Monday, April 29, 2013

Gold And Silver Coin And Bar Shortages Globally

by GoldCore


Today’s AM fix was USD 1,472.50, EUR 1,125.51 and GBP 947.80 per ounce.
Friday’s AM fix was USD 1,462.25, EUR 1,123.43 and GBP 947.79 per ounce.

Cross Currency Table – (Bloomberg)

Gold fell $7.00 or 0.48% Friday to $1,467.30/oz and silver finished down 1.65%. Gold and silver both gained for the week at 4.74% and 3.11%, respectively.
Gold rose another 1% overnight in Asia, consolidating on last week’s 4% gain.

Gold in USD, 1 Month – (Bloomberg)

The slight rebound in prices from multi-year lows has as of yet failed to dampen the global appetite for bullion, causing a shortage in the physical supply of gold coins and bars.
Recent bleak U.S., European and Chinese growth data is also supporting gold due to concerns of recessions and of a global depression.
Central banks including the Federal Reserve and the ECB are set to continue with ultra loose monetary policies which will support gold.

Gold in Euros, 1 Month – (Bloomberg)

The ECB has kept its main interest rate at a record low of 0.75% since July 2012 and may reduce interest rates to 0.5%, either this week or in June. This will further deepen negative real interest rates in most countries in the Eurozone.
The Fed alone is set to keep interest rates near 0% and continue its current pace of bond buying at a whopping $85 billion a month.
Ultra loose monetary policies will support gold as it is a hedge against currency devaluations and inflation and stagflation – all of which are real risks.

Gold in British Pounds, 1 Month – (Bloomberg)


Premiums for gold and silver bars have jumped higher all over the world. They have surged to multi-year highs in Asia. Reuters reports overnight that premiums are surging due to “strong demand from the physical market, which has led to a shortage in gold bars, coins, nuggets and other products.”
Shortages of gold and particular silver coins and bars is not confined to the small coin and bar market and there are also supply issues in the larger bar market with kilo bars being increasingly difficult to secure.
Swiss refineries are struggling to meet global demand for refined gold bars.  They have been cleared out of their stock of kilo gold bars – the preferred form of gold bullion amongst many store of wealth, affluent buyers in Europe and Asia. Buyers have been told that they will have to wait until late May prior to receiving delivery on paid for product.
Shortages are most prevalent in the silver coin and bar market where premiums have surged.
Silver coins and bars can now not be bought from the largest bullion dealers in the U.S. who have been cleared out of stock in recent days. Unlike after Lehman Brothers where there were shortages and delays of 3 to 4 weeks, there is no guidance being given as to when certain gold and silver coins and bars will be available again.

Dimon Loses Key Lieutenant

One of the most trusted allies of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive James Dimon left the nation's largest bank to run a payment-processing company, the latest executive to depart after a multibillion-dollar trading blunder.
The 53-year-old Frank Bisignano was barely visible outside J.P. Morgan, but was well known within the company as a fixer of operational problems and was a close aide of Mr. Dimon since 2005.
Mr. Bisignano became chief executive of Atlanta-based First Data Corp., which has 24,000 employees, processes transactions for 6.5 million merchants and last year posted annual revenue of more than $10 billion.

Fed Governor Stein Warns When A TBTF Bank Fails, Depositors Will Be Cyprus'ed

Two months ago, Fed governor Jeremy Stein caused a major stir [4]among the very serious excel-using economists and other wannabe "scientists"-cum-voodoo witchdoctors, when he hinted that it was the Fed's actions that were leading to "overheating" in the markets. It took quite a bit of rhetoric by other very serious people to talk down his comments and give the impression that the S&P is not about 50% overvalued. Today, Stein has managed to stick his foot in his mouth for the second time in a row, and do what virtually nobody in the status quo is capable of: tell the truth.
In a speech titled "Regulating Large Financial Institutions [5]" Stein made something very clear: if and when a TBTF fails, and since this time is not different, and a failure is only a matter of time, depositors will lose everything (courtesy of some $300 trillion in gross unnetted liabilities which once there is a counterparty chain failure, suddenly become very much net and immediately marginable - a drain of cash), which now that Cyprus is the template, is to be expected. Not only that but Stein makes it all too clear that part of the Dodd-Frank resolution authority guidelines, a bailout is no longer an option.
Perhaps more to the point for TBTF, if a SIFI does fail I have little doubt that private investors will in fact bear the losses--even if this leads to an outcome that is messier and more costly to society than we would ideally like. Dodd-Frank is very clear in saying that the Federal Reserve and other regulators cannot use their emergency authorities to bail out an individual failing institution. And as a member of the Board, I am committed to following both the letter and the spirit of the law.
At least he can't say Americans weren't warned when the Cypressing(sic) hammer finally falls.
Oh, and as a reminder...
[6]

Gold Doesn’t Pay a Dividend… But It Doesn’t Commit Fraud, Steal Depositor Funds, Lie Under Oath, etc.

by Phoenix Capital Research

The mainstream media is rife with investment “experts” who missed the 10- year bull market in Gold and Silver. These guys are now high fiving about Gold’s drop, like they’re geniuses for avoiding precious metals in the past.

Gold doesn’t produce cash flows or pay a dividend, it the manta for these folks. Too bad for them Gold has outperformed stocks on both a 10 year AND a 50 year basis. There are of course exceptions to this in the form of investing geniuses who use compounding to crush the markets… but given that most money managers don’tbeat the market and Gold does… one has to ponder these things.

Sure, Gold doesn’t pay a dividend… but it doesn’t charge commissions, tell you to buy a garbage stock, back date options with its executive board, or commit accounting fraud either.

Gold doesn’t go out of business. It doesn’t get insider information and use it against you. Gold doesn’t make money taking the other side of your trades. It doesn’t front-run your stock orders.

Gold also doesn’t create artificial bids in the market. It doesn’t cause flash crashes. Gold doesn’t use your funds to bail itself out and then parade around fundraising for politicians.

Gold doesn’t blow stock bubbles. It doesn’t manipulate data. Gold doesn’t control interest rates to benefit the big banks at the expense of everyone else. Gold doesn’t lie under oath, nor does it channel the public’s money into foreign banks.

Also, you cannot print Gold. Gold doesn’t violate property rights laws or steal your deposits. Indeed, Gold is essentially one of the few forms of investments that gets your capital OUT of Central banker hands.

One wonders how things would go for Cyprus individuals who had their deposits in Gold in their own custody as opposed to sitting in the award winning Cyprus banks.

This concludes this article. If you’re looking for more information on the threat of inflation, we’ve just released a Special Investment Report outlining the threat of inflation to your financial well-being. It’s titled, The Inflation Secrets Your Broker Won’t Tell You and it outlines three HUGE secrets that 99% of the investment community don’t know about inflation.

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  • The surprising industry that suffers as prices soar, despite being considered “inflation proof” by many investors…
  • Which investment Warren Buffett loves even more than gold…
  • Why U.S. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (or TIPS) don’t work — and what investment could be your best alternative.

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Best Regards,
Graham Summers

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In this report, we outline the risks Europe’s banking crisis holds not only for those in Europe, but for savers around the world. We also explain how this crisis will most likely unfold, including which areas are most at risk in the financial system. And we cap it off by listing multiple backdoor plays on Europe that investors can use to profit from Europe’s Crisis.

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Fisker Spent $660,000 on Each $103,000 Plug-in Car

Fisker Automotive Inc. spent more than six times as much U.S. taxpayer and investor money to produce each luxury plug-in car it sold than the company received from customers, according to a research report.
The Anaheim, California-based company made about 2,500 of its $103,000 Karmas before halting production last year, disrupting its plans to use a $529 million U.S. loan to restart a shuttered Delaware factory owned by the predecessor of General Motors Co. (GM) The Karma was assembled in Finland.
Fisker Automotive Inc. co-founder Henrik Fisker resigned last week. Photographer: Peter Foley/Bloomberg
Fisker was allowed to keep using money from its Energy Department loan after violating its terms multiple times, according to a report released April 17 by PrivCo, a New York- based researcher specializing in closely held companies. It said it based its report on documents, including the loan agreement, obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
“They made a mistake” in awarding the loan, PrivCo Chief Executive Officer Sam Hamadeh said of the Energy Department in an interview yesterday. “Should they have fought this sooner? Obviously -- as soon as it became evident that they had begun to default.”
PrivCo’s report contains errors, particularly in asserting the Energy Department knew by December 2010 that the carmaker wasn’t meeting milestones required to keep drawing taxpayer funds, Bill Gibbons, a department spokesman, said in an e-mail yesterday. The department cut off Fisker’s funding in June 2011, after the company drew down about $193 million.
“PrivCo’s assertion that Fisker defaulted in December 2010 is simply false,” Gibbons said. “The milestones that PrivCo includes in its report are also wrong. The fact is, the department stopped disbursements on the loan after the company stopped meeting its milestones.”

Production Halted

Fisker has spent $1.3 billion in taxpayer and venture capital money, or $660,000 for each car it sold, the report said.
Fisker stopped manufacturing cars late last year and fired three quarters of its remaining workers April 5. The company’s first repayment of $20.2 million on the Energy Department loan is due April 22, the report said.
Tony Knight of Sitrick & Co., an outside public relations agency representing Fisker, declined to comment.
A U.S. House panel is scheduled to hold a April 24 hearing on Fisker and its government financing. Invited witnesses include co-founder and namesake Henrik Fisker, who resigned last month; CEO Tony Posawatz and Chief Operating Officer Bernhard Koehler, who helped start the company whose customers include singer Justin Bieber and actor Leonardo DiCaprio.

Delaware Plant

“PrivCo’s report raises more questions as to the circumstances surrounding government support for Fisker,” Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee holding next week’s hearing, said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
The Energy Department, which has had to defend its loan guarantees to failed solar-panel maker Solyndra LLC, gave Fisker its loan primarily to acquire and restart production at a closed GM plant in Delaware, the home state of Vice President Joe Biden, who attended the press conference announcing the venture. The company forecast it would create 2,500 jobs, according to a project summary still posted on the Energy Department’s website.
Activity at the Delaware plant stopped last year and no cars have been made there.
Of the cars produced, about 1,600 were purchased by consumers. Another 338 cars were destroyed during November’s Superstorm Sandy while parked at the Port of Newark, New Jersey.

Iceland set for coalition talks after government ousted

By Balazs Koranyi and Robert Robertson

REYKJAVIK (Reuters) - Iceland's centre-right parties prepared for coalition talks on Sunday after defeating the ruling Social Democrats in elections with promises of ending austerity measures five years after a financial collapse.

With nearly all the ballots counted, the Independence Party took 26.7 percent of the vote and the Progressive Party 24.4 percent, both gaining 19 seats in the Althing, or parliament.

The Social Democrats were a distant third with 12.9 percent.

"Independence and Progressives teaming up in a coalition is the likely outcome," Olafur Hardarson, a political science professor at the University of Iceland said. "Other outcomes are of course possible but very unlikely."

Once a European financial centre, the windswept north Atlantic island of glaciers, geysers and volcanoes has struggled along for years after a crash that brought it to its knees in just a matter of days.

The election brings back the same parties that presided over the rise and fall. Tired by years of belt tightening, high mortgages, capital controls and unrealised promises of recovery, households lost patience with the Social Democrats.

"We are offering a different road, a road to growth, protecting social security, better welfare and job creation," said Independence leader Bjarni Benediktsson, the favourite to become the next prime minister.

"What we won't compromise about is cutting taxes and lifting the living standards of people," Benediktsson, a 43-year-old former professional soccer player, told Reuters.

The Independence party won the popular vote but earned as many seats in parliament as Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson's Progressive Party, setting the stage for a tussle between the two.

"We've seen all sorts of different forms of governments here in the past decades," Gunnlaugsson, 38, told Reuters. "Sometimes the biggest party delegates the prime minister, sometimes not."

Coalitions in Iceland are traditionally agreed in a matter of days.

"The choice seems to be clear," Benediktsson said. "We'll go into coalition with whoever we can govern with."

SHORT MEMORIES

The two parties ruled Iceland, often in coalition, between 1980 and 2009, setting in motion an economic revolution that made Iceland rich

"People seem to have a very short memory," Halldor Gudmundsson, 44, said after casting his ballot on Reykjavik's outskirts. "These are the parties that got us into the mess in the first place."

Iceland's liberalised banks borrowed heavily on cheap overseas markets and lured British and Dutch savers with high returns.

But after amassing assets worth more than 10 times Iceland's GDP, Landsbanki, Kaupthing and Glitnir collapsed in quick succession, dragging the entire country into a financial abyss in October 2008.

Property prices tumbled, unemployment soared and the currency was only saved by capital controls that locked in foreign investors indefinitely.

The Social Democrats stabilised the economy with a bailout package hailed as exemplary by the IMF. But a series of policy blunders, tax hikes, leniency toward foreign creditors and their inability to deal with household debt cost them popularity.

"Household debt is the main issue, we have very strong opinions on that and can't compromise on that," Gunnlaugsson said. "We'll work with whoever shares this passion."

Both centre right parties campaigned on offering relief to households and both said the failed bank's foreign creditors will have to accept a write-off, perhaps as much as 75 percent.

They also argued against EU membership, so the vote was also a referendum on breaking off stalled accession negotiations.

Turnout, the lowest since independence from Denmark, also reflected the sour mood among Iceland's 320,000 people.

"There's so little room to manoeuvre and they promised so much, their popularity will be gone in three months," said Egill Helgason, a political commentator for national broadcaster RUV.

The victory caps a comeback for Benediktsson.

Two weeks ago he considered resigning after low poll ratings prompted calls for him to step down as party leader.

Hailing from a rich family with many business interests, he was considered out of touch and tainted by the collapse.

He fought back with a television interview which gave voters a glimpse of his human side and propped up his party's ratings.

(Editing by Angus MacSwan)
Reuters

The worldwide Church of the Evening News

Dees Illustration
Jon Rappoport
Activist Post

The march of idiots is an interesting subject for investigation.

The collectivized mind is wired to other minds, and they exchange gibberish to feel whole.

People are addicted to crap. They like it.

That’s why they watch the news.

That’s why they believe the news.

It’s time for a worldwide Church of the News, with its own priests, its own symbols, and its own prophets. In other words, go to the extreme. Why fiddle around? Bring things out in the open.

Brian Williams would be a saint some day. The great ancestors, like Ed Murrow, Cronkite, and Chet Huntley would be celebrated figures in testaments.

Sunday services would feature many screens with simultaneous broadcasts. This would be the first Church that has such an extensive record of its own history. On television.

Think of it. Straight-out worship of the news.
“I had my conversion-experience one night while Diane Sawyer was in her cups, explaining the loss of life in a storm in Kansas. I suddenly realized I was receiving revelation…”

We already have the Church of Biological Mysticism, in which all human suffering is explained by the germ theory or genes. So we need the Church of the News.

If there’s a 36-car pile-up outside Chicago, in the fog, hundreds of millions of people see pictures of it within minutes. It’s automatically a Church document. No need to explain it. Let the anchors who are on-air explain it. Then everyone can suck it in, in the same way.

CBS, NBC, and ABC are wings of the great cathedral. Their anchors are angels right here, right now.

The Church leadership will be composed of the Great Ones, the men who run the corporations that own the networks. The power behind the throne.

Heretics, of course, are necessary. They’re the “conspiracy theorists,” those evil and demented people who challenge official scenarios touted by the news.

The Church is a herald of the New World Order: Globalism. Establishing one body to rule the planet is its mission. Therefore, worshipers are dedicated as well. Eliminate nations. Erase borders. Allow mega-corporations to roam free and wild and buy up land, resources, and labor anywhere and everywhere.

Bring it all out into the open.

But whether it’s a new UN treaty, a car crash, a murder in a motel, a breakthrough in lip gloss, it’s news, so it's sacred.

The Church has a basic flat-earth policy. Every substantial story is presented with drastically shortened perspective, eliminating, for example, the people who are running a specific op from behind the scenes. “Behind the scenes” is a phrase rarely mentioned by the Church.

If we throw in CNN, FOX, and MSNBC, the Church has 24/7 services. That’s quite a reach. Disparate loons like Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch are united in Church annals, as they should be. They’re both significant promulgators of the faith.

And who plays Satan? The Internet, of course. Tax it, control it, censor it, curse it. Cast it out.

Why let people merely bow and kneel down to the news in the privacy of their own minds? Build churches and monuments to externalize and celebrate the broadcasts that shape their reality. There’s no need to hide.

“This is what we know. This is what we see. This is all there is. The news.”

The narration of what exists.

New holidays. The Day of Celebrity Gossip, commemorating a year’s worth of salacious invasions into the lives of meaningless stars. Parishioners on bended knee are fed sugary confections at the altar.

The Day of Commercials, honoring those stalwart companies who support the Church with their ad buys and product placements.

Segue Tuesday, marking the great anchors who excel in blending one fatuous news item into another with seamless skill.

Government Source Saturday, extolling the anonymous persons who feed (dis)information to the press on a regular basis, never to be named “because the investigation is ongoing.”

And of course, a new Bible. “In the Beginning was the anchor’s Voice, and the Voice was inside the mind of the viewer,” fleshing out reality, collectivizing mass programming for All.

From The Children, one will rise to be the premier elite anchor of his generation. To him is given the nod of the Great Corporate Owners, to safeguard the ad buys, the ratings, and the dispensing of the story lines.

To him is awarded the mission of protecting the men behind the curtain. For there is certain knowledge that cannot be told, lest it endanger the constructed consensus and throw the world into chaos.

Centralize the mind. That is the mandate.

There is no history. The past is an illusion. There is only tonight’s broadcast. And then tomorrow’s.

In Church dispensations (broadcasts), there are no contradictions. When a paradox appears on the horizon, it is mitigated and resolved by the instant emergence of a new story that wipes away memory. Yesterday’s tyrant becomes today’s rescuer, according to secret formulas propagated by the Great Owners.

The Church capsulizes and distorts the people it covers on the news, plugging them into an overall cartoon-front. Individuals mustn’t stand out from the televised background. Too provocative, too dangerous. Too disruptive. By contrast, they might expose the whole charade.

From time to time, the news runs up against rebels who challenge the whole broadcast reality.

And once in a while, the rebel holds a few trump cards. This was the case with one of the earliest mass-media duelists, Salvador Dali.

THE STRANGE CASE OF DALI AND THE COSMIC PRISON BREAK

The critics would have declared Dali a hopeless lunatic if he hadn’t possessed such formidable classical painting skills.

He placed his repeating images (the notorious melting watch, the face and body of his wife, Gala, the ornate and fierce skeletal structures of unknown creatures) on the canvas as if they had as much right to be there as any familiar object.

This was quite troubling. If an immense jawbone that was also a rib or a forked femur could rival a perfectly rendered lamp or couch or book (on the same canvas), where were all the accoutrements and assurances of modern comfortable living?

Where was the pleasantly mesmerizing effect of a predictable existence?

Where was a protective class structure that depended on nothing more than money and cultural slogans?

To make it worse, Dali invented vast comedies on canvas. But the overall joke turned, as the viewer’s eye moved, into a nightmare, into an entrancing interlude of music, a memory of something that had never happened, a gang of genies coming out of corked bottles.

What was the man doing? Was he thumbing his nose at the audience? Was he simply showing off? Was he inventing waking dreams? Was he, God forbid, actually imagining something entirely new that resisted classification?

Words failed viewers and critics and colleagues and enemies.

But they didn’t fail Dali. He took every occasion to explain his work in press interviews. However, his explications were dealt out in a way that made it plain he was telling tall tales—interesting, hilarious, and preposterous tall tales.

Every interview and press conference he gave, gave birth to more attacks on him. Was he inviting scorn? Was he really above it all? Was he toying with the press like some perverse Olympian?

Media analysts flocked to make him persona non grata, but what was the persona they were exiling? They had no idea then, and they have no idea now.

It’s possible that every statement ever uttered in public by Dali was a lie. A fabrication. An invention dedicated to constructing a massive (and contradictory) persona.

Commentators who try to take on Dali’s life usually center on the early death of his young brother as the core explanation for Dali’s “basic confusion”—which resulted in his bizarre approach to his own fame.

However, these days, we might more correctly say that Dali was playing the media game on his own terms, after realizing that no reporter wanted the real Dali (whatever that might mean)—some fiction was being asked for, and the artist was merely being accommodating.

He was creating a self that matched his paintings.

It is generally acknowledged that no artist of the 20th century was superior to Dali in the ability to render realistic detail.

But of course Dali’s work was not about realism.

The most complex paintings—for example, Christopher Columbus Discovering America and The Hallucinogenic Toreador—brilliantly orchestrated interpenetrating worlds.

At some point in his career, Dali saw (decided) there was no limit to what he could assemble on one canvas. A painting could become a science-fiction novel reaching into several pasts and futures. The protagonist (the viewer) could find himself in such a simultaneity.

Critics have attacked the paintings relentlessly. They are offended at Dali’s skill, which matches the best work of the meticulous Dutch Renaissance masters.

They hate the dissonance. They resent Dali’s wit and rankle at the idea that Dali could carry out monstrous jokes—in such fierce extended detail—on a given canvas.

But above all, the sheer imagination harpoons the critics. How dare a painter turn reality upside down so blatantly, while rubbing their faces in the exquisite detail.

The cherry on the cake was: for every attack the critics launched at Dali the man (they really had no idea who he was), Dali would come back at them with yet another elaborate piece of fiction about himself. It was unfair. The critics were “devoted to the truth.” The painter was free to invent himself over and over as many times as he fancied.

Dali was holding up a mirror. He was saying, “You people are like me. We’re all doing fiction. I’m much better at it. In the process, I get at a much deeper truth.”

The principles of organized society dictate that a person must be who he is, even if that is a cartoon of a cartoon. A person must be one recognizable caricature forever, must be IDed, must have one basic function. Must, as a civilization goes down the trail of decline, submit to being watched and taped and profiled.

When a person shows up who is many different things, who can invent himself at the drop of hat, who seems to stand in 14 different places at the same time, the Order trembles.

This is not acceptable.

(Fake) reality declares: what you said yesterday must synchronize absolutely with what you say today.

This rule (“being the only thing you are”) guarantees that human beings will resonate with the premise that we all live and think and work in one collective continuum of space and time. One. Only one. Forever.

The big lie.

Whatever he was, however despicable he may have been in certain respects, Dali broke that egg. Broke the cardinal rule.

He reveled in doing it. He made people wait for an answer about himself, and the answer never came. Instead, he gave them a hundred answers, improvised in the moment.

He threw people back on their own resources, and those resources proved to be severely limited.

That was too much.

But there the paintings are.

And the pressure has been building. The growing failure of major institutions (centralized hierarchical religion, psychology, education, government) to keep the cork in the bottle signals a prison break in progress.

More people understand that the veil is not really a veil of tears. It’s a curtain madly drawn across the creative force.

The pot is boiling. People want out. It remains to be seen whether people will admit that the veil was and is ultimately of their own making.

Somewhere along the line we have to give the green light to our own creative power. That is the first great day, the dawn of no coerced boundaries. Everything we’ve been taught tells us that a life lived entirely from creative force is impossible. We don’t have it within us. We should maintain silence and propriety in the face of greater official power and wisdom. We must abide by the rules. We must, at best, “surrender to the universe.”

But what if, when we come around the far turn, we see that the universe is us? Is simply one part of imagination? Is a twinkling rendition we installed to keep us titillated with dreams that would forever drift out of reach?

What if we are popping out of the fences of this culture and this continuum and this tired movie? What then?

Jon Rappoport is the author of two explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed and Exit From the Matrix, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

US Mint Suspends Sales of Smallest Gold Coins In Wake of Buying Frenzy

Empty nets in Louisiana three years after the spill

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John Nowak/CNN
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Saturday marked three years since the Gulf oil disaster erupted
  • Since then, Louisiana's statewide oyster catch has dropped by more than 25%
  • Other seafood catch numbers have rebounded and studies show the catch is safe
  • But in certain areas, there's still a pronounced downturn in blue crab, shrimp, oysters
Yscloskey, Louisiana (CNN) -- On his dock along the banks of Bayou Yscloskey, Darren Stander makes the pelicans dance.
More than a dozen of the birds have landed or hopped onto the dock, where Stander takes in crabs and oysters from the fishermen who work the bayou and Lake Borgne at its mouth. The pelicans rock back and forth, beaks rising and falling, as he waves a bait fish over their heads.
At least he's got some company. There's not much else going on at his dock these days. There used to be two or three people working with him; now he's alone. The catch that's coming in is light, particularly for crabs.
"Guys running five or six hundred traps are coming in with two to three boxes, if that," said Stander, 26.
Out on the water, the chains clatter along the railing of George Barisich's boat as he and his deckhand haul dredges full of oysters onto the deck. As they sort them, they're looking for signs of "spat": the young oysters that latch onto reefs and grow into marketable shellfish.
There's the occasional spat here; there are also a few dead oysters, which make a hollow sound when tapped with the blunt end of a hatchet.
George Barisich pilots his oyster boat on Bayou Yscloskey, in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana.
John Nowak/CNN
About two-thirds of U.S. oysters come from the Gulf Coast, the source of about 40% of America's seafood catch. But in the three years since the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon blew up and sank about 80 miles south of here, fishermen say many of the oyster reefs are still barren, and some other commercial species are harder to find.
"My fellow fishermen who fish crab and who fish fish, they're feeling the same thing," Barisich said. "You get a spike in production every now and then, but overall, it's off. Everybody's down. Everywhere there was dispersed oil and heavily oiled, the production is down."
The April 20, 2010, explosion sent 11 men to a watery grave off Louisiana and uncorked an undersea gusher nearly a mile beneath the surface that took three months to cap.
Most of the estimated 200 million gallons of oil that poured into the Gulf of Mexico is believed to have evaporated or been broken down by hydrocarbon-munching microbes, according to government estimates.
The rest washed ashore across 1,100 miles of coastline, from the Louisiana barrier islands west of the Mississippi River to the white sands of the Florida Panhandle. A still-unknown portion settled on the floor of the Gulf and the inlets along its coast.
Tar balls are still turning up on the beaches, and a 2012 hurricane blew seemingly fresh oil ashore in Louisiana.
.
Well owner BP, which is responsible for the cleanup, says it's still monitoring 165 miles of shore. The company points to record tourism revenues across the region and strong post-spill seafood catches as evidence the Gulf is rebounding from the spill.
But in the fishing communities of southeastern Louisiana, people say that greasy tide is still eating away at their livelihoods.
"Things's changing, and we don't know what's happening yet," said oysterman Byron Encalade.
Life before the spill
Before the spill, Encalade and his neighbors in the overwhelmingly African-American community of Pointe a la Hache -- about 25 miles south of Yscloskey -- earned their living from the state-managed oyster grounds off the East Bank of the Mississippi.
Back then, a boat could head out at dawn and be back at the docks by noon with dozens of 105-pound sacks of oysters.
Now? "Nothing," says Encalade, president of the Louisiana Oystermen Association.
Louisiana conservation officials have dumped fresh limestone, ground-up shell and crushed concrete on many of the reefs in a bid to foster new growth.
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A piece of brick that was dumped in to the bayou in hopes of reinvigorating the oyster beds.
John Nowak/CNN
It takes three to five years for a viable reef to develop, so that means Pointe a la Hache could be looking at 2018 -- eight years after the spill -- before its lifeblood starts pumping again.
"This economy is totally gone in my community," said Encalade, 59. "There is no economy. The two construction jobs that are going on -- the prison and the school -- if it weren't for those, the grocery store would be closing."
When the catch comes in, everyone wants you to know that it's safe to eat. Repeated testing has shown that the traces of hydrocarbons that do come up in the shrimp, crab and oysters are far below safety limits for human consumption.
"The monitoring of the seafood supply has been exemplary," said Steve Murawski, a fisheries biologist at the University of South Florida. "There's no incidence of people getting sick and no report of any tainted fish reaching the market."
While much of the Gulf's seafood industry has rebounded, the hardest-hit communities like Pointe a la Hache, Yscloskey and the inlets in Barataria Bay, west of the Mississippi, have not recovered.
Scientists are still trying to understand what the oil has done to the marshlands of southeastern Louisiana.
Both the supply and demand for Gulf oysters have decreased since the pipeline explosion.
John Nowak/CNN
Sure, the catch is safe -- but that doesn't mean much when seafood prices are down and fuel costs are up.
"Since the spill, my shrimp production is off between 40 and 60% for the two years that I did work full time," said Barisich, who has both a shrimp boat and an oyster boat tied up at Yscloskey. "But my price is off another 50%, and my fuel is high: 60 cents a gallon higher than it's ever been."
Figures from Louisiana's Department of Wildlife and Fisheries tell a similar story.
The statewide oyster catch since 2010 is down 27% from the average haul between 2002 and 2009, according to catch statistics from the agency. In the Pontchartrain Basin, where Encalade and Barisich both work, the post-spill average fell to about a third of the pre-spill catch.
Barisich says oysters are barely worth the effort anymore.
Guys running five or six hundred traps are coming in with two to three boxes, if that.
Darren Stander
"On the state ground -- on a perfect weather day, keep that in mind -- it's 20 sacks a day," he said. "Twenty sacks a day at $30 a sack is $600. $300 worth of fuel. $100 worth of other expenses and I pay the deckhand, I got $150 a day on a perfect day. It don't pay to go out."
And no boats going out means no fuel being sold at Frank Campo Jr.'s marina, down the bayou from Barisich's dock.
"If you don't burn it, I can't sell it to you," Campo says. "They're not doing very well with the crabs, and there's not a lot of oyster boats going out."
Demand for the oysters is off, too.
"You used to never ask the dealer if he wanted oysters," said Campo, whose grandfather started the marina. "You just showed up with them. Now, he'll call you and tell you if he needs 'em."
'Like somebody had poured motor oil all over'
Across the Mississippi from Pointe a la Hache, beyond the West Bank levees, lie some of the waterways that saw the heaviest oiling: Barataria Bay and its smaller inlets, Bay Jimmy and Bay Batiste.
Louisiana State University entomologist Linda Hooper-Bui tracks the numbers of ants, wasps, spiders and other bugs at 40 sites in the surrounding marshes, 18 of which had seen some degree of oiling.
She is part of a small army of researchers who have been trying to figure out what effect the spill will have on the environment of the Gulf Coast. Since 2010, she's recorded a sharp decline in several species of insects -- particularly spiders, ants, wasps and grasshoppers, which sit roughly in the middle of the food web.
They're top predators among insects but food for birds and fish.
Hooper-Bui said she expected their numbers to bounce back the following year: "Instead, what we saw was worse."
Tar balls found washed up on Elmer's Island, Louisiana, in early March.
John Nowak/CNN
The reason, she suspects, is that the oil that sank into the bottom of the marsh after the spill hasn't broken down at the same rate as the crude that floated to the surface.
Instead, it's in the sediments, still giving off fumes that are killing the insects.
Some napthalenes -- crude oil components most commonly known for their use in mothballs -- appear to have increased since the spill, she said.
"They're volatile, and they're toxic," Hooper-Bui said. "And they're not just toxic to insects. They're toxic to fish. They're toxic to birds. They cause eggshell thinning in birds. We think this is evidence of an emerging problem."
Hooper-Bui said crickets exposed to the contaminated muck in laboratories die, and when temperatures were increased to those comparable to a summer day, "the crickets die faster."
By August 2011, the number of grasshoppers had fallen by 70% to 80% in areas that got oiled.
"By 2012, we were unable to find any colonies of ants in the oiled areas," she said.
Then on August 29, 2012, Hurricane Isaac hit southeastern Louisiana. The slow-moving storm sat over Barataria Bay for more than 60 hours as it crawled onto land.
When Hooper-Bui went back to the marshes after the storm, she had a surprise waiting for her.
"We discovered in Bay Batiste large amounts of what looked like somebody had poured motor oil all over the marsh there," she said. "About three-quarters of the perimeter of northern Bay Batiste was covered in this oil."
The chemical fingerprint of the oil matched the oil from the ruptured BP well, Hooper-Bui said. Other scientists confirmed that Isaac kicked up tar balls from the spill as far east as the Alabama-Florida state line, more than 100 miles from where the storm made its initial landfall.
Far from the shoreline, patches of oil fell to the bottom of the Gulf in a mix of sediment, dead plankton and hydrocarbons dubbed "marine snow." It fouled corals near the wellhead, and it's still sitting there.
There's something about this stuff, the carbon in these layers, that's not degrading.
Samantha Joye, oceanographer
"If you took a picture of a core (sample) that was collected today and took a picture of a core that was taken in September 2010, they look the same," University of Georgia oceanographer Samantha Joye said.
"What's really strange to me is, the material is not degrading," Joye added. "There's something about this stuff, the carbon in these layers, that's not degrading."
Normally, microbes go to work on free-floating hydrocarbons almost immediately, digesting the compounds. The controversial large-scale use of chemical dispersants was supposed to accelerate that process by breaking up the oil into smaller droplets that could be more easily consumed.
But that's not happening to this layer, Joye said, and the reason is unclear.
"The first thing everyone asks is, 'Do you think it's dispersants?' And I can honestly tell you, we don't know," she said.
During the spill, scientists warned that fish eggs and larvae, shrimp, coral and oysters were potentially most at risk from the use of dispersants. The Environmental Protection Agency later reported that testing found the combination of oil and dispersants to be no more toxic than the oil alone.
Byron Encalade stands on the dock in Pointe a la Hache, Louisiana.
John Nowak/CNN
But that's no comfort to Encalade, who could watch planes spray dispersant on the slick from the marina where he keeps his two boats.
"We know from history, whenever you put soap in the water around camps and stuff like that, oysters don't reproduce," he said. "And we've heard BP say over and over again, 'Oh, it's like detergent.' That's the worst thing in the world you can do to an oyster."
The impact of these dispersants on marine life is still an open question, and it's something that's under review by scientists involved in the Natural Resource Damage Assessment, the federally run, BP-funded effort to figure out what the spill did to the Gulf Coast.
That assessment could take several years.
As scientists sort out the data, the Gulf fishing communities from Louisiana to Florida are still dealing with the impact of the spill. When you look at the entire expanse of the ocean, there isn't a huge amount of oil, explained Ian MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University.
"You have to look hard to find any oil at all," he said.
But where the oil has been found, MacDonald said, the damage is "intense and widespread."
There is some good news: Some studies indicate that commercial fish species in different parts of the Gulf escaped the worst. Recent research at Alabama's Dauphin Island Sea Lab found that young shrimp and blue crabs off Bayou La Batre, the state's major seafood port, showed no sign of decline since the spill.
But that's no consolation for Donny Waters, a Pensacola, Florida, fisherman who has been involved with efforts to rebuild the red snapper populations off the Florida panhandle.
"I'm still catching fish. I'm not saying everything's dead," Waters said. "But it's taking me longer to catch my fish. I'm not seeing the snappers farther around reefs, whether they're natural or artificial. I'm not seeing the reefs repopulate nearly as fast since the oil spill."
'BP has retired me'
Like many in the trade, Encalade and the other guys on his dock in Pointe a la Hache can spin epic tales. But these days, they're not about the catch. More often, they're about the red tape and low-ball offers they've had to deal with in the compensation process set up after the spill -- a process they say is stacked in favor of big operators.
"I got guys been fishing out here all their life. They've got trip tickets, more than you can imagine," Encalade said, referring to the slips that document a boat's daily catch. "You know what they come back and tell a man his whole life is worth? $40,000."
The oil, the catch and the money: All converge at the big federal courthouse on Poydras Street in New Orleans, where squadrons of lawyers have massed for what promises to be a protracted brawl to figure out how much BP will end up paying for the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
BP says it has shelled out $32 billion for the disaster, including $14 billion for cleanup. It's also spent $300 million on everything from testing seafood to its ad campaign that encourages people to come back to the Gulf, and it pledged $500 million for research into the environmental effects of the disaster.
The company has paid to help replace oyster reefs in Mississippi and Louisiana and rebuild sand dunes and sea turtle habitats in Alabama and northwest Florida. In addition to monitoring part of the Gulf coastline, BP spokesman Scott Dean said, the company has planted new grass in the Louisiana marshes, where the losses sped up erosion already blamed for the loss of an area the size of Manhattan every year.
But of about 13,000 holes drilled into the beaches and marshes in search of settled oil, Dean said, only 3% have found enough to require cleanup, he said.
"The vast majority of the work has been done," Dean said. But when previously undiscovered oil from the Deepwater Horizon blowout does turn up, "We take responsibility for the cleanup," he said.
Last year, the company agreed to pay $7.8 billion to individuals and businesses who filed economic, property and health claims. But in March, the company asked a judge to halt those payments, arguing that it was facing hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in payouts for "fictitious losses."
It's also pleaded guilty to manslaughter charges and fined $4 billion in the deaths of the 11 men killed aboard the rig and been temporarily barred from getting new federal contracts.
.
George Barisich, left, and his deckhand Bob Caretto separate oysters dredged from Bayou Yscloskey, Louisiana.
John Nowak/CNN
Now BP is back in court, battling to avoid a finding of gross negligence that would sock it with penalties up to $4,300 per barrel under the Clean Water Act -- another $17 billion-plus by the federal government's estimate of the spill. BP says that figure is at least 20% too high.
The plaintiffs include the federal government, the states affected by the disaster and people like Encalade and Barisich, who have rejected previous settlement offers from BP.
Freddie Duplessis, whose boat is tied up next to Encalade's, settled with the company. He said he received about $250,000 from BP after the spill, including money the company paid to hire his boat for the cleanup effort. That's about what he says he would have made in six months of fishing before the spill, before expenses.
I got guys been fishing out here all their life. You know what they come back and tell a man his whole life is worth? $40,000.
Pointe a la Hache oysterman Byron Encalade
"I've been all right. I've been paying my bills, but what I'm gonna do now?" asked Duplessis, 54. "You're still gonna have bills. Everything I've got is mine, but I've got to maintain it."
But proving just how much damage can be blamed on the oil spill will be a difficult task in the courtroom. That's where the Natural Resource Damage Assessment, launched after the disaster and partly paid for by BP, comes in. And right now, the studies that make up that assessment are closely held, ready to be played like a hole card in poker.
"There's a substantial amount of fisheries work that's not actually going to see the light of day until after the court case is resolved," USF's Murawski said.
The region's seafood landings largely returned to normal in 2011, after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration closed most of the Gulf to fishing during the blowout, NOAA data show. And BP notes that across the four states that saw the most impact -- Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida -- shrimp and finfish catches were up in 2012 compared with the average haul between 2007 and 2009.
Blue crab was off about 1%. And while oysters regionwide remained 17% below 2007-09 figures, the company says that the flooding that hit the region in 2011 has been blamed for some of that downturn, again by dumping more fresh water into the coastal estuaries.
But Gulf-wide, shrimp landings in 2011 and 2012 were about 15% below the 2000-09 average, according to figures compiled by Mississippi State University's Coastal Research and Extension Center.
And in Louisiana, there's still a pronounced downturn.
State data show that blue crab landings are off an average of 18%, and brown shrimp -- the season for which the industry is now gearing up -- is down 39% compared with the 2002-09 catch.
In Yscloskey, Barisich said three bayou fishermen took settlements from BP, sold their leases and walked away from the docks. As for him, at 56, he's trying to adapt.
He's studying for a license that will allow him to take passengers out on shrimp trawls -- a kind of working vacation for tourists with a taste for the job he learned from his father.
"I can't do what I have for the last two years," he said.
And in Pointe a la Hache, Encalade got heartbreaking news in early April.
The public reefs in nearby Black Bay, one of the post-spill reconstruction projects, had been closed after spat turned up to protect the larvae. But the spat died, and the reefs were being reopened to allow the few remaining mature oysters to be harvested.
"All the little oysters have died, and the big oysters, you can't make a dollar with them," Encalade said. "BP has retired me out of the oyster business."

H7N9 now in SOUTH CHINA – update also in HUNAN – Right now, 18 percent of the cases in China have ended in death!!

H7N9 bird flu spreads to southern China
SHANGHAI – China’s deadly outbreak of H7N9 bird flu has spread to a province in the country’s south, the government said on Friday, marking the second announcement in two days of a case in a new location.

A visiting team from the World Health Organization (WHO), which wrapped up a week-long visit to China on Wednesday, said there had been no human-to-human transmission, but warned H7N9 was “one of the most lethal” influenza viruses seen so far.
Chinese health officials have acknowledged so-called “family clusters”, where members of a single family have become infected, but have declined to call it human-to-human transmission.
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/h7n9-bird-flu-spreads-to-southern-china/655000.html
China reports new bird flu case in Hunan province
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/27/us-birdflu-china-idUSBRE93L0EF20130427
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Huang Li-min (黃立民), chief physician at the National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH) Department of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, yesterday said according to Hong Kong’s latest research, the fatality rate of H7N9 influenza is higher than SARS.
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/national/national-news/2013/04/27/377124/Expert-warns.htm
China’s state-run Xinhua news agency yesterday reported two new human infection cases in Jiangxi and Fujian, the first in both provinces, bringing the total number of cases in China to 113.

http://www.todayonline.com/chinaindia/china/h7n9-transmitted-humans-chickens-chinese-scientists
UPDATED:Based on international research, the incubation time of the H7N9 avian influenza has been increased to 10 days from the previous seven days, a physician said
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday updated H7N9 avian influenza virus testing directives for hospitals following the first confirmed H7N9 infection in Taiwan, whose throat swab samples tested negative twice for the virus before the infection was finally confirmed via sputum specimentesting.
CDC Director-General Chang Feng-yee (張峰義) said the center had to undertake genome sequencing of the virus before making the confirmed case public and it is incorrect to say that throat swab testing is “ineffective.”
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2013/04/27/2003560818
Right now, 18 percent of the cases in China have ended in death. While this is still less deadly than the previous avian flu outbreak in China six years ago – the H5N1 bird flu virus eventually killed more than 300 people after spreading from China to other countries in 2006 – the death rate for this new Chinese bird flu epidemic is more than triple the mortality rate of tuberculosis in China today.
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/at-the-edge/2013/04/26/its-time-to-worry-about-the-new-chinese-bird-flu
This new strain is, in fact, a mixture of three different types of bird flu variants and “seems to have been quietly spreading in chickens without anyone knowing about it,” he said. This has likely been going on for at least two years.

tandym

The True Atrocity of the Fire Bombing of the German City of Dresden (Full Version)

Between the nights of February 13th and 14th, 1945, there began the most controversial and DEADLY bombing-raids of World War II (and of all history at that !), which dwarfed the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined !!
This event was the “Allied” fire-bombing of the German city of Dresden, which was a city of great works of art and architecture.., and had no military manufacturing at all within the city !! It had become a city FAR over-crowded with refugees, as the war was all but virtually over.
This is because from 1939 to the end of 1944, the city had been spared the bombing raids that the Allies had launched on so MANY other cities.., as this was simply a “cultural center,” and at the time was considered “the Venice of Germany.”
AGAIN.., there were NO factories WITHIN the city center.., only a railroad station.., as any other large city would have.
By February 1945, the city was comprised of MOSTLY refugees (women, children and wounded) moving from east to west in an attempt to escape the advancing Red Army.
Hundreds of thousands.., now fled from this Red Army as it relentlessly advanced towards Berlin. No one knows how many people were in Dresden when the city was bombed. But officially, the city’s population BEFORE the mass of refugees flowing in to it was 350,000, FACT !!
BUT with the number of refugees flowing in.., by the time of the bombing.., it had swollen to almost THREE times that amount.., close to a MILLION refugees…
This documentary, which takes into account the latest historical evidence.., makes a GREAT attempt to shed new light on the true atrocity that this attempt at “genocide” of the German people was…
Contemporary witnesses.., previously unheard from.., describe the events and the terror.., during the “multiple nights” (and subsequent days !!) of this fire-bombing raid…
This film (made in 1990), which in the beginning (for approximately the first 25 minutes) shows archive images of pre-war Dresden, which then is then followed by the beginning of the first night of the fire-bombing raid.
It also includes excerpts from a conference, with the outspoken historian David Irving, where he gives information from Winston Churchill’s personal diaries.., and paints a comprehensive picture of the time, the background to the bombing-raid, and the strategies employed to carry out this atrocity…
Above all, this film was made as a memorial to the loss of human life AND the great “works of art” lost…
As always, after watching, do your best to “pass it on”…..
!!! Truth Does Not Fear Investigation !!!
Also something VERY important to remember is.., “He who Wins the War, also Writes the History.”

Hiding the Unemployed: Disability and the Politics of Stats

Some statistics cannot be understood without being set within a political framework, because they reflect politics as much as, or more than, they do reality.
The unemployment rate is an example and a cautionary tale.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the seasonally adjusted official unemployment rate for February fell to a four-year national low of 7.7%. While the White House cautiously congratulated itself, Republicans quickly pointed to what is often called the real unemployment rate; it stood at 14.3%.
The BLS looks at six categories of different data, from U-1 to U-6, to analyze employment every month. U-3 includes people who have been unemployed but who have actively looked for work during the past month; this is the official unemployment rate used by the media. U-6 contains data excluded from U-3, including part-time workers and the unemployed who have unsuccessfully looked for a job in the last year; this is the real unemployment rate.
Those politicians who want to take credit for lower unemployment thrust U-3 figures forward. Those who wish to deny them credit prefer U-6.
But matters may be even worse.
Now there is fresh reason to believe that even the 14.3% rate may be a considerable understatement.
The Disabled and the Unemployment Rate
National Public Radio recently published the results of a six-month investigation by reporter Chana Joffe-Walt: “Unfit for Work: The Startling Rise of Disability in America.” Joffe-Walt uncovered what she calls a “disability-industrial complex,” which spends more on disability payouts than on welfare and food stamps combined.
About a year ago, the New York Post reported that “more than 10.5 million individuals” received disability each month, and that the reserves will be exhausted in 2018. Joffe-Walt claims the federal government sends out approximately 14 million payments; Social Security’s disability fund is expected to run out of reserves by 2016.
On March 22, during an interview with This American Life, we learned that “since the economy began its slow, slow recovery in late 2009, we’ve been averaging about 150,000 jobs created per month. In that same period every month, almost 250,000 people have been applying for disability.”
Why do disability figures skew the unemployment rate? In the NPR article, Joffe-Walt explains that “the vast majority of people on federal disability do not work. Yet because they are not technically part of the labor force, they are not counted among the unemployed.” They become the invisible unemployed.
What Explains the Rise in Disability Payouts?
The precipitous rise in disability claims comes from the unintended consequences of political maneuvering.
“The End of Welfare as We Know It” was announced in 1996 when President Clinton signed a reform act intended to move people off welfare rolls and into jobs. Clinton “encouraged” the individual states to push for the transition by making them fund a much larger share of their welfare programs. To encourage the individual recipients, the reforms also capped the length of time a person was eligible for welfare.
The incentive worked on the states, but not in the manner intended.
Each person on welfare became a continuing cost for a state, but each person who moved onto disability saved the state money, because Social Security disability insurance is fully funded by the federal government.
In her NPR report, Joffe-Walt indicates how aggressively the states shifted welfare recipients onto disability. She writes:
“PCG [Public Consulting Group] is a private company that states pay to comb their welfare rolls and move as many people as possible onto disability… The company has an office in eastern Washington state that’s basically a call center, full of headsetted women in cubicles who make calls all day long to potentially disabled Americans, trying to help them discover and document their disabilities.”
A recent contract between PCG and the state of Missouri offered PCG $2,300 per person it shifted from welfare to disability.
The incentive for individuals to leave welfare also worked, but, again, not in the manner intended.
Disability is easier to qualify for than welfare and has no time limit. Moreover, those on disability qualify for Medicare and other benefits, as well as receive payments roughly equal to a minimum-wage job. According to Joffe-Walt, only 1% of those who go onto disability leave to rejoin the workforce.
Conclusion: What Is the Actual Unemployment Rate?
If neither the official (U-3) nor the real (U-6) unemployment rate can be trusted, then how can we ascertain a more reliable rate?
A huge step would be to acknowledge the invisible unemployed who are not part of the current BLS calculations. They include not merely the so-called “disabled,” but also those who have left the workforce for other reasons.
CNS News noted of the February 7.7% unemployment rate: “The number of Americans designated as ‘not in the labor force’ in February was 89,304,000, a record high… according to the Department of Labor.” The economic trend-monitoring site InvestmentWatch concluded that the actual American unemployment rate — one that includes all unemployed — is around 30%. The site reasoned that “89 million not in the labor force = 29%, give or take, assuming the U.S. population is 310,000,000 + official unemployment 7.7%.”
It is not possible to render an entirely accurate unemployment picture. For example, the population figure of 310,000,000 used by InvestmentWatch almost certainly includes people under 16 who cannot legally work. Thus, the unemployment rate may be higher. On the other hand, many “not in the labor force” could be retired or otherwise voluntarily unemployed. Not enough data are available.
It is possible, however, to reject the official unemployment rate. And it is necessary to cultivate a healthy skepticism of statistics produced by politics, as so many are.
Sincerely,
Wendy McElroy

Spain Is Beyond Doomed: The 2 Scariest Unemployment Charts Ever

More
Indignado1.jpg
(Reuters)

Spain is in a great depression, and it is one of the most terrifying things I have ever seen.

Five years after its housing boom turned to bust, Spanish unemployment hit a record high of 27.2 percent in the first quarter of 2013. It's almost too horrible to comprehend, but 19.5 percent of the total workforce has not had a job in the past six months; 15.3 percent have not in the past year; and 9.2 percent have not in the past two years. You can see this 1930s-style catastrophe in the chart below from the National Statistics Institute.

(Note: The "already found work" category refers to people who did not have a job at the time of the survey, but did have a job lined up).
SpanishUnemployment2.png

Here's the story of Spanish unemployment in three acts. During the boom, joblessness was relatively high due to persistent structural problems. Then it shot up fast and faster as Spain's building bust and then Lehmangeddon hit in 2008. But it has kept climbing up since the panic abated, albeit at a less catastrophic pace, due to the toxic combination of too tight money and budgets.

In other words, austerity hasn't been the path to prosperity. It's been the path to perma-slump.

But the real story of the Spanish depression has been the story of the indignados: the mostly young, long-term unemployed. It's a bit hard to see just how dramatic it's been in the chart above, so I converted it to a line chart below. Almost all of the increase in unemployment since 2010 has been due to the increase in long-term unemployment of two years or more.

SpainUnemployment1.png

In other words, unemployment is a trap people fall into, but can't fall out of. Indeed, the rate of new unemployment has stabilized at a terrible, but not quite-as-terrible, level, as you can see with the flat blue, red, and green lines. But the steadily rising purple line shows us that the rate of job-finding for the jobless has collapsed.

That is what a permanent underclass looks like.

Housing Lows and Hiring Laws Feed a Disaster
Why has Spain's jobs depression been so great? After all, its GDP is "only" 4.1 percent below its 2007 level, compared to 5.8 percent below for Portugal, 7 percent below for Italy, and 20 percent below for Greece. But despite this better (negative) growth, unemployment is higher in Spain than the others. In other words, Spanish unemployment isn't just about inadequate demand. Part of it is structural.

Spain's labor market problems fall into two big buckets: too much regulation, and not enough education. It's almost impossible for companies to get rid of older workers, which creates a horribly bifurcated labor market. There are permanent workers who can't be fired, and temporary ones who can -- and are. Indeed, as Clive Crook points out, about a third of Spain's workforce are temporary workers who enjoy few protections and fewer opportunities. Companies go through these younger workers without bothering to invest much in their human capital, because why would they? These temporary workers will be let go at the first sign of economic trouble. Young people get stuck in a never-ending cycle of under-and-unemployment since firms are always hesitant to hire permanent workers who will always be on their books.

But it gets worse. The housing bust hasn't just cast a shadow over household and bank balance sheets; it's cast one over young people's educations too. At its peak, building made up a whopping 19 percent of Spain's economy, which, as Tobias Buck of the Financial Times points out, lured many young men into dropping out of school for well-paying construction gigs. But now that building has gone into hibernation, all of those young men are left with no work and no education to fall back on. And, again, even if they can find temporary jobs, it's not as if the companies will spend money to develop their skills.

No Hope
It's hard to see anything resembling a case for optimism. Even though the Spanish government's borrowing costs have fallen since the ECB introduced its backstop, Spanish business borrowing costs have not. Small and medium-sized enterprises can't get capital except on prohibitively expensive terms. As Ryan Avent of The Economist points out, this broken monetary transmission mechanism means austerity is hurting Spain more than it otherwise would -- which is clear enough in the data. Despite its cuts, Spain's deficit actually worsened from 9.4 percent of GDP in 2011 to 10.6 percent of GDP in 2012, because its economy fell more than its borrowing costs. The only hint of good news here is Spain just announced it will take two more years to hit its deficit target. But less (self-defeating) austerity isn't enough. Spain needs stimulus. And it might need bailouts too (or, if Cyprus does turn out to be a "template", bail-ins). Indeed, The Economist calculates Spanish housing prices are still overvalued by 20 percent or so -- which will be even more bad news for its banks.

I wasn't exaggerating when I said this is one of the most terrifying things I have ever seen. Spain needs shock therapy for its labor markets, but that's an impossible political sell when more than a quarter of the population is unemployed. In an ideal world, Spain would pair major reforms with major stimulus; in the real world, it will drag its feet on reforms, try to cut its deficit, and fall deeper into depression.

Let me leave you with this, well, depressing question: Assuming everything goes perfectly, how long will it be till Spanish unemployment gets below 20 percent?

Don't answer that.

Bundesbank declares 'war' on Mario Draghi bond bail-out at Germany's top court

Germany’s Bundesbank has issued a devastating attack on the bond rescue policies of the European Central Bank, rendering the eurozone’s key crisis measure almost unworkable.

The European Central Bank's new chief Mario Draghi gestures during his first press conference at the ECB in Frankfurt  
The Draghi plan mobilized the ECB as lender of last resort and led to a spectacular fall in borrowing costs across the EMU periphery, buying nine months of financial calm

The hardline central bank - known as the temple of monetary orthodoxy - told Germany’s top court that the ECB’s pledge to shore up Italian and Spanish debt entails huge risks and violates fundamental principles. “It is not the duty of the ECB to rescue states in crisis,” it wrote in a 29-page document leaked to Handelsblatt.
The Bundesbank unleashed a point by point assault on every claim made by ECB chief Mario Draghi to justify emergency rescue policies - or Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) - unveiled last summer to stop Spain’s debt crisis spiralling out of control.
The Draghi plan mobilized the ECB as lender of last resort and led to a spectacular fall in borrowing costs across the EMU periphery, buying nine months of financial calm. The credibility of the pledge rests entirely on German consent. Analysts say the crisis could erupt again at any moment if that is called into question.
“The report borders on economic warfare,” said Harvinder Sian from RBS. “We think there is going to be fear and dread in the market that the court will reject OMT.”
The document said OMT entails the purchase of “bad bonds”, violates ECB independence and entails a high risk of heavy losses in the “not unlikely” event that debtor states are forced out of EMU.
It said Greek debacle had shown that conditions cannot be enforced, and, in any case, is “very questionable” whether it is desirable to drive down the borrowing costs of profligate states.
To cap it all, the Bundesbank said the ECB has no mandate to uphold the “current composition of monetary union”. Its task is to uphold price stability and let the chips fall where they may.
While the Bundesbank's president, Jens Weidmann, has openly criticised the Draghi plan before, the aggressive language in the report shocked economists. The document was submitted in December but was not revealed until Friday.
Germany’s constitutional court will rule on the legality of the bond rescue plan on June 12. It gave a provisional go-ahead last September for other parts of the EMU rescue machinery, but limited Germany’s bail-out share to €190bn (£160bn). Crucially, it warned that the Bundestag may not alienate its tax and spending powers to any supra-national body or be exposed to “unlimited” liabilities.
“If the court rules against OMT, it means the end of the euro. The stakes are so high that I don’t see how they could just pull the trigger,” said Mats Persson from Open Europe.
He said the Draghi plan is a legal hot potato because it is, by definition, unlimited. “The previous rulings by the court have all been predicated on this point.”
German historian Michael Stürmer said the tough report is a bid by the Bundesbank to “reassert its primacy”. “They have told the ECB in no uncertain terms that it is exceeding its mandate. Angela Merkel may be smiling because this helps her set limits in Europe.”
Prof Sturmer said the forthcoming ruling - wider than just the Draghi plan - is “much more serious” than last September’s judgment, limited to an injunction brought by eurosceptic groups. “This is about issues of sovereignty. I don’t think the Court will dare to issue a ruling before the elections in September. They will procrastinate,” he said.
The court has some jurisdiction over ECB policy because it intrudes on the German Grundgesetz, or Basic Law. “Once the ECB starts bailing out states it is moving into dangerous waters,” he said.
The court made a glancing reference to OMT in September, stating that ECB bond purchases “aimed at financing the members budgets is prohibited, as it would circumvent the ban on monetary financing”.
The bond markets ignored the leaked report on Friday, confident that the court will once again find some formula to avert a crisis. It could cite a clause in the Lisbon Treaty stating that the ECB has a duty to “support the general economic policies in the Union”, which would include saving the euro.
“They might refer the case to the European Court but that would leave the Sword of Damocles hanging over the market for another two years,” said David Marsh, author of books on the Bundesbank and EMU. “I think use of OMT is practically impossible until this is resolved.”
Sovereign bond strategist Nicholas Spiro said markets are “sick and tired” of the eurozone debt crisis and have stopped paying attention to the detail. “There is this ravenous hunt for yield and they think there is all this money coming from Japan. But it has long been unclear whether OMT is real or just a myth, and the eurozone’s underlying economic crisis is still getting worse. The window of opportunity created by Draghi has been wasted.
“If the court sides with the Bundesbank in any way the whole house of cards could come crashing down.”

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Politics: While Wronged Homeowners Got $300 Apiece in Foreclosure Settlement, Consultants Who Helped Protect Banks Got $2 Billion

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The obscene greed-and-arrogance stories emanating from Wall Street are piling up so fast, it's getting hard to keep up. This one is from last week, but I missed it – it's about the foreclosure/robo-signing settlement that was concluded earlier this year.
The upshot of this story is that in advance of that notorious settlement, the government ordered banks to hire "independent" consultants to examine their loan files to see just exactly how corrupt they were.
Now it comes out that not only were these consultants not so independent, not only did they very likely skew the numbers seriously in favor of the banks, and not only were these few consultants paid over $2 billion (over 20 percent of the entire settlement amount) while the average homeowner only received $300 in the deal – in addition to all of that, it appears that federal regulators will not turn over the evidence of impropriety they discovered during these reviews to homeowners who may want to sue the banks.
In other words, the government not only ordered the banks to hire consultants who may have gamed the foreclosure settlement in favor of the banks, but the regulators themselves are hiding the information from the public in order to shield the banks from further lawsuits.
Secrets and Lies of the Bailout
To recap: in the foreclosure deal, 13 banks agreed to pay a total of $9.3 billion to settle their liability in a number of areas, including robo-signing, which is just a euphemism for mass-perjury – robo-signing is the practice of having low-level bank employees sign documents attesting to full knowledge of case files in court foreclosure actions, when in fact they were signing hundreds of files per day, often having no idea whether the paperwork was correct or not.
It was done across the industry and turned housing cases across America into nightmares of jumbled and/or forged paperwork, in which even people who did not deserve to be thrown out of their homes were uprooted thanks to systematic errors by faceless bureaucrats who cut legal corners purely to save money.