Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson on Congress and their 18 Percent Approval Rating

"Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters."

Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check

Congress has an approval rating hovering around 18% according to the latest Gallup poll.  

Yikes! How can that be in a 'democratic' system?

 

Even President Obama's approval rating is hovering around 48% with about the same disapproval in our polarizing society.

 

Can 18% of the people pick the representative they like, while ignoring the other 82%?

Is it the fault of the people, the voting public?

Yes, but mostly by inaction, and their obvious confusion in the face of well funded onslaughts of command, control, and propaganda across most of the media spectrum. 

 

Gerrymandering.  Disgracefully obvious voter suppression. A insider controlled two party candidate selection process. Distorted primaries.  Rabid framing of the issues based on stereotypes and emotions.  Purposeful deceit.  Secrecy.  Manipulation.  Even the results of polls and headlines are distorted to support the 'messaging.'

 

And powerful private interests would definitely like to convince you that government is necessarily evil by its very nature, and that you should just get rid of it, and trust the monopolies and moneyed interests to be naturally benevolent and virtuous.  

They have been waging this campaign to overthrow democracy and repeal every reform, one by one, for thirty years.  And they seem to be winning, little by little, in overturning most safeguards for fairness and justice. 

 

The massive pollution of the airwaves by corporate funds and the moneyed interests with an almost incessant stream of persuasion and propaganda.  They phrase the questions carefully, and then give us the answers they want the people to hear.

And most people still believe what they see on television, the radio, and the mainstream media.

 

You give the 'wrong answer' on television, and you are never invited back.  You are also cut off from access to power and information.   You would not believe have many times I have heard this.  

 

The key morning message from Bloomberg Television this morning was an old meme from almost exactly this time last year by David Zervos, chief market strategist of Jefferies, with Eric Schatzker and Stephanie Ruhle nodding approvingly:

"Stocks are for lovers, gold is for haters."

"In short, he said that if you're somewhat of a pessimist — a hater — and think the Fed's monetary easing can't go on forever, and the system is destined to crash, then you think we're going back to the 1970s and want to be in hard commodities, such as gold. But if you think the U.S. economy is eventually going to emerge from this period of low growth and eventually recover, much like the 1990s, then you're a lover and should be in equities."

 

Yes, that 'worked' as stocks greatly outperformed metals for quite some time now, about three years.  The trend is your friend.  And so is the Fed and their method of implementing monetary policies.  Not so much for workers and real median wages though.  I think we can stipulate that Wall Street has been a major beneficiary of the Fed and the government.  Why not, they paid well enough for it.

 

And yes, we are just about at that point in the banal insipidness of our economic discussion.  Whatever works for whatever reason, just go with it.   Bear and bull markets make people economic forecasting geniuses.  Until they don't.  And then they blame you for listening.

Speaking of geniuses, next year will you may have the privilege to vote Bush v. Clinton, or Clinton v. Bush.

You get to vote for the candidates that the insiders select for you.

I am not sure about Wilkerson's assessment that 95% of the Congress are just stupid.  Jim McGill's opinion on lawyers in the second video is of course exaggerated, but has some merit.  And it seems applicable to quite a few other professions these days, where people say what their paychecks demand.

Chart Updates For Today - The Recovery™ Killing Floor Hard Time Blues

"Every despotic society lives on the basis of a rather implausible dogma."

Reinhold Niebuhr

Here is a snapshot of the key charts as of noon today.

There will be no updates tonight.

Things went well for us yesterday and today. It may be encumbered by an insane bureaucracy of parasitical financial and medical monopolies who add no value but extract fat profits and artificially ration care to keep prices high, but there are many good and hardworking people in the healthcare system itself.

 

Once again, I have ransomed my 'pearl of great price' from the lion's mouth.

 

And as always one finds themselves sharing their plight with others in waiting rooms, offering and receiving comfort, sharing thoughts with those carrying their own daily crosses with their loved ones.  It is a Lenten gift.

Be back tomorrow.

I am keeping an eye on the shenanigans of the careless few.

This 'strong dollar is good' meme will serve the financiers, but it will put a spike into the heart of The Recovery™, and probably the dollar as the world's reserve currency by causing turmoil in the emerging markets.  Think of 1997 and the failures that helped start the movement to displace King Dollar as the reserve currency in the first place.

 

How can anyone forecast inflation or deflation when so much of it is up to discretionary decisions by the Fed and their moneyed interests?  This is why I forecast stagflation, which in itself is the result of either an exogenous economic shock or a willful policy error.  

 

In this case it is the result of massive monetary stimulus, that has been misdirected top down into an unreformed financial system that has left the broad aggregate demand wanting.  It flows to the Banks and the corporations, who skim the best of it before it can barely reach the people. It is like sending aid to a beleaguered nation, straight into the hands of robber barons, petty warlords, and despots who take the best and the most for themselves.

 

Any overseas firms that have been arranging  their loan debt in dollars are going to suffer mightily from this monetary hubris. 

The financiers can skim profits from this dollar short squeeze, and use the King Dollar to acquire even more income producing, even sovereign, assets on the cheap overseas. 

 

We have the best and most skillful liars in the world.   And they are on parade.

 

Winning....

 

Keep your lamps trimmed and burning.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - The Gathering Storm

“I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice...

At the close of that [revolutionary] struggle, nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of its scenes. The consequence was, that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son or brother, a living history was to be found in every family-- a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received, in the midst of the very scenes related-- a history, too, that could be read and understood alike by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned.

But those histories are gone. They can be read no more forever. They were a fortress of strength; but, what invading foeman could never do, the silent artillery of time has done; the leveling of its walls. They are gone. They were a forest of giant oaks; but the all-resistless hurricane has swept over them, and left only, here and there, a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage; unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few gentle breezes, and to combat with its mutilated limbs, a few more ruder storms, then to sink, and be no more.

They were the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now, that they have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason. Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.

Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws: and, that we improved to the last; that we remained free to the last; that we revered his name to the last; that, during his long sleep, we permitted no hostile foot to pass over or desecrate his resting place; shall be that which to learn the last trump shall awaken our Washington.

Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest, as the rock of its basis; and as truly as has been said of the only greater institution, 'the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.'"

Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Address, January 27, 1838

 

Gold and silver did very little today, despite the brisk sell off in equities.  The denizens of the bucket shops were busy picking pockets in other markets.

 

The global economy is in a very difficult circumstance, and the Fed is at the heart of it.  I have no sympathy for them whatsoever, because they have placed themselves there, repeatedly, by their actions and omissions as manager of the world's reserve currency and key regulator of one of the world's most influential financial markets.

 

Will the Fed raise rates as they have now led the world to expect, or will they do nothing, and essentially cut them by once again kicking those who believe them in the expectations?

 

Most Americans do not understand what is going on in the rest of the world.  It is not pretty.  Europe is hanging by a much thinner thread than I think the plutocrats in Frankfurt and Brussels realize. 

 

The emerging markets are absorbing a great deal of inflation being generated and exported by the US.  It would be extremely interesting to have access to a reliable estimate of Eurodollars.  I think we are experiencing yet another Eurodollar short squeeze as the debts contracted for by overseas companies in dollars feel the stress of a disjointed global financial system.

 

It took a little over twenty years for the unease that Lincoln describes above to explode upon the landscape in a bloody civil war.  It might be worth reading his entire Lyceum speech.  It surely does not describe what we might think of as domestic tranquility and pastoral bliss.   The republic endured, but at a terrible cost.

 

In our age reason and morality and honour have fallen to the despicable cheapness of 'greed is good' and the foul god of the market. 

  

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - The Rape of the American Mind

“He who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press and radio, is master of the mind. Repeat mechanically your assumptions and suggestions, diminish the opportunity for communicating dissent and opposition. This is the formula for political conditioning of the masses.

The big lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason.

The continual intrusion into our minds of the hammering noises of arguments and propaganda can lead to two kinds of reactions. It may lead to apathy and indifference, the I-dont-care reaction, or to a more intensified desire to study and to understand. Unfortunately, the first reaction is the more popular one.  Confusing a targeted audience is one of the necessary ingredients for effective mind control."

Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind

 

There is going to be another financial crisis within the next two years, and it will be global, and it may be much more consequential than the other two or three we have seen since the Fed embarked on this course of its long and checkered career.

 

It is also avoidable, and in their quiet, private moments the really good economists can see it coming.  Why don't they say anything?  Ennui of the bureaucrat, entropy of an inability to change, and the credibility trap of failed ideologies in a failing empire. 

 

They did not get to where they are by 'rocking the boat.'  And so they will be quiet, unless they see some advantage in it for them, most ordinarily in a pay for say.

 

Not so for the financiers and their minions.  They will not be quiet, alas.  The more badly they behave, the louder they seem to become.

 

They are short term, and almost infantile in the self-centered reasoning.  Although a child is limited by lack of faculty and experience, the speculator is hampered by vanity, a self-imposed lack of human development, and an almost obsessive preoccupation with drinking, favorite objects, and teats.  

 

They see something and they want it, they know only what they can feel in the desire of the moment, morally they are undeveloped, and when they make a mess they cry loudly, until an adult comes to clean it up for them.  But unlike a child they have no gratitude, no sense of their own dependency, or natural affection for others.

 

Have a pleasant evening

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - The Careless Few and Their Tower of Babel

Gold and silver marked time today, after the fairly heavy handed smackdown from last Friday in honor of our Non-Farm Payrolls report.

 

There was some small bleeding of bullion out of the bucket shop's warehouses as noted in the reports below, but little else of note. 

 

I am reassured by some very serious people that the West's gold is not flowing East.  It is merely disappearing from here, and apparently reappearing as imports into China, Russia, the Mideast, and India there. 

 

There is nothing to see here, so move along.  Our gold is going nowhere, and their gold is apparently just apparating, like Harry Potter.  Although Harry could not have managed such a nice lingering illusion of paper as he scooted off with our gold into the Vanishing Cabinet on the Thames.  Wingardium leviosa!

 

The trick is to concentrate intently on the details, to become mesmerized by them, and to ignore all the rest.  Remember the Three D's: Destination, Determination and Deliberation.  Germany can't get their gold back?  Gold is stupid, and they don't need it.  And so moving right along...

 

I am looking into this news that HSBC is closing seven of their customer gold vaults in London.  I am a bit behind the curve today for personal obligations.  I do not know if this signifies anything yet.  But I do suspect that this will open up quite a bit of useful closet space for the globally careless few who are simply flocking in droves to London real estate like flies to honey, or whatever other propensities that flies may have.

 

I have guest posted a rather good summary of the US economic situation by C. K. Michaelson titled The Minority Report which you can read here.

 

There was also intraday commentary about the state of economic and public policy thought here.  I made some revisions to the chart of the continuum of economic and political philosophy and you may wish to take a look at it, to see if it is now a bit clearer. 

 

Putting a great deal of information and concepts into a meaningful but simple and concise format is always the most difficult challenge.  Especially when the modern impulse is to expend the greatest amount of complexity and mostly irrelevant detail on the simplest of canards.  The currency and class wars are growing this into a thriving cottage industry in support of our export of frauds and domestic deceptions.

 

One thing that struck me today is that, although we may be in difficult economic straits, we are certainly blessed with some of the most skillful and ardent professional liars in the world, if not in all of history. 

Their artfulness in distorting the facts, and in sweeping inconvenient facts aside by exploiting relatively inconsequential details, is almost astonishing. And their shameless diligence in the pursuit of wealth through deception is almost herculean.

We truly excel in our treachery, and as a nation, we can certainly be proud of it, of making good look false, black as white, of murder as human kindness, and the most ruthless and self-serving plunder and repression as the finest expression of the human spirit.

 

As Michael Parenti said, 'The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology.'

 

Never have so many, sacrificed so much, for such an undeserving and deceitfully careless few. 

 

Better call Saul.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - The Great Pause

Remarks may be a bit brief and sporadic at times this week.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

C. K. Michaelson: The American Economy - A Minority Report

Some Assembly Required
A Minority Report
by C. K. Michaelson

The jobs report is all about inflation and interest rates and only incidentally about workers and jobs. Economists claim, with little evidence, that mother nature or the universe or Keynes' ghost has an immutable law decreeing that a certain level of unemployment triggers a certain amount of inflation. Right now they pretend that 5.5% unemployment is the tipping point for this see-saw. If unemployment edges lower than that, inflation will pick up. In fact, hyperinflation may well appear, magically, overnight. It's called NAIRU – the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment. The idea was first introduced as NIRU (non-inflationary rate of unemployment) in 1975. which was supposedly an improvement over the "natural rate" of unemployment made up Milton Friedman in 1968.

The idea is that as employers create more jobs, they have to compete for workers by offering higher wages, workers can demand higher wages for making the same number of widgets or threaten to go down the street and make widgets for the next guy. And to pay the higher wages, companies have to raise the price of widgets. The customers – who are the workers when they are not at work – will spend the extra wage income on the higher priced widgets and pretty soon they'll want more money for their labor. Round and round it goes and the first thing you know we're the Wiemar Republic.

Many things wrong with this idea, the biggest being the rather quaint pretense that today's American worker any clout when it comes to wages. First there's the huge number of workers who are AWOL from the labor pooI right now. And if the workers unite (ha)! to demand more wages, the companies will just move the jobs to Bangladesh or some other right-to-work place. Oh, wait, they already did, except for baristas, burger flippers and bedpan bangers.

If there is such a thing as NAIRU, it obviously isn't 5.5%, for wages went up a whopping 0.1% with the latest 0.2% fall in unemployment.

And then there's the definitional problem: What is unemployment? How big is the work force and who are all those guys sitting on the bench waiting to get into the game?

For that matter, what is employment? Is working 17 hours a week at Wally World or 22 hours a week at Macky D's 'employment'?

What would full employment look like, the kind that might, just might, lead to wage inflation? Would all workers who wanted a job have a job and would that job be commensurate with their skill and experience? Would that job provide the hours and wages they need to provide a decent life for themselves and their families – or would their kids still qualify for free breakfast and lunch at school and go to the emergency room for their healthcare?

Some data: There are 92,898,000 Americans currently not working. We have a 62.8% labor force participation rate, a 37 year low. Just last month another 390,000 Americans became invisible to the BLS. Officially, there are 8.7 million people who were actively searching for work last month, plus another 6.5 million people who didn’t look last month but who say they want a job. Plus another 6.6 million who want to work full-time but can only get a part-time job. That’s nearly 22 million people who are unemployed or underemployed.

The unemployment rate for blacks is nearly twice the national average.

American added 58,700 waiters and bartenders – pretty much earning minimum wage or less - as part of those 300,000 new jobs.

The unemployment rate would have been unchanged at 5.7% - safely out of the inflationary swamp – if the labor force participation rate had stayed steady. The big improvement didn't come from jobs, it came from despair of ever finding a job.

We're still about 1 million full-time jobs short of where we were pre-recession, and that's not even adjusting for population growth. All told, we're still about 4 million jobs away from the economy being okay;. At this rate we'll break even in September 2016.

Go Recovery!