Get More Smarter on Tuesday (Aug. 18)

5 thoughts on “Get More Smarter on Tuesday (Aug. 18)”

1. The Customer is Always Right, unless you are a big banker or insurance advisor – in which case you should be able to promote your own well-being over your customers':

   A new ad by "Secure Families" suggests that a poor couple won't be able to get financial advice from their very trusted stockbroker because of the mean, mean government.

   Michael Hiltzik at the LA Times debunks this lie:

   The new campaign is sponsored by Americans to Protect Family Security, a front for the life insurance and financial advisory industries. Its target is a proposed new Department of Labor regulation to simply require that the sellers of annuities, life insurance, IRAs, 401(k) investments and other such retirement products place their clients' interest first.

   The clients' interest must come before that of the salespeople, or the firms paying them salaries or commissions to steer clients to investments that may not be right for them. That means they must act as "fiduciaries," to use the legal term. The idea is to ensure that the advice customers seek will come unadorned by the self-interest of the seller.

   The explosion in self-directed retirement savings has made this a big deal. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez says that conflicts of interest in the retirement security industry cost IRA investors $17 billion a year. (The Department of Labor's fact sheet on the proposal, which it hopes to implement by the end of the year, is here.)

   These conflicts, Perez told a Senate committee last month, "reduce returns for affected savers by about 1 percentage point per year"–which could reduce the victims' retirement nest eggs by more than a quarter over 35 years of savings. And this happens out of the victims' eyesight, because the industry relies on confusion and opaqueness to conceal its conflicts from the public. Under the DOL regulation, the department and aggrieved customers alike would have the right to enforce the rules.

   So big banks and insurers and money managers don't make enough, aren't protected enough, and don't have enough leeway in their daily operations. We should give them more. The fact that many of them who should be in jail aren't and that they got away with robbing us blind last time means that should be status quo.  And surely everyone agrees that the customer can't be right in this instance, and the banks want to make sure it's put into law, and there's nothing anyone, not even a U.S. Senator, could or should do in this instance.

   It’s bipartisan heaven!

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2. Gun enthusiasts claim the forests as their own….others be damned (or shot)

   Jack Healy of the New York Times reports on increasing tensions between hikers/bicyclists and shooters.  Too often, gun enthusiasts take their recreational shooting about anywhere in the national forests, resulting in endangered lives for other recreational users. 

   Colorado accounts for 1/4 of the reported shooting violations.  The Pike and San Isabel forests have a whoppingly higher number than other national forests around the country. 

   http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/us/a-culture-clash-over-guns-infiltrates-the-backcountry.html?smid=nytcore-iphone-share&smprod=nytcore-iphone

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3. Oh hell no. George Zimmerman paints Confederate flags to raise funds for "Muslim-free zone" gun store.

   Nothing racist to see there, move along.

    

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   1. Here's the yin for these maroons yang…

      Muslim Leaders Issue Declaration of Climate Change

      They called on the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims to protect the world’s equilibrium, or mīzān, in line with religious teaching.

      That meant phasing out greenhouse gas emissions “as soon as possible”, they said, shifting away from fossil fuels to clean sources of energy.

      In a pointed message to the Islamic petropowers of the Middle East, they added well-off and oil producing nations should lead the way.

      Drawing on Islamic texts, the declaration highlights the duty of Muslims to act as stewards of Allah’s creation.

      It ends with a quote from the Qur’an.  

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      1. The Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change was indeed good to see. I like this quote:

         Corruption has appeared on land and sea

         Because of what people’s own hands have wrought,

         So that they may taste something of what they have done;

         So that hopefully they will turn back.

         Qur’an 30: 41

         That's right, bigots who read this blog to find out what those sneaky libs are up to, I am quoting from the Qur'an.  (the real one)

         Muslims are among those most impacted by climate change, especially droughts.  Thomas Friedman talked about this at AREDAY. *He memorably said that environmentalism is one of the few "isms" left that don't divide the Arab world (I'm paraphrasing). I understand that this was a factor in OPEC's deciding not to cut production.  The video was freely available, but now you have to log in to livestream to watch it. Still worth it.

         * and yes, I did notice that there was this Bowman guy as one of the speakers.

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