End of Europe, The Digital Diaspora is Underway

(Tacoma, WA)  After my discussion of irrational markets Monday, apparently someone woke up, came to their senses, and figured out that Greece doesn’t matter as much as the bankster-class would have us think.

Besides, says one knowledgeable reader:  The Market Manipulator have made more on Grecian formula panic than anything in months…many times what what the deal costs are/would have been.

The problem facing Europe is simple:

Imagine a camp of homeless people with no jobs and ho hope.  Lazy, over-fed by decades of U.S. charity (in things like defense, feeding the NATO machine, and so on), and not wanting to face competition from machines – or China – head on.

What to do?

Well, you find a bunch of financial bullies, make up a currency – let’s call it the Euro — and then come up with the Guido and Luigi of trade in order to force others to buy the bloated cost goods from the homeless camp factories.  Wait!  Is that the WTO?

Capitalism Flows Like Water

This is a hard one for people in positions of power to grok:  Capitalism – enabled by free telecommunications costs which have arisen post TCP-IP – means that the lowest cost workers are now “flowing in” to all high/over-priced labor markets (Europe and the US) and as they do, social change comes along with it.

It is as Ure Pard wrote:

There is a tide in the affairs of labor
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyages of containerships
Are bound in shallows and inventory build
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current as it comes,
And lose our ventures.

But, not without a fight.

So it happens that today the Euromeisters are hoping, wishing, and praying that the kindly people of Greece will bend over just one more time.  A quickie for the road, perchance?

If you squint your eyes, just so, you can see how this “Tide in the Affairs of Labor” is driving everything.  A great Digital Diaspora has begun and Ures truly will now show you some examples which will become crystal clear as soon as a point them out.

And you won’t like it any more than you liked the hollowing out of Detroit.

But it all comes back to the fact that even though horrifically slow – glacial speeds are common – in the end, it IS THE END  and it’s where economic cycles of creation and destruction come from.

You saw it first in places like H1-b visas.    You saw it when the factories of Ohio were recreated in Korea, Japan, Indian and Thailand.

So let’s not lie to ourselves about how the Digital Diaspora works out.  It’s coming to get you, your job, and your standard of living.

And if you don’t believe it, let me give you more pertinent examples fresh from this morning’s headlines.

Example #1:  Puerto Broke-o

A headline in the UK Guardian makes the point more eloquently than I can:

Economic exodus means two-thirds of Puerto Ricans may soon live in US .

Let me ‘splain you this:   Economic Exodus means DIGITAL DIASPORA.

Example #2:  The Leaky Border

But not everyone sees the Digital Diaspora (DD) in harsh contrast, as we do.

Take the politically correct sheriff of San Francisco:  “S.F. Sheriff Defends Releasing Killer, Calls Trump ‘Opportunist’”

But while Bay Area residents are having a gay old time living in denial, the rest of the world’s thinkers, including many of Mexico’s elites see it clear as day.  They just don’t call it the Digital Diaspora because that would make the problem clear to the public which would then be less docile and more angry about the binary boinking and theft of lifestyle.

Still, as this note in the Daily Beast reveals “Mexican Elites Secretly Agree With Donald Trump.”

Example #3:  Digital Diaspora and The Don

Squint your eyes again.

This time see the middle ground MSM (Like the Washington Post) trying to stir up Diasporians  by snooping around Donald Trump properties resulting in stories like “For some workers at Trump’s D.C. hotel, route to U.S. wasn’t always legal…”

Fine example of Digital Diaspora Distraction…but that’s because stories like  “House Judiciary Chair: ‘This Administration Is Releasing Criminals Back Onto the Streets’” and “Border Reports Back Up Trump’s ‘Rapists’ Claim” go against the liberal’s grain.

Example #4:  Presidential Impacts

Now that you have an open-carry permit to use yours brain – and you know about the slow-motion Digital Diaspora, let’s see how US presidential hopefuls are doing, shall we?

First – The Don needs someone to pass the term up to him.  Reason?  We live in a sound-bite world.  Digital Diaspora puts the burden of today’s world situation squarely on the backs of those who created it:  Big corporations which optimize profits, not customer lifestyles.

This leaves two kinds of people running for the White House:  Those who are “talking about the DD” and those who are denying and exploiting.

As our morning poster-child for exploiting, let’s take Bernie Sanders.  Turned out 7,500 people in a town of 66,000 up in Maine…so people like him  Hell, I like Bernie, too.  Who doesn’t love a hip grandfatherly image?

And that’s the problem:  In our emotional debris left over from the 1980s and 1990s, we have millions of young people who don’t have strong parent figures. 

So Hillary is the grandmother who was lost to divorce, Bernie is the grandfather figure.  And for those who are still looking for self-taught parenting, we notice how biker gangs have stepped up their recruiting. 

And sure, this is why ISIS is working:  They gather up the kids of broken/dysfunctional homes and offer them recognition and support.

Defending Against Digital Diaspora

Once I lay it out for you, it is likely clear as day how much of modern “news” is really driven by dislocations (and misallocations) of millions of people worldwide.

Here’s the nubbins of the problem:  Key policy makers don’t really get it.

Take US DoD –  Department of Defense.

They’ve been working on something called the Minerva Initiative since 2008.  There’s even a Wikipedia entry:

The Minerva Research Initiative was announced in 2008 by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates. Minerva looks to tap into the community of area specialists and other university researchers, particularly those who work on Islam, Iraq, China, and related areas

In 2008, the project was provided $50 million by the United States Department of Defense to fund academic research on five separate themes. One focus was on China, a second on terrorism, a third on Iraq, a fourth on Islam, and a fifth that is open. The goal was to create improved relations between the Department of Defense and the universities and to develop knowledge that the military can benefit from in the long term.

The Department of Defense funds Minerva directly and through the National Science Foundation

You can see the problem, right?

I’m arguing that there IS a major underlying theme (Digital Diaspora) and that this theme may be found in perhaps as much as 90% of the “news” that is fed to us on a daily basis.

But like the Minerva deal, we don’t look at the whole cloth first.  Instead we  go off looking for the China piece, the ISIS piece, and so forth.

The world is like a pimple with a brand new digital core that no one wants to talk about or address.

And when groups like *(China, ISIS, the Hillary campaign, yada, yada) turn the digital stuff back on us, we fall into the Reductionism trap and try to micro-think our way out of the problem.

At the extreme, the situation is like getting out a microscope and standing on the tracks trying to look at the front wheel of the train that’s rolling toward you with 100 freight cars doing 60-miles an hour.

Oh, sure, you may get a billionth of a second clear view of the intended wheel, but you’ll be dead – flatter than a pancake and left as a WTF puddle on the sleepers.  (Think ties and roadbed if you’ll not well-studied in the art of railroading.)

But it would sometimes help to have a big picture view of trains and how they work.

Or, in the case of this morning, a look at how people – like other investors – actually follow the money and as they do a funny thing happens:

The world changes.

So the only REAL News is?

The world’s oldest person still eats bacon and eggs.

Halle-frigging-lujah!

Or, who will write the 18th million Confederate flag story, or 20 millionth rehash of the prison escapes and who gives a rip about Kaitlin?

We go with over very easy, white toast, thanks.

New Trade Data

That and hot off the press release:

The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce, announced today that the goods and services deficit was $41.9 billion in May, up $1.2 billion from $40.7 billion in April, revised. May exports were $188.6 billion, $1.5 billion less than April exports. May imports were $230.5 billion, $0.3 billion less than April imports.
The May increase in the goods and services deficit reflected an increase in the goods deficit of $1.2 billion to $61.5 billion and an increase in the services surplus of less than $0.1 billion to $19.6 billion.
Year-to-date, the goods and services deficit increased $1.1 billion, or 0.5 percent, from the same period in 2014. Exports decreased $26.5 billion or 2.7 percent. Imports decreased $25.4 billion or 2.2 percent

Dow futures are up about 20.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled thinking.