It’s being called an “unheard of shift in party preference.” A swing of support – and financial backing – that dwarfs anything seen in nearly a quarter of a century. According to the latest campaign finance analysis from the Center for Responsive Politics OpenSecrets.org, a majority of the nation’s top corporate donors have turned from blue to red, so to speak, and are now contributing more to Republicans than Democrats. That’s the exact opposite of what they did in 2008, and as the Bloomberg points out, nowhere is the trend more pronounced than on Wall Street.

While Mitt Romney’s campaign has won the fundraising derby on a national level for the past 3 months, the change of sentiment among big business begs closer scrutiny. As my co-host Jeff Macke and I discuss in the attached video, if you had to boil the issue down, one overriding theme or reason jumps to the fore, uncertainty.

Whether it’s uncertainty over regulation, uncertainty over taxes and the budget, or uncertainty over healthcare, it’s not only eroding corporate confidence buy the cash outlays that normally go with it.

Let’s use Goldman Sachs (GS) as an example. Data shows in 2008, Goldman employees topped all other corporate donors by contributing $6.1 million dollars, three-quarters of which went to Democrats. Today, 70% of their giving is going to Republicans. And they’re not alone, party swings have also happened at JPMorgan (JPM), Citigroup (C), Morgan Stanley (MS) and UBS (UBS).

Read here:

Knowing how many poor idiots are in this state, I’m guessing no.

Please let me be wrong…

No more than a sliver of the statewide vote is in, but former U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra has a lead on the competition in the race to take on U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow this fall – at least for now.

The Associated Press reports that with 12% of the vote in, Hoekstra, from Holland, had 55% of the vote compared to 32% for Cornerstone Schools founder Clark Durant.

Most polls showed Hoekstra with a strong chance of winning the Republican nomination going into Tuesday’s primary balloting but Durant had picked up some key endorsements. He and his supporters also were trying to strike back with ads questioning Hoekstra’s record in Congress.

The polls closed at 8 p.m. except for three counties in the western part of the Upper Peninsula, where they were set to close at 9 p.m.

Read here:

via poltiico.com

Pizza chain Papa Johns told shareholders that President Obama’s health care law will cost consumers more on their pizza.

On a conference call last week, CEO and founder John Schnatter (a Mitt Romney supporter and fundraiser) said the health care law’s changes — set to go into effect in 2014 — will result in higher costs for the company — which they vowed to pass onto consumers.

“Our best estimate is that the Obamacare will cost 11 to 14 cents per pizza, or 15 to 20 cents per order from a corporate basis,” Schnatter said.

“We’re not supportive of Obamacare, like most businesses in our industry. But our business model and unit economics are about as ideal as you can get for a food company to absorb Obamacare,” he said.

KEEP READING

“It’s a tax that punishes people that have been diligent over the years and did the right thing,” says Certified Public Accountant Bob Keebler on the Medicare surtax that kicks in on Jan.1.

As I wrote last week, the additional 3.8% tax is part of the president’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, ak.a. “Obamacare,” and affects individuals Congress has decided are “wealthy:” single taxpayers with modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) of $200,000 or more and married couples with a MAGI of at least $250,000.

If you fall into one of these categories, you’ll pay 3.8% more in federal income tax on the lesser of your investment income or your “excess” MAGI- the amount that exceeds the $200,000 or $250,000 threshold.

Read more:

WASHINGTON (AP) – People retiring today are part of the first generation of workers who have paid more in Social Security taxes during their careers than they will receive in benefits after they retire. It’s a historic shift that will only get worse for future retirees, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

Previous generations got a much better bargain, mainly because payroll taxes were very low when Social Security was enacted in the 1930s and remained so for decades.

“For the early generations, it was an incredibly good deal,” said Andrew Biggs, a former deputy Social Security commissioner who is now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “The government gave you free money and getting free money is popular.”

If you retired in 1960, you could expect to get back seven times more in benefits than you paid in Social Security taxes, and more if you were a low-income worker, as long you made it to age 78 for men and 81 for women.

As recently as 1985, workers at every income level could retire and expect to get more in benefits than they paid in Social Security taxes, though they didn’t do quite as well as their parents and grandparents.

Not anymore.

Read here:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — If lawmakers cannot agree on how to address the pending “fiscal cliff,” $7 trillion worth of tax increases and spending cuts will begin to go into effect in January.

The smart money says Congress won’t come close to an agreement before the November election, and that lawmakers may not even be able to reach one until early next year. At that point, of course, they’d need to undo at least some of the tax increases and spending cuts that went into effec.

In the meantime, uncertainty about just what Congress will do will weigh on the economy.

Here’s a rundown of what happens if lawmakers fail to act before Jan. 1, 2013.

Read here:

What kind of stupidity is this? That’s only about 5.7%, but staggered in such a way that the taxpayers will get absolutely hammered.

Cut the Keynesian horseshit and just raise taxes a bit.

This is a truly astounding story: San Diego’s Poway school district is paying $1 billion to borrow $105 million.

And it may not be alone in San Diego or the state paying loan shark rates.

According to a story in the Voice of San Diego, a mostly investigative online news site, the city really had no choice. It was either raise taxes or float what appeared to be just another bond to fix its schools.

Read here:

Classic form for big gubmint (sic)…..

Full article

China is cutting fees again to boost investor activity and confidence in sagging markets. They encouraged companies to begin stock buybacks to help prop up market activity.

Full article

(CNN) — A recent CNN.com op-ed asked “Was the Shell Oil hoax ethical?” We at Greenpeace, along with the activist group Yes Men, are behind the Shell Oil website ArcticReady.com, which we created to call attention to the company’s Arctic destruction. So we were intrigued by this question.

The writer, Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University, said the spoof website did not announce itself as a parody and that omission could be called misrepresentation. And that could possibly be called unethical. But we revealed our role just hours after the site went up, and the site is so over-the-top — it has a kids’ game called “Angry Bergs” — that people realize very quickly that it is fake.

But mispresentation is Wolpe’s concern, which is why he should have addressed the ethics of Shell’s multibillion-dollar international hoax perpetrated on Earth itself. A hoax the company has failed to reveal to the public.

Royal Dutch Shell made $31 billion in profits last year, while its CEO took home $15 million in compensation during one of the worst economic crises in a century. The company’s lobbyists in Washington, London and other global capitals work to slow the development of clean technologies and renewable energy, preferring instead a status quo that benefits their shareholders and leaves the massive costs of climate change to the 99%.

Read here.

Washington (CNN) — The U.S. House on Wednesday took the opposite action on tax cuts as the Senate, rejecting a Democratic proposal championed by President Barack Obama to extend lower tax rates for middle-income Americans, and then passing a Republican plan to maintain the lower rates for everyone for a year.

In separate votes that amounted to political posturing in an election year, House Republicans joined by more than a dozen Democrats passed the GOP measure by a 256-171 margin.

Minutes earlier, a similar tally defeated the Democratic alternative that would maintain the lower rates for income up to $250,000 for families and $200,000 for individuals for a year.

Wednesday’s votes extended a congressional stalemate over the Bush tax cuts from 2001 and 2003 that has come to symbolize legislative inaction in Washington.

Read here:

Employees at the obscure General Services Administration are quietly gobbling up 10 percent of the entire federal government’s bonus checks, a top Republican lawmaker revealed Wednesday, with the tab reaching a stunning $44 million last year.

The $44 million amount is far more than was previously reported. As House lawmakers convened a hearing Wednesday digging deep into alleged mismanagement and waste at the embattled agency, Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica, R-Fla, called the latest revelations “absolutely outrageous.”

Disclosing the results of what he described as a preliminary investigation, Mica said bonuses totaled $44 million, with many bonuses worth $50,000 apiece and some going to workers now under investigation. One employee, he said, received a $79,000 bonus, adding up to nearly $260,000 in total compensation.

Read more:

“Money-market fund companies have doubled lobbying efforts to convince regulators and lawmakers that they aren’t a threat to the financial system. The money may have been well-spent.

The 10 biggest money-fund managers and the Investment Company Institute trade group reported combined lobbying spending of $16 million in the first half of 2012 and $31.6 million last year in disclosures that reference money-market mutual funds, according to a review of documents by Bloomberg News. That compares with $16.7 million in all of 2010.”

Full article

“WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday urged Congress to give the agency the power to improve disclosure standards and require audited financial statements for the $3.7 trillion municipal securities market as part of an effort to help retail investors in the market.

The SEC advocated the changes in a report it released on the municipal securities market. State and municipal governments issue bonds to finance the building and maintaining of U.S. infrastructure.”

Full article

an announcement should be made over the next two hours….

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — U.S. taxpayers spent $32 billion last year on for-profit private schools, despite the sector’s relatively high drop-out rate, according to a congressional investigation released Monday.

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions found that during the 2008-2009 school year, which is the most recent data available for withdrawal rates, 54% of for-profit students dropped out without a degree. That translates to more than half a million students in one school year.

The report also noted that for-profit schools charge tuition that is much higher than their public counterparts. Bachelor’s programs at for-profits costs 20% more than public schools, while an associate’s degree at a for-profit institution is four times the cost.

Read here:

via The New Republic & Mr. Verbeek’s book 

 

Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things 
By Peter-Paul Verbeek 
(University of Chicago Press, 183 pp., $25)

JUST WEST OF SEOUL, on a man-made island in the Yellow Sea, a city is rising. Slated for completion by 2015, Songdo has been meticulously planned by engineers and architects and lavishly financed by money from the American real estate company Gale International and the investment bank Morgan Stanley. According to the head of Cisco Systems, which has partnered with Gale International to supply the telecommunications infrastructure, Songdo will “run on information.” It will be the world’s first “smart city.”

The city of Songdo claims intelligence not from its inhabitants, but from the millions of wireless sensors and microcomputers embedded in surfaces and objects throughout the metropolis. “Smart” appliances installed in every home send a constant stream of data to the city’s “smart grid” that monitors energy use. Radio frequency ID tags on every car send signals to sensors in the road that measure traffic flow; cameras on every street scrutinize people’s movements so the city’s street lights can be adjusted to suit pedestrian traffic flow. Information flows to the city’s “control hub” that assesses everything from the weather (to prepare for peak energy use) to the precise number of people congregating on a particular corner.

Songdo will also feature “TelePresence,” the Cisco-designed system that will place video screens in every home, office, and on city streets so residents can make video calls to anyone at any time. “If you want to talk to your neighbors or book a table at a restaurant you can do it via TelePresence,” Cisco chief globalization officer Wim Elfrink told Fast Company magazine. Gale International plans to replicate Songdo across the world; another consortium of technology companies is already at work on a similar metropolis, PlanIT Valley, in Portugal.

The unstated but evident goal of these new urban planners is to run the complicated infrastructure of a city with as little human intervention as possible. In the twenty-first century, in cities such as Songdo, machine politics will have a literal meaning—our interactions with the people and objects around us will be turned into data that computers in a control hub, not flesh-and-blood politicians, will analyze.

But buried in Songdo’s millions of sensors is more than the promise of monitoring energy use or traffic flow. The city’s “Ambient Intelligence,” as it is called, is the latest iteration of a ubiquitous computing revolution many years in the making, one that hopes to include the human body among its regulated machines. More than a decade ago, Philips Electronics published a book called New Nomads, which described prototypes for wearable wireless electronics, seamlessly integrated into clothing, which would effectively turn the human body into a “body area network.” Today, researchers at M.I.T.’s Human Dynamics Lab have developed highly sensitive wearable sensors called sociometers that measure and analyze subtle communication patterns to discern what the researcher Alex Pentland calls our “honest signals,” and Affectiva, a company that grew out of M.I.T.’s Media Lab, has developed a wristband called the Q sensor that promises to monitor a person’s “emotional arousal in real-world settings.”

Now we can download numerous apps to our smartphones to track every step we take and every calorie we consume over the course of a day. Eventually, the technology will be inside of us. In Steven Levy’s book In the Plex, Google founder Larry Page remarks, “It will be included in people’s brains … Eventually you will have the implant, where if you think about a fact it will just tell you the answer.” The much-trumpeted release of the wearable Google Goggles was merely the out-of-body beta test of this future technology.

KEEP READING 

Most Americans have a sense TARP was a badly managed program that bailed out “fat cat” bankers at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. Well, it’s even worse than you think, according to Neil Barofsky, former special inspector general for TARP (SIGTARP).

Read the rest here.

via NYTimes.com

TAMPA, Fla. — Over at the back door of the 2001 Odyssey, a limo-size tent with flaps — especially designed for discretion and camera-shy guests — is ready to go up. Déjà Vu is welcoming extra “talent” from around the country in its V.I.P. rooms.

And Thee DollHouse is all Americana: women plan to slip out of red, white and blue corsets and offer red, white and blue vodka. The headliner that week is expected to bear an uncanny resemblance to a certain ex-governor from a wilderness state, known for her strong jaw and devotion to guns and God.

“She’s a dead ringer for her,” said Warren Colazzo, co-owner of Thee DollHouse. “It’s just a really good gimmick to get publicity.”

As Tampa gears up for the Republican National Convention, the biggest party it has ever held, the city and its businesses are primping and polishing for the August arrival of tens of thousands of visitors. Like it or not — mostly not, for city officials — Tampa’s well-known strip clubs have joined the welcome wagon.

Club owners here say they have schmoozed with their counterparts in former host cities, like Denver, and have been told that revenue pours in during conventions, sometimes quadrupling earnings from a Super Bowl week. As for party affiliation, this is one place where the country’s caustic partisan differences fall away, owners say.

Angelina Spencer, the executive director of the Association of Club Executives, which serves as a trade association for strip clubs, said an informal survey of convention business in New York and Denver had determined that Republicans dropped more money at clubs, by far.

“Hands down, it was Republicans,” she said. “The average was $150 for Republicans and $50 for Democrats.”

“WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate has debated, sniped and voted on the politically fraught issue of tax cuts, and next week the House is likely to do it all over again. Still, Americans won’t know until after the November elections how much more of their paychecks will go to the government next year.

House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday that his Republican-led chamber is “more than willing” to make Democrats vote on thePresident Barack Obama’s plan to extend former president George W. Bush’s tax cuts for all but the wealthiest Americans. He also is bringing up the GOP’s proposal to extend the tax cuts for everyone.

The outcome is almost certainly stalemated until the November elections, so leaders of both houses of Congress are turning the House and Senate into campaign stages on one of the defining issues of the presidential and congressional races.”

Full article