national security

Update: S.KOREA RAISES MILITARY READINESS LEVEL, YONHAP REPORTS,  South Korean news agency Yonhap says U.S., China informed about the North Korea nuclear test on Monday

Just because it has been off the headlines for a while, the time has come for North Korea to remind everyone it is still there, somewhere, with what appears another underground nuclear test, a few short years after that last one from May 2009.

• N. KOREA TEST ‘LIKELY’ TO BE NUCLEAR: S. KOREA DEFENSE MINISTRY
  
• S. KOREAN DEFENSE MINISTRY CONFIRMS DPRK NUCLEAR TEST
• USGS says earthquake of 4.9 scale detected in North Korea near to known nuclear test site - RTRS
• Seismic activity has been detected in North Korea. North Korea is not prone to seismic activity, it could indicate a nuclear test - RTRS
• Seismic activity detected in DPRK... believed to be "man-made" per various ROK sources - VOA
• Artificial earthquake detected in N. Korea - Yonhap
• S. Korea's presidential office checking reports of artificial quake in N. Korea - Yonhap

Of course, since this won't have any impact on the only wars that matter, the currency ones, it is unlikely that anything but more jawboning, and hard language out of both South Korea, the US and the UN, will come out of this attempt by DPRK to appear relevant.

Governments Move to Destroy Online Anonymity ... Google Helps

Slowly but surely the administration is making sure that both the US constitution, and its various amendments, become a thing of the past. In the name of national security, of course. And while until now it was the First and Second amendments that were the target of the administration's ongoing efforts to eavesdrop on anyone, all the time, in order to decide who may be a domestic terrorist and thus fit for 'droning', coupled with an aggressive push to disarm and curtail the propagation of weapons in what some perceive is nothing more than an attempt to take away a population's one recourse to defend itself against a tyrannical government, the time may be coming to say goodbye to the Fourth amendment - the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures - next. But only in close proximity to the border at first. According to Wired, "the Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights watchdog has concluded that travelers along the nation’s borders may have their electronics seized and the contents of those devices examined for any reason whatsoever — all in the name of national security."

"I will veto any effort to get rid of the automatic spending cuts" - Barack Obama, November 21, 2011

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"The President will urge Congress to come together and act to ensure these devastating cuts to defense and job-creating programs don’t take effect." - White House statement, February 5, 2013

The list of public/private institutions that desperately need structural reform is long: the Pentagon, healthcare (a.k.a. sickcare), Social Security, the complex mish-mash of programs that make up the Welfare State, the 73,000 page tax code, public pensions and the financial sector, to name just the top few. Regardless of the need for reform, it isn't going to happen for these structural reasons.

Bush and Obama Have Set Us Back 800 Years

Despite the Pretense that the U.S. and Israel Are Not Intervening In Syria’s Civil War, They Are Both At War With Syria

Government Prosecutes and Harasses those Who Expose Criminal Wrongdoing

There are no limits on Central State and financial Aristocracy exploitation, but there are limits on what debt-serfs can pay. Since we can't print money, there are limits for us debt-serfs. There are also limits on how much we can extract from a neocolonial/neofeudal system as wages. This neocolonial/neofeudal financialization model will implode under its own weight, and that will be the crisis.

A titanic political battle is brewing between the parasitic aristocracy, the dependent class and the two classes creating value with their labor. In the conventional view, America's socioeconomic classes are divided by income and wealth into various layers of Wealthy, Middle Class and Poor.  Extending recent analysis, we get an entirely different framework that breaks naturally into four classes: 1. Parasitic financial Aristocracy (creates no value, skims national surplus); 2. High value creation (employed, heavily taxed); 3. Low value creation (employed/informal economy, lightly taxed); and 4. No value creation (unemployed, dependent). In this context, America is filling the gap between the value we create and what we spend by borrowing $1 trillion+ a year on the Federal level and hundreds of billions more on the local-government and private-sector levels. All this debt isn't being "invested" in new value-creation; it is funding consumption and cartel skimming on a monumental scale.

• Doubt Greets Bank of Japan's Easing Shift (WSJ)
• Japan hits back at currency critics (FT)
• Japan upgrades economic view for first time in eight months (Australian) - only to lower them in a few months again
• GOP critics get opportunity to grill Secretary Clinton on Benghazi (Hill)
• Global economy set for ‘slow recovery’ (FT)
• Obama to back short debt limit extension (FT)
• Unfinished Luxury Tower Is Stark Reminder of Las Vegas’s Economic Reversal (NYT)
• Draghi Says ‘Darkest Clouds’ Over Europe Have Subsided (BBG)
• High-Speed Dustup Hits a Clubby Corner (WSJ)
• U.S. Budget Discord Is Top Threat to Global Economy in Poll (BBG)
• Sir Mervyn King says abandoning inflation target would be 'irresponsible' (Telegraph)
• Spain Says It May Cover 13% of 2013 Funding in January (BBG)

For the Gov't to maintain its power and control over a growing population that has pockets of civilians who are using the advances we have in technology to share and collect information in an effort to fight the on-going information battle, it will need to restrict its citizens in another manner.  So far the intelligence of the average American has been wittled down.

In this piece, I re-examine what many economists call "financial repression" and I find it to be sorely lacking as a description of what is happening. I also look at a related concern about the loss of central bank independence. Color me skeptical.

The Winners of the Academy Award and Golden Globe Are ... Government Propagandists

History Repeats ...