Originally published at LooseKannon.com. You can comment here or there.

Jobless #-positive on the suface, will put a bit of wind at O’s back. The numbers are abstract; plight of jobless millions is not. #jobs

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Jobs.  They ain’t comin’ back.  Summit all you want; they ain’t comin’ back.

Corporate America has learned to squeeze blood from a stone, getting stunningly large productivity increases from Americans desperate to keep the jobs they have.  Whether it’s GE or IBM or AOL, they’re not about to give back their profit margins with new hirings.

Construction jobs aren’t coming back; not with the excess dwelling and office capacity that currently exists.  And the only source of funding for new, future oriented industries like solar panel production is…..CHINA.  So unless the Chinese want to build more than a few isolated solar plants in this country, the displaced auto and construction workers, among others, have to hope for unemployment benefit extensions to keep food on their tables.

And the big O decides to commit money we don’t have, and blood we don’t need to spill, to a war in a country that isn’t a country at all, as far as its own inhabitants are concerned.  Aside from Kabul and the surrounding region, what we call Afghanistan is tribes and warlords spread out on a land mass whose borders are figments of our imagination, not their reality.

If O was as courageous as he is articulate, he’d take the advice of an enlightened and farsighted friend of mine who advocates mining on the moon as well as capturing and beaming solar energy to earth from space, and immediately make that the prime  military directive.  And instead of outsourcing work to Blackwater (now “Xe”) and Halliburton, let’s go to the UAW, get the names and numbers of laid off factory workers, and give them first dibs.

Now there’s a new national defense initiative.

Otherwise, count on 8+% unemployment as the new normal/best case scenario for at least a decade, and expect a bit of organized civil insurrection and/or individuals going postal with increasing frequency.

P.S.  Decreasing jobless claims and fewer monthly job losses aren’t a positive sign.  The only positive sign will be substantial hiring numbers.  The rest is spin meant to placate the populace.

Originally published at LooseKannon.com. You can comment here or there.

Why can Obama declare/escalate war unilaterally when Dems said Bush couldn’t?

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O should have left “great” out of “Islam, one of the world’s great religions”. Cadets certainly didn’t appreciate the verbal appeasement.

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Dubailout-indirectly, some monies (our tax dollars) given to US banks will be used to purchase bonds to bail out Dubai World. #Dubailout

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Dubai debt crisis will fuel Muslim extremists.Debtor has stakes in MGM Mirage & Barney’s, both symbols of Western infidels.#Dubaidebt.

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Help me out here.

Should I be thankful because, despite almost one quarter of all mortgage holders being underwater, and 17 million American households having trouble putting food on the table during the past year, consumer confidence came in up this morning?

Should I be thankful that the current unemployment rate of 10+%, as well as the underemployment rate of 17+% are probably lower than they’re going to be 6 months from now, so there’s still some time to prepare for whatever civil insurrection might arise from an increasingly disgruntled populace?

Should I be thankful that New York has 3 brand spanking new sports stadiums, with exceptionally plush luxury boxes, even though school and nursing home budgets are being slashed?

Should I be thankful that Wall Street bonuses are going to be up big this Xmas, and, because trickle down economics never fails,  real estate brokers, supers, handymen, janitors, and high end strip joint employees can breathe a little easier?

Should I be thankful that I’m still a productive part of a functioning, but far smaller economy, and that my sense of obligation to my fellow man can be kept at bay by making a small donation to charity, or by giving a buck out now and then to a homeless person out on the street?

Should I be thankful that military casualties in Afghanistan are occurring with less frequency than they did in the heat of the Iraqi conflict?

And hot off the presses, should I be thankful that the Fed sees the economy improving, even though they don’t see job growth for a while?  And should I be thankful that we must certainly be in the clear (except for those pesky unemployed citizens), since the Fed has been consistently on the mark in all their past projections and policies?

Finally, should I be thankful that our collective conscience isn’t lacking more than it already is?

Just asking.

Originally published at LooseKannon.com. You can comment here or there.

Market turning point: essential truth beneath data being reacted to, rather than rose colored glasses response to surface info. #stocks

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The dollar’s been plunging in value.  No big secret there.  We Americans don’t feel it’s effects much in our day to day personal commerce, but that could change, with overseas goods like $19 Wal-Mart end tables or 100K+ luxury sedans skyrocketing in price.

For now however, the worth-less dollar is hurting our foreign trading partners, who can’t raise prices on an already pinched American consumer, and therefore have to accept what amounts to less purchasing power for their goods.

The one way the Chinese, the Japanese, the Europeans, and even the Russians (see the pending sale of the New Jersey Nets) can take advantage of our plummeting fiat currency is by using it to buy up goods, services, and properties here in America.  Between the flame-out in property values and a stock market that’s far cheaper than it was 10 years ago, bargains can be had, as worth-less dollars can buy assets on the cheap.

So if the rest of the world wants a stronger US economy to help pull us all out of the global slump, they ought to take their stockpiles of dollars and build factories here, using what’s now cheap American labor, as folks will work for less and get paid in a currency they don’t realize is worth less as well.

Imagine the Chinese making durable goods for their own consumption overseas, overseas being here.  Imagine foreign car companies building factories that build cars with, what is to them, cheap foreign labor.  And that cheap foreign labor is us.

Economic karma.  What goes around comes around.  25 years ago we began rejecting our own workers in exchange for the instant gratification of improved profit  margins; margins that grew due to outsourced labor and manufacturing.

As a result, we ended up with our middle class on life support.

The irony is that if anyone, foreign or domestic, has the foresight and the boldness to act on this paradigm shift, we’re poised to become a low cost producer of goods.

Our penance and our deliverance, one and the same.

Originally published at LooseKannon.com. You can comment here or there.

Market reaction to 10% unemp # is obscene and points to severe divergence between Wall and Main. Civil insurrection, here we come. #unemp

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Ft. Hood-Troops stretched too thin when combat phobic doc is deployed. Condolences to families goes without saying. #Ft. Hood

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75% of US youth rejected by armed forces and Repubs want to cut spending on education. Lose the war before it even starts. #education

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Originally published at LooseKannon.com. You can comment here or there.

The latest cable news numbers are out, and CNN’s prime time performance was dismal, with only the ancient and fawning Larry King managing to stay out of the ratings dungeon.  Probably because he finds a reason to interview Suzanne Somers once every couple of months, which must be sexy for his demographic.  Even so, he finished third out of the four cable network offerings (the networks being CNN, Fox, HLN, and MSNBC).

It’s no surprise.  CNN is by far the closest thing to a non-partisan news outlet remaining on cable.  Come sundown, the cable news vampires come out in full force, sucking the essential truth out of the body politic.

And we as Americans have come down squarely on the side of, well, whatever side we’re on.  We watch what confirms our own beliefs and biases, and now that CNN doesn’t have a polarizing presidential election to run with, they’re dead meat, and dead last.

It’s also no surprise that a nation that amuses itself by watching singers who can’t sing and dancers who can’t dance would choose news that isn’t news.

In the same respect as the WWE, the leading professional wrestling organization, labels itself as “sports entertainment”, Fox and MSNBC should drop the pretense of calling themselves news outlets and begin describing their on-air fare as “news entertainment”.

Perhaps it was a blessing that Uncle Walter (as in Cronkite) passed away recently after a long, fulfilling, life.  There’s no telling what would have happened to his blood pressure upon seeing Hulk Hogan behind an anchor desk.

Originally published at LooseKannon.com. You can comment here or there.

Sun Micro cuts jobs and NYTimes to cut newsroom staff. The dots are easily connectible. Stay tuned.

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Armenia/Turkey: just when it looked like there were 2 nations on the planet behaving like grown-ups they regress. Hope it’s temporary.

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Rush having a field day with Obama Nobel. No surprise there. How naive is the committee to have missed the inevitable backlash? #Nobel

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The Nobel Committee, in a blatant attempt to manipulate United States foreign policy, awarded their Peace Prize to Barack Obama earlier today.  The Committee was as easy to see through as an 8 year whose dog ate his homework.

To quote the AP, “The Nobel Committee lauded the change in global mood wrought by Obama’s calls for peace and cooperation but recognized initiatives that have yet to bear fruit: reducing the world stock of nuclear arms, easing American conflicts with Muslim nations and strengthening the U.S. role in combating climate change.”

They clearly bought the “hope” part of “hope and change”.

I don’t have a problem with them recognizing the worthiness of many of the President’s goals.  But with decisions about Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, and the Soviet Union (among others) on the table, the members of the Committee are clearly attempting to exert influence in a realm in which they don’t belong.

Last I looked I didn’t vote for any of the Committee members, and our own elected officials have enough problems getting things done without the meddling of additional foreign lobbyists disguised as highbrow planet minders.

Even if their views coincided completely with the President’s, or with mine for that matter, their amateurish attempt to affect the behavior of this sovereign nation by awarding the prize based on “initiatives that have yet to bear fruit” rather than laudable concrete achievements has lost them whatever credibility they’ve got left.

After all, this is the same body that presented Yasir Arafat with the Peace Prize in 1994.

Originally published at LooseKannon.com. You can comment here or there.

Check out Jake’s comment on http://bit.ly/14NQwM. Insight and foresight leads to frustration these days.

Originally published at LooseKannon.com. You can comment here or there.

I live in NYC.  I went to the Jets game a couple of weeks ago.  First pro football game I’d been to since I was a kid.  A lot of fun.  Last night I turned on TBS and watched the Yankees win their first game of the post-season. I didn’t have much interest in the Mets’ miserable year.

What these 3 franchises have in common, besides their geographic proximity, is that they play in stadiums that sit next to  abandoned stadiums that have been deemed obsolete or, in the Jets case, next to the stadium they’ll occupy next season, as their current home is due to be mothballed following the current campaign.

So in this era of gargantuan government deficits, whether national or local, government largesse has been extended to the fat cats who own professional teams, while government belt tightening causes increasingly crowded classrooms, decreasing social services, and higher property taxes.

It’s not like the pro teams couldn’t live without their new digs; they just felt they needed more luxury boxes and softer seats to satisfy their elite season ticket holders.  And yes, I’m aware that building the new stadiums required a labor force that had two years of steady work.  Ask them now how they feel about the ultimately toxic combination of their current unemployment and their kids receiving a sub-par education that takes the “D” out of American Dream.

It’s a poor reflection on our system and society when we subsidize the class that doesn’t need subsidizing, while imposing harsher burdens on the class that does.

And it’s an indication of our shortsightedness as we slowly destroy the middle class workers/consumers that have kept this country humming.

We”ll keep humming, but it’s no longer a happy tune.