George Ure

This is the kind of thing that would normally show up in ours Peoplenomics subscriber reading, but it’s of broad enough interest, you might want to read it whole as time this weekend permits.

It’s from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.  Yes, he’s a self-described socialist, but no, that doesn’t make him wrong – and here’s why:

As I’ve been writing about for more than a dozen years now, there’s a titanic battle going on between good and evil.  One aspect of that fight is the concentration of the world’s wealth into fewer and fewer hands while the ultra-rich have now got their hands on the neck of government so tightly that we might as well put government policies up for bid on eBay.

Between  the special interest groups of the One Percenters and the K Street Mafioso’s – the lobbying/influence buyers – socialist Sanders is one of the few talking common sense. 

From his website:

With the wealth gap in the United States growing and greater already than in any other major country, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday called for a progressive estate tax on multi-millionaires and billionaires.   “A nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much while so many have so little. We need a tax system which asks the billionaire class to pay its fair share of taxes and which reduces the obscene degree of wealth inequality in America,” Sanders said in a speech to the Vermont AFL-CIO annual convention in South Burlington, Vermont.

The growing wealth gap in the U.S. is worse now than at any time since 1928, the year before the Great Depression began. The top 1 percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. The richest 400 Americans have amassed more than $2 trillion in wealth, a sum greater than all of the assets of the bottom 150 million Americans combined.  One family, the Waltons of Wal-Mart fame, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans.

While the rich are becoming richer, more Americans live in poverty today than at any time in our nation’s history.  Half of all Americans have less than $10,000 in savings. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty – 22 percent – than any other major country.

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(Gig Harbor, WA) My note (Coping: Paint-balling the Internet) Friday reminded me that as smart as we like to think we are, when it comes to sizing up new technologies, we’re actually not that smart.  As evidence, I’d pointed to the numerous companies that various researchers have proposed will be the modern analogs to Radio Corporation of America during it’s 1919 inception through the end of World War II.

As discussed Friday, looking at the analogy between that new communications medium Radio in the 1920’s and our more recent familiarization with the full-spectrum of networked communications (e.g. text, hypertext, texting and Big Data) we don’t seem to really have a firm grip on how to best assess and invest in the emerging Big Data world.

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Hot off the pixels from the Labor Department:

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 142,000 in August, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 6.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in professional and business services and in health care. Household Survey Data In August, both the unemployment rate (6.1 percent) and the number of unemployed persons (9.6 million) changed little.

Over the year, the unemployment rate and the number of unemployed persons were down by 1.1 percentage points and 1.7 million, respectively.

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates in August showed little or no change for adult men (5.7 percent), adult women (5.7 percent), teenagers (19.6 percent), whites (5.3 percent), blacks (11.4 percent), and Hispanics (7.5 percent). The jobless rate for Asians was 4.5 percent (not seasonally adjusted), little changed from a year earlier

Sound good?  Well, hold on.  We need to drill down a bit.

First:  The labor participation rate actually dropped back to 62.8% from 62.9% last month.

What’s more, the labor force shrank by 64,000 people.  Was there a half-Rapture I missed?  (Not that I’d be surprised by that…)

Of these jobs, 142,000 new jobs fully  102,000 were “estimated into existence” by the CES/Birth-Death Model.

The number of people actually working was up a scant 16,000 and (is this fun, or what?) the U-6 long-term unemployment rate dropped from 12.2% last month to (just?) 12.0% this month.

Of course, what that means is that only the richest 10% of Americans have seen  their real incomes rise under the Changer’s regime.  The whole bloody-awful mess is over here, but check out this snip:

Real mean family wealth remained flat between 2010 and 2013. In 2013 mean wealth was $99,200 for the lowest income group, $380,600 for the middle income group and $3.3 million for the top income group. From 2007 to 2010 all groups experienced a decline in mean wealth. The lowest income group had the largest decline.

Sound like “The Rich get richer and the poor…well, that’s US…?”

Which means we’ve all been working our asses off to do what?  Maybe break even.  Average wages for the month were up 6-cents an hour.  Average work week is stuck at 34.5 hours, so the average increase in pay was  (you’ll love this) $2.07.  don’t spend it all in one place, sport.

Bet that makes you want to get up and go hump-it for 60-hours next week, on two or more jobs, doesn’t it?

Remember what researchers like Joseph Tainter have warned:  Complex civilizations (not sure we qualify, though) tend to disintegrate when the marginal rate of return on increased effort falls below zero.  now, go read that Fed report and tell me where you are…

Oh…don’t check your calendar:  The housing mess melted in 2008 and here are are (how many years later) and it’s still just talk about reforming LIBOR.

Can’t rush into change, now, can we?  Gotta keep them bankster fellows rich and rolling in it.

Quick – look surprised.

More after this…

              

Selling “Coalition”

The US has been the world’s “cop” for a long time – and it’s not an inexpensive project. 

By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, we could dramatically reduce the balance of trade problem by simply slapping a “US Defense Tariff” on all goods sold in the USA. 

Say you’re Europe, for example.

Most people don’t know that Germany didn’t pay off the last of its WW I debt until 2010.

Then there’s the matter of money due from Iraq following the Gulf War.  As Wikipedia reports:

After the Gulf War, Iraq accepted United Nations Security Council resolution 687, which declared Iraq’s financial liability for damage caused in its invasion of Kuwait. The United Nations Compensation Commission (“UNCC”) was established, and US$350 billion in claims were filed by governments, corporations, and individuals.

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The week’s last deep public ponder is not about economics, but about a phenomena that I think of as “paint-balling the news.”

Here’s the way it works:

A story breaks – something with huge emotional content like the tragic events in Ferguson, Missouri in the Michael Brown shooting case.

The events are slowly (and unevenly) reported in the mainstream media, but as is so often the case, there are seemingly deliberate spins and twists of events that appear almost immediately and continue on into the future for some period of weeks, or months.

This is what I think of as the “paint-balling” part:  A few facts are released (but not in depth and this leads to speculation).  And then people start to “pile on” (sort of like paintball) and suddenly the whole country seems to become partisans in a social reaction to a news story.

In columns here, I have referred to alleged injuries sustained by the Ferguson cop who was the apparent shooter in the case.  But that quickly brought out name-calling.  So let’s see what we can piece together about the alleged injury to the police officer involved.

First, we hear from the police chief in Ferguson that the officer received injuries.  Later reports from credible local media evolved to facial injuries.

But over the past week, or so, if you listen closely, you can hear the familiar Splat! of the trolls who “paint-ball the news” in an effort to press their own agenda.

It’s at this level that the alleged photos of the officer which turn out to be (again allegedly) of a Moto crosser begin to cross the net.

And next thing you know, the (alleged/concocted) photos are being denied at places like Snopes.com and the next thing you know, public opinion flips around so that anyone who mentions (alleged) injuries to the police officer is now a hopeless racial bigot.  The picture hoax blurs with the official reports.

The next thing you know, I’ve got an email inbox filling with hate mail for referring to the (alleged) injuries of the officer.

As you can see, the “paint-balling” of the news has really kicked in over the past  couple of weeks.  The police chief says the cop was injured, some local St. Louis area media report facial injuries that MAY involve bone damage, but no, that alleged photo was (reportedly) fake and that’s one reason I don’t try to get into details after the fact.  We’re in a kind of data gap.

I prefer to wait for as much data as possible.  But even here, we have a serious problem – one that makes paint-balling the news so easy:  Officialdom is often inexcusably slow  and not very forthcoming about pertinent details of the case.

While the police chief says there were injuries, the official extent hasn’t been made clear unless I’ve missed it.  Which is a possibility.

This opens the door to the paint ballers and trolls who have now smeared the story into a widening camp of partisans, rather than thoughtful citizens who are taking the “Show us the data” moderate approach.

To be sure, there is something wrong with the racial composition of the Ferguson police force and that’s fair game for Eric Holder and Justice to be looking into.  However, my point in an earlier column this week is that when surrounding jurisdictions get pulled into the mix, they shouldn’t be limited to St. Louis County, Missouri:  They should be applied uniformly coast-to-coast.

Otherwise, what wells up is the idea that if you want a police department to be reviewed as to whether it reflects the racial composition of the law enforcement area, all you need is a number of nights of rioting and here come the feds.

The problem becomes like pixilation in computers:  The picture may look OK when viewed from across the room, or at the State level, but if you zoom in enough, there will be increasing variances as you soon in (like Ferguson’s apparent force composition).

Question:  Does the racial composition of a police force come down to the state, county, city, or precinct/ward level?

Obviously, this is not something you can’t look up in the Constitution.  That was written back when only land-owners were considered worthy of voting – something that today would make banks the largest ultimate property owners, I suppose.

I’ll leave it to the legal scholar readers to comment on this one – it’s over my pay-grade.

# # #

Ferguson isn’t the only episode of “paint-balling” the news.

The MH-17 preliminary report is due out next Tuesday and the “paint-balling” blur of this one has mostly smeared any chance of hard analysis of what to expect.

The gov-trolls and many others go with the idea that Putin is all bad and that it must have been Russia that show down the jetliner and killed all those people.

But the Russia-friendly media maintains it was a stealth/off radar Ukrainian jet (though made in Russia) that shot down the plane.

Off on the sidelines are hopeless data junkies like me who ask other questions (What the hell was the plane flying over a war zone for?) and it’s here that derelict officialdom pops up again.

Unless that is addressed in the preliminary report, MH-17 will continue being paint-balled on the net.

When I last checked the news budget for Tuesday, no press conference was planned to accompany the initial findings on MH-17, so we’re braced for further “paint-balling” of the  story as early as mere minutes after the press release hits.

Absent actual facts, who need’s ‘em?  There’s really not much law (and even less responsibility) on the internet.

About the only useful purpose that such paint-balling to come will serve is to indicate who holds the upper hand in press manipulation:  NATO which is Kremliphobic, or Putin’s posse  is paranoid that anything coming east from the Danube is a Western attack.

That’s the makings of a Death Dance.

# # #

Take any conflict in the world today and singular events become paint-balling targets.  The Gaza-Israel mess is another fine example.

It leaves us with an  uncomfortable feeling that while the internet has done a tremendous amount of general good in terms of education and allowing people to go looking for facts on their own, there is a growing problem of paint-balling.

In many ways it is similar to the problems of radio in the 1930’s before the Communications Act of 1934.

Radio had its analog to the paint-ballers of the ‘net.  One might argue that the case of 1930’s Catholic radio activist Charles (father) Coughlin is something of a prototype for today’s paradigm:  (From Wikipedia)

Early in his radio career, Coughlin was a vocal supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal. By 1934 he became a harsh critic of Roosevelt as too friendly to bankers. In 1934 he announced a new political organization called the National Union for Social Justice. He wrote a platform calling for monetary reforms, the nationalization of major industries and railroads, and protection of the rights of labor. The membership ran into the millions, but it was not well-organized at the local level.^[1]

After hinting at attacks on Jewish bankers, Coughlin began to use his radio program to issue antisemitic commentary, and in the late 1930s to support some of the policies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

It was this kind of (then) “new media” uprising that may be expected any old time on the ‘net.  Which side, or which agenda is promoted, will likely matter less than the specifics of policy that are likely to follow.

While the US Army is worrying (at the doctrine level) how to worry about a mega-city uprising, sooner or later it will dawn on policymakers that just as slapping limits on media in the Great Depression made sense  in the lead-up to WW II, so too we might see similar logic applied today in a run-up to WW III.

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No, I have not read Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” cover to cover.  But that’s OK, because our discussion here is not about the troubles between Russia and France.  It’s the troubles of today and how things in the international stewpot work out in the age of swaying populations

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: Who do we believe when comes to the mess in Ukraine and how do we shade our investment decisions with the possibility of wider war in Eastern Europe?

It’s not a simple question.  But it is one of our own making.

This assertion is based on two simple facts.  The first being the operations of the US State Department which sided with the right-wing/ultra-nationalists in Ukraine back in December.  If you remember the famous cookie episode.

.The second Western gaffe came at an April press conference (that I happened to catch on RT live on FTA) television.  In that episode, the EU announced to a shocked Vlad Putin that they had designs on a “European Union that stretches from Lisbon to Vladivostok.”

Except for one small detail:  What Putin had proposed was not the absorption of government authority from Eastern Europe, but rather an autonomous region.  But in April, the (idiots) of the European Union claimed ownership of the idea  and it was to be their trade area, not a shared one.

It’s like have one driveway serve two homes.

Putin’s announcement of support was for the idea of a shared driveway.  The European response was (essentially) to claim not only superior use rights of the driveway, but to  erect toll booths and begin traffic enforcement.

With a history of European invasions, that got to be too much and it has driven Putin into a difficult spot, since every nation has its share of ultranationalists just like we have ‘em in the United States.

Back in April/May I hinted that wars don’t come overnight; they cast a long shadow before them.

Six months is a decent starting estimate from mid April, so we still have another month or two to run before the actual outbreak of hostilities should be apparent.  But in the meantime we are in now is what amounts to foreplay.

The specific reason for mentioning this now is that a high-ranking group of former US officials have sent a letter to Germany’s Angela Merkel arguing that Ukraine should (among other things) not be fast-tracked into NATO membership for Kiev.

From the Russian standpoint, that would be the equivalent of hiring a SWAT Team to patrol the “shared driveway” and given the millions who died in defense of Russia in the Great War (WW II) that’s not the way to go about promoting peace.

Doubtless, many of the “My country right or wrong” crowd don’t want to question the “offishul” Western narrative (fairytale), but when we read the bio of Victoria Nuland of our State Department, we catch her links to the same thinking that founded the Project for a New American Century – another colossal foreign policy disaster.  The invasion of Iraq and excessive emphasis on war-making over diplomacy (not to mention the regime change mantra) are a few of their previous outcomes.

It was the PNAC philosophy of regime change that led to ISIS, too, but of course we don’t see that much in headlines.  But a note from my consigliore on point seems about right:

Per our past discussion.   This article actually has solid links which detail the US involvement in building up ISIS.
I, and probably you, have read all this information over the past three years, but this brings it together all the bits and pieces into one linked piece.  For some reason I missed Seymour Hersh’s article this spring on this, which based upon his past work is probably pretty good, so I need to find it. 

The coming difficulty with Ukraine/Russia is well-described by US military professionals:  You reach a point in a pending conflict (while the preps and arms shipments are still in motion) that momentum begins to drive policy.

And that’s the point of this note this morning – to become acutely aware of the passing of the tipping point this fall where momentum in the EU and Kremlin will begin to run ahead of policy and common sense.  We’re almost there.

If it does, radiation from Fukushima will be the least of our worries,  An

If through some miracle the momentum is insufficient to light up World War III/IV, would it be asking too much of the  Changer in Chief to clean house at the State Department and come up with a policy team that doesn’t consistently lay the seeds of “next conflict” every couple of years?

You see, the major problem in the world today is economic rather than political in nature.

The European Union is a fiscal disaster and they’ve gotten stuck in “expand or implode” mode.  So, too, the US is in the same pickle. 

Absent the political will to attack the real sources of the world’s ills (like the offshore bankers that make untold billions on illicit arms sales (US and Russia compete head on in this arena, but let’s not forget how the bankster class facilitate tax avoidance for the elite/rich and corporations as well…), we’ll continue to reap the bitter harvest of agenda-driven half-think.

The only good I can see coming of it is a never-ending stream of lies from all parties (about wars, enemies, climate change, yada, yada) that will give the internet bleacher crowd a virtually unending stream of fodder well into the infinite future.

Disconventional Language

Got me!

Several readers (more awake than I was yesterday at 2:30 AM Pacific) clubbed me on using the word mute instead of moot.  Reader Marc down in Florida, for example:

You started today with 

“I’m not sure who will take down America:  Jihadists, hackers, Vlad Putin, or corporations.  But, one thing is certain:  The question is far from mute.”

Dollars to donuts, I bet you meant the last word to be “moot”!  Google gives 2 hits on “question is far from mute” but 357 on “question is far from moot”.

As usual, I’m enjoying your writing.  At the least it saves me time from scouring the corners of the ‘net for news that might actually affect my life.

Yes, I know the difference between “moot” (as in irrelevant) and “mute” (as in silent).  Alas, I meant silent as much as irrelevant.

Did I mention I have run out of coffee and will be picking some up today?  Absent the liquid jumper-cables, I confess that mute made sense up until the first of a dozen emails arrived.

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