I want your money – The Movie

by GunRights4US

Summer of False Hope

by Greg Farber

Unemployment: WTF? Unchanged???

By George Ure’s Urban Survival

OK, here’s the deal – hot of the Labor Dept. website:

“Total nonfarm payroll employment declined by 131,000 in July, and the unem- ployment rate was unchanged at 9.5 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Federal government employment fell, as 143,000 temporary workers hired for the decennial census completed their work. Private-sector payroll employment edged up by 71,000.

Household Survey Data

Both the number of unemployed persons, at 14.6 million, and the unemployment rate, at 9.5 percent, were unchanged in July. (See table A-1.)

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rate for adult men (9.7 per- cent), adult women (7.9 percent), teenagers (26.1 percent), whites (8.6 per- cent), blacks (15.6 percent), and Hispanics (12.1 percent) showed little or no change in July. The jobless rate for Asians was 8.2 percent, not seasonally adjusted. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)

In July, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was little changed at 6.6 million. These individuals made up 44.9 per- cent of unemployed persons. (See table A-12.)

The civilian labor force participation rate (64.6 percent) and the employment- population ratio (58.4 percent) were essentially unchanged in July; however, these measures have declined by 0.6 percentage point and 0.4 point, respectively, since April. (See table A-1.)

The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes re- ferred to as involuntary part-time workers) was essentially unchanged over the month at 8.5 million but has declined by 623,000 since April. These in- dividuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. (See table A-8.)

About 2.6 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in July, an increase of 340,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were avail- able for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. (See table A-16.)

Among the marginally attached, there were 1.2 million discouraged workers in July, up by 389,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally ad- justed.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.4 million persons marginally attached to the labor force had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities.

As long as the workforce number is being reduced, it keeps the unemployment figures in check. However, the real number to look at is the labor participation rate. In April it was 65.2% and now its down to 64.6%.

That’s how you lose 131,000 jobs and hold the rate steady…only change the participation rate a tenth for the month…

The CES Birth/Death Model also shows declines in new/small business/estimated job creation. Last month 147,000 new jobs were estimated into existence. This month: Just 6,000 with another 12,000 lost in manufacturing and 9-thousand each in Financial activities and the Trade Transportation and utilities group.

On a Not Seasonally Adjusted basis, the Alternative Measures of Labor Underutilization figure was up another tenth to 16.8% of the workforce. Same place we were a year ago.

Feedback: “George, did you mention that the June Jobs report was revised majorly downward to -221K, from -125K? eom” No, wouldn’t want to complete f/u the weekend.

Predictably, the futures point down. But it gets worse…

How Gov’t Screws Job-Seekers

As long as we’re talking about the job collapse, reading InformationWeek may not be on your list of sites to scan for economic news, but a fine case of screwing up the recovery is being presented by the federal government and what the article refers to as a ‘hand-picked Obama appointee” as the (got a blood pressure pill handy?) “U.S. to Train 3,000 Offshore IT Workers”.

What’s worse? On Thursday InformationWeek did a follow-on story about how “USAID Funds IT in Eurasia”.

If you’re an unemployed American IT wizard, and you’re asking “WTF is wrong with these people in Washington? Don’t they know we have a serious unemployment problem right here in America?”, I’d have to point out that America isn’t what it used to be.

Seems to me that when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said this week…

“The President has proposed to terminate or reduce government programs we do not need and cannot afford. He has proposed to freeze non-security, discretionary spending, which will by 2014 bring such spending to its lowest share of the economy since the 1960s…. ”

…he could have mentioned that cutting government spending by outsourcing was in the plan somewhere.

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No, I’m not picking on Obama; the reason all presidents have been acting the same, regardless of party, is that corporate strings pull both parties. Obama is just the latest marionette; Bush the preceding puppet. Campaign promises to withdraw from Iraq? Create new jobs and industries? And what about that surveillance promise? Bush was of the same ilk, same wars, same…..well, you get the idea.

Ever since the Kennedy days (at least that’s a good point of transition to consider, since he was killed with a move to begin taking back direct government control of money from the Federal Reserve pending under Executive Order 11110)) we have done a smooth transition from government “by, of, and for the people” to a government “by, for, and of corporation interests in general and their bankers in particular. Need a few more zeroes on your bailout?”

—

But what’s the use? We’re probably past the point of no return, although I’ll still vote against every incumbent I can in November. The hard part isn’t the voting, it’s the remembering that the corporate agenda is to keep voters believing in left-right divisions so the up/down manipulation and exploitation can profitably (to the few) continue.

Besides, we really do need more IT outsourcing to South Asia, and Armenia, don’t we? I mean, how else could American corporate interests keep cutting jobs, right? And what better way to cut federal costs than to outsource them to South Asia and Armenia?

Hell, I’m so old I can remember when my job competitor was the human standing next to me…not a piece of software or some faceless corpslave in an Asian prison sweat shop. Now that’s old.

ViceGrips (to pinch yourself) and a Bic lighter (for your vaporizer) only go so far.

With America facing massive unemployment – and by my reckoning, more to come – how is it we need foreign aid programs, in the first place?

Gerald Celente: The bailout bubble is the mother of all bubbles

by Greg Farber

Gerald Celente: Let Them Eat Losses

by Greg Farber

Gerald Celente: Let Them Eat Losses

Published on 07-27-2010 Email To Friend Print Version
By Gerald Celente – Daily Reckoning

http://dailyreckoning.com/

This had nothing to do with the so-called “Trickle Down” theory. This was “Gush Up.” In Bush/Obama economics, the richest and biggest that had lost billions through bad investments, or were in danger of going bust, had to be rescued. If the Über-Rich weren’t saved, there would be nothing left to trickle down to the population below. By government decree, those taxpayers who had never felt any trickle to begin with, now had to finance the failed financiers.

If taxpayers found themselves unable to understand the thinking behind “Gush Up,” it was not surprising. Why should it make sense? Nothing else did. The entire financial system had been hijacked by bandits. It was criminal from beginning to end.

For example, in a 2008 interview, hedge fund executive Kyle Bass, who runs Hayman Advisors, described the deceit that was camouflaged by its own complexity as a billion-dollar fraud, “… so complex that The [Wall Street] Journal couldn’t even write about it. That’s how complex it is. It would take teams of lawyers reading indentures, complex flow charts. And then people would look at you with cross-eyes, even if you understood it all. They’d go like, ‘Yeah, well, I don’t see it.’”

The experts engineering the schemes were baffled by the complexity of their creations, and yet insisted upon being bailed out of something that they themselves didn’t understand.

The implicit rationale was that only those Harvard, Princeton and Yale MBAs, Ph.Ds. and LL.Ds. were qualified to pull the levers of power on Wall Street and in Washington. Only they – who had devised the derivative, and conjured up the synthetic credit default swap, and invented the enhanced structured investment vehicle – were equipped to deal with the complexities of contemporary business and finance. Thus, those who didn’t know nevertheless insisted they knew best. The Bigs had to be saved.

In the dying American Empire, there was no longer a place for the small:
The Mom & Pop shop was as passé as the corner candy store.
The family farm – penalized by big government’s “Get Big or Get Out” policies that subsidized factory farms – had become a quaint curiosity.
The village hardware store was hammered by Lowe’s and Home Depot; Staples and Office Depot stomped out the stationery store.
Across the spectrum… finance, defense, insurance, health, news and entertainment… virtually every business sector had been commandeered by the Bigs.

And the bigger they got, the more untouchable they became. TV Money Honeys, fast-talking finance finaglers, Nightly News anchors, Sunday Morning Beltway Blowhards, and Talk Show Tough Guys genuflected, scraped, kissed up and bowed down before those magnificent men in their money machines.

When these kings, queens and aristocrats of 21st-century commerce spoke, their ex cathedra judgments went unquestioned. Thus, when they warned that if the “too big to fail” were allowed to fail the world financial system would collapse, their conclusions went unchallenged. No evidence was provided, no proof was needed, and no explanation was tendered. Harvard, Princeton, Yale… the White Shoe Boyz had spoken. They who invented the “too big to fail” were “too big to question.”

Yet note, as economic conditions declined worldwide, many blamed the crisis on the intrinsic nature of capitalism. But it wasn’t capitalism that failed – it was human nature that was flawed. Capitalism had been corrupted and perverted by the Bigs who, in collusion with the government and faced with the consequences of their own criminal greed, betrayed the system that had enriched them.

The very essence of functioning capitalism that by definition is “…the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market,” was violated and destroyed.

Not only was there no hard evidence demonstrating that saving the “too big to fails” was necessary to save the economy, the rescue plans themselves violated the most cherished tenets of capitalism, which hold that:
Failures should be allowed to fail.
The best will succeed.
Competition is healthy.
Market voids created by failures will be filled by competitors.

No individual, business, institution, nation or empire is too-big-to-fail. Had true capitalism been allowed to function unimpeded, the bloated, over-extended, inefficient and gluttonous firms and industries would have failed. There would have been hardships and losses but, finally rid of its financial tapeworms, the purged system could be restored to health.

No “ism” or “ology” – regardless of purity of intent or moral foundation – is immune to corruption and abuse. While capitalism itself is being blamed for the excesses that brought on financial chaos, prior to the most recent gambling binge, in tandem with the blanket dismantling of safeguards and the overt takeover of Washington by Wall Street, capitalism was responsible for creating one of the world’s most successful and universally admired societies.

July 27, 2010

Gerald Celente is founder and director of The Trends Research Institute, author of Trends 2000 and Trend Tracking (Warner Books), and publisher of The Trends Journal. He has been forecasting trends since 1980, and recently called “The Collapse of ’09.”

Anyone who’s had economics 101 will be frightened by this

by GunRights4US The beancounters at the Congressional Budget Office issued a brief yesterday entitled FEDERAL DEBT AND THE RISK OF A FINANCIAL CRISIS.

The CBO Director's Blog has an easy to understand summary of that report which anyone concerned about America's future should read.

The rest of you should just continue to read the sports page, or keep watching American Idol on TV.

Thomas said…

by GunRights4US "I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

Thomas Jefferson

Libertarian author Vox day expounds on the coming Depression

by GunRights4US In an interview format with Ilana Mercer, Vox Day paints a frightening picture of our economic future.

Here's the punchline:

Government can’t fix what government has broken. All of the desperate attempts to “fix” the global economy according to Neo-Keynesian and Monetarist principles are going to fail, state, local, and even national governments are going to default on their debts, and it’s going to be a very difficult road ahead for the next two decades. There will probably be a major war or two as well, as usually happens in times of large-scale economic contraction. But it is a second Great Depression, it’s not the Ragnarok. This isn’t a Democratic problem or a Republican problem and although the politicians will do their best to take partisan advantage of the situation, it is a structural crisis that cannot end until the structure collapses and is replaced with a more economically realistic one. Needless to say ownership—self-ownership, property ownership—will not fare well.

This is a two-part interview. Here's Part I, and here's Part II. I sincerely hope you take the time to read this thoughtfully.

The Mortgage Meltdown

by Greg Farber

Oh my god, Communist Broad Cast Services (CBS) allows a little truth to come forth for a change.. I’ve been telling you this collapse is just getting warmed up, we have not seen anything yet.. Dontcha just love fiat paper and ink fraud and historical mayhem, thats right, here we go again..

Bob Chapman on Freedomizer Radio It Will Cost Them Their Lives

by Greg Farber

New Technology Makes Oil Fast

by Al Remington

“Called “biomass catalytic cracking,” KiOR uses a unique chemical to catalyze, or greatly speed up, the “cracking” of larger plant compounds into smaller oils that can be refined for practical use. Their goal is to build small processing units that will be used in rural areas to produce energy, yielding only water and ash as waste products. The process can generate “green oil” in seconds, in contrast to the crude oil that supposedly required millions of years to develop.”

article by Brian Thomas, M.S.

Institute for Creation Research

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