698K Native-Born Americans Lost Their Job In August: Why This Suddenly Is The Most Important Jobs Chart

After the Fed admitted over a year ago that the US unemployment rate (which in 2012 was supposed to be a rate hike “threshold” once it hit 6.5% and is now at 5.1%) has become irrelevant in a country where a record 94 million people have left the labor force, and with the Fed poised to hike rates even though …

ROBERT REICH – Labor Day 2028

In 1928, famed British economist John Maynard Keynespredicted that technology would advance so far in a hundred years – by 2028 – that it will replace all work, and no one will need to worry about making money. “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom …

Alan Nasser – The Myth of the Middle Class: Have Most Americans Always Been Poor?

One of the most firmly entrenched myths of the American Ideology is that the U.S. is a “middle class society,” a “land of opportunity” where anyone who works hard has the opportunity to achieve the standard of living which has made America “the envy of the world.” A common, and spot on, rejoinder has been to remind us that America …

Paul Craig Roberts and Dave Kranzler – Central Banks Have Become A Corrupting Force

Are we witnessing the corruption of central banks? Are we observing the money-creating powers of central banks being used to drive up prices in the stock market for the benefit of the mega-rich? These questions came to mind when we learned that the central bank of Switzerland, the Swiss National Bank, purchased 3,300,000 shares of Apple stock in the first …

Lawrence Davidson – Explaining the Trump Phenomenon

It is really not too hard to figure out Donald Trump. The man is having fun. What we have witnessed so far is a demonstration of how a billionaire megalomaniac and narcissist has fun: having secured a national stage, he runs around and says whatever he pleases, even if it is blatantly obnoxious. If he gets positive feedback, he does …

Pam and Russ Martens – How U.S. Achieves a 5.3% Unemployment Rate: If You Earn No Money, You Can Still Be Counted as Employed

Last Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report of 215,000 new jobs in July with its attendant announcement of an unemployment rate of 5.3 percent drew mostly yawns from the media. That wasn’t the case on February 3 of this year when Jim Clifton, CEO of the polling company, Gallup, wrote a stunning opinion piece on the company’s web site calling the U.S. …

Pam Martens & Russ Martens – New York Times Pushes False Narrative on the Wall Street Crash of 2008

William D. Cohan has joined Paul Krugman and Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times in pushing the patently false narrative that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 had next to nothing to do with the epic Wall Street collapse of 2008 and the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression. (See related articles on Krugman and …

Solar Power: Fiddling While the Earth Burns. By David William Pear

The U.S.A. has no limit on the amount of money, treasure, lives, and inalienable rights it is willing to sacrifice against Terrorism. It justifies it by saying that it is necessary to keep the American people safe. There is little proof that it does. An American today, and into the far future, is much more likely to suffer from human-caused climate change …

The Era of Dissolution – John Michael Greer

The last of the five phases of the collapse process we’ve been discussing here in recent posts is the era of dissolution. (For those that haven’t been keeping track, the first four are the eras of pretense, impact, response, and breakdown). I suppose you could call the era of dissolution the Rodney Dangerfield of collapse, though it’s not so much …

How Big Business Invented the Theology of ‘Christian Libertarianism’ and the Gospel of Free Markets By Kevin Kruse

During the Great Depression, big business needed rebranding.  Blamed for the crash, belittled in the press, and beset by the New Deal’s regulatory state, corporate leaders decided they had to improve their image, and soon. “The public does not understand industry,” an executive complained, “because industry itself has made no effort to tell its story; to show the people of …