June 2014 – Page 10 – The Burning Platform

IT’S RELAXING BEING IN THE FREE SHIT ARMY

Hat tip to Boston Bob for pissing me off and ruining my day.

It seems my life would be much more relaxing and leisurely if I had dropped out of high school, managed to not be employed, and joined the legion of 102 million working age Americans who are not working. I’d have more time to sleep and spend quality time doing sports and leisure activities. According to the infuriating article below, the Average American is sleeping 8.6 hours per day, while working a whole 4.1 hours per day. These are averages because 42% of Americans are in free shit army and the 145 million actual working people have a slightly different distribution of their hours. Here’s my average day:

Fitful sleep – 6.5 hours

Working – 9.0 hours

Cursing at assholes during my horrible daily commute – 2.5 hours

Eating while doing something else – 1.0 hour

Reading stuff that pisses me off – 1.0 hour

Writing about stuff that pisses me off – 2.0 hours

Mindless shit like paying bills, mowing lawns, watering plants, grocery shopping, laundry – 1.8 hours

Satisfying Avalon – 0.1 hours

Relaxing time for myself – 0.1 hours

I don’t think I’ve slept for 8.6 hours straight since I was 19 years old. Now I understand why I never see anyone on the streets of West Philly at 7:15 am every morning on my way to work. They are all sleeping off the exhaustion from all that sports and leisure activity. Someone should paint a mural of these people doing what they do best – sleep.

BLS: Americans–on Average–Sleep Twice as Many Hours as They Work

June 18, 2014 – 4:28 PM

By Terence P. Jeffrey

(CNSNews.com) – On average, Americans spent about twice as many hours sleeping on weekdays in 2013 as they did working, according to the annual “American Time Use Survey” released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, the sleeping and working hours were not evenly distributed among the population.

Among Americans who do work on weekdays–which is approximately half the civilian population that is 15 and older–hours of sleep and work are approximately equal.

During the 24 hours in a weekday, according to the survey, the total American civilian population 15 years and over slept, on average, 8.48 hours and worked, on average, 4.01 hours. By that measure, Americans, on average, slept 2.1 times as many hours per weekday as they worked.

But Americans, on average, also spent 0.40 hours per weekday on “work-related” activities, which BLS says “include activities that are not obviously work but are done as part of one’s job, such as having a business lunch or playing golf with clients.”

How Americans--on Average--Spend a Weekday

If the 0.40 hours spent on “work-related” activities is added to the 4.01 hours spent actually “working,” the 8.48 hours that Americans spent, on average, sleeping on weekdays was only 1.9 times as much as the 4.41 hours they spent working and on work-related activities.

Among the civilian population 18 years and over, as reported in Table 8 of the survey, Americans slept, on an annual average in 2013, 8.60 hours per day. These Americans, 18 and over, reported working, on average, 3.82 hours per day, and spending a combined total of 4.20 hours per day on work and work-related activities.

After sleeping and working, the next most-time-consuming weekday activity for Americans 15 or older was watching television. On average, Americans did that for 2.57 hours per weekday.

On weekends and holidays, Americans pulled back the average working hours to 1.14 per day (plus 0.13 hours on “work-related” activities)–and cranked up the television watching to 3.24 hours per day.

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When all days during both the work week and weekend were combined, Americans, on average, slept 8.74 hours per day, worked 3.14 hours per day (spent another 0.32 hours on “work-related” activities), and watched 2.77 hours of television.

The overall combined average of 8.74 hour per day of sleep was 2.5 times the 3.46 hours of combined average work and work-related activities.

On weekdays, Americans spent, on average, 0.07 hours per day on religious and spiritual activities. On weekends and holidays, they increased that to 0.31 hours per day.

The BLS survey indicates that the average number of hours the American civilian population 15 and older worked was reduced by the large percentage who did not work.

On weekdays, according to the survey, 50.6 percent participated in work. This 50.6 percent who did work, worked an average of 7.92 hours per weekday and engaged in another 0.54 hours of work-related activities, bringing their combined work and work-related activities to an average of 8.46 per weekday. At the same time, these working Americans slept an average of 8.49 hours. Thus, those who typically worked on weekdays, slept and worked, on average, approximately the same number of hours each day.

On weekends and holidays, 20.7 percent of American civilians 15 and older worked, averaging 5.48 hours per day.

On weekdays, 7.1 percent of Americans 15 and older attended class, averaging 5.16 hours per day in the classroom. A somewhat smaller percentage—6.3 percent–did homework and research, consuming an average of 2.99 hours per day doing so.

Those who were not employed or who were 25 years and older and had dropped out of school before earning a high school degree were the Americans who managed to devote the most time, on average, to what the BLS calls “sports and leisure activities.”

American Who Aren't Employed Spent More Time on Leisure and Sports Activities

“The leisure and sports category includes sports, exercise, and recreation; socializing and communicating; and other leisure activities, says BLS. “Sports, exercise, and recreation activities include participating in–as well as attending or watching–sports, exercise, and recreational activities. Recreational activities are leisure activities that are active in nature, such as yard games like croquet or horseshoes.

“Socializing and communicating includes face-to-face social communication and hosting or attending social functions,” says BLS. “Leisure activities include watching television; reading; relaxing or thinking; playing computer, board, or card games; using a computer or the Internet for personal interest; playing or listening to music; and other activities, such as attending arts, cultural, and entertainment events.”

People who were not employed spent an average of 6.87 hours per day in these activities, according to the survey. That was about 71 percent more than the 4.02 hours that Americans employed full-time could spend on leisure and sports activities.

Dropouts Spend More Time on Leisure and Sports Activities

Among these Americans who were not employed, the “leisure and sports” activity they engaged in least was actually “participating in sports, exercise and recreation.” They dedicated an average of 0.31 hours to this on weekdays and 0.33 hours on weekends and holidays. The “leisure and sports” activity Americans who were not employed engaged in most was “watching TV.” On average, they devoted 3.70 hours to this activity on weekdays and 4.02 on weekends and holidays.

The survey also discovered that the longer someone had spent in school earning academic degrees, the less likely they were to devote time to leisure and sports activities. High school dropouts spent an average of 6.29 hours per day on these activities. That was about 38 percent more than the average of 4.57 hours per day that college graduates spent on leisure and sports activities.

The BLS survey was based on interviews with 11,400 individuals 15 and older conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau during 2013.

The US Economy Is Still in the High-Danger Zone

By Dennis Miller

I hate being the bearer of bad news.

I remember the one and only time in my life I agreed to umpire a Little League game behind the plate. My youngest son was on the mound, and his older brother came to bat. The count went to 3-2, and I realized I had a huge knot in my stomach.

I said to myself, “God, please let him swing and hit the ball!” And he did. I don’t even recall where it went; I was just thankful I didn’t have to make a call that would have meant bad news for one of them.

Calling it the way you see it may be a good way to live your life, but it isn’t always fun.

I have been harping on the Federal Reserve policy of artificially keeping down interest rates since it started over five years ago.

Nothing has changed; in fact, you could make the case that things have gotten worse. Although there are rumors that the Fed may end QE in September or October of this year, I am not holding my breath. Right now, they are still flooding the banking system with billions of dollars per month, and finally the baby boomers—10,000 of whom are turning 65 every day now, for the next 16 years—are starting to understand what we already know.

Low Interest Rates Are Killing Savers…

In a recent Bloomberg article, Bill Gross of PIMCO (the world’s biggest bond fund) calls the minimal returns that savers and income investors have seen from bank deposits and fixed-income securities a “financial repression.”

“I hate to be gloomy,” said 69-year-old billionaire Gross, “but, yes, for the next 10 years, the oldsters, and I’m in that camp, are going to be disappointed in terms of the policy rate.”

Former President of the Atlanta Fed William Ford chimed in, saying that current low US Treasury yields reduce conservative investors’ income by at least $280 billion annually.

“The costs of low interest rates are being ignored,” Ford said. “It is killing savers, elderly savers who are living on life savings that have been conservatively invested.”

Can it get any more depressing?

Yes: according to the Department of Labor, due to lack of yield from savings and investments, workers 65 and older are the only group of Americans who are increasingly employed or looking for jobs.

… and Keep the US Economy from Recovering

In a March 10 article in Gold-Eagle, author Ian Gordon joins the critical voices. “This is unprecedented,” he writes; “there has never been a time that the entire world has been subjected to such dishonest money that can be created at the whim of unelected bureaucrats acting on behalf of their private shareholders.”

And legendary investor Jeremy Grantham told the Sydney Morning Herald that the US Federal Reserve is killing the recovery of the world’s biggest economy:

“My view of the economy is not principle-based. Higher interest rates would have increased the wealth of savers. Instead, they have become collateral damage of Bernanke’s policies. […]

There is no evidence at all that quantitative easing has boosted capital spending. We have always come roaring back from recessions, even after the mismanaged Great Depression. This time we are not. It’s anecdotal evidence, but we have never had such a limited recovery.”

As you can tell, I could keep going and going.

If it weren’t so sad, I would have been tempted to laugh when I read an RT article titled “’Too big to fail’ status gives US banks a ‘free pass’—Fed Study.”

According to the article (emphasis in original): “The new research shows ‘it is improper to ask the taxpayer to underwrite the non-commercial banking operations of a complex bank holding company,’ Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher told Reuters in an interview.”

Boy, are these folks slow on the uptake. I could have told them that even before the 2008 crash, and without spending millions of dollars on a high-falutin’ study.

The top 10 banks in America, says the article, now have combined assets of about $9.72 trillion (that’s compared to a total GDP of $15 trillion in 2012).

“The banks are still gambling with FDIC-insured money,” says Ted Kaufman, a former US Senator from Delaware. “The JPMorgan Chase ‘London Whale’ fiasco was just the latest proof that there has been no change in the casino speculation of Wall Street banks.”

“No one has gone to jail,” Kaufman predicted. “And no one will. There are many examples of criminal behavior during the meltdown, but not one megabank executive has been jailed. Without that deterrent, white-collar crime is not just profitable but inevitable.”

Enough Already!

We all get the point—the Federal Reserve is bailing out the banking system. And to do so, it’s keeping interest rates suppressed, forcing American savers and income investors to put more money at risk than we should have to.

And that’s not going to change with the new Fed Chair Janet Yellen, who flat-out tells us that “the Fed still thinks rates should remain low to stimulate borrowing, spending, and economic growth. I think this extraordinary commitment is still needed and will be for some time, and I believe that view is widely held by my fellow policymakers at the Fed.”

Of course there is no evidence that any of the policies have actually worked… so we’re on our own to maintain and/or enhance our standard of living.

High Danger of Wildfires

I am generally considered a pretty positive guy, but even I have been wondering if this artificial propping up of the economy and stock markets will ever stop.

Last month, my wife Jo and I were staying in Arizona. A couple of days after a heavy rainstorm, we drove through Tonto National Forest. There was a Smokey the Bear cutout next to a meter with color-coded markings outlining the danger level of a forest fire, and it was at light yellow.

I’ve never seen it light yellow before, very close to the green that signals “all clear.” Late last summer, when we last visited, it was way over in the red with a high-danger signal.

Unfortunately our economy is still in the high-danger zone. I hope to live long enough to tell everyone that I see the threat moved back to Smokey pointing at light yellow. I just don’t see it, despite what we read in the mainstream press. As I said, calling them the way I see them is not always fun—but there is a silver lining…

Here’s One Big Positive for All of Us

Good friend Chuck Butler of EverBank writes a terrific report each day called the Daily Pfennig. In a recent issue he wrote:

“I do believe that quite a few people in their 50s and 60s are about to find out that the money they’ve set aside for retirement is too meager to support the standard of living they’d hoped for, and then the forecast for a retirement system crisis will become reality, and then it will be too late!”

Chuck would be the first to agree that none of us has to be in that group—that is, the people who wear their rose-colored glasses until it is too late to change anything. His readers and our subscribers are some of the best-informed people on the planet. We simply refuse to fall in the category of helpless citizens that are termed “collateral damage.”

Intelligent investors who can see the truth are inherently problem solvers. Tell us the rules, and we will figure out a way to survive. We’ll do much better than the masses who may not be as well informed or, worse yet, may be listening to those who don’t have their best interests at heart.

Personally, I have never felt as confident as I do today, even though the economy is in terrible shape. We have a plan in place—a solid diversification strategy coupled with position limits and stop losses—and I’m proud of our track record of great yield as well as our safety measures to limit risk.

There’s one strategy in particular that I recommend for every conservative investor: I call it my “Paychecks” strategy because it’s like getting a steady paycheck—without having to work for it. If that sounds too good to be true, it’s not; the secret is a special way to invest in dividend-paying stocks. It’s all laid out in my special report Money Every Month, which also includes my favorite stocks that you can use to implement this simple strategy. Click here to read Money Every Month now.

The article The US Economy Is Still in the High-Danger Zone was originally published at millersmoney.com.

One Less Sociopath On The Street

The dog had gotten away from its owner and was likely scared, it nipped a person who tried to help it so the copfuks rolled up. The dog was detained with one of the lasso poles but then the copfuk felt the need to slit the throat of the detained Shar-pei right there on the spot in front of everyone.

It was so outrageous, commissioner copfuk doesn’t even try to defend this cops actions. This psychopath copfuk’s goose is cooked; it sucks that a dog unnecesarily died but on the positive side, this sociopath showed his true colors and it is likely future lives were saved by the fact he won’t be a member of the gang in blue.

Baltimore police officer charged with slitting throat of dog that had already been contained

By Justin George June 18 at 7:59 PM

A Baltimore police officer slit the throat of a dog that officers had already detained and now faces felony animal cruelty charges, the department said Wednesday.The department’s Internal Affairs division is investigating the incident, which police Deputy Commissioner Dean Palmere called “outrageous and unacceptable” at a news conference. Officials say they learned of the dog’s killing Monday, two days after it occurred.Other officers who witnessed the incident have been forthcoming with details, police say, but investigators are trying to determine whether any of them should have disclosed the incident immediately.The killing of the 7-year-old Shar-Pei named Nala came a day after a Baltimore police officer shot to death a steer in Mount Vernon after it had escaped a slaughterhouse and evaded capture for about 2 miles. That incident is also under department investigation, but officials have defended the officer’s use of force in that case.
In the case of the dog’s death, Baltimore police Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said there was no “viable” way to justify the veteran officer’s actions, which took place in the 700 block of Grundy Street in Brewers Hill.

“We have no words to describe this,” he said.

On June 14, police said, Nala got loose and bit the hand of a woman who tried to catch the dog. Palmere said the wound was superficial. Officers from the Baltimore police’s Southeastern District detained the dog and summoned emergency services officers to the scene.

The emergency services unit handles many duties including assessing barricade situations and providing police crime-scene lighting.

They also carry the long dog-control poles, which can lasso stray dogs safely, Lt. Eric Kowalczyk, a Baltimore police spokesman, said.

The Shar-Pei was detained with one of these poles, police said.

At some point, one of the emergency services officers then pulled out a knife and slit its throat, Palmere said. The dog died from its injuries.

“Officers were appalled by what they saw, as were other citizens,” Palmere said.

Rodriguez said no motive or provocation could justify the act. The dog poles are meant to keep animals safely at bay for detainment and the department had “gone through great lengths” to train officers on how to handle almost any situation involving dogs.

“There is no procedure or training that justifies this behavior,” Rodriguez said.

Police did not release the identity of the officer, who they said was being booked Wednesday afternoon. They did not disclose the owner of the dog, either.

— Baltimore Sun

Original HERE.

FAT DRUNK & STUPID IS NO WAY TO GO THROUGH LIFE SON

I can’t understand why an employer wouldn’t be hiring these weight challenged people. It’s a mystery.

Welcome to Amurika.

Maybe a few more people should have listened to Dean Wormer’s advice.

Gallup’s Stunning Explanation For America’s Unemployment Epidemic: Obesity

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/18/2014 21:32 -0400

Two things became abundantly clear during today’s Yellen press conference: i) the Fed no longer has any idea what it is doing, or where it is steering the economy, exemplified by the Chairwoman’s response that she has little “confidence” in the Fed’s current set of forecasts (because one can be wrong only for so long about the economy before one indeed loses all confidence in one’s abilities), however since everyone is benefiting for now as the asset bubble is still growing and asset prices are still rising, there is nothing the Fed will change about its current line of action and ii) the Fed has no idea how or why unemployment – as massaged as it may be courtesy of tens of millions of Americans dropping out of the labor force – is as high and as structural as it is.

Of course, all of this should have been quite obvious to everyone else years ago when trillion after trillion in excess liquidity did nothing to stimulate the economy (as can be seen in the -2.0% GDP Q1 GDP is set to print in its final revision), and certainly nothing to boost employment, particularly long-term unemployment – those who are out of work for 12 months or more – to above-consensus levels.

So it appears there is something far more structural with America’s long-term unemployment problem, something not even the “smartest academics in the (Marriner Eccles) room” can diagnose. Surprisingly, earlier today Gallup reported one factor that may be contributing to America’s unemployment malaise – the same problem that is the reason for the insolvent US welfare state coffers: obesity.

According to Gallup, Americans who have been out of work for a year or more are much more likely to be obese than those unemployed for a shorter time. The obesity rate rises from 22.8% among those unemployed for two weeks or less to 32.7% among those unemployed for 52 weeks or more.

How does Gallup keep track of the Body Mass Index of America’s millions of unemployed?

Gallup tracks U.S. obesity levels daily using Americans’ self-reported height and weight to calculate body mass index (BMI) scores as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. Individuals with BMI scores of 30 or higher are considered obese. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index also tracks the percentages of Americans who report that they have ever been diagnosed with various health conditions related to obesity, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes.

These results are based on nearly 5,000 interviews throughout 2013 with the long-term unemployed (defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as being unemployed for 27 weeks or more) and more than 13,000 interviews with the short-term unemployed (those out of work for less than 27 weeks).

Gallup and Healthways also track the percentages of Americans who say they currently have or are being treated for health conditions such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol. In both cases, the differences between the short-term unemployed and the long-term unemployed are striking: Those who have been jobless for 27 weeks or more are nearly twice as likely to say they currently have high blood pressure, and to say they have high cholesterol.

Gallup’s shocking finding: Americans who have been unemployed for less than 27 weeks are somewhat less likely than those with jobs to have each of these conditions.

But is unemployment the cause of obesity, or vice versa, are the obese Americans simply more unwilling to look for work, or are just considered less “attractive”, less hireable, and more of a “health insurance cost” threat to potential employers?

While these results offer evidence of a strong relationship between unemployment and obesity-related health concerns, the causal direction is not clear. Unemployment may cause some people to engage in behaviors that lead to health problems, while pre-existing health conditions may make it harder for others to find and keep work. For many individuals, both dynamics may be at work, perpetuating a negative cycle of declining job prospects and worsening health.

Gallup observes that jobless Americans may be more likely to fall into such a cycle if a higher incidence of health problems hinders their efforts to find a good job. Those out of work for 27 weeks or more report experiencing an average of 4.7 days out of the past 30 when poor health kept them from doing their usual activities. That compares with an average of 2.8 lower-productivity days for those unemployed for a shorter period, and just 1.4 days for full-time workers.

Over the longer term, one of the most worrisome implications of these relationships is that many of those who have been unemployed for a prolonged period may suffer chronic health problems even if they successfully re-enter the workforce. A 2009 study of Pennsylvania workers laid off in the 1970s and 1980s found that even 20 years later, these workers were 10% to 15% more likely to die in a given year than those who had not suffered a job loss.

Gallup’s conclusion:

With record-setting rates of long-term unemployment in most U.S. states, the health consequences of extended periods of joblessness have become a rising concern for policymakers. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index makes it possible to examine health and well-being conditions associated with long-term unemployment more closely than is possible using smaller-scale studies. Importantly, the tracking data can be aggregated to produce the large sample sizes necessary for studying well-being among specific employment groups.

One key concern raised by the current analysis is that employers in industries that require manual labor, such as manufacturing and construction, may be less likely to hire candidates who are clearly out of shape. If so, workers in these industries — who already earn lower wages, on average, than those in knowledge-based sectors — may be even more likely to be caught in a negative cycle of joblessness and poor health.

And there is another aspect, one where Obamacare also comes into play: private employers’ high healthcare costs might lead them to avoid taking chances on those who pose greater health risks, particularly in a tenuous economic climate. As a result, candidates who are obese and who have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more may have two strikes against them even before they sit down for an interview.

So perhaps instead of dumping trillions into the stock market in hopes this record “wealth”, already accruing to the wealthiest 1%, will trickle down to the average American, a far better use of the Fed’s cash would be to launch weight-loss initiatives for America’s record obese population: perhaps offering a monthly prize of $1,000 for every 10 pounds that Joe Sixpack manages to lose, and keep off every month. While it is arguable if this will help solve America’s unemployment (and obesity) problems, it certainly will lower US healthcare costs in the long-run, and will also make for a far more fit population… At least until those who are not obese and also can’t find a job accuse the Fed of discriminating against them.

Of course, considering the efficacy of the Fed’s behavioral experiment this could simply backfire and force ever more Americans to become obese in hopes they too will be “subsidized” by free taxpayer money to lose said weight.

Perhaps, in retrospect, there is no fixing these two intertwined problems. Which leads to a sad conclusion: America’s population may be increasingly unemployed, but at least it’s fat…

Yes, the Iraq War Was All for Nothing

FREEMANSPERSPECTIVE

As stories circulated of Iraqi cities falling to Sunni militia groups, I was struck by the words of Former Marine Staff Sgt. Keith Widaman, who spent a tour in Iraq: “When I left in April 2009, I said, ‘In five years there’ll be a civil war.’”

Mr. Widaman was right, as we’ve all seen over the past few days, and the “high officials” were wrong. The result – and I say this with sympathy for the dead, injured, and traumatized – is that the fighting, “nation building,” and trauma were all for nothing.

When it comes to war, always believe the men and women who spent time on the streets, not the politicians and generals.

Iraq is not going to become a Western country. Afghanistan is not going to become a Western country. There is no foundation for Western life there, and as soon as overwhelming force pulls back, life there will return, more or less, to its usual ways.

If you want to change a way of life, you have to change the deep cultural assumptions that give it its shape. Armies and corrupt sycophants won’t cut it.

Saddam Was Necessary

Please understand that I think Saddam Hussein was a monster, and that I’m pleased he’s no longer running around on this globe killing people. But that said, if you want a country like Iraq to hold together, you need more than the usual level of coercion; you require a tyrant.

The borders of Iraq were drawn by the Brits in about 1920. In other words, a conquering power (the Brits ‘won’ World War I) drew lines on the map as it suited them. But when they did, they ignored the fact that they were forcibly grouping Sunnis and Shiites together, and that they hadn’t learned how to mix.

Forced grouping is a very important subject, and one that is almost totally ignored by rulers. They control the borders and they expect everyone to get along. They have scribbles on papers called laws, after all!

But when you force humans together against their will, all sorts of frictions, insults, and misunderstandings arise… and there is no way to escape them, because the grouping is enforced.

If you leave people alone, they generally learn to co-exist. For example, there is a street in my old neighborhood lined with stores owned and run by both Indians and Pakistanis. These people – bloody enemies in their old countries – have learned to get along for one reason: No one forces them to live or work on that street. If they want to open a store or rent an apartment there, they can. If they don’t want to, they don’t have to.

The result of freewill grouping is that people eventually learn to get along. The result of forced grouping is resentment, sectarianism, and all too often, blood.

If you want a nation of Shias and Sunnis and Kurds to function as a single unit, overwhelming force – permanent overwhelming force – is required. Without it, things fall apart, and civil war is the typical result. So, if the Foggy Bottom Gang (that’s the State Department) is religiously committed to sacred, unchangeable borders, the US must become a colonial dominator. That means a permanent military occupation and our sons and daughters spending years, openly and knowingly oppressing people, “for their own good.”

Afghanistan

Afghanistan is a more homogenous country than Iraq, but it’s not going to become a Western nation either. I spent time in Afghanistan in 2007, outside of the safe bases where politicians and media show up, take a few photos, and leave. I dealt with real Afghans, from the lowly to high military.

I saw a tremendous amount during my short stay, including the worst corruption I’ve ever seen, anywhere. Everything was corrupt, from the lowest levels of bureaucracy and police power to the Western aid agencies. It was a riot of domination, bribery, poverty, skimming, and dirty deals. That place is not going to become normal in any way that we understand. Not for a long time.

A Few Have Done Well

Seeing that the US government has spent about $2 trillion on these escapades (it was officially $1.283 trillion in 2011), someone had to make money on them.

Those people were Dwight Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex (MIC), with the new mega-intelligence complex tacked on for good measure. The people who make killing machines have done very, very well. As have the people who build spying machines.

Certain engineering and private military contractors have done very well too, but only those who had contacts inside the MIC. Independents got nothing.

The people who were in positions to hand out contracts made a lot of money. Perhaps the oil companies and Middle Eastern royalty did well on it too, but that’s beyond my direct knowledge.

Who Lost Badly

The worst losers, of course, were the dead. I’m not sure how many Iraqis died; estimates range from 100,000 to over a million. That’s a lot of dead people – all of them sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and friends. The fact that these deaths were far away doesn’t make them any less tragic. The number of injured must be much higher, of course.

On the Westerner side, only a number of thousand died, but that’s not trivial either, nor are the many more thousands of injured. And not only that, but returning soldiers are committing suicide in surprising numbers.

Aside from the military-industrial-intelligence complex, everyone has lost, and the situations in both Iraq and Afghanistan are “reverting to the mean.” And there they will stay, unless Americans commit their children to serve as international oppressors.

It really was all for nothing.

Paul Rosenberg

[Editor’s Note: Paul Rosenberg is the outside-the-Matrix author of FreemansPerspective.com, a site dedicated to economic freedom, personal independence and privacy. He is also the author of The Great Calendar, a report that breaks down our complex world into an easy-to-understand model. Click here to get your free copy.]

IGNORANT LYING BITCH

Do they send central bankers to a special school where they learn to lie without blinking an eye? Food prices are skyrocketing. Natural gas prices are skyrocketing. Oil prices are skyrocketing. Healthcare costs are skyrocketing. Tuition is skyrocketing. Rents are at all-time highs. At least wages are falling, so we got that going for us.

This lying bitch has the balls to stand in front of the American people and declare that inflation is evolving in line with her expectations. What a load of horseshit. Inflation is now running at 6% on an annual basis and over 8% in the last two months. The fucking stock market soars to new highs based on the lies of this bitch. What a warped fucked up country we live in.

Those Soaring Food And Gas Prices? The Fed Has A Name For Them: “Noise”

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/18/2014 15:30 -0400

Don’t worry about the surging food and gas prices you face each and every day… Janet Yellen says “it’s just noise” and is actually “evolving exactly as they expected.” It is this kind of mind-blowingly ignorant of the facts statement that has the central banks of the world losing more and more credibility (just take a look at the dot plot’s 0.5 to 4.25% rate expectations for 2015). The following exchange between Yellen and Liesman is simply priceless in its ignorance.

This looks like a trend to us…

But no – The Fed says its transitory and exactly what they expected…

LIESMAN:

There’s every reason to expect, Madam Chair, that the PCE inflation rate, which is followed by the Fed, looks likely to exceed your 2016 consensus forecast next week. Does this suggest that the Federal Reserve is behind the curve on inflation? And what tolerance is there for higher inflation at the Federal Reserve? And if it’s above the 2 percent target, then how is that not kind of blowing through a target the same way you blew through the 6.5 percent unemployment target, in that they become these soft targets? Thanks.

YELLEN:

So I think recent readings on, for example, the CPI index have been a bit on the high side, but I think it’s — the data that we’re seeing is noisy. [ZH: What noise?]

I think it’s important to remember that, broadly speaking, inflation is evolving in line with the committee’s expectations.

The committee has expected a gradual return in inflation toward its 2 percent objective. [ZH – It’s already there!!!!!] And I think the recent evidence we have seen, abstracting from the noise, suggests that we are moving back gradually over time toward our 2 percent objective and I see things roughly in line with where we expected inflation to be.

I think if you look at the SEP projections that were submitted this time, you see very little change in inflation projections of the committee. [ZH: Because you are all ignorant!!]

Still believe The Fed has inflation all under control?

MESS O’ POTAMIA

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SLAVERY REPARATIONS HUSTLE

Guest Post by Walter E. Williams

Calls for slavery reparations have returned with the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic magazine (May 21, 2014). In making his argument, Coates goes through the horrors of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination.

First off, let me say that I agree with reparations advocates that slavery was a horrible, despicable violation of basic human rights. The gross discrimination that followed emancipation made a mockery of the guarantees of the U.S. Constitution. I also agree that slave owners and slave traders should make reparations to those whom they enslaved. The problem, of course, is that slaves, slave owners and slave traders are all dead. Thus, punishing perpetrators and compensating victims is out of the hands of the living.

Punishing perpetrators and compensating victims is not what reparations advocates want. They want government to compensate today’s blacks for the bondage suffered by our ancestors. But there’s a problem. Government has no resources of its very own. The only way for government to give one American a dollar is to first — through intimidation, threats and coercion — confiscate that dollar from some other American. Therefore, if anybody cares, a moral question arises. What moral principle justifies punishing a white of today to compensate a black of today for what a white of yesterday did to a black of yesterday?

There’s another moral or fairness issue. A large percentage, if not most, of today’s Americans — be they of European, Asian, African or Latin ancestry — don’t even go back three or four generations as American citizens. Their ancestors arrived on our shores long after slavery. What standard of justice justifies their being taxed to compensate blacks for slavery? For example, in 1956, thousands of Hungarians fled the brutality of the USSR to settle in the U.S. What do Hungarians owe blacks for slavery?

There’s another thorny issue. During slavery, some free blacks purchased other blacks as a means to free family members. But other blacks owned slaves for the same reason whites owned slaves — to work farms or plantations. Are descendants of these slaveholding blacks eligible for and deserving of reparations?

When African slavery began, there was no way Europeans could have enslaved millions of Africans. They had no immunity from diseases that flourished in tropical Africa. Capturing Africans to sell into slavery was done by Arabs and black Africans. Would reparations advocates demand that citizens of Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Kenya and several Muslim states tax themselves to make reparation payments to progeny of people whom their ancestors helped to enslave?

Reparations advocates make the foolish unchallenged argument that the United States became rich on the backs of free black labor. That’s nonsense that cannot be supported by fact. Slavery doesn’t have a very good record of producing wealth. Slavery was all over the South, and it was outlawed in most of the North. Buying into the reparations argument about the riches of slavery, one would conclude that the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth of the matter is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our nation were places where slavery flourished — Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia — while the richest states and regions were those where slavery was absent: Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts.

One of the most ignored facts about slavery’s tragic history — and it’s virtually a secret today — is that slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years. It did not become a moral issue until the 18th century. Plus, the moral crusade against slavery started in the West, most notably England.

I think the call for slavery reparations is simply another hustle. Advocates are not demanding that government send checks to individual black people. They want taxpayer money to be put into some kind of reparations fund from which black leaders decide who receives how much and for what purpose.

FACTS ARE SO INCONVENIENT FOR LIARS

The beat goes on. The lying pricks trying to convince you that we are in the midst of an economic recovery keep having the rug pulled out from beneath their feet. So let me get this straight. The reason, housing, retail, and manufacturing have been in the toilet for the last six months was supposedly cold and snowy weather during the WINTER.

We were assured by highly educated Ivy League Wall Street economists and millionaire CNBC talking heads that there would be a dramatic rebound in the Spring. Well, Summer is only three days away. Home sales always surge in the Spring. Everyone knows that. Here is today’s announcement from the Mortgage Bankers Association:

The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, decreased 9.2 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from one week earlier. On an unadjusted basis, the Index decreased 10 percent compared with the previous week. The Refinance Index decreased 13 percent from the previous week. The seasonally adjusted Purchase Index decreased 5 percent from one week earlier. The unadjusted Purchase Index decreased 6 percent compared with the previous week and was 15 percent lower than the same week one year ago.

So let me get this straight. We have 30 year mortgages available at near record low interest rates of 4.35%, we supposedly have a record number of Americans employed as the Obama recovery blossoms, and people are rolling in dough because household net worth is also at an all-time high, but the number of people applying for mortgages is 15% BELOW last year, 30% below levels of 2010, 60% below levels of 2004/2005, and at the same levels of 1997. How can you have a real housing recovery when mortgage applications are at 17 year lows?

The schmuck who generates the chart below continues to blather about a phantom housing recovery because it is clear he was bought off by the industry. Housing starts are in the toilet. New homes sales are at recession levels. The Wall Street Rent to REO scam has run its course. Housing is headed back into the toilet, along with home prices. Housing bust 2.0 is underway and all the propaganda in the world won’t change the facts.