The “New Economy” Is The No Jobs Economy

by Paul Craig Roberts

One of my most popular columns was about escaping from the Matrix existence in which Americans live. It is a world of disinformation and misinformation in which facts are fiction, and abstract theories are substituted for empirical reality.

Official government statistics are make-believe. The government makes inflation and unemployment disappear by how it defines inflation and unemployment, and it makes the economy grow by how it defines Gross Domestic Product. The definitional basis determines the statistical result.

For example, in his report on the official GDP revisions released July 31, John Williams (shadowstats.com) writes that “academic theories, often with strong political biases, have been used to alter the GDP model over the years, resulting in “Pollyanna Creep,” where changes made to the series invariably have had the effect of upping near-term economic growth.” In other words, definitional changes produce economic growth whether or not the economy produces economic growth.

Inflation is made to disappear by substituting lower priced items for higher priced items and by defining price rises as quality improvements. Thus, the higher prices don’t count as inflation.

Unemployment disappears by defining discouraged workers who cannot find employment as people who are no longer in the work force. 

They simply are disappeared out of the ranks of the unemployed. It reminds me of Punjab’s magic blanket in the old cartoon strip, “Little Orphan Annie.” Punjab disposed of problem people by covering them with his blanket, or perhaps it was a rug, and they disappeared.

Despite the absurdity of the government’s data, Wall Street awaits with baited breath each new release to decide whether markets should go up or down or stay the same. In other words, the financial markets themselves take guidance from make believe numbers. In short, capitalism is rudderless. It has no reliable indicators. Everything is rigged to support the Matrix which keeps the population in a stupor.

Certainly the monthly payroll jobs number is misconstrued and has undeserved influence. If the economy is down, a jobs number significantly higher than the approximately 130,000 new jobs required to stay even with population growth is seen as a beacon of recovery. But the number is so distorted, as John Williams explains, by shifting and unstable seasonal adjustments and an average monthly add-on of 52,000 jobs from the “birth-death” model that no one really knows what the number is. Only a statistician like John Williams who is very familiar with the government’s data procedures can make much sense from the official statistics.

I take a simpler approach. I look at where the reported jobs are alleged to be. In the 21st century, the jobs created by “the world’s largest economy” have been lowly-paid, non-tradable, domestic service third world jobs. Manufacturing and tradable professional service jobs such as software engineering have been moved offshore to low-wage, low-salary locations. The savings in labor costs have enriched corporate executives, Wall Street, and shareholders.

I have made this point monthly for many years, and it has had no effect on economists, policymakers, money managers, or financial markets, all of which continue in their make-believe world of make-believe reality.

Here we go, one more time. Of the 161,000 reported private sector jobs gained in July, 157,000 or 97.5 percent, are in non-tradable domestic services. A non-tradable service is a job that produces services that cannot be exported, such as waitresses, bartenders, hospital orderlies, retail clerks, warehousemen. Thus, no matter how large the number might be, it cannot reduce the huge US trade deficit. Most of these jobs are part-time jobs without health or pension benefits. People in these jobs tend to live hand-to-mouth. These jobs do not produce sufficient income to drive a consumer economy.

Of these 157,000 reported jobs, 63,000 or 40 percent are reported to be in trade, transportation, and utilities. Of these 63,000 jobs, 60,500 of them or 96 percent are in wholesale and retail trade.

Before we go to the next category, ask yourself if you believe that in an economy that has had no recovery, in which there are no new manufacturing or construction jobs, in which the labor force participation rate is down, in which shopping center parking lots are far from full, stores with such a poor sales outlook would hire so many people in July?

Financial activities account for 15,000 of the reported new jobs. The Federal Reserve accounted for 80 percent of these jobs and bill collectors for the rest.

Professional and business services accounted for 36,000 of the new reported jobs. About half of these jobs were temporary help services and services to buildings and dwellings.

Health care and social assistance accounted for 8,300 jobs of which ambulatory health care services comprised 80 percent.

Waitresses and bartenders contributed 38,400 jobs. I have previously noted the anomaly of a population without good employment prospects or rising incomes going out to eat and to drink more and more often, so often that waitresses and bartenders comprise each and every month a significant percentage of the new employees.

In her commissioner’s statement accompanying the jobs report, Erica Groshen acknowledges that 8,200,000 or 6 percent of the currently employed are “involuntary part-time workers” who cannot find full-time employment.

The July 2013 payroll employment level of 136,038,000 stands 2,018,000 below the employment level in January 2008, which was 5 years and 7 months ago. If it requires 130,000 new jobs each month to keep employment equal with population growth, the US economy is behind by 10,728,000 jobs. These missing jobs show up in the declining labor force participation rate and the large number of discouraged workers who are no longer counted as unemployed.

Obviously, there is no economic recovery, despite the reporting of such by the presstitute financial press. Most likely the US economy is sinking further into a depression. The numerous indicators of economic collapse are ignored by economists and financial media busy at work weaving the Matrix to support The Lie.

As former executives of the “banks too big to fail” and their proteges run the US Treasury, the financial regulatory agencies, and the Federal Reserve, US economic policy has been focused on bailing out the excessively large banks created by mindless deregulation. The purpose of US economic policy is to save the large banks from their bad bets on poorly understood new financial instruments in the gambling casino created by deregulation.

The architects of financial deregulation, such as former Senator Phil Gramm and President Bill Clinton were rewarded for their service with fortunes of their own. The free market dupes, who aided and abetted Bill and Phil and misrepresented the repeal of financial stability as a new beginning for laissez faire capitalism, still pretend that the crisis resulted from Congress requiring banks to make mortgage loans to poor black people who could not pay.

The lack of reality in America is extreme. I do not believe anything like it has ever existed in the modern world. Essentially, no one in government or out understands anything.

The combination of the power of vested interests with ideological thinking remote from empirical reality is destroying the US economy and the economic prospects of the American people. The employment profile of the US economy is increasingly that of a third world country. Economic security, except for the rich, has disappeared. A large and growing percentage of the population experiences the insecurity of poverty or near-poverty, while the waiting lists for $50 million yachts expands. The distribution of income is so skewed upward that people of enormous wealth bid up the prices of used Ferraris from the 1950s and 1960s to $12,000,000 and $35,000,000. I can remember when a used Ferrari was something that a person with a moderate income could afford to purchase. I have a friend who bought and sold for $9,000 in the 1960s the Ferrari that last sold for $35 million.

Detroit, once the fourth largest American city and the manufacturing powerhouse of the world, is bankrupt. The populations of the cities that once were America’s thriving manufacturing base are declining. Cleveland has boarded up homes. St. Louis has 20 percent of its homes vacant. Welfare is under attack by the Republicans and even some Democrats as the plight of the population worsens and despair rises.

Washington only responds to the half dozen powerful, rich private interest groups that fund election campaigns. The American people have no one to represent them. The American people have been placed outside the system of “democratic capitalism” which is only for the one percent.

As Jeffrey St. Clair has made clear, America no longer has a left-wing. America is a right-wing world in which people, including “progressives” have been brainwashed into perceiving reality in racial contrast: the whites are well off and the blacks are poor and destitute.

This is the false reality of the Matrix. As whites are a larger percentage of the population than blacks, there are more poor whites than poor blacks. Moreover, the percentage of poor whites is growing. The way the jobs-offshoring, bail out the rich, US economy operates today makes every one poor, including the remnants of America’s once flourishing middle class. It is not a racial issue. It is a class issue. A few people have the power, and they are driving everyone else into the ground. The US government is their agent.

So go wave the flag, support the troops, believe the government’s and media’s lies, but unless you are the well-connected one percent, don’t expect any future for your children. You have been sold out by “your” government. Obama is making pretty speeches, but only the stupid will be fooled.

What bill of Rights?

Potential Well Water Contaminants Highest Near Natural Gas Fracking Wells, UT ARLINGTON Study Says

26 July 2013

A new study of 100 private water wells in and near the Barnett Shale showed elevated levels of potential contaminants such as arsenic and selenium closest to natural gas extraction sites, according to a team of researchers that was led by UT Arlington associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry Kevin Schug.

The results of the North Texas well study were published online by the journal Environmental Science & Technology Thursday. The peer-reviewed paper focuses on the presence of metals such as arsenic, barium, selenium and strontium in water samples. Many of these heavy metals occur naturally at low levels in groundwater, but disturbances from natural gas extraction activities could cause them to occur at elevated levels.

“This study alone can’t conclusively identify the exact causes of elevated levels of contaminants in areas near natural gas drilling, but it does provide a powerful argument for continued research,” said Brian Fontenot, a UT Arlington graduate with a doctorate in quantitative biology and lead author on the new paper.

He added: “We expect this to be the first of multiple projects that will ultimately help the scientific community, the natural gas industry, and most importantly, the public, understand the effects of natural gas drilling on water quality.”

Researchers believe the increased presence of metals could be due to a variety of factors including: industrial accidents such as faulty gas well casings; mechanical vibrations from natural gas drilling activity disturbing particles in neglected water well equipment; or the lowering of water tables through drought or the removal of water used for the hydraulic fracturing process. Any of these scenarios could release dangerous compounds into shallow groundwater.

Researchers gathered samples from private water wells of varying depth within a 13 county area in or near the Barnett Shale in North Texas over four months in the summer and fall of 2011. Ninety-one samples were drawn from what they termed “active extraction areas,” or areas that had one or more gas wells within a five kilometer radius. Another nine samples were taken from sites either inside the Barnett Shale and more than 14 kilometers from a natural gas drilling site, or from sites outside the Barnett Shale altogether. The locations of those sites were referred to as “non-active/reference areas” in the study.

Researchers accepted no outside funding to ensure the integrity of the study. They compared the samples to historical data on water wells in these counties from the Texas Water Development Board groundwater database for 1989-1999, prior to the proliferation of natural gas drilling.

In addition to standard water quality tests, the researchers used gas chromatography – mass spectrometry (GC-MS), headspace gas chromatography (HS-GC) and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Many of the tests were conducted in the Shimadzu Center for Advanced Analytical Chemistry on the UT Arlington campus.

“Natural gas drilling is one of the most talked about issues in North Texas and throughout the country. This study was an opportunity for us to use our knowledge of chemistry and statistical analysis to put people’s concerns to the test and find out whether they would be backed by scientific data,” said Schug, who is also the Shimadzu Distinguished Professor of Analytical Chemistry in the UT Arlington College of Science.

On average, researchers detected the highest levels of these contaminants within 3 kilometers of natural gas wells, including several samples that had arsenic and selenium above levels considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency. For example, 29 wells that were within the study’s active natural gas drilling area exceeded the EPA’s Maximum Contaminant Limit of 10 micrograms per liter for arsenic, a potentially dangerous situation.

The areas lying outside of active drilling areas or outside the Barnett Shale did not show the same elevated levels for most of the metals.

Other leaders of the Texas Gas Wells team were Laura Hunt, who conducted her post-doctoral research in biology at UT Arlington, and Zacariah Hildenbrand, who earned his doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Texas at El Paso and performed post-doctoral research at UT Southwestern Medical Center. Hildenbrand is also the founder of Inform Environmental, LLC. Fontenot and Hunt work for the EPA regional office in Dallas, but the study is unaffiliated with the EPA and both received permission to work on this project outside the agency.

Scientists note in the paper that they did not find uniformity among the contamination in the active natural gas drilling areas. In other words, not all gas well sites were associated with higher levels of the metals in well water.

Some of the most notable results were on the following heavy metals:

• Arsenic occurs naturally in the region’s water and was detected in 99 of the 100 samples. But, the concentrations of arsenic were significantly higher in the active extraction areas compared to non-extraction areas and historical data. The maximum concentration from an extraction area sample was 161 micrograms per liter, or 16 times the EPA safety standard set for drinking water. According to the EPA, people who drink water containing arsenic well in excess of the safety standard for many years “could experience skin damage or problems with their circulatory system, and may have an increased risk of getting cancer.”
• Selenium was found in 10 samples near extraction sites, and all of those samples showed selenium levels were higher than the historical average. Two samples exceeded the standard for selenium set by the EPA. Circulation problems as well as hair or fingernail loss are some possible consequences of long-term exposure to high levels of selenium, according to the EPA.
• Strontium was also found in almost all the samples, with concentrations significantly higher than historical levels in the areas of active gas extraction. A toxicological profile by the federal government’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry recommends no more than 4,000 micrograms of strontium per liter in drinking water. Seventeen samples from the active extraction area and one from the non-active areas exceeded that recommended limit. Exposure to high levels of stable strontium can result in impaired bone growth in children, according to the toxic substances agency.

“After we put the word out about the study, we received numerous calls from landowner volunteers and their opinions about the natural gas drilling in their communities varied,” Hildenbrand said. “By participating in the study, they were able to get valuable data about their water, whether it be for household or land use.

“Their participation has been incredibly important to this study and has helped us bring to light some of the important environmental questions surrounding this highly contentious issue.”

The paper also recommends further research on levels of methanol and ethanol in water wells. Twenty-nine private water wells in the study contained methanol, with the highest concentrations in the active extraction areas. Twelve samples, four of which were from the non-active extraction sites, contained measurable ethanol. Both ethanol and methanol can occur naturally or as a result of industrial contamination. Historical data on methanol and ethanol was not available, researchers said in the paper.

The paper is called “An evaluation of water quality in private drinking water wells near natural gas extraction sites in the Barnett Shale formation.” A Just Accepted version is available here on the journal website.

Other co-authors include: Qinhong “Max” Hu, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at UT Arlington; Doug D. Carlton Jr., a Ph.D. student in the chemistry and biochemistry department at UT Arlington; Hyppolite Oka, a recent graduate of the environmental and earth sciences master’s program at UT Arlington; Jayme L. Walton, a recent graduate of the biology master’s program at UT Arlington; and Dan Hopkins, of Carrollton-based Geotech Environmental Equipment, Inc.

Alexandria Osorio and Bryan Bjorndal of Assure Controls, Inc. in Vista, Calif., also are co-authors. The team used Assure’s Qwiklite™ system to test for toxicity in well samples and those results are being prepared for a separate publication.

Many from the research team are now conducting well water sampling in the Permian Basin region of Texas, establishing a baseline set of data prior to gas well drilling activities there. That baseline will be used for a direct comparison to samples that will be collected during and after upcoming natural gas extraction. The team hopes that these efforts will shed further light on the relationship between natural gas extraction and ground water quality.

The research published this week is representative of the important work going on at The University of Texas at Arlington, a comprehensive research institution with about 33,800 students and more than 2,200 faculty members in the heart of North Texas. For more information, please visit www.uta.edu.

Manufactured Poverty: a reality but not a necessity

An Elegant Feast - JULY 21, 2013 

The history of poverty in the United States is depressing. So we repress it. Instead our history books talk about industrial revolutions, wars, economic prosperity, global trade, and so on. The consequences that such events have on the poor and oppressed are either whitewashed or legitimized. Our history books serve as an example of a larger ideological mission to naturalize poverty and to give us reasons to ignore it. In other words, there has been a direct and systematic attempt to make poverty appear to be innate, unchanging, irreversible, and everlasting. If people can be convinced to accept poverty, then the incentive to alleviate it is removed.

Even well meaning progressives will, unsuspectingly, get caught up in a regressive language. They will say, “Poverty is complex.” But the perception of poverty’s complexity has been conditioned in us in order to overwhelm our motivation. What if we accepted the uncontroversial fact that a small fraction of US military spending could feed, house, and educate everyone on the planet, 10 times over. If we wanted to eliminate poverty in the United States, it could be done within a week.

What is our impediment? There is a concerted effort, by those with economic and political power, to manufacture and to maintain poverty. Currently, an effort is underway to eliminate the minimum wage. On the surface, advocates will unabashedly argue that the goal is to create the cheapest possible labor force. But it should be lost on no one that the ability to push the working class into economic desperation is, in itself, a political end. People who are merely trying to survive do not have the time, the energy, or the resources for political advocacy. Economic exploitation always accompanies marginalization.

The desire to eliminate the minimum wage is only the most recent and flagrant part of an organized effort to barricade the halls of wealth and power. The series of so-called free trade agreements in the 1990s consistently lowered human rights standards abroad while, simultaneously, forcing US workers to compete with third world labor. The intent is clear: to drive down real wages and to decrease the quality of life of the working class. The tax cuts of Bush the Second’s presidency redistributed wealth from the bottom to the top in an explicit effort to further consolidate economic and political power. These efforts coincided with a national push for ‘right to work laws’ (or really, right to work for nothing laws) so that workers were politically disenfranchised while also being economically exploited. No politician worthy of the name would be foolish enough to discuss these practices in public, but the strategy is unmistakable. There is a political motivation to fossilize poverty.

Unfortunately, the Obama years have made the problem worse. The bailouts of the banks assured the financial sector that they will always be protected. In order to guarantee poverty, the powerful maintain this simple equation: privatize profits, socialize losses. After the downturn of 2008, everyone has become poorer except the people who caused the crash. To call this an accident ignores the facts and ignores the history. Still, there are people, many people, who genuinely want to combat poverty. But this needs to be done with eyes wide open. To face poverty is not to fight laziness or circumstance or ability; these are mirages. To combat poverty is to take the fight directly against those who have consciously made poverty one of the most shameful institutions of the United States.

Fewer Americans Will Work: What That Means for the Economy

By Christopher Matthews, TIME Magazine

July 22, 20130

With last year’s presidential election so focused on jobs and the economy, the American public probably knows more about the nuances of the unemployment rate than they ever have before. One particular of the official unemployment rate that received attention last year is that the Labor Department counts someone as unemployed only if he or she is actively looking for employment. Other folks who, for whatever reason, aren’t searching for work are considered not in the labor force.

The ratio between those considered in the labor force and the total working-age population is known as the “labor-force-participation rate.” And the reason why the unemployment rate has been able to fall from more than 10% in 2009 to 7.6% today despite middling job growth is that more and more Americans are dropping out of the labor force altogether.

As you can see from the chart below, this decline in the labor-force-participation rate is a trend that’s been going on for many years now. The primary driver of the overall trend is the aging workforce — many of those dropping out are simply retiring at around the normal age. But the trend accelerated during the recession, suggesting that many more people dropped out of the workforce than otherwise would have if the economy were in better shape.

As the economy improves, however, should we expect to see the participation rate bounce back? According to new analysis from Macroeconomic Advisers, it’s not likely. They estimate that roughly 45% of the recent decline in labor-force participation is a result of a weak economy, and the rest because of demographic factors. But as the economy improves, the workforce is going to continue to age, meaning that by 2015, when the Federal Reserve expects the economy to be back near full employment, the participation rate will remain where it is today.

In one sense this is good news because the economy doesn’t need to produce as many jobs per month to see reductions in the unemployment rate. But on a deeper level, it’s evidence that the high labor-participation rates that helped spur economic growth from the 1970s through the 1990s is a thing of the past. To put it another way, our economy is going to have to produce more with fewer people going forward, which — all else being equal — will slow economic growth.

So just how big of an effect will a smaller workforce have on the economy? In 2011, Harvard University’s Program on the Global Demography of Aging published a paper that tried to understand this question. Logic suggests that a workforce that has to support fewer nonworking individuals will be wealthier overall, and the study bears out that hypothesis. In the paper, economists David E. Bloom, David Canning and Günther Fink estimated how high-income countries (most of which have aging populations) would have grown from the 1960 to 2005 period if they had experienced population growth similar to the projections for 2005 to 2050. According to the report, if a high-income country like the U.S. had a per-person income of $10,000 in 1960, that income grew to $34,600 under the population growth we actually experienced. On the other hand, if the 1960 to 2005 period experienced the sort of population growth that we’re expected to see through 2050, that income would have grown only to $25,500.

This huge difference underscores how important population growth and workforce participation is to a country’s economy. If there are more people working in a country, and if a higher percentage of those people are productive, the whole country will be richer. (This is one reason why economists tend to support policies that increase immigration.)

Former Mobil VP Warns of Fracking and Climate Change

Friday, 19 July 2013 

By Ellen Cantarow, Truthout


Few people can explain gas and oil drilling with as much authority as Louis W. Allstadt. As an executive vice president of Mobil oil, he ran the company's exploration and production operations in the western hemisphere before he retired in 2000. In 31 years with the company he also was in charge of its marketing and refining in Japan, and managed its worldwide supply, trading and transportation operations. Just before retiring, he oversaw Mobil's side of its merger with Exxon, creating the world's largest corporation.

The first in a modest Long Island German-American family to graduate from college (the US Merchant Marine Academy), Allstadt got a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia University then was hired by Mobil. Before his retirement he wasn't aware of a new, sophisticated form of rock fracture, high-volume hydraulic fracturing, developed only in the late 1990s. "It just wasn't on our radar at that time," he said. "We were heavily focused on developing conventional oil and gas offshore in deep water."

Quaint, arty Cooperstown, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, is perched on the shores of Lake Otsego, which supplies drinking water to the village and glimmering, placid expanses for kayakers and boaters. Allstadt launched his leisure years in this idyllic spot, intending to leave the industry behind. He founded an art gallery with his wife, Melinda Hardin, made pottery, kayaked, taught other people to kayak, and played tennis. But then friends started asking him questions about fracking - it had been proposed near the lake. What he saw as he began investigating the technology and regulations proposed by New York’s state Department of Environmental Conservation (1,500 pages titled "Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement, a.k.a. 'the SGEIS ' ") alarmed him. In these pages last year he called high-volume fracking "conventional drilling on steroids." "Just horrible," is how he described the 2011 SGEIS in our conversation in June 2013.

Allstadt has become an indispensable guide for one of the country's most powerful environmental movements, New York's grass-roots anti-fracking resistance. Recently he was elected a Cooperstown Trustee. He is modest and low-key, his authority hallmarked by personal understatement. He said this interview was a first for him: earlier talks and interviews have focused on what he calls "tweaking the technology and [promoting] tighter regulations." Never before has he focused squarely on the industry's impact on the planet's atmosphere.

A note about interview chronology: Allstadt's observations about the Obama climate-change address were added in phone conversations in July 2013. The rest of the interview took place in person in mid-June 2013. A brilliant June sun illuminated the greenery of gardens below the back porch of the Cooperstown house where we spoke. In the driveway, a kayak rested atop a car.

We began by discussing fracking as part of what oil-scholar Michael Klare calls "the race for what's left. "

Louis Allstadt: The fracking that's going on right now is the real wake-up call on just what extreme lengths are required to pull oil or gas out of the ground now that most of the conventional reservoirs have been exploited - at least those that are easy to access.

Ellen Cantarow: So could you describe the dangers of this industry?

LA: First of all you have to look at what is conventional oil and gas. That was pretty much anything that was produced until around 2000. It's basically a process of drilling down through a cap rock, an impervious rock that has trapped oil and gas beneath it – sometimes only gas. If it's oil, there's always gas with it. And once you're into that reservoir - which is really not a void, it's porous rock - the natural pressure of the gas will push up the gas and oil. Typically you'll have a well that will keep going 20, 30 years before you have to do something to boost the production through a secondary recovery mechanism. That conventional process is basically what was used from the earliest wells in Pennsylvania through most of the offshore production that exists now, that started in the shallow water in the Gulf of Mexico and gradually moved down into deeper and deeper water.

Now what's happened is that the prospect of finding more of those conventional reservoirs, particularly on land and in the places that have been heavily explored like the US and Europe and the Middle East just is very, very small. And the companies have pretty much acknowledged that. All of them talk about the need to go to either non-conventional shale or tight sand drilling or to go into deeper and deeper waters or to go into really hostile Arctic regions and possibly Antarctic regions.

Methane release: fracking the planet's future

So when you talked about "the race for what's left," that's what's going on. Both the horizontal drilling and fracturing have been around for a long time. The industry will tell you this over and over again - they've been around for 60 years, things like that. That is correct. What's different is the volume of fracking fluids and the volume of flow-back that occurs in these wells. It is 50 to 100 times more than what was used in the conventional wells.

The other [difference] is that the rock above the target zone is not necessarily impervious the way it was in the conventional wells. And to me that last point is at least as big as the volume. The industry will tell you that the mile or two between the zone that's being fracked is not going to let anything come up.

But there are already cases where the methane gas has made it up into the aquifers and atmosphere. Sometimes through old well bores, sometimes through natural fissures in the rock. What we don't know is just how much gas is going to come up over time. It's a point most people haven't gotten. It's not just what's happening today. We're opening up channels for the gas to creep up to the surface and into the atmosphere. And methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas in the short term - less than 100 years - than carbon dioxide.

Methane-migration evidence and the DEC

EC: Was there any major turning point that started you thinking about methane migration?

LA: There were many. An example is that one of the appendices of the draft SGEIS [New York Department of Environmental Conservation guidelines for the gas industry] that was issued in July 2011, had a section describing an EPA study of the only cases where similar fractures had been unearthed. These were in a coal-mining area. The EPA investigation indicated that the fractures had progressed in unexpected patterns and at greater lengths than expected. In September, when the draft SGEIS was eventually put out for comment, that section had been expunged.

EC: That's shocking! I know a lot has been discovered about thecollusion between New York's DEC and the industry. Is this one big example?

LA: Yes, it is. To ignore the only direct evidence of fractures, or to remove it from public information, indicates that the industry was trying to hide something. The other point is that in terms of a turning point (in my thinking), here is evidence that the fractures go further and in patterns that were not expected. It showed that fractures could allow methane to reach drinking water aquifers or the atmosphere.

In Charge at Mobil

EC: Let's back up for a moment to your career at Mobil. Were you thinking about climate change then?

LA: Just starting to in the 1990s. When I first heard about it I thought climate change was overblown. I don't think anybody in the industry was focused on it at that point.

EC: And did you have any idea you would be talking to a reporter about it?

LA: No, not at all.

EC: Maybe you could talk a little about what you did at Mobil. You were in charge …

LA: I was in charge of the US and Latin America.

EC: In charge of exploration?

LA: Mostly production. There wasn't a whole lot of exploration going on in this area.

EC: What does being in charge of production mean?

LA: Production is everything other than finding something in the first place. There was some exploration going on, more in the Eastern hemisphere than the West at that particular point in time. But if you have already discovered a field, production means drilling more wells to further delineate it and to get more production out of it or going back in and doing secondary recovery operations or buying fields from somebody else and combining them with yours, things like that.

EC: How long did you do that?

LA: I got into this toward the end of my career. I started in logistics and then moved into marketing and refining. I was in Japan and Singapore for a total of 12 years, ended up running Mobil's operations in Japan, which was their biggest [marketing and refining] operation outside the US. And then I came back to headquarters in the US to head up the logistics area - all of the shipping, about 40 tankers moving oil around the world, buying types of crude oil that we needed, selling types that we didn't need, making sure that all of our refineries around the world got the right supplies at the right time and then also trading oil with other companies. And after that, Mobil did a major reorganization and put me over in an exploration-producing job. When the merger with Exxon came along, I was in charge of implementing the merger from the Mobil side. I had worked in three major areas of the company and I was going to retire after the merger. I had a counterpart on the Exxon side who had also done the same thing.

A quiet retirement gets fracked

I retired with no intention of doing anything in the oil or gas industries. [But] about the time we bought this house and started restoration, people that knew I had been in the oil business started saying, what do you think about fracking? I had not been following it at all, and said, 'What do you mean?' " They said, 'They're talking about maybe drilling gas wells 100 or 150 feet from the lake." I said, "That's crazy. It doesn't make any sense, I'll see what I can find out."

That's where it started. I started looking into it, realized what the new process was, and looked at the New York State regulations, and at that point they were just starting to draft the first version of the SGEIS, and they were just horrible. They didn't make sense even for conventional drilling, most of them, they were so weak.

Initially I put together a little presentation. People started asking me if I would talk about it. It just happens that there are a few people within a couple miles of here that know something about it. We had different approaches, different styles, but we would share information. The focus at that time was the SGEIS, which was supposed to guide the establishment of high-volume hydrofracking. I ended up giving presentations to many towns around upstate New York. Sometimes this was on my own or in a small group. Sometimes it was as part of panel discussions with people from both sides of the fracking debate.

Standing Room Only

A Canadian drilling company started drilling nearby, and that got people's attention. … And then they started doing some seismic testing in the town of Middlefield. When the seismic took place, [it] spurred a grass-roots anti-fracking group to form almost overnight. It was mostly women. They started going to the town board. I own property in the town, so I went over, talked some. Another nearby town, Otsego, asked me to be on their gas advisory committee. So I did that. Once a month we'd get together. There were some pro-drillers on it, some anti. When it came to the town meetings the town halls hardly ever had anybody come unless they needed a stop sign or some issue like that. And all of a sudden there was standing room only. And it just kind of kept building.

Those two Town Boards pretty quickly realized that they had to do something and started thinking about how they could zone it out [using zoning regulations to ban the industry from town limits, a strategy that has since been remarkably successful.] That was in the early days of talking about the possibility that you could indeed zone against drilling.

In the early days I was not sure that a ban was the right thing to do. I was thinking that there probably could be a technical solution, and if you had regulations [written] properly, you might be able to do it. The industry had solved some huge technical problems over the years. Like, how do you drill 250 miles offshore in iceberg alley off Newfoundland?

More Fracking Consequences

The industry actually has a lot of very smart people working for it. As long as the box that they're working in is manageable, they can do a very good job. I think that what you've got in fracking is 'How do we work in a box this big,' narrowly defining the problem, [he holds his hands a foot apart in front of him] when you're really working in a huge box [he stretches his arms out wide] The real box is as big as the globe and the atmosphere. And they're not seeing the consequences of moving outside the small box that they're working in.

EC: So to go back to your earlier comments, what are the future consequences?

LA: 20, 30, 100 years down the road we don't know how much methane is going to be making its way up. And if you do hundreds of thousands of wells, there's a good chance you're going to have a lot of methane coming up, exacerbating global warming. … That is what Tony Ingraffea is talking about as part of the problem. [Anthony Ingraffea, Dwight C. Baum professor of engineering at Cornell University, in 2011 co-authored a landmark study on the greenhouse-gas footprint of high-volume fracking.]

What you [also] don't know [is that] when you plug that well, how much is going to find its way to the surface without going up the well bore. And there are lots of good indications that plugging the well doesn't really work long-term. There's still some pressure down there even though it's not enough pressure to be commercially produced. And sooner or later the steel casing there is going to rust out, and the cement sooner or later is going to crumble. We may have better cements now, we may have slightly better techniques of packing the cement and mud into the well bore to close it up, but even if nothing comes up through the fissures in the rock layers above, where it was fracked, those well bores will deteriorate over time. And there is at least one study showing that 100 percent of plugs installed in abandoned wells fail within 100 years and many of them much sooner.

The way forward

EC: So what's the solution?

LA: I think we have wasted a lot of time that should have gone into seriously looking into and developing alternative energies. And we need to stop wasting that time and get going on it. But the difficult part is that the industry talks about, well, this is a bridge fuel [that] will carry us until alternatives [are developed] but nobody is building them. It's not a bridge unless you build the foundations for a bridge on the other side, and nobody's building it.

EC: Have corporations like Mobil considered developing alternative energies?

LA: Yes. Back after the first [1973] and second [1980] oil crises, when we had the spikes in prices and the lines and rationing, there was a lot of talk and substantial investments in alternative energies. Mobil invested in solar, and so did Exxon, and kept it going for quite a number of years. They abandoned it as just not coming up to the technical promises [because] solar cells weren't converting enough sun to electricity to be economically viable. There was also at that time a fair amount of work done on shale oil in the Western states, and that was not fracking for shale. It was mining the shale and trying to extract oil from it. It just never came through. More recently there've been attempts at biofuels and some attempts to use algae.

Obama and the future

EC: What are your thoughts about President Obama's national address on climate change?

LA: Well, when he talked about the XL pipeline he said he wanted to be sure it didn't increase carbon emissions. When he talks about natural gas, he kind of broad-brushes it and implies it's better than coal.

The whole speech is feeding into [Exxon-Mobil CEO] Rex Tillerson's comments at a recent Exxon-Mobil shareholders' meeting where he said there's nothing we can do to switch to alternative fuels [and still] allow economies to continue the way they are. Society has to solve the problems by dealing with global warming - building levees around the cities, things like that. Obama is feeding into that, saying we have to strengthen the infrastructure. Basically what the industry is doing is unloading all the costs of what it's been doing onto the public. Just go out and build miles and miles of levees around New York City and build drainage systems and things like that. Obama is saying the same thing. We'll go on producing natural gas and keep the cost low by having the taxpayers pick up the cost of dealing with the consequences of global warming. Obama proposed some very positive steps toward developing alternative energies but he is not addressing the impact that methane has on global warming.

Fractivists and the future

EC: You've been on both sides now - promoting fossil fuel development for your whole life until your retirement and now trying to fight fracking. Do you think the anti-fracking movement and other environmental movements are the main hope now?

LA: I think the main question is how fast can these movements educate enough people about the dangers of fracking and its impact on global warming. It will take masses of people demanding action from politicians to offset the huge amount of money that the industry is using to influence lawmakers, a world-scale version of those standing-room-only town meetings. Something has to wake up the general public. It will either be education from the environmental movements or some kind of climate disaster that no one can ignore.

This Modern World

 

Friday’s Job Report

No Hope On The Jobs Front 
July 5, 2013 | Paul Craig Roberts


Do you remember the promise of the New Economy that was going to replace the lost “dirty fingernail” manufacturing jobs with innovative highly paid New Economy jobs? Well, the promise was just another deception from the elites who have stolen Americans’ future.
For the umpteenth consecutive month and year, the June BLS payroll jobs report (released on July 5) shows that the US economy has created no such jobs. The same old tired categories account for the same old lowly paid new domestic service jobs.

Of the 195,000 new private sector jobs alleged to have been created, 75,000 or 38% are accounted for by the category “leisure and hospitality.” Within this category there were 52,000 new waitresses and bartenders, and 19,000 jobs in “amusements gambling, and recreation.”
Retail trade added 37,000 employees. Is your local shopping center that busy?

Wholesale trade added 11,000.

Zero Hedge points out that the retail and wholesale jobs numbers seem inconsistent with the latest report from the Institute of Supply Management, which shows a sharp drop in new order components and business activity.  Perhaps the New Economy’s inefficiency requires more people to sell less.

Professional and business services added, allegedly, 53,000 jobs, which are largely building management services, janitors, employment services, and temporary help.

Ambulatory health care services added 13,000 jobs.

Financial activities allegedly added 17,000 jobs despite the Bank of America moving its property appraisals to India.

Local government, despite severe budget cuts, added 13,000 jobs.

The BLS news release points out that the number of involuntary part-time workers (the number of people who are unable to find full-time jobs or whose hours were cut back) increased by 322,000 in June to 8.2 million.

This deplorable report provided the cover for the market riggers to take the stock market up and the gold market down. Remember that economic theory about “rational markets”? Another deception.

The "Risk" of Terrorism,,,

Don't know how this was calculated or if it's correct, but the point is the odds of being a victim of a terrorist are so ridiculous there shouldn't be so many resources  devoted to preventing terrorism. I'd rather be the victim of a terrorist attack than have my freedoms ignored and/or taken away...

The Presstitute Media

America’s Greatest Affliction
June 2, 2013 | Paul Craig Roberts
When Gerald Celente branded the American media “presstitutes,” he got it right. The US print and TV media (and NPR) whore for Washington and the corporations. Reporting the real news is their last concern. The presstitutes are a Ministry of Propaganda and Coverup. This is true of the entire Western media, a collection of bought-and-paid-for whores.

It seems that every day I witness a dozen or more examples. Take May 31 for example.
The presstitutes report that US Secretary of State John Kerry and his German counterpart are working on Russia to convince that country to be a “party to peace” in Syria by not supplying the Syrian government, whose country has been invaded, with arms. Kerry and the Israelis especially do not want Russia to deliver the S-300 anti-aircraft missile system to Syria.

This was the extent of the presstitutes’ report. The presstitutes made no mention of the fact that the invasion of Syria by al-Qaeda affiliated radical Muslims was organized and equipped by Washington via its proxies in the region, such as Saudia Arabia and the oil emirates. Americans sufficiently stupid to rely on the presstitute media do not know that it is not Syrians who want to overthrow their government, but Washington, Israel, and radical Islamists who object to Syria’s secular non-confrontational government.

One might think that the US media would wonder why Washington prefers to have al-Qaeda governing Syria than a non-confrontational secular government. But such a question is off-limits for the US media.

Israel, unlike Washington which so far hides behind proxies, has actually openly committed war crimes as defined by the Nuremberg trials of Nazis by initiating unprovoked aggression against Syria by militarily attacking the country.

In reporting Kerry’s pressure on Putin, presstitutes made no mention that the Washington-backed attempted overthrow of the Syrian government has run into difficulty, causing President Obama to ask the Pentagon to come up with a no-fly plan, which means according to the Libya precedent NATO or US air attacks on Syrian government forces. As the S-300 missiles are a defensive weapon, Obama’s plan to send in Western or Israeli air forces to attack the Syrian army is why Kerry is pressuring Russia not to honor its contract to deliver to Syria the S-300 missiles, which can knock US, NATO, and Israeli aircraft out of the sky.

Those who believed that Kerry could have made a difference as president must be disillusioned to see what a warmongering whore he is. In America marketing is everything; truth is nothing.

The real news story is that Washington is trying to convince Putin to acquiesce to
Washington’s overthrow of the Syrian government so that Russia can be evicted from its only naval base in the Mediterranean Sea, thus making it Washington’s sea, Washington’s Mare Nostrum. The American pressitutes put all the onus on the Russian government for not helping Washington to overthrow the Syrian government in order that Washington has another victory over Russia and can start next on Iran.

William Hague, who serves, with Washington’s approval, as British foreign secretary to the shame of a once proud nation, made this clear when he declared: “We want a solution without Assad. We do not accept the stay of Assad.” This is amazing hypocrisy, because the Syrian government is more respectful of human rights than Washington and London.

While Kerry was trying to con Putin, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that the Obama administration’s immediate priority was removing Assad from power. So for the US and UK, “peace” means the overthrow of the Syrian government by force.

Why isn’t the United Nations protesting? The answer is that the countries and their UN representatives have been purchased by Washington. Money talks. Integrity and justice don’t. Integrity and justice are poverty-inflicted. The UN belongs to the evil empire. Washington owns it. The american Empire has the money. It pays for the headlines and for the budget that lets the UN delegates enjoy New York City,

In the world today, integrity is worthless, but money is valuable, and Washington has the money because, as the dollar is the world reserve currency, it can be printed in sufficient quantities to purchase every country’s government, including our own. One year out of office and Tony Blair was worth $35 million. Look at the amazing Clinton riches. According to news report, $3.2 million was spent on Chelsea’s wedding. 

Hague said that the UK and France “seek to end the ban on arming Syrian rebels.” Hague did not explain how the invasion force was armed if there is a ban against arming it. But Hague did tell us who the invading force is: “the Syrian National Coalition,” which consists of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt (still the American puppet), the United States, Britain, France, Turkey, Germany and Italy. Obviously, the talk about a “Syrian rebellion” is pure BS. Syria is confronted with an attempted overthrow of its government by the US and its puppet states. Kerry is trying to convince Putin to let Washington overthrow Syria.

As if this wasn’t enough, also on May 31, I listened to E.J. Dionne and David Brooks on National Public Radio discuss the state of the Obama presidency. Both were protective of “our president.” Neither would dare say: “the military-security complex’s president,” “Wall Street’s president,” “the Israel Lobby’s president,” “Monsanto the devil’s president,” “the mining and fracking president.” Obama is “our president.”

Both Brooks and Dionne agreed that the media had got rid of the Benghazi issue and that the IRS persecution of Tea Party members was under the media’s control and was not a threat to Obama. David Brooks did acknowledge that there were economic problems ignored and no new ideas. However, the blatant fact that under Obama the US is in a constitutional crisis, well described by Dr. Francis Boyle, professor of International Llaw at the University of Illinois, was not mentioned by NPR’s pundits, who define correct thoughts for the NPR audience, people too busy to pay attention.

In America today, the executive branch in explicit violation of the US Constitution detains indefinitely or murders any US citizen alleged without proof by an unaccountable member of the executive branch to be in any way associated with the broad but undefined term, “terrorism,” even innocently as a donor to hungry or ill Palestinian children. The executive branch clearly violates the US Constitution and US statutory laws against torture and spying on citizens without warrants. Congress does not impeach the president for his obvious crimes, and the Federal Judiciary enables them.

President Nixon was driven from office because he lied about when he learned of a burglary for which he was not responsible. President Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives for lying about a sexual affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.

President George W. Bush took america to wars based on obvious lies, and so did President Obama. Both administrations are guilty of war crimes and almost every possible infraction of constitutional and international law. Yet, no presstitute member of the media would dare mention impeachment, and the House would never bring the charge.

There is no doubt whatsoever that in the 21st century presidents, their lawyers, Justice (sic) Department officials, and CIA and black-op operatives have broken law after law, and there is no accountability. For the presstitutes, this is a non-issue. “Rule of law, Constitution? We don’t need no stinking rule of law or Constitution.”

For the presstitutes, the bought-and-paid for-whores for evil, the issues are Obama’s stable poll numbers; teenage girls arrested for fighting at a kindergarten graduation ceremony; ”Microsoft’s Bill Gates extended his lead over Mexico’s Carlos Slim as the world’s richest person,” “the $14 million-dollar girl: Beyonce rakes it in.”

Constitutional crisis? What is that? I mean, really, look at Beyonce’s legs. Didn’t you hear, the dollar rose today?

The presstitutes have not investigated any important issue. Not 9/11. Not the accumulation of unaccountable power in the executive branch. Not the demise of the Bill of Rights. Not the Boston Marathon bombing. Not the endless and unexplained wars against Muslims who have not attacked the US.

The Boston Marathon saga reached new levels of absurdity with the FBI’s murder of Ibragim Todashev, who was being pressured to admit to various associated crimes. The presstitutes first reported that Todashev was armed. It was a gun, then a knife, then after the presstitutes duly reported the false information planted on them, which for the insouciance American public was sufficient to explain Toashev’s murder, the FBI admitted that the victim was unarmed.

Nevertheless, he was shot seven times, one to the back of the head. His father wants to know why the FBI assassinated his son, but the presstitutes could not care less. Don’t expect any answer from the American press and TV media or from NPR, an organization that pretends to be a “listener station” but is financed by corporate contributions.

How’s Todashev’s murder for Gestapo justice? Where is the difference? A bullet in the back of the head. And america is the shining light on the hill, the font of freedom and democracy brought to the world courtesy of the military/security complex out of the barrel of guns and hellfire missiles from drones. And relentless propaganda in the schools, universities, and media.

Washington certainly learned from Mao and Pol Pot. You kill them into submission.

But you will never hear about it from the presstitutes.

Statement from Edward Snowden in Moscow

Monday July 1, 2013  Wikileaks

One week ago I left Hong Kong after it became clear that my freedom and safety were under threat for revealing the truth. My continued liberty has been owed to the efforts of friends new and old, family, and others who I have never met and probably never will. I trusted them with my life and they returned that trust with a faith in me for which I will always be thankful.

On Thursday, President Obama declared before the world that he would not permit any diplomatic "wheeling and dealing" over my case. Yet now it is being reported that after promising not to do so, the President ordered his Vice President to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions.

This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me.

For decades the United States of America has been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum. Sadly, this right, laid out and voted for by the U.S. in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is now being rejected by the current government of my country. The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon. Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.

In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.

I am unbowed in my convictions and impressed at the efforts taken by so many.

Edward Joseph Snowden

Monday 1st July 2013

Funnies (Cuz they're true)

 

 

Catching Up with This Modern World...

FBI admits using surveillance drones to spy on Americans on US soil

Thom Hartmann, Truthout

You need to know this. As if the news of the NSA's phone and internet spying weren't enough to worry us, the FBI has just admitted to using surveillance drones to spy on Americans on US soil. During a Congressional hearing on telephone data collection, FBI director Robert Muller said the agency is in the "initial stages" of developing privacy guidelines, and has only used drones in a "very, very minimal way." However, Americans are skeptical of such a description after being told that sweeping data collection was only a "modest" invasion of our privacy. Democratic Senator Mark Udall, said he is "concerned the FBI is deploying drone technology while only being in the 'initial stages' of developing guidelines to protect Americans' privacy rights." Senator Udall explained that he understands drones have the potential to "more efficiently and effectively perform law enforcement duties," but promised to do everything in his power "to hold the FBI accountable and ensure its actions respect the US constitution." In keeping with the defense of NSA spying, Director Muller urged Congress to consider national security before placing any limits on drone surveillance and data collection. He said, "Are you going to take the dots off the table, make it unavailable to you when you're trying to prevent the next terrorist attack?" Our nation is at a crossroads in deciding how much privacy we are willing to give up in the name of security. As Benjamin Franklin said, "those who would give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Indefinite Surveillance: Say Hello to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2014

Tuesday, 18 June 2013
By Stephen Benavides, Truthout

Passed in 1978, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) set the groundwork for surveillance, collection, and analysis of intelligence gathered from foreign powers and agents of foreign powers, up to and including any individual residing within the U.S., who were suspected of involvement in potential terrorist activity. On October 26, 2001, a little over a month after 9/11, President George W. Bush signed the USA Patriot Act into law. Two provisions, Sec. 206, permitting government to obtain secret court orders allowing roving wiretaps without requiring identification of the person, organization, or facility to be surveyed, and Sec. 215 authorizing government to access and obtain “any tangible thing” relevant to a terrorist investigation, transformed foreign intelligence into domestic intelligence.

NDAA 2014 builds on the powers granted by both the Patriot Act and FISA by allowing unrestricted analysis and research of captured records pertaining to any organization or individual “now or once hostile to the United States”. Under the Patriot Act, the ability to obtain “any tangible thing” eliminated any expectation of privacy. Under NDAA 2014 Sec. 1061(g)(1), an overly vague definition of captured records enhances government power and guarantees indefinite surveillance.

On May 22, 2013 the Subcommittee on Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities, one of several Armed Services Committees, met to discuss the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2014. The main subject of the hearing was Sec. 1061, otherwise known as Enhancement of Capacity of the United States Government to Analyze Captured Records. This enhancement provision of NDAA 2014 would effectively create a new intelligence agency, one with the authority to analyze information gained under the Patriot Act, FISA, and known spying programs such as PRISM.

Sec. 1061(a) authorizes the Secretary of Defense to "establish a center to be known as the 'Conflict Records Research Center'" (Center). The main purpose of the center, according to the bill text, is to create a "digital research database," one with the capability to "translate" and facilitate research on "records captured from countries, organizations and individuals, now or once hostile to the United States." The authorization also says the Center will conduct research and analysis to "increase the understanding of factors related to international relations, counterterrorism and conventional and unconventional warfare, and ultimately, enhance national security."

In order to make the Center run, and to accomplish such an incredibly broad scope of "research," the Secretary of Defense needs the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to cooperate in coordinating "information exchanges important to the leadership of the United States Government." That coordination would require participation of all 16 member agencies and departments of the U.S. Intelligence Community. This would leave James Clapper, the man accused of lying to Congress about the National Security Agency's (NSA) domestic spying program known as PRISM, in de facto direction of another federal surveillance and data analysis agency. And while the Center would be officially directed and overseen by the Secretary of Defense, without unfettered access to secret and top secret information, the Center would become completely ineffective. These information exchanges would most likely include data and records generated by the mass surveillance of everyday people under PRISM, as well as surveillance of those identified as "potential terrorists" or " high value targets" by any one of those 16 intelligence agencies now in operation.

The proposed Center's information exchanges rely on captured government records. Under the NDAA 2014, Sec. 1061(g)(1), a captured record is defined as "a document, audio file, video file, audio file, video file, or other material captured during combat operations from countries, organizations, or individuals, now or once hostile to the United States." But considering that the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) allows the War on Terror to exist in a perpetual and permanent state of combat operations and that the American public is already existing under an expansive surveillance state, any record may qualify as a "captured record." Thus, any captured document, audio file, video file, or other material could potentially be submitted to this new intelligence agency for research and analysis, all in the name of national security and counterterrorism, as deemed appropriate by the swelling government surveillance class.

The NDAA 2014 enhancement provision extends and consolidates the government's authority to further gather and analyze records and data captured during any national security or terrorist related investigation, not just combat operations. But it does so without creating any explicit restriction against violating an individual's right to privacy, conducting unwarranted searches and seizures, or violating due process for individuals as guaranteed by the Constitution. That's eerily similar to the NDAA 2013 Sec. 1021, which codified the indefinite military detention of American citizens without requiring they be charged with a specific crime or given a trial. Under NDAA 2013, Sec. 1021 allowed the military detention of civilians without a writ of habeas corpus, when a person "was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces." Under NDAA 2014, anyone is now subject to surveillance, not based on support of al-Qaeda or its associated forces, but based merely upon whether or not an individual is, or once was hostile to the U.S. The question of what constitutes “hostility”, is left completely unanswered.

The new enhancement provision, as well as the previous NDAA's indefinite detention mandate, goes to show how far the legislation has strayed from its stated purpose. According to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-California), the NDAA "authorizes funding for military activities of the Department of Defense, for military construction, for defense activities of the Department of Energy, to prescribe military personnel strengths, and for other purposes."

Instead, the NDAA has become the vehicle for the Executive Branch and Department of Defense to bypass Congress and legislate away any perceived right, liberty, or privilege that conflicts with permanent war and indefinite surveillance.

In 2012, in an attempt to stop that "indefinite detention" provision, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) introduced an amendment that would have prohibited the government from detaining citizens indefinitely using military force. That proposed law, otherwise known as the Feinstein Amendment easily passed the Senate floor, but was later removed by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Michigan). After removal of the only specific language that would guarantee the US government would be prohibited from interpreting the Act illegally, President Obama, also a Democrat, signed NDAA 2013 into law.

If passed in its current state, NDAA 2014 would authorize approximately $552 billion in total defense spending, with $86 billion going directly to war spending. This amount exceeds what is allowed under the automatic austerity measures that went into effect as of March 1, 2013. According to a report released in April 2013 by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, if personnel, operation and maintenance costs continue to rise, they may consume the whole of the defense budget by 2024, drying up funds for construction, procuring weapons, or military family housing. Any program created by the Enhancement Provision of NDAA 2014 would necessarily burden an already overwhelmed working class that has been hardest hit by austerity measures.

While the NSA swears that no citizen was spied on under PRISM, the very fact that cell phone metadata and online activity was gathered from millions of individuals guarantees that information was taken illegally from innocent people. We're told that the government is attempting to minimize the amount of information captured from Americans, and that all of that information is being kept in specialized and restricted servers in order to protect our constitutional rights. But that's difficult to believe when the Department of Justice is currently fighting the release of a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court opinion that details unconstitutional government surveillance.

If indefinite detention became the primary reason for opposing NDAA 2013, then the enhanced provision authorizing unlimited indefinite surveillance may fuel the most outrage against NDAA 2014. If passed in its current state, NDAA 2014 will further guarantee that people exist not only under indefinite detention and permanent war, but also under indefinite surveillance by its government.

Another Phony Jobs Report

Well, I'm still offline for the foreseeable future, but I had to share this...--jef


From A Government That Lies About Everything
June 7, 2013  | Paul Craig Roberts


June 7, 2013. The payroll jobs report for May released today continues the fantasy.

Goods producing jobs declined, with manufacturing losing another 4,000 jobs, but the New Economy produced 179,000 service jobs.

Are these jobs the high-powered, high-wage “innovation jobs” that economists promised would be our reward from Globalism. I’m afraid not.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobs created are the usual lowly paid
non-exportable domestic service jobs–the jobs of a third world country.
Retail trade accounts for 27,700 of the jobs.

Wholesale trade accounts for 7,900 jobs.

Ambulatory health care services accounts for 15,300 of the jobs.

Waitresses and bartenders account for 38,100 of the jobs.

Local government accounts for 13,000 of the jobs.

Amusements, gambling, and recreation account for 12,500 of the jobs.

Temporary help services provided 25,600 jobs.

Business support services provided 4,300 jobs.

Services to buildings and dwellings provided 6,400 jobs.

Accounting and bookkeeping services provided 3,100 jobs.

Architectural and engineering services provided 4,900 jobs.

Computer systems design and related provided 6,000 jobs (most filled by H-1B work visas).

Management and technical consulting services provided 3,200 jobs.

For a decade this has been the jobs profile of “the world’s most powerful economy.” It is the profile of third world India 40 years ago. The jobs that made the US the dominant economy have been moved off shore by corporations threatened by Wall Street with takeovers if they did not increase their profits.

The easiest way for corporations to increase profits is to take advantage of cheap labor in countries with massive quantities of unemployed labor.

So, if we believe the BLS report, and the reported new jobs are not simply a product of faulty season adjustments and a faulty birth-death model, why is the financial press happy that the US economy can only create third world jobs? Why was the stock market up on the news that the US economy has created 179,000 third world jobs? Would rational markets be up on such discouraging news?

But are the jobs really there?

With retail sales going nowhere, why 35,600 new jobs in wholesale and retail trade?

With real median incomes declining, why 38,100 more waitresses and bartenders? For every month as long as I can remember the BLS reports numerous new jobs in waitresses and bartenders, despite the long-term decline in real median income.

In the May jobs report, where are the jobs for the vast number of new college graduates?

The US now has more hotel maids, bartenders, and waitresses than it has manufacturing workers. The US has twice as many people employed in government than in manufacturing.
The services of maids, bartenders, waitresses, and government cannot be exported.
Therefore, the US trade deficit remains large and without exports to reduce it, a crisis in itself.

What the BLS jobs reports have been telling us for many years is that the US economy is in crisis, in a death-spiral. Yet, not a handful of economists’ voices have been raised.

Today president obama’s economist said that the notch upward in the unemployment rate was because the economic outlook was so good that more people were encouraged to enter the labor market than there were new jobs available.

The conclusion is inescapable: The same government that lies about weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein’s al-Qaeda connections, Iranian nukes, and so on, also lies about jobs, the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, rigs every financial and commodity market, pretends that terrorism is such a threat that the US Constitution must be set aside and that Americans are safer without the protection of habeas corpus and due process.

It is amazing how rare terrorism is, especially with Washington in the second decade of trying to stir up terrorism by invading countries on totally false pretenses, murdering citizens of countries, such as Pakistan and Yemen with drones, and supporting Israel’s never-ending murder and dispossession of the Palestinians.

After such massive provocations from Washington, one would think that the world would be ablaze with terrorism. But it isn’t.

As there is so little terrorism, Washington and its presstitute media call those who resist
Washington’s invasion of their countries “terrorists.” Everyone who resists Washington’s military aggression is a terrorist. Just ask the New York Times, Fox News, or any neoconservative. Or, for that matter, the Bilderbergs, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and Homeland Security, the Gestapo organization that now defines all American dissenters to be “domestic extremists.”

Washington’s claim that Americans have “freedom and democracy” is the sickest joke in human history.

In 21st century America, defendants have no more rights than the accused in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. The FBI now shoots suspects brought in for questioning in the back of the head even before the suspect is arrested.

Long before Bradley Manning’s trial the presstitutes have convicted the accused based on lies leaked by the prosecutors. Consider Bradley Manning. After three years of detention, including one year of torture, he is brought to a rigged trial as a national security danger. All that Bradley Manning did was to comply with the Military Code and report war crimes. As his corrupt superiors did not want to know, he complied with his duty, apparently, by going public.

Now he is being made an example. The message is clear: Support Washington’s war crimes or be destroyed.

The Amerika that exists today has more in common with Nazi Germany than with the America in which I grew up. The young don’t know any different. But those my age realize that we have lost our country. America no longer exists.

Offline for a while

Due to unforeseen events, I will have to take a break from blogging for a while. I will definitely pick it back up when things become less unpredictable...cheers!