Some Big News Stories you missed

Walmart (NYSE: WMT) is trying to buy ecommerce unicorn Jet.com for $3 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Jet launched year with $500 million venture capital. The fact its team is already thinking of selling indicates it might not be making money. Walmart probably wants Jet for its technology to boost its ecommerce effort.

Jet is a minor player but it’s been growing fast’ its sales went from $33 million in December 2015 to $90 million in June which is pretty good, Forbes contributor Neil Stern noted. The deal might not be a game changer but it might save Jet.com by giving the start up a deep pocketed backer.

This probably won’t hurt Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) but it might make things tougher for smaller ecommerce players like Target (NYSE: TGT). One has to wonder if Walmart will make other ecommerce acquisitions soon.

BOFI is Even Worse than We Thought

Bank of Internet or Bofi Holdings (NASDAQ: BOFI) might be America’s sleaziest financial institution. Seeking Alpha contributor Aurelius is alleging that BOFI loaned money to criminals and foreign nationals mentioned in the notorious Panama Papers.

Aurelius examined public records of loans that Bank of Internet made in Florida and wrote this: “This review indisputably confirms that BOFI has made loans to criminals and numerous foreign nationals (and their shell companies) that hail from fraud-riddled countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Colombia, Venezuela, and China.”

Other revelations include:

• “The former employees and executives (including a former officer) have publicly detailed alleged loans that BOFI made to criminals, politically exposed persons (“PEP”), and unverified foreign nationals and assert that these loans put BOFI at great risk of violating stringent Bank Secrecy Act (“BSA”), Know Your Customer (“KYC”), and Anti-Money Laundering (“AML”) rules.”

 

• A lawsuit filed by Houston Municipal alleged that BOFI made loans to a Salvadoran Gambling Gang.

• BOFI made a $2.4 million loan to a registered sex offender in Florida named Leon F. Machin. Machin apparently used the money to buy an apartment building in Hialeah, Florida. The property is across the street from South Hialeah Elementary School; and Machin has been convicted of a crime against a child.

 

• BOFI made a loan to Oleg Markovich Vol; a Russian whose name was mentioned in the Panama Papers. The loan was used to buy a condo in Miami.

 

One has to wonder how long BOFI can stay in usiness at this rate. I also have to wonder how the Motley Fool keeps promoting this stock and why anybody takes the Fool seriously after this.

Only Nine Percent of Americans Voted for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton

Only around nine percent of Americans cast votes for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in the presidential primaries, New York Times writers Alicia Parlapano and Adam Pearce noted. That means less than 10% of the US population decided who the presidential nominees for the two major parties would be.

This revelation casts doubt upon the whole primary process; and shows why the American people are so unhappy with the presidential nominees. Some other bothersome data the two uncovered includes:

• The majority of the 113 million voters in the United States did not participate in the primaries.

 

• 73 million Americans did not vote in the primaries.

• 88 million eligible voters did not participate in elections at all.

 

• 60 million people participated in the primaries. Around 30 million each for Republicans and Democrats.

 

This shows us why we have two candidates that are widely disliked and distrusted by a majority of Americans. A tiny minority that does not represent the mainstream chose them. It also shows us that there is a serious level of voter suppression at play here.

These numbers reveal it is time for a major change in the electoral process. A good start would be to scrap primaries; another would be to harness new technology to politics. Jordan Greenhall makes an interesting suggestion for that over at Medium.com.

His suggestion called Liquid Democracy would involve applying the strategies of massive multiplayer online games and multilevel marketing to politics. The idea would be to mobilize an army of political activists using apps and totally overwhelm the existing political system. A more advanced and involved version of what Bernie Sanders’ followers tried to do during the presidential election.

Would it work? I don’t know but major change is going to be needed if we want democracy to survive.

DNC Emails Scandal is worse than You Thought

A member of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) allegedly killed horses for the insurance money. That is just one of many damaging allegations made in the DNC emails released to Wikileaks by unidentified hackers.

The Beltway Pundit has posted a long list of damning information from emails uncovered by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders supporters who trolled through the WikiLeaks dirt. Some other bombshells include:

• DNC staffers made fun of an African-American woman’s name.

 

• DNC staffers made up false information about Trump and released it to Reuters.

• Hillary supporters on the DNC staff infiltrated Bernie’s presidential campaign.

 

• The DNC had a mole in the Sanders campaign.

 

• DNC staffers proposed bringing up Bernie Sanders’ religion to “scare southern voters.” Since Sanders is a non-practicing Jew this might mean antisemitism.

 

• The DNC may have engaged in money laundering.

 

• A DNC consultant called former Fox News personality Meagan Kelly a bimbo.

 

• DNC staffers tried to figure out how to violate the Hatch Act. The Hatch Act is a 1939 federal law that makes it illegal for any employee of the executive branch of the federal government to engage in political activity. This would indicate they were trying to get the Obama Administration involved in campaigning. Only two federal employees the president and vice president are exempt from the Hatch Act.

 

• DNC interns pretended to be protestors and organized fake protests.

 

It looks as if the DNC is even more corrupt than we thought. With party leadership like that it is no wonder large numbers of Americans don’t vote.