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I spend a great deal of time looking at the various government reports, and especially the Payrolls report as you know. I keep my own spreadsheets with their data, and measure various changes in the way in which they calculate the seasonal adjustment factors, imaginary jobs, and prior revisions.
If I wish to leave you with one takeway, it is that the current use of the monthly headline number is more of a Sales and PR program for Wall Street and the government, and hardly the product of serious and thoughtful analysis of statistical data.
The US economy is on a flatline from all that I can tell. I suspect that if a double dip occurs it will be blamed on Europe or some other factor. but in fact there has been no real recovery as of yet.
There is a yawning discrepancy between the bond and equity markets in the manner in which they are interpreting the data. And one of them is wrong. Based on my experience, it is the bond guys who are most always the adults in the room.
Still, the markets are what they are, and it does not pay to fight the tape ahead of its season. Wall Street and its Banks have shown a marvelous ability to create paper rallies out of nothing and sustain them for quite some time before their inevitable collapse.
The US economy can recover. The system can be repaired. But I do not see the effort required to perform that task coming out of New York or Washington yet. They may be talking a good game, but it looks like just more of the same.
It is interesting to read this now, when Europe once again considers what its shape and its future will be. And the rest of the world as well.
This leaflet was written and distributed in January, 1943. Intelligent and open minded Germans could see the decline and fall coming, even while the Reich was intensifying its efforts to feed the hatred and delusion with its lies.
I was always struck by the fact that even while the Russians were shelling Berlin, there were gangs of Nazi thugs roaming the streets, hanging old men and even boys who were not in uniform, labeling them as slackers. The will to power calls out the madness. Always. If men who would be gods cannot create and sustain life as God does, then they must ravage and destroy life, and the creative impulse and diversity of art, and finally themselves in their delusion.
As Charles Upton said, "This is why true evil always exhibits a tell-tale mixture of diabolical cunning and immense stupidity." It only imitates and steals its forms from true being, but remains a souless and non-productive aberration of genuine life.
The White Rose
Fifth Leaflet
Munich, 1943
We will not be silent.
The war is approaching its destined end. As in the year 1918, the German government is trying to focus attention exclusively on the growing might of our submarine warfare, while in the East the armies are constantly in retreat and invasion in imminent in the West. Mobilisation in the United States has not yet reached its climax, but already it exceeds anything that the world has ever seen. It has become a mathematical certainty that Hitler is leading the German people into the abyss. Hitler cannot win the war; he can only prolong it. The guilt of Hitler and his minions goes beyond all measure. Retribution comes closer and closer.
But what are the German people doing? They will not see and will not listen. Blindly they follow their seducers into ruin. Victory at any price! is inscribed on their banner. "I will fight to the last man," says Hitler-but in the meantime the war has already been lost...
What can we learn from the outcome of this war-this war that never really was our own national war?
The imperialist ideology of force, from whatever side it comes, must be shattered for all time. A one sided Prussian militarism must never again be allowed to assume power. Only in large-scale cooperation among the nations of Europe can the ground be prepared for reconstruction.
Centralized hegemony, such as the Prussian state has tried to exercise in Germany and in Europe, must be cut down at its inception. The Germany of the future must be a federal state.
At this juncture only a sound federal system can imbue a weakened Europe with a new life. The workers must be liberated from their condition of down trodden slavery under National Socialism. The illusory structure of autonomous national industry must disappear. Every nation and each man have the right to the goods of the whole world!
Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the protection of individual citizens from the arbitrary will of criminal regimes of violence-these will be the bases of the New Europe.
Please make as many copies of this leaflet as you can and distribute them.
Bear raid on the metals intraday, with the message that piling into 'risk assets' like stocks and junk bonds was the thing to do because of the wonderful economic recovery.
Nothing has changed. The band just played a lively polka, and Josef and Magda led a cheer on the financial networks.
Keep an eye on Europe. That is where the rubber meets the road, or the truncheon meets the jaw, as they say.
Can the triple A's bring Greece and the other prodigals under control? Will they submit as meekly as the Irish? Stay tuned.
