Blogging for 'The Cause'? Nonsense! I Write for Money

You're a conservative, and what is conservatism? The belief that liberalism is wrong. Very simple, and you don't really need anybody to explain that to you. Given that Democrats are the party of liberalism, you oppose Democrats generally and specifically, both in terms of politics and policy, which is also pretty much self-explanatory.

Things are a bit more . . . nuanced for Booman's buddies in the progressive netroots community:

If you are doing full-time political blogging, something is motivating you. For most of us, that motivation was originally outrage at what the Bush administration and the Republicans in Congress were doing. . . .
What brought people together into progressive blogging communities and networks was related to policy (the invasion of Iraq, torture, illegal surveillance, regressive taxation, bad environmental policy) but also other things (a one-sided corporate media, incompetent government, and lack of meaningful and effective resistance by the Democrats). . . .

OK, with a set-up like that, perhaps you're starting to get an inkling of what comes next:

If we got into blogging and political activism to put the Democrats in power, should we not be focusing on helping them pass their agenda and stay in power? . . .
[I]f you are waking each morning to blog about what a bunch of corporate whores the Democrats and the president are, you haven't really adjusted your style to the new situation in Washington. . . . Is this first thing you do in the morning to look for ways to talk about how the president has disappointed you? How Congress sucks? Then you aren't interested in keeping the Republicans out of power any more. You are fighting a different battle. . . . No one is compelled to support the Democrats over the Republicans or to support policies they disagree with. But we should call this kind of blogging what it is, which is anti-Obama, and anti-Democratic Party . . . and anti-government, really.

Hmmmm. Wonder who that was aimed at? Jane Hamsher, perhaps? Three weeks after the 2008 election, I wrote about "Future Ex-Democrats." And it's important to keep in mind that the backlash against the Age of Obama won't be limited to moderates repulsed by the administration's radicalism. There will also be many sincere progressives repulsed by the cynicism and hypocrisy of Democrats in power.

I, Chump
Speaking as an ex-Democrat myself, I always tell my "cradle Republican" friends that Democratic disillusionment can happen in the most surprising ways. If you intervene at the right moment, you might find that your fiercest opponent today could be your staunchest ally in the future. When conservatives see the "progressive netroots community" issuing these calls for solidarity and threatening to excommunicate heretics -- "We must support the Democrats, no matter what they do!" -- you are being alerted to an opportunity.

For me, believe it or not, one of the breakthroughs was reading William Greider's Who Will Tell The People?, a left-wing critique of the Clinton administration's economic policies. (Remember that I actively supported Clinton in 1992.)

Having campaigned on promises of a "middle-class tax cut" and an economic "stimulus package," the Clintonistas abandoned those plans between Election Day and Inauguration Day. In part, this was a recognition of fiscal reality. In part, it was a sellout to the Clinton campaign's corporate sponsors.

It's hard to overstate the impact of Greider's revelation that the Clintons weren't really sincere about their class-warfare campaign promises. It was all just convenient political rhetoric, motivated by focus-group studies, and they were just as sold-out to "corporate America" as the Republicans. Once you cease to swallow liberal rhetoric as gospel and begin to examine the Democrats from a cynical perspective (i.e., "What's in it for them?"), you acquire a certain contempt for the kind of naive chump you used to be.

"Chump" is a very tough self-judgment to accept. And once a Democrat realizes he's been hoodwinked, bamboozled, sold out, backstabbed and betrayed -- do you hear me, Jane Hamsher? -- a revolutionary change in worldview becomes possible.

'Who Is John Galt?'
What happened to me was that friends and co-workers encouraged my second thoughts. One of my editors turned me on to The Freeman, the monthly magazine of the Foundation for Economic Education, a publication full of Austrian School economic insights. And then, in a heated argument one day with a Dittohead co-worker, I said, "Have you read Who Will Tell the People?"

"No," he said. "Have you read Atlas Shrugged?"

Heh. I hadn't. Personal pride in my own erudition was ruffled, and I was embarrassed by this literary one-upsmanship from my Dittohead friend. So I went out, bought Atlas Shrugged and spent a weekend reading it.

Thus I became one of millions converted to the capitalist cause by Rand's radical classic. I'm constantly amazed at how common that experience is, just as I'm amazed to discover how many "cradle Republicans" have never bothered to read it, nor even to read Leonard Read's brilliant free-market essay, "I, Pencil." How can you defend entrepreneurism and free markets if you haven't read these classics?

Once you understand that capitalism is not actually evil -- do you hear me, Jane Hamsher? -- then the fundamental corruption of the Democratic Party becomes transparently obvious: They gain money and power by hypocritically claiming to oppose money and power.

Screw the Democratic Party and all their cynical lies. Stop "blogging for The Cause" and come on over to the side of shameless greed. I Write For Money. There is no conflict of interest between my advocacy of capitalism and my practice of capitalism. So please hit the tip jar!

A slowing trend is not a 'reversal'

noting that the recession has slowed migration to the Sunbelt, The New York Times gets it wrong:

More broadly, however, the recession that began in 2007 has significantly slowed the great American migration toward warmth and sun. It was a move, earlier in the decade, driven as much by quality of life as easy credit, according to demographers and economists. But the reversal is nearly as striking.

There has been no "reversal." Nevada and Florida have had a net outflow of residents in this recession, but the general trend -- population shifting southward and westward from the Northeast and Upper Midwest "Rust Belt" -- continues. Can't the people at the New York Times even read a press release?

Wyoming showed the largest percentage growth: its population climbed 2.12 percent to 544,270 between July 1, 2008, and July 1, 2009. Utah was next largest, growing 2.10 percent to 2.8 million. Texas ranked third, as its population climbed 1.97 percent to 24.8 million, with Colorado next (1.81 percent to 5 million).
The only three states to lose population over the period were Michigan (-0.33 percent), Maine (-0.11 percent) and Rhode Island (-0.03 percent). The latter two states had small population changes.

So if Michigan, Maine and Rhode Island are losing population, while Wyoming, Texas and Colorado are gaining, the alleged "reversal" of the trend is non-existent.

Intellectual fanboy David Brooks

When he tries to talk about economics, he sounds even more like a clown than usual:

Economic change is fomenting intellectual change. When the economy was about stuff, economics resembled physics. When it's about ideas, economics comes to resemble psychology.

The economy is still about stuff, just as the economy was always about ideas. McCormick's reaper and Morse's telegraph were both ideas before they became stuff.

The Brooksian tendency toward breathlessness -- he's read yet another "important new book" about a subject he doesn't actually understand -- is balanced by his habitual petulance, as when he complains about economists being "excessively individualistic and rationalistic." He seems to be boning up on intellectual trends among economists to "get a complete view of where the debate is headed."

But "where the debate is headed" is not the same thing as where the economy is headed. Brooks prattles on like a Star Trek fanboy, a spectator getting a vicarious thrill. When you get through reading his column, you don't really know anything about his ostensible subject, Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz's new book, From Poverty to Prosperity. It may indeed be important, but Brooks' column does a piss-poor job of explaining why.

Contrast this, just for example, with Joseph Lawler's discussion of unemployment in the January issue of the American Spectator. Lawler explains that the "jobless recovery" problem is due mainly to the fact that recent changes in our economy are not cyclical, but structural, requiring the shifting of workers from one labor sector to another. In many cases, this will require that workers relocate, and policies that encourage them to stay put -- collecting unemployment in their hometown, waiting for something to come along after the local factory closes down -- actually make matters worse.

Lawler's discussion is lucid and informative, because he's actually trying to explain a real phenomenon, rather than playing the intellectual fanboy game.

How to become a good Keynesian

R.I.P., six decades after writing the most disastrously influential college textbook in history:

Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94.

As Keynes himself famously said, "In the long run, we are all dead." Samuelson has finally become the only good kind of Keynesian, an example we hope Paul Krugman will soon follow.

Not exactly news: Democrats continue to destroy capitalism, prevent recovery

You're not surprised by this, are you?

The House passed the most ambitious restructuring of federal financial regulations since the New Deal on Friday . . .
The sprawling legislation would give the government new powers to break up companies that threaten the economy, create a new agency to oversee consumer banking transactions and shine a light into shadow financial markets that have escaped the oversight of regulators.
The vote was a party-line 223-202. No Republicans voted for the bill; 27 Democrats voted against it.

Hey, did you catch that? The government could "break up companies that threaten the economy."

• Question: Which companies are targeted by this?
• Answer: Any big company that gives too much money to Republicans.

Honestly, this misguided legislation is about one thing and one thing only: Expanding government power. A few other tidbits from the Washington Post:

The 1,279-page House bill . . .
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who guided the bill through the House Financial Services Committee . . .

1,279 pages! Let's face it: The Democrats couldn't pass a resolution to honor National Stamp Collecting Week that didn't run at least a thousand pages long with $50 billion in pork-barrel spending buried in the amendments.

And of course Barney Frank is in charge of the bill! Who else can we trust to bring reform and transparency to the financial industry?

And when the bill goes to the Senate, Chris Dodd will be in charge of it. Because this just makes sense, you see?

Please, Mr. Caterpillar, let me hit that hookah. After four or five puffs, maybe the madness will seem sane.

'Cap and Trade Is Dead'

Well, duh! This is kind of obvious, isn't it? Once the fraudulent "science" behind the global warming scare was exposed, Al Gore became the Piltdown Man of American politics and that whole Kyoto-style agenda was as obsolete as the mullet and parachute pants. Delicious commentary from Eric Raymond:

For those of you who have been stigmatizing AGW skeptics as "deniers" and dismissing their charges that the whole enterprise is fraudulent? Hope you like the taste of crow, because I do believe there’s a buttload of it coming at you. Piping hot.

Unlike crow, schadenfreude is a dish best served cold. And I remind you what I said in June:

The simplest way to define conservatism is this: The belief that liberalism is wrong.

All along, the strongest evidence that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was a hoax was a simple fact: Liberals believed in it.

Kind of like the Obama administration's economic plan, really. It didn't take any prophetic power to declare last December, "It Won't Work." And the emerging obviousness of the failure of Obamanomics is just further confirmation of the fundamental truth that liberalism is always wrong.

Now, if only we can get liberals to agree that Florida will win the SEC championship next Saturday, an Alabama victory is guaranteed.

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: G.M. Roper:

The recent exposure of emails, data and software from the pre-eminent global warming organization -- the Climate Research Unit -- shows not only that scientists are human and thus tribal, arrogant and sometimes deceitful, but also the modern process is inadequate and antiquated.
Skeptics have argued that critical data had been "cooked," and scientists had been refusing requests for data. Now we know that not only was the data misused and that the scientists had been engaged in a coverup and suppression of dissent, but also that they are not even able to understand their own data. . . .

Read the whole thing. What we need, I tell you, is a scientific consensus that Florida will win next Saturday. Get the CRU working on it. Roll Tide.

Ruh-roh: U.S. debts coming due

In the private sector, it's called a "liquidity crisis":

The United States government is financing its more than trillion-dollar-a-year borrowing with i.o.u.'s on terms that seem too good to be true.
But that happy situation, aided by ultralow interest rates, may not last much longer.
Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides that the emergency has passed.

Read the whole thing. When the crunch finally hits, that haunting voice you hear in your head will be Ron Paul saying, "I told you so."

Best. Blog. Headline. Evah?

When Your Neighbor Loses His Job
It's A Recession.
When You Screw A Whore Behind Your Wife's Back, Get Caught, And Lose Your Job, It's A Catastrophic Economic Meltdown.

Via Memeorandum. About Eliot Spitzer.

Harry the Loser

Philip Klein at The American Spectator blog:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is increasingly looking like one of the most vulnerable Senate Democrats in the 2010 election cycle.

That's based on a new poll showing Reid losing to either of two candidates for the GOP nomination in 2010.

Reid's biggest problem? It's The Stupid Economy, Harry -- oh, yes, and the heavy burden of Obama's plummeting job-approval numbers. Urgent Headline of the Day:

OBAMA FAILS TO WIN
NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS

I'm thinking that the definitive history of this administration will eventually be published by The Onion with the title Hope Beyond Parody: Obama's Prize-Winning Campaign to Rescue the Political Satire Industry and Revive the Republican Party.

Hey, did anybody else notice . . .

. . . that the fundamentals of the economy suck?

The dollar has weakened considerably this year amid low interest rates and massive government spending designed to spur the economy . . .
The U.S. dollar continued its six-month slide Tuesday amid a growing international chorus that wants the dollar replaced -- or at least supplemented -- as the world's reserve currency, a move that would end the greenback's six decades of global dominance . . .
The U.S. office vacancy rate reached a five-year high in the third quarter . . .

More where that came from. Also, generally speaking, oppose any proposal supported by Robert Reich.

SIGTARP bites again!

Bailout Watchdog Says Treasury and Fed Knew Bailed-Out Banks Were Not Healthy

Michelle Malkin blogs it. Via Memeorandum. Background: "The War on Watchdogs," September print issue, The American Spectator.

No time for more. Hit tip jar. Kids demanding slushies now. Will update . . .

Home-school arithmetic lesson

My wife is the cafeteria lady at the academy, which explains why she's been forced to entrust me as substitute teacher at The McCain School while she's at work. This isn't how we planned it, but necessity is a mother, IYKWIMAITYD.

So, immediately after I'd assigned Emerson to supervise Reagan's kindergarten spelling lesson -- "bring," "better," and "about" are her Words of the Day -- the phone rang and my wife started telling me that she'd paid the past-due car payment and was planning to go pay the electric, for which we had a shut-off notice. (Hit the tip jar, but fret not. We are past masters at the financial genius of strategic delinquency. and don't plan to be living under a freeway overpass any time soon.)

Just as my wife was burdening me with this discussion of the creditors who'd been neglected while I was in Kentucky, I looked out the window to see the mail truck pull up to the box.

"Hey, the mail's here," I said. "I'm walking out in my pajamas to get it."

This embarrasses Mrs. Other McCain, who's still on the phone when I get to the box to find good news.

"Hey, the Spectator check's here," I say.

"Good," she says. "Oh, I forgot to tell you, there's two other checks for you on top of the piano."

"Two other checks?"

"Yeah, your Google Ads check and your Amazon check came last week."

"Well, now you tell me."

Anyway, I go back in the house, open all three checks, separate them from the stubs, and hand them to Emerson.

"Get out your notebook and add 'em up," I say.

Emerson just brought me his notebook and showed me his work. Of course, his work was perfect. (The sum was more impressive to my 8-year-old than to me, since I earned an equivalent amount in salary during a single day less than two years ago.) The value of this lesson, however, was not about the simple arithmetic. Rather, it was intended to teach him how capitalism works:

• Dad writes 16 hours a day like a crazy fool.
• People send Dad checks.
• Everybody gets to ride to the bank with Dad and stop by Sheetz for slushies on the way home.

So, what did your kid learn in school today? Hit the tip jar. Lessons this valuable are worth it.

P.S.: Necessity is a mother. One of the things we've neglected lately is to purchase printer paper, so I've been recycling by printing on the back of any old stuff laying around my desk (of which there is an awful lot).

Anyway, I grabbed some scrap paper to print out the preview of this post -- let 10-year-old redheaded Jefferson read it aloud to his siblings on the way to the bank -- and happened to notice it was from a draft manuscript I'd read a few months ago: "Hunter Biden raked in the MBNA consulting payments . . ." Best. Book. Evah!

Remember to check Page 291. I Write For Money, and there are five A's in raaaaacist.

Another reminder that the MSM is in the tank for Obama, as if you didn't know that

Jeffrey Tucker of the Mises Institute headlined this "All is well because Obama is in charge," which elucidates a point that the New York Times carefully endeavors to obscure:

A study to be released Monday of financial news coverage this year found that government, Wall Street and a small handful of story lines got the bulk of the attention while much less was paid to the economic troubles of ordinary people. . . .
Reviewing almost 10,000 reports from Feb. 1 to Aug. 31 in newspapers, on news Web sites, on the radio and on network broadcast and cable television, Pew found that almost 40 percent of economic news reports dealt with the trials of the banking and auto industries, and the federal stimulus bill passed in February. . . .
Unemployment and the housing crisis accounted for 12 percent. And, the study said, “stories that tried to explicitly examine the broader impact of the economic downturn on the lives of ordinary Americans filled 5 percent of the economic coverage." . . .
In February and March, the economy was the subject of nearly half of all news coverage, driven mostly by the stimulus bill and the uses of bank bailout money. After those fights died down, financial news coverage fell by more than half.
Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Pew project, said it was easier for the national news media to cover Washington “than to fan out around the country and measure the impact on real lives.”
“There’s plenty of reason to understand why a lot of this is a Washington and New York story,” he said. “But we’re talking about something that affected almost every American in some way.”

All of which is to say, with unemployment at 9.8 percent and no prospect of it going down in the next six months, the MSM have been ignoring this turd in the punchbowl and pretending that recovery is just around the corner.

What has actually been happening in the economy, of course, is that the way the TARP bailout was structured, it pumped massive liquidity into Wall Street. This inevitably led to a rise in stock prices -- a "sucker's rally" -- that I believe is the main reason we haven't seen a consumer price increase as a result of the Fed's insanely inflationary monetary policy. Relatively little of that extra currency is going to Main Street. Instead, it's been siphoned off into the financial sector and we're seeing an inflationary stock bubble.

Because the MSM desperately wants to believe in the unicorns-and-rainbows magic of Obamanomics, they've highlighted the stock market rally and twisted the headlines about other economic news -- "We only lost 200,000 jobs last month? Great!" -- in an attempt to manufacture consumer confidence.

Alas, consumer confidence isn't magic, either. At some point, the fundmentals actually matter and, as I have occasionally had cause to remind you, the fundamentals still suck.

VIDEO: Judge James Garrison explains the economic plight of Eastern Kentucky

You meet the finest people in the world at the Huddle House in Manchester, Ky. When my readers learned I was en route to Clay County, one commenter told me to talk to former county judge/executive James Garrison. What a coincidence that he walked into the Huddle House where I was meeting Tuesday evening with Manchester Enterprise news director Morgan Bowling, who is the judge's cousin (of course, practically everybody is cousins in Clay County).

Before I left Wednesday, I made sure to interview Judge Garrison, who gave me a tour of his 600-acre property, where I watched him feed the catfish at his commercial fish-farming operation and recorded this brief video:

As my commenter told me, if you close your eyes, it's like listening to the legendary Southern comedian Jerry Clower. Judge Garrison is extremely knowledgeable of regional history and, in his down-home vernacular, expresses a very well-informed -- and essentially libertarian -- understanding of how federal regulation has hindered the economic development of the community he loves.

If there is an "anti-government" sentiment in Clay County, it's not as if they've got no legitimate grievance. Thomas Sowell or Friedrich Hayek would understand. So would Rand Paul, whom Judge Garrison is supporting in the 2010 Republican Senate primary.

TARP watchdog Neil Barofsky warns of 'far more dangerous' economic problems

As soon as I learned that Timothy Geithner's Treasury Department was obstructing the investigations of Neil Barofsky -- the special inspector general for the TARP financial bailout -- I predicted that "SIGTARP" was a watchdog who could take a bite out of the Obama administration. Now there's this:

(Via Rick Moran at American Thinker.)

• MORE ABOUT NEIL BAROFSKY
• AMERICAN SPECTATOR: 'THE WAR ON WATCHDOGS'

S.C. Boeing workers vote for freedom

Michelle Malkin notes this encouraging news from the Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier:

Boeing Co. workers in North Charleston voted overwhelmingly to disband their union in a move that could give the region an edge in landing an aircraft plant the company is looking to build.
Of the 267 ballots cast, 199 were in favor of decertifying the election that made them members of the International Association of Machinists. . . .
Boeing has said it would consider North Charleston and its manufacturing hub outside Seattle, among other sites, for a new 787 assembly plant. A decision is expected by the end of the year.

Free labor's competitive advantage is always important, but more obvious in a time of economic stagnation.

It was during the 1970s, when the steel mills and other industrial plants of the unionized Northeast and upper Midwest were laying off thousands, that the economic vitality of the "Sun Belt" became such a contrast with the misery of the "Rust Belt." And the right-to-work laws of the Southern and Western states were the chief reason for this remarkable shift.

Auguries of Economic Apocalypse

Last week was an excellent week for gloom and doom, not least because idiots were optimistic, a topic addressed in my latest American Spectator column:

Six months into a stock-market rally, Wall Street apparently saw more good news last week when a Labor Department report showed employment had jumped to 9.7 percent in August. Exactly why Friday's news -- joblessness at a 26-year high -- produced a 97-point gain in the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a good question, but if the stock market were perfectly predictable, we'd all be rich. . . .
First the Bush administration and now the Obama administration have pumped hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars into the system, justifying the stimulus-and-bailout policy as necessary to avert a financial cataclysm. Yet the augurs who study the entrails of the economy are muttering darkly about the inauspicious omens.
Last week, Vice President Joe Biden gave a happy-talk presentation -- "Rainbows! Unicorns! Recovery!" -- about the miraculous effects of the $787 billion stimulus package that President Obama rammed through Congress in February. Once more trotting out the administration's rhetoric about jobs "saved or created" (pick a number, any number), Biden declared, "In 200 days, the president's Recovery and Reinvestment Act isn't just working . . . it's working toward something: It's working toward a more resilient, more transformative economy."
Surely, many economists greeted this declaration with arched eyebrows. What, exactly, is a "transformative economy," and in what sense is it "more resilient"? Never mind. Being liberal means never having to define one's terms.
Biden showed himself adept at the art of ambiguity when he proclaimed to his Brookings Institution audience: "The Recovery Act has played a significant role in changing the trajectory of our economy, in changing the conversation about the economy in this country. Instead of talking about the beginning of a depression, we're talking about the end of a recession eight months after taking office."
Well, who is "we"? It is by no means universally agreed that the U.S. economy is now bound for the sunlit uplands of prosperity, and many of the financial augurs perceive that we may be approaching an economic abyss. . . .

Read the whole gloomy thing. And expect further omens of catastrophic Obamanomics at NTCNews.com. The revolution will not be televised, but the apocalypse will be blogged.

UPDATE: Doug Ross anticipates Zimbabwe USA.

UPDATE II: Taxpayers get screwed:

The federal government is unlikely to recoup all of the billions of dollars that it has invested in General Motors and Chrysler, according to a new congressional oversight report assessing the automakers' rescue.
The report said that a $5.4 billion portion of the $10.5 billion owed by Chrysler is "highly unlikely" to be repaid, while full recovery of the $50 billion sunk into GM would require the company's stock to reach unprecedented heights.
"Although taxpayers may recover some portion of their investment in Chrysler and GM, it is unlikely they will recover the entire amount," according to the report . . .

In other words, the auto bailout was a taxpayer-funded swindle, cheating the legitimate stakeholders on behalf of the UAW bosses. Oh, and here's some more cheerful news: Inflation's back!

UPDATE III: Read Max Baucus's lips: More New Taxes!

What the Baucus proposal means in real terms is that a family of four with a household income above $66,150 would face a tax of $3,800 if they do not obtain health care, while an individual with income above $32,490 would face a tax of $950.

Meanwhile, Cato's Andrew J. Coulson explains how Obama's stimulus spending on public schools is actually hurting the economy. Man, this is turning out to be a great day for gloom and doom!

Ruh-roh

China ditching the dollar?

Cheng Siwei, former vice-chairman of the Standing Committee . . . said Beijing was dismayed by the Fed's recourse to "credit easing." . . . "If they keep printing money to buy bonds it will lead to inflation, and after a year or two the dollar will fall hard. Most of our foreign reserves are in US bonds and this is very difficult to change, so we will diversify incremental reserves into euros, yen, and other currencies," he said.

Edward Harrison of RGE Monitor explains:

For months now, the Chinese have signalled growing unease with U.S. monetary policy. And now comes the clearest signal yet that they are moving away from the dollar. . . . The $2 trillion in U.S. dollar reserves the Chinese already have are a sunk cost. Going forward, the Chinese are free to do as they wish with incremental additions to reserves.

Which is to say there is a limit to the willingness of Beijing to keep funding endless deficit spending. If China starts shorting the dollar . . . Oh, this could get ugly.

Expect a lot of public pushback from Geithner and Bernanke, who will emphasize that this one official was not expressing actual policy for Beijing. But I rather doubt the markets will be spun so easily.

Watch gold prices today. Wall Street won't be open until Tuesday, but gold is traded globally 24/7 and that price will tell you whether investors are taking this Chinese official's remark seriously.

Who needs more gloom and doom?

Always happy to keep you miserable!

The nearly 15 million unemployed Americans won't enjoy Labor Day as a relaxing respite from work. . . .
As the jobless rate nears 10 percent, even those fortunate enough to be employed fret about keeping their jobs. But for those without them, it's a daily struggle with emotional and economic distress.
"It's hard to maintain your focus that you're a valuable member of society when you go three months and nobody really wants to employ you," says David O'Bryan, 59, of Barre, Vt. . . .
The nation's jobless rate jumped to a 26-year high of 9.7 percent in August from 9.4 percent in July. It's expected to top 10 percent this year and keep climbing into part of next year before falling back. The post-World War II high was 10.8 percent at the end of 1982.
And it could take four years or more for the unemployment rate to fall back down to a normal level of about 5 percent. . . .

You know who loves him some gloom and doom? Instapundit:

• Obama's job-killing "stimulus"!
• The deficits are coming!

We scour the globe in search of more gloom . . . bank failures! construction loans in trouble! FDIC underfunded! "God help us"!

Ahhhh . . . The joy of misery!

'God Help Us'

So says Blue Crab Boulevard, surveying the catastrophic effects of Obamanomics. And that was before he learned of The Mother Of All Bailouts.

The O'Biden Happy Talk about the magical wonders of "stimulus" continues to deceive much of the MSM -- it's all unicorns and rainbows and "recovery," as far as they know -- but the financial press can't ignore the evidence of impending crisis.

One thing NTCNews.com has focused on is aggregating financial and economic news, which has required me to scour over Google Business News and other sources. Is the DJIA up or down? What about Treasury notes? Gold? Oil? Currencies? Banking? Housing? Employment?

Thursday, the stock market broke a 4-day slide, and gained again on Friday, after the much-anticipated August jobs report showed unemployment had risen to 9.7%. The average person sees these two facts -- jobs down, market up -- and asks, "How on earth is 9.7% unemployment good news?"

Beats me. If I could figure out the stock market, I'd be rich. Instead, I'm a blogger. However, facts are facts. Since peaking at 14,034.39 on Oct. 9, 2007, the DJIA has lost 4,593.12 points. Even though the Dow has bounced up some 3,000 points since bottoming out in March, we're still talking about a net loss of 32.7% in less than two years.

Combine that with the meltdown in housing prices, and it represents a massive devastation of asset-value, an economic cataclysm of historic proportions.

Now, consider that we are less than two years away from 2001, when the oldest of the Baby Boomers, born in early 1946, turn 65. Their retirement funds have been diminished by the stock-market collapse, and if they had planned to cash out the equity in their homes . . . Well, good luck with that plan.

Beginning in 2011, then, an increasing number of Baby Boomers will undergo the transition from taxpayers to tax consumers, eligible for Social Security and MediCare, a fiscal drain on the economy. Only by dipping into what remains of their asset value -- selling their homes or other valuables, spending out their IRAs, 401(k)s and other retirement funds -- will this exploding population of retirees be able to live above the minimum level provided by the government.

Without getting into a lot of complicated analysis (e.g., the growth-killing impact of just about anything the federal government might do to meet the looming fiscal crisis), the ordinary person with a minimal level of economic education who looks at this situation can only conclude: We're completely screwed.

Which is why, as I scour the financial news, I keep an eye out for omens and portents of the inevitable apocalypse, such as these items aggregated at NTCNews.com the past week:

Are We Facing a Banking Crisis? Is the Gold Price About to Explode?
-- Market Oracle, Aug. 31

"Oil prices fell to near $71 a barrel Monday as China's stock market tumbled and commodities investors questioned whether the U.S. economy can recover strongly in the second half."
-- Associated Press, Aug. 31

"AIG fell 17% after Sanford C. Bernstein dropped the stock to 'underperform,' on concerns that Washington will pull back on financial assistance as AIG recovers. The firm is still on the hook for $80 billion in federal loans . . ."
-- Forbes, Sept. 1

"The American economy will suffer 'a long time' as a result of last year's federal bailout of the financial industry, according to Johan Norberg, author of a new book about the policies that caused the banking meltdown. . . . 'The bailouts . . . the debts -- we won't be able to pay them back. We're going to pay for it for a long time . . .' "
-- The American Spectator, Sept. 2

"FDIC head Sheila Bair told CNBC Tuesday evening that commercial real estate loans remain a "looming problem" for banks' balance sheets and she expects the area to increasingly be a driver for bank failures during the remainder of this year and 2010 . . ."
-- Reuters, Sept. 2

"U.S. banks are holding more than $1 trillion of mortgages backed by commercial property that is fast losing value."
-- Wall Street Journal, Sept. 2

" 'Most participants saw the economy as likely to recover only slowly during the second half of this year, and all saw it as still vulnerable to adverse shocks,' the Fed said in today’s minutes. 'Labor market conditions remained of particular concern to meeting participants . . .' "
-- Bloomberg News, Sept. 2

"Gold prices reached their highest point in nearly three months as the U.S. dollar weakened and participants bought in a flight-to-quality bid based on economic uncertainty and concerns about the stock market . . ."
-- Wall Street Journal, Sept. 2

"Treasurys fell Thursday, sending yields higher, as stocks edged up and the U.S. government said it planned to sell $70 billion in Treasury bonds and notes next week."
-- MarketWatch, Sept. 3

UNEMPLOYMENT REACHES 9.7%
-- NTCNews.com, Sept. 4

"Tony Crescenzi, a market strategist and portfolio manager at Pacific Investment Management Co., manager of the world’s biggest bond fund, said the U.S. faces a slow recovery because unemployment is persisting . . . 'The key ingredient for a sustainable recovery is still absent,' Crescenzi said today in an interview on Bloomberg Radio. 'We need income growth to produce self-reinforcing expansion. . . . The duration of unemployment will be longer and will put downward pressure on wages.'"
-- Bloomberg News, Sept. 4

"Congress passed the Cash for Clunkers program in order to increase automobile employment and save jobs. . . . The employment report shows that -- despite the Cash for Clunkers craze, and the $2 billion Congress added to the program at the end of July -- motor vehicles and parts manufactures shed 15,000 jobs in August. That erased half of the jobs gained in July and continued the yearlong downward trend . . ."
-- Heritage Foundation, Sept. 4

FEDS SHUT DOWN 5 BANKS
-- NTCNews.com, Sept. 5

Given the serious underlying problems of the economy -- "The Fundamentals Still Suck," as I explained in May -- no amount of unicorns-and-rainbows "recovery" talk from the administration and its MSM sock-puppets can avert the inevitable consequences.

So NTCNews.com keeps an eye on the economy and readers who appreciate this service -- you can subscribe to the RSS feed in Google, Atom, etc., to get the latest updates -- are invited to support this project by hitting the tip jar.

"The revolution will not be televised, but the apocalypse will be blogged."