Unemployment claims up!

Greetings good citizen,

Here we are less than a week after the incredible report by the BLS that the economy only lost 11,000 jobs in the entire month of November. Well, what do you suppose the job loss number was for this week? You’d think it would only be in the 2,500 range, keeping pace with the latest report, wouldn’t you?

I was tempted o shoot in the 2,750 range, which would get us closer to the 11,000 figure but we have to keep in mind that the jobless numbers are ‘improving’ rapidly so I went with 2,500.

How far ‘off’ do you think I was? What we have here in another one of those ‘orphan’ stories that made it onto the NY Times web site but never got picked up by one of the in-house reporters.

So we arrive at tonight’s offering

New U.S. Jobless Claims Rise

By REUTERS
Published: December 10, 2009

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The number of U.S. workers filing new claims for jobless benefits rose more than expected last week, but a surprise narrowing in the trade gap in October suggested the economic recovery was becoming entrenched.

Initial claims for state unemployment insurance rose 17,000 to 474,000 last week, the Labour Department said on Thursday, after five straight weeks of declines. [Note the spelling of ‘labor’, the reporter on this article obviously isn’t a citizen of the US.]

Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast claims climbing but only to 460,000. A Labour Department economist said claims had been bumped up by seasonal industries laying people off and by applications that had been held back during the Thanksgiving holiday week. [Okay, I can see the ‘holiday lag’ they’re talking about but what’s this ‘seasonal industries’ nonsense all about? Christmas is a month away although most places only hired skeletal crews to supplement their ordinary workers. I can’t put my finger on what a ‘non US citizen’ might suppose about our economy…roadwork never stops, there’s no fishing fleet to speak of…hell they even swing hammers and pour foundations in the dead of winter around here! It may suck to work outdoors in this weather but they do it.]

A separate report from the Commerce Department showed the nation's trade deficit in October shrank 7.6 percent to $32.9 billion (20.2 billion pounds). Analysts had expected the gap to widen to about $36.8 billion. [You know this knife has two edges, I’m betting on the side of orders being down rather than exports being up.]

"Overall we are in an environment where layoffs are abating but people who were fired are still having a difficult time in finding jobs. The trade deficit is worth a couple of tenths" for fourth-quarter economic growth, said Tom Porcelli, senior economist at RBC Capital Markets in New York.

U.S. stock index futures trimmed gains on the claims data, while the dollar fell against the euro.

The labour market, considered the missing link in the economy's recovery from the most crippling recession since the 1930s, is definitely NOT slowly healing. [Its not ‘healing’ at all, there are no jobs] Government data last week showed employers cut a mere 11,000 jobs in November. [Although alternative measures indicate a quarter of a million jobs were cut last month! So the alleged ‘11,000’ figure is deeply suspect.]

In signs that world trade is slowly shaking off the effects of the global financial crisis, U.S. exports of goods and services were the highest since November 2008 and imports the highest since December 2008. [Both positively abysmal months good citizen.]

The smaller-than-expected trade gap is likely to prompt analysts to raise their estimates of fourth-quarter economic growth and is good news for the Obama administration, which sees export growth as an avenue for creating jobs. [Um, wait a minute Slim, who said exports were up…it’s just as likely that imports are down!]

A stronger rise in imports than exports in the third quarter left a wider trade gap, which constrained economic growth in that period. The economy grew at a 2.8 percent annual rate in July-September quarter, ending four straight quarters of contraction.

Even though claims rose last week, applications for unemployment benefits have dropped from lofty levels in March. [Back to ‘fun with statistics’ and some numbers that never get mentioned in the media…the number of working US citizens is roughly equal to the number of working aged US citizens counted as ‘not in the workforce’. Only half of the ‘paycheck peasants’ have jobs, the other half doesn’t…there’s something very wrong with that picture.]

However, they are still holding above the 400,000 level that analysts reckon will signal payrolls growth. [The newspapers are devoid of jobs, there were only nine help wanted ads in the local rag, which has a circulation of nearly a half million households!]

The four-week moving average for new claims dropped 7,750 last week to 473,750, the lowest level since September last year. The four-week moving average, considered a better gauge of underlying trends as it irons out week-to-week volatility, has declined for 14 straight weeks. [You’d like to think that the heartless cocksuckers are letting their people keep their jobs through the holiday season, there are some types of ‘bad press’ that are hard to shake.]

"The claims are on a good trend, and the trade number is much better than expected. It's a big plus for fourth-quarter growth forecasts. People will be marking up fourth-quarter growth forecasts after this," Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts. [Um, why does it seem like Nigel is full of what makes the grass grow green?]

The number of workers still collecting benefits after an initial week of aid dropped 303,000 to 5.16 million in the week ended Nov 28, the lowest level since February.

The decline, however, was largely due to people exhausting their benefits and hopefully moving to emergency unemployment programs.

This was below market expectations for 5.44 million. The four-week moving average of continuing claims fell 123,500 to 5.42 million, the lowest since March.

The insured unemployment rate, which measures the percentage of the insured labour force that is jobless, fell to 3.9 percent in the week ended November 28 - the lowest since February -- from 4.1 percent the previous week.

So, good citizen, that was a headline you didn’t get to see, not in the NY Times anyway.

You may have noted that this particular story appears to try a little bit too hard to be appealing to the image the US press tries to project. Makes you wonder which former British colony the reporter is from.

You can even imagine the ‘pep talk’ the editor gave the reporter before he turned over the ‘raw’ story. “we want to sell this to the Yanks so make sure it’s ‘upbeat’ as you can eh?”

Yes, the trade deficit has fallen but it more a function of demand being down for imports than it is a weak dollar driving exports, because we export next to nothing…food and a few raw materials, that’s about it.

This is where we need to, er, focus our attention, producing more of what we consume will be crucial to our future survival, screw the dickhead importers!

If we fail to prevent this nation from becoming a Banana Republic it will be our own damn fault because the only way to throw off the noose from our necks is to fight…and make no mistake about it good citizen, we’re fighting for our lives and the future of our children!

Perhaps that is the one factor where this ‘class war’ is most obvious. Their kids will walk into bright and prosperous future, our kids will be forced to fight for their kid’s table scraps…and I ain’t condemning my kid to that kind of fate…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Hammer meets Nail...

Greetings good citizen,

Seems as though I’m on another ‘roll’; meaning most of my recent pieces possess a common thread…a certain ‘contrariness’ that the original reporting conceals, although not so much with tonight’s offering as the premise itself tends to boggle the mind…

While the webmaster over at Cryptogon considers this story a bit ‘tongue in cheek’, my own reaction was considerably more sobering…for reasons that may not be immediately apparent.

Interpol and UN Back Global Policing Doctrine
October 13th, 2009

I was thinking, “Wow, this seems very familiar. Where have I seen something like this before?” HAHA. This is just too much.

Start em’ young with Justice League International:

The text says:

Once upon a time—There was the Justice League of America. But that was another era, when the world could afford borders and boundaries, when heroes could claim national loyalties and feel justified in their claims.

But in today’s world there’s no longer room for borders and boundaries. The walls between nations have to fall if our planet is to survive.

So, for a new era—A new League: Justice League…International!

In case you don’t recognize the logo on the wall, here’s the real one:

U.N. Logo

(The Justice League International comic books were published in the 1980s and 1990s.)

Via: the New York Times:

Interpol and the United Nations are poised to become partners in fighting crime by jointly grooming a global police force that would be deployed as peacekeepers among rogue nations riven by war and organized crime, officials from both organizations say.

On Monday, justice and foreign ministers from more than 60 countries, including the United States and China, are gathering in Singapore for a meeting hosted by the two international organizations.

It is the first step toward creating what Interpol calls a “global policing doctrine” that would enable Interpol and the United Nations to improve the skills of police peacekeepers, largely by sharing a secure communications network and a vast electronic trove of criminal information, including DNA records, fingerprints, photographs and fugitive notices. [On the surface what we’re seeing is, as worst, an extension of global police co-operation. But wait, you have to look a little closer here and consider very carefully what is being proposed…Like the paragraph below…]

“We have a visionary model,” said Ronald K. Noble, secretary general of Interpol and the first American to head the international police organization, which is based in Lyon. More than 187 member nations finance the organization.

“The police will be trained and equipped differently with resources,” Mr. Noble said. “When they stop someone, they will be consulting global databases to determine who they are stopping.” [I ask you good citizen, which is more important, is it who is being stopped that is important or is why they are being detained more important?]

Modern peacekeeping has evolved dramatically since the blue-helmeted U.N. military force won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1988. Since 2005, the number of police officers within the total force of 95,400 peacekeepers has more than doubled from about 6,000 to 12,200 in 17 countries.

U.N. police are already battling kidnappings and drug crime in Haiti and illicit lumber trading in Liberia. The aim of the joint effort is to increase the ability to track the movement of criminals around the world by sharing resources and common standards, according to Mr. Noble. He is also pressing ahead with plans for special electronic passports for the agency’s staff of more than 600 Interpol investigators to speed border crossings. [I’m far from being a ‘legal eagle’ here but the thing slapping me in the face is the creation of a (super) police force that has no laws of its own to enforce! Or are we suddenly faced with that ‘legal limbo’ of…’well, it’s got to be illegal somewhere…’? Because that knife cuts both ways…will a warrant issued by any ‘dot on the map’ suddenly have a willing ‘supra-national’ force to execute it? Let’s put some hair on that bad boy, it’s already tough enough to rein in ‘local’ cowboys with badges…imagine how difficult it will be to dissuade a cowboy who doesn’t answer to the local authorities?]

The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is contributing more than $2 million to finance the development of international global policing standards, according to Andrew Hughes, an Australian who currently heads the U.N.’s force of police officers.

The ambition is to create a series of networks to counter borderless organized criminal operations, Mr. Hughes said. Women, in particular, are being recruited, with a goal of reaching 20 percent of the U.N. force and the development of all-female units like the group of 140 peacekeepers from Bangladesh that is about to be deployed.

“We’re working with refugees,” Mr. Hughes said. “Many of the victims of atrocities are women, and they’ve had enough of men with guns and uniforms.”

He said that among the most critical tasks for a global police force were piracy combating illegal arms and drug trafficking. His own officers in West Africa have watched the growth of cocaine smuggling by Colombian and Venezuelan drug cartels through weakened countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia to the lucrative consumer markets in Europe.

The United States remains the biggest market for cocaine, according to the U.N.’s annual report on drugs and crime. But in the past three years, South American cartels have moved more drugs to Europe using transit points like Guinea Bissau, where the president and the head of the military were killed in sophisticated bombing attacks in March. Each year, at least 50 tons of cocaine from Andean countries passes through West Africa to the streets of Europe, where the drugs are worth almost $2 billion, according to the U.N. report. [So you are expected to believe that none of the transit nations, never mind the final destinations of these shipments, have police forces capable of arresting the flow of illicit goods…which is nothing new. Billions are spent every year on drug enforcement actions that have, to date, failed miserably to even put a kink in these supply lines…so, after legions of cops working in concert around the world have failed repeatedly to do the job, is the answer, seriously, ‘more cops’?]

“Organized crime is a business that looks for opportunity to expand their market enterprise,” Mr. Hughes said. “When you have a breakdown in police and courts and corrections, organized crime is ripe. We also see the toxic effect of corruption, because they are able to corrupt officials, which makes it difficult to build a functioning society.” [Where do you suppose the best starting point is to address the corruption issue? It certainly isn’t a police problem, it’s a ‘physical properties of money’ problem…]

In Afghanistan, where heroin and hashish trafficking is also a thorny issue, NATO announced plans this month to start training the local police — a move it has avoided in the past eight years to concentrate on military responsibilities.

But Mr. Noble of Interpol says he takes a dim view of transforming warriors into beat cops, because the mind-sets are so different.

“We caution on making the delegation of civil police development tasks to military structures,” Mr. Noble said, citing the example of an attack that freed hundreds of Taliban from a prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, last year. Although Interpol immediately asked for information about the missing prisoners, he said, “we were really shocked and dismayed to learn there were no fingerprints and photographs despite billions spent to train police there.” [Since we are talking ‘coalition forces’ here it’s tough to say for certain just who ‘dropped the ball’…although finger print files and photo catalogs cost money…money the Afghans don’t have…for finger print files and photo catalogs that is…]

With the meeting of justice ministers on Monday, which coincides with a general assembly of Interpol police members, the group is expected to debate the global police issue and to craft a declaration that would lead to an action plan for international police peacekeeping within 12 months.

Once again, good citizen, we are presented with the puzzle of the chicken and the egg. Do we need more cops to take down the bad guys or do we need more courts to try them in…or are more prisons the answer?

One would think the ‘strategy’ of policy-makers is one where they, themselves plan on becoming so numerous that the criminals will go broke buying them all off.

Or so it would seem…doesn’t it appear that the more cops you throw at the problem, the worse it gets.

Left to your imagination is whether or not the, er, ‘creation’ of this new, albeit misnamed, police force isn’t a not so subtle attempt to establish a ‘Goon Squad’ that is beyond the laws of any particular nation?

This ‘alleged’ marriage of Interpol and the UN is hardly necessary, hell, Interpol IS the agency this ‘new’ force will supposedly replace! The ‘hic-cup’ here is membership in Interpol is restricted to law enforcement agents of member nations…the fact that you’re already a cop is what gives Interpol its credibility.

Understand good citizen that what we are seeing here is the next logical step in the ‘Global war on Terra!’ The unchallenged (and unchallengable) ability to go anywhere and arrest anyone on the flimsiest of evidence.

“Step out of line, the man come and take you away”…likely never to be seen (alive) again…

So, are we reading what we think we are reading or is there something more here than meets the eye?

I think the answer to that one lies with how ‘effective’ throwing more police at a given problem has proven to be…so far?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner