January 8, 2016

Tears (cartoon)

http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/item/tears_20160108

January 8, 2016

This is What Happens after PE Firms Get Through with a Retailer

This is What Happens after PE Firms Get Through with a Retailer
by Wolf Richter • January 8, 2016


[font color="blue"]At least, they didn’t blame China.[/font]

Thursday afterhours, the Container Store, former LBO queen and IPO hero with 77 stores around the country, reported third quarter “earnings” – in quotes because those “earnings” were negative.

Consolidated net sales for the quarter ending November 30 rose 3.3% to $197.2 million. But cost of sales rose 5.3%. CEO Kip Tindell blamed their new “$75 free-shipping service.” It’s “driving sales” and is “absolutely a good thing, but of course it’s a headwind to gross margin,” he said. That’s how Amazon leaves its mark.

Selling, general, and administrative expenses jumped 8.6%. “Disappointing,” Tindell called it. CFO Jodi Taylor blamed the “complexity of our transformational TCS Closets initiative,” plus higher payroll, healthcare, and storage expenses. Stuff happens in real life.

Stock-based compensation, pre-opening costs, and depreciation and amortization also rose. So income from operations plunged 87% to $1.8 million. And after $4.2 million in interest expense and a tax benefit of $694,000, there was a net loss of $1.7 million. It brought the net loss for the nine months to $4.3 million. ...............(more)

http://wolfstreet.com/2016/01/08/this-is-what-happens-after-pe-firms-get-through-with-a-retailer/

January 8, 2016

Ahh, the ceaseless wonders of for-profit "health" care

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/commercially-fueled_spike_in_drug_shortages_endangers_lives_20160108


Commercially-Driven Spike in Drug Shortages Endangers Lives


Emergency room doctors are reaching for medicines that aren’t there as drug shortages have jumped more than five-fold between 2008 and 2014. And experts say drug companies are to blame.

Shannon Firth reports at MedPage Today:

About one-third of the 1,798 documented drug shortages from 2001 to 2014 were for drugs used in emergency medicine. Of those emergency department drug shortages, about half were described as “lifesaving interventions” or “drugs used as a direct intervention for high-acuity conditions,” according to Pines and colleagues. That’s 18% of all shortages.

And, for 32 of the drugs in shortage for lifesaving or high-acuity issues, there are no substitutes. (…)

Generic sterile injectable drugs had the most access issues, and shortages were most prevalent in three areas: infectious disease, analgesia, and toxicology. (…)

[Jesse Pines, MD, MBA, director of the Office for Clinical Practice Innovation and professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences] noted that heightened FDA scrutiny may have contributed to manufacturing delays and caused some products to be discontinued. But, he said, “basically a lot of these companies are stopping producing these medicines primarily for business reasons.” (…)

Mark Reiter, MD, MBA, president of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine and an emergency physician in Nashville, Tenn., said the reason emergency medicine is so deeply affected by drug shortages is because they rely more heavily on generic drugs than other departments.

Pharmaceutical companies profit more from branded products and reserve few resources for generics.

“I think the FDA thing is a minor issue. I think the real issue is economics.”

Read more here.

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

January 8, 2016

U.S. Stocks Tumble, Cap Worst Five-Day Start to Year Since 1928

(Bloomberg) U.S. stocks fell for a third day, tumbling in a late-afternoon selloff that sent major equity indexes to their worst weekly declines in more than four years, as investors found little relief in moves by China to restore calm to its sinking markets and data that showed resilience in the U.S labor market.

Bank stocks led the late-Friday declines, with JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. falling at least 2.2 percent to cap the week with drops of more than 10 percent. Energy shares in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index lost 1.3 percent to press deeper into five-year lows. Seven of the benchmark’s 10 main industries sank more than 5.5 percent this week.

The S&P 500 dropped 1.1 percent to 1,922.03 at 4 p.m. in New York. The gauge fell 6 percent this week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 167.65 points, or 1 percent, to 16,346.45, and lost more than 1,000 points this week. The Nasdaq Composite Index declined 1 percent, stretching its losing streak to seven days, the longest since 2011.

“We’re still in a risk-off mentality,” said Mark Spellman, a fund manager who helps oversee more than $4 billion at Alpine Funds in Purchase, New York. “I think any kind of risk-on trade mentality that comes in is going to be short-lived until global economic growth improves. It’s not a great time to pile in right now.” ..............(more)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-08/u-s-index-futures-signal-rebound-as-yuan-fixing-soothes-nerves

January 8, 2016

Where Were the Post-Hebdo Free Speech Crusaders as France Spent the Last Year Crushing Free Speech?

by Glenn Greenwald


It’s been almost one year since millions of people — led by the world’s most repressive tyrants — marched in Paris ostensibly in favor of free speech. Since then, the French government — which led the way trumpeting the vital importance of free speech in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings — has repeatedly prosecuted people for the political views they expressed, and otherwise exploited terrorism fears to crush civil liberties generally. It has done so with barely a peep of protest from most of those throughout the West who waved free speech flags in support of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists.

That’s because, as I argued at the time, many of these newfound free speech crusaders exploiting the Hebdo killings were not authentic, consistent believers in free speech. Instead, they invoke that principle only in the easiest and most self-serving instances: namely, defense of the ideas they support. But when people are punished for expressing ideas they hate, they are silent or supportive of that suppression: the very opposite of genuine free speech advocacy.

Days after the Paris march, the French government arrested the comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala “for being an ‘apologist for terrorism’ after suggesting on Facebook that he sympathized with one of the Paris gunmen.” Two months later, he was convicted, receiving a suspended two-month jail sentence. In November, on separate charges, he was convicted by a Belgian court “for racist and anti-Semitic comments he made during a show in Belgium” and was given a two month prison term. There were no #JeSuisDieudonné hashtags trending, and it’s almost impossible to find the loudest post-Hebdo Free Speech crusaders denouncing the French and Belgian governments for this attack on free expression.

In the weeks after the Free Speech march, dozens of people in France “were arrested for hate speech or other acts insulting religious faiths, or for cheering the men who carried out the attacks.” The government “ordered prosecutors around the country to crack down on hate speech, anti-Semitism and glorifying terrorism.” There were no marches in defense of their free speech rights. ................(more)

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/08/where-were-the-post-hebdo-free-speech-crusaders-as-france-spent-the-last-year-crushing-free-speech/

January 8, 2016

Bundy's Oregon Occupation Is Capitalist at Its Core

Bundy's Oregon Occupation Is Capitalist at Its Core

Friday, 08 January 2016 00:00
By Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, Truthout | Op-Ed


The standoff between law enforcement and Ammon Bundy and his supporters, who began an armed occupation of the visitor's center of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in rural southeastern Oregon on January 2, has precipitated a range of interpretations from pundits, journalists, academics and social media users. Many have sought to highlight racialized disparities in state responses to displays of firearms - a particularly poignant critique in light of both the December 28, 2015, announcement of a Cuyahoga County, Ohio, grand jury not to indict the police officers who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who had been playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland park, and the recent 30th anniversary of the firebombing of the Black radical organization MOVE by Philadelphia police in 1985.

Others have debated whether the Malheur action does or does not constitute an act of terrorism. Hashtags such as #yallqaeda, #vanillaisis and #yokellharam have flooded Twitter and other social media platforms. But if such hashtags have been a potent, humorous means by which to highlight the racialization of "terrorism" in contemporary US political discourse, they also reify that "terrorism" as somehow always "Muslim" even when carried out by an overwhelmingly white group of ranchers from Nevada and other Western states. The "y'all," the "vanilla" and the "yokel" modify the "default" frameworks for understanding what terrorism is in the contemporary moment - al-Qaeda, ISIS and Boko Haram - but they don't displace or even really critique it. And those humorous references to the whiteness of the Bundys and their followers also carry with them an often unacknowledged classism. These gleeful caricatures of bumbling redneck militants, moreover, gloss over the political economy of the ranching industry that has inspired the actions of the Bundys and their allies. In doing so, they miss what's really at stake.

Ranching is a globalized industry that has had dramatic effects on the climate and physical landscape of North America. It is enabled by and entwined with the state to at least as great a degree as the state acts as a hindrance upon it. Cattle ranching's early 20th century boom occurred precisely because of (rather than in spite of) the federal government's control of so much of the West, which allowed ranchers access to wide expanses of grazing lands. Cliven Bundy, Ammon Bundy's father, owns nearly $1 million worth of cattle, which he has grazed (illegally) on public lands in Clark County, Nevada, since 1993. In Oregon, as elsewhere, the expansion of ranching as a business required both cheap access to federal land and the parceling of land formerly allotted to reservations under the Dawes Act of 1886.

.....(snip).....

In the western United States, enclosure meant fencing what had been held in common, transforming it into (public) property, and thus dispossessing and immiserating Indigenous people and producing nature as a collective patrimony of white settlers. The Bundys and other ranchers have benefitted from these enclosures for well over a century, but now they want to further enclose what is already enclosed, to privatize what the Northern Paiutes had to be dispossessed of before the land could be made public. Nature preservation has often itself been a form of enclosure - see Bram Büscher's contribution here for a contemporary example - but I disagree with writer and filmmaker Charles Mudede's claim that the occupation at Malheur is against "capitalism itself." Bundy and his followers do not want to end the enclosures, but instead to carve out their own enclosures within the shell of the state's. To be an aggrieved rancher is not the same thing as an "emancipated" serf. ................(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/34333-bundy-s-occupation-in-oregon-is-capitalist-at-its-core

January 8, 2016

The End of the Monetary Illusion Magnifies Shocks for Markets

(Bloomberg) Central bankers are no longer the circuit breakers for financial markets.

Monetary-policy makers, market saviors the past decade through the promise of interest-rate reductions or asset purchases, now lack the space to cut further -- if at all -- or buy more. Even those willing to intensify their efforts increasingly doubt the potency of such policies.

That’s leaving investors having to cope alone with shocks such as this week’s rout in China or when economic data disappoint, magnifying the impact of such events.

“The monetary illusion is drawing to a close,” said Didier Saint Georges, a member of the investment committee at Carmignac Gestion SA, an asset-management company. “With central banks becoming increasingly restricted in their stimulus policies, 2016 is likely to be the year when the markets awaken to economic reality.”

Even against the backdrop of this week’s market losses, Federal Reserve officials signaled their intention to keep raising interest rates this year. Those at the European Central Bank and Bank of Japan ended last year playing down suggestions they will ultimately need to intensify economic-aid programs. ...................(more)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-08/the-end-of-the-monetary-illusion-magnifies-shocks-for-markets

January 8, 2016

Retail sector down after holiday same-store sales results, outlook announcements, analyst downgrades

(MarketWatch) Major retailers across the sector are down in Friday trading after analyst downgrades, disappointing holiday season same-store sales and quarterly forecasts that are causing concern. American Eagle Outfitters, Inc. AEO, -16.63% has plummeted 16% after it said it could miss fourth-quarter guidance. The company, which reports earnings on March 2, said same-store sales are up 4% for the quarter so far, below the FactSet consensus of 4.9%. Gap Inc. GPS, -14.45% shares are down 15.2% in trading after the company reported negative same-store sales across its three brands - Gap Global, Old Navy, and Banana Republic. Nordstrom Inc. JWN, -4.60% is down 4.5% after a week in which its stock was downgraded by anumber of analysts. And Macy's Inc. M, -2.82% is down 2.9% after it said that holiday same-store sales were down 4.7%, though there had been some positive reaction to the company's announced cost-cutting measures. Also down today are Kohl's Corp. KSS, -5.95% (6.4%), Coach Inc. COH, -2.74% (2.6%), Tiffany & Co. TIF, -3.45% (3.1%), Target Corp. TGT, -2.94% (2.8%), and Kate Spade & Co. KATE, -2.91% (2.2%).

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/retail-sector-down-after-holiday-same-store-sales-results-outlook-announcements-analyst-downgrades-2016-01-08

January 8, 2016

Jim Hightower: Demanding tax “reform,” CEOs of profiteering multinationals are fooling noone

from Salon:


Corporate tax dodgers: Demanding tax “reform,” superrich CEOs of profiteering multinationals are fooling no one
Takeover specialist Carl Icahn whines that companies with foreign sales are being doubly taxed. Wrong

JIM HIGHTOWER


Carl Icahn, noted corporate predator and takeover specialist who made billions of dollars in corporate deals, has recently begun pushing a charitable cause involving a group of people who, through no fault of their own, are being forced out of America. Syrian migrants who’ve lost everything, you ask? Or maybe Central American children fleeing the horrors of drug wars? Nope, none of those foreign sob stories for Icahn. Rather, he weeps for the incomprehensible suffering of a small tribe of Americans, namely: the CEOs of several U.S.-based multinational corporations.

You see, Carl is fronting for CEOs of a small group of huge multinational conglomerates who are demanding that Congress drastically slash the taxes they owe on foreign sales of their products. This “reform” would let them escape paying most of the $600 billion in taxes that U.S. law assesses on some $2.6 trillion in profits they’ve been hiding in foreign bank accounts and offshore tax havens. Three-fourths of these hidden profits belong to only 50 enormously profitable corporations.

In a recent heart-wrenching op-ed, he wails that poor superrich chieftains of such profiteering giants as Pfizer pharmaceuticals are having to move their corporate domains abroad, having been driven out of the USA by “our uncompetitive tax code.” These American-raised corporations have been raking in enormous profits on foreign sales, but the CEOs have whined that those profits should be exempt from U.S. taxation, since they’re taxed by the countries where their products are sold.

In fact, their “double taxation” claim is a fraud, for most of that $2.6 trillion in profits is subject to zero in taxes. These rank corporate tax dodgers are starving America’s essential public services of $600 billion they owe us taxpayers, yet Icahn sobs in print that they are the victims. If these trillions are brought back home, he explains, they’ll be taxed — so, don’t you see, this “forces” CEOs to desert the U.S., moving their corporate citizenship to a place that doesn’t make them pay for public services. ...................(more)

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/08/corporate_tax_dodgers_demanding_tax_reform_superrich_ceos_of_profiteering_multinationals_are_fooling_no_one/

January 8, 2016

The armed Oregon occupiers would be raided if they weren’t white — same goes if they were leftists

Yes, the armed Oregon occupiers would be raided if they weren’t white — same goes if they were leftists
The U.S. gov't is fundamentally right wing, and supports many of the things the Bundys & militants are calling for

BEN NORTON


(Salon) Armed right-wing extremists occupied a federal building in Oregon late on Jan. 2. The white militants, from far-right, anti-government militias led by the infamous Bundy family, announced they would remain there indefinitely, and were willing to “kill or be killed if necessary.”

The response of the federal government was lackluster, to put it mildly. Two days into the armed occupation, law enforcement authorities admitted they had no plans to deal with it.

Gracious, euphemistic media treatment echoed the paltry governmental response.

In response, social media and Op-Ed pages of newspapers were inundated with condemnations of white privilege and arguments that the far-right militants would have been violently removed if they were people of color.

There is a crucial point missing from many of the liberal hot takes on the Oregon paramilitary occupation, however. In their hyper-emphasis on white privilege, many are depoliticizing the situation. ...............(more)

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/08/yes_the_armed_oregon_occupiers_would_be_raided_if_they_werent_white_same_goes_if_they_were_leftists/