As far as I’m concerned, she’s the only one with the mind, character, and moral direction, and BALLS, to do the job of taking over after this country, after this country is run to the ground by corruption and graft and draining our resources for those who are corrupt, in power, and not being caught.

Eddie Burk show is great. He has been photo shopped and name called A to Z. “He’s Sarah Palins pimp…” and the like. On and on. You know how it goes.

Behold, the trolls and denialists will never get it till its over..and then awe shucks it just happened last night…

“The Recovery” and Other Tall Tales

The US jobs report came out a few minutes ago, but before we delve into the ‘offishul’ report and details thereof, some appropriate ‘contexting’ seems in order before the first cuppa Joe kicks in. Remember: The jobs report is ‘just a number’ and, as such, is bound to be somewhat ‘noisy’. It’s for this reason that a sane person looks at broader statistical data than these ’single points of light” (or darkness) when trying to make what former Fed deity Sir Alan called “judgments” about the economy.

For example, yesterday’s report on the S&P/Case-Schiller housing numbers is a fine example because we’re able to look at how far down housing equity has come since its statistical high in July of 2006. Home equity is down almost a third in that time.

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One of a ‘conspiratorial bent’ could come up with a very interesting question about here, as a friend of mine asked me late Wednesday: “Don’tcha think it’s kind of strange that so many Americans are first going to be forced out of their homes by declining home values, just before hyperinflation that would have (otherwise) made it possible for them to pay off their homes for pennies on the dollar when it comes along next year?”

Yeah….very much coincidental I’m sure, I told her, as I applied another set of ViceGrips to my left arm, since pinching myself in today’s economic climate has become a full-time job with an increasing amount of overtime, of late.

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Similarly, while the Obama administration has been heard whistling in the graveyard about the chances of the national unemployment rate going over 10% before ‘recovery’ sets it, the MainStreamMedia (MSM) has give scant coverage to the Metropolitan Area Employment report released by the Labor Department on Tuesday. Care to guess why?

Mine guess is simple: It plain old sucks, especially this part:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/metro.nr0.htm

“In May, 112 metropolitan areas reported jobless rates of at least 10.0 percent, up from 6 areas a year earlier, while 97 areas posted rates below 7.0 percent, down from 333 areas in May 2008. El Centro, Calif., recorded the highest unemployment rate, 26.8 percent, fol- lowed by Yuma, Ariz., at 23.3 percent. Among the 15 areas with job- less rates of at least 15.0 percent, 7 were located in California, 3 were in Michigan, and 2 were in Indiana. Bismarck, N.D., registered the lowest jobless rate in May, 3.5 percent, followed by Iowa City, Iowa, 3.7 percent, and Ames, Iowa, 3.8 percent. Overall, 148 areas posted unemployment rates above the U.S. figure of 9.1 percent, 215 areas reported rates below it, and 9 areas had the same rate.”

So now, back to the broader context of this morning’s report. In advance of it, we saw that unemployment in the Euro zone has just hit a 10-year high this morning, so don’t be surprised by today’s data from the Labor Department:

“Nonfarm payroll employment continued to decline in June (-467,000), and the unemployment rate was little changed at 9.5 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Job losses were widespread across the major industry sectors, with large declines occurring in manufacturing, professional and business services, and construction.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Euro-zone-unemployment-hits-apf-2455056912.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=main&asset=&ccode=

Unemployment (Household Survey Data)

The number of unemployed persons (14.7 million) and the unemployment rate (9.5 percent) were little changed in June. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of unemployed persons has increas- ed by 7.2 million, and the unemployment rate has risen by 4.6 percentage points.

In June, unemployment rates for the major worker groups–adult men (10.0 percent), adult women (7.6 percent), teenagers (24.0 percent), whites (8.7 percent), blacks (14.7 percent), and Hispanics (12.2 per- cent)–showed little change. The unemployment rate for Asians was 8.2 percent, not seasonally adjusted.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Euro-zone-unemployment-hits-apf-2455056912.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=main&asset=&ccode=

Among the unemployed, the number of job losers and persons who com- pleted temporary jobs (9.6 million) was little changed in June after increasing by an average of 615,000 per month during the first 5 months of this year.

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) increased by 433,000 over the month to 4.4 million. In June, 3 in 10 unemployed persons were jobless for 27 weeks or more.”

You may wish to pinch yourself here, since there seems to be little connection between economic reality on Main Street and political expediency in Washington where most of the recent ’stimulus’ spending won’t even kick in for months. But that’s because the democons and the republicorps want to pull out all the stops to ensure that some air of optimism can be pumped & pimped just ahead of the 2010 CONgressional elections. But I digress; back to the fine points of the unemployment report where my favorite pair of numbers must be considered.

The first is Table A-12 U-6, where in the “Alternative Measures of Labor Under-utilization” section we can see what the more ‘real’ unemployment number is – this is the PhD’s flipping burgers and former IT Directors working as Census takers type people: That’s pegged at 16.5%, up another tenth of a percent for the month.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t12.htm

The other part of this morning’s Tall Tale that most people don’t get to is the CES Birth/Death Model. This number is where some statistical ‘mighty tall’ estimating goes on, trying to guesstimate how many jobs were created that government didn’t actually count, but knew must be there by statistical inference.

If you click over here http://www.bls.gov/web/cesbd.htm you’ll see the job creation in June was 220,000 and we’re led to believe that 77,000 of these jobs were created in leisure and hospitality. If that doesn’t have you chocking on your coffee, consider that since the first of the year the CES model says more than 110,000 jobs have been (statistically) created in construction. Cool numbers, huh? Net year to date job creation in the CES model is 338,000, but more like 694,000 created if you back out the January drop of 356,000 in the model.

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Mainstream economists (you know, the guys who have been so spectacularly wrong so far?) might correctly argue from their thought-constrained perspective that none of this really makes the case I’ve been arguing since 2000 – that America is really in a second economic Depression and whether we label it Depression 2.0, The Greater Depression, or something else that will emerge next year isn’t the point.

What matters is that my view keeps being reinforced by inconvenient truth which continues to leak out and suggest that fleeing paper assets and buying tangibles hasn’t been a bad strategy so far, and that further, when the next leg down for the economy becomes publicly visible late next month, it will again be too late to move assets around and batten down for the Bank and Trading holidays of the fall which keep popping up in the predictive linguistics work.

If there was one ‘investment’ I’d recommend to people of any income level right now, it would not be gold or silver (although you can imagine how they will do in the hyperinflation to come!). It would simply be enough cash-on-hand to keep your household with basics like water & power, and lay in a six months supply of food, if you don’t already operate the rolling-inventory supplies.

When oil gets up to the hundreds of dollars per barrel, the dollar has collapsed, goods from overseas have dried up, and troops back from ‘the wars’ will be protecting banks and supermarkets, a little hedging against that kind of world seems a reasonable ‘insurance bet’ particularly if you’ve studied the often recommended Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects by Dmitry Orlov, or more recently, Michael Panzner’s When Giants Fall: An Economic Roadmap for the End of the American Era.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0029F1AZS?ie=UTF8&tag=urbansurvivar-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B0029F1AZS

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/047031043X?ie=UTF8&tag=urbansurvivar-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=047031043X

Granted, we may not go down either path, but given the likelihood of higher taxes and government spending levels that will be ‘required’ to eventually pull the country out of its depreciated condition in a couple of years, buying creature comforts (like food) now and learning how to grow more, is the be-all, end-all of no brainers.

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My friend Robin Landry whose outlook I share with you now and then, and who is another student of longwave economics, often reminds me that “What flips a good-sized recession over into a full-on depression is drought. Which brings me to an even more important ‘big picture’ story than even this morning’s ‘jobs report.’

I talked to some friends in agriculture around the country on Wednesday and several things popped out of the conversation as big Red Flags that we should all be building contingency plans around:

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Not only has Tulsa, Oklahoma has “June ‘09 Hottest Since 1990? but….
http://www.ktul.com/news/stories/0709/636696.html

http://www.ktul.com/news/stories/0609/635430.html
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“According to the National Weather Service Office in Tulsa, temperatures have not been this hot in June in Tulsa since 1936. Only the summer of 1980 was hotter than that year.”

This has me thinking back to the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s Depression:

The Dust Bowl or the Dirty Thirties was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936 (in some areas until 1940). The phenomenon was caused by severe drought coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation or other techniques to prevent erosion.[1] Deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains had killed the natural grasses that normally kept the soil in place and trapped moisture even during periods of drought and high winds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

Something to watch, since the prairie grass – and pretty much everything else – is shriveling up in much of Texas and Oklahoma.

On the other side of the weather, several community supported agriculture operations in the Northeast have been sending out notices that tomatoes and potatoes are at high risk from blight this year. One headline “Blight outbreak threatens Jersey tomatoes” is reinforced by another that “Late Blight – The Irish Potato Famine Fungus – Is Attacking Northeast Gardens And Farms Now.”
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/style/blight-outbreak-threatens-jersey-tomatoes

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090701163647.htm

Yet more reports that cause worry? Wells drying up…or reports of flows dropping – are starting to pop up in netversations. And parched south/west Texas, “More communities impost mandatory water use restrictions”.

http://www.kwtx.com/home/headlines/49648452.html

No doubt, the drought will be taken by global warming promoters as further ‘evidence’ that global warming is a peril to humanity (like politicians are not?) and they’ll put on a fresh stampede to tax farm animals in the mistaken belief that taxing cow methane emissions to hire more government workers is somehow an answer.

The bottom line comes down to the obvious: America has gotten too big for its resources, along with the rest of the world, yet we’re stuck in a death-dance of advertising inspired excessive consumption which is required to sustain a failing globalist business model. But those who would point the obvious must be either silenced or marginalized.

And those of us who are – and have already undertaken the personal transition to a different kind of life are investing in a few sacks of grain, a few acres of land, a few rounds, and a few books; not to mention soar panels since “You’ll pay more for Power, study stays.” Of gee, who would have thought?

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But don’t let me get you down. And try not to think through the implications of the White House ‘pre-screening” questions for the Obama administration “Town Hall” meetings. Ah, such choreography of the MSM…despite the efforts of a few to open questions up to more than whatever screeners pick.
http://www.breitbart.tv/white-house-reporters-grill-gibbs-over-selected-questions-for-obama/

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There’s an important dynamic at work in America right now – and it deserves, I think, some careful consideration as you head off for your Long Weekend whatever…best explained by using an analogy from medicine.

We begin with a description of how “shock” works. Medically speaking, it comes in four stages and we’re going through the socioeconomic equivalent of it right now.

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INITIAL Stage of shock. This is the part where the body (or in our analogy, the economy) discovers it has been mortally wounded and begins to react. This was October 2008’s first financial panic.
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COMPENSATORY Stage of shock: This is the stage we’re just coming to now. The body (politic) has done what it can to keep the patient (country) alive and ‘living.’
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DECOMPENSATING Stage of shock: This is the part where the patient (public) and the body (politic) begins to sense that “oh-oh – this is not working…” This is the part that starts up at the end of August and rolls through till year end and beyond…
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IRREVERSIBLE Stage of shock: From Wikipedia: “At this stage, the vital organs have failed and the shock can no longer be reversed. Brain damage and cell death have occurred. Death will occur imminently.” Seems the Western profits before humans global paradigm will go down this road, too.

On this last point, seems we get to that part in 2010…but those details will be in next predictive linguistics run from http://www.halfpasthuman.com due out about July 20th, or so.