Yesterday
was Memorial Day. We said a prayer for all the brave men and women
who died in warÂ…after all, we have a heart!

But the brain
never quite gets in sync. When it looks at what those soldiers were
doing, it wishes they had never left home. AmericaÂ’s wars were
almost all ‘wars of choice,’ says a friend. “They
were fought to expand the power of the empire. The Mexican-American
war was a bald-faced grab for Mexican land. The ‘Civil War’
was a battle to bring the South into submission. The US took Puerto
Rico and the Philippines in the Spanish American war. President
Wilson took the US into WWI simply to throw our weight around in
Europe; we had no dog in that fight. He botched up the peace so
badly that the Europeans went to war again 20 years later to sort
it out. That was a war – WWII in Europe – that the US
didnÂ’t have to get involved in either.

“And then
there was Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, AfghanistanÂ…and hundreds of
sleazy assassinations, tawdry meddles and rank ops. They all increased
the reach and power of the military-led empireÂ…but the price
was paid by the Old Republic, which is now almost extinct.”

Mr. Obama can
start a war with whomever he pleasesÂ…no vote of the peopleÂ’s
elected representatives needed (as if that would make any difference).

Frankly, we
never much cared for the empire. We liked the Old Republic, as it
was meant to be. So, we didnÂ’t festoon our house with red,
white and blue, celebrating the success of the US empire, this Memorial
Day. Instead, we hung black crepeÂ…and mourned the loss of America.

And whatÂ’s
thisÂ…? A headline that caught our eye:

100 Million
Americans Without JobsÂ…

Business
Insider reports:

The national
unemployment rate gets lots of attention, and lately more attention
has been paid to the workforce participation rate since more Americans
have given up looking for a job, but we can also see that an astounding
100 million Americans donÂ’t have jobsÂ… According to
the April jobs report, the number of jobless American stood at
100.9 million.

LetÂ’s
seeÂ…thatÂ’s about one in three Americans actually working.
And how many of them have productive jobs? It depends on what you
mean.

Do you mean
jobs that actually increase the supply of goods and services that
make up our real wealth? If so, you have to take out all the people
who are doing zombie jobsÂ…

You may be
thinking of people working for the governmentÂ…paper pushers
whose contribution to national prosperity is marginal, or even negative.
What about all the TSA agents who are feeling up nuns and radiating
grandmothers? And what about people who work for the zombie industries
– like “Government Motors”…funded by the feds…or
Solyndra, which got a $535 million loan, guaranteed by the fedsÂ…or
the Bank of America, kept in business by Fed bailoutsÂ…or any
one of dozens of companies whose revenues come almost entirely from
the feds? Do any of them add to the nationÂ’s wealth? Net? Probably
not.

So, out of
a population of 311,000,000 how many are carrying the load?

Maybe 50 million.
One in 6. The rest are zombies. Or retired. In school. Disabled.
Or just goofing off.

Land of the
free? RIP.

Darn! Day after
day, the Dow is headed down.

Finally, on
Thursday of last week, stocks caught a break. The end of a long
losing streak. But thenÂ…on FridayÂ…down again, with a 74
point loss for the Dow.

Gold lost money
too. Oil closed right on the $90 mark.

WhatÂ’s
going on? The Wall Street Journal reports:

New signs of
a global slowdown are darkening the economic outlook.

On Thursday,
the US reported that businesses were slowing their orders of computers,
aircraft, machinery and other long-lasting goods. Measures of
business sentiment in Europe slipped, and reports from purchasing
managers at manufacturers around the globe turned down. Among
them, China, the worldÂ’s second-largest economy, registered
its seventh straight drop in an important manufacturing index.

A slew of
data this week suggests that the global economy is slowing down.

With the
latest reports, a new economic threat is emerging: That activity
is slowing in sync around the globe and not just in a few markets
with their own isolated problems. Europe, struggling with the
risk of a Greek pullout from the euro area and broader fiscal
problems, is the epicenter of global economic concerns right now.
But reports of economic trouble are turning up in China, India,
South Africa, Brazil and elsewhere.

When the
global economy is performing well, synchronized growth reinforces
itself and spreads prosperity wide and far. But slowdowns can
become interconnected and self-reinforcing, and the global economy
has been plagued by them since the financial crisis of 2008.

A synchronized
worldwide slowdown? Bummer!

But hey, dear
reader, would you reach out and pat us on the back?

In 1999, we
said the tech bubble was going to pop. We made fun of the techies.

And guess what?
We were right. Tech blew upÂ…and never came back.

OkayÂ…okayÂ…we
were wrong about some things. We called Amazon the “River of
No Returns.” Well…Amazon has done quite well. But where’s
Global Crossing? And Pets.com? Boo.com? GeoCities? All dead and
gone.

We urged dear
readers to buy gold, not stocks. If they had done that they would
be way ahead. Stocks went nowhere for the next 10 years. Gold went
up 5 times.

Dear readers
who got all golded up would have dodged the housing bubble, too.
Sell your expensive house, we urged dear readers in 2005 and 2006Â…and
rent! That turned out to be good advice, as the bubble blew up in
2007 and has been in tatters ever since.

When
the recession of Â’09 hit, economists and pundits wondered what
shape the recovery would be. V? or W? We said it would be an L.
DownÂ…then dragging across the floor for a very long time.

A real recovery
was “impossible,” we said, choosing our words recklessly…but
correctly. It was impossible for a debt-soaked economy to recover
until the debt had been squeezed out, we said.

Well, here
we are, 5 years after the crisis hit, and weÂ’re still at the
bottom of the L. Debt is still being wrung out of the private sectorÂ…while
the feds pour it on the public sector as fast as they can.

Right again!
The economy bumps along the bottomÂ…with persistent high unemployment,
record low bond yields, and “growth” that is more a product
of government gas than real, honest GDP building.

So, what are
we going to be wrong about?

HereÂ’s
our hunch: that the bottom of this L stretches out for a long, long
time. Maybe 10 more years. Maybe 20. Maybe 100.

WeÂ’ve
got a whole theory to back this up. But since weÂ’re just back
from a long weekend weÂ’ll save it for tomorrow!

May
31,
2012

Bill
Bonner is the author, with Addison Wiggin, of Financial
Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of The 21^st
Century and
The New Empire of Debt: The Rise Of An Epic Financial Crisis
and the co-author with Lila Rajiva of Mobs,
Messiahs and Markets (Wiley, 2007). His
latest book is Dice
Have No Memory.
Since 1999, Bill has been a daily contributor and the driving force
behind The Daily Reckoning.

Copyright
© 2012 Daily Reckoning

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