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Celebrate Einstein's birthday (which was this past Saturday) by reading his classic piece on why he was a socialist. [Monthly Review / Albert Einstein]
Other interesting news items that may change the world you live in (if you're paying attention anymore):
Jeb Bush Wants To Eliminate Minimum Wage: 'Leave It To The Private Sector'
Scott Walker's Convicted Chief of Staff Going To Jail After Appeals Denied - Walker Knows Nothing (Mirroring WI Voters)
The List Of Potential Future Republican Presidents Once Included Aaron Schock
Omidyar’s Paper Turns a Blind Eye to the American Deep State
Lunatics running the asylum (or just those seeming to be lunatics for a deeper unstated reason)?
Psychopaths possessing millions totally fixated on accumulating billions (without the least consciousness of how they look to non-psychopaths)?
And these are the figures we are told (seriously) to emulate?
Lunatics running the asylum would seem to be an improvement over these guys.
Citizens Fight for Home Rule Against Fracking and Pipelines
Awash in Cash, Jeb Bush Begs Donors Not to Give More Than $1 Million – Just Now
What's Scarier: Terrorism, or Governments Blocking Websites in Its Name?
“Not True and They Knew It”: What Rahm Emanuel’s Wall Street Craze Cost Chicago
Beginning over a decade ago, Wall Street banks sold municipalities, school districts, water systems and public hospitals across the country on obscure financial instruments, pitching them as a way to borrow more cheaply than plain-vanilla municipal bonds. But just as homeowners were swindled into loans they couldn’t afford during the housing bubble, local governments suffered a similar fate.
. . . “The banks made a fundamental representation, that it was a cheaper way to borrow,” said Brad Miller, a former Congressman and Of Counsel at Grais and Ellsworth, who has focused on these deals. “That was not true and they knew it.”
Loving those latest fake BLS numbers sufficiently?
How about that political rebranding? Gotcha!!!
Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept:
"Just as the Bush administration and the U.S. media re-labelled 'torture' with the Orwellian euphemism 'enhanced interrogation techniques' to make it more palatable, the governments and media of the Five Eyes surveillance alliance are now attempting to re-brand 'mass surveillance' as 'bulk collection' in order to make it less menacing (and less illegal)."Or better yet, how about Bill Gates lovin' up on Warren Buffett for no perceptible reason?
Or Mike Jesus Huckabee?
"One ad arriving in January in the inboxes of Huckabee supporters, who signed up for his political commentaries at MikeHuckabee.com, claims there is a miracle cure for cancer hidden in the Bible." [NYT / Trip Gabriel]
I'm not sure I can take this anymore.
The worst people are not just reaping the benefits while the rest of us are reaping the whirlwind, they are reaping the billions of benefits.
Thinking of the fraudulent Bill Gatesspeak again - I'm loving more the truth version available at Zero Hedge.
It may not be exactly the truth either, but it must be a whole lot closer. Like hand grenades to horseshoes when you want to ensure you get close to the target.
After you read the essays below, see the video "Fall and Winter" on Free Speech TV (FSTV). Look it up. It will give you pause and, perhaps, a way out of this morass.
Something Strange Is Going On With Nonfarm Payrolls
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/17/2015
Let's start with the basics: why is there a majority consensus that the Fed will hike rates after it removes its "patient" language tomorrow? One simple reason: non-farm payrolls. As reported earlier in the month, following the report of March's expectations smashing 295,000 jobs added, there have now been a 13 consecutive months of 200K+ payroll months...
... something which together with the 5.5% unemployment rate, is for the Fed is a clear indication that the slack in the labor is about to disappear and wages are set to surge.
Sadly, as we showed before, wages are not only not rising, but for 80% of the population they are once again sliding.
Falling wages aside (a critical topic as it singlehandedly refutes the Fed's bedrock thesis of no slack in a labor force in which there are 93 million Americans who no longer participate in the job market) going back to the original topic of which economic factors are prompting the Fed to assume there is an economic recovery, without exaggeration, all alone.
Is there nothing else that can validate the Fed's rate hike hypothesis? Well... no.
Below is a selection of the economic data points that have missed expectations in just the past month.
MISSES
So a pattern emerges: we have an economy in which jobs and only jobs are acting as if there is a strong recovery, while everything else is sliding, disappointing economists, and in fact hinting at another contraction (whatever you do, don't look at the Fed's internal model of Q1 GDP).
- Personal Spending
- Construction Spending
- ISM New York
- Factory Orders
- Ward's Domestic Vehicle Sales
- ADP Employment
- Challenger Job Cuts
- Initial Jobless Claims
- Nonfarm Productivity
- Trade Balance
- Unemployment Rate
- Labor Market Conditions Index
- NFIB Small Business Optimism
- Wholesale Inventories
- Wholesale Sales
- IBD Economic Optimism
- Mortgage Apps
- Retail Sales
- Bloomberg Consumer Comfort
- Business Inventories
- UMich Consumer Sentiment
- Empire Manufacturing
- NAHB Homebuilder Confidence
- Housing Starts
- Building Permits
- PPI
- Industrial Production
- Capacity Utilization
- Manufacturing Production
- Dallas Fed
- Chicago Fed NAI
- Existing Home Sales
- Consumer Confidence
- Richmond Fed
- Personal Consumption
- ISM Milwaukee
- Chicago PMI
- Pending Home Sales
- Personal Income
- Personal Spending
- Construction Spending
- ISM Manufacturing
- Atlanta Fed GDPNow
To be sure, economists these days are better known as weathermen, and so they are quick to blame every economic disappointment on the weather. Because, you see, they were unaware it was snowing outside when they provided their forecasts about the future, a future which should be impacted by the snowfall that day, and which they promptly scapegoat as the reason for their cluelessness. Yet one wonders: why didn't the harsh snow (in the winter) pound February jobs as well? Recall last year's payroll disappointments were immediately blamed on the weather which was just as "harsh" as this year. Why the difference?
And yet, today this rising "anomaly" between Nonfarm Payolls "data" and everything else, hit a crescendo, and some - such as Jim Bianco - have had it with the lies anomalies, which prompted him to ask the following:
Why Are Construction Jobs and Housing Starts Telling Different Stories? Is The Problem Non-Farm Payrolls* * *
Bloomberg.com – Housing Starts Plunge by the Most in Four Years
Housing starts slumped in February by the most in four years as bad winter weather in parts of the U.S. prevented builders from initiating new projects. Work began on 897,000 houses at an annualized rate, down 17 percent from January and the fewest in a year, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday in Washington. The median estimate of 80 economists surveyed by Bloomberg called for 1.04 million. “It was just the weather, basically,” said Richard Moody, chief economist at Regions Financial Corp. in Birmingham, Alabama. Still, “my view of the recovery in single-family housing is that it’s coming more gradually than others think.”
Comment
The red line above shows seasonally adjusted housing starts for February plunged by one of the largest amounts in the post-crisis period.
The chart below shows a subset of the February non-farm payroll report, residential construction jobs. Seasonally adjusted these jobs increased by 17,200 in February, the most in two years (Feb 2013 was greater) and the second most in four years.
The vast majority of residential construction jobs are due to new housing starts. Existing housing does not create a lot of construction jobs. So while economists are blaming the weather for the plunge in housing starts, residential construction jobs were fairly robust in February. This makes no sense.
Could remodeling have accounted for this discrepancy? Was there a big rush to redo kitchens in February? In Home Depot’s February 24 investor conference call, they made no mention of an unusual or a big increase in remodeling. Remodeling is so important to Home Depot that they partnered with Harvard University to create an economic series to help track sales (noted in the conference call).
If remodeling was not responsible for this discrepancy, we are left with a theme we have brought up on multiple occasions over the past few weeks. Payrolls data continues to paint a rosy picture of the economy while the rest of the economic data is doing quite the opposite.
Economists seem to start with the premise that the non-farm payroll data is correct and everything else needs to be dismissed by weather and other factors. Maybe we should ask why the non-farm payrolls number is different from everything else.
Here is another way of seeing the above "anomaly":
So, instead of asking why everything else is showing an abnormal - and rapid - slowdown in the US economy (and blaming everything on snow) is it about time that everyone - the Fed included - finally asks: just what is going on with the "data" that is reported every month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics?
Lucid Comments:
Headbanger
Sum Ting Wong!
Tue, 03/17/2015kliguy38
funny shit .....like this is special with all the other complete bullshit they're pumping???
Tue, 03/17/2015 cossack55
FEMA camp construction
Sam Spade
There was a post here on ZH last week which pointed out that 84% of workers in the O&G industry are classified as independent contractors (based on a UC Berkeley academic paper). I would imagine a lot of workers in the construction industry are also self-employed. The NFP data does not track self-employed workers (an increasingly large part of our the workforce), so these lost jobs are not being captured by the official BEA reports. . . . I don't have a good explanation for the construction job gains, other than the thought that somebody somewhere is making shit up!
Buckaroo Banzai
All this tells you is they still have some work to do getting their stories straight.
Evil Franklin
Even FEMA camps need material to build and supply. Somewhere the supply chain would show a blip.
TruthInSunshine
Why the fuck does ZH keep trying to interject reason or analysis into a
construct that is a fraud?
Just sell anything of tangible, actual value, and buy as many electronic stawk certificates as you can, as fast as you are able to.
The financialization of USSA's fraudconomy must go on, Comrades.
FFS.
Chuck Knoblauch
ZH is controlled opposition.
Roll with it.
Dr. Richard Head
I tend to disagree with you. It is because of sites like this that I have done everything possible to detach and disrupt the system as much as possible. It has allowed me more financial freedom than any talking head on MSNBC...
Chuck Knoblauch
And your IP address has probably been noted and listed.
I don't care either :)
Fun Facts
also agree. ZH is very fair in their comment moderation and article presentation.
There is a lot of truth presented here....enough so that the matrix tards even if they are a little bit curious can dig themselves out of the well of lies they're living in.
Gazooks
'Why the fuck does ZH keep trying to interject reason or analysis into a
construct that is a fraud?'
fraud, the new truth
BC
Because the point of the blog is to coninue to pump out commentary with substance that relates to the theme of the blog. I personally like the continued validation of the ponzi/fraud/fiat scheme presented here.
RedHarley
It's a bitch keeping all those lies straight.........
OldPhart
When you done nothing but tell the same lie over and over, eventually you'll forget it's a lie. See: Brian Williams
Caleb Abell
Or alternatively, see: WMD
Of course, when you lie about a personal experience, you're fired.
When you lie and get a million plus people killed, nobody loses their job.
Winston Churchill
They can't even keep track of their lies anymore,so how do you expect them to keep
track of employment ?
junction
Having once worked at a UI local office (when they still existed, and UI is short for Unemployment Insurance, philistine), the big concern for the senior manager there was trolling the Continued Claim section for her next girlfriend. Dykes aside, you should not put your faith in government numbers. The civil service drones who generate these numbers pass them on to empty suits who follow orders. IMHO, the government numbers are estimates, as accurate as the estimated utility bill Con Edison generates.
KnuckleDragger-X
They are all black box numbers. Try to get the raw data and the algorithms including any correction factors and how they were derived. This is why sheep are important, they never ask where the numbers came from, they just smile and say "that's great". We keep hearing about what the Fed will do but they have become a slave to their own lies and they know what will happen when they have to keep their promises.
disabledvet
News to Bill Gates that all those billionaires can't pay for anything.
What's he know about truck driving or oil drilling or war fighting? How is that Washington State deficit doing again?
Glass Seagull
Where "residential" contruction job = "correctional facility" construction job.
Welcome to your new "residences," climate deniers!
thepigman
It's so simple. All the newly-hired waiters are hiring their construction buddies to remodel all the restaurants and bars.
i_call_you_my_base
They need to buy my new product, the Unified Data Distortion Warehouse (UDDW), which assists in aggregating data across many disparate departments and "massages" data uniformly so that these embarrassing situations don't occur. Call me, Janet.
SeattleBruce
Wow, talk about employment security! You'll be busy til the end of days!
PTR
Well, at least "bullshit" has never been doing better.
Snoopy the Economist
There's no strong recovery in jobs - have you forgotten the 92M Americans out of work?
Abbie Normal
Get with the program: they're not out of work, they just don't want to work -- so they're not counted. Hard to believe that one out of every two people aged 18-64 have no desire to work...
andrewp111
There could be major time lags between housing starts and housing completion. Lags like years. The definition of a "housing start" is a building permit and perhaps a few stakes hammered in the ground, or some trees clearcut. Remember, most builders don't actually complete a building until they sell a contract on it and collect most of the money. They don't even dig the hole for the foundation until a down payment is recieved. Nothing to see here, move along.
RobD
They are just adding in the now legal construction workers that were formally working off the books. No new jobs created, they can just count them now. Just my guess, otherwise it's just the usual bs.
FieldingMellish
iPhone wins again! Can't wait to see what the productivity will be when they all lever up their HELOCs to buy the Apple Watch. We used to while away the hours playing Farmville, now its Twitter, Tumblr, Vine...
TruthInSunshine
The iWatch has an app that let's you 3D build a single family home with worm hole materials transported from Planet Xylon.
FieldingMellish
Is it free or will I have to pay $1.99 for it? I'm not paying until I can at least try the free version.
TruthInSunshine
The free version forces you to agree to let Apple sodomize your family.
FieldingMellish
meh... they'll probably do that to all of us anyway... eventually.
FieldingMellish
Bureau of Lieing Scum.
semperfi
it makes perfect sense when you come to the realization that every fucking thing the govt/banksters say is a lie.
Jonesy
Sure it makes sense, all the numbers are fake just like everything else in the US, the food, the pride, etc.
Why is this guy (and all like him in the U.S. Congress) smiling?
Senate Budget Committee chair Mike Enzi (R-WY), pictured here without a care in the world. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
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