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Generally Right When you call the Iraq War a "nightmare with no end in sight" (as I've mentioned once or twice on this sight) there might be a temptation to whip out a convenient republicorp label programmed by mass media into your subconscious and blurt out jingoisms like "weak-willed sissy who doesn't get it" or "If you're not with us, you're against us!" But, when the outlook is supplied by a trainer of generals - ex Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, as a cool assessment of the reality of Iraq, then it might give even the more conning of neocons pause to wonder. Or, at least should.
You'll also notice that it fits with Gywnne Dyer's book title for an equally steely-eyed assessment of political and military conditions in the Middle East "The Mess They Made". In a September 17 article, Dyer sums up the problem of set players who don't care to change their thinking this way:
As you read the reports this weekend about how Sanchez has "dropped a bomb" on the administration, try to remember that there've been verbal bombs going off all over the place. Neocons are frigging deaf. Reality is too harsh, so we get dreamland policy in response.
The Tragedy of Iraq, it turns out, is likely to be entered in the history books as the Tragedy of Corporate Governance: Being supra-human, bereft of feelings, and with their only sensory organs being P&L statements, the mass hypnosis of corporations and their proxies, advertising & politics, have cast on the world, continue to drive humanity further and further into the ditch.
Look! Here comes another ditch...
The Widening Mess Meantime, the relations between the US and Turkey are sliding toward it. One because the US seems backing a move which would label Turkish slaughter of Armenians as genocide. Two, and more important to the otherwise unfeeling investor is that Turkey is in a position to move into northern Iraq - and that means they could move on what the neocons would have you thinking of by now, as "our oil."
So this does what? Pushes the price of oil to a record $83, of course. Got to love those futures.
103 Points in Seven and One Half Years Although the market was able to post a closing Dow over 14,000 again, there's plenty of worry in the pipeline about third quarter earnings, which may be a little on the disappointing side, according to recent headlines.
Not surprisingly, corporate-controlled media hasn't yet unveiled the truth about the hollowness of the market's advance since former all-time highs in early 2000. When the market peaked that year around 11,723 (plus or minus a cheeseburger) it seemed only a minor feat compared to this week's close. But was it? Remember that using the Federal Reserves own calculator, the Dow would need to hit 13,989 and change just to hold onto the purchasing power represented by the Dow in 2000. Since this week's close is 103 points higher than that, forgive me if I seem just a tad on the skeptical side with all the ebullient headlines about.
As inflation marches on, the Dow needs to hit 14,548 by this coming March in order to just keep up with inflation since 2000, if we get 4% inflation this year...
Not that it will be reported when we do. With digidollars of M3 down approaching 15%, proving the Fed knew in advance it would need to bury those numbers, which is why they disappeared in March a year ago, we can see the hyperinflation in paper assets on the way. Nevertheless, it will be statically invisible in terms of the cost of living, because to admit to it would COLA the government out of declining deficit la-la land. Better they suck out your standard of living. So sorry.
Borrowing the Good Life All of the little nits aside - Like real 8-9% inflation - an intractable war, and mania with paper profits - America has, nevertheless, managed to construct a form of perpetual motion machine. The way it works is through inflation pumping up the price of homes (lamed a bit recently by the departing housing bubble), then refinancing that to take money out, while the banks bundle and sell the collected new debt as "investments" to unsuspecting true believers who might be equally prone to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.
With all of this going on, it should come as no surprise that exports from China are going through the roof. In fact, reports the International Herald Tribune today, China's exports are up 27% this year compared with last.
Free Trade Isn't Free While The Decider has been making pointed remarks in support of free trade, and while as much as 30% of Mexico's population is in the US illegally, I have to wonder if we really need more free trade deals with Central America. I mean if "we" means as people, then decidedly "No!" But if "we" means investors pimping minimal cost goods, regardless of the fact that it has the highest resource burn rates, then the answer sadly is "Hell yes!"
Depends where your core values are. Fortunately, a lot of investors aren't bothered by those triflings. If they did, the markets would be at lower, more sustainable levels...
Toll Road Honesty I keep forgetting to mention this, but it's a key 'Big Picture" to watch. You've seen how State Governments are busily leasing off highways, paid for by taxpayers, in theft by conversion schemes that somehow has attained legal blessing by local governments who wish to feather their State Budget nest? A current example is in Pennsylvania.
Well, hats off today to Democratic Congressman Leonard Boswell and Republican Congressman Lee Terry: They've introduced the Toll Road Prohibition Act of 2007 and it says in effect, that if States want to sell off operating leases, so be it BUT the Federal government's stake in the highways must be paid back first because citizens shouldn't have to pay for the same road twice. Right on!
Food and Lipstick Administration Seems the Feds are going to be looking at lead levels in lipstick. Even without lead, I have often wondered over the course of a lifetime, just how much lipstick does a woman eat?
Hmm.. let me slip out of the People's Economist lecture cape and into the Mr. Science lab coat: Women outlive men by on average more than 7 or 8 years. Therefore, doesn't it follow that I should go wolf down a couple of lip glosses once in a while! Yeah, dat's it....
Undercooking? As long as I have the lab coat on, I'm now scratching my head about the Banquet chicken pot pie recall over salmonella. Doesn't heat kill salmonella? Are people habitually undercooking their food, or something here?
Price of Justice There's an interesting federal case against a lawyer in California worth reading.
Taylor Rules Stanford economist John Taylor getting praised by Fed head Ben Bernanke.
Three Way Street Microsoft is launching an online 'event planner' site. This as competition heats up in the 'thin client' computing world. More on that next weekend on our Peoplenomics report for subscribers, but you can already see how the three-way fork in the road is coming along: Fat aps that live on your bloated operating system computer and have tons of corp DRM on them, the trimmer/faster/arguably safer open source movement, and then the online thin-client option with Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Microsoft Office Live coming along.
Peoplenomics: Decision Framing & Portfolio Balance A strange and subtle thing will happen if Ray Kurzweil is right - over the coming few years, the world will move into a twilight zone where creation of new 'things' will become almost instantaneous. If you can think it, it can be built - in many cases right online with services and the whole new class of 3-D printers; devices that will output "things". While this outputting of things sounds really neat, there's a whole other class of possible investments which might make sense specifically because they can not be mass produced: things like land, fish, air, and for lack of a better term, 'natural resources.' The problem, which I didn't see addressed in Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" is that just like physics (of the classical sort) requires an object approaching the speed of light to be pushed by ever greater amounts of energy, so too, ever-faster computational powers and lightning bolt fast development, also call for exponential growth of capital for infrastructure - and what I call "Ure Corollary 13: Accelerated obsolescence which (you may not like this) translates to wasted resources.
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New Solutions Require New Leaders To get your "No Incumbents in 2008" click here. They're just $5. And no, that would not keep Ron Paul from running for the White House - he is not an incumbent for that office - having never held that job before, you see.
Best of Cheap Living Order our handy ebook "How to Live on $10,000 a year or less - and learn to live like a Third World person now. It's coming anyway, with big job layoffs this summer - and by ordering now, you can beat the rush...You may have more time to read this fall if the economy falls apart as I expect...
Friday October 12, 2007 Note: A somewhat shorter report than usual today because my Vista computer ate this morning's report again about 7:07 AM - after an hour of writing. And, since I can't seem to find an auto save every x minutes feature in FP 2003 (and Expression Web isn't playing nicely yet, we'll just have a little shorted report than usual today. Fuming? me? Oh yeah...) so this is what you get in 40-minutes of work...
Producer Prices Scream OK, this is definitely not good news for people who were holding their breath and waiting for the Fed to lower rates one or two more times before year end. The Producer Price report is out today and it's a head-spinner:
Sort of gives you the idea that "Gee, maybe inflation isn't dead after all..." In fact, says the report, the price of finished goods from 12-months ago was up 4.4%.
But wait! Something isn't making sense here! How can finished goods (e.g. consumer goods and the things we buy) be up 4.4% year-on-year in this report, while the CPI reported year-on-year for a month earlier was only 2.0%. Obviously, the right hand is not talking to the left over aqt the Labor Department - that's just a little much to swallow...unless you want to believe that middlemen are giving away their margins. If you believe that, I'm sure you love the Easter Bunny...
Markets Dollar up a bit, ergo gold down, and likely some pressure down on oil and commodities today. Yawn. That was before PPI though.
Budget Deficit It's smaller than expected, so quite predictably, republicorps and The Decider himself are saying lower taxes are the reason. Others (more rationally) think the weaker dollar might have had something to do with it.
Around here, though, we know better. It's common knowledge that lower taxes cause global warming...OK, just seeing if you're awake yet.
The Nobel: Gore
Gore will give his slice of the $1.5 million dollar prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection, which, oh by the way, he chairs.
Cold War II The Russians are mighty ticked at the US for trying to put its missile shield into eastern European countries. Today, they are giving that message to SecState Condi Rice and crew who are holding talks with the Russians.
OK, so the US unilaterally abrogated the ABM Treaty in 2001...who would have thought Russia would bounce back this quickly from the Soviet collapse and make a big deal about it?
Stealing America Once again this week, I was appalled to see the seditious talk from the promoters of a North American Union and the Amero currency as Vincente Fox visits on a PR tour. As USA Today headlines "Vincente Fox admits plans to form a North American Union and alludes to Regional Currency."
Last time I studied it, seemed to me that 'sedition' was talk that openly tries to subvert a Constitution...but maybe I'm just sensitive about being railroaded into a corporatist plan to hollow out the US dollar and shove the Amero down ouir throat - rather sooner than later.
The folks over at World Net Daily have been running a series ("Premeditated Merger") and they report "Amero plot real, says biz columnist".
Apparently, there are not enough people in America these days who remember the death and sacrifice paid by our Armed Forces in the past to preserve America's independence and freedom to take a stand on this. Just give 'em a refi and a new HDTV and it's all good. OMG...what's a Constitution?
And while this is going on, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has just pulled off a massive banking coup which is bound to lead to a showdown with his government and the heavily bankster-influenced US: He's promoting a plan for a regional bank for South America and it would be a power just like the European Central Bank or our Fed is here. The question is simple here: Is there room for another gang of banksters, or does this kind of move set the stage for bullets to fly? He's got oil - and that in itself seems to make countries subject to gunpoint democracy by corpgov...
Shooting Averted?
Road to Stepford Says here that a "British scientist gets PhD for thesis predicting human-robot marriages" in the future. Shouldn't be too hard to teach them to say "yes dear..." on command. "Whatever you say, dear..." Gag me. Change my battery...
Around Here Since I'm in the goat-raising business, this is a big day on the calendar: Eid-al-Fitr. Big feast day for Muslims worldwide.
Thursday October 11, 2007 |
