Beck’s not the only who pimps gold but he was by far the most powerful and influential player. And Fox gave him an audience, one so large it could effectively move the price of gold. The blog post explains that the goldbug market is sufficiently small — around 25,000 or so — that advertising and Beck’s daily exhortations were enough to do the job.
The accompanying graphic explains how Beck worked it for the betterment of the goldsellers as well as himself.
If one was to buy gold, the correct way was to buy bullion or accepted gold bullion coins. This is not, however, what Beck advocated. He recommended French franc Roosters and other European numismatic coins. The graphic accompanying the blog makes it quite clear.
The difference is critical to the investor, or the person about to be ripped off.
Gold bullion is compensated for sale at melt value and that is typically one to five percent less than what you would pay for the gold. This is how the sellers make their money. For you to break even on the investment the price of gold must then appreciate.
And that is the spread dealers work. However, it gets more profitable if the goldseller peddles gold numismatic coins, like those recommended by Beck. They lose their value immediately on purchase.
The graphic states bluntly: “Customer loses 42 percent of their investment instantly.”
Beck is gone from Fox but the gold commercials are not. And as anyone who watches cable news knows, many other gold sellers have entered the advertising fray. It’s not just Goldline International.
Goldline, the blog post also notes, is being investigated for criminal practices.
The current GOP is thoroughly infested with gold bugs/fiat money kooks. Paul Ryan is fond of flaunting his Zimbabwe hyperinflation note — another item Beck used to regularly frighten his audiences into buying gold.
Tea Party wingnut and candidate for the Bethlehem school board, Randy Toman — also sometimes a subject of the blog — is crazy for fringe precious metals investment newsletters and is on record going on about the collapse of the dollar. Toman is a good example of someone completely taken in by gold scams and the belief in runaway hyperinflation.
There’s this, too:
The examples are virtually without end.
I even spotted noted quack Jim Cramer advocating for gold while being laundered through MSNBC. Paradoxically, this was said to be because the US government was unstable and the GOP was looking ever more likely to push the country into default in August.
While various tech nerds think it’s cool, it’s virtually unlistenable. You have to endure a little more than you’ll want to get to the robot guitar part.
You’ll hear it’s patently awful but a good pick for a robotic contraption being as it does away with 98 percent of the expression present in typical electric guitar performance. It’s the guitar line for Marilyn Manson’s “The Beautiful People,” a machine-like and very stiff riff that doesn’t require the device to do anything real guitarists more frequently do — like bend notes, use finger vibrato, work the volume or tone knobs, etc.
GE’s Greenville plant, where all 22 gas power-plant turbines will be exported this year, is hiring 125 people in 2011. — SF Chronicle
Yesterday, arch rent-seeker Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric CEO and Obama’s job czar, headlined the “Campaign for Free Enterprise??? job summit. In typical fashion, Immelt had little concern for free enterprise or job creation. Since the beginning of the Obama administration, GE has realized that lobbying for big government, subsidies, and tax credits is far more profitable than competing and profiting from merit.
GE has chosen to specialize in rent-seeking behavior and has directly receiving millions of dollars from Obama’s stimulus and much more cash indirectly. GE notoriously paid zero taxes in 2010. — OpenMarket
The charge from labor-friendly liberals and free-market conservatives has been the same: the appointment [of Jeff Immelt as jobs adviser] represents pure crony capitalism. The leaders of the largest U.S. multinationals are hardly the best suited to give advice on domestic job creation, the line goes, when they spent the last decade eliminating 2.9 million jobs at home and adding 2.4 million overseas. And in particular, the chief of GE, No. 6 on the Fortune 500, shouldn’t be charged with heading that effort, considering the company’s sprawling lobbying agenda in Washington. — Fortune
The chairman of President Barack Obama’s jobs and competitiveness council said Wednesday there is no magic potion to jobs creation. — Newsday
Then the Obama administration sends Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, which paid no federal income taxes last year, to lecture U.S. business firms to “stop complaining about government.” –letter to the Allentown Morning Call newspaper
Cisco Systems plans to cut 15 percent of its staff and sell a set-top box factory as part of a plan to cut annual expenses by $1 billion as the network equipment maker tries to revive its fortunes.
The company said on Monday that it will cut 11,500 jobs, compared with the several thousand that analysts had predicted. The cuts come after Cisco’s chief executive John Chambers said in April that the company had “lost its way.”
Cisco will notify U.S. and Canada-based employees who are losing their jobs in the first week of August. The layoffs in other countries will take place later in compliance with local laws and regulations, Cisco said.
Cisco outsources about 90 percent of its manufacturing to contract manufacturers … [to the same factories in Asia that produce all of Apple’s iKit.].
Portraits of sociopathic minds in action. Two guys, one who is part of a “jobs council” but whose most notable achievements are off-shoring and tax evasion, the other one who maintains on the premier news program in the US that tax relief will create jobs while making plans to reduce his labor force by fifteen percent.
You think they’d make graduate students a little smarter, particularly if they’re going to contribute something to the home of all good boys, The Atlantic.
Infrequently I return to Randy Toman, the ol’ Tea Party blogger at the Lehigh Valley Conservative.
He’s the Pennsy ex-union anti-union goldbug, equipped with the Bible and scripture, judging and shaking his head at all the heathens ruining America.
Normally, this wouldn’t matter.
But Toman is running for school board in Bethlehem School District. And his views make him totally unfit for any elected office, particularly any one involved in shaping the environment in which children are educated.
Anybody that has read anything about the school districts around the country knows the gathering of students to pray or discuss God and Christianity are discouraged, challenged and shut down from happening.
The attempt to teach creationism or intelligent design will close a school district down and bring out the Darwin supporters along with the ACLU.
The extremists get elected when the local media — in the Lehigh Valley, two fairly bad newspapers, The Morning Call and the Easton Express — fall down on the job and neglect to inform people on what the names on the local ballots really believe in.
The wealthy class needs gardeners who can plant tulips.
Today, inspired by GOP Presidential candidate Thaddeus McCotter’s inimitable series, Rock Solid with Thad, DD has thrown his hat into the ring of public educational shows on national affairs, too.
And while I don’t have the same authority and gravitas conferred by government service, I play guitar a lot better.
Rock Hard features a crew from the country and some of you may recognize them. And in the first show we tackle unemployment and reinvigorating your skills for the economy of the future through vocational training at Flatsonville Community College near the bucolic birthplace of author Conrad Richter. Which could be in any state you know.
DD knows Americans are busy, particularly when looking for the jobs of the future. And I’ve kept that in mind on Rock Hard! It’s advice you can take in three minutes! Although, being educational, it may seem longer.
Don’t drink too much now. Or this will happen to you.
How many times have you seen the Viagra commercial and the manly man come on about “getting things done?”
A couple hundred? More? Can’t get that old Howlin’ Wolf tune, “Smokestack Lightning,” backing for the white he-man in the muscle car with the boiling over radiator, out of your head? The dude is so getting it done, rolling the Z-28 in the Mojave!
“Woo-hooo!” goes the Wolf.
Well, I’m sick of it, too.
So I redid the music with something I’d like to hear propping it up.
And it’s entitled “Mister Can’t Get It Up.” Lyrics — what there are of them, heh — are on YouTube proper in the description.
Wooo-hoooo. Gotta get the doctor!
As usual, YouTube does everything in its power to corrupt the video and put artifacts into it during processing. I do not control your tv set.
Yesterday I foolishly decided to take an old Gibson SG to Pasadena’s Guitar Center.
The idea, since I don’t use it very much anymore and it’s an old American-made piece when Gibson was still in Michigan, was to trade it in for something new.
Big mistake. GC Pasadena spent an hour and half photographing it digitally, then sending them off to the Hollywood store for consultation. All for the sake of an offer that wasn’t worth making.
It’s a Gibson SG, stamped as a Les Paul Custom on its truss rod cover plate, with all original hardware. And it plays wonderfully.
It is obviously from 1979 — that is, it looks great but it also appears well played. And as fairly common for thin neck SGs of this age it has a minor, almost imperceptible, neck repair near the tuning peg head.
Whatever that damage was it had happened to the guitar before I bought it in 1986. And the instrument performed perfectly at all dive bars it was asked to in the Lehigh Valley in subsequent years.
What I hadn’t taken into account, and what I’d forgotten I’d written about on this blog, was that instrument valuation, like everything else in the US, has turned into a racket. One in which only certain pieces, never or almost never played — hidden away in closets, are coveted appreciating assets for various among the plutocracy and those serving it.
You know, the annoying guys — lawyers, semi-high end people in Internet businesses, early retirees, assorted shoeshine boys to the heads of investment firms, the types you sometimes meet at a show in a high-rent place where they serve expensive drinks.
“I used to play guitar a lot and I have …” they always say, wanting to get into a penis-measuring contest before you turn to the amp and make like you’re checking connections until they go away.
Tied with this was the always-on observation that the American made guitars are now all for the plutocracy. You go into the store and the US pieces worth having are all hung up on the wall out of reach without help, or behind the counter, or in the special glass-walled room where you can be kept under observation.
The off-shored stuff, however, is for you.
So, too, you see the big Fender amps — like some Frontman model kind of dressed up to look sort of like a Fender Twin — out for the peons.
In the back among the used gear is a ’74 Fender Twin, really beat-up looking from the time when CBS owned the company, priced among the pearls, almost three times the amount of the new foreign-made stuff.
There are, unfortunately, no pictures of the old Fender manufacturing facility after it was expanded by CBS in California during the early Seventies. And that’s a shame because it actually employed a lot of people. As opposed to employing a lot of people in China and Mexico.
An aerial view of it in “The Soul of Tone,” a coffee table book on Fender, shows old pre-CBS Fender filling nine medium-sized warehouse-type buildings. CBS then immediately doubled the company’s manufacturing floor space.
Imagine that!
With a little stroll across the floor we come to the rack of Fender Telecasters. Hidden among them is one US-made model distinguished immediately by its price above 1k.
Everything else is distributed between Chinese and Mexican origin, the latter being the new middle-market price point.
My friend asks me where they’re all made. I tell him to look at the headstock or the serial number.
Or, uh, cartoon. Mark Fiore’s lacerating spoof on the old Reagan “Morning in America” commercial.
Back when I ate shoe leather and like it when I wrote for the Village Voice, before it turned into something with no identity except ads, movie reviews, and trivial in-house bloggers who don’t get paid much, it ran the animations of Fiore.
