Thursday, December 18, 2014

Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, December 18, 2014


Sorry for no newsbites yesterday...

 Anyway... after 45 minutes... here's today's Christmas message in song!


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4 comments:

William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/another-cromnibus-sneak-attack-4th-amendment-probable-cause-safeguard-eviscerated/

* BY JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO

Is Government Faithful to the Constitution?

* NO.

When the government is waving at us with its right hand, so to speak, it is the government’s left hand that we should be watching. Just as a magician draws your attention to what he wants you to see so you will not observe how his trick is performed, last week presented a textbook example of public disputes masking hidden deceptions. Here is what happened.

Last week was dominated by two huge news stories. One was the revelation by the Senate Intelligence Committee of torture committed by CIA agents and contractors on 119 detainees in the post-9/11 era – 26 of whom were tortured for months by mistake.

* ENHANCED INTERROGATION - NOT "TORTURE."

In that revelation of anguish and error were the conclusions by CIA agents themselves that their torture had not produced helpful information.

* WELL IF WE'RE TALKING QUESTIONING THE WRONG PEOPLE...

(*SNORT*)

President Barack Obama acknowledged that the CIA had tortured, yet he directed the Department of Justice not to prosecute those who tortured and those who authorized it.

* IT WASN'T TORTURE.

The other substantial news story was the compromise achieved by Congress and the White House to fund the government through the end of September 2015. That legislation, which is 2,000 pages in length, was not read by anyone who voted for it.

(*PURSED LIPS*)

It [also - once again] spends a few hundred billion dollars more than the government will collect in tax revenue.

(*NOD*)

The compromise was achieved through bribery; members of Congress bought and sold votes by adding goodies (in the form of local expenditures of money borrowed by the federal government) to the bill that were never debated or independently voted upon and were added solely to achieve the votes needed for passage. This is how the federal government operates today. Both parties participate in it. They have turned the public treasury into a public trough.

* THUS... JUSTIFICATION FOR REVOLUTION...

Hidden in the law that authorized the government to spend more than it will collect was a part about funding for the 16 federal civilian intelligence agencies. And hidden in that was a clause, inserted by the same Senate Intelligence Committee that revealed the CIA torture, authorizing the National Security Agency to gather and retain non-public data for five years and to share it with law enforcement and with foreign governments.

* YEP. (SEE PREVIOUS NEWSBITES!)

* TO BE CONTINUED...

December 18, 2014 at 1:46 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

“Non-public data” is the government’s language referring to the content of the emails, text messages, telephone calls, bank statements, utility bills and credit card bills of nearly every innocent person in America – including members of Congress, federal judges, public officials and law enforcement officials. I say “innocent” because the language of this legislation – which purports to make lawful the NSA spying we now all know about – makes clear that those who spy upon us needn’t have any articulable suspicion or probable cause for spying.

* OUR COUNTRY IS GONE, FOLKS; THE AMERICA WE GREW UP IN... THE AMERICA UNDER THE CONSTITUTION AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS... KAPUT.

The need for articulable suspicion and probable cause has its origins in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which was written to prohibit what Congress just authorized.

* YEP...

That amendment was a reaction to the brutish British practice of rummaging through the homes of American colonists, looking for anything that might be illegal. It is also a codification of our natural right to privacy. It requires that if the government wants non-public data from our persons, houses, papers or effects, it must first present evidence of probable cause to a judge and then ask the judge for a search warrant.

Probable cause is a level of evidence that is sufficient to induce a judge into concluding that it is more likely than not that the place to be examined contains evidence of crimes. In order to seek probable cause, the government must first have an articulable suspicion about the person or place it has targeted. Were this not in the law, then nothing would stop the government from fishing expeditions in pursuit of anyone it wants to pursue. And fishing expeditions turn the presumption of liberty on its head. The presumption of liberty is based on the belief that our rights are natural to us and that we may exercise them without a permission slip from the government and without its surveillance.

Until last week, that is.

Last week, Congress, by authorizing the massive NSA spying to continue and by authorizing the spies to share what they have seized with law enforcement, basically permitted the fishing expeditions that the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.

* AMERIKA - WITH A "K."

How can the president and Congress defy the Constitution, you might ask? Hasn’t every member of the government taken an oath to uphold the Constitution? Doesn’t the Constitution create the presidency and the Congress? How can politicians purport to change it?

The answers to these questions are obvious, as is the belief of most of those in government that they can write any law and regulate any behavior and ignore the Constitution they have sworn to uphold whenever they want, so long as they can get away with it.

* AGAIN... NOT A THREAT... JUST SIMPLE LOGICAL ANALYSIS... WE NEED TO START KILLING THESE PEOPLE UNTIL THE REST GET THE MESSAGE AND REVERSE COURSE.

December 18, 2014 at 1:46 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/im-not-buying-it-not-the-wall-street-rip-nor-the-keynesian-dope/

* BY DAVID STOCKMAN

First comes production.

Then comes income.

Spending and savings follow.

All the rest is debt…… unless you believe in a magic Keynesian ether called “aggregate demand” and a blatant stab-in-the-dark called “potential GDP”.

I don’t.

* NEITHER DO I!

So let’s start with a pretty startling contrast between two bellwether data trends since the pre-crisis peak in late 2007 — debt versus production.

Total credit market debt outstanding - government, business, household and finance - is up by 16% since the last peak - from $50 trillion to $58 trillion.

(And that 2007 peak, in turn, was up 80% from the previous peak {2001}; and that was up 103% from the business cycle peak before that {July 1990}.)

Yes, the debt mountain just keeps on growing. It now stands 4.2X higher than the $13.6 trillion outstanding just 24 years ago.

As a proxy for “production” I am using non-durable manufactures rather than the overall industrial production index ... the virtue of the industrial production index is that it is a measure of physical output, not sales dollars which reflect inflation. And unlike indicators that are deflated into “real” terms, it is not distorted by Washington’s fudging and finagling of the prices indices.

So how are we doing on production of things the American economy consumes day-in-and-day out?

Well, at the most recent data point for November, production had soared - all the way back to where it was in January 2003!

(*SMIRK*) (*SNICKER*)

That’s right. Domestic output of food and beverages, paper, chemicals, plastics, textiles and finished energy products (e.g. gasoline), to name just a few, has experienced no net growth for nearly 11 years.

Now that’s a lot more informative than the Keynesian GDP accounts, which presume that government output is actually worth something and that do not know the difference between current period “spending” derived from production and “spending” funded by hocking future income, that is, by borrowing.

(*NOD*)

* I HOPE YOU'RE PAYING ATTENTION, FOLKS - ESPECIALLY MY FRIEND "HE WHOSE NAME DARE NOT BE MENTIONED."

Stated differently, the current capitalism suffocating regime of Keynesian central banking and extreme financial repression has created systematic bias and noise in the so-called “in-coming data”. These distortions are the result of misallocations and malinvestments reflecting artificial, sub-economic costs of debt and capital.

* LOW INTEREST RATES - OFTEN TARGETED (OR RATHER "MISTARGETED!")

* TO BE CONTINUED...

December 18, 2014 at 1:48 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

The resulting bubbles and booms, in turn, cause highly aggregated measures of economic activity to be flattered by the unsustainable production, spending and investment trends underneath at the sector level.

Bubble finance does not create growth; it funds phony booms that end up as destructive round trips.

(*NODDING WHILE SIGHING*)

Yet, here we are again.

The graph below reflects production of oil and gas, coal and other mining products including iron ore and copper. It has soared by 35% since the 2007 peak, and accounts for virtually all of the gain in industrial production ex-utilities over the last seven years.

Yet the plain fact is, the above explosion of mainly oil and gas production did not reflect the natural economics of the free market, and certainly no technological innovation called “fracking.” The later wasn’t a miracle; it was just a standard oilfield production technique that was long known to the industry, if not to CNBC. It became artificially economic during recent years only due to the massive and continuous distortions of both commodity prices and capital costs caused by the world’s central bankers.

* PUSHING DOWN THE DOLLAR FORCED DOLLAR DENOMINATED OIL PRICES UP; THE RISING DOLLAR HAS BEEN A FACTOR IN PUSHING OIL PRICES BACK DOWN. (BUT WHY DID THE DOLLAR RISE...??? WAS IT DUE TO EXPECTATIONS THAT QE WAS GOING TO END...???)

The meaning of the oil crash is that the central bank fueled bubble of this century is over and done. We are now entering an age of global cooling, drastic industrial deflation, serial bubble blow-ups and faltering corporate profits.

What counts is production of real goods and services based on honest prices and the efficient utilization of labor and capital. And it goes without saying that cannot happen under the current central banking regime of false prices and drastic misallocation of economic resources.

The current illusion of recovery is a result mainly of windfalls to the financial asset owning upper strata, the explosion of transfer payments funded with borrowed public money and another supply-side bubble - this time in the energy sector and its suppliers and infrastructure.

But that’s not real growth or wealth. Indeed, the desultory truth about the latter is better revealed by the fact that the American economy is not even maintaining its 20th century level of breadwinner jobs.

(*PURSED LIPS*)

And the real state of affairs is further testified to by the lamentable trend in real median household incomes. That figure - not distorted by the bubble at the top of the income ladder - is still lower than it was two decades ago.

So much for the Keynesian rap. Yet that’s about all that underpins the latest Wall Street rip.

December 18, 2014 at 1:48 PM

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