May 2015 – Page 19 – The Burning Platform

Triumph Of The Will

You may tire of comparisons between the USA!USA!USA! and Nazi Germany. Too bad! President Oreo is very much like Hitler, whether you want to admit it, or not. (Hopefully, Oreo’s fate will mirror Hitler’s.)

“The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way, the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed.” – Adolf Hitler

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“The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.” – Adolf Hitler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=OitnMp8MWb0

To the Class of 2015 – You Chumps!

Guest Post by Bill Bonner

Dull, Embarrassing, Earnest and Trivial

A long, long time ago
On graduation day
You handed me your book
I signed this way

“Roses are red, my love
Violets are blue
Sugar is sweet, my love
And boy are we screwed”

– With apologies to Bobby Vinton

Image credit: Merlon Drâs

Last year at about this time, we waited for the phone to ring. Not calling were thousands of universities in need of someone to give the annual commencement speech.

Every year, we prepare an appropriate graduation speech. And every year, with the unanimous accord of America’s institutions of higher learning, we do not give it.

With six children who have gone to college, we have heard more than our share of these speeches. They are almost always dull, embarrassing, earnest and trivial.

The University of Virginia had a TV newscaster. St. John’s College had socialist philosopher Cornel West.

When socialist philosopher Cornel West is in a good mood, he actually looks vaguely threatening …

Photo credit: Evan Agostini / AP

We can’t remember the others – most likely because they had nothing memorable to say either.

Class of 2015: The Most Indebted in History

It is unlikely that we would ever be called upon to give a speech to graduating students. But if we were, we would say the following: Congratulations, Class of 2015: You chumps! The Wall Street Journal reports that you are the most indebted generation in history.

The average graduate with student debt has a little more than $35,000 of it. The whole bill for student debt this year is expected to reach $68 billion – a tenfold increase over the last 20 years.

Average graduate debt over time – 2015 produced yet another record.

That may seem like a lot of money. And big numbers get reported in the headlines along with the celebrity news. But student debt is like the foul smell of gangrene: It testifies to a deeper, inner corruption.

We are now 25 centuries after Pericles and Socrates. But today, the typical university has no more interest in learning than a rat terrier or a congressman. Our government is a disgrace to honest democracy, if there were such a thing; it is a scam and a deceit.

Rich, powerful special interests wager billions of dollars on hollow puppet candidates, knowing their investment will pay off hugely if they are successful. Our money system is an elaborate fraud, too. It steals from laborers, merchants and artisans and rewards speculators, insiders and layabouts. The entire system is sick and dysfunctional.

Continue reading “To the Class of 2015 – You Chumps!”

OBAMA’S PLAN IS WORKING TO PERFECTION

The destruction of our coal industry by Obama is proceeding perfectly. So 4,000 workers have to be sacrificed at the altar of global warming. Big deal. They’re just peasants. Al Gore, Leonardo Dicaprio, and our savior Obama don’t need coal to fuel their luxury jets and Air Force One. They say “Let Them Eat Sunshine”. We are on the verge of green energy independence. Everything would be perfect if Buffett’s oil trains would just stop derailing and blowing up every week.

FORWARD!!!!

Second Largest Coal Miner East Of The Mississippi Files For Bankruptcy: 4000 Patriot Coal Jobs In Peril

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/12/2015 09:23 -0400

At last check Patriot Coal had around 4000 employees. Those soon to be former employees will soon require yet another massive seasonal adjustment by the BLS to be “adjusted” out, because moments ago the second largest coal miner east of the Mississippi and the second largest producer of thermal coal in the eastern US filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

As part of its filing, the Peabody spinoff announced it had obtained a $100 million DIP, which will be sued to fund the company until it finds a “strategic buyer” or otherwise restructures its balance sheet. Alas, with the price of coal being where it is these days, the most likely outcome for ticker formerly known as PCX is an outright liquidation and another 4000 people in the rest belt left without jobs who, just like the case of Denny Ryder of Decatur, IL, will promptly disappear from the labor force so as not to spoil the US “recovery” propaganda.

Continue reading “OBAMA’S PLAN IS WORKING TO PERFECTION”

BUG APPROACHING WINDSHIELD

I know Americans are math challenged. Public schools are too busy teaching diversity and environmental propaganda about global warming to spend any time on adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing. Here are a couple charts of doom. Japan has been on a kamikaze mission to destroy their economic system for the last 25 years and the plane is about to hit the carrier. Their total debt now stands at 1.053 QUADRILLION Yen. That’s right. QUADRILLION. That equals $8.8 trillion.

Interest rates in January on their 10 Year bonds reached an all-time low of 0.20%. This morning they reached 0.46%. When you are already paying $130 billion per year in interest and your interest rates double in a matter of months, you’ve gotta problem. If the worldwide bond market reassessment of risk continues, it won’t only be Greece crashing and burning. One of the biggest economies in the world will implode. And it will take the world with it.

U.S. 10 year Treasury rates are also soaring. Politicians and central bankers across the globe have done nothing but add debt, devalue currencies, create mal-investment with 0% interest rates, and prop up financial markets for the last six years. Now the bill is coming due. The slightest increase in interest rates will trigger a worldwide financial Armageddon. Bugs will be meeting windshields across the world.

CHRISTIE LIKES HIS SNACKS & BOOZE

It seems the jolly governor of NJ really likes to eat and drink at sporting events.

Chris Christie racked up an $82,594 bill from the concessions operator at MetLife Stadium during the 2010 and 2011 football seasons, the New Jersey Watchdog reported on Monday as part of a broader look at how the New Jersey governor spent $360,000 of his state allowance over five years. Christie spent $300,000 of that amount on food and alcohol, the report said, pointing to the stadium bill as the most notable spending spree. The governor used a debit card on 58 occasions to pay Delaware North Sportservice, which handles concessions operations at MetLife Stadium during New York Giants and Jets games, according to the report.

A man’s gotta eat. Right? Why shouldn’t the taxpayers of NJ pay for the tons of food required to sustain this pig?

Why shouldn’t the King of NJ live better than the peasants? He deserves luxury boxes and unlimited hot dogs and beer. He don’t need no stinkin receipts. That’s for the rest of the government drones. I wonder if he’ll give the proceeds from his Weight Watchers commercials back to the citizens.

The Associated Press also reported last week about the use of public money for expenses associated with the luxury boxes. Both reports note that the New Jersey Republican State Committee later reimbursed the expenses.

A Christie spokesman defended the expenses, including the concessions, which the New Jersey Watchdog report said did not come with any receipts, business reasons or names of individuals who benefited from the spending allowance.

“The official nature and business purpose of the event remains the case regardless of whether the event is at the State House, Drumthwacket or a sporting venue,” Christie’s press secretary, Kevin Roberts, said in a statement.

Imagine what this pig could do with the Presidential expense account.

TIED FOR THIRD WORST

Damn. My beloved Pennsylvania is only projected to run a $2 billion deficit in the upcoming year. Only Alaska and Virginia politicians are doing a worse job than PA. politicians. And these are just projections. More than half the states in the country will run budget deficits in 2016. The new Democrat governor of PA. thought he was going to tax the living shit out of the fracking industry to balance his budget. Too late Tommy Boy. The frackers will be lucky to survive the next two years. There will be nothing left to tax. Of course plan B will be to tell the citizens of PA to bend over and take it up the ass again. He wants to increase our income tax rate by 21% and our sales tax rate by 10%. This is how politicians think. They never think to cut any spending. They never think to cut the gold plated pensions of government drones. Just increase taxes, fees and regulations on the little people.

This country is delusional, dysfunctional, dystopian, and in debt up to its eyeballs. We have supposedly had a growing economy for 6 years, the lowest unemployment rate in 8 years, 0% interest rates, and non-existent inflation (according to the BLS). If these states can’t balance their budgets under these “GREAT” economic conditions, just wait until the stock market implosion, soaring unemployment, and debt payments come due. You don’t have to be a doomer to understand the situation. You just need to understand math. Oh yeah. I forgot. I should have known better than to expect the iGadget addicted, math deficient, Kardashian watching, Twitter crowd to care, understand, or even pay attention.

War Threat Rises As Economy Declines

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

Keynote Address to the Annual Conference of the Financial West Group, New Orleans, May 7, 2015

The defining events of our time are the collapse of the Soviet Union, 9/11, jobs offshoring, and financial deregulation. In these events we find the basis of our foreign policy problems and our economic problems.

The United States has always had a good opinion of itself, but with the Soviet collapse self-satisfaction reached new heights. We became the exceptional people, the indispensable people, the country chosen by history to exercise hegemony over the world. This neoconservative doctrine releases the US government from constraints of international law and allows Washington to use coercion against sovereign states in order to remake the world in its own image.

To protect Washington’s unique Uni-power status that resulted from the Soviet collapse, Paul Wolfowitz in 1992 penned what is known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine. This doctrine is the basis for Washington’s foreign policy. The doctrine states:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

In March of this year the Council on Foreign Relations extended this doctrine to China.

Washington is now committed to blocking the rise of two large nuclear-armed countries. This commitment is the reason for the crisis that Washington has created in Ukraine and for its use as anti-Russian propaganda. China is now confronted with the Pivot to Asia and the construction of new US naval and air bases to ensure Washington’s control of the South China Sea, now defined as an area of American National Interests.

Continue reading “War Threat Rises As Economy Declines”

America’s Achilles’ Heel

Guest Post by Dmitry Orlov

Heiko Müller

Last Saturday, a massive Victory Parade was held in Moscow commemorating the 70-year anniversary of the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Red Army and the erection of the Soviet flag atop the Reichstag in Berlin. There were a few unusual aspects to this parade, which I would like to point out, because they conflict with the western official propaganda narrative. First, it wasn’t just Russian troops that marched in the parade: the troops of 10 other nations took part in it, including the Chinese honor guard and a contingent of Grenadiers from India. Dignitaries from these nations were present in the stands, and the Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife were seated next to President Vladimir Putin, who, in his speech at the start of the parade, warned against attempts to create a unipolar world—sharp words aimed squarely at the United States and its western allies. Second, a look at the military hardware that rolled through Red Square or flew over it would indicate that, short of an outright nuclear mutual self-annihilation, there isn’t much that the US military could throw at Russia that Russia couldn’t neutralize.

It would appear that American attempts to isolate Russia have resulted in the exact opposite: if 10 nations, among them the world’s largest economy, comprising some 3 billion people, are willing to set aside their differences and stand shoulder to shoulder with the Russians to counter American attempts at global dominance, then clearly the American plan isn’t going to work at all. Western media focused on the fact that western leaders declined to attend the celebration, either in a fit of pique or because so ordered by the Obama administration, but this only highlights their combined irrelevance, be it in defeating Hitler, or in commemorating his defeat 70 years later. Nevertheless, in his speech Putin specifically thanked the French, the British and the Americans for their contribution to the war effort. I am sorry that he left out the Belgians, who had been so helpful at Dunkirk.

Continue reading “America’s Achilles’ Heel”

THE CRASH IS NOT CAUSED BY AN EVENT

Hussman analytically describing the process leading to a crash. It hasn’t happened yet, so it won’t happen. Right?

From an investment standpoint, market conditions remain characterized both by obscene valuations and still-negative market internals. It’s that combination that continues to suggest potentially vertical downside risks. When people think about crashes, they tend to think about an event – as if some massive, grotesque, red, scaly, fire-breathing, razor-toothed catalyst should be obvious beforehand. But we know from history that that’s not the way it works. Instead, the sequence goes like this: the conditions that create vulnerability to a crash emerge first (elevated valuations coupled with deterioration in market internals and/or widening in credit spreads), the crash emerges second, and catalysts are then identified – often just flashpoints that were consistent with speculative breakdown. Many investors think that “Lehman” caused the global financial crisis, but the mortgage crisis was already unfolding well before that. Lehman and Bear Stearns before it were only symptoms, not causes. The cause is always speculative distortion that was well-known for quite some time: elevated valuations, often accompanied by speculation and new issues of low-quality stocks representing some “new economy” theme, or yield-seeking speculation and heavy issuance of low quality debt. The main reason investors don’t believe that such speculation will end in a crash is simply that a crash hasn’t happened yet.

In shorter-term market action, we see a general tendency toward distribution, for example, declines on expanding volume coupled with low-volume recoveries on mixed breadth and narrowing leadership (which was also the pattern last week). We note that prior to Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had gone 40 trading sessions without setting a 20-day high or low. If we look across history for periods of extended range-bound activity in overvalued markets where: a) the DJIA had gone more than a month without setting a 20-day high or low; b) the DJIA was confined to a range of less than 6%; c) the DJIA was within 10% of a 2-year high; and d) the Shiller P/E was 18 or higher, there are only 7 clusters that fit the bill (1929, 1937, 1965, 1973, 1999-2000, 2007-2008, and today). While the full-cycle resolution was repeatedly brutal, I should note that the short-term resolution was not very informative at all, and didn’t depend on whether the initial break out of the range was higher or lower. What’s interesting about the general pattern is that range-bound action often coincides with distribution on price-volume measures. In October 2000, I mentioned similar measures of distribution, such as one that Peter Eliades called the “sign of the bear” based on range-bound market breadth. As I also observed then, neither elevated valuations, nor internals, nor distribution patterns ensure a market crash, but we don’t like the probabilities. Still, we aren’t terribly impatient about the near-term resolution of what we see as a likely topping process here.

You’ve been warned.

Read Hussman’s Weekly Letter

America’s Vanishing Worker: The Truth Behind The “Recovery” Propaganda

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/11/2015 15:49 -0400

The biggest paradox of the so-called US recovery is that in the same report in which the US Department of Labor reported that the US unemployment has dropped to a depression-low 5.4%, a level suggesting near zero “slack” in the labor force, the BLS also indicated that the number of people not in the labor force rose to a fresh all time high of 93.2 million, keeping the participation rate at a level first seen in 1978.

How does one make sense of this glaring contradiction and paradoxical data, which one one hand suggest the recovery is fully in place, while on the other screams depression?

For the answer we go to the WSJ’s report on the curious case of America’s vanishing worker.

To be sure, this “curious case” covers nothing new for regular Zero Hedge readers, but may explain to casual observers how it is possible that America’s labor metrics have devolved to such a Schrodingerian state in which the US labor market is both alive and dead, depending on whose propaganda one observes.

For the answer, the WSJ tracks the career, or rather lack thereof, of Denny Ryder of Decatur, Illinois, 47 years old, who is one of hundreds of thousands of (former) employees in the industrial Midwest who has been forced to move away, retire or give up on finding a job. As a result, the unemployment rate in this has fallen even as Denny is no closer to being able to provide for his family.

As the WSJ reports, “by one key gauge of economic health, this industrial city three hours south of Chicago is well on the way to recovery. Hit hard by the recession, when its unemployment rate topped 14%, Decatur over the past year has seen one of the swiftest declines in joblessness in the country, with the rate dropping to 7% in March from 10.2% a year earlier.”

The problem: it’s nothing but a statistical mirage, a lie.

Continue reading “America’s Vanishing Worker: The Truth Behind The “Recovery” Propaganda”