team (Bernstein & Woodward). Notice how relentless DT’s attacks on the NYT are, he knows where his possible downfall would come from. But without the aid of true corporate know-how, the NYT is fighting a battle with one hand tied behind its back. We need a new Deep Throat. A very wealthy Deep Throat...

Here’s where it gets strange: there is a brighter side of the capitalist force, which includes people like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Mark Cuban, and quite a few others. You would think that this brain trust could easily join forces with a fourth estate warrior like the NYT and bury the Don in chief once and for all. But unfortunately for the good of the world it’s not that simple. These men are somewhat compromised by a system that rewarded a few bad habits of their own (tax loopholes on steroids), though arguably not at the levels of DJT. Their reluctance is unfortunate and unnecessary. Some questionable maneuvers aside they are net creators of value. As such they should not lurk in the shadows and watch this debacle as if they were powerless. 

Depending on the outcome of the election in four weeks, the fate of our society as we know it may be in the hands of this bright side of the capitalist force. If the voters cannot manage to overturn a deadly error in our democracy, then our captains of industry will have a huge amount of soul-searching to deal with. Turn a blind eye, and they will essentially become grifters themselves by omission. They might as well be the last nail in the coffin of America. 

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The Unnecessary Stupidity of Being A Politician

Our two party system has failed. Think about it: salespeople have found a hack in a system that, as imperfect as it was, started out of a legitimate concern over the tyranny of monarchy. Elections, the darling of democracy, have become a simple game of “low lying fruit” - to borrow a classic sales term. When you know that all you need is 50.1% of an electoral college majority, which is significantly less than the majority of the people, then you have plain and simply figured out how to hack the system. A system, mind you, that was not put in place for “hackers” to create power sharing clubs. It was intended to one day unite all the people. Not that the founders would necessarily agree with the letter of this list, but let’s call it the spirit of it: poor, rich, middle, black, white, female, male, native, immigrant. 

The stupidity comes in the realization that you don’t need to play two people against each other. Or in the case of an entire nation, half the people against each other. When you find the true common denominator in people, powerful agents of change and transformation like love with responsibility, compassion with accountability, and empathy with productivity, you find that you can lead the world beyond the wildest dreams of mediocre Machiavellians. 

Instead, what we have is the oldest Machiavellian play in the book. The Nazis and the Soviets mastered it, like the perfect assassins they became. But like the nazis and the soviets, perfect assassins are soon enough removed from their bully pulpits. They can fool some of the people some of the time, but, to quote GW Bush, “we won’t get fooled again” (with apologies to Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey on that intellectual property).

The scary part is how fast misinformation turns into disinformation. Which is essentially propaganda. Apparently it rears its ugly head every 50-100 years or so, which is just enough for a generational memory to pass. Makes sense, I suppose, but it doesn’t make evolutionary sense. It is the equivalent of the average addict throughout his or her lifetime falling back on self-destructive behavior. Over. And over. And over. Again. 

When simple minded elites crack the code of “plain speak”, AKA “telling it like it is”, they can do the impossible: they can rally poor and disadvantaged folks to do and believe anything a trust fund benefactor says. They can have them venerate the ground they walk on, just because they spew out the exact same prejudices. I mean, throughout their lives they were marginalized because of those same prejudices, and now the president of the United States is talking like them? Oh man, he is indeed the savior. Get up. Grab your guns, and let that hatred lead you to the promised land. Like it always does. We promised you it would.

Paradigm Lost

In a more perfect union we would be just a few orange tweets shy of bullshit fatigue. An America where the only people tuning in to the shitshow are pundits, trolls, and politicians. Or as I believe Cher put it, gypsies, tramps & thieves. The rest of us, the true majority, would theoretically know better and be united, like it @#$%& says on our name.

But, we don’t live in that “more perfect union”, do we. So off we rush to swallow that bias confirmation painkiller. With our sincere regrets, founding pops, that more perfect thing didn’t quite work out. I mean, don’t get me wrong: a lot has improved since you guys demanded liberty for... um, well, not-exactly-all. 

But maybe that has been the problem all along. You guys didn’t quite believe in your own message yourselves, did you. It was a flawed prime directive from day one. You didn’t like it when a royal family of dicks messed with your freedom, but I cannot tell a lie: pass that Aunt Jemima syrup. Mmmm, hmm.

Now this one’s gonna sting just a little founding pops, but don’t shoot the messenger: Britain abolished slavery thirty years before we did. Yeah, ouch. 

But it’s alright, I still love you. I look to the past for the intention of the lesson, and maybe a paradigm shift or two. Certainly not for greatness, there’s nothing great about ignorance. The only great thing about our past, all of our pasts, lies in the fucking miracle that we didn’t kill everyone. Especially given the sheer amount of ignorance we carry around with us. We didn’t know shit 250 years ago, but we knew enough to walk away from single-family rule. We created a multi-family rule, and it was a step in the right direction. As imperfect as it was, it had elements of greatness in it. Don’t get me wrong, I do admire and respect the paradigm shift. We built a sacred temple of checks and balances, and saw that it was a good thing. 

So here we are, two and a half centuries later. But instead of carving our own greatness all we have done, besides finally abolishing slavery AND apartheid, landing on the moon, and stopping a tyrannical megalomaniac or two, is consolidate that multi-family rule thing. We turned our sacred temple into a country club. A “reality” shitshow. No paradigm shift here to see, more like paradigm shit. Instead of making our own greatness, we got lazy. And fat. And stupid. Must be an empire-ending thing, is it not, Pax Romana...

So maybe that’s where our big misstep lies. Our founders may have set themselves up for partial failure with that half-assed notion of liberty and freedom, but at least they didn’t set out to create another empire. In fact, they shunned the very notion. It was more of a “let our people go” moment, not a “our ruler can fuck the planet up by pressing a button” dystopia. But, that little dictator we all fight inside got the best of us, didn’t it.  

And here we are. Founding pops, meet your offspring, Napoleon and Snowball the pigs. Animals in a barn, one that used to be a temple. I don’t mean to point the finger back at you pops, but maybe if we could finally understand where we went wrong on day one, we just might be able to pick up where you left off. And build a better paradigm, to finally shift the world like you did. This time without a fundamental lie poisoning the well. A well we’ve been drinking from for about one quarter of a millennium.

It is time.

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Humanity 4.0

Been thinking a bit about the winds of change that are racing through the social media speedway. I have to say, for the most part the perspectives seem misguided to me. Well-intentioned maybe. But from where I’ve seen the world in my crazy travels we need to think out of the ol’ box way more than that.

A lot of people are seeing this pandemic as both a sign and an opportunity. A sign that we need to stop-and-think differently. An opportunity to change the broken systems that were and still are plaguing us. So far so good. 

But then inevitably the recurring theme I read and hear is that capitalism is evil, and that we are slaves to it. And therein lies the trap: that’s where those perspectives are setting themselves up for failure. 

Capitalism as the predominant “ism” did not come about just last century. To be clear it was not born even two hundred years ago. It goes back at least to the Phoenician merchants of millenniums ago, never mind a couple of centuries. 

What we DID do sometime in the last couple of centuries was give capital-driven systems their very own “ism”. We spanked it from birth and watched it usher in Humanity 3.0. 

It was very well intentioned at the time, given that we were trying very hard to wean ourselves away from totalitarian monarchies and despotic empires. No self-respecting future historian is going to ding capitalism for that. So far so good.

Enter abuse and greed, stage right. Yes, we couldn’t help ourselves, and the fucked-up human tendency to want to “have it all” comes every-damn-time at the expense of too many. A mere handful at first, but soon enough it spirals down to hundreds, thousands, and invariably millions of fellow humans. And THAT’S were the system begins to act like a runaway freight train.

Some societies shut the doors to capitalism early on. China and Russia among the most obvious. Didn’t work out very well for Russia, China is probably not too far from its own implosive fireworks. Others embraced capitalism, but after two horrific back-to-back wars they fell to their knees and suffered through a shock-based change. That was Europe. America on the other hand, not so much. 

Just about the biggest suffering that the US has ever endured on its own soil was not 9/11. Or Pearl Harbor. Or the great Depression. Or even this pandemic - knock on wood. No, it was the Civil war. 

It’s not just the raw number of deaths mind you: 620,000 is as close as it gets to genocide. The US population at the time was around 31 million. So about 2% of the population died in that war. Two percent of today’s US population would make it 6.6 million. Chew on that for a bit.

So the fact that the US has not embraced a socialist democracy most definitely comes from a lack of extreme suffering, like the one Europe felt since the fall of their monarchies. Over one hundred million deaths from two world wars alone. ONE HUNDRED MILLION. And we’re worried about a quaint virus? Bitch please. It is Covid-19 that fears humans, not the other way around. Animals fear humans. Life itself fears us.

It hasn’t been paradise for European socialist democracy, no doubt. Most US conservatives make a very good living poking holes through the Swiss cheese of European socialist democracies. The lesser intelligent among these conservative pundits point to the likes of Venezuela, but hey. Those Americans are their own worst enemy, so there’s not much we can do to save them. 

Which brings us back to those who are heralding a new post-capitalist era. A brave new social order. That’s great, except for one minor detail: they don’t have a plan. Go back and re-read where they spend most of their energy in their premise. It’s a brutal critique of capitalism, in all its worstness. You can’t build anything out of sheer criticism. Well, not anything of value or sustainable. 

That’s not how isms work, so fail they will - unless they change their tune. From the get-go capitalism was way too busy looking to capitalize on productivity. It was too busy to be whining about the dark side of humanity. It had a plan. A vision. A mission. Strategies, and deliverables. To quote from one of my favorite Don Henley lyrics, “and Jesus people bought them...” (yes, I know. They were ugly boxes.)

You want this Covid-19 experience to change the world? Focus on a positive force for humanity. Leave capitalism alone, it’s just an “ism” we created to get us to the next level two centuries ago. Humanity 4.0 awaits. But we’re not going to find it in the holes of capitalist Swiss cheese. There’s nothing there to begin with, that’s why it’s called a hole. Either fix it or create something better, but we’re beating a dead horse by pointing out how toxic it has become. Yes, in many ways it has become toxic. And yet it’s still the only ism we have. Personally I neither hate it nor am I in love with it. It’s just a system, a tool. To me it’s like a car: it got us from point A to point B. We’re at point B. Kicking the old car is not going to launch us on our next journey. 

Guys like Bernie Sanders were proposing we join our European brothers and sisters on that next journey. Love him or hate him he was proposing something positive. He had a plan. You don’t think it will work? Find something better. Or get in the old beat up car and keep driving it until the wheels fall off. That’s it, no other options. Kicking it is a dumb option, please stop doing that. It is just as dumb as poking through the holes of European socialist capitalism. It’s Swiss cheese, stop poking through something that’s not there. Take a sad song, and make it better. Otherwise let it be. Words of wisdom indeed. 

Hello Humanity 4.0... my god, it’s full of stars...

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Death By Data

The first thing you learn in the training and/or practice of Quantitative Methods (aka statistics) is to be highly suspect of raw data. You know, like gas station sushi. Generally speaking you need to be highly mindful of the behavior of data, including variables such as the size of the data sample vs. total population, correlation, extrapolation, deviation, etc. Because, as my favorite professor of QM would be fond of reminding us, “garbage in, garbage out”. 

Some of you may have heard of a statistics term called Standard Deviation (SD). I won’t get into its excruciating details, but just be aware that many statistical analyses thrown your way deviate more than two data points away from their respective assumptions. Why two? Because one is the loneliest number, duh. But stay with me: standard deviations technically make the base assumptions mildly contaminated, if you will. Yes, I use “contaminated” very consciously here, in these times of pandemic. Assumption contamination, the inevitable erosion of a hypothesis, is something I’m sure you’ve heard footnoted as “margin of error”. Most of you have experienced this dissonance in political polling, aka The Art of Manipulation (with all due respect to Nate Silver).

THAT BEING SAID. If there was ever a time to be BOTH tuned into AND guarded of statistics in the same breath, the day has finally arrived. Let’s just say that 2020 will most likely be known as the year we all became a little wiser. Whether you’re predisposed to look at the glass... nay, at the DATA half-full or half-empty, we will all be a little smarter at the other end of the curve. When all else fails, apparently suffering is that overload trigger that switches on a brave new forced behavior in life. I would have gone for pleasure as that trigger, but hey. Nobody asked me. Perhaps in THAT parallel universe, evolution was completed in about a WEEK (insert eye roll emoji here).

Whether you know it or not, and whether you like it or not, there are two exponential forces at this moment shaping your destiny: one is SCIENCE, and the other... no, it’s not love. It’s not family, religion, or politics either, as powerful as those forces are. Those forces are constants in life, not exponential. That second exponential force forging your destiny at this moment is a crazy little thing called SOCIAL MEDIA. 

If you don’t believe Social Media is an ever-increasing force in your life, you might want to reconsider. Consider what it has done to what we used to call the Fourth Estate - aka The Press, or Journalism. Down to its knees the once-mighty Fourth Estate went. Suddenly scarlet-lettered as the MAINSTREAM Media, its Goliath-like relevance is now pitied against any David with a laptop, WiFi, and a clever slingshot of manipulated data.

Which of course brings us to that curious little word that is changing your life like a magnitude 9 earthquake. You might have heard it very recently referred to as Big Data or Data Mining, by the Captains of Industry and their army of merchants. Nothing wrong in principle that it was capitalism which brought the power of data to the forefront, even more so than science. Whatever it takes, evolution doesn’t care. But, alas, what do we have here: between capitalism and science, guess which one is not on its knees at this moment...

In SCIENCE, most researchers report the STANDARD DEVIATION of experimental data. By scientific convention, only data points that are more than two standard deviations away from a “NULL” expectation (the base assumption) are considered “significant”. Mind you, that null point is still a hypothesis. Think of it as the presumed innocent in a trial, until otherwise proven guilty.

SOCIAL MEDIA for its part works with an equal but opposite force: most posters report based on highly emotional triggers and bias confirmation binges. By social media convention, only data points with zero standard deviation from an assumption are considered (period, never mind “significant”). At the end of the evening, when all smart phones go down on that night stand... If the data don’t fit, you must acquit.

A deadly virus, not love, is in the air. I mean, some may argue that love will kill you sooner rather than later as well, but I digress. A killer pathogen is in your neighborhood, one that floats like an invisible butterfly, stings like the mother@#$% grim reaper. So it is  unequivocally a great thing that we have a sufficiently developed science at this stage in the game of evolution. Science, as we speak, is looking at the data objectively. It is desperately seeking standard deviations above and beyond that second loneliest number. Relentlessly, until the hypothesis is either discarded or PROVEN. Then and only then will science set you free. 

Until then, enjoy Social Media - aka the New Mainstream. Share data if you must. But if you do, please understand what a null expectation is, and what standard deviation means. If you don’t that’s OK, but please, please-please: until we DO understand those things better, let’s all stick to the comic section of that new world order newspaper we call Facebook.

Killing Socialism

Source: "World Population Review 2020"

In his “Killing Series” (Killing Lincoln, Killing Reagan, Killing Jesus, etc.), former Fox News conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly uses a powerful hook in his titles, one that leaves only one question unanswered: is he for or against the killing? You would think that‘s the one thing to be clear about, but no. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Some conservatives have been known to go out of their way to deconstruct the “socialist” teachings of Jesus, Lincoln’s “socialist” war on the South, etc. After all, if there’s one thing that history teaches us is that you can spin it however you want. Alternative truth is as alternative truth does.

And so goes socialism. Somewhere between the hot war and the cold one, socialism committed political harakiri by declaring war on capitalism. Of course, depending on how intelligent your education was, over time you realized that socialism had nothing to do with it. The real system was unmasked as “communism”, an unsustainable hijacking of socialism by totalitarian dictatorships. An attempt to sanitize the dictatorship part. Yet another chapter in the history books under the “alternative truths” era. Not unlike, when it comes to systemic distortions in history, invoking the unalienable rights of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not quite self-evident to those forced immigrants from Africa, now was it. More like self-serving. Let’s get one thing clear, American Fringe: if it doesn’t sting half the time it ain’t the truth. 

Speaking of the pursuit of happiness: one of the least intelligent things history has witnessed over the past 100 years is the political pandering to the mutual exclusivity of capitalism and socialism. As if your left arm and your right arm were mutually exclusive. Oh, the evolutionary harakiri...

Capitalism and socialism were never meant to be “standalone” systems. There is no endgame in pure socialism anymore than there is one in pure capitalism. When the roots of free trade sprouted, when supply and demand driven economics launched a thousand ships, and when the invisible hand of the market itself first touched the brave new face of mankind, the emerging system known as capitalism was never intended as a means to replace social welfare. Not in a million years. In fact, quite the opposite is true: through the newfound wealth of hundreds, and eventually thousands, the collective notion of charity was born (collective as in, post-Royal). It was a self-conscious realization that perhaps something should be done to help the disenfranchised. Whether in guilt or practicality (an overly disenfranchised society cannot be capitalized on, not to mention it is dangerously unstable), socialism was born out of capitalism. One could not, and still cannot, exist without the other.

After a Marxist false-start, severely wounded by a Soviet false flag, socialism finally found its wings in European intelligence. After two devastating world wars, no one understood better the importance of a free and enfranchised society. Not “or”. AND.

To pity socialism against capitalism is not merely unintelligent: it reveals a pathological need to affiliate yourself to a political ideology for the approval of your peers. One that you neither understand nor care to do so. At best, it persists in great part by a misguided overcompensation for a pain caused by false flags: Socialism may or may not be communism, but it must die. Capitalism may or may not be post-slavery, but it must be killed.

The zero-sum games of politics are systemic dead-endgames. They are evolutionary filters of sorts, where obsolete prime directives go to die. Not merely in body, to be sure: extinct. Wiped out from the face of time, for the greater good of an enfranchised human race.

Life And Death Of An Executive Order

Let’s pick one out of a hat, shall we? Aside from the underhanded hyperbole that Obama handed “cash payments” to Iran, there are some non-alternative facts to consider here:

In 2010 Obama signed the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act.

Three Executive Orders were signed by Obama freezing Iranian assets between 2010-2011.

An additional Executive Order was signed by Obama in 2013, seizing more assets. The aim of the executive orders were to strangle Iran’s nuclear program.

Enter the talk-show buzz, “King Obama”, stage right.

By 2015 it was clear that Iran was at a stranglehold tipping point: either let go of nuclear ambitions or face a slippery slope towards collapse. That’s when the leading Western nations, including the US under Obama, agreed to a treaty that would keep Iran alive but in check. 

A collapsed Iran is a dangerous liability to the world. The rabbit hole that is Palestine, Syria, and Iraq is child’s play compared to the hell that the Middle East would become if Iran collapses. Which is why Western Europeans were so adamant about not strangling Iran to death by 2015. 

To be clear it’s not the US who would immediately suffer destabilizing consequences in that scenario: it‘s Europe. It always has been Europe. They already feel the fire of Middle Eastern volatility much more than the US does (aside from self-inflected US military interventions).  From refugees and overwhelming migration to terrorism, Western Europe always gets the proximity shaft. Obama was wisely aware of this, so he agreed to release the same assets he froze, on specific conditional terms. Ratchet up far-right hyperbole on “cash payments” made to the enemy by a despotic American king.

Are there ever any guarantees that a government does what they promise to do in a treaty? Of course not, everyone knows that. The history of the world is the history of broken treaties. Were there guarantees that Russia would cease nuclear proliferation? Nyet. And yet, no one in their right mind feels that a collapsed Russia would not spell doom for the world as we know it. If you don’t know what I’m talking about look up “nuclear weapons in the hands of Russian mafia”.

Should Obama have used the more democratic channel of Congress to unfreeze Iranian assets? Maybe. We have become a nation of “executive orders”, present commander in chief being no exception. Talk about a slippery slope away from our great system of checks and balances. 

To be fair: it’s not so much the number of executive orders, it’s the content of the orders. Executive powers discretion is first and foremost a privilege, not a divine right. More importantly, rubber-stamping by a hyper-partisan chamber of puppets is not exactly the bright beacon of democracy we were promised. 

If this trend continues we will be well on our way to joining the ranks of caliphates and banana republics. The implosion of the Fourth Estate is adding insult to injury, with party propaganda (foreign AND domestic) posing as “news”. It’s  “man the torpedoes!” when the opposing party does it. Blind-eye when their own party does. This is where alternative facts live. This is where the Republic dies. 

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