I just wanted to post these here before I'm unable to access them on the
site any longer (I'm disappointed that I can only go so far back).
Don't get it twisted, there were plenty of losses in between these (mostly on one game)!
Dec 27 4:12pm
4 Team Parlay - Winner
25.00 to win 281.26
281.26
1. Basketball - Orlando Magic - spread -4½ (-130)
for the entire game held on Dec 27 at 7:05pm [winner]
2. Basketball - Atlanta Hawks - spread +3½ (-130)
for the entire game held on Dec 27 at 8:05pm [winner]
3. Basketball - Los Angeles Clippers - moneyline (+105)
for the entire game held on Dec 27 at 10:05pm [winner]
4. Basketball - Dallas Mavericks - spread +1½ (-110)
for the entire game held on Dec 27 at 8:05pm [winner]
Jan 4 6:49pm
4 Team Parlay - Winner
35.00 to win 478.16
478.16
1. Basketball - Miami Heat - spread -9½ (-110)
for the entire game held on Jan 4 at 7:35pm [winner]
2. Basketball - Atlanta Hawks - moneyline (-220)
for the entire game held on Jan 4 at 10:05pm [winner]
3. Hockey - Tampa Bay Lightning - moneyline (+140)
for the entire game held on Jan 4 at 7:05pm [winner]
4. Hockey - Minnesota Wild - moneyline (+120)
for the entire game held on Jan 4 at 7:05pm [winner]
Jan 5 2:02am
2 Team Parlay - Winner
89.00 to win 216.05
216.05
1. Basketball - San Antonio Spurs - spread +2½ (-120)
for the entire game held on Jan 5 at 7:35pm [winner]
2. Football - LSU - moneyline (-115)
for the entire game held on Jan 7 at 8:00pm [winner]
Jan 10 12:47am
Football - Winner
99.00 to win 90.00
90.00
1. Football - Auburn - spread -2 (-110)
for the entire game held on Jan 10 at 8:30pm [winner]
Jan 10 8:04pm
Football - Winner
40.00 to win 40.00
40.00
1. Football - Auburn - moneyline (+100)
for the entire game held on Jan 10 at 8:30pm [winner]
Jan 13 12:42pm
2 Team Parlay - Winner
88.00 to win 275.00
275.00
1. Basketball - Orlando Magic/Oklahoma City Thunder - total Over 202½ (-120)
for the entire game held on Jan 13 at 8:05pm [winner]
2. Football - Green Bay Packers - moneyline (+125)
for the entire game held on Jan 15 at 8:00pm [winner]
Jan 17 1:47pm
2 Team Parlay - Winner
104.00 to win 100.75
100.75
1. Basketball - Houston Rockets - moneyline (-200)
for the entire game held on Jan 17 at 3:05pm [winner]
2. Basketball - Golden State Warriors - moneyline (-320)
for the entire game held on Jan 17 at 4:05pm [winner]
Jan 23 1:57pm
2 Team Parlay - Winner
105.00 to win 146.26
146.26
1. Football - Green Bay Packers - spread -2½ (-155)
for the entire game held on Jan 23 at 3:00pm [winner]
2. Football - Pittsburgh Steelers - moneyline (-220)
for the entire game held on Jan 23 at 6:30pm [winner]
By Michael Parenti
There is a "mystery" we must explain: How is it that as corporate
investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries
have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half
century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is
growing at a faster rate than the world's population. What do we make of
this?
Over the last half century, U.S. industries and banks (and other western
corporations) have invested heavily in those poorer regions of Asia,
Africa, and Latin America known as the "Third World." The transnationals
are attracted by the rich natural resources, the high return that comes
from low-paid labor, and the nearly complete absence of taxes,
environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety
costs.
The U.S. government has subsidized this flight of capital by granting
corporations tax concessions on their overseas investments, and even
paying some of their relocation expenses---much to the outrage of labor
unions here at home who see their jobs evaporating.
The transnationals push out local businesses in the Third World and
preempt their markets. American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidized
by U.S. taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below
cost and undersell local farmers. As Christopher Cook describes it in
his Diet for a Dead Planet, they expropriate the best land in these
countries for cash-crop exports, usually monoculture crops requiring
large amounts of pesticides, leaving less and less acreage for the
hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed the local
populations.
By displacing local populations from their lands and robbing them of
their self-sufficiency, corporations create overcrowded labor markets of
desperate people who are forced into shanty towns to toil for poverty
wages (when they can get work), often in violation of the countries' own
minimum wage laws.
In Haiti, for instance, workers are paid 11 cents an hour by corporate
giants such as Disney, Wal-Mart, and J.C. Penny. The United States is
one of the few countries that has refused to sign an international
convention for the abolition of child labor and forced labor. This
position stems from the child labor practices of U.S. corporations
throughout the Third World and within the United States itself, where
children as young as 12 suffer high rates of injuries and fatalities,
and are often paid less than the minimum wage.
The savings that big business reaps from cheap labor abroad are not
passed on in lower prices to their customers elsewhere. Corporations do
not outsource to far-off regions so that U.S. consumers can save money.
They outsource in order to increase their margin of profit. In 1990,
shoes made by Indonesian children working twelve-hour days for 13 cents
an hour, cost only $2.60 but still sold for $100 or more in the United
States.
U.S. foreign aid usually works hand in hand with transnational
investment. It subsidizes construction of the infrastructure needed by
corporations in the Third World: ports, highways, and refineries.
The aid given to Third World governments comes with strings attached. It
often must be spent on U.S. products, and the recipient nation is
required to give investment preferences to U.S. companies, shifting
consumption away from home produced commodities and foods in favor of
imported ones, creating more dependency, hunger, and debt.
A good chunk of the aid money never sees the light of day, going
directly into the personal coffers of sticky-fingered officials in the
recipient countries.
Aid (of a sort) also comes from other sources. In 1944, the United
Nations created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
(IMF). Voting power in both organizations is determined by a country's
financial contribution. As the largest "donor," the United States has a
dominant voice, followed by Germany, Japan, France, and Great Britain.
The IMF operates in secrecy with a select group of bankers and finance
ministry staffs drawn mostly from the rich nations.
The World Bank and IMF are supposed to assist nations in their
development. What actually happens is another story. A poor country
borrows from the World Bank to build up some aspect of its economy.
Should it be unable to pay back the heavy interest because of declining
export sales or some other reason, it must borrow again, this time from
the IMF.
But the IMF imposes a "structural adjustment program" (SAP), requiring
debtor countries to grant tax breaks to the transnational corporations,
reduce wages, and make no attempt to protect local enterprises from
foreign imports and foreign takeovers. The debtor nations are pressured
to privatize their economies, selling at scandalously low prices their
state-owned mines, railroads, and utilities to private corporations.
They are forced to open their forests to clear-cutting and their lands
to strip mining, without regard to the ecological damage done. The
debtor nations also must cut back on subsidies for health, education,
transportation and food, spending less on their people in order to have
more money to meet debt payments. Required to grow cash crops for export
earnings, they become even less able to feed their own populations.
So it is that throughout the Third World, real wages have declined, and
national debts have soared to the point where debt payments absorb
almost all of the poorer countries? export earnings---which creates
further impoverishment as it leaves the debtor country even less able to
provide the things its population needs.
Here then we have explained a "mystery." It is, of course, no mystery at
all if you don't adhere to trickle-down mystification. Why has poverty
deepened while foreign aid and loans and investments have grown? Answer:
Loans, investments, and most forms of aid are designed not to fight
poverty but to augment the wealth of transnational investors at the
expense of local populations.
There is no trickle down, only a siphoning up from the toiling many to the moneyed few.
In their perpetual confusion, some liberal critics conclude that foreign
aid and IMF and World Bank structural adjustments "do not work"; the
end result is less self-sufficiency and more poverty for the recipient
nations, they point out. Why then do the rich member states continue to
fund the IMF and World Bank? Are their leaders just less intelligent
than the critics who keep pointing out to them that their policies are
having the opposite effect?
No, it is the critics who are stupid not the western leaders and
investors who own so much of the world and enjoy such immense wealth and
success. They pursue their aid and foreign loan programs because such
programs do work. The question is, work for whom? Cui bono?
The purpose behind their investments, loans, and aid programs is not to
uplift the masses in other countries. That is certainly not the business
they are in. The purpose is to serve the interests of global capital
accumulation, to take over the lands and local economies of Third World
peoples, monopolize their markets, depress their wages, indenture their
labor with enormous debts, privatize their public service sector, and
prevent these nations from emerging as trade competitors by not allowing
them a normal development.
In these respects, investments, foreign loans, and structural adjustments work very well indeed.
The real mystery is: why do some people find such an analysis to be so
improbable, a "conspiratorial" imagining? Why are they skeptical that
U.S. rulers knowingly and deliberately pursue such ruthless policies
(suppress wages, rollback environmental protections, eliminate the
public sector, cut human services) in the Third World? These rulers are
pursuing much the same policies right here in our own country!
Isn't it time that liberal critics stop thinking that the people who own
so much of the world---and want to own it all---are "incompetent" or
"misguided" or "failing to see the unintended consequences of their
policies?" You are not being very smart when you think your enemies are
not as smart as you. They know where their interests lie, and so should
we.