John Kyl, Republican, AZ Senator, is not running in 2012. This is great news, I cannot recall any corporate written lobbyist agenda bill he did not champion.

The era of commercial Calvinism and Ayn Rand's deviant strain are over. Almost everyone feels vulnerable, except those who pull the strings to enrich their small crew. This can't go on for a much longer. The absurdity of flat job growth for 10 years is only exceeded by the failure to discuss or seriously address that phenomenon. Talk about malfeasance. But they think they're doing just fine, the leaders who give each other awards as their failures create an artificial history of contraction and failure.

My impression is the minute he got into the Senate, leadership maneuvered him into military, security, defense areas. Which considering his background, no big surprise. That said, he seemed to get muzzled on economic issues, along with many others from the 2006 class. They would say something in floor speeches, but even on co-sponsoring amendments, they have been shut down.

Considering how corrupt Congress is, we have a host of people trying to do the right thing, for years, never ending getting shut down by their own party.

I'm thinking of Byron Dorgan, who also didn't run again in 2010, foremost. I mean that must suck to be labeled with "Democrat" who are busy undermining what the principles "Democrat" are supposed to stand for.

Just a guess, I have no insider knowledge. Webb did try to pipe up, but trying to get an extension of G.I. benefits and other things he was working on, I'm sure they muzzled him on other issues in some trade off.

He's a really smart guy who knew the ways of Washington.

Why didn't we hear more from him?

He makes no mention above of the economic issues that have been plaguing the average person since he's been in the Senate. Where was he on them? If he was getting no where with the Washington insiders and the big money interests, why not appeal to the people?

Or is the public perceived as that powerless and weak these days that even good people don't want to bother engaging us?

It's all very sad and frustrating.

If you can see how credit default swaps are non linear because the counterparty is buying insurance against something he "plain doesn't own", then the commodity futures analogy is that counterparties can hold any type of speculative position on commodity futures without ever intending to take physical delivery.

You can even hold a one million dollar position with 500 dollars while Goldman uses the remaining $999,500.00 to bet on the default of the Greek 5 year bond (for example).

Surely we can see how oil as a commodity is finite, unlike agriculture, which is much more seasonal (cyclical, replenishable). The demand for both oil and food increase with population growth and development. But the outrageous price fluctuations in oil cannot be supply related, because the supply has been continually diminishing and the demand continually increasing for decades.

In a natural supply and demand price equation, oil should have started rising from about $10 dollars a barrel in the 70's to something like $20 in the 80's, $30 in the 90's, $40 in the 00's per barrel, and so on (thats a "crude" calculation I know, but I'm just trying to show a steady natural increase in prices due to relative fixed supply against increasing demand - pun obviously intended).

But with Goldman Sachs parking millions of barrels of oil in Contango and other such speculative power plays, the prices have been volatile. Any idea how many times a barrel of oil gets traded (speculated upon) before the end product reaches consumers at the pumps? About 27 I hear lately. There is no natural supply and demand explanation for oil to peak at $140 a barrel, then collapse to $40 within 5 months in 2008.

When the real interest rate is negative, courtesy of the FED (extended and exacerbated by 300 trillion in unhedged interest rate swaps) it doesn't make economic sense to hold cash. When the paper is going down, real assets have a much better chance of holding value, through inflation.

With foreign currencies, tech stochs and real estate all busted flat (in that order) commodities are the last logical choice for the next bubble. It's a self-fulfilling proposition and yet another positive feedback loop -- the higher the commodities price, the higher the inflation pressure, and therefore the higher the commodities price ... and so on. Just like with oil. Self replicating profit based on speculation, a.k.a. financialization. It's not that complicated or hard to do really if you have no conscience and don't mind the hardship, homelessness, famine and death toll you'll arbitrarily inflict upon people who did you no wrong, just to make a buck (me, I work for a living like the rest of us suckers, but when I shave in the morning I can still live with the face in the mirror).

I doubt that the "official statistics" offered by "international" media outlets including the FED, are anything more than herd control. Do you actually believe that inflation in the U.S. is holding at 1.5 to 2% as Zimbabwe Ben claims? Is your grocery bill only 2% higher than last year? How about your insurance costs? How about gas? How about your utility bill? Property taxes? Any new fees being assessed your way like our Fire service fee last year in Leon County Florida? My comparisons all substantiate a 12-15% average inflation of basic necessities, like commodities. But Bernanke factors in the housing collapse (deflation) against real inflation, when in fact we all know that home prices are no "deflating" just due to natural supply and demand pressures (though mounting foreclosures do add fuel to that fire) but rather home prices are "normalizing" as a result of an asset bubble correction.

Globalists want us to believe that capitalism is alive and well, even recovering, along with all the civic trappings of basic economics we were taught in grade school but which no longer apply. Capitalism is no longer practiced in global finance (I digress into corporate global fascism only to remind readers that propaganda from cooked statistics has always been their hallmark).

I don't think you'll find the concrete proof you're looking for when you consider that trillions in continuing BAILOUTS depend on hiding it. Those who pull the curtain away too early, just when the great and powerful OZ is puffing forth his last great burst of fire and steam risk ending up like JFK, and I wouldn't want to see that happen.

I suspect the real unemployment rate is higher than U-6, in part, because there are no jobs to hunt for and how long this has gone on now.

I've noticed individuals who are 99ers, or more, speaking up and interviewing on TV. In the past, when an individual did that, they would get character assassinated, in order to "blame the victim" and dismiss the problem through character assassination. Some of these people who are interviewing are so pristine in their credibility and background and skill levels, it's made it impossible to attack them personally to attempt to discredit their experience.

Which is about time! Pobody is nerfect and every person in this country has made mistakes or has flaws, but that media/press attack the person piping up, who is not a media professional really stuck in craw as unethical. There you've got some regular person, going public and instead of listening to what they were describing, they would get attacked in order to minimize what they were actually describing is the situation.

What irks me also on this is many of these long term unemployed people are so talented, they really could rebuild America.

Some believe that the housing market and foreclosure problem are closely tied to the jobs market. They believe that so many businesses are connected to real estate, that the economy will remain in a slump until folks start buying houses again. But, now the argument is the new tight restrictions on packaged mortgages will further hamper an already depressed market. An example of the ill effects of very slow jobs growth and the housing market can be seen in these charts.

Another interesting item on the jobs picture:

The unemployment rate for college graduates may not have risen as much as for less educated workers, but it’s still increased significantly — more than doubling, to 4.8 percent, over the last three years. Presumably, an economy with stronger demand for goods and services, the kind of demand that stimulus programs create, would put many college graduates (and others) back to work. ( economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/ )

ForecastChart.com projects the unemployment rate will be 9.6 by January 2012, which doesn't jive with the reports of around 8.6 seen in the main stream media circles.

The people in Tahrir Square are all alone without anything but their experience and wits. Not one G-20 leader supports their goals. And, of course, there's the Egyptian grandees who have much to lose. I share you lack of optimism. On the other hand, if they hang in there and Mubarak goes, that will be a victory equal to any revolution in the last 100 years. One can hope. Like the Turkish saying goes, 'If you sleep on the floor, you can't fall out of bed.' It's not very comfortable, though.

and we should be chatting over here, but Q is output and for nonfarm business productivity that is 75% of real GDP.

So, what is GDP? I guess we'd have to go to the GDP report.

It is supposed to be that all imports are subtracted and that includes intermediate imports, such as our Foxconn slave labor. The finished iphone comes in as an import. the export would be the design. The profits would be Apple and where they are parking those profits, say the Caymans, is that entire "tax incentives to offshore outsource your job" thing.

yeah, that's in the research on phantom GDP and improperly attributed productivity. I link to a good 4 research papers in this post, but to date, I haven't gone into these actual statistics via the BLS/BEA/Census and tried to locate the productivity elements being wrongly attributed.

The BEA claims this isn't a problem, yet they also mention the difficulty with measurement with these intermediate offshore outsourced parts of goods..
then, in terms of using people by importing them as guest workers, illegal workers as well as offshore outsourcing services, I have not seen anything to account for that...

Looks like I need to go read up again on the latest, because this research is a couple of years old...

But it is true, the BEA does a lot of price deflators and price indexes to deal with differing economies, prices, exchange rates and inflation rates.

So, officially, no answers where the Chinese in the iphone are inside GDP, but we know this has to be "somewhere", so might be time to review the latest research.

This is what I mean about "philosophies" versus hard equations and statistics without bias, there is alot of spin out there on this topic, even though anyone with common sense can see the effects every day....so somewhere, something is screw up in the actual statistics, methods or "Missing data".