That’s certainly how it sounds when you read Douglas Lindholm’s article in Forbes magazine entitled “Once A Friendly Locale To Business, The Modern State Of Delaware Is A Bully.”

I commend the entire article to you, but the short version is this:

Under the guise of “unclaimed property” laws, the state forces companies to prove that they are not holding unclaimed property, even from 20 or 30 years ago, then fine the companies if they can’t prove it.

We’re talking big money here, the sort of thing that would make John Gotti proud: “Last year alone, Delaware seized $319.5 million from liquidated property, while returning only $18.9 million of unclaimed property to its rightful owners. The State’s estimated General Fund revenue from unclaimed property for FY 2013 is over a half billion dollars.”

As if this isn’t bad enough, the state pays an auditor on contingency, meaning the auditor has self-serving financial motives to go after the state’s business particularly aggressively. And as Lindholm notes, it’s working out well for the auditor, Kelmar Associates, which earned $30 million in the second half of 2012: “It is astounding to think that the payout to this one auditor for six months of its ‘auditing’ was almost twice the unclaimed property returned to all owners all of last year.”

This is not entirely a new story: In 2009, Delaware assessed McKesson Corporation $4.5 million dollars when a Kelmar audit – which took six years to perform – came up with four vendors (out of 116 questions) who claimed that McKesson owed them a total of $19,337.

McKesson settled out of court; I do not believe the amount of the settlement was ever made public. To add insult to McKesson’s injury, roughly at the same time as the settlement, Delaware amended their unclaimed property statute so that the type of “property” which McKesson was fined for is no longer subject to that law.

According to attorney Scott Smith at the law firm of Baker Donelson, while Delaware is probably the most aggressive state in this area, they are far from alone, and it’s becoming a bigger revenue source for many states: “They see it as easy money – even if it’s not theirs.”

Smith also believes that third party auditor firms like Kelmar are as much the driving force behind the extortion of companies as the states are: “These outfits are really targeting the companies and then marketing themselves to the states.” Sounds a lot like a mafia boss offering a lower-level thug protection for a cut of the money.

We can only hope that with a Forbes article and perhaps some help from these pages and elsewhere, Delaware, and other states which are behaving similarly or even thinking about it, will be shamed – or competed, such as by Nevada, Texas, or other states which are making major efforts to attract business – into ceasing their mafia-like tactics.

In the meantime, i encourage any state which uses Kelmar Associates for any services to switch to another provider until such time as Kelmar agrees not to be a co-conspirator in Delaware’s extortion. Given that they made $30 million stealing from Delaware corporations in just six months, it’s easy to guess their response: Like a mafioso, once you get it, you never get out.

Few places seem less likely to find humor than a New York Times article about rogue IRS agents, but this line from Friday’s article was laugh-out-loud funny: “[Lerner] insisted that the move was not driven by politics.” Nearly as ridiculous was Lerner’s assertion that the behavior was little more than the activity of overzealous low-level employees and that more senior IRS officials were unaware of the “absolutely inappropriate” behavior.

Lerner did herself no further favors during a subsequent conference call with reporters in which she couldn’t calculate one quarter of 300, saying “I’m not good at math.” Then she and her staff complained about “repetitive” questions, prompting liberal Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston to say, according to a Washington Post report (entitled “The IRS’ public relations disaster”), that “it was because they weren’t answering the questions.”

One wonders whether anybody, even New York Times readers believed that the actions were only those of low-level IRS employees in Cincinnati. If so, they couldn’t believe it for long: Barely 24 hours later, the Associated Press revealed that a draft of an IRS inspector general’s report shows, contrary to lying Lerner’s assertions that the Tea Party-targeting was confined to 2012, that senior IRS officials including Lerner learned of the targeting no later than June 29, 2011.

Please read the entirety of my article for the American Spectator:
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/05/13/the-taxman-cometh-for-tea-part

If ponies rode men and grass ate cows,
And cats were chased into holes by the mouse …
If summer were spring and the other way round,
Then all the world would be upside down.

Once in a long while, an event evokes one of my favorite historical images: the British Army band, at Lord Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown which sealed the Americans’ revolutionary victory, playing “The World Turned Upside Down.”

In this case, the event is the dramatic change over the past two weeks in the “mainstream” media’s coverage of President Obama.

From reporters to opinion writers, from newspapers to television, after a mere four and a half years of economic fecklessness, foreign policy failure, unseemly narcissism, and a Nobel Prize for deeds to be named later, prominent liberal-leaning pundits and organizations may have finally realized that reality, if not journalistic ethics, demands a more clear-eyed look at the president they have been so deeply invested in.

Or maybe they’ve just noticed that their fawning and sycophancy has meant declining circulation and viewership.

But whatever the reason, the dominant establishment mass media’s turn is as remarkable as it is welcome.

Please read the entirety of my article for the American Spectator here:
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/05/07/turning-on-obama

While I do have some reservations about e-Verify, nevertheless it’s good to see a city government not be cowed by the political correctness that seems to take over local governments when it comes to immigration issues.

You can read the resolution here:
http://www.rossputin.com/MissionViejoRuleOfLaw.pdf

Congressman Steve King (R-IA) has for years been a lonely voice willing to risk charges of “racist!” coming his way when he fought against it.

But when a fraud against the federal government and all American taxpayers is as big and as obvious as what has resulted from the Pigford case against the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), even the New York Times, protector of Democrats, must eventually take notice.

Please read the entirety of my article for the American Spectator here:
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/04/30/the-pigs-of-pigford

If you’re interested in getting the best possible single-day training about your AR-15, BluCore Shooting Center is offering their Armorer’s Course, and a $20 discount to my listeners with promo code “ross".

More info on the course here, and you can sign up and use “ross” to get your discount.

The next course date is Saturday, May 11 from 9 AM to 5 PM. It’s an in-depth, hands-on course that should be both fun and informative.

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Color me skeptical.

Politicians and activists, pundits and columnists across the political spectrum have used the murder and mayhem caused by a pair of Islamic radicals (yes, President Obama, I said “Islamic”) to grind their own policy or opinion axes.

Some (but probably not most, at least within the political class) are sincere, others simply opportunistic. But on almost every issue, even if agreeing with the speaker’s fundamental position, broad policy implications of the murderous Tsarnaev brothers are overstated.

Please read the entirety of my article for the American Spectator here:
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/04/26/overstating-boston

Here’s one interesting story. The summary: Near-legendary silver investor Eric Sprott has been selling large quantities of his own silver trust, and he says that he’s using some of the money ” to buy shares in silver mining companies, which he believes will outperform the metal itself on the next rally.”

One thing which I think is very interesting in the market is that while oil is also going down, this sort of selling would normally accompany a big rise in the USD and a big sell-off in stocks, but that’s not happening. (There’s been a very slight rise in the USD over the past day or two and slight selling in the stock market.)

What this says to me is that the selling is about two things: First, fundamental issues: fear of a marginal global slowdown, but mostly a slowdown in China. And fear that Cyprus, and then other European weaklings might need to sell gold reserves.

Second, and this is really what is happening today, there are massive margin calls in silver and gold and anticipation that the public is getting washed out of the SLV and GLD ETFs, causing massive selling pressure in the spot and futures markets. These redemptions cause further margin calls among the investors with the weak hands, and it snowballs until the public is out and/or those who are short jump in and cover. But the weak public is much bigger and the short pros. Furthermore, there are fast-money traders who simply follow momentum, and will be selling just because it seems like the path of least resistance.

One reason I think this second issue is the key to current trading is that base metals, which followed gold and silver down pretty closely in percentage terms on Friday are down much less (but still down) on Sunday night, with lead and zinc each down less than 1%, and copper just over 1%. The public is not in base metals, so are not being panicked and margin-called out of those metals.

For those (like me) who have any investment exposure to precious metals, the past few months have been very bad, with the past few days being a true disaster. I wonder how people like Glenn Beck, who advertise aggressively for gold-selling firms on their radio shows, will feel as they read these tea leaves. I’m sure Mr. Beck’s money is where his mouth is, and I’m not suggesting that he’s hawking something he doesn’t believe in. I’m simply saying that when you hear ads for any financial asset all over TV and radio, it’s only a matter of time until that asset crashes. The most surprising thing about the metals is that they didn’t crash sooner.

All that said, I imagine we’re close to a bottom in these things, especially silver. But catching a falling commodity is at least as dangerous as catching a falling knife.