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Luongo: The DNC Soap Opera Gets A New Villain – RFK Jr.

Luongo: The DNC Soap Opera Gets A New Villain – RFK Jr.

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats ‘n Guns blog,

Last week was a big one for…

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Luongo: The DNC Soap Opera Gets A New Villain – RFK Jr.

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats 'n Guns blog,

Last week was a big one for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  His testimony in front of a House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government created quite the row.

It should not be a shock to anyone that the DNC is committed to killing RFK Jr’s candidacy.  The performance by Democratic members of the committee was just that; performance.

They had their statements prepared, not for the general public but to generate the sound bites the rest of the Davos-controlled media complex will use to cut together propaganda pieces against RFK Jr., regardless of what was said, what data was presented, or anything else.

This is how the game is actually played.  People like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz are there to play their part, hog the microphone when appropriate and ‘get the shot.’

And that shot was to try and censor RFK Jr.’s testimony in a hearing about government censorship because he gave an opinion on research about COVID-19’s seeming ethnic bias.

Efforts by Democrats to prevent Kennedy from testifying began earlier this week. On Monday, Reps. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) and Judy Chu (D-Calif.) sent a letter signed by 102 House Democrats to House Republican leadership, requesting they “rescind Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s invitation to testify.”

According to the letter:

‘Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly attacked two groups that have long been subject to deadly discrimination. His own credibility as a witness is nonexistent. Allowing Mr. Kennedy to serve as a witness before the Select Subcommittee only services [sic] to legitimize his antisemitic and anti-Asian views.’

I guess the DNC still thinks they can shame us into not submission at this level of histrionics.

Then they gave Economic Monologue to the voteless rep from the Virgin Islands to reinforce the NPC’s view of the evil GOP playing politics while the economy burns and jobs are being lost.

If it wasn’t all so badly written it would actually be hilariously funny.  But it’s not.

It’s all a big livestreamed soap opera, folks, with bad actors, worse direction, ad hoc script pages coming from the caffeine-addled third stringers in the writer’s room.

They are the only ones left because, like in all things right now, there’s a skills deficit in all sectors of the economy.

If you think the scripts coming out of Hollywood are bad, and most of them are, then you have to realize it’s the same people with the same functional deficits.

It’s tightly scripted on their end to make sure certain phrases are said, captured on film and repeated ad nauseum through the 30 minute news cycle and seeded by bots into the social media cesspit.

However, like Trump, RFK Jr. understands this process all too well.  He’s using it to seed ideas into the zeitgeist from alternative media sources which forces them to play whack-a-mole on an issue-by-issue basis.

This isn’t to say that some of the issues he embraces aren’t good cannon fodder for the DNC because they are.

*cough* Chemtrails *cough*

But then that also begs the question why aren’t they making hay about those things.

Because if you want to censor RFK Jr. for lacking “credibility” then this seems like fertile ground, rather than peer-reviewed research, which we are all supposed to unquestionably accept as fact.

Or don’t we “trust the science” anymore?

And he’s doing this months before the primary season begins for real while the DNC is trying to figure out how to replace Joe Biden with California Governor Gavin Gruesome while sidelining Vice-President Kamala Harris.

RFK told the world what his strategy was when he was on with Joe Rogan and he’s following through on those statements.  He’s running the Trump Playbook from 2016 but this time using podcasts and alternative media voices rather than just Twitter to seed the zeitgeist.

As I noted last week when I was on a podcast with Alex Mercouris of The Duran, RFK’s retweeting one of their videos on Ukraine and NATO was a massive signal that his staff is plugged into the alternative media at a level I think very few were suspecting.

That tweet knocked me for a loop. Then this observation was further reinforced when RFK introduced the concept of gold/bitcoin redeemable US Treasuries is the real body blow to Davos.  

This is a concept that I’ve been talking about for more than a year, advancing ideas put forth by Judy Shelton who was rejected by the Senate during the Trump administration joining the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

High-fiving with Kamala Harris after blocking Shelton was one of the last things John McCain did before his brain tumor gave its life for our country and humanity.

We know the idea of the US repairing its balance sheet is Davos’ biggest Achilles’ heel.

A US with a corrupt globalist-tethered president is the fulcrum on which all of their evil rests, folks.  And “Joe Biden” is the perfect guy for that job. Like McCain, he wakes up every morning trying to figure out (if he’s figuring anything anymore) whose bread he needs to butter that day.

I can’t put it more succinctly than that.  So, 2024 is all about ensuring no sovereigntist-minded person gets into the White House.

And, unlike Trump, RFK is not the same kind of thin-skinned bully looking for payback. He’s a lawyer and the closest thing we have to the inheritor of American royalty. To think he won’t unmake most of what Obama has built over the past 14 years just out of spite is naïve in the extreme.

In fact, I’d expect he already has a well-ordered To-Do List for his first 100 days in office.

For that reason he’s more of a threat than Trump.  He’s got the pedigree.  He’s got the right strategy.  And he’s got, in political terms, the cleanest balance sheet of anyone on the campaign trail, Chemtrails notwithstanding.

This makes him, by far, the most dangerous insurgent candidate they’ve seen in this Fourth Turning yet. Not Trump, not Ron Paul.  Certainly not captured Bernie Sanders.

This is why as Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was trying desperately to keep him from speaking in front of Congress. It’s why Gavin Newsom all but declared his candidacy for president the same day.

Newsom is being positioned to replace Biden on the campaign trail.  Time was running out with the primaries only a few months away. So, they got got crackin’.

Newsom will inherit all of Biden’s money when Joe is forced out of the race.  There will be a negotiation between the GOPe and the DNC allowing Joe a way out of this with what’s left of his dignity intact.

The big tell will be them doing to Harris what Obama did to Biden in 2016, sidelining the two-term Vice President to allow Hillary Clinton to run.

It should also be no surprise that Mitt Romney threatened to switch his party affiliation to Democrat officially.  He knows he won’t be re-elected in Utah.  His work is done, now he gets to vandalize as much as he can before he’s out the door.

Someone is positioning themselves for a either a Vice-Presidency vacancy or a split-party scenario once Joe’s been put out of our misery.

RFK’s rise in stature through the grassroots of alternative media is a big deal.  He has his faults.  He may be yet another ‘looks good on paper’ candidate.  His environmental background is still very problematic for me.

But his championing the Judy Shelton program of gold redeemable US Treasuries is such a huge tell that he’s for real.  This is a six-sigma event.  It means he understands what Powell et.al. are doing on Wall St. and at the Marriner-Eccles building.

It means they are likely in consultation at the strategic level.

Strategy matters.  What information you give your enemies matters.  How you go on the offensive while shoring up your flanks matters. I wish someone would tell this to the Ukrainian Military so they stop wasting thousands of men running headlong into Russian target practice.

The Ukraine Middle Finger Trap

The events in Ukraine trace a political throughline right back to Trump’s second impeachment and the 2020 election.

While the DNC was persecuting Trump over the phone call to Zelensky. Back then, like many others I fell for the whole, “they’re impeaching Trump for Joe Biden’s crimes” narrative that was the low-hanging fruit.

But I also made sure to always go one step further reminding everyone that all of the major players on Capitol Hill — Pelosi, Romney, Graham, McCain, the Clintons, Obama, etc. — were guilty as hell in Ukraine. They were all in over their hip-waders in the mud there.

And the reality is… what this impeachment is really about is distracting and covering up the multiple layers of corruption in U.S. foreign and domestic policy stretching back decades. Many of the tendrils emanating from the events surrounding the FISA warrants improperly granted connect directly to the Clintons, Jeffrey Epstein, William Browder and the rape of Russia in the post-Soviet 90’s.

We’re talking an entire generation or more of U.S. officials and politicians implicated in some of the worst crimes of the past thirty years.

The stakes for these people are existential. This is why they are willing to risk a full-blown constitutional crisis and civil war to remove Trump from office.

And it was the easiest thing to see unfold in real time.

Ukraine and corruption there became the new third rail of US politics.  

To Trump’s credit he not only touched that rail he lubed himself up in high conduction flux and rolled around on it until the rail exploded.

The result was predictable.  They impeached him for it, for pity’s sake!  For what? Nothing.  It wasn’t what he said but what he signaled he was threatening by trying to broker a deal over Ukraine.

For that alone, I have to give him immense credit.  Whether he’s the guy this time to exit us from this mess is an open question.

But what’s important is that Davos’ plans as we have seen them play out since then have all been in the service of bringing us to February 2022 and Russia’s reluctant military operation against Ukraine.

These globalists and Neocon freaks really did think they were going to win this thing.  They tore apart the US political system, rewrote whole swaths of the legal code, called in all the markers, activated every shadow operative — Alexander Vindman, Fiona Hill, John Bolton, etc.  They even got Mike Pompeo to tear himself away from the Swedish meatballs on the buffet table from time to time.

Now they’ve recalled Nikki Haley from the Waffle House outside of Greenville to run interference on the debate stage this winter. She’s the only one Tucker Carlson didn’t completely eviscerate recently.

The War in Ukraine has been a project close to 30 years in the making.  It’s accelerated since Putin’s speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference.  There isn’t any one issue that brings out the fangs of the Uniparty more than it.

This is where RFK Jr. can really move the ball forward in a way that Trump can’t.

Their corruption is so endemic it’s not just appalling, it is the thing they have to protect more than anything for their own personal empires.

But now the whole thing is collapsing.  The GOPe is seeing the shift in the political winds on Capitol Hill. Blood is in the water not just over Joe Biden, but the entire rotten edifice. Is it possible they’ll finally get to Obama here?

And they are beginning to press their advantage.  This is why we have Speaker McCarthy openly going after Biden.  Why there are IRS whistleblowers testifying.

Lots of rats are beginning to run out of sinking political ships.  It’s a slow process and then it’s an avalanche.  Whatever finally takes down Biden will take down so many on the Hill.  

Screaming “Anti-Semitism and Racism” at RFK Jr. by Broward’s Queen Debbie of old Queens, NY is so 2016 it’s not funny.

While Elizabeth Warren is nearly ready for her close-up, Mr. DeVille.

You’d think with the writer’s strike going on in Hollywood that some of those guys would be doing under the table work for their paymasters on the Hill.  Here’s the scary thought. What if they are? Then this thing is going to get more pathetic than Ilhan Omar stating with a straight face the recent heat wave brought the hottest seven days in the last 120,000 years.

Maybe we really are in hell, and it’s not just other people.

*   *  *

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Tyler Durden Mon, 07/24/2023 - 19:40

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February Employment Situation

By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000…

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By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert

The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000 average over the previous 12 months. The payroll data for January and December were revised down by a total of 167,000. The private sector added 223,000 new jobs, the largest gain since May of last year.

Temporary help services employment continues a steep decline after a sharp post-pandemic rise.

Average hours of work increased from 34.2 to 34.3. The increase, along with the 223,000 private employment increase led to a hefty increase in total hours of 5.6% at an annualized rate, also the largest increase since May of last year.

The establishment report, once again, beat “expectations;” the WSJ survey of economists was 198,000. Other than the downward revisions, mentioned above, another bit of negative news was a smallish increase in wage growth, from $34.52 to $34.57.

The household survey shows that the labor force increased 150,000, a drop in employment of 184,000 and an increase in the number of unemployed persons of 334,000. The labor force participation rate held steady at 62.5, the employment to population ratio decreased from 60.2 to 60.1 and the unemployment rate increased from 3.66 to 3.86. Remember that the unemployment rate is the number of unemployed relative to the labor force (the number employed plus the number unemployed). Consequently, the unemployment rate can go up if the number of unemployed rises holding fixed the labor force, or if the labor force shrinks holding the number unemployed unchanged. An increase in the unemployment rate is not necessarily a bad thing: it may reflect a strong labor market drawing “marginally attached” individuals from outside the labor force. Indeed, there was a 96,000 decline in those workers.

Earlier in the week, the BLS announced JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) data for January. There isn’t much to report here as the job openings changed little at 8.9 million, the number of hires and total separations were little changed at 5.7 million and 5.3 million, respectively.

As has been the case for the last couple of years, the number of job openings remains higher than the number of unemployed persons.

Also earlier in the week the BLS announced that productivity increased 3.2% in the 4th quarter with output rising 3.5% and hours of work rising 0.3%.

The bottom line is that the labor market continues its surprisingly (to some) strong performance, once again proving stronger than many had expected. This strength makes it difficult to justify any interest rate cuts soon, particularly given the recent inflation spike.

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Mortgage rates fall as labor market normalizes

Jobless claims show an expanding economy. We will only be in a recession once jobless claims exceed 323,000 on a four-week moving average.

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Everyone was waiting to see if this week’s jobs report would send mortgage rates higher, which is what happened last month. Instead, the 10-year yield had a muted response after the headline number beat estimates, but we have negative job revisions from previous months. The Federal Reserve’s fear of wage growth spiraling out of control hasn’t materialized for over two years now and the unemployment rate ticked up to 3.9%. For now, we can say the labor market isn’t tight anymore, but it’s also not breaking.

The key labor data line in this expansion is the weekly jobless claims report. Jobless claims show an expanding economy that has not lost jobs yet. We will only be in a recession once jobless claims exceed 323,000 on a four-week moving average.

From the Fed: In the week ended March 2, initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits were flat, at 217,000. The four-week moving average declined slightly by 750, to 212,250


Below is an explanation of how we got here with the labor market, which all started during COVID-19.

1. I wrote the COVID-19 recovery model on April 7, 2020, and retired it on Dec. 9, 2020. By that time, the upfront recovery phase was done, and I needed to model out when we would get the jobs lost back.

2. Early in the labor market recovery, when we saw weaker job reports, I doubled and tripled down on my assertion that job openings would get to 10 million in this recovery. Job openings rose as high as to 12 million and are currently over 9 million. Even with the massive miss on a job report in May 2021, I didn’t waver.

Currently, the jobs openings, quit percentage and hires data are below pre-COVID-19 levels, which means the labor market isn’t as tight as it once was, and this is why the employment cost index has been slowing data to move along the quits percentage.  

2-US_Job_Quits_Rate-1-2

3. I wrote that we should get back all the jobs lost to COVID-19 by September of 2022. At the time this would be a speedy labor market recovery, and it happened on schedule, too

Total employment data

4. This is the key one for right now: If COVID-19 hadn’t happened, we would have between 157 million and 159 million jobs today, which would have been in line with the job growth rate in February 2020. Today, we are at 157,808,000. This is important because job growth should be cooling down now. We are more in line with where the labor market should be when averaging 140K-165K monthly. So for now, the fact that we aren’t trending between 140K-165K means we still have a bit more recovery kick left before we get down to those levels. 




From BLS: Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 275,000 in February, and the unemployment rate increased to 3.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in health care, in government, in food services and drinking places, in social assistance, and in transportation and warehousing.

Here are the jobs that were created and lost in the previous month:

IMG_5092

In this jobs report, the unemployment rate for education levels looks like this:

  • Less than a high school diploma: 6.1%
  • High school graduate and no college: 4.2%
  • Some college or associate degree: 3.1%
  • Bachelor’s degree or higher: 2.2%
IMG_5093_320f22

Today’s report has continued the trend of the labor data beating my expectations, only because I am looking for the jobs data to slow down to a level of 140K-165K, which hasn’t happened yet. I wouldn’t categorize the labor market as being tight anymore because of the quits ratio and the hires data in the job openings report. This also shows itself in the employment cost index as well. These are key data lines for the Fed and the reason we are going to see three rate cuts this year.

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Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Last month we though that the January…

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Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Last month we though that the January jobs report was the "most ridiculous in recent history" but, boy, were we wrong because this morning the Biden department of goalseeked propaganda (aka BLS) published the February jobs report, and holy crap was that something else. Even Goebbels would blush. 

What happened? Let's take a closer look.

On the surface, it was (almost) another blockbuster jobs report, certainly one which nobody expected, or rather just one bank out of 76 expected. Starting at the top, the BLS reported that in February the US unexpectedly added 275K jobs, with just one research analyst (from Dai-Ichi Research) expecting a higher number.

Some context: after last month's record 4-sigma beat, today's print was "only" 3 sigma higher than estimates. Needless to say, two multiple sigma beats in a row used to only happen in the USSR... and now in the US, apparently.

Before we go any further, a quick note on what last month we said was "the most ridiculous jobs report in recent history": it appears the BLS read our comments and decided to stop beclowing itself. It did that by slashing last month's ridiculous print by over a third, and revising what was originally reported as a massive 353K beat to just 229K,  a 124K revision, which was the biggest one-month negative revision in two years!

Of course, that does not mean that this month's jobs print won't be revised lower: it will be, and not just that month but every other month until the November election because that's the only tool left in the Biden admin's box: pretend the economic and jobs are strong, then revise them sharply lower the next month, something we pointed out first last summer and which has not failed to disappoint once.

To be fair, not every aspect of the jobs report was stellar (after all, the BLS had to give it some vague credibility). Take the unemployment rate, after flatlining between 3.4% and 3.8% for two years - and thus denying expectations from Sahm's Rule that a recession may have already started - in February the unemployment rate unexpectedly jumped to 3.9%, the highest since February 2022 (with Black unemployment spiking by 0.3% to 5.6%, an indicator which the Biden admin will quickly slam as widespread economic racism or something).

And then there were average hourly earnings, which after surging 0.6% MoM in January (since revised to 0.5%) and spooking markets that wage growth is so hot, the Fed will have no choice but to delay cuts, in February the number tumbled to just 0.1%, the lowest in two years...

... for one simple reason: last month's average wage surge had nothing to do with actual wages, and everything to do with the BLS estimate of hours worked (which is the denominator in the average wage calculation) which last month tumbled to just 34.1 (we were led to believe) the lowest since the covid pandemic...

... but has since been revised higher while the February print rose even more, to 34.3, hence why the latest average wage data was once again a product not of wages going up, but of how long Americans worked in any weekly period, in this case higher from 34.1 to 34.3, an increase which has a major impact on the average calculation.

While the above data points were examples of some latent weakness in the latest report, perhaps meant to give it a sheen of veracity, it was everything else in the report that was a problem starting with the BLS's latest choice of seasonal adjustments (after last month's wholesale revision), which have gone from merely laughable to full clownshow, as the following comparison between the monthly change in BLS and ADP payrolls shows. The trend is clear: the Biden admin numbers are now clearly rising even as the impartial ADP (which directly logs employment numbers at the company level and is far more accurate), shows an accelerating slowdown.

But it's more than just the Biden admin hanging its "success" on seasonal adjustments: when one digs deeper inside the jobs report, all sorts of ugly things emerge... such as the growing unprecedented divergence between the Establishment (payrolls) survey and much more accurate Household (actual employment) survey. To wit, while in January the BLS claims 275K payrolls were added, the Household survey found that the number of actually employed workers dropped for the third straight month (and 4 in the past 5), this time by 184K (from 161.152K to 160.968K).

This means that while the Payrolls series hits new all time highs every month since December 2020 (when according to the BLS the US had its last month of payrolls losses), the level of Employment has not budged in the past year. Worse, as shown in the chart below, such a gaping divergence has opened between the two series in the past 4 years, that the number of Employed workers would need to soar by 9 million (!) to catch up to what Payrolls claims is the employment situation.

There's more: shifting from a quantitative to a qualitative assessment, reveals just how ugly the composition of "new jobs" has been. Consider this: the BLS reports that in February 2024, the US had 132.9 million full-time jobs and 27.9 million part-time jobs. Well, that's great... until you look back one year and find that in February 2023 the US had 133.2 million full-time jobs, or more than it does one year later! And yes, all the job growth since then has been in part-time jobs, which have increased by 921K since February 2023 (from 27.020 million to 27.941 million).

Here is a summary of the labor composition in the past year: all the new jobs have been part-time jobs!

But wait there's even more, because now that the primary season is over and we enter the heart of election season and political talking points will be thrown around left and right, especially in the context of the immigration crisis created intentionally by the Biden administration which is hoping to import millions of new Democratic voters (maybe the US can hold the presidential election in Honduras or Guatemala, after all it is their citizens that will be illegally casting the key votes in November), what we find is that in February, the number of native-born workers tumbled again, sliding by a massive 560K to just 129.807 million. Add to this the December data, and we get a near-record 2.4 million plunge in native-born workers in just the past 3 months (only the covid crash was worse)!

The offset? A record 1.2 million foreign-born (read immigrants, both legal and illegal but mostly illegal) workers added in February!

Said otherwise, not only has all job creation in the past 6 years has been exclusively for foreign-born workers...

Source: St Louis Fed FRED Native Born and Foreign Born

... but there has been zero job-creation for native born workers since June 2018!

This is a huge issue - especially at a time of an illegal alien flood at the southwest border...

... and is about to become a huge political scandal, because once the inevitable recession finally hits, there will be millions of furious unemployed Americans demanding a more accurate explanation for what happened - i.e., the illegal immigration floodgates that were opened by the Biden admin.

Which is also why Biden's handlers will do everything in their power to insure there is no official recession before November... and why after the election is over, all economic hell will finally break loose. Until then, however, expect the jobs numbers to get even more ridiculous.

Tyler Durden Fri, 03/08/2024 - 13:30

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