Dear All,
As the country is absorbed this week in remembrance of the events and victims of 9/11, apparently no one gives a damn that the Obama administration is providing weapons to al Qaeda -- Osama Bin Laden's disciples -- the very terrorist organization that perpetrated that event. Boobus americanus has wholly swallowed the media drivel that Washington is concerned about the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, and so the facts about Washington's interest in invading Syria have been successfully obfuscated. In Syria, al-Qaeda controlled Al Nusra Front has slaughtered Christians, beheaded priests, trained children to behead and been accused -- no less credibly than has Assad -- of using sarin gas in its fight against the regime. The U.S. has embraced these "rebels," as the administration prefers to refer to them, claiming they are moderate (Welcome to the world of 'moderate' terrorism or 'Jihad lite.') and that the group has no affiliation with al Qaeda (You can begin drawing your own conclusions about their affiliations and calorie count here). Who in the media are questioning Washington's imperative to align itself with the 9/11 terrorist organization in Syria as politicians attend 9/11 memorial ceremonies at home?
There are the stated and the real reasons why military actions occur and a story must be sold to the public. Always, without exception --money is involved. The Qatar gas pipeline project would -- absent an obstructionist such as Assad -- run through Syria and deprive Russia's Gazprom of its enormous European market revenue stream. There are also diversionary benefits -- media coverage of the NSA and IRS scandals have faded.
It might be pointed out that the Bin Laden rebels receive their American supplied shoulder rocket-launchers, automatic weapons and other goodies without any of the background checks, licensing, waiting periods, paperwork or fees that are imposed upon law-abiding U.S. citizens desiring to obtain a pistol for self-defense.
How Presidential decisions are actually made...President Obama had spent two years considering whether or not to intervene in the Syrian conflict when former President Bill Clinton said that Obama's continued inaction risked making the President "look like a total wuss." 48 hours later Mr. Obama announced that the U.S. would arm the Syrian rebels.
A presidential order...I included the following in a post several years ago to provide a sense of the weight that falls upon a politician's conscience when he finds himself commander-in-chief of the U.S. military. On August 7, 1964 Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (based on an entirely fabricated incident) giving President Lyndon Johnson the authority to use conventional military forces in Vietnam. Here is Johnson on August 9th -- two days following the passage of the Resolution. The conflict he was about to escalate would ultimately lead to the loss of 47,000 American lives and the gravity of his decision was obviously very much on the president's mind. As you listen to Johnson give the order, notice his concern with detail: WhiteHousetapes: President Johnson 8/9/64
If you are ever again inclined to believe the altruistic justification that Washington concocts for its military escapades, refer to this remarkable clip of former U.S. General Wesley Clark.
As an agnostic observer of the chess games played between governments I'm finding myself increasingly impressed by Vladimir Putin. I don't confuse a country with its government; all of the latter are to one degree or other natural enemies of civilized men and women. So understanding that Washington's foreign policy formulation has little to do with the interests of the American people and that none of the players -- those from the U.S. included -- have my welfare in mind, I have no qualms about rooting for a foreign government or dictator (Venezuela's late Hugo Chavez was a favorite) in the Kafkaesque geopolitical posturing that is entertaining in the same way that professional wrestling might be to some. The fact that human lives are being toyed with is not something I have control over. I can either watch or turn my head.
So in the Syrian playoffs I find I'm enjoying watching Putin, a seasoned leader with great street smarts, running circles around the U.S. president. The former KBG man simply does not make the kind of foot-in-mouth blunders that Barack Obama does on the world stage. Putin is also a strategic thinker with sharp geopolitical instincts, in contrast with the former community organizer/school teacher who spent altogether too much time in the faculty lounge. Putin is a decisive, confidence exuding leader -- the kind of guy you want calling plays in the huddle. Ironically, he has emerged as a reasoned and thoughtful world leader through the Syrian crisis, offering a far more credible version of what has been transpiring in Syria than has the U.S. He is seen as a consensus and alliance builder and has become the most respected leader on the world stage. Obama is simply outclassed by him. In his scripted and telepromptered delivery, President Obama appears as though he's continually surprised at how badly screwed up things are. Vladimir Putin on the other hand gives the impression of controlling the chess board.
Friday's employment report for August asserted a less than expected 169,000 jobs addition for the month and a little changed unemployment rate of 7.3%. In the farcical Labor Department pronouncements on the health of the U.S. economy, nothing says "unemployment good" than a plunging labor participation rate, which now stands at 63.2%, a 45-year low. Were the participation rate pegged at its average since 1980, the official unemployment rate would currently be 50% higher. There are two reasons for the plummeting rate:
The first is the Bureau of Labor Statistics practice of goosing the percentage of Americans "employed" through its penchant for discarding denominators (i.e. human beings) that have been looking for work for more than a year -- which by BLS dictum renders them 'discouraged' rather than unemployed. What one's state of mind has to do with being designated as unemployed or not (and more pointedly, why unemployment and 'discouragement' would be mutually exclusive) is anyone's guess but this is how the political bureaucracy contrives such measurements.
The second reason for the shrinking labor force is the growing American welfare state, which facilitates an income and lifestyle for the non-working that is the envy of much of the working world (hence, a burgeoning immigration population). Despite medical advances a record 8.9 million Americans (exceeding the population of Greece) are now receiving Disability benefits averaging $13,548 per annum, while 47.8 million (exceeding the Population of Spain) are on food stamps (Recipients are issued a government charge card, actually). Add in Obamacare and too many other federal and state programs to begin to list and there is no reason to expect this trend to reverse. These people all vote.
According to Shadowstats, the most credible source for unbiased and straightforward U.S. economic statistics, approximately one out of four Americans is currently unemployed.
If this can happen in what is supposed to be among the most civilized democracies in the west, all bets are off. These are the type of things one expects to see in a third world dictatorship. The British Prime Minister is a thug:
Reuters: Close Cameron aides asked paper to destroy Snowden data
UK Prime Minister David Cameron Placed At Center Of Guardian Detention Controversy
David Stockman has written as good a summation on the state of American foreign policy as I've read: The American Imperium is Finally Over
"The recurrent phony narratives that generate these war drum campaigns and then rationalize their disastrous aftermath are rooted in a common structural cause: a vastly bloated war machine and national spying apparatus, the Imperial Presidency and the house-trained lap-dogs which occupy the congressional intelligence, foreign affairs and defense committees. This triangle of deception keeps the American public bamboozled with superficial propaganda and the media supplied with short bursts of reality TV when the Tomahawks periodically let fly."
History establishes that aside from enriching public officeholders, the entire point of government is to grow larger and create problems. The reliance upon the state to continually seek to remedy predicaments of its own making perpetuates the cycle, leading to a swelling public sector and declining living standards. When government obstructs private competition and imposes burdensome regulations upon an industry the result is always the same. Peter Schiff has written a first-rate piece on the Obama administration's blocking of the American Airlines/U.S. Air merger - a combination ironically necessitated by the inability of these companies to survive under oppressive government regulation and policy. It is a roadmap for what is to come in the healthcare industry under Obamacare: The Unfriendly Skies
Ron Paul expands on this theme."Beginning in the 1940s, government policies distorted the health care market, causing prices to rise and denying many Americans access to quality care. Congress reacted to the problems caused by their prior interventions with new interventions, such as the HMO Act, ERISA, EMTLA, and various federal entitlement programs. Each new federal intervention not only failed to fix the problems it was supposedly created to solve, it created new problems, leading to calls for even more new federal interventions. This process culminated in 2010, when Congress passed Obamacare."
Don't expect this study published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy to sway gun-control zealots, to whom facts and data are annoyances. As was recently pointed out here, on a per capita basis Americans are more likely to be accidentally shot by a law enforcement officer than a private citizen. The study at hand finds a negative correlation between gun ownership and violent crime.
"The burden of proof rests on the proponents of the more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death mantra, especially since they argue public policy ought to be based on that mantra... But those correlations are not observed when a large number of nations are compared across the world...The same pattern appears when comparisons of violence to gun ownership are made within nations. Indeed, “data on firearms ownership by constabulary area in England,” like data from the United States, show “a negative correlation,” that is, “where firearms are most dense violent crime rates are lowest, and where guns are least dense violent crime rates are highest.'
Regarding gold and silver...
Grant Williams, proprietor of investment blog "Things That Make You Go Hmmm" was interviewed by Erik King yesterday. Williams points out that the ratio of paper gold claims to physical has reached 54:1. That is to say, for every ounce of physical gold available for good delivery there are claim holders representing 54 ounces for that same ounce.
To any owners of precious metals or the shares that do not comprehend or doubt that there is massive suppression of the gold price -- get out. Given the counterintuitive price action, I cannot imagine what rationale compels you to remain invested. To those who understand the manipulation of gold and silver, the reasons behind it and the extraordinary opportunity the manipulation creates I counsel you as follows:
You make your money in a bull market by sweating out corrections.
All my best,
Jeff