Un petit vidéo que Pauline Marois (et les autres nationalistes du PQ) auraient intérêt à écouter…

"Like the harnessing of electricity in our cities, or the fall of the Berlin Wall, English represents hope for a better future. A future where the world has a common language to solve its common problems."

P.-S. Beaucoup de gens ont dit que l'émergence de la Chine allait rendre la maîtrise du mandarin essentielle. Il semble que ces gens devront revoir leur pronostic.

"Some businesses see nothing but profits in the green movement."

The Climate-Industrial Complex
By BJORN LOMBORG

Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.

The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the "military-industrial complex," cautioning that "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." He worried that "there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."

This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a "climate-industrial complex" is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain.

This phenomenon will be on display at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen this weekend. The organizers — the Copenhagen Climate Council — hope to push political leaders into more drastic promises when they negotiate the Kyoto Protocol's replacement in December.

The opening keynote address is to be delivered by Al Gore, who actually represents all three groups: He is a politician, a campaigner and the chair of a green private-equity firm invested in products that a climate-scared world would buy.

Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to profit from carbon regulations. The term used by economists for their behavior is "rent-seeking."

The world's largest wind-turbine manufacturer, Copenhagen Climate Council member Vestas, urges governments to invest heavily in the wind market. It sponsors CNN's "Climate in Peril" segment, increasing support for policies that would increase Vestas's earnings. A fellow council member, Mr. Gore's green investment firm Generation Investment Management, warns of a significant risk to the U.S. economy unless a price is quickly placed on carbon.

Even companies that are not heavily engaged in green business stand to gain. European energy companies made tens of billions of euros in the first years of the European Trading System when they received free carbon emission allocations.

American electricity utility Duke Energy, a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, has long promoted a U.S. cap-and-trade scheme. Yet the company bitterly opposed the Warner-Lieberman bill in the U.S. Senate that would have created such a scheme because it did not include European-style handouts to coal companies. The Waxman-Markey bill in the House of Representatives promises to bring back the free lunch.

U.S. companies and interest groups involved with climate change hired 2,430 lobbyists just last year, up 300% from five years ago. Fifty of the biggest U.S. electric utilities — including Duke — spent $51 million on lobbyists in just six months.

The massive transfer of wealth that many businesses seek is not necessarily good for the rest of the economy. Spain has been proclaimed a global example in providing financial aid to renewable energy companies to create green jobs. But research shows that each new job cost Spain 571,138 euros, with subsidies of more than one million euros required to create each new job in the uncompetitive wind industry. Moreover, the programs resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs for every job created.

The cozy corporate-climate relationship was pioneered by Enron, which bought up renewable energy companies and credit-trading outfits while boasting of its relationship with green interest groups. When the Kyoto Protocol was signed, an internal memo was sent within Enron that stated, "If implemented, [the Kyoto Protocol] will do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory business."

The World Business Summit will hear from "science and public policy leaders" seemingly selected for their scary views of global warming. They include James Lovelock, who believes that much of Europe will be Saharan and London will be underwater within 30 years; Sir Crispin Tickell, who believes that the United Kingdom's population needs to be cut by two-thirds so the country can cope with global warming; and Timothy Flannery, who warns of sea level rises as high as "an eight-story building."

Free speech is important. But these visions of catastrophe are a long way outside of mainstream scientific opinion, and they go much further than the careful findings of the United Nations panel of climate change scientists. When it comes to sea-level rise, for example, the United Nations expects a rise of between seven and 23 inches by 2100 — considerably less than a one-story building.

There would be an outcry — and rightfully so — if big oil organized a climate change conference and invited only climate-change deniers.

The partnership among self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist campaigners truly is an unholy alliance. The climate-industrial complex does not promote discussion on how to overcome this challenge in a way that will be best for everybody. We should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act. Spending a fortune on global carbon regulations will benefit a few, but dearly cost everybody else.

Mr. Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank, and author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming" (Knopf, 2007).

Depuis quelques jours, Richard Hétu est désemparé parce que de méchants droitistes ont osé dire que Sonia Sotomayor, la candidate de Barack Obama pour un poste de juge à la Cour suprême, est raciste.  Avant de grimper dans les rideaux, Hétu aurait dû faire un peu de recherche…

En 2003, les services d'incendie de la ville de New Haven (Connecticut) ont fait passer un examen parmi ses pompiers pour déterminer lesquels devaient obtenir une promotion.  Tous les candidats ayant réussi l'examen étaient caucasiens; aucun hispanique et aucun Afro-Américain n'ont pu obtenir la note de passage.  Les pompiers ayant échoué l'examen ont porté leur cause devant les tribunaux invoquant qu'ils avaient été victimes de discrimination.  La juge Sonia Sotomayor, qui a présidé ce procès, s'est rangée du côté des plaignants et elle a fait annuler toutes les promotions décernées par les services d'incendie de la ville de New Haven.

Ce n'est pas Martin Luther King qui avait dit: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" ?

Imaginez si pour sauver quelques dollars, un établissement de santé privé avait bâclé les analyses pathologiques pour des patients ayant reçu un diagnostic de cancer.  Imaginez si en agissant de la sorte, 1 patient sur 3 aurait reçu un traitement inapproprié.

Les gens seraient probablement descendus dans les rues pour dénoncer cet échec du capitalisme.  Les médias auraient probablement exigé une nouvelle réglementation pour nous protéger de l'avarice des businessmen.  Bref, pour tout le monde cette situation aurait été une preuve incontestable de l'échec du privé en santé.

La situation que je viens de décrire est celle qui prévaut actuellement dans le réseau de santé publique québécois.  Par contre, si la population et les médias ont manifesté leur préoccupation, on sait tous que les politiciens ne feront rien pour remédier à la situation.  Encore plus significatif, personne n'osera dire que cette situation représente une preuve incontestable de l'échec du public en santé.

Le résultat de plusieurs décennies de pensées uniques anti-capitalistes…

Voici comment l'appartenance des Américains aux partis politiques a évolué depuis 6 ans:

Soure: Pew Research Center

Si Richard Hétu n'ose pas en parler, Glenn Beck de son côté ne cache pas sa satisfaction:

Voici comment Hugo Chavez a mis son pays sur la la route de la servitude:

—

« In 2004, the Chávez regime in Venezuela distributed the list of several million voters whom had attempted to remove him from office throughout the government bureaucracy, allegedly to identify and punish these voters. We match the list of petition signers distributed by the government to household survey respondents to measure the economic effects of being identified as a Chavez political opponent. We find that voters who were identified as Chavez opponents experienced a 5 percent drop in earnings and a 1.5 percentage point drop in employment rates after the voter list was released. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the loss aggregate TFP [Total Factor Productivity] from the misallocation of workers across jobs was substantial, on the order of 3 percent of GDP. »

Leon Trotsky a déjà dit : « In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: Who does not work does not eat, has been replaced by a new one: Who does not obey shall not eat. »

Maggie Simpson dans le rôle d’Howard Roark, le héro du livre The Fountainhead d’Ayn Rand:

Une illustration assez juste de ce qu’est devenu notre système d’éducation depuis la réforme…

Voici une présentation fascinante de l’économiste Alex Tabarrok sur la transformation du monde par la mondialisation, un « must see« :

One idea, one World, one market !

Le Top 5 de l'actualité québécoise (15-25 mai) selon Influence Communication:

Un avant-goût de la basse saison ?

Avec une actualité si morcelée, il ne manquerait que des conseils pour bien faire cuire ses hamburgers afin de se croire en basse saison des nouvelles.  On est loin de 2008 alors qu’à pareille date, les travaux de la Commission Bouchard et la disparition de Nancy Michaud occupaient respectivement 5,78 % et 3,03 % des nouvelles.

C’est encore la crise financière qui a dominé le palmarès avec un poids médias de 3,19 %.

La Coupe Memorial a connu un gain de 49 % pour terminer la semaine avec 1,85 %.

La décision de General Motors de fermer plusieurs concessionnaires a obtenu 1,30 %.

Si les médias continuent de se désintéresser de la grippe A, celle-ci disparaitra pratiquement de l’actualité d’ici une semaine ou deux.  La presse québécoise lui a cédé la 4^e place avec 1,19 %.

Finalement, avec un poids de 1,09 %, la Commission Oliphant a obtenu son sommet de médiatisation lors de la conclusion du témoignage de Brian Mulroney.

Pendant ce temps, au Canada anglais :

• Crise économique et financière: 2,12 %
• Coupe Memorial: 1,14 %
• Enquête sur la mort de Victoria Stafford: 1,12 %
• Grippe H1N1: 0,87 %
• Commission Oliphant: 0,77 %

Source:

Influence Communication

Maxime Bernier avec Mark Carney, le gouverneur de la Banque du Canada au Comité permanent des finances de la Chambre des communes:

Je vous invite à ajouter le blogue de Maxime Bernier dans vos bookmarks !

La période de la Renaissance, c’est de la p’tite bière:

Are you ready ?

"With the renaissance of Keynesian economics we can only conclude that the preconditions for a new super cycle have been established, and that if the policies are not reversed we face many years of depressed economic conditions."

Austrian Recipe vs. Keynesian Fantasy

The current crisis has revealed the Keynesian roots of mainstream economics. The only debate has been the type and size of bailouts and stimulus packages. For example, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University thinks nationalization is preferable to the Geithner-Summers toxic-asset-relief plan. The Keynesian fantasy is really a monomania because ultimately it is a fixation on a single panacea — more government spending. Meanwhile, the Austrians have the opposite set of policy guidelines and have heroically held to their recipe of liquidation.

The high degree of unanimity among mainstream economists in support of the bailouts and stimulus packages came into sharp relief at the recent convention of the American Economic Association. In addition to this unanimity, mainstream economists have become more influential and powerful than ever before. For example, Paul Krugman, the most recent Nobel laureate in economics and columnist for the New York Times, supports the stimulus packages to combat the recession. No matter how many new plans are offered, his only complaint is that it is not enough. Krugman's former colleague at Princeton University, Ben Bernanke, who is now in charge of the Federal Reserve, believes that if he can fix the problems in the "financial economy" he can prevent problems spreading to the "real economy." Larry Summers, former economist and president of Harvard University is now President Obama's director of the National Economic Council and presumably the coordinator of plans to address the economic crisis. It is interesting to note that Summers is the son of two academic economists and is the nephew of Nobel laureates, Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow. He is also considered a mentor of Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, who worked under Summers in the Treasury department during the Clinton administration.

All this suggests to me that this crisis is a "market test" for mainstream economics. Never before have so many academic economists held such primary roles in the economic policy of the federal government. If we include the two outsiders, Stiglitz and Krugman, with the two powerful insiders, Bernanke and Summers, we get a good sample of the elite mainstream economics. Given that Congress has voted on very few of the many measures to address the economic crisis, this economic team, including Secretary Geithner, is presumably responsible for designing the bulk of the responses to the crisis.

Their responses amount to Keynesian economics on steroids. In the last quarter of 2007, there were the typical interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve. Then, in January 2008, the first of the unprecedented moves came from Bernanke when the Fed began auctioning off reserves at the discount window. This was followed by one unprecedented response after another, bailouts, stimulus, and government guarantees, such as increasing FDIC insurance coverage on bank deposits and extending it to money-market mutual funds, but it all amounts to trillions of dollars of more government spending. Obama did not really bring "change"; he only increased the magnitude and speed of the policy responses.

Bailouts, stimulus packages and guarantees should be seen as a kind of backdoor protectionism. Washington is protecting Wall Street; it's protecting the banks; it's protecting the auto companies; and it's protecting "jobs" in general. Foreigners have already raised concerns about this bailout-style protectionism and the potential of a global trade war. Of course, if you make this point to one of the elite economists in Washington, they would scoff and deny the charge. Why? Because every economist — even mainstream economists — knows that protectionism will just make the problems worse. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff made the Great Depression much worse, and such increased protectionism can lead to trade wars.

The Austrian recipe for economic crisis is very simple and requires little action on the part of government. It only seems "hard" because of the presumption that the Keynesian approach could possibly be less painful. However, if you understand that the Austrian recipe is correct — that it would produce quicker and better results, and that the Keynesian approach is a recipe for disaster — then it is the obvious course to take.

Here are the passive ingredients of the Austrian recipe:

1. Allow liquidation of bankrupt firms and debt (no bailouts)
2. Allow prices to fall (no monetary inflation)
3. Do not prop up employment (no stimulus)
4. Give no assurances against failure (no nationalizations of GSEs or expanding FDIC coverage)
5. Do not subsidize unemployment (no extending of unemployment insurance)
6. Do not discourage "hoarding," i.e., saving

This recipe will produce the quickest possible recovery and minimize the magnitude of economic pain. The active side of the Austrian policy response would be to reduce the size of government, budget, taxes, and regulations.

It should be pretty obvious that the Austrians and mainstream/Keynesians have polar opposite views when it comes to solving the current economic crisis. To see how it might turn out, let us take a look back in American economic history.

The Next Super Cycle?

Mainstream economics identifies turns in the business cycle with the National Bureau of Economic Research's dating of American business cycles. In the table of cycle dating, the center column is the length of contractions in months. It appears to suggest that contractions are becoming shorter in duration while expansions have become longer in duration. However, there are many significant problems with NBER's cycle dating.

One problem to note is that the NBER dating obscures what I call "super cycles," which should not be confused with Kondratiev or Elliot Wave cycles. The first of these super cycles is the Progressive Era when a host of radical changes were made to the Constitution, government, and the economy. This super cycle encompasses the five cycles from 1907 to 1921. The second super cycle was the Great Depression from 1929 through World War II and the third super cycle was the Great Stagflation of the 1970s, which lasted from 1970 to 1982.

Another problem is how best to measure the economy over the business cycle. NBER looks at many factors in its dating of peaks, troughs, and recessions, but it largely boils down to GDP. One problem with this approach is that over time government spending has increased relative to the private sector, rising from just a few percent to a large minority of all spending in the economy. Federal government spending is less susceptible to cutbacks during recessions due to government's power to run budget deficits, tax, and inflate. The large amounts of government spending automatically makes more recent cycles seem less severe than older cycles when measured in terms of GDP.

However, government spending does not have its value tested with consumers in the market, and much of the spending is actually bad for the economy. Government could pay people to dig ditches and other people to fill the same ditches, and it would increase GDP, but no one argues this is the path to prosperity. Austrians would argue that such ditch digging and filling are actually better for the economy than what government actually does with our money.

Murray Rothbard addressed the problem of measuring a big government economy with the concept of private product remaining (with producers), or PPR, which basically takes GDP and subtracts from it twice the amount of government spending. Government spending is subtracted once to obtain gross private product and it is subtracted again to account for all the resources that government has siphoned off from the private sector. For example, applying PPR to the stagflation super cycle of the 1970s, we find that PPR (adjusted for inflation) increased from $600 billion in 1969 to merely $729 billion in 1982. That means there was anemic average economic growth of less than 1.4% per year during this period.

Rothbard then accounts for the increase in population by looking at the number of producer-breadwinners in the private sector (not government employees). Using calculations provided by Robert Batemarco, Real PPR per productive worker actually fell from $9,134 in 1969 to just $8,708 in 1982. What first appears to be four short contractions in the NBER dating system turned out to be an economic nightmare for the average American. On top of lower real incomes, when adjusted for inflation, the value of stocks fell by more than 50% during this period.

The three super cycles of the 20th century therefore coincided with the rise of the Progressives, the New Dealers, and the Keynesians.

In contrast, if we look at normal recessions, where the country is not at war, is on the gold standard, and where Keynesian policy is not dominant, we find a much different story. For example, the recessions of 1953–1954, 1957–1958, and 1960–1961 were short in duration, shallow in depth, and followed by robust growth. In terms of real GDP, economic growth briefly turned negative by one percent in the first and third recessions and by 2.5% in the second recession, which was the briefest of the three. If we look at the three recessions in terms of real PPR (per producer) we find that the first recession did not produce an annual decrease, but an increase of 2.7% in 1954, and more than a 5% increase in 1955. The second recession shows an annual drop of 2% in 1958 and a 6% increase in 1959. The final recession shows an annual drop of 2% in 1960, an increase of 2% in 1961, and an increase of 4.5% in the year following the recession.

The housing bubble peaked in July 2005. Private investment, a leading indicator of the economy, peaked at the end of 2006. As worsening conditions in the home building industry spread, the economy stumbled in late 2006 and again in late 2007 before falling into clear depression in 2008. The size and scope of the Keynesian policy remedies employed since late 2007 have been unprecedented. With the renaissance of Keynesian economics we can only conclude that the preconditions for a new super cycle have been established, and that if the policies are not reversed we face many years of depressed economic conditions.

Poids média de l'actualité américaine dans les blogues et les médias traditionels selon le Pew Research Center:

Once Again, Interrogation and Torture Drive the Online Debate

The polarizing issue of what defines torture dominated social media last week, marking the third time since the beginning of April that the subject has been among the top-two weekly stories in the blogosphere. From May 11-15, almost a quarter of the links (23%) on blogs and social media sites related to the  debate over harsh interrogation techniques, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The commentary online spread across two main areas of debate: Whether harsh interrogation techniques help keep the country safe, as former Vice President Dick Cheney has repeatedly suggested in a series of media interviews, and whether President Obama should release photographs of reported abuse of prisoners.

In the latter case, Obama experienced somewhat rare criticism from left-leaning bloggers who were disappointed with his decision to not release photographs involving U.S. soldiers and their prisoners.

Beyond the issue of torture, last week's most discussed topics online were a diverse mix ranging from remarks by a Saudi judge to the White House Correspondents' Dinner to health care reform.

The second largest story online, with 11% of the links, was a CNN report that quoted a  Saudi Arabian judge saying it was okay for husbands to slap their wives if they spend too lavishly. The comment was universally condemned online with many bloggers connecting it to other examples of the mistreatment of women in that country.

The third most linked to story took a somewhat lighter tone, the May 9 White House Correspondents' Association dinner (10%) where President Obama performed his first comedic monologue as Commander-in-Chief to mostly positive reviews. Some bloggers, however, felt Obama had reacted inappropriately to controversial jokes told by the mistress of ceremonies, comedienne Wanda Sykes.

Fourth (at 8%) was a report on Foxnews.com about the Andersons, a family living in Chicago that decided to only patronize black-owned businesses for a year as an "Empowerment Experiment."

Health care policy and Obama's May 11 health care summit rounded out the top five (7% of links). Some of the discussion revolved around a May 10 New York Times column by Paul Krugman applauding insurance companies' willingness to participate in discussions about reforming the system. Social media also focused on a May 8 report in the Los Angeles Times that claimed the Obama administration was threatening to rescind stimulus money earmarked for California if wage cuts to unionized health care workers were not restored.

Two of the week's top-five stories matched up in both the traditional press and social media-terrorism and interrogation techniques (22% in the mainstream press) and health care policy (6%). The other top stories in the mainstream press were the economic crisis (at 12% of the newshole), further troubles for the U.S. car manufacturers General Motors and Chrysler (5%), and continued developments in the war in Afghanistan (4%).

These are some of the findings of the PEJ's New Media Index for the week of May 11-15, an effort to monitor the content appearing in new media platforms. The full methodology is described below, but this week, due to recurring technical problems with Technorati, the data comes primarily from Icerocket. (Data from Technorati was only available Monday, May 11, and Tuesday, May 12. The page was not functioning properly for the remainder of the week.)

Source:

Once Again, Interrogation and Torture Drive the Online Debate

Les « vieux » comme moi seront content de voir le retour de la série culte « V » de retour au petit écran.

En bonus, le « trailer » de la série est une allégorie de la présidence de Barack Obama:

« You know what the V’s – they call it spreading hope »

« Ambracing change is never easy, but the reward for doing so can be far greater than anything you can imagine »

« They gain trust when all they are really doing is positioning themselves as the saviors of mankind »

« They are arming themselves with the most powerful weapon out there: devotion. »

Pour ses clowneries démagos populistes lors d'une commission parlementaire, Amir Khadir a été promu au rang d'analyste économique crédible par les médias québécois.

Ainsi, lors de son passage au 98.5, le bon docteur a fourni l'explication la plus farfelue que j'ai pu entendre sur les causes de la crise économique.

Selon Amir Khadir, les banques américaines ont volontairement créé une bulle immobilière en accordant des hypothèques aux plus démunis.  Ensuite, elles ont sciemment fait éclater cette bulle dans le but de pouvoir reprendre les maisons à rabais.  Cette stratégie machiavélique avait pour objectif, vous l'aurez deviné, de faire des profits sur le dos "du pauvre monde"…  J'imagine que c'est pour cette raison que l'éclatement de la bulle immobilière a mis les banques en faillite.

Amir Khadir connait-il Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ?  Sait-il que ces 2 géants bancaires sont dirigés par les politiciens ?

Voici un article publié dans le New York Times le 30 septembre 1999.

Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates — anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.

"Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990’s by reducing down payment requirements," said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae’s chairman and chief executive officer. "Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market."

Demographic information on these borrowers is sketchy. But at least one study indicates that 18 percent of the loans in the subprime market went to black borrowers, compared to 5 per cent of loans in the conventional loan market.

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.

"From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us," said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry." [...]

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, does not lend money directly to consumers. Instead, it purchases loans that banks make on what is called the secondary market. By expanding the type of loans that it will buy, Fannie Mae is hoping to spur banks to make more loans to people with less-than-stellar credit ratings.

In July, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed that by the year 2001, 50 percent of Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s portfolio be made up of loans to low and moderate-income borrowers. Last year, 44 percent of the loans Fannie Mae purchased were from these groups.