Pain

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

August 7, 2016August 7, 2016 by Michael

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.

The Economic Collapse In Venezuela Is So Bad That People Are Slaughtering And Eating Zoo Animals

August 3, 2016August 3, 2016 by Michael

If you were hungry enough, would you kill and eat zoo animals? To most of us such a notion sounds absolutely insane, but this is actually happening in Venezuela right now. This is a country where people are standing in lines for up to 12 hours hoping that there will be food to buy that day, and where rioting and looting have become commonplace. So even though the U.S. economy is in dreadful shape at this moment, we should be thankful for what we have, because at least we are not experiencing a full-blown economic collapse yet like Venezuela currently is.

Black stallions can be some of the most beautiful horses on the entire planet, but things are so desperate down in Venezuela this summer that everything looks like food to some people at this point. What happened at the Caricuao Zoo on Sunday is so horrible that I actually debated whether or not to share it with you. Desperate people do desperate things, and when people get hungry enough they will do things such as this…

Venezuela’s worsening food shortages had tragic consequences for a rare show horse last weekend, when a group of intruders broke into the zoo, pulled the black stallion from its cage, then slaughtered it for meat.

Prosecutors say the crime occurred in the small hours of Sunday morning at Caracas’ Caricuao Zoo, when “several people” sneaked into the state-run park under the cover of darkness and busted into the stallion’s pen. The horse, the only one of its kind in the zoo, was then led to a more secluded area and butchered on the spot. Only its head and ribs were left behind in a gruesome pile for zookeepers to find after sunrise.

Unfortunately, this precious animal was not even the first victim at that particular zoo.

A few weeks ago, pigs and sheep were the targets…

Sadly, this horse wasn’t the first zoo animal to suffer the effects of Venezuela’s crippling food shortages. Some Vietnamese pigs and sheep were reportedly stolen from the same zoo earlier this month.

Dozens of other zoo animals are slowing starving to death because there is no food available to give to them. In fact, it is being reported that at least 50 animals have died from lack of food at one zoo alone…

At least 50 animals have died in the last six months at the Caricuao zoo in Caracas, Venezuela, due to widespread food shortages that are affecting both man and beast in the socialist nation.

Marlene Sifontes, a union leader for employees of state parks agency Inparques which oversees zoos, told Reuters that the zoo lost Vietnamese pigs, tapirs, rabbits and birds after the animals went weeks without eating. Others animals at the zoo are in danger of severe malnutrition. Lions and tigers, which should be on a carnivorous diet, are being fed mango and pumpkin just to get something in their empty stomachs, while an elephant is being fed tropical fruit instead of its usual diet of hay, the union leader said. According to one report, the big cats are being fed slaughtered thoroughbred racehorses from a nearby race track.

If what you have just read hurts your heart, let us not forget that it is not just the animals that are suffering. There are millions of precious people down there that are living on the very edge of starvation as you read this article.

Earlier this year, one mayor came forward and admitted to the world that some people are so hungry that they are actually hunting “cats, dogs and pigeons” for food…

Ramón Muchacho, Mayor of Chacao in Caracas, said the streets of the capital of Venezuela are filled with people killing animals for food.

Through Twitter, Muchacho reported that in Venezuela, it is a “painful reality” that people “hunt cats, dogs and pigeons” to ease their hunger. People are also reportedly gathering vegetables from the ground and trash to eat as well.

The crisis in Venezuela is worsening everyday due in part to shortages reaching 70 percent […] six Venezuelan military officials were arrested for stealing goats to ease their hunger, as there was no food at the Fort Manaure military base.

With each passing week, the situation in Venezuela keeps on getting worse.

And even though the United States has made many of the exact same mistakes that Venezuela has made, most of us just assume that what is happening down there could never happen up here.

After all, we have “the greatest economy in the world” and we are “the wealthiest nation on the entire planet”, right?

Well, actually our economic infrastructure has been systematically gutted by free trade deals and we consume far more wealth than we produce. We have artificially pumped up our standard of living by adding more than 1.1 trillion dollars a year to the national debt since Barack Obama has been in the White House, and one recent poll discovered that 62 percent of all Americans have less than $1,000 saved up.

But don’t worry. Instead of turning out like Venezuela, the mainstream media insists that the best days for America are right around the corner.

In fact, just today I came across a Business Insider article that insisted that soon our biggest economic problem will be that we won’t be able to find enough workers.

And Barbra Streisand is so thrilled that Hillary Clinton is going to be our next president that she launched into a rousing rendition of “Happy Days Are Here Again” as she kicked off her farewell tour in Los Angeles. The following account comes from the Drudge Report…

So long sad times
Go along bad times
We are rid of you at last
Howdy gay times
Cloudy gray times
You are now a thing of the past
Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
So let’s sing a song of cheer again…

Streisand suddenly interrupted the lyric, realizing a Democrat was currently in the White House!

“By the way, I love Obama.”

Altogether shout it now
There’s no one
Who can doubt it now
So let’s tell the world about it now
Happy days are here again

So what is the truth?

Are we going to end up just like Venezuela, or are happy days here once more?

Unfortunately, I have a feeling that we are not going to have to wait too long to find out…

Painful To Watch: This Is The Weakest U.S. Economic ‘Recovery’ Since 1949

July 31, 2016July 31, 2016 by Michael

Most of us have never witnessed an economic “recovery” this bad. As you will see below, the average rate of economic growth since the last recession has been the lowest for any “recovery” in at least 67 years. And unfortunately, the economy appears to be slowing down even more here in 2016. On Friday, I talked about how the U.S. economy grew at a painfully slow rate of just 1.2 percent in the second quarter after only growing 0.8 percent during the first quarter. And last week we also learned that the homeownership rate in the United States has dropped to the lowest level ever. This is not what a recovery looks like. Instead, it very much appears that a new economic downturn has already begun.

But don’t just take my word for how painful this economic “recovery” has been. The following comes from a Wall Street Journal article that was just posted entitled “Seven Years Later, Recovery Remains the Weakest of the Post-World War II Era“…

Even seven years after the recession ended, the current stretch of economic gains has yielded less growth than much shorter business cycles.

In terms of average annual growth, the pace of this expansion has been by far the weakest of any since 1949. (And for which we have quarterly data.) The economy has grown at a 2.1% annual rate since the U.S. recovery began in mid-2009, according to gross-domestic-product data the Commerce Department released Friday.

The prior expansion, from 2001 through 2007, was the only other business cycle of the past 11 when the economy didn’t grow at least 3% a year, on average.

This entire seven year stretch has come while Barack Obama has been in the White House. After more than seven and a half years, he is solidly on track to be the only president in U.S. history to never have a single year when the U.S. economy grew by at least three percent.

And unlike many presidents, he has had two terms in which to try to accomplish that feat.

One of the industries that had been doing fairly well during this recovery was the auto industry, but now in early 2016 they have found themselves struggling too…

Now, the auto sector, which has propped up GDP growth for years, is slowing down. For the first six months, total car and light truck sales, at a seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) of 17.5 million vehicles, are lagging behind last year by 100,000 units. Over the first half, fleet sales to rent-a-car companies and big fleet buyers were up industry wide. But retail sales fell 2%.

All over the corporate world, earnings are down.

In some cases, they are way down.

It is being projected that this will be the fifth quarter in a row when corporate earnings have declined, and even mainstream analysts are now admitting that it is “evident” that we have entered “a global slowdown”…

“Earnings season in the U.S. confirms the overall macro picture that we have. We have a global slowdown. It’s evident in all of the major economies,” said Peter Garnry, head of equity strategy at Saxo Bank, on a Bloomberg podcast.

Of course I have been saying this exact thing for the past 12 months, but a lot of people have tuned me out because the stock market in the United States has been doing so well.

But the stock market is not an accurate barometer for the real economy. It never has been, and it never will be.

If stocks accurately reflected the health of the U.S. economy, they would have already crashed really hard a long time ago. At this moment, stock prices are completely disconnected from economic reality, and this has many of the most respected names on Wall Street scratching their heads. One of them is Jeffrey Gundlach, the chief executive of DoubleLine Capital. Just check out what he told Reuters on Friday…

Noting the recent run-up in the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 index while economic growth remains weak and corporate earnings are stagnant, Gundlach said stock investors have entered a “world of uber complacency.”

The S&P 500 on Friday touched an all-time high of 2,177.09, while the government reported that U.S. gross domestic product in the second quarter grew at a meager 1.2 percent rate.

“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.”

If you follow Gundlach, you probably already know that he has been dead on accurate with regard to the financial markets over the past couple of years.

So when he says that the stock market “should be down massively” and that it is time to “sell everything”, we should all take him very, very seriously.

All throughout history, a huge decline in corporate earnings has almost always resulted in a huge decline in stock prices. As Jesse Felder has noted, “we have never seen a decline in earnings of this magnitude without at least a 20% fall in stock prices” during the last 50 years.

To any rational observer, it is quite obvious that stock prices should have already started collapsing quite some time ago.

And to a large extent this has already happened around the planet, but here in the United States stocks continue to defy the laws of economics.

But at this point it isn’t going to do much good to warn people about this. Those that could see the danger coming have already pulled their money out of stocks, and most of those that want to stick their heads in the sand and pretend that things are somehow going to be different this time are not likely to be persuaded this late in the game.

In the end, we should all be grateful that this absurd financial bubble has lasted for as long as it has, because stability is much more pleasant than instability. The U.S. economy and the U.S. financial system have enjoyed a prolonged period of stability that has defied all the odds, and let us hope that it lasts for at least a little while longer…

Deutsche Bank Profit Plunges 98 Percent As The Outlook For ‘The World’s Riskiest Bank’ Darkens

July 27, 2016July 27, 2016 by Michael

The biggest and most important bank in the biggest and most important country in Europe continues to implode right in front of our eyes. If you follow my work regularly, you probably already know that I issued a major alarm about Deutsche Bank last September. Subsequently, Deutsche Bank stock hit an all-time low. Then I sounded the alarm about Deutsche Bank again back in May, and once again that was followed by another all-time low for Deutsche Bank. And then I warned about Deutsche Bank again in early June, and you can probably imagine what happened after that. Over the past year, this German banking giant has literally been coming apart at the seams, and in so many ways it is paralleling exactly what happened to Lehman Brothers back in 2008.

Today, we got some more bad news from Deutsche Bank. Compared to the exact same period last year, profits were down 98 percent. A nearly 100 percent drop in net income spooked a lot of investors, and Deutsche Bank shares got hit hard on Wednesday. Of course Deutsche Bank shares are already down by more than half over the past 12 months, and the financial sharks can smell blood in the water.

Just like Lehman Brothers in 2008, Deutsche Bank is essentially in panic mode at this point. They recently announced that they will be closing 188 branches and that 3,000 workers will be losing their jobs. But this could just be the beginning of the layoffs at the bank. According to some reports, the bank could cut up to 35,000 jobs by the year 2020, and CEO John Cryan recently admitted that they “may have to accelerate cost-cutting measures“.

What makes all of this even more alarming is that Deutsche Bank is widely considered to be “the most dangerous bank” on the entire planet. The following comes from a CNN article posted just today entitled “The world’s riskiest bank is in trouble“…

What is going on with Deutsche Bank?

Germany’s biggest lender was dubbed the world’s riskiest bank by the International Monetary Fund last month, just as one of its U.S. businesses failed a Federal Reserve stress test.

Its shares are down 45% this year, and on Wednesday it said second quarter profits were wiped out by a 98% slump in earnings. The stock fell 2.5% in Frankfurt.

The primary reason why Deutsche Bank is “the world’s riskiest bank” is because of the mammoth derivatives portfolio that is possesses. It currently has 42 trillion euros of exposure to derivatives, which is an amount of money about 13 times the size of the entire German economy.

When Deutsche Bank finally goes down for good, it is going to be “the shot heard around the financial world”, and it will be a disaster many times greater than the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Just consider what Jeff Gundlach had to say about the bank earlier this year…

“Banks are dying and policymakers don’t know what to do,” Gundlach said. “Watch Deutsche Bank shares go to single digits and people will start to panic… you’ll see someone say, ‘Someone is going to have to do something.'”

As I write this, shares of Deutsche Bank are sitting at just $13.63, and many experts are having a very difficult time finding any reason for optimism. In fact, Edward Misrahi has stated that the bank is his number one short trade, and Jim Collins says that “it is just impossible” to recommend buying shares of Deutsche Bank even at this depressed level…

As an equity analyst, it is just impossible to recommend shares of a bank that is not growing revenue. So really, Deutsche is an untouchable, and the stock market is trying — to the tune of a 58% decline in DB’s market value in 12 months — to recalibrate Deutsche’s market capitalization to the true value of its assets net of liabilities. That’s a painful journey.

I don’t mean to just pick on Deutsche Bank. Certainly there are a lot of other major banks around the globe that are also teetering on the brink right now. Just take a look at Italy. Basically their entire banking system is in the process of melting down.

But the utter collapse of Italy’s banking system won’t have the same kind of worldwide impact that the collapse of Deutsche Bank will.

Unlike some of his predecessors, CEO John Cryan is being honest about some of the struggles that Deutsche Bank is going through right now, and he admits that they may need to be “more ambitious in our restructuring”. The following comes from Business Insider…

Cryan said in a statement (emphasis ours):

“We have continued to de-risk our balance sheet, to invest in our processes and to modernize our infrastructure. However, if the current weak economic environment persists, we will need to be yet more ambitious in the timing and intensity of our restructuring.”

He said something similar in a note to employees (emphasis again ours):

“Here I would like to speak plainly. If this weak economic environment persists, we will need to be still more ambitious in our restructuring. We will do everything in our power to accelerate the measures we have already planned.”

Yes, I know that the stock market in the United States has been setting all sorts of all-time record highs lately.

But that doesn’t change what is going on in the rest of the world one bit.

The financial crisis that has been gripping Europe, Asia, South America and most of the rest of the planet since the second half of last year is accelerating.

And it is inevitable that the U.S. is going to be experiencing some very real pain in the not too distant future as well.

So even though things may seem a bit quiet this summer in the financial world, the truth is that there is a whole lot going on under the surface.

Deutsche Bank is one glaringly obvious example of this, but there are many others all over the globe. And not too long from now, the dominoes will begin to fall very rapidly.

Terror Attacks And Mass Killings Are Becoming A Daily Event

July 26, 2016July 26, 2016 by Michael

Terror attacks and mass killings are happening so rapidly now that it is really difficult to keep up with them all. In fact, as you will see below, so far there have been several this week alone. This latest attack in France during which radical Islamic terrorists slit the throat of a Catholic priest was particularly disturbing. Just a few days ago I warned that churches in the western world would be targeted, and now it is happening. According to thereligionofpeace.com, there have been 1274 Islamic terror attacks in 2016. These attacks have been spread across 50 different nations, and as a result of these attacks more than 11,000 people have been killed and more than 14,000 people have been injured. When are we going to finally wake up and understand how serious this threat really is?

Very few people would have imagined that a sleepy Catholic church in France would be the target of an Islamic terror attack on Tuesday morning, but that is precisely what happened. The following description of the attack comes from the New York Times…

Mass was ending around 9:30 a.m. when two young men with knives burst in. They forced the auxiliary priest, the Rev. Jacques Hamel, 85, to kneel. When he resisted, they slit his throat. They held several worshipers and at least one nun hostage, while another nun escaped. Officers from a specialized police unit descended on the church. A short while later, officers shot the young men dead when they emerged from the church.

We have all seen images of ISIS slitting the throats of Christians in the Middle East, but now it is taking place in Europe.

As the terrorists emerged from the church, they reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” before being shot dead by the police.

ISIS has already taken responsibility for the attack and is referring to these two young men as “two soldiers of the Islamic State“. And France knew that one of them had tried to go to Syria to join ISIS twice, but still allowed him to roam free for at least part of the day…

One of a pair of ISIS knifemen who stormed a church in Normandy before slitting the throat of an elderly priest has been named as known terror threat Adel Kermiche.

The 19-year-old ‘ISIS soldier’ was being monitored with an electronic ankle tag after he was arrested for twice attempting to flee France to join the terror group in Syria.

Despite having been released early from prison, Keriche’s bail conditions allowed him to roam unsupervised between 8.30am and 12.30pm, leaving him free to murder the priest in the attack which was carried out between 9am and 11am.

This horrific attack in France came on the heels of a tremendous tragedy in Japan. Mass killings are fairly rare over there, and so virtually the entire Japanese nation is in shock at this point. The following comes from the Washington Post…

Early on Tuesday morning, a man identified as Satoshi Uematsu allegedly attacked a care home for disabled people in Sagamihara, about 35 miles west of Tokyo. Armed with three knives and tie cables, the assailant killed 19 people and wounded many before he drove to a police station and turned himself in.

And that mass killing in Japan came on the heels of a suicide bombing in Ansbach, Germany on Sunday…

The Syrian man who blew himself up outside a bar in Ansbach vowed the people of Germany “won’t be able to sleep peacefully anymore” in a video filmed before the attack.

Investigators said the suicide bomber, known only as Mohammad D., had declared loyalty to Islamic State in the recording – and announced “a revenge act against Germans because they are standing in the way of Islam”.

Further details have emerged about the 27-year-old, who injured 15 people – four of them seriously – when he detonated a backpack filled with explosives and shrapnel after being turned away from a music festival being attended by thousands of people.

Of course just prior to the suicide bombing in Ansbach, there were two other acts of terror in Germany that made headlines all over the globe…

The bombing has rattled the German public following a week of violence in southern Germany that began on July 18, when an immigrant teen, apparently also inspired by ISIS, stabbed passengers on a train in Wurzburg in Bavaria.

That was followed by a shooting spree Friday in which nine people were killed in the Bavarian state capital, Munich, before a Syrian asylum seeker killed a woman in Reutlingen, in the neighboring southern German state of Baden-Wurttemberg, on Sunday, hours ahead of the Ansbach attack.

Are you starting to get the point?

In the summer of 2016, it has been terror attack after terror attack and mass killing after mass killing.

And in this article I haven’t even mentioned Orlando, Dallas, Nice or Baton Rouge at all.

As I have written about extensively, we have entered a period of time when our world seems to be going crazy. The love of most people has grown cold, and we are being hammered with headlines about horrific acts of violence almost every single day now.

The terrorists are not just going after military and political targets. In fact, they seem to take glee in hitting us where we are most vulnerable.

Just recently, I wrote about how all the members of one particular church here in America ended up on an ISIS kill list. It appears that ISIS is collecting names from church directories and synagogue directories that they find on the Internet. So if you run a church or a synagogue you should take note of this.

Even bigger attacks than we have seen so far are coming. At some point Islamic terrorists will get their hands on chemical, biological and potentially even nuclear weapons, and they will not hesitate to use them.

Many of our politicians are promising to rid the world of these terrorists, but I don’t think that they even know what we are really dealing with or how to really fight this battle.

After a decade and a half of dropping bombs and spending trillions of dollars fighting in the Middle East, the threat of Islamic terror is worse than ever. And even nations that were never heavily involved in the “war on terror” are seeing Islamic terror rise to unprecedented levels.

The blind are leading the blind, and meanwhile the terror attacks and the mass killings are just going to continue to get even worse.

Michael Moore Explains Why Donald Trump Will Win In November – And It Actually Makes Perfect Sense

July 25, 2016July 25, 2016 by Michael

Michael Moore is a radical leftist that is trying to destroy everything that America once stood for, but for once he is making sense. In his recent article entitled “5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win“, he makes a compelling case for why Donald Trump could win the election in November. I can’t remember the last time I actually agreed with Michael Moore about something, but in this instance I do. The American people are very angry and very frustrated, and they want someone that is going to shake things up in Washington. Needless to say, that is not going to be Hillary Clinton. According to Real Clear Politics, Trump has won five of the last six major national polls, and top Democrats are starting to understand that they could actually lose to the New York billionaire.

As Michael Moore has pointed out, the key to the election may be the upper Midwest. That is why it may turn out to be very wise that Trump has picked a running mate from the region. Residents of the upper Midwest have watched NAFTA and other “free trade deals” turn their formerly booming economy into an area now known as “the rust belt”. Now that there is a major presidential candidate that is openly speaking out against these “free trade deals”, they will finally have a real opportunity to let their voices be heard. The following is from the Michael Moore article that I mentioned above…

I believe Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper Great Lakes – Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four traditionally Democratic states – but each of them have elected a Republican governor since 2010 (only Pennsylvania has now finally elected a Democrat). In the Michigan primary in March, more Michiganders came out to vote for the Republicans (1.32 million) that the Democrats (1.19 million). Trump is ahead of Hillary in the latest polls in Pennsylvania and tied with her in Ohio. Tied? How can the race be this close after everything Trump has said and done? Well maybe it’s because he’s said (correctly) that the Clintons’ support of NAFTA helped to destroy the industrial states of the Upper Midwest.

Since NAFTA went into effect on January 1, 1994, the United States has lost tens of thousands of manufacturing facilities and millions of good paying jobs. Once upon a time, the city of Detroit had the highest per capita income in the entire country, but now it is a rotting, decaying, crime-infested disaster zone that the rest of the world makes jokes about.

It was under Bill Clinton that NAFTA was implemented, and Bill and Hillary have long been supportive of NAFTA and other “free trade deals” that have been responsible for systematically dismantling America’s economic infrastructure. Trump has already made this a major theme of his campaign, and the voters in the rust belt states could potentially make the difference in who wins in November. Here is some additional analysis from Michael Moore…

And this is where the math comes in. In 2012, Mitt Romney lost by 64 electoral votes. Add up the electoral votes cast by Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It’s 64. All Trump needs to do to win is to carry, as he’s expected to do, the swath of traditional red states from Idaho to Georgia (states that’ll never vote for Hillary Clinton), and then he just needs these four rust belt states. He doesn’t need Florida. He doesn’t need Colorado or Virginia. Just Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And that will put him over the top. This is how it will happen in November.

But there is another factor that Michael Moore has pointed out that I think we should consider as well. While most American voters take their votes very seriously, there is a small minority that will let some of the most frivolous reasons imaginable decide their votes.

Some Americans just want a good story. Others want to stick it to the establishment. Yet others just “want to see what will happen” if a certain person gets into the White House. And it seems quite likely that Donald Trump will win the “curiosity vote”, the “anger vote”, and “the twisted sense of humor vote”. Everyone pretty much knows what we will get with Hillary Clinton in the White House (and it would be horrible), but there is a great mystery as far as what Donald Trump would do as president. I happen to agree with Michael Moore that this is a factor that greatly favors Trump…

You can take as long as you need in there and no one can make you do anything. You can push the button and vote a straight party line, or you can write in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. There are no rules. And because of that, and the anger that so many have toward a broken political system, millions are going to vote for Trump not because they agree with him, not because they like his bigotry or ego, but just because they can. Just because it will upset the apple cart and make mommy and daddy mad. And in the same way like when you’re standing on the edge of Niagara Falls and your mind wonders for a moment what would that feel like to go over that thing, a lot of people are going to love being in the position of puppetmaster and plunking down for Trump just to see what that might look like.

But before you get too excited about a Trump presidency, let us not forget that the electoral map tends to greatly favor Democrats. All Hillary has to do is to win all of the states that she is expected to win and add one battleground state…

Perhaps you enjoy talk of battleground states. Well, there’s a scenario for you, too. First, pick the six “closest” swing states (VA, NH, IA, OH, FL, NC). Got it? Now understand that New Hampshire excepted, Clinton only has to win one of them in order to reach the requisite 270 electoral votes to win.

It remains my contention that the establishment will do whatever they have to do to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. And now that the general election looks like it will be much closer than anticipated, we may get to see what lengths the establishment is willing to go to in order to get rid of a “problem candidate”.

Hillary Clinton is an utterly evil and extremely corrupt politician, but the establishment absolutely loves her. She would say and do just about anything to get elected, and the establishment knows that she will do their bidding.

So we shall see what happens between now and November, but personally I don’t see any way that this is going to end well…

Erdogan’s Staged Coup Has Resulted In A Purge Of 50,000 Teachers, Judges, Soldiers And Government Officials

July 19, 2016July 19, 2016 by Michael

Barack Obama’s “friend” in Turkey is a deeply corrupt radical Islamist dictator that has just staged a coup to consolidate his grip on power. As I have reported previously, 1,845 “journalists, writers and critics” have been arrested for “insulting” President Erdogan over just the past two years, and a couple of years ago he had a monstrous 1,100 room presidential palace built for himself that is 30 times larger than the White House. With each passing day, more evidence emerges which seems to indicate that the recent “coup” was a staged event meant to enable Erdogan and his allies to eliminate their enemies and solidify their stranglehold over the nation. At this point the number of victims of “Erdogan’s purge” has hit 50,000, but the final number will not be known for quite some time.

Of course there is a possibility that the coup was not staged, but if it wasn’t staged it was the worst military coup that I have seen in my entire lifetime. As Fox News has pointed out, not a single high level member of government was killed or detained…

Among the questions being asked are why coup plotters didn’t execute the most basic steps in seizing power, like securing Erdogan and other top officials. Not a single member of his cabinet and inner-circle AKP party leadership was detained. Nor did coup plotters effectively take control of TV, radio and internet outlets. The government TRT station and CNN Turk were for a time occupied by alleged coup plotters, who quickly retreated as the putsch fell apart.

It is being reported that soldiers that took part in the coup claimed “that they thought that they were taking part in military exercises”, and those running the “coup” allowed Erdogan’s plane to fly across the country without incident. Here is more from Fox News…

Coup plotters also failed to secure most airports and other transportation hubs, didn’t occupy or attack Erdogan’s $600 million presidential palace, and failed to intercept his plane before, during or after he flew from one of the country’s busiest and most accessible airports back to Istanbul. This despite the supposed active participation of top generals in Turkey’s Air Force, which maintains a fleet of F-16 aircraft easily capable of tracking, intercepting or – if it came to it – shooting down Erdogan’s plane.

There were opposition soldiers that did occupy Ataturk International Airport for a short time, but they suspiciously left just in time for Erdogan’s plane to land.

So much about this supposed “coup” absolutely stinks, and that includes the fact that lists of judges, teaches, soldiers and government officials to be rounded up after the coup appear to have been prepared ahead of time. This is so obvious that even the EU commissioner in charge of Turkey’s membership bid, Johannes Hahn, is commenting on it…

“It looks at least as if something has been prepared. The lists are available, which indicates it was prepared and to be used at a certain stage,” Hahn said.

“I’m very concerned. It is exactly what we feared.”

So far, at least 50,000 people have been rounded up or stripped of their positions since the coup. The following breakdown of “the purge” comes from the BBC …

6,000 military personnel have been arrested, with more than two dozen generals awaiting trial
Nearly 9,000 police officers have been sacked
Close to 3,000 judges have been suspended
Some 1,500 employees of Turkey’s finance ministry have been dismissed
492 have been fired from the Religious Affairs Directorate
More than 250 staff in Mr Yildirim’s office have been removed

Not included in that list are 15,200 education workers and 1,577 university deans that were just sacked…

But while Turkey’s press is already mostly under Erdogan’s control, it is the educational witch hunt fallout that is far more troubling, and just as expected over the past hour we have gotten a glimpse of just how extensive the Turkish’s president cleansing of secular society will be, when the state-run Anadolu news agency reported that Turkey’s ministry of education has sacked 15,200 personnel for alleged involvement with a group the government claims is responsible for Friday’s failed coup.

Even more shocking, Anadolu reports that Turkey’s Board of Higher Education has requested the resignations of all 1,577 university deans, effectively dismissing them. Of the deans dismissed, 1,176 worked in public universities and 401 in private institutions.

In addition, the teaching licenses of 21,000 teachers there were employed at private educational institutions have been revoked.

In one fell swoop, Erdogan is eliminating as much institutional opposition to his leadership as he possibly can. And not only is he stripping them of their jobs and arresting many of them, CNN is reporting that he actually wants to push for the death penalty for anyone that has any connection to “treason”…

Turkey’s President refuses to rule out the death penalty for thousands of people arrested after a failed military coup Friday, despite warnings that reintroducing capital punishment could dash Turkey’s chances of joining the European Union.

Speaking through his translator in an exclusive interview with CNN’s Becky Anderson, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the failed military coup a “clear crime of treason.”

The Turkish people have made it clear they want death for the “terrorists” who plotted the coup, Erdogan said in his first interview since the July 15 attempt.

Erdogan has been a radical Islamist throughout his entire political career, and his goal has always been to transform Turkey from a highly secular society into a highly Islamic one.

Sadly, now he has the power to do just that.

So what does the future hold for people of other faiths in Turkey? Well, we may have gotten some clues on the night of the alleged “coup”…

During the night of 15 July, unidentified assailants broke the glass panels in the door of the Malatya Protestant Church. The pastor, Tim Stone, said he thought someone with a grudge against the church had taken advantage of the general unrest.

Meanwhile, in Trabzon, on the northern coast, around 10 people smashed the windows of the Santa Maria Catholic Church, where in 2006 a priest, Fr. Andrea Santoro, was murdered. The attackers tried to break into the church, but a group of Muslim neighbors drove them away, before contacting a priest.

And as Erdogan continues to transform into a Turkish version of Adolf Hitler, he is putting his nation’s membership in NATO in jeopardy. The following comes from the Telegraph…

In an ideal world, it would be in everyone’s interests for Mr Erdogan to cease his efforts to turn Turkey into an Iranian-style Islamic republic, thereby allowing Turkey to retain its place at Nato’s top table. But if he really is determined to pursue his radical Islamist agenda, then Nato will have no option but to rid itself of its troublesome Turkish ally.

What is happening in Turkey right now is truly chilling.

A country that is already a member of NATO and that was supposed to become a member of the European Union is rapidly becoming a hardcore radical Islamic dictatorship.

Let us keep a close eye on these developments, because ultimately they could have tremendous implications for Europe and for the entire Middle East in the years ahead.

Axe-Wielding Terrorist Attacks Train Passengers In Germany And A Police Car Is Firebombed In Florida

July 18, 2016July 18, 2016 by Michael

Crazy people committing random acts of senseless violence is rapidly becoming the “new normal” in the western world. On Monday, a police vehicle was firebombed in Daytona, Florida by someone that was enraged by the recent shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. And over in Europe, an axe-wielding Islamic terrorist shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he started wildly attacking passengers on a train in southern Germany. Authorities say that the young man was originally from Afghanistan, and according to the Mirror he was shot dead before he could flee the scene of the attack…

The horror began at around 9mpm local time when the teenager stormed a train that was traveling close to Wurzburg in southern Germany.

He then shouted “Allahu Akbar” – which means God is greatest – before launching into the terrifying attack on innocent passengers and then attempted to flee.

News outlets in Germany have claimed the crazed attacker was shot dead by armed police as he tried to escape.

Even though this 17-year-old Afghan terrorist was armed with an axe and a knife, none of the passengers were killed, although a few of them were seriously injured.

It is likely that this was a copycat attack. This young Afghan probably saw the attention that the horrible attack in Nice received, and he probably thought that he could become famous too by jumping on a train and hacking innocent people to death with his axe. Unfortunately for him, he is now dead and facing the afterlife, and most of the rest of the planet will probably forget about him by tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the wave of violence against police in the United States continues to intensify. On Monday, a police vehicle in Daytona, Florida was firebombed by an unknown individual. The following comes from the Daily Mail…

A squad car in Florida was set on fire with a Molotov cocktail in what appears to be more anti-cop backlash following the shootings of two black men that have sparked protests throughout the nation.

The police cruiser was parked in front of the Islamic Center of Daytona about 2:30am Sunday when it was set on fire.

The car was fully engulfed in flames when police firefighters arrived.

By itself, it may have been difficult to connect this incident with the recent attacks on police in Dallas and in Baton Rouge, but the perpetrator removed all doubt about his or her motivation by leaving a note at the scene of the crime…

Police said a note was found at the scene.

‘BLACK LIVES MATTER. A. Sterling. P. Castile,’ the note said, referencing the shootings of Alton Sterling, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota.

There was a bit more to the note, but it contained an expletive directed toward police that would not be appropriate for young readers to see.

On Sunday, the deaths of three police officers in Baton Rouge overshadowed another very disturbing incident that took place in Wisconsin. A suspect shot and seriously wounded a police officer while he was just sitting by himself in his vehicle…

A domestic violence suspect opened fire on a Milwaukee police officer who was sitting in his squad car early Sunday, seriously wounding him before fleeing and apparently killing himself shortly afterward, authorities said.

The shooting, coming the same day that three police officers were killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, prompted the Milwaukee Police Department to send all officers out in two-person squad teams, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

I think that what the Milwaukee Police Department has done is very wise. No police officer should be alone in any major city at this point.

Sadly, I think that what we have seen so far is just the beginning of the violence. Once the conventions are over, things will swing into full general election mode, and emotions on both sides will be running extremely high.

In particular, the radical left is being absolutely inundated with messages telling them that Donald Trump is basically the American equivalent of Adolf Hitler. Of course that is complete and utter nonsense, but after hearing it enough times a lot of them are starting to believe it, and some of them are actually discussing the possibility of real violence against the government if Trump wins in November. Just consider the following…

The failed coup in Turkey that killed more than 200 people and wounded thousands more could be coming to America — if Donald Trump is elected and #BlackLivesMatter activist and Daily News columnist Shaun King has his way.

King tweeted this weekend that the U.S. would suffer the same fate as Turkey if the soon-to-be Republican nominee won the presidency.

“If Donald Trump becomes President, you are fooling yourself if you think we’re far from having a coup our own selves,” King tweeted. “I’m dead serious.”

And of course I think that most people are anticipating that riots, protests and violence will follow the Trump campaign around the country between now and election day in November. The radical left hates Donald Trump with a passion, and they have already shown what they are willing to do to disrupt Trump rallies. If Donald Trump looks like he has a realistic shot at winning as we approach election day, that will just send activists on the radical left into overdrive.

We have entered a period of time when America is the most divided that it has been in decades. The mainstream media loves to pit us against one another, and they love to focus on hatred and dissension. This country is starting to come apart at the seams, and what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning.

As a nation, we have made certain choices, and at first those choices didn’t seem to have any serious consequences. But now decades later we stand poised to reap what we have sown, and it is going to be a very, very bitter harvest.

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