Most Americans Only Have 3 Days Worth Of Food

NATO GENERAL FRUSTRATED: WANTS FASTER ACTION AGAINST THE RUSSIAN THREAT

US Government Recovery Statistics Are No Longer Matching The Collapsing Economy

Why The Jobs Report Is Not Nearly As Strong As You Are Being Told

Happy days are here again? On Friday, the mainstream media was buzzing with the news that the U.S. economy had added 255,000 jobs during the month of July. But as you will see below, the U.S. economy did not add 255,000 jobs during the month of July. In fact, without an extremely generous “seasonal adjustment”, the number of jobs added during the month of July would not have even kept up with population growth. But the pretend number sounds so much better than the real number, and so the pretend number is what is being promoted for public consumption.

Why doesn’t the government ever just tell us the plain facts? Unfortunately, we live at a time when “spin” is everything, and just about everyone in the mainstream media seemed quite pleased with the “good jobs report” on Friday. However, as Zero Hedge has pointed out, the truth is that the “unadjusted” numbers tell a very different story…

As Mitsubishi UFJ strategist John Herrmann wrote in a note shortly after the report, the “jobs headline overstates” strength of payrolls. He adds that the unadjusted data show a “middling report” that’s “nowhere as strong as the headline” and adds that private payrolls unadjusted +85k in July vs seasonally adjusted +217k.

In Herrmann’s view, the government applied a “very benign seasonal adjustment factor upon private payrolls to transform a soft private payroll gain into a strong gain.”

He did not provide a reason why the government would do that.

Every month, the U.S. economy must create at least 150,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth. According to the unadjusted numbers, we did not hit that threshold, and so the employment situation in this country actually got worse last month.

In America today, there are 7.8 million Americans that are considered to be officially unemployed, and another 94.3 million working age Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force”.

When you add those two numbers together, you get a grand total of 102 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now.

Rather than focusing on the headline “unemployment” figure, we get a much fairer look at the employment crisis in the United States when we examine the employment-population ratio. The following chart comes directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it shows that the percentage of Americans that are employed has never even come close to getting back to where it was just prior to the last recession…

Over the past couple of years we have seen a slight bump in this number, and that is good, but normally after a recession ends the employment-population ratio goes back to at least as high as it was before.  Unfortunately, this has not happened after the last two recessions.  The following comes from Wolf Richter…

The ratio always drops during recessions, but before 2001, it always climbed to higher highs during the recoveries. The 2001 recession and subsequent recovery changed this. For the first time, the ratio never fully recovered, never got even close to fully recovering. That was a new phenomenon: employment growth could no longer keep up with population growth.

When the Great Recession hit, the ratio plunged from its lower starting point at the fastest pace on record (going back to 1948). The Fed’s efforts were all focused exclusively on bailing out bondholders, re-inflating the stock market, re-inflating the housing market, and generally creating what had become the official Fed policy at the time, the Wealth Effect (here’s Bernanke himself explaining it). This has re-inflated asset prices – many of them way beyond their prior bubble peaks.

But the Fed’s astounding focus on capital accelerated the already changing dynamics of the economy, at the expense of labor.

Even the Wall Street Journal admits that we are in the weakest “economic recovery” since 1949, and now there are lots of signs that we have entered a brand new economic downturn.  Here are just a few examples from Chad Shoop…

• Ford, GM and Chrysler — three of the U.S.’ largest auto companies — reported sales for July that missed estimates: down 3%, 1.9% and up 0.3%, respectively.
• Delta Airlines, one of the largest airlines in the world, said revenue fell 7% in July as part of its monthly performance update.
• Macy’s, the biggest department store company, reported a decline in sales for July, leading to more aggressive markdowns and an industry-wide sell-off.

And lots of ominous signs continue to pop up on Wall Street as well.  For one thing, the Libor rate has surged to the highest level since the last financial crisis.  If you are not familiar with Libor, here is a pretty good explanation of it from Business Insider…

The Libor, or London Interbank Offered Rate, measures the interest rate at which banks lend to each other at different durations, and its sharp jump was a harbinger of the financial crisis.

And according to that same article, the Libor rate is now the highest that we have seen since early 2009…

In the past month, the Libor rate has spiked to rates not seen since the first quarter of 2009, the heart of the banking meltdown.

Not to mention, the spread between the Libor and the Overnight Index Swap rate, which tracks the lending rate from the Federal Reserve, has widened, another potentially worrying sign.

But of course I have been quoting facts and figures like this for months, and yet U.S. financial markets continue to hold it together.

There are literally dozens of parallels between the global financial crisis of 2008 and what is happening in 2016, but Wall Street continues to defy the laws of economics.

Of course it won’t last forever, but it certainly has been a sight to behold.

And I am certainly not alone in my analysis.  As I noted the other day, DoubleLine Capital CEO Jeffrey Gundlach is entirely convinced that stocks “should be down massively”…

“The artist Christopher Wool has a word painting, ‘Sell the house, sell the car, sell the kids.’ That’s exactly how I feel – sell everything. Nothing here looks good,” Gundlach said in a telephone interview. “The stock markets should be down massively but investors seem to have been hypnotized that nothing can go wrong.”

For the moment, investors continue to pay extremely irrational prices for stocks, and the mainstream media is just giddy about the state of the economy.

So let us enjoy this very strange period of stability for however much longer it lasts, but let us also protect ourselves from the horrible crash that will inevitably follow.

Credit to Economic Collapse

U.S. A DECADE BEHIND CHALLENGING RUSSIA'S DEADLY NEW SARMAT ICBM

Italy gives green light to pivotal referendum which could DESTROY the EU

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said victory in the poll would end Italy's notoriously shaky political system that has prevented any government completing a full term since the Second World War.

But defeat will mean the end of the line for pro-Brussels Mr Renzi who has promised to quit if voters do not approve his constitutional changes.

It is a huge political gamble for the pro-EU centre-left leader with opinion polls showing many of the 50 million voters are undecided and the "No" camp gaining momentum in what will be a very close campaign.

Support for opposition parties who want away from Brussels and have been emboldened by Britain's historic decision to pull away from the EU is growing and the battleground is being set.

And if enough anti-EU protest voters are mobilised to outnumber those who back Mr Renzi's reform proposals he will be forced to pack his bags and Italy's membership of the bloc will be brought into sharp focus.

Such a result would be a hammer blow for the EU - and could spark a domino effect in the dozens of other critical votes across the eurozone that are set to be held.

A recent ECFR report revealed there are a total of 34 public votes lined up to be held in Europe which will be crucial to the future of the Brussels union.

Today's legal move saw the Court of Cassation validate the more than 500,000 signatures needed for the referendum to be held.




Credit to The Express

Russian Super Soldiers Will Dominate the US Military On the Battlefield

The US Military Is No Match For Russia’s New Secret Weapons


The Russians are surpassing the US in nuclear weapons, land-base military, and their submarine fleet. But nowhere is their dominance going to be felt more then in the arena of the super-soldier, in which the Russians have no equal. The details are in the video.



Credit to Common Sense

HAS THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE ALREADY BEGUN?

Turkey legalizes pedophilia

The Constitutional Court has ruled to annul a provision that punishes all sexual acts against children under the age of 15 as “sexual abuse,” stirring outrage from academics and women’s rights activists who warn that the decision will lead to cases of child abuse going unpunished. 

The Constitutional Court discussed the issue upon an application from a district court, which complained that the current law does not discriminate between age groups in cases of child sexual abuse and treats a 14-year-old as equal to a four-year-old.

The local court said the law does not provide legal consequences for the “consent” of victims in cases where the child victim is from 12 to 15 years of age and able to understand the meaning of the sexual act. “This creates an imbalance between legal benefits and sanctions that should be preserved in crime and punishment,” the application stated.

With seven votes against six, the Constitutional Court agreed with the local court and decided to annul the provision. The decision will come into effect on Jan. 13, 2017.

The local court’s argument and the Constitutional Court’s endorsement have drawn a backlash from academic and human rights circles, which underlined that all individuals under the age of 18 are considered children according to international conventions to which Turkey is a party.

“First of all, every individual under the age of 18 is a ‘child’ according to international conventions. Seeking a child’s consent in cases of sexual abuse is out of the question,” the chair of the Association to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect, Professor Bahar Gökler, told Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency.

Gökler said this “calamitous” decision was in violation of child rights.

The general secretary of the same association, Professor Aysun Baransel, said consent could be sought in cases of sexual intercourse between peers, but it was impossible to speak of consent if the case involves a 60-year-old and a 15-year-old child.

“The most important point is that unless this provision is urgently addressed, child abusers will start walking around freely because there is no new regulation [to fill the void],” Baransel said. 

Credit to hurriyetdailynews.com

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkeys-constitutional-court-stirs-outrage-by-annulling-child-sex-abuse-clause.aspx?PageID=238&NID=101607&NewsCatID=509