North Korea, Russia, Syria, Africa - bad things are happening all over the place, but America is looking inward again, paying attention to the political circus playing out while the rest of the world falls apart.
As for the election, it will be interesting to see if 'nice guys finish last' is true, or if it's not.
For instance, I can't help but wonder how long it'll be before the Election Mortician shows up for Jeb! His campaign is fascinating from the standpoint of how badly it's being managed, yet he insists he's serious. His Super PAC, funded by the elites who want him to win, is throwing tens of millions of dollars away in advertising that is not doing a thing to move the needle on the dial. That's telling.
Instead of playing off his last name, it appears that Jeb! is attempting to distance himself from his family by not appending 'Bush' to his candidacy. Of course, that family name comes with a lot of baggage.
In 1989, Daddy said, 'read my lips, no new taxes' and, almost as soon as he was elected, raised the taxes he promised not to touch.
Big Bro launched the ever unpopular war in Iraq. For some of us there is still the WMD question. Most people dismiss that as a false flag, an excuse, but some of us, deeper thinkers perhaps, don't.
What the No War for Oil crowd will not acknowledge is that IF the intel showed that Hussein did have WMDs we might well have been right to invade. After all, Hussein had already used chemical agents on the Kurds in the north part of the country. That was well documented. There are pictures of women and children lying dead in the streets and that showed he was not reluctant to kill thousands of people using chemical weapons.
What if we hadn't invaded Iraq and what if Hussein had launched a chemical or biological attack against Europe or America because we didn't invade and he perceived us as weak and ineffectual? Then what? Still, nothing happened and no WMDs were found so the naysayers were and are right to say nay.
Then there's the little matter of the economic implosion at the end of Big Bro's presidency. He and Paulson devised a scheme to bankrupt our country, and it's working even now. Debt is through the roof, government has greater reach into our private lives, and we are tiptoeing along the edge of an economic abyss - barely keeping from falling off the edge.
So Jeb! comes into the race with that family baggage.
On top of that, whenever I see Jeb! on the news, he always looks like the put-upon pouty little brother. From the expression on his face - something that resembles hurt surprise or desperation - to the slump in his shoulders and slight slouch in his back, he does not look excited, happy or vibrant. Poor Jeb! I don't think his heart is in this. He's doing it because the friends and backers of Daddy and Big Bro are pushing him into it.
No matter what he wants, though. The Koch brothers and the rest of the right-wing political elites are pushing him, and they're pushing his family. Why else are Barbara and George out there? What kind of desperation cry is that when you drag mommy and daddy out of their dotage closet to boost your ratings? That is more than desperate. It's pathetic.
Come on, Jeb! Your parents are in their nineties. Don't you think they have something better to do? I'm sure they do, but this is ugly old political debt coming home to roost. The puppet masters propelled Bush I into the White House and made sure Bush II got there, too (remember Florida with its hanging chads?). Now they've called and the Bush family will perform because the elites do not want a change to status quo and Jeb! would make the perfect puppet. No spine, no gumption and, as far as I can see, little brains and capacity to think for himself. The perfect front man.
Elsewhere, it seems Russia is playing both sides against the middle in Syria. Putin and his generals are propping up Assad and helping ISIS against the Kurds and who the hell cares who's caught in the middle. Putin and Assad certainly don't, and no one in ISIS has a shred of humanity - they are straight vermin across the board.
For now, it's the Syrian people who are bearing the brunt of the horror. They're caught between two forces that are fighting for control of the territory. Unless something is done, the massacre will continue but we aren't supposed to get involved because it's not our fight.
So what does the left propose? Should we just go ahead and bring all and sundry, anyone who asks, into the US and Europe? I don't want to do that. Not because I don't have a heart, but because I do have a head. How easy would it be for ISIS to infiltrate the refugees? Out of 10,000 people if you have just one dozen - twelve bad actors - how much damage could they do here or in Europe?
Show up at an embassy looking like a poor, downtrodden victim. Beg for entrance for yourself and your family and be given a pass with nary a background check, questionnaire or cursory inspection. That's how Obie-One and John Kerry and the rest of the rat pack in Washington want it because it looks so nice, so kind.
Never mind that the wannabe immigrant is holding the design for an attack under his robes. Knowing that we're leery of lone 'strong young men', ISIS has probably already adapted. While the vast majority of Syrian family men really are family men, they will probably use the skirts of willing women, or unwilling women to whom they're married and with whom they have children, and sucker us. Just a few getting into the country and connecting up with sympathizers here could do huge amounts of damage. Hide in the shelter of a woman's burqa with a passel of kids, beg for entrance and... And these vermin have no compunction about hiding in the skirts of their women. That's why they've surrounded themselves with women and children in Syria.
What needs to happen, but won't because Obie-One has none between his legs and Herman Munster (aka John Kerry) has nothing between his ears, is we need to refuse these people. Or we need to bring them in and set them up in those remote REX-84 camps Reagan built. Use them as the modern Ellis Island where these refugees stay until they're thoroughly vetted and can be released into society with better than reasonable assurance that they're 'safe'.
But, in the meantime, Putin and Assad and ISIS have free reign across Syria. That contagion will spread with flareups and outbreaks here and in Europe. It's already pushing into Turkey and, within six months if something doesn't give, Turkey is going to be at serious risk.
In the past few days Homeland Security has warned, again, that ISIS has infiltrated the refugees accepted into Europe and the US. That's about 100% certain, and ISIS is declaring it will bring its war here, to the US, this year. They are here and, because of political correctness - which prevented neighbors from reporting what they saw in the weeks leading up to the San Bernardino shooting - no one is going to report anything that looks peculiar. God forbid we should profile someone because they look, dress, speak and worship a certain way! No! Let's let 'em build their arsenal, do their training and kill dozens or hundreds or thousands of innocents. Too bad they missed the Super Bowl, but there's always the World Series, the political conventions, the Olympics and a bunch of other places full of soft targets.
Needless to say, while I'm not cowering in my bunker, neither am I going to places that are full of crowds. I'm going about my life and living in my part of the world - away from city centers and masses of people - and keeping my head up, my eyes open and my powder dry.
In economics, the Treasury is still fighting to shore up the stock market but it looks like they might be losing the battle. China's Shanghai Index and Japan's Nikkei aren't helping. No matter now hard governments try, they just cannot keep propping up the paper market because there really is no there, there. It's an empty void inside that bubble and that bubble is reaching near critical mass.
International shipping - the Baltic Dry Index - keeps falling.
The US equity markets have been down more than they've been up this year.
OPEC is flooding the market with oil, driving the price of oil down until American companies, fighting the costs of regulation and taxation, can't manage or compete. Chevron is laying of thousands of people in an attempt to cut costs.
What happens if our country's oil and gas companies go belly up? Betcha anything the left will first cheer and then, when the reality of what they've been calling for hits home, cry, 'wait a minute!' But it will be too late. An entire industry will have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people from Chevron and Exxon and their supporting industries will be unemployed and gas prices will be up at $10 or more per gallon because we have to import and there are no domestic producers or refiners.
What these limousine liberals don't get because they have no capacity for rational thought is how the higher prices of gas and oil will impact those people whom they say they care about. How will the working poor who require their cars for transportation manage to pay for the gas they need to get to work? If it costs $10 per gallon and these people are making just minimum wage or a little more, that's a hefty amount of money for them - $100 to fill their tank with ten gallons of gas. Oh! Of course! We'll look to government to help us. We'll ask for subsidies. We'll just add that to the national debt and we'll get the one percent to pay for it.
The US dollar is falling again, despite the Treasury's attempts at manipulation.
What's most worrying is that the US Treasury bills - what used to be one of the safest of the safe investments - has dipped to lows not seen since 2012 and the only reason it's not lower is because the government keeps buying its own paper, making it look better than it is. That's a problem because a) those are the notes the US tries to sell around the world to get money in here so we can keep propping; b) with no one wanting them, which is part of the reason they're falling, it's only going to get worse.
I expect that within the next eighteen to twenty-four months, certainly by 2020, our debt is going to come home to roost in a big way.
If Trump gets in, and if he can effectively negotiate with Congress to undo some of the damage that's been done in the past thirty years, we might push the inevitable back by a few years. If Sanders or Clinton gets in and starts messing around with their Socialist agenda - free things for everyone and damn the cost! - we'll be hosed in short order.
First, our markets will crash and burn because no one is going to want to invest here. We will no longer be seen as the 'safe haven'. Then, our currency will go the way of the Zimbabwe dollar. No one, not even a village idiot, will believe in the 'full faith and credit of the United States' because there will be none. Our dollar will have no value, no perceived intrinsic value anywhere else but here. And, yes, the following image of a one hundred trillion dollar note is real. You can read about Zimbabwe's meltdown here: http://www.cato.org/zimbabwe
Imagine living in a country where the daily inflation rate is at virtually 100%. You go to the store on Monday and the loaf of bread is $2.00. On Tuesday it's $4.00. By Friday - in just five days - that same loaf of bread costs $64 dollars! And we are in far worse position than Zimbabwe. As a country, as an economy, Zimbabwe was nothing compared to the United States.
When we go, it is going to be unbelievable - and it will take down the rest of the world. After the first shock, which will hit like an earthquake and then continue with aftershocks, it will take probably take between six and ten months to start showing signs of settling, but it's going to be devastating and it is something that will take not years but at least a generation from which to recover.
At that point, no one is going to want US dollars - which is something that Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS) have been praying for. OPEC wouldn't mind, either, since they don't like the US all that much. If economically important countries around the world peg their currencies and their trade to another currency, the US will not just be hamstrung, it will be economically crippled.
After things start to recover and get back on track, the United States, because of the monetary manipulation of its government, our enormous debt load and the instant fall from Goliath to gnat, will never be a world player again in our lifetimes. We will be that third world country - the 'has been' over which everyone else shakes their heads, points and says, 'see, pride does go before the fall.'
Chickens coming home to roost and what I predicted in broad terms back in 2007 before Obie-One got the nomination and won the Presidency. Then I said that by 2014 or 2015 our economy would be in a shambles and the Dow would be down around 7,500. I didn't foresee the Treasury and Fed intervention with POMO, so I was wrong about that, but look at the rest of it:
We have nearly doubled our national debt in the past fifteen years. This is debt that we, our children, our children's children and their children's children will never be able to repay. We just passed $19T in debt, without including the entitlements of Social Security and Medicare. Those push our total debt - what we owe to all and sundry - upwards of $64 trillion. That debt is continuing to increase, exponentially, by the second.
Following the Great Recession from 2007 through 2012, the "regular" work week went from forty hours per week to just thirty, meaning that full-time work is no longer full-time. In this scenario, a worker is earning less money per hour and working fewer hours. A $20 per hour worker in a forty hour week would earn $800 per week. In the new paradigm of thirty hours, their real wages are down $200 per week to just $600. No wonder so many people now require government assistance to live!
Aside from wage pressure, unemployment is not as rosy as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and government would like us to believe. Real unemployment is still around 10% but after the BLS manipulates the data, adding in casual workers - people who can't find regular work but are sometimes employed - and temporary workers, along with made up numbers of people it "thinks" are working and pulling numbers out of the air for "kitchen table entrepreneurs", they're able to adjust the unemployment rate to about 5%. Which, in any other scenario, is good. However, the fact that they have to make things up as they go to get it there doesn't tell the whole story.
Supporting my statement above, this is from Gallup's Daily snapshot taken just yesterday morning:
For example, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does not count a person who desires work as unemployed if he or she is not working and has stopped looking for work over the past four weeks. Similarly, the BLS does not count someone as unemployed if he or she is, for instance, an out-of-work engineer, construction worker or retail manager who performs a minimum of one hour of work a week and receives at least $20 in compensation.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/187589/bls-unemployment-seasonally-adjusted.aspx
So if you want to work but have given up looking through frustration, you're employed.
If you work for just one $20 hour per week, you're employed.
Real wages are down significantly. The number of under-employed, those people with strong training and skills who cannot find work in their field, is huge: 14%.
'Good jobs', those defined as regular work for thirty-plus hours per week, are at 44.7%, down from 45.3% in December and 44.9% in November. This data is also available from the link above.
The Fed is already manipulating the stock market. They are already determining our growth by trying zero interest rates to make our debt burden a bit less intolerable, but that's not working. Investment still hasn't moved because who wants to invest and get no return? Now they're talking, seriously, about negative interest rates.
Instead of putting your money into an account or a fund and getting a return, you get to park your money there and pay for the privilege. This is one reason the government is pushing us away from a cash trade system.
If we no longer have cash, if everything is done by electronic transfer through debit and credit cards and cash transactions go the way of the dinosaur, they will have us by the economic short-ones and can pull as long and as hard as they like. If your money, your labor as represented by money, is in their hands who has control of it? Take a 401k as an example.
If you're in a 401k you're already paying an administrative fee. You put the money in but you cannot touch it until you reach age 59.5. If you do before then, you're penalized except in certain situations and in those you have to repay that money within a set time period.
In the past few years there have been serious steps taken in government designed to take your 401k funds so they can be passed out to people who haven't saved. The 401k annuity program is a first step.
They say you're guaranteed a return but the plan is to turn that into a redistribution of your wealth.
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2012/12/how-government-is-coming-after-your-ira.html
The linked article is from 2012 and is darker than the more recent articles because the Fed and the Department of Labor have already instituted this scheme. Ultimately, they are planning to reduce your annuity payment to somewhere in the range of 3% per year. That means that for every $1,000 you have saved, you would get an annual payout of just $30, or a whopping $2.50 per month. The rest would be distributed to people who didn't save. How do you like that idea? Your money, the money you worked hard to earn and save, wouldn't be yours anymore. It would belong to someone else because government says so.
That's one of the reasons government wants to do away with cash transactions. You can put your credit card away in a safe or under a mattress, but that's only a representation of your buying power. If your money is kept in digits on a computer someplace, the government can take it, just by the push of a button.
Nine years ago I projected that by 2017 the standard of living in the United States of America will look like Senegal on a good day. We're just about there, the window might be a little bigger than I said back then, but I do think the timbers under this massive mess are starting to crack and shift. It's just a matter of time until it all collapses around our ears.
What's really pathetic are the paper-gold investors. Those people who have invested in gold 'funds' and think they have some sort of security because they 'own' gold. In fact, all they own is a piece of paper.
Going back to my analogy of a tree (gold) and sawdust, you cannot parse a single ounce of gold ten thousand people each think they own into ten thousand ounces of gold. It is just one ounce divided by ten thousand. And that is precisely what investors in EFT gold funds are: the equivalent of sawdust. When the spit hits the fan and those people run to their broker demanding settlement, it isn't going to be there. They will be offered paper currency in exchange, and that is going to be worthless in the scenario I see coming.
But, no worries. The way Pyong Yang is going, and the US is doing nothing to stop, we'll have a nuclear weapon detonating somewhere over US territory in another year or so and that'll solve some problems. Not the currencies and economics, but it will certainly draw our attention away from the fact that no one is working, we're all freezing and starving and the money we have in our pockets is more useful for keeping warm than it is for buying things.
Best~
Philippa
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