The Week of Lies?

Oh, oh.  I bet you’re thinking “There goes George on the Brian Williams story…” but you’d be wrong.

That’s just a distant “Who cares?”  CNN says he was there, but his chopper didn’t take an RPG but did catch ground fire.  The NY Times has a different take  Across town, the NY Daily News is now questioning his coverage of hurricane Katrina.

While the Williams story may be boundlessly entertaining (pitting the right and left over what media should, or shouldn’t do, say, act, etc) the story won’t impact where we go next as a country.

Lying is, I hate to break it to you, a well-established policy of government.  Which is my so many documents about historical events – like the Kennedy Assassination  – are still secret.  It’s also why FOI requests get turned down all the time and nowhere is this more apparent than in economics.  The public’s right to know seems government-impeded, and likely for good reason:  People would be pissed and angry if they had all the facts, more’n likely.

The lie changes from day to day.

The big lie du jour I refer to, of course, is what we’ve been telling you for years.  We report the government press release, word for word, but we discount it a bit.  Say 90%, or so.

And it’s not like I’m the Lone Ranger and you’re Tonto in this:  The  Gallup polling organization.reported something extremely interesting earlier this week:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Payroll to Population employment rate (P2P), as measured by Gallup, was 44.1% in January. This is statistically similar to the 44.3% measured in December, but it is the highest measurement of P2P for any January since Gallup began tracking the metric in 2010. January is typically one of the lowest months for P2P in any year.

They go into the other factors a bit, too, including the alternative measures of labor under-utilization and the CES Birth-Death Model which allows bureaucrats to just “make up” numbers as long as they came make statistical justifications for their estimates.

And, of course, what will make this morning’s report even more interesting (in terms of fudging things) is when someone in the MSM gets around to figuring out that it seems highly likely that the employment numbers include 5+ million illegals who have partaken of an illegal (as in not embodied in law passed by Congress) way to snatch up a US work permit.

Seems simple enough to me:  If there aren’t enough people working in the US, you just open the border, hand out work permits to anyone who wants one, and then infer that they are all working because, gosh, why would they need a work permit if they weren’t working?

So in the bigger scheme of life, Brian Williams is likely only a scapegoat for bigger lies in play all around us.  Not the least of which is employment but which extends into other areas as well:  climate, globalism, how big government is (20+ million) and so forth.

So with that as foreplay, let’s go jump in that pool, again, shall we?

Noting, before we jump into the cesspool, that Williams is a distraction because there’s bigger fish.  Not the least of which is that the Federal Reserve notes of today buys just 4.18 CENTS compared to the purchasing power of the Dollar when the bankster coup took place in the fading hours of 1913.

The Grand-Whopper of them all is simple if you want to see it:  Money is not a storehouse of value (leastwise the paper stuff passed as money.).  It’s a tool of the cruel used to manage and rule.  And thems that makes the “money” makes the “rules.”

Expat Bruce, down in the mountains of Ecuador, where he’s waiting for the US to implode, sent me this sobering reminder:

“id you really think we want those laws observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them to be broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against… We’re after power and we mean it…

“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

“Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted –and you create a nation of law-breakers– and then you cash in on guilt.

“Now that’s the system, Mr. Reardon, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”

Excerpted from ‘Atlas Shrugged’ 1957, By Ayn Rand

I read somewhere, if my memory is working, that Alan Greenspan was a Rand fan.  Maybe it was solace, I can’t be sure, but if the foo sh*ts, as they say…wear it.

The Jobs Report

Brace Yourself, Citizen!  Take an aspirin, put a clothespin on your nose, a nitro pill maybe, and here’s the press release:

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 257,000 in January, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 5.7 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in retail trade, construction, health care, financial activities, and manufacturing.

Household Survey Data

The unemployment rate, at 5.7 percent, changed little in January and has shown no net change since October. The number of unemployed persons, at 9.0 million, was little changed in January. (See table A-1. See the note at the end of this news release and tables B and C for information about annual population adjustments to the household survey estimates.)

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rate for teenagers (18.8 percent) increased in January. The jobless rates for adult men (5.3 percent), adult women (5.1 percent), whites (4.9 percent), blacks (10.3 percent), Asians (4.0 percent), and Hispanics

The good news is that the labor participation rate came up to 62.9%.

We also know the workforce went up, so there has been some [apparent] progress on the jobs front.

But before you get too excited, consider that long-term un and under employed edged up to 11.3% from 11.2% last month.

And next month will be work, since we are still in the waiting period as layoffs in the oil industry and so forth have to meet waiting requirements to file and many workers, like up north, may return to families before filing and….we call that hysteresis (waiting period between cause and effect).

Hours worked are down a bit, as are wages. 

But the market likes it:  Futures were up about 40, gold got whacked, and oil pushed over $51.

Now, if we could just figure out what this means: 

It’s a snip from the CES Birth Death Model range which says that 275,000 jobs estimated into existence were taken away from the count this month.

But then there’s the next like that says the annual adjustment for January was minus 2.7 million jobs.

All of which leaves a simple-minded person like me wondering if this is the Latter Day Three Card Monte, or what?   Whole year adjustments for all of 2014 have disappeared off the page so no telling how it all washes out, in the end.

Recovery of the Baltic Dry Index?

Reader/ designated smart guy of the day Hans has the answer to our question t’other day about how the Baltic Dry (cargo) Index was doing back in 2009 when the market was at its recent suck-point low:

BDI low was 554 in 1986.

Shipping company, Copenship just filed for bankruptcy.

I imagine that buying a cargo ship is sort of like buying or leasing a car.  Anyone buying when rates are still on the way down could end up in trouble.

This morning, the Dry Ships Index is at 564 which means officially, we’re still 10-points about the previous disastrous low.  That was 2009.

Care to how long we can tread water here?  The deflation monster’s coming to get lots more people and jobs.

AmeriCorps NCCC is currently accepting applications to begin serving in October 2015!

The application deadline is April 1st, 2015. To apply, visit: my.americorps.gov.

Wonder how many of those new new jobs are working for AmeriCorps?  That’s be like counting CCC workers in the 1930’s, but do you want to bet…naw….go have a Friday.

More after this…