DENVER – New standards for air pollution caused by natural gas development – including standards for the process known as hydraulic fracturing (fracking) – are scheduled to be released next week by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The industry claims fracking has minimal environmental impacts, but a study by the Colorado School of Public Health has found that health risks from cancers and asthma are higher than normal for people living near fracking sites in the state.
According to an attorney with Earthjustice, Robin Cooley, it has been 25 years since the EPA last reviewed some of these standards. The industry has changed significantly since then, she says.
The risk of the 30 most systemically important financial institutions (SIFI) in the world has risen over 30% in the last three weeks as the effects of LTRO fade and encumbrance becomes the new reality.
This less-manipulated, government-bank-reacharound-driven bond-market sense of reality has retraced almost 40% of its improvement from its peak last November at 311bps to its best level mid-March at 171bps.
The current 226bps level is extremely elevated and as one would expect is dominated by European and US banks (with US banks on average trading wider than Europeans – which may surprise many but Europeans dominate the worst names – most specifically the Spanish banks).
One can only look on in anguish as the US Government continues to betray the public trust for lack of intelligence and integrity.
The headlines about earthquakes being related to oil and gas drilling have been common for some time now. Despite the fact that the federal government has noticed the connection at very low bureaucratic levels, the fact is that the politicized government persists in ignoring the precautionary principle and continues to betray the public trust by not stopping all activities associated with increasing earthquakes.
Earthquakes are now coming to the East Coast just as they are about to become much more frequent, intense, and consequential on the East Coast.
One can only pray that at some point the public will demand an honest government capable of making informed decisions with integrity.
John Williams, of Shadowstats, notes that manipulated government statistics are not changing the fact that the true SGS Unemployment Measure now sits at a staggering 22.2%. Williams also demonstrates that despite the hype from Wall Street about a recovery, parts of the economy remain collapsed. Here is what Williams had to say about the situation: “Adding the SGS estimate of excluded long-term discouraged workers back into the total unemployed and labor force, unemployment—more in line with common experience as estimated by the SGS-Alternate Unemployment Measure—notched lower to 22.2% in March from 22.4% in February.”
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John Williams continues:
“The SGS estimate generally is built on top of the official U.6 reporting, and tends to follow its relative monthly movements. Accordingly, the SGS measure will suffer some of the current seasonal-adjustment woes afflicting the base series, such as recent distortions in adjusted reporting of part-time employment for economic reasons. Nonetheless, there continues to be a noticeable divergence in the SGS series versus U.6. The reason for this is that U.6, again, only includes discouraged workers who have been discouraged for less than a year.
As the discouraged-worker status ages, those that go beyond one year, fall off the government counting, and new workers enter “discouraged” status. Accordingly, with the continual rollover, the headline workers flow into the short-term discouraged workers counted in U.6 continue, and from U.6 into long-term discouraged worker status (SGS Measure) at what appears to be an accelerating pace.
Recovery? What Recovery? 4 years after central banks have progressively injected over $7 trillion in liquidity into the global markets (and thus, by Fed logic, the economy), and who knows how many trillion in fiscal aid has been misallocated, to halt the Second Great Depression which officially started in December 2007, the US “recovery” is the weakest in modern US history! How many more trillions will have to be printed (and monetized) before the central planners realize that fighting mean reversion by using debt to defeat recore debt, just doesnt't work? Our guess – lots.
Incidentally, the US has now generated 3 million jobs since the trough of the recession in September 2010, until which point it had previously lost 8 million. Unfortunately, since the real labor force has grown by 4.6 million over the same period, or at the conventionally accepeted 90,000 labor pool entrants per month for 51 months, despite what the BLS may say, because America is after all growing, this means that the Obama administration has created a negative 1.6 million jobs net of demographics, which in turn have cost the US a modest $5.1 trillion in new debt, or an even modest $3.1 million in debt for every job lost.
Chart 1 – the current “recovery” in the context of all previous ones:
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Chart 2 – Min, Max and Average… and now
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Chart 3 – in bar chart format
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Chart 4 – There is good news: 16 quarters after the start of the recession, US output has turned positive. Just barely.
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Phi Beta Iota: What is one to do when the government, with the full complicity of the two parties that monopolize power through various illegitimate means, the full complicity of the five major media corporations whose “mouthpieces” bury their intelligence along with their integrity, all lie to the public? Have we really become a nation of idiot sheep? At what point is the government impeachable for lies to the public?
by GÉRARD DUMÉNIL and DOMINIQUE LÉVY, Counterpunch
The crisis that began in 2008 has brought the deindustrialization of the US and Europe, at the center of the global economic system, to the forefront of the debate. President Barack Obama has made it a key issue of his re-election campaign. There is a new word, “insourcing,” the opposite of “outsourcing” or sub-contracting. The idea is to return industrial production to national territory.
. . . . . .
As long as the general neoliberal framework, with all its elements — the hegemony of the capitalist classes and financial institutions, the complicity of senior management, financialization and globalization — remains unchallenged by “financial repression”, of the kind that took place in the US during the postwar period, all attempts to fight the process of deindustrialization, no matter how successful, will continue to be retrograde. They undermine what remains of the social gains made in the preceding decades, without making any clear contribution to the re-establishment of growth and the rebuilding of employment.
GÉRARD DUMÉNIL and DOMINIQUE LÉVY are economists and co-authors of The Crisis of Neoliberalism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts), 2011/.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a very important article. A government with intelligence and integrity would re-industrialize using the Open Source Everything ethos combined with the localized food-energy-water model. As the authors point out, as long as criminal mind-sets continue to dominate government and industry, re-industrializing in the old form will make no difference to the public at large.
