banana republic let's look at some artwork here from zero heads this is william bonzai seven and he's talking about the state of the union it's a state of the banana of course some more artwork speaking in front of a cash congress and world's highest standard of living billboard as we know everybody keeps on talking about america as if it's the great hope you know that everything is going to recover there and we're all going to be saved and of course it doesn't recover. max well we're going to move from bananas over on to apple live apple numbers are add and it's a blowout apple reported their first quarter earnings the very same day that obama was lying to the american public about the state of the economy and their revenue was forty six point three three billion versus thirty eight point seven six billion expected earnings per share was thirteen eighty seven versus ten dollars and seven cents expected i phone units sold thirty seven point zero four million versus the

expected thirty point two million well yes this is amazing because they have one hundred seven hundred billion dollars in cash they have more cash than a lot of countries have their total g.d.p. and over four hundred fifty of the s. and p. five hundred have in total market capitalization but here's the thing they got rich by outsourcing jobs to china apple computer if they have those jobs onshore it would add something like sixty bucks per iphone to the current price of many hundreds of dollars it's almost insignificant but they refused to do it because they want to build this huge cash hoard for no apparent reason they don't pay a dividend they just sit on the cash so if they're going to just rip people off their jobs and they're not going to give them the means to buy the products that they themselves manufacture now most of the sales go outside of the u.s. then you have to give them something you just can't use the u.s. infrastructure greedily for your own purposes and give back nothing so the only

thing they have a give back in my opinion would be shares in the company itself stock in the company in fact i phone sold for an average of six hundred sixty dollars which was higher than analysts had expected as well so people are already willing to spend more on it so if it were a sixty five dollars more they're saying it would add cost of ten percent just a minor adjustment but if you calculate the new customers that would then be in a position to buy more i phones net net. it would be a creative they would actually make money doing this it would be a way for them to make money but they're so frickin stupid apple computer that they don't seem to think that it makes any difference whether they disenfranchise millions of americans now in the state of the banana republic speech barack obama also mentioned this new buffett law that he wants to bring in that warren buffett shouldn't be paying a lot less tax than his secretary and also on the very day before i guess it was mitt romney released his tax returns from the previous year and sure enough he paid

thirteen point nine percent honest twenty five million dollars in income now that brings me to this headline further about apple most of apple's eighty two billion dollars cash stockpile is trapped overseas now of course this is only a few weeks ago and it was only eighty two billion dollars the cash pile now is ninety seven billion but fifty four billion of apple's overall eighty two billion in cash is an offshore accounts and apple cannot repatriate that money to the states unless it wants to pay a huge thirty five percent corporate tax on it but it's another stab in the back to americans not even paying the tax on the short and letting the benefits accrue to people outside of the united states but also it is a banana republic and only certain sectors have huge privilege private equity who extract the capital the wealth hollows out an economy they get

taxed only thirteen point nine percent of their income apple which could potentially create enormous wealth in the u.s. economy is taxed at thirty five percent and we all know when everybody says oh people are just jealous of the wealthy well they were throngs of people throwing themselves at the various apple shops and steve jobs a multibillion are died his company is taxed at thirty five percent on their earnings mitt romney is tap. at thirteen point nine percent so there is that element to the bet and a republic right of course a turban of republic comes from the united fruit company which changed our name to chiquita after that such huge p.r. disaster of finding out that they were involved in the overthrow of governments in latin america and south america to further their ends and now you've got american oligarchs american banana republic leaders like barack obama or the leaders of apple computer doing the same thing that these other dictatorships are doing

causing the same kind of economic distress and and they seem to then themselves after fruits for some reason whether it's a banana republic or certain apple computer apple said they would return the money to the united states if they were taxed at nine percent did they threaten the people in congress like the people like hank paulson did when he got the seven fifty billion tarp bailout threatening martial law no now let's turn from the state of the banana republic to the state of the stiff upper lip this is over in the united kingdom serving king no reason to despair so his report says britain is heading back into recession the governor of the bank of england urged against despair because all crises come to an end eventually he says he looks pretty miserable doesn't think he should talk like usually we're telling people don't despair you don't look like you're about to top yourself you try and have a smile and put it like clown nose on really like a burning look out the clown those always delivering bad economic numbers of irving kangas got that british kind of in the bag have blitzed on gin luck which is not

fooling anybody and of course the u.k. economy is contracting why because the debt in the banking sector continues to expand and nobody's doing anything about that mervyn king wake up as we compared apple to the banana wielding bankers in america. where the bankers have so much more power over government officials via their debt that you see this playing out here with mervyn king he's also pleading this is all he has is desperate pleas to the banking sector the tragedy of the financial crisis is that those who have suffered most have been those who bear no responsibility for it the legitimacy of a market economy will inevitably be challenged if rewards go disproportionately to a small elite especially one which benefited from the support of taxpayers so he then goes on to plead with them please don't give yourself massive bonuses and rub

it in to make our jobs more difficult but he has the means to rectify this problem simply by raising interest rates instead of engaging in quantitative easing which is to lower interest rates you have in your ability to right this wrong mervyn king why are you pretending as though you are powerless you're sitting on the bank of england the premotor primo of central banks the progenitor of all central banks if you don't know what to do then either resign or in fact top yourself as it looks like you want to do max more importantly he can just stop buying their debt he keeps on engaging and quantitative easing he's like a freaking madman why don't you just stop giving them the money and stop. stop playing with it that you yourself issue stop it. you know it's like exactly like that movie psycho when norman bates starring in the into the mirror and he's trying to you know attack what turns out to be mere reflection of himself just as his

mother this is mervyn king he's looking into the mirror dressed up like a woman like most british men like to do most of them and he's attacking himself. so you yourself are the psycho mervyn king well let's look at the state of the actual british citizen u.k. family debts up by almost fifty percent in a year the typical debt owed by a u.k. family has soared by forty eight percent since january two thousand and eleven as rising inflation has taken its toll on household incomes according to the latest family finances report and max how is inflation caused. by printing money and buying your own debt mervyn king doing exactly who's doing. king the only hope he gives them with his glowing face is despair one day i'll stop printing money i can't tell you when it's like a sprinter economics basically because he's trying to hold in the inflation but he

can't seem to do a good job it is leaking out and stinking up the joint. it's just one step too far perhaps but it's a good analogy that most people can relate to so research by the insurance company found that the typical u.k. family is seven thousand nine hundred forty four pounds unsecured borrowing on credit cards loans overdraft and other forms of credit compared with just five thousand three hundred sixty pounds in january two thousand and eleven the figure represents thirty two percent of a typical net annual income and suggests families are falling further into debt as financial pressures grow because pam least people who work in these families can't have jobs why because all the jobs that are not in finance been squeezed out of the system due to mervyn king's artificially low. the traits that have rewarded speculators and push legitimate jobs out of the way so this is exactly what you don't want to see an economy that builds itself as being competitive there should

be a competitiveness in the u.k. economy where people who want to work and have jobs doing stuff should not be squeezed out by the central bank which is making it possible for the cancer of speculative bubble of comics to grow its way to the point of killing the host that is to say the u.k. economy which is clearly shrinking lanced a boil of speculators worming and you will stimulate the economy unless you yourself are the pos in the boil which i suspect that you are well again you know perhaps the british population shouldn't despair too much because things could be worse they could be american the caging of america there are now more people under correctional supervision and america more than six million that were in the gulag archipelago under stalin at its height. their america their third of american american i don't want to but then you know look. like americans don't

care that they're in cages as long as they get cheap access to cable to be in a good rate on a mic not. exactly if they're in a banana republic i mean many monkeys behind a cage as well and are fed bananas the accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just a startling as the sheer number it tripled since one thousand nine hundred eighty to seven hundred thirty one per one hundred thousand no other country even approaches that in the past two decades the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education ours is bottom to top of course several state and who want the republicans as their presidential nominee none other than chief warden himself mitt romney of a private equity background bain capital whose job it is is to destroy the manufacturing economy in the real economy in favor of a financial lies economy that crowds out all real jobs in favor of speculative

bubbles and speculator gamble our kings that run the economy and as a result the incarceration population keeps going higher and higher and americans love to be incarcerated they hate their freedom they would prefer to be treated like dogs in a cage and have some warden like mitt romney in charge and that's why we're going to vote for all right stacy ever don't go stay right there we'll be back right after this. well. this month but particles that make up the fabric of the universe find what you're looking for in the deep siberian forest prevent a fire with the help of lasers in fibers pull out your template of a new game in the gym and let the teacher begin all of that here with severe specific knowledge here on. the future covered.

i'm max foster this is the kaiser report we're back talking about bananas and banana republics stacey well max speaking of bananas in my first headline here in the second half we have can a monkey pick a hedge fund they may match a typical fund of hedge funds in a research paper from some academics at their brussels free university in belgium and the geneva school of business administration in switzerland called assessing the performance of funds of hedge funds they studied abroad sample of one thousand three hundred funds of funds from one thousand nine hundred four through two thousand and nine and analyze just how much value they actually created their core

finding when you strip out the fees just twenty two percent deliver any alpha or risk adjusted vestment gains at all you know and none with any consistency over time and almost all completely worthless and a fund of funds is particularly worthless because it's a consummation it's a an aberration it's an abomination they're using people's money to invest in other people's money invested in tertiary money invested by some guy in greenwich connecticut is probably drunk on his desk wishing he were mervyn king and never even looks at the market except for paul tudor jones they're all worth less and nearly half of all fund of hedge fund managers the academics report delivered negative after fees alpha one benchmark against the hedge fund indices and other words they couldn't even keep up with the index so this is a new term negative alpha negative alpha otherwise known as losing money. they just say they're lost money but no that's my community needs

a way to say it that makes it sound like they're intelligent about the way they lose their money so they say negative alpha but they are empowered in ways that are quite detrimental to the overall economy because you know than the greek debt situation the hedge fund community and their use of naked credit default swaps are forcing political change in austerity on a country using their incredible leverage because they have a trillion dollars in cash which they leverage up to fifty or sixty trillion dollars of poor greek greek economy is only a couple hundred billion so these hadrons gang up the kowloon they talk to each other again more illegal activity to pick on a country like greece that has no representational government that is nobody defending the country and they sell the bonds down to zero and they force austerity measures on a country with huge assets of those assets off one of the hands of people friendly to the hedge funds well exactly and those hedge funds are taking their case to the human rights court which is why we should just hand over all of that hedge fund activity to monkeys well you know the technology is becoming very sophisticated and you know there are injured do saying technology that allow for people to use brain

waves to manipulate cursors on screens to surf the web using your mind and i would imagine that monkeys will soon be able to do this hire lawyers and defend themselves in court against slander by having hedge fund managers compare themselves to monkeys includes the monkeys are a lot more intelligent well remember in the first half of the show we were talking about mervyn king and he's so angst ridden about these bankers and their bonuses well here's a possible solution strippers can show us bankers just rewards jamie whyte in the city am proposes that strippers and bankers they operate on a similar performance bonus scheme but here is one of the many differences he says between lap dancers and bankers whereas mr stringfellow makes his lap dancers pay for the privilege of being put in the way of their bonuses with a house fee of about one hundred pounds a night investment bankers are paid to have the chance of earning bonuses in the millions with base salaries range and. roughly fifty thousand pounds to three hundred thousand pounds it's not even that they're being paid but they're given

a subsidy if you look at in terms of the concept of too big to fail banks the government gives investment banks a subsidy in the form of low interest rates and bailouts so that they can go ahead and do what is no more instrumental in keeping the economy going as the average pole dancer so the pole dancing model of you've got to give the house some money to basically rent space to pole dance is exactly what the model should be for investment bankers because their job at the end of the day is just to seduce suckers into giving them lots of money for cheap thrill as we just reported the headstrong community does not deliver alpha that is to say they don't make anybody money they instead produce they get about which is to say they lose people money which is exactly what the typical pole dancer does they get the client all hot and bothered but they don't actually deliver what the ultimate desire of that client

would be same thing with an investment banker they talk a good game but they deliver nothing and the fact they are nothing but subsidy suckers in germany you know the street prostitutes they have a kiosk or they put in some money and they rent space to do their job this is exactly the same on wall street jamie diamond said to go to wall street government put in a million dollars and exercises right as a wall street prostitute to seduce idiots into j.p. morgan stock in all their products that's exactly the way it should be done he had to put on their t.v. strings man and do a little dance and see who is better i think james got some nice chicks when you compare it to lloyd blankfein is kind of sagging and out of shape but you know jamie jamie is constantly out running the pitchforks and the and the torches so he's got nice legs well investment bankers like lap dancers should have to pay to go to work if investment banks held auctions in which prospect. employees bid for jobs by offering an annual fee the bank's owners and all of those others who

nowadays concern themselves with the issue could be confident that they are not overpaying their staff any excess pay would be competed away in the auction auction is capitalism we don't have capitalism you know thanks to our behavior on wall street and the city of london no more bear stearns no more lehman brothers the competition is shrinking the too big to fail problem is growing the agency fraud as bill black calls it is increasing well between these two have max i haven't told you this yet but i did put out word to the primate community basically looking for somebody to audition to be our fund manager and i've got this video here from a given he's our new hedge fund manager. but he could pull. this guy he's got the chops and he's got what it takes to be a good fund manager because he's decisive you know there's a credible analog between a suicide bomber and

a hedge fund manager they are willing to die for market fundamentalism without thinking about it too much well i'd like to see lloyd and jamie performing next to him and see who could do that better swing down there was a row well some clearly the government isn't down in ways that i don't think either of those other two gentlemen are but that's clearly maybe not great for the hedge fund industry for say but it could be useful in other contexts speaking of natural endowments there are certain artists who are naturally endowed with great art and those who still taking the mickey joy division drummers anger at disney t. shirts inspired by unknown pleasures album cover so joy division drummer stephen morris has hit out at a disney t. shirt which appears to have been inspired by the band's first album cover the way with mickey mouse t. shirt is similar to the one nine hundred seventy nine album. own pleasures but uses silhouette so here you can see the images side by side the one on the left is the

mickey mouse t. shirt and the one on the right is joy division's album cover now disney originally said that it was inspired by the iconic sleeve but the disney store website now contains no reference to the band well let's introduce a new personality to our role gal gallery of terrorists and kleptocrats bob iger our c.e.o. of does they just announce fifty million dollars compensation for the air bob iger are is to to copyright terrorism what blankfein and diamond are to financial terrorism and disney of course is the company that every single time mickey mouse is due to enter the public domain they lobby congress to extend copyright most famously with bondo bono bonnie bono bono yes cher's ex-husband who got it extended by another twenty years to create what lawrence lessig calls perpetual copyright and gives a cook to crowd of powers to do this actually this say that we know we're violating

copyright law but we don't care because we have the power to tell you to go buzz off at the same time we're going to use it to deprive you of your constitutional right to fair use this is at the nexus of the copyright problem the soap of the people that act bob iger are copyright terrorists disney is a shameless organization that really needs to be broken up as well as these big banks so stephen morris the drummer from joy division said i was quite angry when i first saw it no one asked us they were trading off the band and our album cover but get away with it by apparently saying the design was inspired by us so why isn't that the argument for mega upload we were just inspired by warner brothers music or universal music what about the creators of that show californication it's from the title of a red hot chili peppers song they simply stole it they didn't pay him compensation they said you know we're we're bigger than you tough luck well so it's part of that banana republican ism however where

a certain class of kleptocrats get all sort of rights exclusions exemptions from all laws and tax laws and criminal laws and the other class. have been at us thrown at them behind a cage that's right those are americans so fur that you mentioned sopa thirty years before sopa m p a feared the v c r so somebody uncovered some testimony by jack valenti the former n.p.a. head the motion picture association of america and this is him speaking before the house judiciary subcommittee in one thousand nine hundred eighty two he said to the gathered congress people i say to you that the v c r is to the american film producer and the american public as the boston strangler is the woman home alone right jack valenti arguing against technology course the v.c.r. gave birth to the blockbuster franchise of rentals of video

a multi billion dollar revenue source for hollywood which that went into the d.v.d. market another multibillion source of revenue which could enter into the download market every step of the way hollywood has put their foot down and said no we need protection from the government against any competition and they have reluctantly been dragged through the innovative process to multi-billion dollar profits going forward why anyone listens to these idiots in los angeles i don't understand meanwhile in new york you've got people like louis c.k. who put on his concert film online no diarra asked for people to just give him money for the show and he raised over a million dollars no bob iger are no disney no ca no management fee just artist public and beaucoup bucks so he used this as an argument that it was just being used by people who were illegally copying material from the television he said the loser will be your public because they don't have these expensive machines

and that is what i am saying sir the public is the loser when creative property is taken and. here is the reason why the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars each year to produce quality programs to theaters and televisions will surely decline exact same words they're using today and what happened these expensive machines v.c.r. players used to cost a thousand fifteen hundred dollars they came down to fifty bucks today yeah you know they can't get more it's called capitalism right and this is the one thing that hollywood doesn't want to participate in they want to have like the big banks on wall street huge government subsidies for an industry that is completely superfluous you could go a limb in a hollywood eliminate too big to fail banks and the u.s. economy would be the beneficiary of this more competition in the creative space more competition in the financial space well max have got to go pay or fund manager he is paid in and mangos you know.

those plenty more where that came from buddy keep picking those winners all right stacy your work thanks so much for being on the kaiser report thank you max and that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with me max kaiser and stacey herbert send me an e-mail at kaiser reported r t t v dot are you follow me on twitter max kaiser you can follow stacey on twitter too until next time x. guys are saying bio.

arab league holds its observer mission in syria over the upsurge of violence while russia slams the new u.n. draft resolution to end the conflict saying it some acceptable because it targets regime. protesters in poland but the continued fighting the international and piracy pact they say brings internet censorship under the guise of protecting copyright. and yet another blow to the struggling eurozone is the credit ratings of five nations

a cut despite the crisis type thing optimism of the world economic forum. live from moscow at midnight watching r t with me kevin now in our top story the arab league frozen its monitoring mission in syria because of the escalation of violence there more than one hundred people are thought of being killed in clashes between syrian security forces no position groups in the past two days alone the u.n. security council remains split on how to end the crisis russia's given a resoundingly no new resolution on syria drafted by the e.u. and arab states that warns of further action if damascus fails to comply the text call for president assad to transfer power to the deputy moscow says the resolution should not contain any threat of sanctions or imply any outside intervention.