Karl Denninger STRONG FIVE – Original, Award-Winning, Major Contribution, February 5, 2012
On the very last page of the book I learn that the author received the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award for Grassroots Journalism, for his coverage of the 2008 market meltdown. This confirms my own already formed very high estimation of the author and his work. In fact, although I normally do links at the end of the review, let me open with some other books that are world-class and within which I place this work as comparable:
Here is the author's three-line conclusion to the longer chapter that ends the book (my own notes in parenthesis):
01 Federal and state governments KNEW what was going on, and are COMPLICIT. (This introduces me to the reality of “control fraud,” where the government commits impeachable acts that are not sanctioned; I also learn in this book that when Congress passes laws it does not include sanctions for failure by the GOVERNMENT to uphold those laws.)
On Friday, the entire financial world celebrated when it was announced that the unemployment rate in the United States had fallen to 8.3 percent. That is the lowest it has been since February 2009, and it came as an unexpected surprise for financial markets that are hungry for some good news. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nonfarm payrolls jumped by 243,000 during the month of January. You can read the full employment report right here. Based on this news, pundits all over the world were declaring that the U.S. economy is back. Stocks continued to rise on Friday and the Dow is hovering near a 4 year high. So does this mean that our economic problems are over? Of course not. A closer look at the numbers reveals just how fraudulent these employment statistics really are.
Between December 2011 and January 2012, the number of Americans “not in the labor force” increased by a whopping1.2 million. That was the largest increase ever in that category for a single month. That is how the federal government is getting the unemployment rate to go down. The government is simply pretending that huge numbers of unemployed Americans don't want to be part of the labor force anymore. As you will see below, the employment situation in America is not improving. Yet everyone in the mainstream media is dancing around as if the economic crisishas been cancelled. I can't take it anymore! It is beyond ridiculous that so many intelligent people continue to buy in to such fraudulent numbers.
The truth is that the labor force participation rate declined dramatically in January. For those unfamiliar with this statistic, the labor force participation rate is the percentage of working age Americans that are either employed or that are unemployed and considered to be looking for a job.
As you can see from the chart posted below, the labor force participation rate rose steadily between 1970 and 2000. That happened because large numbers of women were entering the labor force for the first time.
The labor force participation rate peaked at a little more then 67 percent in the late 90s. Between 2000 and the start of the recent recession, it declined slightly to about 66 percent.
Since then, it has been dropping like a rock. The chart below does not even include the latest data. In January, the labor force participation rate was only 63.7 percent. That is the lowest that is has been since May 1983. So keep that in mind as you view the chart.
Click on Image to Enlarge
In reality, the percentage of men and women in the United States that would like to have jobs is almost certainly about the same as it was back in 2007 or 2008. There has been no major social change that would cause large numbers of men or women to want to give up their careers. So there is something very, very fishy with this chart….
The federal government has been pretending that millions of unemployed Americans have decided that they simply do not want jobs anymore.
This does not make sense at all.
The truth is that unemployment is not really declining at all. The percentage of Americans that are working is not increasing. The civilian employment-population ratio dropped like a rock during 2008 and 2009 and it has held very steady since that time.
In January, the civilian employment-population ratio once again held steady at 58.5 percent. This is about where it has been for most of the last two years….
Does that chart look like an “economic recovery” to you?
Of course not.
If the percentage of people that are employed is about the same as it was two years ago, does that represent an improvement?
Of course not.
If the employment situation in America was getting better, the civilian employment-population ratio would be bouncing back.
We should be thankful that our economy is not free falling like it was during 2008 and 2009, but we also need to understand why things have stabilized.
The federal government is spending money like there is no tomorrow. During 2011, the Obama administration stole an average of about 150 million dollars an hour from our children and our grandchildren and pumped it into the economy. Even though the Obama administration spent that money on a lot of frivolous things, it still got into the pockets of average Americans who in turn went out and spent it on food, gas, clothes and other things.
Without all of this reckless government spending, we would not be able to continue to live way above our means and our economic problems would be a lot worse.
But even with the federal government borrowing and spending unprecedented amount of money, and even with interest rates at record lows, our economy is still deeply struggling. Just consider the following facts….
-New home sales in the United States hit a brand new all-time record low during 2011.
-According to the Census Bureau, an all-time record 49 percent of all Americans live in a home that gets direct monetary benefits from the federal government. Back in 1983, less than a third of all Americans lived in a home that received direct monetary benefits from the federal government.
So let's not get too excited about the economy.
Yes, things have somewhat stabilized. The percentage of Americans that have jobs is about the same as it was two years ago. Considering how rapidly jobs are being shipped out of the United States, that is a good thing.
Enjoy this false bubble of hope while you can. Things are about to get a lot worse.
Do you remember how rapidly things fell apart after the financial crisis of 2008?
Well, another major financial crisis is on the way. This time it is going to be centered in Europe initially, but it is going to spread all around the globe just like the last one did.
As the charts above show, we have never even come close to recovering from the last recession, and another one is on the way.
So how bad are things going to get after the next wave of the financial crisis hits us?
That is something that we should all be thinking about.
From rap to ‘radicalisation scores', today's e-jihadists are more than just consumers – but they tend to keep it all online
Jarret Brachman
Guardian, 3 February 2012
EXTRACT:
In 2012, al-Qaida's senior leadership is several heartbeats away from extinction. Their affiliate groups in Yemen, Algeria and elsewhere remain embattled. What remains is a global support movement that is rabid, technologically empowered, but less concerned with the al-Qaida brand name or all that came along with it. Al-Qaida's global movement today is sloppy and self-centred. It is only the most zealous few who seek to live up to their legendary status in the virtual world these days. The problem for intelligence and law-enforcement professionals is identifying that needle in the online jihadi haystack.
The War of Independence, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Iran War. That's the sequence Defense Minister Ehud Barak laid out at the Herzliya Conference on Thursday in a speech on Israel's fateful decision.
All for the better, it has been suggested, that behind the wheel as successor to David Ben-Gurion in 1948, Levi Eshkol in 1967 and Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan in 1973 is military leader Barak and his assistant on prime ministerial matters, Benjamin Netanyahu. Barak has been quoted as saying, ignoring the law and the cabinet, that “at the end of the day, when the military command looks up, it sees us – the minister of defense and the prime minister. When we look up, we see nothing but the sky above us.”
The immunity zone that Iran is constantly moving closer towards is meant to limit the possibility of a strike against its fortified and dispersed nuclear infrastructure. The Israeli argument is a global innovation in the theoretical justification for preemptive wars. The intended victim usually strikes preemptively when hostile preparations to act are discovered.
The precedents of Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007 teach us that the desire for wider security margins made Israel attack while a nuclear capability was still being acquired. Barak's comments suggest an argument for acting even earlier, at the phase of developing a capability to acquire a capability.
Phi Beta Iota: There are two competing narratives, neither of which is properly researched and documented. Narrative A (our tentative preference) has all of these Al Qaeda stories as part of a contrived joint Israeli-led but US supported disinformation campaign to justify armed force against Iran. Narrative B (equally plausible, but the point is we do not actually know) has Iran — these are Persians, not ragheads — well-prepared to do asymmetric attacks via multiple channels including the remnants of Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda posers. This would including exploding apartments in Tel Aviv. We really don't know, and it is a rather important question.
There has been a veritable explosion of peer-to-peer projects. A complete and current listing is essentially impossible. This list is a best-effort attempt at high-profile projects and some pointers to some decent meta-sites that contain links to lesser known projects.
STRONG FIVE – Original, Award-Winning, Major Contribution, February 5, 2012
