CHUMP

Greetings good citizen,

The Dow opened down 150 points, supposedly on, er, ‘tepid’ job numbers. Talk about hell, the economy needs to add almost 200,000 jobs a month just to keep up with population growth so what, precisely, is ‘tepid’ about falling 120,000 short?

Make no mistake about it good citizen, the civilian labor force continues to grow every day whether there are jobs for those workers or not.

So what are we to make of headlines like this:

Job Growth Remains Tepid; No Dent in Rate of Unemployed
By CATHERINE RAMPELL 2 minutes ago

The economy added 80,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported on Friday, which is not enough to significantly reduce the backlog of unemployed workers. The jobless rate remained at 8.2 percent.

Economix Blog: Reaction to June Jobs Report, in Tweets 8:54 AM ET
Economix Blog: Another (Seasonally Adjusted) Slowdown 10:40 AM ET

Ms. Rampell is no ‘rookie’, she’s been around long enough to know these figures suck BUT the people who cut her paycheck don’t want to upset the people they work for/with so we, er, ‘put lipstick on the pig’ and pretend it’s a poodle.

Which, in her defense, she KNOWS the economy has been ‘falling behind’ for the past four years. However, the people who cut the paychecks want YOU to believe things are getting better so the ‘shortfall’ that 80,000 jobs represents for a labor force already in excess of 230 MILLION; over a 30 day period really is a farce!
Thus do we end up with reports like the one below:

Wall Street Lower After Jobs Report
By REUTERS 52 minutes ago

The main stock indexes were down about 1 percent after the Labor Department said employers hired at a weaker-than-anticipated pace in June.

Is it fair at this point in the game to parse ‘weaker than anticipated’ to ‘weaker than hoped for’ after so many missed expectations by so-called experts?

Once again we are cautioned that monkeys throwing darts would be correct more often than these apparently clueless experts are!

Which brings us to my favorite ‘hobby horse’ (that I continue to flay relentlessly) the labor force continues to rise while the labor force ‘participation rate’ continues to fall.

What do you suppose we should make of these circumstances, good citizen?

Who do you suppose is doing the cha-cha on this particular batch of the Grapes of Wrath?

Some of you would opine that it is me and you wouldn’t be completely wrong. I didn’t grow the grapes nor did I nurture them, I am merely pointing to what has always been there.

And, ironically, that is exactly how those who do ‘nurture’ these gross inequities in our society defend the practice, they’ve always been there!

Like the question of ridding ourselves of them is somehow pointless.

But they pooh, pooh that, preferring to imply that darker and more evil inequities are waiting behind these so called minor injustices to fill any possible gap created by eliminating them.

It’s the old ‘devil you know’ ploy.

Well good citizen, the fuse on this ticking time bomb resides in the ‘participation rate’. The greater the number of people left with zero prospects for the future, the higher the likelihood of a catastrophic failure of the system.

The system isn’t designed to ‘warehouse’. It is designed to ‘exploit and dispose’.

The hyper-extension of unemployment benefits coupled with the dramatic increase in federal food assistance is, quite naturally ‘unsustainable’.

But they can do it because all ‘money’ is ‘funny’ (literally meaningless.)

And while it disturbs some of you to read me repeating this message, it doesn’t dilute the interpretation you fear.

What interpretation is that, good citizen?

That ‘work’ is an exercise in futility…you don’t work for YOU, you work for THEM, making YOU the CHUMP!

Do the ones at the top ‘work’?

NO, they don’t need to because fools like you do everything for them!

But wait good citizen! The icing on this true ‘shit sundae’ is when our betters exclaim (proudly in fact) that this is THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS!

THEIR ‘God’ put YOU here to SERVE THEM!

Is it any wonder an increasing number of us have no use for ‘spirit in the sky’?

Worse, it goes a long way towards explaining why these people consistently treat ‘The Help’ like shit…because THEIR GOD made YOU to be ‘disposable/replaceable’.

Now, after reading this, let me ask you.

Don’t you feel like walking right up to one of these smug bastards and straightening them out with a slap upside the head (with a brick in your hand)?

(And it goes without saying that you’d be foolish not to finish the job by crushing their skull with the brick on the down swing…)

Just a little smirk for you as we ease on into the weekend,

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Where's the Beef?

Greetings good citizen,

Every once in a while I encounter a piece that saves me a ton of writing. What follows isn’t precisely how I’d put it but it is mighty damn close.

Long time readers should be able to pick out the ‘quibbles’ (which are few.)

I tend to just start typing, which makes a lot of my works difficult to follow. The ‘stream of consciousness’ is less than constant, causing the reader to draw upon their ability to ‘filter’ rather frequently.

Sorry, it is a personal weakness that I could correct if I wanted to ‘re-write’ everything I post.

You might want to call this ‘blogger disease’ as I am not the only one who suffers from this, er, ‘tendency to ramble’.

While writing IS re-writing, blogging seldom affords you the luxury of unlimited time.

You just dash these bad boys off and hope the reader can sort most of it out…

Um, anyway…let’s get things back on track here by taking a quick peak at the stock markets, which are, it appears, taking the dive they should have taken yesterday…for the exact same reason as yesterday no less!

The ‘red ink’ is global; although the ‘Thieves Republic’ (USA) is bleeding far less than the exchanges of its, er, ‘vassals’…

Dunno what to make of this but it strikes me that we would be in far worse shape if the ‘head thieves’ didn’t consider these shores home.

You don’t shit in your own backyard. (For very obvious reasons.)

Stock markets aside, where is this ‘crippled economy’ leading us?

If we ask ‘question one’ it leads us to some rather grim assessments:

Where Are The Jobs?

Most Americans don't really care about the economic minutiae that many of us who study the U.S. economy love to pour over. When it comes to the economy, the typical American citizen just wants to be able to get a good job, make a decent living and put bread on the table for the family. For generations, this arrangement has worked out quite well. The U.S. economy has provided large numbers of middle class jobs and the American people have worked hard and have helped this nation prosper like no other.
But now people are starting to notice that something has shifted. Millions of people are looking around and are realizing that the jobs that are supposed to be there are not there anymore. [I would never use this ‘POV’; there is nothing ‘abrupt’ about our current circumstances! This shit has been going on for decades.] The American people are still working hard (and in many cases harder than ever [for less pay!]) but all of that hard work is producing fewer and fewer rewards.

Often politicians will placate voters by telling them that they are working harder and harder for less and less. [Must be a ‘local phenomenon’. I have yet to see a politician cop to ‘me too’ while campaigning.] That tends to ring true with voters because that is a very accurate description of what so many of them are actually experiencing, but what the politicians don't tell us is that they are the ones to blame for the situation that we are in. As millions of jobs become obsolete because of technology and millions of other jobs are shipped overseas, our politicians tell us over and over that we can "compete" with anyone and that if we will just go out and get some more education we can make it happen. But those of us who are extremely over-educated know what a fraud that line is. The truth is that there are not nearly enough jobs for all of us no matter how "educated" we are. This is creating a lot of anger and frustration, and now even the IMF is warning that we will could see "an explosion of social unrest" if high unemployment persists.

But what can be done? You can't force large [private] corporations to hire people. The reality is that there are a couple of huge factors that have brought us to this point. First of all, advanced technology means that big corporations need fewer people to do the same amount of work now. Secondly, the globalization of our economy means that U.S. workers have now been merged into a global labor pool where they are in direct competition with workers who are more than happy to make less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world.

This all means that the labor of American workers is less valuable to global corporations than it ever has been before. [Funny how the solution to the problem lies in problem itself…eliminate global corporations and you eliminate the problem!] Advanced technology and computers have enabled corporations to operate leaner and meaner. If they do need some old-fashioned muscle for certain tasks they can always run out and set up a facility in some third world nation where they can pay people close to slave labor wages and where they don't have to worry much about taxes, regulations, unions, health benefits or pension plans. [This, ‘indifference’ to the health of society at large is a crime against humanity and it should be prosecuted as such! This is commerce to enrich the owner at the expense of society. These ‘destroyers’ shall be themselves, destroyed.]

What did you think was going to happen when the United States entered into all of these "free trade" agreements with nations around the world that did not have minimum wage laws? [This is where (very misguided) Libertarians defended globalization for lowering prices to the consumer, ignoring the fact that the bulk of consumers double as ‘producers’. The ONLY winners in the global race to the bottom has been the employer/importer, everybody else loses and our civilization is falling apart because of it!]

U.S. corporations are not in existence to provide the American people with jobs. They are in existence to make money. If they can make more money by shipping jobs overseas, then that is exactly what they are going to do. [This is essentially ‘fucked up’ because all ‘corporations’ are ‘chartered’ by the guardians of the public (the government) to serve ‘the public’. If a company ‘harms’ the society that founded it, it faces the revocation of its charter. How many corporations can you think of that are in violation of their charters? Would it be simpler to throw the blanket over the whole mess because all NYSE listed corporations are ‘guilty’?]

According to Tax Notes, between 1999 and 2008 employment at the foreign affiliates of U.S. parent companies skyrocketed 30 percent to 10.1 million. During that same time period, U.S. employment at American multinational corporations declined 8 percent to 21.1 million.

Are you starting to see the picture?

Global corporations based in the U.S. have been creating lots of jobs - just not in the United States.

In fact, things only seem to be accelerating.

In 2008 alone, U.S. employment at American multinational corporations fell by 445,500.

In the old days, you could give tax breaks to U.S. firms and that would spur them to do more business and to hire more workers. But today, if U.S. multinationals decide they wish to expand they will just go hire more third world workers and pocket the rest of the profits for themselves. [And who is behind handing out tax cuts to the already rich?]

The reality is that we are facing a very disturbing long-term trend in the United States. Today, over half of all unemployed workers in the United States have been out of work for over six months. In fact, the duration of unemployment in the United States has spiked up to the highest level it has been at since World War II....[It’s even worse than that good citizen, it is worse than its ever been!]

This has created a growing subclass of people in the United States who feel that the system has failed them. The anger and the frustration in the country is rising every day. You can almost feel it. [It’s a ‘tinderbox’ just waiting for a match.]

In fact, the IMF is warning that we are at risk of "an explosion of social unrest" due to this unemployment crisis. [Unemployment is bad enough, it will be when ‘heat or eat’ becomes an issue for tens of millions that haven’t faced this choice yet.]

The head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, recently made the following statement at an Oslo jobs summit with the International Labour Federation....

"The labour market is in dire straits. The Great Recession has left behind a waste land of unemployment." [Geez, you wouldn’t guess that from listening to the local media now would you? Are things really worse than they are letting on? You bet they are!]

So exactly what is going to turn that around?

Are millions of jobs going to suddenly hop up and return home from overseas? [No, the answer lies in a shorter workweek/day and a severely reduced level of expenses across the board…all while letting the useless banks go hang!]

Is the U.S. government going to suddenly eliminate a whole raft of taxes and regulations and are U.S. workers going to suddenly become much cheaper?

Is the U.S. trade deficit crisis suddenly going to reverse and turn into huge trade surpluses for the United States?

Of course none of those things is going to happen.

America is going to continue to bleed jobs, wages inside the United States are going to continue to be forced down and the standard of living for most Americans is going to continue to deteriorate. [Just understand that this isn’t ‘infinite freefall’ people won’t obliging starve to death without retaliating…then watch out!]

Plus, if the American people don't have good jobs, they can't buy homes. In fact, a growing number of Americans are finding out that they can't even afford the homes they are in right now. CNBC is reporting that the nation's banks repossessed a record number of homes in August.

But for many Americans, a foreclosure is just the beginning of their problems. People are falling out of the middle class at an alarming rate. Approximately 45 million Americans [households, the number of affected individuals is considerably higher!] were living in poverty during 2009. That is an absolutely astounding figure.

The American people are getting mad and faith in the economy is plummeting. According to Gallup, confidence in the economy is way down compared to the same period last year. [Wait until ‘lack of faith’ in the economy becomes lack of faith in the currency!]

So what is going to happen when (not if) things get even worse?

Well, some investors are already anticipating rough times ahead and are flocking to commodities. The price of gold soared to a record intra-day high of $1,276.50 an ounce on Tuesday, and the price of gold and other commodities will probably continue to climb as economies around the world continue to destabilize. [Some are predicting gold to exceed $5,000 an ounce. Personally, human stupidity being what it is, I expect to see gold hit a million dollars an ounce before the gold market collapses into worthlessness.]

These are very, very difficult times that we are moving into. There are not going to be nearly enough jobs for everyone. People you know are going to be unemployed. People you know are going to lose their homes. People you know might even end up living on the streets. [Already there Amigo…we’re already there.]

Just hope that you don't end up being one of them.

Squatting will temporarily ‘ease’ the homeless situation. What’s going to throw the torch onto the bonfire is when people ‘living free’ are unable to scrape up enough to keep their ‘squat’ heated AND keep bread on the table.

These people are already living ‘illegally’ so they don’t want to attract unwanted attention to themselves by stealing fuel oil too (although some will.)

You can see the two edged sword already starting to drop. ‘Cheated’ fuel oil dealers will be on the police to evict squatters from, er, ‘abandoned’ properties.

The police have no place to house these, er, criminals so they will ask the state for assistance. The state can’t house them either…so ‘fuel assistance’ funds will be tapped.

[Although some families with small children will be ‘made an example of’ (arrested and taken into custody)…and this will turn out VERY BADLY for the law enforcement officials involved.]

But (damn it!) I digress…

I will refrain from making any ‘predictions’ regarding this coming winter, if things go to hell it is unlikely the MSM will draw your attention to it.

(Unless it’s ‘unavoidable’…which is bound to happen. Although, some ‘civil actions’ could be disguised as, er, ‘natural disasters’. I suspect this has already happened on more than a few occasions.)

More digressing…sorry.

Just as it is not possible to spend one’s way out of debt, you can’t solve a labor surplus by increasing imports…yet these are the ‘solutions’ our corporate overlords are giving their pet politicians.

What happens when we ‘lose faith’ in charade we call politics?

Stay tuned.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

A certain lack of focus...

Greetings good citizen,

We’re roughly halfway through the trading day and markets worldwide are bleeding to death…except the intrepid Nasdaq, which is up 2 points at the moment…whoop-de-ding-dong-dang!

[Update: We’ve had another ‘God Bless America’ close, where the markets turned positive an hour before the close, while the rest of the world sank like a rock.]

Removing our focus from this very moment and looking forward to a time when our ‘economic barometer’ is much simpler to read/make sense of (did you eat today…do you have something to eat tomorrow?) Before there was as stock market, this was precisely how ‘social satisfaction’ was measured.

Full Stop! Throw that bad boy in reverse, partner! We have a considerable ways to go before things become that ‘simple’ again (although we’re edging closer with each passing minute.)

Okay, that’s enough! Take it out of gear and set the parking brake. The President is slated to make his ‘State of the Union Address’ tonight and those ‘intuitive bastards’ in the MSM are already saying it’s going to be all about ‘jobs’…which automatically tells you that there isn’t going to be anything meaningful proposed on the jobs front in tonight’s speech.

It’s hard to compress some concepts into sound bites but it looks like we’re going to have to try.

Why is the US economy (and that of the whole ‘developed world’) falling apart? Because ‘competitiveness’ is being confused with ‘currency manipulation’.

How’s that for a ‘short answer’? Tells the whole story, completely ‘de-fogged’. There’s no bull shit here nor is it an ‘over-simplification’. There is no such thing as a ‘cheaper there’, it doesn’t exist yet millions have lost their job to ‘low wage’ labor pools.

Again the simple explanation is the people who set the prices of commodities are ‘fucking’ with your livelihood for their own benefit, and they should, at the very least, be shot. There is precious little comfort in the thought that ‘wasn’t personal’, they weren’t fucking with you specifically because it all works out to be the same difference in the end.

I bring this up not because the president for the first time ever is going to admit tonight that we have ‘bigger than you can imagine’ problems with the banking system.

No, that isn’t going to happen.

I bring this up because the leaky canoe we call society is about to submerge for the last time, the threads that hold society together are about to snap.

No taxes and you can forget about ‘public services’. The roads don’t get plowed, the water treatment plant stops making the water safe to drink, the cops stop reporting to work and the teachers stay home…hell, the custodians even stop swamping out the classrooms once the municipality you live in goes broke.

Take that another half a step…the electric company shuts down once enough customers stop paying their bill (so they can afford heat…) there are certain ‘minimums’ that need to be met.

If electricity stops flowing, commerce in that service area stops…rare is the enterprise that is wired directly to the grid…and even that might not save a customer if there isn’t enough usage to justify firing up a generator.

Naturally, by the time things get that far gone you’re suffering more supply line problems due to hijackings and equipment/fuel shortages that keeping the lights on no longer matters.

This is full-bore deflation driven by ‘uncertainty’. When the value of money falls into doubt, all commerce stops in its tracks. You can still barter ‘on the fly’, the problem with barter is there’s no changing your mind, once a bargain is struck you’re obliged to see it through…or you’ll be force to kill party you made the original deal with (because they won’t take getting stiffed kindly…)

Um, nobody thinks the value of money will fall into doubt…even though it has happened countless times before…it even happened when the currency was made of precious metals to give you an idea of how bad it can get.

Because it hasn’t happened here (lately) people mistakenly believe it won’t, or worse, can’t.

And no, it’s not going to happen today or even tomorrow…as we push the envelope out o next week, all bets are off! There isn’t a good indicator to tell us how long things will remain glued together.

The scary part is they really can fall apart overnight. You can go to bed with everything being right as rain and wake up to total chaos, the streets literally running in blood. And when that happens, the only thing that will save your ass is keeping your head!

Anyway, this is NOT another one of my mindless rants, I was just overdue to put the bunch of you ‘on notice’. Time is indeed getting short, they can’t keep the whole nation on ‘life support’ indefinitely, we are not Japan.

That said, onward with tonight’s offering

[Purloined from The Automatic Earth]

Nowhere to go and going nowhere

Ilargi: I'm not going to try and find what the CBO this time last year projected the 2009 US budget deficit to be, but I'm willing to bet a lot of bread crumbs that it was a lot less than the $1.4 trillion it turned out to be (three times the 2008 deficit). Today's CBO projection of a $1.35 trillion 2010 deficit inevitably needs to be seen in that pale shade of light.

If you can find any government projection number these days that turns out to be more positive after time, congrats: you're a rare species. With present policies in place, the known total deficit one year from now may well be sharply higher than $1.35 trillion. Even if interest rates don't rise. Which they will.

Obama will announce a "discretionary budget freeze" in the State of the Union, but that's really just for showcase purposes, and not the smartest ones either, by the looks of it. For one thing, 83% of the budget will not be affected at all by the freeze. For another, the 3-year freeze is expected to save $10-15 billion per year initially, and a total of $250 billion over 10 years. If the budget deficit averages $1 trillion for that next decade, the freeze will shave 2.5% off of the overall deficit. And to achieve that, the president will have to fight bitter battles with representatives who rely on that part of the budget to look good in their districts.

I’d say you’d need to save at least 10 times the $250 billion to have any effect (not that that would suffice), but while this can be put up for debate, I would suggest when the President gets to that part of his speech tomorrow night you might as well go get some cold ones. And then take a deep breath and let reality sink in.

Not only has Obama already committed himself to runaway deficits, he now urgently needs to come with a job creation plan that produces real results. And that will cost. A lot. Of money. That’s not there.

To get from today's U3 number of 15.3 million unemployed, a 10% rate, to a 5% rate and 7.65 million jobless by 2015, the US needs to add 1.53 million jobs each year, on top of the 150,000 per month or 1.8 million per year needed just to play even. That means needing 277,500 jobs every month for 60 months. And that's just if you use U3. Take the far more realistic U6 number, and you're looking at a demand of around 400,000 jobs every single month.

Really, do you believe it? Well, whether you do or not, you’ll hear a lot about job creation in the President's speech, and in the weeks and months that follow. Me, I’m wondering what all those people would do in their new jobs. How many burgers does one nation need flipped? And what would they be paid? Enough to pay for health care? To buy a home?

Speaking of homes. Mortgage rates are at a record low, the government buys and guarantees just about any and all loans in the market, gives $8000 premiums to buyers, and settles for a 3.5% downpayment. And in that environment, the November-December monthly drop in the number of existing homes sold was 16.7%, the biggest in over 40 years, in fact since records began. Now you ask yourself: how much more attractive can you make buying a home? And, alternatively, if and when the government withdraws and interest rates go up, what will happen to housing market prices? And if those go down, as they are bound to do, what happens with the taxpayer trillions put into Fannie and Freddie et al?

30% of Americans are hovering around the poverty line, and their numbers are growing rapidly. But poor as they may be, they still stand to lose a lot more money through their federal mortgage "possessions" when that housing market inevitably starts tanking for real. Oh, and Washington needs to bail out state and local governments. So when the poor have become the destitute, the government will start raising taxes. It will have no choice. And how do you think that will influence the pool of prospective home buyers?

I happens to me quite often these days that when I read through the numbers, I see these images of Katrina in my mind's eye, but this time the destruction's nationwide, and there's nowhere to go, even as the country's going nowhere.

And everybody keeps having the wrong conversations. It’s no longer about how to return to prosperity, it’s about how to stave off mayhem, misery, hunger, violence. But that’s not what the president will talk about. And why, then, would his people? It's much more attractive to deny it all a while longer. And be as unprepared as you can be.

Ilargi is right, we are having the ‘wrong conversations’, turning things around is a non-starter, we can’t go back to the way things were or even to the way they ‘should have been’.

More importantly, we can’t keep going the way we’re headed, not without running civilization off of a cliff and sacrificing the lives of millions of innocent people…so the greedy can scoop up what remains from the dust and ash.

Um, further along in this edition of TAE I encountered this this little tidbit of news, just to complete your day…

Signs Of The Apocalypse: The Return Of The Layoff

Layoffs in unrelated industries, even when close together in time, are just that: unrelated. That is until they begin to grow rapidly in number.

Three of America's largest firms announced firings or signaled them during the last week. Wal-Mart cut the deepest, which is frightening because it is the most financially healthy company in the world. In a surprise announcement, the world's largest retailer said it would cut 10% of its Sam's Club division, which means nearly 12,000 workers will get axed. The news cannot be good for the staggering retail sector. Christmas was weak, but Wall St. assumed that Wal-Mart was doing as well as if not better than its smaller competitors.

The Wal-Mart move will give other retail firms "permission" to take fresh looks at their staff levels without the stigma of announcing firings ahead of other large store chains. Xerox also unexpectedly said it would cut 2,500 people. It did so at the same time as it posted good earnings. That means Xerox believes that it can still wring more productivity from the people it will continue to use. The tech sector is still on a bumpy ride while consumers and IT managers try to decide if they can afford to upgrade to new equipment. The beginning of 2010 could cause a fresh round of reviews of how much blood can be squeezed from the employment pool stone. Large firms that made layoffs last year can now look at four quarters of what those layoffs have done to them or for them financially. If cuts worked once, they might work again.

Oracle is close to closing its deal to buy Sun Micro. Sun's remarkable history of large layoffs is an example of what happens to a company when its products lose most of their relevance and R&D efforts cannot bring the firm back into alignment with customers demands. Sun will now become one of the many divisions of Oracle and that almost certainly means that many management and sales people will be gone by the end of the quarter.

The early part of 2009 was marked by an unprecedented number of large cuts as America's most well-known companies. In some weeks over 100,000 American were put out of work by "downsizings" at these firms. That process has slowed a year later, but there is a growing body of evidence that it is not going away.

The most critical difference between last year and this is that 10% of Americans, 17% by some measures, are without jobs. The economy has not started to add new jobs yet. Each person that a Wal-Mart, Xerox, or Oracle lets go now is put into jobless pool with a record low number of openings for each job seeker. That means there is no Dutch Boy at the dike to prevent the ongoing effects that unemployment has on housing, credit, and the government's ability to improve income to the IRS.

The employment mess, a tragedy beyond description, is still going on.

I’ll stop this bad boy ‘short’ tonight, I’ve already chewed on your ears enough for one session,

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

joblessness

Greetings good citizen,

What part of no jobs means no recovery don’t’ you get? People without income can’t pay their debts so its pretty much a no brainer that folks no longer employed are also not paying they’re debts!

Yet the economists among us think (stupidly) that the people without income will somehow pay their debts, thus all the ‘green shoots’ they keep pointing to.

‘Green shoots’ has done wonders for the stock market, even if it has no basis in reality.


Worse, people currently losing their jobs have next to no chance of ever being re-hired. So we an only wonder how this translates into ‘green shoots….

These cuts aren’t ‘temporary’, they’re permanent!

So only an oaf would mis-interpret this as a temporary slow-down.

Not that we have a shortage of oafs…

There are still plenty of them saying we are only experiencing a ‘temporary downturn’.

Which doesn’t make them correct by any stretch of the imagination, it only makes them wrong on a grand scale.

Thank heavens for this nation’s waterways or there wouldn’t be anyone trading stock regardless of how far they were from the markets…

Yes good citizen, the ‘health’ of our economy is based almost solely upon the health of our import market.

If we fail to arrest our tumbling employment numbers we will soon find ourselves in that terrible crisis laid out in ‘for want of a nail’…

Not only will we find ourselves in the position of not being able to supply critical goods or services to society, but we will find ourselves trapped in a situation that there is no way out of.

Its bad enough that we have so many unemployed but hid compounds he problem of our money becoming more worthless.

That which we don’t produce for ourselves must come from somewhere else. This leads to the horrendous situation of how will we secure what we need if we cannot pay for it?

This is the ‘bottom line’ for an economy that imports more than it exports (and had done so for decades.)

If we don’t start making what we need we’re going to be forced to do without it because our credit card is just about max’ed out.

It’s bad enough that summer has been trimmed by a half dozen irreplaceable weeks, we are now in the sorry position of having to buy from someone else that which grows naturally here.

And we don’t have the funds.

Think unemployment is a big ‘whoop’, think again!

We’ve lost a lot of ‘core industries’ due to ‘profit minded’ investors now we find ourselves in the position of having to replace that lost production via the trade door…and its not there!


We are the ones living on a ‘war footing’, if our ability to make war is impacted, it only stands to reason that our ability to win wars is similarly left wanting.

Our tax base is a shambles because our spending is focused on war, not production.

Talk like this must seem pretty ridiculous to you but believe me, this is the handwriting on the wall.

I apologize for going off again about the unemployment numbers but once again it is important to reinforce the concept that there won’t be anything resembling a recovery until the employment figure are stabilized.

You know this, they know this…so why do they downplay the significance of the nightmares we’re all having?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner