The modern world has become a multi-strata layering of bullshit in the form of propaganda. The layers are so multiple and piled so deep that everyone seems to have forgotten where they put the truth. I was going to say that it's like a train of propaganda, where each individual car acquires mass from being linked to every other car. But even that understates it. Rather than a linear train of propaganda, it more like a network of propaganda that spreads out in every direction, creating a fog of illusion that even the best of us have difficulty completely seeing through.
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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
Most discussions of possible United States military operations in the Persian Gulf, should Iran try to prevent maritime traffic from going through the Strait of Hormuz, generally say that while it would not be a cakewalk, it would not be an enormously difficult task either.
But that conventional wisdom is wrong, according to a recent report issued by an independent, non-profit public policy research institute in Washington DC. The report found that the traditional post-Cold War US military ability to project power overseas with few serious challenges to its freedom of action may be rapidly drawing to a close.
. . . . . . .
It stressed that “a Strait of Hormuz closure could trigger a much larger price spike, including by limiting offsetting supplies from other producers in the region”.
Phi Beta Iota: Two themes are emerging in the open source world. First, the depth and breadth of Israel's clandestine agreements with its Arab neighbors is not clearly understood–a National Intelligence Estimate is required, but the collection, processing, and analysis capabilities are simply not there, and the management will to do this as a multinational task is not there either. Second, as the US loses its ability to actually project force, the finance of war is being replaced by the theater of war, such that oil prices can still be manipulated, but at a fraction of the blood, sweat, and tears previously mobilized – financial fraud on the cheap, as it were.
Europe: Updates. In an interview with a French daily on 25 December, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde stressed that Europe's financial crisis is turning into “a crisis of confidence in public debt and the solidity of the financial system.
Greece: According to an IMF source involved in discussions with Greece, the situation in Athens is “deteriorating” and “a further 10-15 billion euros ($13.1-19.6 billion) still needs to be found.” Banks may be asked to agree to write off 65 % instead of 50% of Greece's debt.
France: The French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) said on 26 December that there were 29,000 new job seekers “without any occupation” in November, up 1.1% over October. The year-on-year increase reached 5.2%. In total, 2,844,800 people did not have any occupation, the highest such figure since November 1999.
An economist at the French Observatory of Economic Conditions speculated that France's unemployment rate — which currently stands at 9.3% — will reach 10.7% by the end of 2012, and predicted that Paris will not succeed in bringing the deficit down to 3% of GDP by 2013.
Spain: At a news conference on 26 December, Spanish Economy Minister Luis De Guindos said that the Spanish economy had suffered a “relapse” and would record negative growth in the fourth quarter of 2011. De Guindos warned that “the next two months are not going to be easy, neither from a growth nor a jobs point of view.”
Comment: According to the Financial Times and multiple economists the fate of the euro depends on what happens in Italy. This week Italy intends to auction bonds worth Euros 20 billion. The market reaction to the auction will be an important indicator of whether the central bankers have found a way to stabilize the financial crisis, or have just made it worse.
All analysts of European economics predict a recession in 2012. They differ only about how severe it will be. In an integrated global economy, the ripple effects from Europe will drag the US and the Chinese economies, among all others.
Phi Beta Iota: Christine Lagarde, perhaps because she is a woman with a smaller ego and larger intuition than most men, appears to be the first Epoch A leader to “get” that we are all calling into question the very existence of the Western financial system that is rooted in fraud, waste, and abuse. When she begins to point to Iceland as an example, and to demand that Western countries arrest and try Goldman Sachs, Morgan, Citi-Bank, Bank of America, and other officials for high crimes against the public, the healing can begin. Until then, the West is avoiding the fundamentals.
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called out lawmakers for their inability to compromise and develop bipartisan strategies and policies to “address our very real and serious problems.”
During a speech in which he called Washington a town of “oversized egos and undersized backbones,” Gates said “zero-sum politics and ideological siege warfare are the new order of the day.”
On 12 December, I described a concatenation of warmongering pressures that were shaping the popular psyche in favor of bombing Iran. Now, in a 21 December essay [also attached below], Steven Walt describes a further escalation of these pressures — in this case, via the profoundly flawed pro-bombing analysis, Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike is the Least Bad Option, penned by Matthew Kroenig in January/February 2012 issue of the influential journal Foreign Affairs.
One would think that our recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and our growing strategic problems in Pakistan, not to mention our economic problems and political paralysis at home, would temper our enthusiasm for launching yet another so-called preventative war. But that is not the case, as Kroenig's analysis and the growing anti-Iran hysteria in the debates among the the Republican running for president show (Ron Paul excepted) show. Moreover, President Obama’s Clintonesque efforts to triangulate the pro-war political pressures of the Republicans, while appeasing the Israelis, may be smart domestic politics in the short term, but they add fuel to the pro-war fires shaping the popular psyche. Finally, as I wrote last January, lurking beneath the fiery anti-Iran rhetoric are more deeply rooted domestic political-economic reasons for promoting perpetual war — reasons that have more to do with sustaining the money flowing into the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex in the post-Cold War era than in shaping a foreign policy based on national interests.
While it is easy to whip up popular enthusiasm for launching a new war, our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that successfully prosecuting wars of choice are quite another matter. Nevertheless, as my good friend Mike Lofgren explains in his recent essay, Propagandizing for Perpetual War, devastating rebuttals like Walt's are likely to have little effect on the course of events.
One final point … a surprise attack on Iran would trigger a far tougher war to prosecute successfully that either Iraq or Afghanistan. If you doubt this, I suggest you study Anthony Cordesman’s 2009 analysis of the operational problems confronting Israel, should it decide to launch a surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
If you'd like to read a textbook example of war-mongering disguised as “analysis,” I recommend Matthew Kroenig's forthcoming article in Foreign Affairs, titled “Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike Is the Least Bad Option.” It is a remarkably poor piece of advocacy, all the more surprising because Kroenig is a smart scholar who has done some good work in the past. It makes one wonder if there's something peculiar in the D.C. water supply.
There is a simple and time-honored formula for making the case for war, especially preventive war. First, you portray the supposed threat as dire and growing, and then try to convince people that if we don't act now, horrible things will happen down the road. (Remember Condi Rice's infamous warnings about Saddam's “mushroom cloud”?) All this step requires is a bit of imagination and a willingness to assume the worst. Second, you have to persuade readers that the costs and risks of going to war aren't that great. If you want to sound sophisticated and balanced, you acknowledge that there are counterarguments and risks involved. But then you do your best to shoot down the objections and emphasize all the ways that those risks can be minimized. In short: In Step 1 you adopt a relentlessly gloomy view of the consequences of inaction; in Step 2 you switch to bulletproof optimism about how the war will play out.
