03 Economy – Page 137 – Public Intelligence Blog

Today (March 9, 2012) the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that 227,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs were created by the economy during February. Is the government’s claim true?

No. Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that 44,000 of these jobs or 19% consist of an add-on factor derived from the BLS’s estimate that 44,000 more unreported jobs from new business start-ups were created than were lost by unreported business failures. The BLS’s estimate comes from the bureau’s “birth-death model,” which works better during normal times, but delivers erroneous results during troubled times such as the economy has been experiencing during the past four years.

Taking out the 44,000 added-on jobs reduces the February jobs number to 183,000, but does not provide a full correction. In an economy as troubled as the US economy is, most likely the deaths exceeded the births, but we don’t know what the number is. Was it 20,000? 50,000? What number do we deduct from the 183,000? We simply do not know.

Williams reports that seasonal adjustment factors do not work properly during troubled economic times and add their own overstatement to the jobs figure. If anyone could estimate the overestimate of new jobs that results from malfunctioning seasonal adjustments, it is John Williams, but he doesn’t provide an estimate.

Most likely, the new jobs did not exceed 150,000, a figure that would merely keep even with population growth and thus not reduce the rate of unemployment, which, consistent with this deduction, remained constant.

Let’s look now at the kind of jobs that were created. Of the new jobs reported by BLS,
92% are in services. Of this 92%, only 7% could possibly relate to exportable services–architectural, engineering, and computer systems services.

Continue reading “Paul Craig Roberts: No Jobs for Citizens – Death Spiral”

2012/03/042012/03/04

Koko: Iowa passes outrageous law demanding total secrecy over factory meat filth and cruelty practices

01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency

Iowa passes outrageous law demanding total secrecy over factory meat filth and cruelty practices

Ethan A. Huff

Natural News, 4 March 2012

(NaturalNews) Capturing undercover footage of extreme animal abuse at factory farms is soon to be illegal in Iowa, thanks to the passage of a new bill that squelches First Amendment protections for agricultural whistleblowers. In one of the fastest legislative rush-throughs in history, the “American Heartland” state's House and Senate recently passed House File 589, also known as the “ag-gag” bill, which redefines undercover filming and various other whistle-blowing activities as “agricultural production facility fraud” punishable under the law.

Prior to the passage of the bill, which now sits on Republican Governor Terry Branstad's desk for signing, exposing the horrific conditions in many of Iowa's factory farms was a legally-protected free speech right. Once signed into law, however, H.F. 589 will make Iowa the first state in America to actively muzzle individuals from exposing the ugly truth about what takes place at chicken farms, animal processing plants, and even behemoth genetically-modified (GM) crops farms across the state.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: The truth at any cost lowers all others costs. This is the worst possible step Iowa could take.

2012/03/012012/03/02

Owl: Greece Explodes on 20 March – Massive Credit Insurance Whirlpool Speeds Up — and Forced Population Reduction…

03 Economy, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society

Some very strong and strange signals coming out of sources that have a track-record of being accurate.

1) Banks have created an economic doomsday scenario. Greece is going to default on 20 March, and will eventually get to renounce 80% if not more of the debt that its government very unwisely took on (never mind Goldman Sachs high crimes, governments are supposed to have a modicum of intelligence and integrity).

2) This is going to lead to two consequences, not one:

First, the banks have huge amounts of “insurance” obligations, an entire underworld of banking in which these obligations to cover one another's bad debts are not counted as liabilities — when these all come due, banks crash and no amount of government bail-outs with printed or digital counterfeit money is going to save them.

Second, the combination of riots and economic collapse among hundreds of millions of previously “rich” Europeans with the collapse of the banks is going to present some governments with “internal control” issues. In the USA, the plan under Bush-Cheney was the Civilian Inmate Labor Facilities (CILF), incarcerating the unemployed on agriculturally-productive land. That plan has now been abandoned as unscaleable and unenforceable — the number of pissed off citizens with guns may have something to do with the realization.

And now for the scary part: how do you handle a population of what Henry Kissinger likes to call “useless eaters” who are also armed? Enter the Forced Population Reduction Program (FPRP). Originally to be implemented with neutron weapons (allegedly killing people without destroying infrastructure), the new new thing is VX gas that is heavier than air and make an entire city die with even less environmental damage. How the deaths are “sold” is no doubt being worked on. Testing this in South Africa or the Congo first (they are a party to the program), then simulating a “black plague meets SARS” transfer to Detroit or a couple of southern states, can be anticipated.

Below are a few links. On the edge, no question about it.

Circling the Drain: Euro Default Preppers (2012)

Credit Default Swaps: Evolving Financial Meltdown and Derivative Disaster Du Jour (2008)

Europe's ticking time bomb: Credit default swaps (2012)

Bill Gates, Monsanto, and eugenics: How one of the world’s wealthiest men is actively promoting a corporate takeover of global agriculture (2012)

The Population Reduction Agenda For Dummies (2009)

The Ruling Elite’s Agenda for Global Population Reduction! (2009)

Obama Science Advisor Called For “Planetary Regime” To Enforce Totalitarian Population Control Measures (2009)

Bill Gates: Use vaccines to lower population

Law, ethics and medicine: After-brith abortion: why should the baby live?

Last item is a scholarly paper (it just came out) which argues for making “permissible” the killing of babies after birth. Abstract: Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call “after-birth abortion” (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

2012/02/29

Theophillis Goodyear: Internet, Undersea Cables, Africa, and Digital Remittances

03 Economy, Autonomous Internet

Internet access has become a vital public interest. Cutting it off is almost like cutting off our air. I can't imagine mankind transcending all of the challenges we're facing without the internet. It's gone beyond being a luxury to being an absolute necessity for positive social transformation.

Epic net outage in Africa as FOUR undersea cables chopped

Brid-Aine Parnell

The Register (UK), 28 February 2012

Underwater data cables linking East Africa to the Middle East and Europe have been severed, bringing transfer rates to their knees in nine countries.

In a bizarre coincidence, a ship allegedly dropped anchor off the coast of Kenya on Saturday in a restricted area, cutting The East African Marine Systems (TEAMS) cable – shortly after three other cables were chopped in the Red Sea between Djibouti and the Middle East, the Wall Street Journal reported.

TEAMS was already stuffed with the traffic from the other three cables, the Europe India Gateway (EIG), the South East Asia Middle East Western Europe-3 (SMW-3) and the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSY), which were severed ten days before.

“It's a very unusual situation,” Chris Wood, chief executive of West Indian Ocean Cable, the largest shareholder of the EASSY, and a major owner of data-capacity rights on the two other Red Sea cables. “I believe these were accidental incidents, although more will be known when we bring the cables up from the sea bed.”

Naturally, the number of cables ruined in a short timeframe has sparked suspicions of sabotage. A source from African carrier Airtel told Ugandan independent newspaper the Daily Monitor that the cables had been sliced on purpose.

“The EASSY and TEAMS cables were cut by malicious people at the weekend and this is causing connection problems. All internet providers, particularly Orange and Airtel have been affected because they all depend on these cables for service provision,” he said.

Wood told the WSJ that the cables in the Red Sea had all been severed at the same time, around 650 feet below the Red Sea, but he said that a passing ship could have done the damage because the sea is so shallow.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: The vulnerability of secessionist movements, and the vulnerability of the rising poor using the Internet to by-pass government corruption and corporate predation, are illuminated here. The Autonomous Internet and Open Source Everything are the imperative if humanity is to create a prosperous world at peace that works for all.

See Also:

Search: map ocean cables

Undersea Cables: The Achilles Heel of our Economies

Undersea Cable Ships, Cables, & the People that Help Facilitate the Global Internet

2012/02/262012/02/26

Theophillis Goodyear: New Animal Virus Across Europe

01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Earth Intelligence

There's an animal virus that's spreading in the UK. They may never know where it came from or why it's suddenly a threat. But I wonder if it has to do with genetic engineering, either with livestock or food products.

It's possible that such genetic engineering introduces a weakness in the animal or plant that makes it vulnerable to a common virus or bacteria or other pest that it was never vulnerable to before. The potential for epidemics scares me.

New Schmallenberg Animal Virus Spreading Across British Farms

A new animal disease which causes birth defects and miscarriages in livestock has now been found on 74 farms in England.

The Schmallenberg virus first emerged in the Netherlands and Germany last year, causing mild to moderate symptoms in adult cattle, including reduced milk yield and diarrhoea, and late abortions and birth deformities in newborn sheep, goats and cattle.

It is thought the virus is spread by midges, and has crossed the Channel from the Continent. Adult animals that contract the virus usually recover, but the young born with birth defects have to be destroyed.

The Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency (AHVLA) said the infection had now been identified on 74 farms.

Read rest of article.

Phi Beta Iota: In our view bio-chemical “experiments” are proliferating and out of control. The cucumber attack is suspected by some to have been a bio-war experiment. The mounting evidence that we create many of our own problems, and that viruses may often be constructed in ways that are against the public interest (e.g. built-in sterilization as a form of eugenics), is troubling.

2012/02/25

Eagle: Israel Does the Shiksa, “Owns” Obama

03 Economy, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military

Shiksa: a disparaging and offensive term applied to a non-Jewish girl or woman. As in “Shiksas don't count.”

2013 Budget: ‘Difficult Cuts’ for Americans, Jackpot for Israel

EXTRACT:

Yet, instead of reducing or even just freezing levels of U.S. military aid to Israel, President Obama wants to provide Israel with $3.1 billion of U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons next year, an increase from $3.075 billion in 2012, making the State Department’s claim that this budget request “maintains last year’s record funding levels” for Israel both immodest and inaccurate. By comparison, of the nine other Near Eastern countries receiving U.S. military aid, the budget request for eight of them is unchanged from last year’s budget while the request for Tunisia declined.

Read full article.

2012/02/242012/02/25

Owl: Who Is in Charge of the Economy? Does It Matter?

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth

What Would a “Good” Banking System Look Like? Banks Weren’t Meant to Be Like This

MICHAEL HUDSON

CounterPunch, Weekend Edition January 27-29, 2012

In medieval times, wealthy bankers lent to kings and princes as their major customers. But now it is the banks that are needy, relying on governments for funding – capped by the post-2008 bailouts to save them from going bankrupt from their bad private-sector loans and gambles.

Yet the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the United States. Joseph Stiglitz characterizes the Obama administration’s vast transfer of money and pubic debt to the banks as a “privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a ‘partnership’ in which one partner robs the other.” Prof. Bill Black describes banks as becoming criminogenic and innovating “control fraud.” High finance has corrupted regulatory agencies, falsified account-keeping by “mark to model” trickery, and financed the campaigns of its supporters to disable public oversight. The effect is to leave banks in control of how the economy’s allocates its credit and resources.

If there is any silver lining to today’s debt crisis, it is that the present situation and trends cannot continue. So this is not only an opportunity to restructure banking; we have little choice. The urgent issue is who will control the economy: governments, or the financial sector and monopolies with which it has made an alliance.

Fortunately, it is not necessary to re-invent the wheel. Already a century ago the outlines of a productive industrial banking system were well understood. But recent bank lobbying has been remarkably successful in distracting attention away from classical analyses of how to shape the financial and tax system to best promote economic growth – by public checks on bank privileges.

How banks broke the social compact, promoting their own special interests

People used to know what banks did. Bankers took deposits and lent them out, paying short-term depositors less than they charged for risky or less liquid loans. The risk was borne by bankers, not depositors or the government. But today, bank loans are made increasingly to speculators in recklessly large amounts for quick in-and-out trading. Financial crashes have become deeper and affect a wider swath of the population as debt pyramiding has soared and credit quality plunged into the toxic category of “liars’ loans.”

The first step toward today’s mutual interdependence between high finance and government was for central banks to act as lenders of last resort to mitigate the liquidity crises that periodically resulted from the banks’ privilege of credit creation. In due course governments also provided public deposit insurance, recognizing the need to mobilize and recycle savings into capital investment as the industrial revolution gained momentum. In exchange for this support, they regulated banks as public utilities.

Over time, banks have sought to disable this regulatory oversight, even to the point of decriminalizing fraud.

Read full article.