If you have any money and you want to understand the lies that “your” government tells you with statistics, subscribe to John Williams shadowstats.com.
John Williams is the best and utterly truthful statistician that we the people have.
The charts below come from John Williams Hyperinflation Report, January 25, 2012. The commentary is supplied by me.
Here is the chart of real average weekly earnings deflated by the US government’s own measure of inflation, which as I pointed out in my recent column, Economics Lesson 1, understates true inflation.
This chart (below) shows the behavior of inflation as measured by “our” government’s official measure, CPI-U (bottom line) and John Williams measure which uses the official methodology of when I was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. The gap between the top and bottom lines represents the amount of money that was due to Social Security recipients and others whose income was indexed to inflation that was diverted by the government to wars, police state, and bankers’ bailouts.
This next chart shows the gains that gold and the Swiss franc have made against the US dollar. The Swiss franc is the top line and gold is the bottom. When gold and the Swiss franc rise, the dollar is falling. Notice that during President Reagan’s first term, when I was in the Treasury, gold and the Swiss franc dropped, that is, the dollar rose in purchasing power. Obviously, the supply-side policy that Reagan implemented strengthened the US dollar. It was only with the advent of the Bush policy of endless trillion dollar wars, reaffirmed by Obama, that the US dollar and economy collapsed relative to gold and hard currencies.
The recent drop in the Swiss franc is due to the Swiss government announcing that the country’s exports could not tolerate any further run up in the franc’s value, and that the Swiss central bank would print new francs to accommodate future inflows of dollars and euros. In other words, Switzerland was forced to import US inflation in order to protect its exports.
Here is nonfarm payroll employment. As you can see, the US economy has been in recession for four years despite the easiest monetary policy and largest government deficits in US history.
Here is consumer confidence. Do you see a recovery despite all the recovery hype from politicians and the financial media?
Here is housing starts. Do you see a recovery?
Here is real GDP deflated according to the methodology used when I was in the US Treasury.
Here is real retail sales deflated by the traditional, as contrasted with the current, substitution-based, measure of inflation.
These graphs courtesy of John Williams make it completely clear that there is no economic recovery. In place of recovery, we have hype from politicians, Wall Street, and the presstitute media. The “recovery” is no more real than Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” or Iranian “nukes” or the Obama regime’s phony story of assassinating last year an undefended Osama bin Laden, allegedly the mastermind of Islamic terrorism, left by al Qaeda to the mercy of a US Seal team, a man who was widely reported to have died from renal failure in December 2001, a man who denied any responsibility for 9/11.
A government and media that will deceive you about simple things such as inflation, unemployment, and GDP growth, will lie to you about everything.
Phi Beta Iota: Here is the paraphrase as reported previously, from Ellen Seidman, former member of the National Economic Council:
CIA reports only focus on foreign economic conditions. They don't do domestic economic conditions and so I cannot get a strategic analysis that compares and contrasts strengths and weaknesses of the industries I am responsible for. On the other hand, Treasury, Commerce, and the Fed are terrible at the business of intelligence — they don't know how to produce intelligence.[1]
When you add a lack of integrity across the board to basic incompetence on the part of both consumers and producers of intelligence, you end up with lies that neither patriotic nor helpful.
[1] Seidman was speaking to the Open Source Lunch Club on January 1, 1994. Her observations were subsequently reported in OSS Notices 94001 dated February 21, 1994
Last Friday (January 27) the US Bureau of Economic Analysis announced its advance estimate that in the last quarter of 2011 the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.8% in real inflation-adjusted terms, an increase from the annual rate of growth in the third quarter.
Good news, right?
Wrong. If you want to know what is really happening, you must turn to John Williams at shadowstats.com.
What the presstitute media did not tell us is that almost the entire gain In GDP growth was due to “involuntary inventory build-up,” that is, more goods were produced than were sold.
Net of the unsold goods, the annualized real growth rate was eight-tenths of one percent.
And even that tiny growth rate is an exaggeration, because it is deflated with a measure of inflation that understates inflation. The US government’s measure of inflation no longer measures a constant standard of living. Instead, the government’s inflation measure relies on substitution of cheaper goods for those that rise in price. In other words, the government holds the measure of inflation down by measuring a declining standard of living. This permits our rulers to divert cost-of-living-adjustments that should be paid to Social Security recipients to wars of aggression, police state, and banker bailouts.
When the methodology that measures a constant standard of living is used to deflate nominal GDP, the result is a shrinking US economy. It becomes clear that the US economy has had no recovery and has now been in deep recession for four years despite the proclamation by the National Bureau of Economic Research of a recovery based on the rigged official numbers.
• U.S. Hyperinflationary Great Depression Moves Ever Closer
• U.S. Government and the Federal Reserve Effectively Have Destroyed Global Confidence in the U.S. Dollar
• Systemic-Solvency and Economic Crises Have Not Abated
• Precursors to Ultimate Dollar Disaster Are in Place; 2014 Remains the Outside Timing for Same
Gunboat diplomacy was the essence of military power projection for centuries. Want to coerce a country? Sail a aircraft carrier battle group into their national waters.
However, carrier battlegroups are hideously expensive, increasingly vulnerable to low cost attack, and less lethal than they appear (most of the weapons systems are used for self-defense).
What are nation-states replacing them with? Drones. You can already see it in action across the world as drone staging areas are replacing traditional military bases/entanglements. Further, drones already account for the vast majority of people killed by US forces.
Of course, the reason for this is clear. Drones are relatively cheap, don't require many people to deploy/operate, don't put personnel directly at risk, can be easily outsourced, can be micromanaged from Washington, and are very effective at blowing things up.
The final benefit of Drone Diplomacy: drones make it possible to apply coercion at the individual or small group level in a way that a blunt instrument like a carrier battle group can't.
What does this mean?
It allows truly scalable global coercion: the automation of comply or die.
Call up the target on his/her personal cell (it could even be automated as a robo-call to get real scalability — wouldn't that suck, to get killed completely through bot based automation).
Ask the person on the other end to do something or to stop doing something.
If they don't do what you ask, they die soon therafter due to drone strike (unless they go into deep hiding and disconnect from the global system).
With drone costs plummeting, we could see this drop to something less thanWhat can we look forward to?
The mid term future of a national security apparatus in secular ($$) decline?
Drones, drones, and more drones. Shrink the headcount. Cut training. Put manned weapons systems in life support mode. Cut mx.
All the money is on cyber intel (to generate targets based on “signatures”) and drones to kill them. When domestic unrest occurs in the US due to economic decline, these systems will be ready for domestic application.
Workers at the Regency Ceramics factory in India raided the home of their boss, and beat him senseless with lead pipes after a wage dispute turned ugly.
The workers were enraged enough to kill Regency’s president K. C. Chandrashekhar after their union leader, M. Murali Mohan, was killed by baton-wielding riot police on Thursday. The labor violence occurred in Yanam, a small city in Andra Pradesh state on India’s east coast. Police were called to the factory by management to quell a labor dispute. The workers had been calling for higher pay and reinstatement of previously laid off workers since October. Murali was fired a few hours after the police left the factory.
. . . . . .
India’s factory workers are the lowest paid within the big four emerging markets. Per capita income in India is under $4,000 a year, making it the poorest country in the BRICs despite its relatively booming economy.
. . . . . . .
Once news of Murali’s death spread, the factory workers allegedly destroyed 50 company cars, buses and trucks and lit them on fire. They ransacked the factory. Residents joined hands with around 600 workers, while others were enroute to Chandrashekhar’s house.
Phi Beta Iota: A very famous experiment in the 1970's added one rat at a time to an empty aquarium, and found that at the same point each time, there was a crowding “tipping point” at which the rats would begin eating each other. The world is ready to explode. The resource split between the 1% and the 99% is unsustainable.
Two British tourists were detained after tweeting a joke about Marilyn Monroe. Is Homeland Security monitoring social media too closely?
Mathew Ingram
Bloomberg/Businessweek, 30 January 2012
Planning to make a joke on Twitter about bombing something? You might want to reconsider: According to a report from Britain, two tourists were detained and denied entry into the U.S. recently after they joked about destroying America and digging up Marilyn Monroe. That the Homeland Security Dept. and other authorities—including the FBI—are monitoring such social media as Twitter and Facebook isn’t surprising. That these authorities are willing to detain people based on what is clearly a harmless joke, however, raises questions about what the impact of all that monitoring will be.
Leigh Van Bryan, a 26-year-old bar manager from Coventry, told The Sun that he and friend Emily Bunting were stopped by border guards when they arrived at Los Angeles International Airport and were questioned for five hours about messages Van Bryan had tweeted saying he planned to “destroy America.” After the questioning, during which Homeland Security agents threatened the two, said Van Bryan, they were put into a van and taken—along with a few illegal immigrants—to a holding cell and held overnight. The next morning, they said, Van Bryan and Bunting were forced to take a plane back to England.
According to a report in the Daily Mail, the officers gave Van Bryan a document that detailed why he was refused admission into the U.S. The document reads like a bad joke itself, saying:
“He had posted on his Tweeter [sic] website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe. … Also on his tweeter [sic] account Mr. Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America.”
Van Bryan told the newspaper he tried to explain to Homeland Security officials that the term “destroy” was British slang referring to a party and that his comments about “digging up Marilyn Monroe” were an attempt at humor, but the officers didn’t listen. The authorities even searched the two tourists’ luggage for shovels and other tools, he said.
Phi Beta Iota: Good news is that our experiences with TSA do not bear out the many horror stories in the media. Bad news is that DHS may be retarded beyond all expectations.
Juxtaposing Merkel's (righteous and principally correct) insistence on debt brakes and fiscal discipline with the socialist tendencies of her European (let us print) comrades is at the heart of the crisis in Europe.
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Nowhere is that more apparent than in these three charts, from the World Bank, which highlight just how large in absolute and relative terms Europe's social protection based government spending has become. This situation will only get more demanding as by 2060 almost a third of Europeans will be over 65 years old. While there was a belief that Europeans were willing to accept less growth for better growth (cleaner, smarter, kinder?), in order to meet the needs of an increasingly heavy ‘social' burden, government debt brakes will clearly have to be unhitched further, no matter what Merkel demands (increasing tensions), or the ‘new growth model' that is heralded but not yet substantive will have to be a miracle.
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World Bank: THE PRECIPITATE PROMISE OF SOCIAL PROTECTION
Europe will have to make big changes in how it organizes labor and government. The reasons are becoming ever more obvious: the labor force is shrinking, societies are aging, social security is already a large part of government spending, and fiscal deficits and public debt are often already onerous.
In dealing with government spending, deficits, and debt, it is sensible to start by asking whether European governments are too big; that is, whether they spend too much. They are obviously bigger than their peers. In the EU15, governments spent 50 percent of GDP in 2009; in much of the rest of Europe, this share was about 45 percent—versus less than 40 percent in the United States and Japan, 33 percent in Latin America, and about 25 percent in emerging East Asia. A map of the world resized to reflect government spending instead of land area shows how Europe might look to outsiders (figure 16 below).
Phi Beta Iota: Three themes jump out. First, governments are too big, will fail, the era of small government leveraging new tools and new ways and new mindsets is emergent. Second, the US overspends on the military and Europe overspends on social protection–both of these are culturally-insulated forms of corruption. Third, the Industrial Era model of making decisions and allocating resources is no longer affordable and needs to be abandoned. Assuming that national government refuse to heal themselves, we see local and state jurisdictions becoming very aggressive about resilience and sustainability, to the point of nullifying national regulations and if necessary declaring secession. It is noteworthy that those governments that refused to bail out the banks and instead turned to their public for common sense solutions, are now the strongest governments.
