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Friday
GAO Report -
Post 9/11
From the
Government
Accountability Office today:
Analysis
of DODs 2005 Selection
Process
and Recommendations for Base
Closures
and Realignments
DOD had
varying success in achieving its 2005 BRAC goals of (1) reducing
excess
infrastructure and producing savings, (2) furthering
transformation,
and (3)
fostering jointness. While DOD proposed a record number of
closures
and realignments, exceeding all prior BRAC rounds combined,
many
proposals focused on reserve bases and relatively few on closing
active
bases. Projected savings are almost equally large, but most
savings are
derived
from 10 percent of the recommendations. While GAO believes
savings
would be acheived, overall up-front investment costs of an
estimated
$24
billion are required, and there are clear limitations associated
with
DODs
projection of nearly $50 billion in savings over a 20-year
period. Much
of the
projected net annual recurring savings (47 percent) is
associated with
eliminating jobs currently held by military personnel. However,
rather than
reducing
end-strength levels, DOD indicates the positions are expected to
be
reassigned to other areas, which may enhance capabilities but
also limit
dollar
savings available for other uses. Sizeable savings were
projected from
efficiency measures and other actions, but underlying
assumptions have not
been
validated and could be difficult to track over time. Some
proposals
represent efforts to foster jointness and transformation, such
as initial joint
training
for the Joint Strike Fighter, but progress in each area varied,
with
many
decisions reflecting consolidations within, and not across, the
military
services. In addition, transformation was often cited as support
for
proposals, but it was not well defined, and there was a lack of
agreement on
various
transformation options.
DODs
process for conducting its analysis was generally logical,
reasoned,
and well
documented. DODs process placed strong emphasis on data,
tempered
by military judgment, as appropriate. The military services and
seven
joint cross-service groups, which focused on common
businessoriented
functions, adapted their analytical approaches to the unique
aspects
of their
respective areas. Yet, they were consistent in adhering to the
use of
military
value criteria, including new considerations introduced for this
round,
such as surge and homeland defense needs. Data accuracy was
enhanced
by the required use of certified data and by efforts of the DOD
Inspector General and service audit agencies in checking the
data.
Time
limitations and complexities introduced by DOD in weaving
together
an
unprecedented 837 closure and realignment actions across the
country
into 222
individual recommendations caused GAO to focus more on
evaluating major cross-cutting issues than on implementation
issues of
individual recommendations. GAO identified various issues that
may
warrant
further attention by the Commission. Some apply to a broad range
of
recommendations, such as assumptions and inconsistencies in
developing
certain
cost and savings estimates, lengthy payback periods, or
potential
impacts
on affected communities. GAO also identified certain candidate
recommendations, including some that were changed by senior DOD
leadership late in the process that may warrant attention.
Crisis
Counseling Grants Awarded to the
State of
New York after the September 11
Terrorist Attacks
For the
period September 11, 2001, through September 30, 2004, Project
Liberty
reported that it had expended approximately $121 million, or
threequarters
of the
$154.9 million in grants awarded by FEMA, leaving a
remaining balance of $33.9 million. The majority of the
remaining balance,
approximately $32 million, related to unresolved issues
involving the
adequacy
of supporting documentation for the New York City Department of
Educations (NYC DOEd) expense claims. As of March 31, 2005,
city and
state
officials told GAO they had accepted alternative forms of
supporting
evidence
related to $5.2 million in NYC DOEd expenses; however, this
alternative evidence provides only limited assurance of the
propriety of the
claimed
amounts. It is unclear whether similar alternative sources of
evidence
will be accepted for the remaining $26.8 million in NYC DOEd
expense
claims.
FEMA
assisted state officials in developing estimated funding needs
for
Project
Liberty immediately after the terrorist attacks. By necessity,
these
initial
budgets were developed using estimates established during the
initial
stages
of the disaster. However, FEMA never required Project Liberty to
prepare
adjusted budgets to reflect new information or subsequent
changes
to the
program. As a result, FEMA did not have realistic budget
information
to
assess how city and state officials were planning to spend
Project Liberty
grant
funds.
FEMA
assigned primary responsibility for oversight and monitoring to
the
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)
through
an interagency agreement. Although SAMHSA had procedures in
place to
monitor Project Libertys delivery of services, it performed
only
limited
monitoring of financial information reported by Project Liberty
about
the cost
of those services. For example, while SAMHSA received periodic
financial reports from Project Liberty, it did not perform basic
analyses of
expenditures in order to obtain a specific understanding of how
the grant
funds
were being used and, as noted above, did not have updated budget
information to gauge how actual spending compared to budgets. As
a result,
SAMHSA
was not in a position to exercise a reasonable level of
oversight to
ensure
that funds were being used efficiently and effectively in
addressing
the
needs of those affected by the September 11 attacks.
Both the
state of New York and the federal government have taken steps to
assess
how Project Liberty delivered services. These assessments were
ongoing
as of March 2005. FEMA plans to consider lessons learned from
Project
Liberty when conducting its own internal review of the crisis
counseling program.
Warning
About the Sun
From our friends at
www.halfpasthuman.com comes this advisory:
"Salve, We have had a series of warnings within this year's
ALTA reports about solar activity, especially in this ALTA 905
series. We have had rises of aspects for 'sun energetic 3 times
in one day' as well as the recent 'twice flooding sun'.
And let us not forget the issue from previous ALTA reports of
the rise of the 'sun disease' seen for late this summer.
We need to unhappily note that perhaps some of this may be
manifesting. There is indeed a new pattern of behavior now being
observed on/from the sun. At this point we can only speculate as
to what the development may mean for future solar activity, and
subsequent impact on earth, however it is interesting that the
new behavior is being seen now, as it forms a neat marker for
our potential series of events.
AND as the sun-earth energy relationship is the driving force
for planetary movements/climate here on earth, we can speculate
that perhaps changes now observed in solar energy output may be
the required energy inputs for potential great quakes, and plate
shifts as has been found in recent rising aspects/attribute
sets.
One site below has
two pages of encapsulated pictures detailing the recently
emerging patterns. These are new developments, and the pictures
are taken from recent soho images. That raw links is provided
below the encapsulation links.
Basically our ALTA reports are probability analysis. What is
scary is that it was seen as *probable, to some degree above
neutral* within the ALTA 905 series, that these extreme solar
patterns would develop. We need also note, that given energetic
solar activity, the *probability factor* for both great quakes,
and plate shift rises. "
We pass this along because of the extremes of weather which are
being noted - and point out that the connection between the
"weather" of the sun and our everyday weather here are earth seems
closely interrelated. We like to think about things like a metal
roof, working in an underground building and lots of SPF 50 when
see receive advisories like this. See following story....
Oz Wet - Web
Bots Right (again)
After warning about
columns of heat and dry weather which would remarkably reverse
course, we couldn't help but notice that in
Australia what had been a record drought has now turned into a
record flood. More than a foot and a half of rainfall in
a 24-hour periods is absolutely remarkable.
Baghdad Dry
Just when residents of
Iraq thought things couldn't get worse - they did.
Seems a power transformer which feeds the main water production
facility has been lost, and millions now face a shortage of
basic drinking water.\
Minnesota Shuts
Down
If you think the
economy is doing peachy - don't try and push your viewpoint off on
a Minnesota State worker today because
about 9,000 have been laid off due to a state budget impasse.
Rally, but so
what?
OK, the market is
trying to put on a little
pre-holiday rally this morning, but the fact of the matter is
that the market is down for the year to date, if measured by the
Dow. A few minutes after the open the down was at 10,314 and
I hasten to add that at the beginning of the year we pegged it at
10,783. That's a year to date loss of 4.3% - and that's
before you tack on another 1-2% for the effects of inflation which
have reduced your purchasing power, and the commissions to get
your money back out of the market should you have chosen to sell
equities. We expect it would be worse for mutual fund holder
in the period because of fees.
Our fractalist G.
Lammert makes some interesting points in his update this morning:
George, the daily evolutions of equity, commodity, bond and
real estate valuation fractals represent a composite integration
of: money circulating in the macroeconomic system including
those dollar equivalent assets held by foreign governments;
credit available through interest rate dependent borrowing -
offset by ongoing and expected bad debt liquidation; consumer
saturation and forward durable goods buying; personal,
corporate, federal ongoing debt loads including future
healthcare and pension liabilities; savings as a base for
fractional bank lending; and consumer forward job
sustainability.
The various markets' valuation fractals and their ongoing
trends predict future economy activity. The prior sentence is
worth rereading. Incipient major fractal decay patterns for
every type of recorded asset bubble in history, every one,
resulted in a post hoc ergo propter hoc aftermath of economic
contraction. Lenders of last resort can take interest rates to
nearly zero as they did throughout the 1930's and mid 40's, but
if the consumer is saturated with both assets and debt, and his
job is no longer needed because of systematic and widespread
'malignant' forward consumption and debt, money will not be
borrowed by the private sector and entered into the economy.
Even in a predominantly state run economy where the majority
of citizens are employed by the state and can have their ongoing
debt repudiated by government driven currency hyperinflation,
consumer forward saturation will ultimately result in periodic
consumption and economic contractions. It is at the consumer
saturation and debt level where major approximately 70 year
turns in the global economy occur.
As the real economy runs into the wall of over consumption,
peaked asset overvaluation, and wage-limiting consumer debt, the
markets' fractal valuations instantaneously incorporate all debt
and saturation parameters into their patterns and provide a
clarity of forward economic direction that is routinely
obfuscated by the data noise and traffic and emotions that are
generally accepted as the important conventional economic news
and causal elements of market valuations.
The decaying US market daily valuation fractals of late 1929
spoke a plain language clearer than any of the rosy economic
platitudes provided by Irving Fischer and the Hoover
administration in the winter of 1929. The declining fractals
offered a clearer direction of the economy than did the
reassurances of the Federal Reserve which powered treasury rates
to ultimately less than .05 percent.
Even the fractal growth in the equity market valuations after
32 rising to 1937 was merely a further low volume asset bubble
for the rich, the only equity players with chips left on the
tables and the only credit worthy element in the economy left
capable of borrowing funds at near zero interest rates.
The capacitor-like primary decay pattern for the terminal
portion of the first half of the grand 140 year second fractal
sequence starting in 1858 was about 32 months in length from
1929 to 1932. The terminal portion of second half of the 140
year cycle began in March of 2000 and mechanistically,
non-stochastically, and non-coincidentally decayed in fractal
manner top to bottom in... 32 months.
Unlike the situation in 1932 where there was only the rich
left to borrow, 2002 witnessed two dynamic, emerging powerful
growth industries at the nadir of the first fractal equity decay
for the United States that continued the credit cycle, the
borrowing demand, and hence the money supply growth.
The first US growth industry was an international enterprise:
the new profitable business of importing and distributing Asian
goods - whose labor and nonexistent legal cost- essentially have
priced the American worker out of the global manufacturing arena
and displaced him and her into the service, financial, and
housing construction industries. In spite of the ailing auto and
commercial airliner industries, the Dow Transports in 2003 lead
the equity growth valuation fractals with speculative money
directed at import company equities and at equities relating to
container ships, distribution transportation systems, and
recipient retail behemoths such as Wal-Mart. The American
consumer while losing his manufacturing jobs, received the mixed
blessing of acquisition of relatively high quality and low cost
Asian manufactured items. Negligible Asian labor cost involved
in the production of these manufactured goods continuously
dampened the US CPI and nominal inflation rate. Along with empty
containers returning to China for refill came US dollars,
exchanged with domestic currencies by foreign governments and
invested in US debt instruments. American CEO's were happy,
global bankers were happy, and the Fed was happy. Only the
American worker was scratching his head while Mr. Perot was
knowingly shaking his.
The second even more dominant growth industry erupting at the
bottom of the incipient 2000-2002 decay fractal was the dynamic
interactive collection of the financial, lending, housing, and
real estate industries fueled primarily by low interest rates
and by both greed and the lack of any adult banking and lending
regulatory supervision. Most if not all of the US's recent 3
years of GDP growth has occurred via mania debt creation from
primary or speculative secondary house acquisition and home
equity loans from grossly over-valuated relative-to-wages
housing prices.
After a basing period of 23 weeks beginning in 2002, a mature
22/54/44 week fractal growth sequence was completed about two
weeks ago. Potentially the markets are 2 weeks into a
devaluation fractal sequence that - by the empirical nature of
ideal 3 cycle fractal growth periods and the subsequent natural
occurring decay sequences - follows a x/2.5x/2x growth sequence.
A strong bias exists that this devaluation will occur in
concert with an expected secondary - but, by far, much more
substantial decay fractal period- oconcludng the 140 year Second
Grand Fractal Cycle for the United States economy - now in its
147 year. An empirical bias exists that the decay will be
unexpectedly abrupt - and be not nearly as slow as the 32 month
evolutionary decay fractal pattern that occurred at the end of
its first half cycle in 1929 and during the primary decay
fractal sequence of the second half of the 140 year cycle from
March 2000 to October 2002.
The long term note and bond markets have incorporated the
coming economic retreat in their fractal valuations. Locking in
the current long term interest rate of four to five per cent in
a potentially deflationary environment is a great bargain. In
late 2000 for four or so months, the US ten year notes inverted
in yield below the 3 month treasuries as the long term bond
market received relatively greater money inflow and competition
than the short term debt market. In the last four months of
2000, the market efficiency 'tried' to lock in 5 and 3/4 percent
long term yields. Those 5 and 3/4 percent long term yields did
very well in comparison to the subsequent three years of general
performance of the equity markets.
At the current market juncture it is reasonable to expect the
competition for long term US debt to once again be fierce,
fueled by an ample supply Asian government held US dollars and
the motivation to lock in, dejavu, as in late 2000, a ten year 4
percent, 30 year 5 percent annual return. With the scramble for
dollars for long term US debt investment, dollar valuation
relative to other currencies should temporarily be enhanced. An
inversion of the short term and the long term interest rate
spreads should occur in concert with the ongoing fractal decay
of equities.
While the prior fractal predictions made two weeks ago for
the expected terminal Wilshire top of 2002-2006, is, thus far,
(exactly) correct with regard to day 17 or 18 of the predicted
interpolated 9 day first base fractal sequence, specifically on
17 June and 20 June 2005 respectively - and the expected fractal
low of a 9 day first fractal base occurred as predicted on day
23, 27 June, constant recalibration of the subsequent unfolding
decay fractal sequence is reasonable.
While there are a plethora of individual equity fractal
valuation examples indicating a major near term secondary top,
GM will do. GM has disencumbered its sales parking lots of 2005
models by offering deals normally given only to GM production
family members. While the US python consumer has ingested a
small pig of GM cars over the last few weeks, sating his
appetite for further consumption in the near term of both GM
cars and other competing US auto manufacturers, GM will make
little profit on its fire yard discounted sale. Sales numbers
will be all the good news that will be forthcoming to support
GM's fractal valuations throughout the rest of the summer and
autumn. Pension problems, junk bond problems, Canadian
equivalent total national debt problems, health care cost
problems, and assembly line closure of venerable product line
and sentimental makes will be the order of news.
GM's growth fractals from its low on April 19, 2005 are quite
elegant in their conformation to the idealized three cycle
growth fractal pattern x/2.5x/2x. With a base of ten days:
The evolving pattern for GM is 10/25/19 of an expected 20-25
days to top. One or two days to day 20-21 will probably do.
This week's drop in oil valuations are in concert with last
week's daily fractal observations and guidance. Last week's
piece may be worth another read.
The bias from inductive fractal analysis is that the
conclusion of the 140 plus year grand second fractal cycle will
end both dramatically, suddenly, and nonlinearly.
G. Lammert
So, here we are half way through the trading year with a
typical loss in portfolios (on a purchasing power basis) of
somewhere between 5 and 6% and our outlook is for a continuing
decline through the summer at this point.
German
Elections
Germany is to hold elections shortly due to a recent key vote,
but as always, it boils down to the economy and how things are not
going too well.
Good for
Time
We applaud Time
Magazine's decision to name the source of a story which outed CIA
operative Valerie Plame. While the administration may not
like what happens next, the fact is that at some point, outing of
a government agent must be called what it is - treason. What
has us scratching our heads this morning is why the NY Times is
not going along - something which is grandstanding now that the
prosecutor will find out who the leak is from Time. I'm a
great fan of reporter shield laws, but not when applied to
reporting the names of government operatives who do put their
lives on the line on behalf of us regular folks.
Ups and
Downs of Rates
Sure the Fed moved the
interest rate up a quarter yesterday - but interesting, as the
Chinese media report,
that hasn't stopped the fall in housing interest rates, which
we all know is what is driving the housing bubble - and which when
it reverses will lead to the housing bust...
CAFTA
Closer
If you thought NAFTA
screwed over American workers, you ain't seen nothing yet - the
Senate is ignoring the will of the people and going with
corporate interests by pushing
CAFTA
ahead.
See following article
for something to think about when it comes to corporate power over
CONgress.
Something To
Think About This Weekend
The following
memorandum is hypothetical, but I think it makes a point:
Office of the Chief Counsel
June 30, 2005
To: Corporate Representatives and Senators in Washington,
D.C.
Fr: Office of the Chief Counsel
REF: Markup of Declaration of Independence
We
have done very well with the recent eminent domain case, and we
have high hopes to be able to exact control of vitamins with
Codex now pending, and some of our colleagues have yet to stand
trial thanks to successful public diversion campaigns.
On
the matter at hand, I have directed my staff to mark up the
proposed Declaration of Independence in order that it more
clearly reflects the current relationship between the
electorate and those of us who actually control things. I
endorse the changes and believe there will be little opposition
to adopting them, as the electorate is not capable of making
its own decisions. We must therefore act preemptively in
adopting the markup language at the earliest possible date.
The Declaration of
Independence of the Thirteen Colonies
Corporate Control
In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776
July 5, 2005 or when voted
The unanimous Declaration of
the thirteen united States of America
Corporate Control
When in the Course of human
corporate events, it
becomes necessary for one
people corporate
interests to dissolve the political
bands
parties which have connected
them with another, and to assume
among
all the powers of the earth.
the separate and equal
station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle
them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that
they should declare the causes which impel them to the
separation. (Counsel
note: Unnecessarily broad)
We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that
all men are
no man is a corporations
equal, and that
they corporations
alone are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Profits, Tax Breaks and an economic
base of docile
workers --That to secure these rights,
Governments are Corporate
Governance is instituted
among
over Men, deriving their
just powers from the consent
of the governed a vote
which we paid for, --That whenever any Form of
Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of
the People
corporations
to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
Government,
laws laying its foundation
on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to
them shall seem most likely to
effect their Safety and Happiness
ensure maximum profitability.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established
should not be changed for
light and transient causes
do what we tell them; and
accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more
disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right
themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a long train of
abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object
evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is
their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and
to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been
the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the
necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of
Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain
[George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations,
all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute
Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted
to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to
Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to
pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended
in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when
so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws
for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those
people would relinquish the right of Representation in the
Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to
tyrants only.
He has called together
legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant
from the depository of their public Records, for the sole
purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative
Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his
invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time,
after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby
the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned
to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining
in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from
without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the
population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the
Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others
to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions
of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the
Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for
establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on
his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount
and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New
Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our
people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of
peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the
Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to
subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and
unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of
pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of
armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock
Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit
on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with
all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without
our Consent:
For depriving us, in many cases,
of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas
to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of
English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an
Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to
render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing
the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters,
abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally
the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own
Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to
legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here,
by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas,
ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of
our people.
He is at this time transporting
large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of
death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances
of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous
ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow
Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against
their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and
Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic
insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the
inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages,
whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction
of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these
Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble
terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by
repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by
every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of
a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in
attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from
time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an
unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the
circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have
appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have
conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these
usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections
and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of
justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in
the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as
we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
(Counsel note: Irrelevant historical
references)
We,
therefore, the Representatives
Corporations
of the United States of
America world
, in General Congress, Assembled,
appealing to the Supreme Judge of
the world for the rectitude of our intentions
(Counsel note: we cant locate the
official referenced)
,
do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the
good People business
interests of this country, solemnly publish and
declare, That these United
Colonies are States,
and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they
are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown interests of it, and that all political
connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and
ought to be totally dissolved
accountability and that as
Free and Independent States,
they corporations,
we have full Power to
levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish
Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent
States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration,
with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we
mutually pledge to each other
our Lives, our
Fortunes and our sacred Honor will
take everything we can get.
Peoplenomics This Week
This
weekend on Peoplenomics: "How Free is America?" - we look at the
evidence to try and reach some conclusions about growth and
government regulation. This week
www.peoplenomics.com looks at whether we should have a Patriotic Labeling Act to show what
percent of American Labor is in the products we buy.
Subscription information at
www.peoplenomics.com/subscribe.htm
Best
Book EVER about Sales released
The
daily updates (as well as our extensive library of past weekly
reports costs a lot to keep going - server time alone is pretty
impressive. So to make this project self-sustaining, I offer
various e-books as well as a weekly premium subscription service.
Today, I'm pleased to report that my latest "how to" book is out.
It's designed to give a person with no sales
background an overview into how sales works in about two hours of
reading. the books covers careers, compensation, techniques,
the sales funnel, sales automation and a whole lot more.
It's just $10 using PayPal or you can send $10 to our ranch
address (George Ure, 319 ACR 4416, Palestine, TX 75803) - if you
do, please be sure to send along your email address as I
distribute via PDF files.
If you
run a sales organization, or if you are new to sales yourself, I
think this is a dandy "first timers" book - I tuned it up and got
it finished up because my son (George II) is working for a bicycle
parts distributor in sales and needed something that would give
him the "whole picture" in 2-hours of reading rather than a year
of school. He loves it - and I think you will, too.
How to
Live on Less than $10,000 a Year
Yes,
this e-book of our is still selling like hot cakes...
Thursday
Shame on You
Federal Reserve!
By
Roger Reynolds - reposted with his permission:
AFTER THE CLOSE
THURSDAY----
1)Continuing on the
idea of what the "real" market of all stocks has been doing. The
DOW, the S&P, the WLSH, and the Nasdaq "IF" divided by the $XOI
all show a "ski slope" down pattern. All are below the 2002
bottom. The implication of this is that THE BROAD MARKET PEAKED IN
THE FOURTH QUARTER OF 2003 AND WOULD BE DOWN BY ABOUT 33 PERCENT
EXCEPT FOR THE STRENGTH IN ENERGY STOCKS. Therefore, It's been
very difficult to make any money in anything but energy for
several months.
2)The chart of the S &
P shows, from early dec to late Jan, a broadening top pattern of 4
points. The fifth point was in march. The sell off and rally back
are all part of the pattern. Now the market is breaking down again
and should take out the spring lows before long.
3)The US Dollar chart
shows top divergence and it should start a multi week correction
back toward it's 200 day average. The Euro shows an oversold
condition and it could rally upward toward it's 200 day average.
BUT, in theory, a rallying EURO should cause gold metal prices to
lift. A rising gold price and a declining DOW, will the investment
world "chase" gold stocks???
4)Go to
www.THELONGWAVEANALYST.CA and read the latest write up
on gold stocks plus silver. Using price bands, the writer shows
that silver's low should be in the neighborhood of $7, where it is
now!!!!
Thanks Roger -That
pretty well sums it up...
UP A
QUARTER!
From the Fed:
The Federal Open Market Committee decided today to raise its
target for the federal funds rate by 25 basis points to 3-1/4
percent.
The Committee believes that, even after this action, the
stance of monetary policy remains accommodative and, coupled
with robust underlying growth in productivity, is providing
ongoing support to economic activity. Although energy prices
have risen further, the expansion remains firm and labor market
conditions continue to improve gradually. Pressures on inflation
have stayed elevated, but longer-term inflation expectations
remain well contained.
The Committee perceives that, with appropriate monetary
policy action, the upside and downside risks to the attainment
of both sustainable growth and price stability should be kept
roughly equal. With underlying inflation expected to be
contained, the Committee believes that policy accommodation can
be removed at a pace that is likely to be measured. Nonetheless,
the Committee will respond to changes in economic prospects as
needed to fulfill its obligation to maintain price stability.
Voting for the FOMC monetary policy action were: Alan
Greenspan, Chairman; Timothy F. Geithner, Vice Chairman; Susan
S. Bies; Roger W. Ferguson, Jr.; Richard W. Fisher; Edward M.
Gramlich; Donald L. Kohn; Michael H. Moskow; Mark W. Olson;
Anthony M. Santomero; and Gary H. Stern.
In a related action, the Board of Governors unanimously
approved a 25-basis-point increase in the discount rate to 4-1/4
percent. In taking this action, the Board approved the requests
submitted by the Boards of Directors of the Federal Reserve
Banks of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Richmond,
Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Dallas,
and San Francisco.
Fed In a
Box
Around 2:15 Eastern
time this afternoon, the Fed will make its latest interest rate
decision - and this one will be a toughie. On the one hand,
in order to maintain high demand for the US-backed bond and bill
auctions to keep the hyper hyped economy "growing" (which is a bit
less lustrous after you back out the economic impacts of Bush's
War in Iraq) there is pressure on the Fed to raise rates.
However, with the economy really driven by housing refi's
any diddling with the interest rates paid by people refinancing
could send the housing bubble (which we expect is popping in slow
motion anyway) into an immediate and more apparent tailspin.
Thus, the most likely thing we think for the Fed to do is:
nothing.
But others expect a small raise.
Rates are already dropping a bit in Europe. Not good for
people who listened to the Bubblator Greenspan advise people to
buy homes with ARM's, but then you wouldn't use a guy whose own
economics forecasting firm went bankrupt as your advisor, would
you?
On the other
hand, it might be argued that one more hike would be a good thing
because it would keep inflationary pressures in check - a crazy
idea because the fundamental behind inflation is almost 100%
energy-driven as we see it - and if you want to contain soaring
costs of goods, you better start finding a suitable national
energy plan. And the "on the other hand" arguments could go
on all day.
We
expect a rally this morning based on the MBNA acquisition by Bank
of America ,- which is spending $35-billioon on that project -
but after that pop, the markets may just go into "hover".
The most frightening scenario would be a Fed drop because
that would essentially mean they are in full-scale pump mode
trying to keep the Bubbletanic afloat.
Personal
Incomes
The latest from the
Bureau of Economic Analysis says that personal income was up a tad
in May - all of 0.2% which pushing out something like a 2.6%
annualized rate (compounded). The details from BEA?
After-tax income
received by individuals, adjusted for inflation, increased 0.1
percent in May, after increasing at the same rate in April,
according to estimates released today by the U.S. Bureau of
Economic Analysis. Real consumer spending remained unchanged in
May after increasing 0.2 percent in April. Over the last 12
months, real disposable personal income has increased 3.2 percent,
and real consumer spending has increased 3.4 percent.
Personal incomethe
total income received by individuals, before taxes and not
adjusted for inflationincreased $23.5 billion (or 0.2 percent) in
May. In April, personal income increased $65.4 billion (or 0.6
percent).
-
Wages and salaries, the
largest component of personal income, increased $8.0 billion in
May.
-
Personal current
transfer receipts (primarily social security benefits) increased
$7.2 billion in May.
-
Personal income
receipts on assets (personal interest income plus personal
dividend income) increased $7.1 billion in May.
Consumer spending not
adjusted for inflation increased $0.5 billion in May. An increase
in spending on services was mostly offset by decreases in spending
on big-ticket items and on nondurable goods. Personal saving was
0.6 percent of disposable personal income in May. Estimates
of personal income and be released on August 2, 2005.
News Tip Hotline
Try on this one if
you're worried about a "terrorist attack" over the fourth of July
weekend or a huge earthquake (more likely we think):
TIPTYPE: Choose Type
T1:
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
S1: George,
Ever since I happened to check the Global Consciousness
Project out last weekend and saw it orange, I've been checking
it daily. At about 6:20 a.m. CDT it was red. It's been moving
back and forth between yellow and red. Is this normal? I
wouldn't think so. I don't really understand what the different
colors mean, but my limited understanding is that red is "bad"
or indicates we are close to something big happening. A BBS that
I'm a member of now has the "dot" posted at every page. I've
quoted UrbanSurvival several times there, with all recognition
to you and a link back to your site of course. Lot's of topics
discussed there. You might want to check it out.
www.conspiracycafe.net
Thanks for all you do.
If you see a bright flash this weekend don't look at it!!!
The SAC bomber pilots, if I recall my readings on such, have a
practice of putting a Band-Aid over one eye to keep one eye from
being blinded should a nuke go off - maybe not true, but something
I recall reading in a novel once. And remember, if it turns
out to be a quake to always be 100% ready to shelter from falling
things. - As
www.halfpasthuman.com reports, earthquakes don't kill people.
But poor engineering of buildings sure does.
Fish Tale
OK - so much for the
serious stuff - let's talk fishing - and specifically about
catfish. As everyone (who is a fisherperson) knows, catfish
which live in irrigation ditches and so on may become relatively
large. The one that used to inhabit the water obstacles at
the Boca Raton Executive Golf Course we used to play a few years
back was about 5 feet long - although I don't know if he's still
around. But check out the
report from Thailand - a catfish that weights more than 600 pounds
and is more than 8- feet long. I mention this so the
die-hard nimrod has something to really go looking for in the way
of a fish story over the Fourth of July weekend which is creeping
up very quickly on us.
South
American Oil Pact
Back to the more
serious:
13-nations around the Caribbean have signed an energy cooperation
pact - something that no doubt worries the US - Any time Cuba
and the country that supplies around 20% of our energy (Venezuela)
partner up on anything it bears watching.
China Oil
Bid
We continue watching to see if China's money is any good -
specifically I mean all the US Wal-Bucks that it has collected by
filling the shelves of American stores with consumer goods.
The problem with the pending Unocal bid by a Chinese national oil
company is that if they can't freely spend their US dollars, then
convertibility of the dollars will be effectively limited and the
renunciation of US dollars overseas will have started - which
brings either a two-tiered currency structure (one money inside
the US and another kind of money outside the US) or it brings
currency collapse - or both in short succession.
Equal
Protection Under Law...
...except for those who
are a little more equal than others - I remember that saying from
back when and it applies in spades to the oil company statement of
reserves deal going on right now. The
Houston Chronicle reports in today's editions that the feds will
not go after Shell Oil executives for over-stating their reserve
figures. Youy know why, right? because every other
oil company out there has expposure to one degree or another and
the prosecution of Shell would open that box which the feds and
the Bush oilists wouldn't like out there in public when Peak
Oil is so far just a debating point.
Bird Flu
Mounting
The death toll is up to 39 now in Vietnam according to CNN.
We're waiting for this to go human-to-human and then for air
traffic from Asia to be quarantined - but that may be off a ways.
Food
Shortages Beginning
Along the lines of our
"Anarchy Quietly Arriving" theme, we noticed that a reader had
sent us a story that
one country in six is now facing food shortages. Given
the incredible heat and dry weather which the web bots forecast
(and which is bound to reverse just as suddenly to excessively
wet) we thought we'd pass it along. Watch weather and oil
because weather and oil drive food production - and the US is
importing a lot of what goes onto the dinner table already.
Wednesday
Rising Tide of
Anarchy
Our publication of a
recent free issue off our
www.peoplenomics.com web site brought this letter - which is
our candidate for "letter of the week":
"George, Your piece this morning reminded me of a very
instructive moment in my life regarding over-population, the
perception of scarcity, the volatility of hordes. See, as
follows: In the late 60s as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I lived in
Bombay for a few months. At the time, Indias population was a
mere 650 million, not the 1.2 billion it is now.
It was customary for hundreds of Indians to converge on the
beach before sundown, to walk, eat treats and hang out to watch
the sunset over the Arabian Sea. They would all depart once the
sun went down. Then, rats would come out (many thousands) to
clean up the beach of the treats left behind.
Two of us were going home from dinner, stopped at the beach
and saw the rats teeming over the beach. We got up on a bench to
stand and watched for a few minutes, with an understandable
degree of revulsion. The fellow I was with tossed a pebble into
the crowd, naturally hitting a rat. The rat turned and attacked
the rat next to him, the fight was on. After tossing perhaps
twenty pebbles, there was a full scale riot in progress.
We left.
That picture has been with me for the forty years. I have
concluded that people will become just like those rats when the
situation gets congested enough. That little incident has played
into my life on several occasions, and I have gradually migrated
as circumstances allowed, to the sparsely populated high desert,
where I live a highly self-sufficient life.
Please do not identify me, if you use this information.
Thanks for what you do, resonates with me!"
Wasn't there a poem to the effect that "The fog comes in on
little cat's feet..." or some such? Just so with the arrival
of the rising anarchy.
George Stands
Corrected - sort of...
A couple of readers
have sent in links which purport to clear up the Bush use of
"Third World War" imagery. here are a couple for your to
ponder"
http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/RL32759.pdf
This is the link to the statement from Osama he does not call
it WWIII but he does refer to Iraq similarly to bushs quote.
Another reader writes:
Regarding the "World War III" quote from last night's speech:
I was not able to watch the speech so I had to read it. When I
read the official translation from the White House site, this is
how the WWIII section is presented:
Some wonder whether Iraq is a central front in the war on
terror. Among the terrorists, there is no debate. Hear the words
of Osama Bin Laden: "This Third World War is raging" in Iraq.
"The whole world is watching this war." He says it will end in
"victory and glory, or misery and humiliation."
According to the manner in which this is presented, OBL never
says WWIII is raging in Iraq - he quotes OBL as saying war is
raging, and "in Iraq" is outside the quotes. You would never
pick that up, however, simply listening to the speech.
The interesting thing
is that this all gets back to the December 2004 tape allegedly
from Osama but that may be questionable as there are plenty of
reports since 9/11 that
Osama is long dead and is being kept "alive" in media for
propaganda purposes. We hold no opinion one way or the
other, although we note that World War II was a strictly American
concept - and so use by an Arab of a strictly America/British
concept as "World War III" is at least suspect in translation. On
a linguistic basis, we would suspect the alleged Dec 27 tape to be
too Western conceptually in regards to the use of WWIII references
to be definitively Osama bin Laden speaking.
The "World War
III" Lie?
Not only was president
Bush's speech last night a stilted affair that as we predicted did
nothing to bring the country together, but the obvious attempt to
relink al Qaeda to the conflict actually alienated a lot more
people than it swung, if one can infer such from watching the
press turn on Bush.
But what really caught
out attention was
Bush's assertion - never before held out - that:
"Here are the words of
Osama bin Laden: This third world war is raging in Iraq. The whole
world is watching this war. He says it will end in victory and
glory or misery and humiliation."
Here we have to pause
and ask something: Did GW quote bin Laden, or have the
speech writers started to believe their own hype now?
A quick search of Google for the phrase "third world war is raging
in Iraq" turns up only one source of such a quote - and it all
comes from GWB's speech last night.
Even more frightening
is that no one in the talking head mainstream media (that we
watched) had the presence of mind to call this glaring factual
error - or call it a Big Lie - to the public's attention. So
there may be such a reference out that, but I've read everything
made public by the supposed writer Osama (who may very well be
dead, and is just being kept "alive" in the public's mind for
publicity purposes) words. If you can find the original
source on a web page created before yesterday, please pass it
along for our study. If you can't find it, this means the
country's leadership is having to resort to outright lies in order
to retain their grip on governance. Iraq seems to be taking on
more and more of the hallmarks of a Vietnam conflict, including
secret talks now -
and problems maintaining day to day life.
Respect
Rally to End?
Our expectation for later today is that stocks will turn around by
mid session - and the Dow in the early
pretrading was up only 16-points or so. At some level, the
Bush failure to do anything other than address one third of the
three Iraq persuasion blocks (hawk, dove, and moderates) will
settle into Mr. Market and the price of oil will begin rising as
the lack of a U.S. solution to the mess continues to erode
confidence later this week. We don't offer this as trading advice,
just our own expectations...
GDP
Numbers
From the
Bureau of Economic Analysis this morning:
Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and
services produced by labor and property located in the United
States -- increased at an annual rate of 3.8 percent in the
first quarter of 2005, according to final estimates released by
the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter, real GDP
also increased 3.8 percent.
The GDP estimates released today are based on more complete
source data than were available for the preliminary estimates
issued last month. In the preliminary estimates, the increase in
real GDP was 3.5 percent (see "Revisions" on page 3).
The major contributors to the increase in real GDP in the
first quarter were personal consumption expenditures (PCE),
exports, private inventory investment, residential fixed
investment, and equipment and software. Imports, which are a
subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.
BOX Annual Revision of the National Income and Product
Accounts
The annual revision of the national income and product
accounts, covering the first quarter of 2002 through the first
quarter of 2005, will be released along with the "advance"
estimate of GDP for the second quarter of 2005 on July 29. An
article describing the revision will appear in the August 2005
issue of the Survey of Current Business.
FOOTNOTE.--Quarterly estimates are expressed at seasonally
adjusted annual rates, unless otherwise specified.
Quarter-to-quarter dollar changes are differences between these
published estimates. Percent changes are calculated from
unrounded data and are annualized. "Real" estimates are in
chained (2000) dollars. Price indexes are chain-type measures.
This news release is available on BEA's Web site at
www.bea.gov/bea/rels.htm .
The growth rate of real GDP in the first quarter was the same
as that in the fourth. In the first quarter, accelerations in
exports, in residential fixed investment, and in private
inventory investment and a deceleration in imports were offset
by decelerations in equipment and software and in PCE.
Final sales of computers contributed 0.48 percentage point to
the first-quarter change in real GDP after contributing 0.56
percentage point to the fourth-quarter change. Motor vehicle
output contributed 0.24 percentage point to the first-quarter
change in real GDP after contributing 0.86 percentage point to
the fourth-quarter change.
The price index for gross domestic purchases, which measures
prices paid by U.S. residents, increased 2.7 percent in the
first quarter, 0.2 percentage point less than the preliminary
estimate; this index increased 2.9 percent in the fourth
quarter. Excluding food and energy prices, the price index for
gross domestic purchases increased 2.7 percent in the first
quarter, compared with an increase of 2.0 percent in the fourth.
About 0.2 percentage point of the first-quarter increase in the
index was accounted for by the pay raise for federal civilian
and military personnel, which is treated as an increase in the
price index of employee services purchased by the federal
government.
Real personal consumption expenditures increased 3.6 percent
in the first quarter, compared with an increase of 4.2 percent
in the fourth. Real nonresidential fixed investment increased
4.1 percent, compared with an increase of 14.5 percent.
Nonresidential structures decreased 2.4 percent, in contrast to
an increase of 2.1 percent. Equipment and software increased 6.1
percent, compared with an increase of 18.4 percent. Real
residential fixed investment increased 11.5 percent, compared
with an increase of 3.4 percent.
Real exports of goods and services increased 8.9 percent in
the first quarter, compared with an increase of 3.2 percent in
the fourth. Real imports of goods and services increased 9.6
percent, compared with an increase of 11.4 percent.
Real federal government consumption expenditures and gross
investment increased 0.6 percent in the first quarter, compared
with an increase of 1.2 percent in the fourth. National defense
increased 0.5 percent, in contrast to a decrease of 0.6 percent.
Nondefense increased 0.9 percent, compared with an increase of
5.3 percent. Real state and local government consumption
expenditures and gross investment decreased 0.1 percent, in
contrast to an increase of 0.6 percent.
The real change in private inventories added 0.72 percentage
point to the first-quarter change in real GDP after adding 0.46
percentage point to the fourth-quarter change. Private
businesses increased inventories $66.8 billion in the first
quarter, following increases of $47.2 billion in the fourth
quarter and $34.5 billion in the third.
Real final sales of domestic product -- GDP less change in
private inventories -- increased 3.0 percent in the first
quarter, compared with an increase of 3.4 percent in the fourth.
Gross domestic purchases
Real gross domestic purchases -- purchases by U.S. residents
of goods and services wherever produced -- increased 4.1 percent
in the first quarter, compared with an increase of 5.0 percent
in the fourth.
Gross national product
Real gross national product -- the goods and services
produced by the labor and property supplied by U.S. residents --
increased 3.9 percent in the first quarter, compared with an
increase of 3.5 percent in the fourth. GNP includes, and GDP
excludes, net receipts of income from the rest of the world,
which increased $2.7 billion in the first quarter after
decreasing $9.7 billion in the fourth; in the first quarter,
receipts decreased $2.7 billion, and payments decreased $5.4
billion.
Current-dollar GDP
Current-dollar GDP -- the market value of the nation's output
of goods and services -- increased 6.7 percent, or $196.9
billion, in the first quarter to a level of $12,191.7 billion.
In the fourth quarter, current-dollar GDP increased 6.2 percent,
or $179.9 billion.
Revisions
The final estimate of the first-quarter increase in real GDP
is 0.3 percentage point, or $7.4 billion, higher than the
preliminary estimate issued last month. The upward revision to
the percentage change in real GDP primarily reflected upward
revisions to exports and to residential fixed investment.
Corporate Profits
Profits from current production (corporate profits with
inventory valuation and capital consumption adjustments)
increased $76.1 billion in the first quarter. In the fourth
quarter, profits increased $150.8 billion. Current-production
cash flow (net cash flow with inventory valuation and capital
consumption adjustments) -- the internal funds available to
corporations for investment -- increased $103.3 billion in the
first quarter, in contrast to a decrease of $37.7 billion in the
fourth.
Taxes on corporate income increased $64.3 billion in the
first quarter, compared with an increase of $42.4 billion in the
fourth. Profits after tax with inventory valuation and capital
consumption adjustments increased $11.9 billion in the first
quarter, compared with an increase of $108.3 billion in the
fourth. Dividends decreased $91.9 billion, in contrast to an
increase of $110.7 billion; current- production undistributed
profits increased $103.8 billion, in contrast to a decrease of
$2.4 billion.
Domestic profits of financial corporations increased $36.7
billion in the first quarter, compared with an increase of $84.1
billion in the fourth.
Domestic profits of nonfinancial corporations increased $24.5
billion in the first quarter, compared with an increase of $66.7
billion in the fourth. In the first quarter, real gross
corporate product increased, and profits per unit of real
product increased. The increase in unit profits reflected an
increase in unit prices that was partly offset by an increase in
unit labor costs; unit nonlabor costs decreased.
The rest-of-the-world component of profits increased $14.8
billion in the first quarter, following no change in the fourth.
This measure is calculated as (1) receipts by U.S. residents of
earnings from their foreign affiliates plus dividends received
by U.S. residents from unaffiliated foreign corporations minus
(2) payments by U.S. affiliates of earnings to their foreign
parents plus dividends paid by U.S. corporations to unaffiliated
foreign residents. The first-quarter decrease was accounted for
by a larger decrease in payments than in receipts.
Profits before tax with inventory valuation adjustment is the
best available measure of industry profits because estimates of
the capital consumption adjustment by industry do not exist.
This measure reflects the depreciation-accounting practices used
for federal income tax returns. According to this measure,
domestic profits of both financial and nonfinancial corporations
increased. The increase in the profits of nonfinancial
corporations was largely in "other" nonfinancial, in nondurable
manufacturing, and in information.
Profits before tax increased $266.1 billion in the first
quarter, compared with an increase of $125.1 billion in the
fourth. The before-tax measure of profits does not reflect, as
does profits from current production, the capital consumption
and inventory valuation adjustments. These adjustments convert
depreciation of fixed assets and inventory withdrawals reported
on a tax-return, historical-cost basis to the current-cost
measures used in the national income and product accounts. The
capital consumption adjustment decreased $198.7 billion in the
first quarter (from $260.0 billion to $61.3 billion), in
contrast to an increase of $37.0 billion in the fourth. The
large increase in first-quarter profits before tax and the large
decrease in the first-quarter capital consumption adjustment
reflect the expiration of the "bonus" depreciation provisions of
both the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act of 2002 and the
Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003. The
inventory valuation adjustment increased $8.7 billion (from
-$49.1 billion to -$40.4 billion), in contrast to a decrease of
$11.3 billion.
If one was a complete puddin' head (to borrow a Mark Twain
sounding descriptor) one could read this all and figure that
things are pretty good. But wait! Back out the spending on
the Iraq (and Afghanistan) wars and you have a crappy rate of
growth. As we have said before, the war is not so much about
"freedom and democracy" but about maintaining control over oil and
managing the domestic economy.
If you click over to the mis-named federal (which it
isn't) Reserve site and look up M-1 growth over the past year, you
will find that
monetary growth is somewhat mismatched to BEA growth:
|
|
M-1 |
M-2 |
M-3 |
|
May '04 |
1324.8 |
6255.3 |
9246.5 |
|
May '05 |
1361 |
6453.7 |
9651.2 |
|
Change |
2.732% |
3.172% |
4.377% |
This leaves government in a fine kettle of fish: Raising
rates will kill the illusion of growth as Americans are already
refinancing their homes to live month-to-month. Lower rates
and the deflationary depression ramps up, and if no action in
taken, the Fed loses initiative. That's the price of having
an economy backed by ended pieces of paper, including no real
money in the Social Security Trust fund, just a pile of paper
IOU's, the real value having been looted by previous
administrations.
Now all of this wouldn't be so bothersome if there was likely
to be continued high confidence globally that the US Dollar
would continue to be the world's reserve currency. But that
illusion is fading quickly as the
Chinese attempt to buy Unocal is now being opposed by US self
interests. The outcome we expect is that if China can't spend
it's dollars freely, we will then have a situation of limited
currency convertibility and that's either a) the beginnings of a
two tier (internal-external) currency system or b) a depression as
the world renounces the dollar or c) both. Oh well, back to
the coffee... things are really
starting to fall apart in China too. As we proposed in
one of our
www.peoplenomics.com issues recently, there's a chance that
anarchy has arrived as we're just slow on the uptake. In
fact, here's some of that article to ponder - think of it as a
complimentary read of a weekly Peoplenomics report (May 22, 2005
edition) without all the charts..
Is Anarchy Quietly
Arriving?
Our topic this
week is "Stealth Anarchy." If there were two books written a
decade ago that seem to have grasped the full implications of
the future from the times when written, my two candidates would
be Robert Kaplan's article (and book) "The Coming Anarchy" and
Lord Rees-Mogg and James Davidson's superb "The Sovereign
Individual." I think they are still must-reads.
Kaplan's book,
serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, was especially interesting
because it looked at conditions then prevalent in the backwaters
of Africa and the Middle East, and projected them into the
future - our presently emerging future, which as you might
surmise from the title, was a fairly grim place:
Also, war-making
entities will no longer be restricted to a specific
territory. Loose and shadowy organisms such as Islamic
terrorist organizations suggest why borders will mean
increasingly little and sedimentary layers of tribalistic
identity and control will mean more. "From the vantage point
of the present, there appears every prospect that religious .
. . fanaticisms will play a larger role in the motivation of
armed conflict" in the West than at any time "for the last 300
years," Van Creveld writes. This is why analysts like Michael
Vlahos are closely monitoring religious cults. Vlahos says,
"An ideology that challenges us may not take familiar form,
like the old Nazis or Commies. It may not even engage us
initially in ways that fit old threat markings." Van Creveld
concludes, "Armed conflict will be waged by men on earth, not
robots in space. It will have more in common with the
struggles of primitive tribes than with large-scale
conventional war." While another military historian, John
Keegan, in his new book A History of Warfare, draws a more
benign portrait of primitive man, it is important to point out
that what Van Creveld really means is re-primitivized man:
warrior societies operating at a time of unprecedented
resource scarcity and planetary overcrowding.
Van Creveld's pre-Westphalian vision of worldwide
low-intensity conflict is not a superficial "back to the
future" scenario. First of all, technology will be used toward
primitive ends. In Liberia the guerrilla leader Prince Johnson
didn't just cut off the ears of President Samuel Doe before
Doe was tortured to death in 1990--Johnson made a video of it,
which has circulated throughout West Africa. In December of
1992, when plotters of a failed coup against the Strasser
regime in Sierra Leone had their ears cut off at Freetown's
Hamilton Beach prior to being killed, it was seen by many to
be a copycat execution. Considering, as I've explained
earlier, that the Strasser regime is not really a government
and that Sierra Leone is not really a nation-state, listen
closely to Van Creveld: "Once the legal monopoly of armed
force, long claimed by the state, is wrested out of its hands,
existing distinctions between war and crime will break down
much as is already the case today in . . . Lebanon, Sri Lanka,
El Salvador, Peru, or Colombia."
If crime and war become indistinguishable, then "national
defense" may in the future be viewed as a local concept. As
crime continues to grow in our cities and the ability of state
governments and criminal-justice systems to protect their
citizens diminishes, urban crime may, according to Van Creveld,
"develop into low-intensity conflict by coalescing along
racial, religious, social, and political lines." As
small-scale violence multiplies at home and abroad, state
armies will continue to shrink, being gradually replaced by a
booming private security business, as in West Africa, and by
urban mafias, especially in the former communist world, who
may be better equipped than municipal police forces to grant
physical protection to local inhabitants.
Future wars will be those of communal survival, aggravated
or, in many cases, caused by environmental scarcity. These
wars will be subnational, meaning that it will be hard for
states and local governments to protect their own citizens
physically. This is how many states will ultimately die. As
state power fades--and with it the state's ability to help
weaker groups within society, not to mention other
states--peoples and cultures around the world will be thrown
back upon their own strengths and weaknesses, with fewer
equalizing mechanisms to protect them. Whereas the distant
future will probably see the emergence of a racially hybrid,
globalized man, the coming decades will see us more aware of
our differences than of our similarities. To the average
person, political values will mean less, personal security
more. The belief that we are all equal is liable to be
replaced by the overriding obsession of the ancient Greek
travelers: Why the differences between peoples?
Kaplan's book
didn't capture the media aspect of the arriving anarchy in great
detail, nor did it proclaim the realities of climate change, the
arrival of Peak Oil, or any of the other items that seem to be
cropping up in the headlines now, but he did get into the issue
of map-making and how maps define the modern nation-state's
borders:
In Geography and the Human Spirit, Anne Buttimer, a
professor at University College, Dublin, recalls the work of
an early-nineteenth-century German geographer, Carl Ritter,
whose work implied "a divine plan for humanity" based on
regionalism and a constant, living flow of forms. The map of
the future, to the extent that a map is even possible, will
represent a perverse twisting of Ritter's vision. Imagine
cartography in three dimensions, as if in a hologram. In this
hologram would be the overlapping sediments of group and other
identities atop the merely two-dimensional color markings of
city-states and the remaining nations, themselves confused in
places by shadowy tentacles, hovering overhead, indicating the
power of drug cartels, mafias, and private security agencies.
Instead of borders, there would be moving "centers" of power,
as in the Middle Ages. Many of these layers would be in
motion. Replacing fixed and abrupt lines on a flat space would
be a shifting pattern of buffer entities, like the Kurdish and
Azeri buffer entities between Turkey and Iran, the Turkic
Uighur buffer entity between Central Asia and Inner China
(itself distinct from coastal China), and the Latino buffer
entity replacing a precise U.S.-Mexican border. To this
protean cartographic hologram one must add other factors, such
as migrations of populations, explosions of birth rates,
vectors of disease. Henceforward the map of the world will
never be static. This future map--in a sense, the "Last
Map"--will be an ever-mutating representation of chaos.
The Indian subcontinent offers examples of what is
happening. For different reasons, both India and Pakistan are
increasingly dysfunctional. The argument over democracy in
these places is less and less relevant to the larger issue of
governability. In India's case the question arises, Is one
unwieldy bureaucracy in New Delhi the best available mechanism
for promoting the lives of 866 million people of diverse
languages, religions, and ethnic groups? In 1950, when the
Indian population was much less than half as large and
nation-building idealism was still strong, the argument for
democracy was more impressive than it is now. Given that in
2025 India's population could be close to 1.5 billion, that
much of its economy rests on a shrinking natural-resource
base, including dramatically declining water levels, and that
communal violence and urbanization are spiraling upward, it is
difficult to imagine that the Indian state will survive the
next century. India's oft-trumpeted Green Revolution has been
achieved by overworking its croplands and depleting its
watershed. Norman Myers, a British development consultant,
worries that Indians have "been feeding themselves today by
borrowing against their children's food sources."
Pakistan's problem is more basic still: like much of
Africa, the country makes no geographic or demographic sense.
It was founded as a homeland for the Muslims of the
subcontinent, yet there are more subcontinental Muslims
outside Pakistan than within it. Like Yugoslavia, Pakistan is
a patchwork of ethnic groups, increasingly in violent conflict
with one another. While the Western media gushes over the fact
that the country has a woman Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto,
Karachi is becoming a subcontinental version of Lagos. In
eight visits to Pakistan, I have never gotten a sense of a
cohesive national identity. With as much as 65 percent of its
land dependent on intensive irrigation, with wide-scale
deforestation, and with a yearly population growth of 2.7
percent (which ensures that the amount of cultivated land per
rural inhabitant will plummet), Pakistan is becoming a more
and more desperate place. As irrigation in the Indus River
basin intensifies to serve two growing populations,
Muslim-Hindu strife over falling water tables may be
unavoidable.
As we look at
how the map has changes since Kaplan wrote his book in
1993-994, we see that many of the world's problems can be
read in a certain light as being issues of map-making. For
example, the southern tier of Russian satellite nation-states,
sometimes referred to as Chaostan, is presently going through
numerous trials as it is used both as a staging area against
militant Islamic targets in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also
because it represents a stratification of of the boundary where
Islam meets Westernism. Pakistan and India are still nearly at
war over Kashmir.
When I was
young, I remember my father telling me that when it came to how
high school students interacted with students of other schools,
it was often driven by differences in incomes. When a high
school had a broad range of incomes attending the same school,
social issues were more pronounced, cliques more important, and
the school's reputation might include fine scholarship and good
street fighting, all under the same "organization." Where the
social-economic range was less extreme, relative ease prevailed
in governance and teaching. Wide ranging incomes led to
governance trouble but did great things for "gangsmanship."
We can see
something of this on a macro scale today. Where rich countries
are abutted by very poor countries trouble seems to pop up. The
U.S. Mexico border. And if there's one thing that has made
America ugly in the view of our detractors, it is likely our
extreme wealth which leads us to dispose of what other people in
the world would consider a crowning achievement of a lifetime.
For example, we
routinely get rid of our automobiles just because they get
old. That's something that doesn't happen in poor
countries. Cars can be revered and lovingly cared for because
they are such potent symbols of accomplishment. To own a car in
Cuba or El Salvador, or most African nations is a monumental
achievement, but in the USA the distinctions between cars are
not made based simply on ownership, but such minutia as "How
many G's will it pull on a skid pad?" and "What's the 0-60
time?" And if it looks freshly waxed.
Back to the
point: With the Minutemen planning to help police the California
border with Mexico this summer, we feel that the decades of
"leakage" - letting illegal immigrants in - may well fuel a huge
border war with Mexico in the not-to-distant future, especially
because Mexico has oil, and we don't have a National Guard. We
have sent nearly all available units to Iraq to conquest for oil
on behalf of international bankers and others such as Detroit..
Published in
1997, The Sovereign Individual takes up the notion that despite
all the problems of the world, there will be an emergent class
of humans who will ascend to a new station in life called
"sovereign individuals." The authors posit that until quite
recently, humankind has sequentially organized itself in three
ways:
- The
hunter-gatherer societies (that anthropologists find so
interesting)
- Agricultural
societies which began the whole litany of social ordering
headlined by things like property ownership and
governance of wide areas by a leader class
- Industrial
societies where power transfers to to those who control the
means of production and last but not least...
- The
sovereign individual triumphs by seeing the future more
clearly than the rest of society due to very high levels of
participation in the information infrastructure which evolved
to support wider industrialization. Seeing through coming,
the Sovereign Individual has a well developed "bug out" plan.
Place in Pot, Stir
Violently
There is not a lot
of conflict between these two world-views, namely that a global
anarchy is coming because complexification often does break
down, and that those at the peak of the information society will
see it first and take action long before others, and thus be
able to act in anticipation of actual events.
What we might want
to ask ourselves periodically is whether global anarchy is
arriving today in a manner that's slow moving enough that we
don't see it clearly. Are we falling victim to a kind of
"stealth anarchy?"
Let me drag out my
favorite tool for looking at the world, the curious view that
our modern society is defined by food, shelter, transportations,
communications, energy, environment, and financial systems. As
you look at the drawing below, picture yourself (as a
semi-sovereign person who is already using more communications
than most) as viewing the world electronically to pick up on
world developments.
If you could look
inside my head at any particular moment, you would likely see
some variant of this model at work most of the time because I
have learned that slicing and dicing the world this way is an
extremely effective tool not only to internalize the gist of
things, but it also forces me to consider all "ripple effects"
that come out of a given news story or social development.
It's also a great
way to assess whether anarchy is increasing or decreasing.
So What is Anarchy?
"A state of
lawlessness and disorder, usually resulting from a failure of
governance," is one way to put it.
Obviously, if you
awoke tomorrow morning into a world where lawless behavior was
running rampant, would you consider that a state of anarchy had
arrived? Of course! But now suppose in a little different
world, anarchy arrived very slowly - how would that look?
Let me give you an
example that relates to the current housing bubble. Since the
last Great Depression, we have seen the following sequence of
events take place:
-
Conventional
Loans: These are always where the loan cycle begins. You put
20-50% down and pay off the balance on a short contract,
usually 10-15 years. Because of the down payment requirements
of most lending banks in the 1930's, not many people were able
to afford such loans
-
FHA Loans: The
Federal Housing Administration was founded in 1934 to help
make home ownership more affordable: "During the
1940s, FHA programs helped finance military housing and homes
for returning veterans and their families after the war. In
the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the FHA helped to spark the
production of millions of units of privately-owned apartments
for elderly, handicapped and lower income Americans. When
soaring inflation and energy costs threatened the survival of
thousands of private apartment buildings in the 1970s, FHA's
emergency financing kept cash-strapped properties afloat. "
-
VA Loans:
"The
VA Loan became known in 1944 through the original
Servicemen's Readjustment Act also known as the GI Bill of
Rights. The GI Bill was signed into law by President Franklin
D. Roosevelt and provided veterans with a federally guaranteed
home with no down payment. This feature was designed to
provide housing and assistance for veterans and their
families, and the dream of home ownership became a reality for
millions of veterans. The GI Bill contributed more than any
other program in history to the welfare of veterans and their
families, and to the growth of the nation's economy. "
-
Zero Down Loans: A More recent
development is the zero-down or 100% conventional loan:
This program is designed for the borrower who has maintained
an excellent credit history verified by high credit
scores. This program is exclusively for the purchase of a
primary residence, with a maximum loan amount of $440,000.
Borrowers can also finance up to 3% of their closing costs for
a maximum loan of 103% of the sales price. "
-
Zero Principal
Loans: here we arrive at the last stage of the housing bubble
when something truly bizarre happens. First, you need to know
that a "zero principal loan" means that for most participants,
they are able to buy a house with nothing down and make no
payment on principal, paying only low interest. Is it a good
idea? Well, in a word, NO! Not when you read what is
starting to make headlines is such middle America towns as
Fort Wayne, Indiana: "The
data, from the Mortgage Bankers Association, show that
adjustable-rate and interest-only mortgages accounted for
nearly two-thirds of mortgage originations in the second half
of last year. Both types of loans have helped fuel the strong
housing market because they carry lower initial monthly
payments than do fixed-rate loans, enabling borrowers to buy
more-expensive homes. "
That in itself
wouldn't be so frightening except that the article continues
"Although it has been clear that borrowers in high-priced
markets have been gravitating to products that make homes more
affordable, the shift has been greater than expected. In
California, where home-price growth has been sizzling,
interest-only loans accounted for 61 percent of the mortgages
taken out to buy homes in the first two months of this year, up
from 47.1 percent in 2004 and less than 2 percent in 2002,
according to an analysis prepared for the Wall Street Journal by
San Francisco researchers LoanPerformance, a unit of First
American Corp. Just 18 percent of California households can
afford to buy a median-price house using a conventional 30-year
fixed-rate mortgage, according to a report issued this month by
the California Association of Realtors."
Does the evolution
of Housing in this manner look something like anarchy
developing Certainly not as long as the housing bubble is being
inflated. But what happens when the air stops? Then it will
implode with little or no warning and most people won't believe
it until it is too late and they are driven to bankruptcy.
How Anarchy Arrived
I will make this
really simple for you: Anarchy arrived in the housing market
through the mechanism of progressively changing loan parameters
on the part of borrowers and lenders. Let's whip up a quick
table to compare how one of these new-fangled "loans" compares
with just plain renting or leasing of a home. We'll consider
two tables, first a comparison of the typical home sale in the
1930's using a conventional loan, and then a look at the present
practices.
1930's
Case
|
Aspect or Attribute |
Conventional Loan |
Rental or Lease Agreement |
| Conveys ownership |
Yes - but only when satisfied |
No |
| Requires finding buyer/tenant at end of term
of instrument |
Yes |
No |
| Form of debt |
Note secured by property |
Unsecured promise to pay
enforceable as lease default |
| Typical term of instrument |
10-15 years |
1 year (or less) |
| Requires appreciation of property (inflation
or demand) |
No |
No |
| Purchaser can make money |
Yes |
Only in extreme inflation, if
assignable |
|
Implied risk
of bankruptcy |
Varies |
Not likely |
2005 Case
|
Aspect or Attribute |
Zero Down Zero Principal Loan |
Rental or Lease Agreement |
| Conveys ownership |
Yes - but only when satisfied |
No |
| Requires finding buyer/tenant at end of term
of instrument |
Yes |
No |
| Form of debt |
Note: Secured by property and
a promissory note |
Unsecured promise to pay
enforceable as lease default |
| Typical term of instrument |
30-40 years |
1 year (or less) |
| Requires appreciation of property (inflation
or demand) |
Yes |
No |
| Purchaser can make money |
Yes - if inflation continues |
Only in extreme inflation, if
assignable |
|
Implied risk
of bankruptcy |
Yes, if
housing bubble pops |
Not likely |
As the table
demonstrates, there has been a distinct change in how mortgages
are originated late in the housing bubble - the type of
mortgages used today are looking more and more like long term
rental agreements, except that if you default on the house any
time in a 30-40 years period you are more likely to be involved
in legal proceeding for default because the dollar amounts
involved are higher.
Look at what would
happen to a California "home owner" with a zero/zero loan in the
face of a 25% deflation of housing prices, which are predictable
based on normal cyclicity in the market, or almost always happen
after a big earthquake. With a $600-thousand dollar home, the
"owner" is on the hook for $150,000 of debt. If a person had
rented or leased the same property for $2,500, then the average
debt is a mere $12,500.
Now, let's see,
which is more likely to be worth fighting over? A solid
mortgage document plus a promissory note (the human
indenture instrument) that basically pledges everything down to
the first born child where there is $150,000 at stake, or
a $12,500 debt (assuming a default withy 6-months remaining, and
a normal first/last deposit)? the answer is clear - like sharks,
lawyers are drawn to money like blood.
I think you can
appreciate given the uneven structure of zero/zero finance why
Elaine and I are perfectly content in our month-to-month setting
in a turnkey extended stay hotel for however long we are in
California until the earthquake or housing bubble drops this
horrifically overpriced market back to something rational.!
On more thought,
as long as we are talking about real estate: I doubt you do this
on an annual basis, but a wonderful test of your personal
success as a human being is to make an annual assessment of your
life - birthdays are a great time to perform this "annual
review" of what amounts to your personal financial statement.
Graphed out over a number of years, it is a very effective
measurement of your personal financial management of your life.
One of the things that pops out is that divorces are incredibly
expensive and severely curtail personal financial growth for
years - as long as child support and obligations continue. From
a purely financial standpoint, they should be avoided at all
costs.
Other Signs of
Anarchy
We can see the
tightening of the noose in a quick review of other aspects of
the Peoplenomics Worldview:
Energy:
We are at, past,
or just in front of Peak Oil. Whatever we think doesn't matter
though, because it's what the market thinks.
The latest is the markets are a bit confused by conflicting
signals from some of the big names in OPEC. But the more
likely explanation is that when you hear someone saying that
they think oil supplies are good and prices are coming down,
they are likely to have close ties to the Bush administration -
or they want something (money or military hardware, or
protection) from the United States.
Money:
Like the housing
bubble, things are really on a fast boil in the derivatives
market where there have been rumors of a recent bankruptcy of a
major Asian player.
The global notional value of derivatives is $248-trillion,
which pencils out to 5-years or so of everything made by the
United States.
We are also
picking up snips that indicate the web bot prediction of soaring
silver (emotive values, not necessarily being monetary
valuations) may well be right on the mark - extracted from bot
streams:
"PoP_Eye (10% of the total above ground stockpiles of
silver just changed hands in the past 2 weeks) ID#83135:
Copyright 2002 PoP_Eye/Kitco Inc. All rights reserved
Significant also was the 1,672 May contracts that were
delivered in silver Friday leaving an OI of 283 ( 1.415 Moz )
. Now does a 8.36 Moz delivery on Friday get your attention?
Ted Butler in his latest has opined that if you want your
crimex/nyNOmex silver you think you have contracted for
you,,,,,,,,,,better be in the very, very front of the line at
the delivery window.
And,,, The standout feature of the May delivery month has
been the two-day transfer of 9 million ounces of silver from
the eligible category to the registered category in the
Delaware warehouse. This put the silver into delivery form and
it is reasonable to assume that this silver will be delivered
soon."
Transportation:
Because E and I
presently hang out in the Los Angeles area (but for how long is
a subject of active debate) we would expect the whole of the
U.S. to be aware of the random shootings that are continuing on
the local freeways. Nope. Not hardly a word of this outside
the local TV and news coverage. It's almost like the big
corpmedia editors don't want you to know how things are breaking
down here. But they are. Even more strange:
The best coverage is coming from foreign press reports like this
one!
Food:
We expect anarchy
(and it's companions hunger and famine) to show up late this
year when U.S. crops fail to meet projections. Oh, it won't be
for a lack of energy inputs - the Bushco crowd will take care of
the farmers in that regard. But the big story could be the
collapse of the
bee population. "
The Penn State researchers report their findings in today's
(May 17) online version of the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Science.
Yang and Cox-Foster looked at how bee mites affect the bee
immune system. They injected heat-killed E. coli bacteria into
virus-infected bees that were either infested with bee mites
or mite free. The dead bacteria was used to trigger an immune
response in the bees in the same way human vaccines cause our
bodies to produce an immune response. They checked the bees
for production of chemicals that disinfect the honey and for
other immunity related chemicals.
They also measured the amount of virus in each bee.
Surprisingly, they found that the virus in mite-infested bees
rapidly increased to extremely high levels when the bee was
exposed to the bacteria. The virus levels in mite-free bees
did not change when the bee was injected with bacteria.
One chemical, GOX or glucose oxidase, is put into the honey
by worker bees and sterilizes the honey and all their food. If
bees have mites, their production of GOX decreases.
"As mites build up, we suspect that not as much GOX is
found in the honey and the honey has more bacteria," says
Cox-Foster. "It is likely that the combination of increased
mite infestation, virus infection and bacteria is the cause of
the two-week death collapse of hives."
The mites suppressed other immune responses in the bees,
leaving the bees and the colonies more vulnerable to
infection. The bee mites transfer from adult bees to late
stage larva. The virus can be transferred through many
different pathways.
"This system is important not only because of what the
mites are doing to honey bee populations in the U.S., but
because it can be used as a model system for exploring what
happens to viruses in animal or human populations," says
Cox-Foster. "If we view the colony as a city, then we have a
variety of infection modes -- queen to eggs, workers to food
supply, bee to bee, and parasite to bee."
Environment:
We have had more
freaky weather over the past year or three than anyone can
remember - and the earth itself is in rebellion with disclosures
just in the past week that part of the sea bed in the area of
the tsunami actually fell 4, 000 feet. And the web bot
"dailies" are pulling all kinds of things out of the current
data collection run for ALTA 905 that reflect the seriousness of
our environmental problems: The early arrival of
113
heat in Phoenix and the "by the way" inputs from the bot
team like this one:
Fifteen thousand evacuated as freak wave strikes villages
Last Updated 22/05/2005, 09:22:36 In southern India, upwards
of 15,000 villagers have been forced to flee their homes,
following a freak wave.
Small fishing hamlets in Kerala State were flooded by
seawater, prompting fears of a tsunami.
Sixteen makeshift camps have been established to house the
evacuees and fishermen have been warned not to take their
boats out to sea.
It is unclear at this stage what triggered the high tides.
Here's the link, but no additional info:
http://www.abc.net.au/ra/news/stories/s1374082.htm
You probably
don't need me to remind you that with the Gulf Stream in
trouble, the number of hurricanes this year is expected to be up
substantially again (or further?). Perhaps its in anticipation
that two items have come to our attention as The Powers That Be
seem to be spreading out geographically:
see the articles if you can get to them...mostly paper
copies only from a board for woo woos but nonetheless part and
parcel of what is coming in from all over- sudden, odd
movements of TPTB From the BBCs roundup of the Sunday
newspapers at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/4570323.stm :
"The British garrison on the Falklands is being boosted
amid islanders fears of a new invasion by Argentina,
according to the Sunday Express."
(For those of you who dont remember, Argentina and Britain
fought a war in the early 80s after Argentina invaded the
islands. The war was rumoured to have been entirely about oil
- there are allegedly very rich oil pockets in that region,
albeit in very deep and stormy water.)
The story leads the paper today in fact. I cant link to
the story itself as the Sunday Express doesnt post news
online but their website has a picture of todays front page
http://www.express.co.uk/
and you can make out some of the leading article.
Besides reports
of various lodges or the Fraternal Order of the type described
in "National Treasure" moving some of their facilities to higher
ground, although unconfirmed, we find a strangely close fit in
the report in the Washington Post early this month that the
CIA is moving some operations to the Mile High City - Denver.
Communications:
We have reached -
or are just arriving - at a point of supersaturation of media.
I've been working on a theory which I call "Length of
Communications" theory. It is best shown schematically, but the
central idea is that most people only "go out" on a
communications system only as far as they need to in order to
achieve the desired contact with another human, or what they are
told is the "information."
Thus, during the
period before brain cooking cell phones (E and I both won't use
them, and our distaste for them is furthered by the tracking
potential they offer not-always-honest governments) people would
read far more and with more purpose than they do today. With
the advent of cell phones and the internet, everything is being
distilled into smaller and more frequent information "bytes".
Sound bytes, history bytes, policy bytes, and the lack of
critical thought that elevated both Teri Shiavo's case and
Michael Jackson's trial to international incidents.
Timing Our Exit
There are other
things bearing on my thinking at the moment besides the faint
murmur in the back of my mine that 'time is getting close.' One
example (which will be posted to the free side of this site on
Monday) is the report that
IRS has given up on trying to further prosecute a tax offender.
Our thinking is that governments are most dangerous when their
"right to govern" is in any way threatened/ We're in the window
of history where we are apparently transitioning from "self
governing people" to "selves governing people," if you follow
the distinction.
The second thing
that is weighing on me is that the business I am consulting for
is about to move from one location in the Burbank/San Fernando
Valley area of Los Angeles to the San Gabriel Valley area
(Alhambra). The personal problem I have is that I have advised
my colleagues that not only is the move far from certain in
regards to the marketing outcome, but more importantly, 75% of
the current staff of four employees (in other words all but me)
have advised me that they will start looking for work if the
planned move goes ahead.
This is bringing
clearly into focus a personal decision that I have to make about
whether m y highest duty is to help build successful businesses,
which continue the economic system and continue the pattern of
growth, or whether there is more of an obligation to help
support the needs and interests of other humans, whether friends
or co-workers.
As so often
happens in my
semi-charmed kind of life the Universe supplied something to
think about in the form of an email this morning that is
precisely and exactly on point, The Universe can do this\, of
course, because it is after all, the Universe, right? Anyway,
the reader picked up on my trying to explain in simple terms how
the Universe seems to work based on what we have been learning
from the web bot work:
"Also in this zone (just before an event) you find in the
literature that a lot of humans have an ability to perceive
things outside of normal time constraints.
Thomas Etter's paper from 1960 on the appearance of
everyday events in the time-reversed domain is a classic, but
Dean Radin's work on Time Reversed Human Experience is
much more to the point because it demonstrates in the
laboratory environment that yes, humans actually react
appropriately at a physical level to future events
(e.g. an event before it happens in linear timekeeping) even
if that doesn't necessarily percolate up into consciousness."
George,
This got me thinking, as I often do, about a certain
passage I read in a novel. You might want to meditate on it
too, not the least because the novel was "War & Peace" by
Tolstoy, which is universally regarded as very important, a
classic, etc. etc. People who have read it, like me, may or
may not have the brain power to learn anything from it, but
getting through the thousand or so pages does entitle us to be
boors about it every now and then.
Anyway, the passage is about this little old lady, a widow,
but with a little money and means. The time is just after the
big battle in front of Moscow, which was kind of a draw and a
high water mark for Napoleon, but still it seemed not victory
enough for the Russians to knock themselves out holding
Moscow. Both Napoleon and the Russians were sort of looking
for a decisive battle, but it wasn't, so, Napoleon, with the
momentum and the prize just miles away, seemed destined to
take Moscow. But what patriotic Russian would leave the city,
the second Rome, which hadn't fallen to any enemy in hundreds,
if not a thousand, years? What was Russia if it fell? But the
little old nobody lady didn't have to worry so much about her
image. She could see the writing on the wall. She could go
with her fear, or her worries, or her common sense, whatever
you want to call it. This is Tolstoy talking and me
paraphrasing, of course. So she left. And she was the first to
leave, of any class. Days before. And so she led the
evacuation of Moscow, which resulted, directly, in the army
not defending it, which led to Napoleon walking in, which led
to his army disintegrating in the lush confines of a
world-class but nearly empty city, which led to opportunistic
fires set by vandals, or just erupting of course because there
was no one to put them out, which led to the Grand Armee
losing it's shelter as the harsh winter set in, which led to
retreat, and defeat, and on an on. Tolstoy asks why? He
ruminates on history and what causes what and who is
responsible for what? He essays on the vanity of Man, all from
the indisputable fact that even three days before the Battle
of Borodino old widow Madam Rustovsky ordered her servants to
pack up her things and departed her Nevsky apartments early
for her country estate 200 miles to the southeast. So the
seemingly insignificant old lady in a way turned the tide of
the whole grand event, the destinies of millions.
Like, so much for what Greenspan and Bush and Friedman and
all the rest are saying and advising; what are the little
people doing?
I can't speak
for all of them, but folks like me, Elaine to some lesser
extent, and Cliff at HalfPastHuman to a greater extent are
worried that what Robert Kaplan wrote so presciently about
nearly 12 years ago is actually showing up and that our modern
era Nevsky apartments could soon be under fire.
I'll grant you
that the world has always been "going to hell" but do you catch
the scent of sulfur and brimstone now and then?
Getting Back at
the Supreme Court
A movement has started
to install something called the Liberty Hotel on grounds of the
home of one US Supreme Court justice who voted to allowed
corporatists to take over private land for corporate expansion.
Here's the news release:
Press Release For Release Monday, June 27 to New Hampshire
media For Release Tuesday, June 28 to all other media
Weare, New Hampshire (PRWEB) Could a hotel be built on the
land owned by Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter? A new
ruling by the Supreme Court which was supported by Justice
Souter himself itself might allow it. A private developer is
seeking to use this very law to build a hotel on Souter's land.
Justice Souter's vote in the "Kelo vs. City of New London"
decision allows city governments to take land from one private
owner and give it to another if the government will generate
greater tax revenue or other economic benefits when the land is
developed by the new owner.
On Monday June 27, Logan Darrow Clements, faxed a request to
Chip Meany the code enforcement officer of the Towne of Weare,
New Hampshire seeking to start the application process to build
a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road. This is the present location of
Mr. Souter's home.
Clements, CEO of Freestar Media, LLC, points out that the
City of Weare will certainly gain greater tax revenue and
economic benefits with a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road than
allowing Mr. Souter to own the land.
The proposed development, called "The Lost Liberty Hotel"
will feature the "Just Desserts Caf" and include a museum, open
to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of
freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon's Bible each guest will
receive a free copy of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged."
Clements indicated that the hotel must be built on this
particular piece of land because it is a unique site being the
home of someone largely responsible for destroying property
rights for all Americans.
"This is not a prank" said Clements, "The Towne of Weare has
five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to
use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr.
Souter we can begin our hotel development."
Clements' plan is to raise investment capital from wealthy
pro-liberty investors and draw up architectural plans. These
plans would then be used to raise investment capital for the
project. Clements hopes that regular customers of the hotel
might include supporters of the Institute For Justice and
participants in the Free State Project among others.
# # #
Logan Darrow Clements Freestar Media, LLC
Phone 310-593-4843
logan@freestarmedia.com
http://www.freestarmedia.com
Tuesday
Respect Rally?
Buy the Rumor...
Sell the news.
That's one of the oldest sayings on Wall St., but it may have its
uses on days like this one. Tonight, the president is giving
his speech on Iraq - and even if it goes off perfectly and there's
not a single misstep in the delivery, he's in an almost impossible
position. For one thing, the pressure from the neocon hawks
is to "stay the course" which Don Rumsfeld figures will be
12 more years of involvement. The more moderate would just
like the US to help build more prisons in Iraq to
lock
up all the insurgents, but the way things are going, that
might well turn out to be more than half the country. And on the
anti-war side, we have a motion building to
require the withdrawal of troops.
George Bush awaken this
morning to find he's in a very ugly world where he has three
incredible large problems that should be keeping him up late at
night with worry:
-
Tonight's speech on
Iraq has to be done perfectly - and even so, it promises to
disappoint 2/3'rd's of the American public - only the hawks, the
moderates or the doves will be happy with his pronouncements under
the best of circumstances. And remember, the future scanning
technology of the web bot project says - in effect - that by the
end of the week the markets will be feeling "humiliation." - not a
happy sign.
-
The second major issue
facing the president is the whole notion of a
Chinese state-run oil company taking over American prize Unocal,
which has more than half of its assets in Asia - China's back
door. The problem is that if china can't spend its trading
excess Wal-Bucks to buy whatever they want, it will be a message
to the Chinese that the dollar is no good any more - at least it
will have in Chinese hands only limited convertibility as "legal
tender". T^hat would sure encourage the Chinese to trash the
dollar.
-
The one other thing
that should keep the president awake nights is the
pending
blow up of the housing bubble. The weekly email
newsletter "Martin on
Monday" with Martin Weiss offered this to readers on Monday: "
The Economist estimates that the total value of residential
property in developed economies rose by more than $30 trillion
over the past five years, to over $70 trillion. Thats
approximately equivalent to the total growth in the entire
economy of every one of the countries combined.
In other words, the worldwide real estate bubble is equal to
100% of the worldwide growth in GDP. According to the Economist,
this housing bubble is ...
Far larger than every previous house-price boom in history
...
Far larger than Americas stock market bubble of the 1920s
(estimated at 55% of GDP) ...
Even larger than the global stock market bubble between
1995 and 2000 (80% of GDP), and ...
Therefore the biggest bubble in the history of the world!
Given all this weighing
on the economy, our best guess - if we were still playing the
markets - would be to expect a "respect rally" today before
the presidential pronouncements - and then disappointment in the
aftermath later this week. It's just a guess, but that's
what the gut check says.
Iran
Elections
Apparently quite a few
people are scratching their heads
over the election outcome in Iran.
AMD Suit
Microprocessor
challenger AMD is taking Intel to court
yelling "Foul! Anti-trust!" over how Intel arrangtes
relationships with customers in order to keep them in the
Intel family of products.
Dell
Hoaxed
Several dozen readers
have asked us to comment on the alleged implant of a keylogger
into certain Dell laptop computers.
If you haven't seen the
story click over here. As best we can tell, it's a hoax
- and no one I know with a Dell laptop has discovered such a
thing.
Hoax
- but a clever one that plays on a lot of fears out there, for
sure. ALWAYS be suspicious of a rumor that tracks back
to a non-U.S. site and is not shown anywhere else on the web - but
a great gotcha one, huh? (Paranoia is a survival skill, so
it's OK if you believed this one for a minute...)
Phosphoric Acid
and Caffeine
We notice that the
Russian Duma is preparing legislation that would
outlaw
soft drinks containing caffeine and certain other ingredients
- which would have the effect of outlawing sales of Coca Cola and
Pepsi if passed. That has to make certain corporations
jittery. I would expect the ADHD problem would be less
apparent in societies which have lower use of additives and
refined sugars and caffeine, but hey, I'm not a doctor....
Mourning
at Wal-Mart
yesterday, heir to the
fortune John T. Walton
died in
an ultralight airplane crash. Jackson Hole Wyoming,
Torture
Suit Coming
A Russian who says he
was detained illegally and tortures at Guantanamo Bay
says he will be suing the U.S.
French
Reactor
The French will be
building a
new reactor designed to produce fusion power. We're
always concerned when this much energy gets packed into a single
project - we hope the engineers get it exactly right.
Monday
Over $60 Blues
The presidential speech
this week on Iraq is obviously not the big problem of Wall St.
Instead,
it's the problem of oil over $60 - and how long it might stay
there. not too much that can be said, except oil continuing at $60
and going up from here really would make the case that Peak Oil is
real. It will also put the administration further behind the
eight ball on the China Unocal story which we
touched on this weekend. Thee policy questions raised by
China's bid for Unocal are
beginning to get coverage elsewhere too...
China is also playing
"guts poker" with the administration on currency valuation - which
China figures will stay right where it is for now - a hint you can
get by seeing how
China trumpets a story abouit an economist's view to that effect.
And the head of China's Central Bank
minces no words on the topic, either.
Speech
Bets
A reader makes the
following sage observations about tomorrow's presidential speech:
1) Bush's speech at 8pm Tuesday night is being broadcast at a
major US military base (Fort Bragg). You do not go to a military
base to announce a cowardly series of negotiations with your
enemy. It is far more likely to be the announcement of a war on
Iran. 2) Perhaps the negotiations were intended to stay secret
and were designed to facilitate the war on Iran. After all, most
of the Insurgents are Sunni, and Iran is Shiite.
3) I will still lay even money that a new war will start around
6:15 Eastern Time on Tuesday. (15 minutes before the start of
the network news is the perfect time to start a war, it throws
the news organizations into chaos).
4) Watch the oil market. Negotiations with insurgents would
imply a lower oil price. War with Iran implies a higher price.
Which direction are you seeing?
Maybe I am just too hopeful, but I just don't think Bush would
be so stupid as to launch anything on Iran because they are
already democratic - and what would be the pretext? I think
people of America would take to the streets by the thousands if
they pulled something like this...but you never know, I guess. I
think I'd expect cancellation of the speech myself...
Summer Shakes
Back
Right on schedule - Off
Jalisco, Mexico:
Magnitude 6.3 - OFF THE COAST OF JALISCO, MEXICO
2005 June 27 11:35:45 UTC
Preliminary Earthquake Report
U.S. Geological Survey, National Earthquake Information Center
World Data Center for Seismology, Denver
A strong earthquake occurred at 11:35:45 (UTC) on Monday,
June 27, 2005. The magnitude 6.3 event has been located OFF THE
COAST OF JALISCO, MEXICO. The hypocentral depth was poorly
constrained. (This event has been reviewed by a seismologist.)
Magnitude 6.3
Date-Time Monday, June 27, 2005 at 11:35:45 (UTC)
= Coordinated Universal Time
Monday, June 27, 2005 at 4:35:45 AM
= local time at epicenter
Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones
Location 18.788N, 107.342W
Freak
Windstorm
We'll just pretend that
the major windstorm that
blew through Moscow over the weekend wasn't really a
hurricane and someone is taking a little poetic license.
Still, if you're a web bot fan, this would be number 2 of 9 freak
windstorms for this period - the previous one being the hurricane
force winds which hit Spokane, Washington a week ago.
(Read below for a rare
Sunday edition)
Sunday
Emotions
Building Sunday
From a very alert
reader:
Hey George,
Have you checked out the Global Consciousness Project out
lately? The "dot" is just about orange now and looks to be
fading to red. I'm really sure what this means. Is read a good
or a bad thing? I've read several pages on the site and couldn't
really find out what it's supposed to mean. Maybe I'm just dense
and don't get it. Any illumination from your perspective would
be appreciated. Maybe this brightening of the dot is correlating
with Cliff's web bots but I don't understand it enough to know.
The dot was blue to green just a couple of weeks ago. Thanks in
advance for your reply.
(name withheld) Baton Rouge, LA
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
Ask me later this week
if it was more than a freak of statistics - you know what the bots
are saying about this time period.
Will China's
Dollars Work?
The
Big Question which is floating around under the surface of the NY
Times story on China's bid to buy Unocal is this: Can the US
afford to let China spend its Wal-Bucks that way - buying up
strategically critical U.S. companies? One argument is they
should be banned - but the other says if their US "federal"
reserve notes have strings on them, China won't be needing to
acquire any more dollars and that would be a train wreck that
would drive the West into instant depression. Ugly outcome
either way, unfortunately. But that's just one problem...
Desperate
to Withdraw
With GW giving a speech
on Iraq tomorrow night, we are hearing from our highly credible
sources in Baghdad that the US is desperate to cobble up a
withdrawal strategy:
I DONT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE HEARING BACK AT HOME BUT THE WORD
HERE ON THE GROUND IS THAT THE US IS DESPERATELY NEGOTIATING
UNDER THE TABLE, TRYING TO FIND A WAY OUT OF THE MIDEAST. AS I
TELL YOU THIS MORE AND MORE INSURGENTS ARE POURING ACROSS EVERY
BORDER. THINGS ACTUALLY LOOK WORSE THAN THEY EVER HAVE IN THE
PAST.
WANDERING TEXAN ON THE GROUND - IRAQ
This gets us to the latest notes from HPH:
Note the days that this occurred. And when it is now
appearing. We will see much fallout from this. Many of the
current supporters of Bush will see this as a sell-out. And this
will likely rile the markets...if the US concedes what happens
to Iraqi oil and Haliburton contracts? And how do the political
class justify the deaths and other crimes to come from their
action?
Curious though that it took place on the 3rd and again the
13th.
Rumsfeld: U.S. Met With Iraq Insurgents By THOMAS WAGNER,
Associated Press Writer1 hour, 53 minutes ago Secretary of
Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld acknowledged Sunday that U.S.
officials have met with insurgents in Iraq, after a British
newspaper reported that two such meetings took place recently at
a villa north of Baghdad. Insurgent commanders "apparently came
face to face" with four American officials during meetings on
June 3 and June 13 at a villa near Balad, about 25 miles north
of Baghdad, The Sunday Times reported.
Unfortunately, now that this kind of thing kicks out into the
public, it will fuel the will of the insurgents and will make a
"victory" all that much harder for the US to attain - provided
someone can show us a definition for "victory" there that makes
sense beyond fattening up corporate coffers and depressing
unemployment...
The Week
Ahead
I may have screwed up
by naming the subscription side of this site
www.peoplenomics.com -
it should maybe have been "suckonomics" because of what we see as
an alternative future based on some of our conversations with
Cliff at
www.halfpasthuman.com.
In the emotional terms
of linguistics, the web bot update Cliff will post for his
subscribers this weekend will hint at the flavor of next week as
one where the markets will begin the week in "tension" and will
end of the week in humiliation.
On Tuesday night, the
president will do an Iraq speech - and even if everything
is said just according to script, the reaction of the people will
go poorly such that by the time we get into the fourth of July
weekend, the markets will sense "humiliation."
The problem then boils
down to the next false flag attack potential, which we rate as an
increasing risk and the costs of the war continue to build and the
presidential approval ratings decline. A "terrorist" attack,
whether real or orchestrated, would cause the country to unite
around our core values and leader - at least for a while.
Thus our concerns about a "terrorist" attack are way as June ends
at the same time when several hedge funds are desperately
unloading stocks to raise money in a series of moves that
obviously started to bite in the financial markets this week.
This weekend, we still
have a high potential for a big earthquake or two based on the big
alignment of planets which is detailed by NASA at
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/22jun_spectacular.htm
Housing Bubble
Versus Internet Bubble
We thought it would be
a worthwhile linguistics exercise to look up how man times the
phrase "internet bubble" and the phrase "housing bubble" have been
appearing over time - based on date range specific runs in a
www.altavista.com advanced
search. Plotted out on a log-scaled chart here's what you
get:
Just for what it's
worth, my daughter reports the house I bought in 1973 for $43,950
about 10 miles from Microsoft headquarters is now worth in excess
of $400,000. She also asks "How can us young people afford
those kind of prices?" The parent answer: "be patient a
little while and keep watching the chart above..." which we'll
update once in a while.
News from
Elliott Wave International
On to Our Charts!
Write when you get
rich,
George Ure, The People's Economist
|
Sunday, July 3, 2005 13:40 PDT
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