Category Archive: 5.) The United States

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Six Narratives on the Ascendancy of Trump

2016-12-01

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2016-12-01

Grorss Domestic Income
A remarkably diverse array of "explanations" of Donald Trump's presidential election victory have been aired, representing both the conventional political spectrum and well beyond.

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Why Is the US Dollar Rising?

2016-11-26

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2016-11-26

US Dollar Index - Cash Settle
Note the apparent breakout above 100 and the constructive similarities to the 2014 breakout that was followed by a 20% increase in the purchasing power of the USD relative to other currencies.

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The New Nobility Uses Political Correctness to Fragment the Precariats

2016-11-26

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2016-11-26

Peasants
Combine identity politics with political correctness, and the New Nobility/Oligarchy can laugh their way to the bank while their pawn-serfs fight over how many politically correct angels can dance on the head of a pin.

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How Do We Create Value When Knowledge Is Almost Free?

2016-11-26

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2016-11-26

Credentials are increasingly in over-supply; problem-solving skills are scarce. How do we create value in an economy that is increasingly dependent on knowledge? The answer is complicated by the reality that knowledge is increasingly digital and "unownable" and therefore almost free. Financialization as a substitute for creating value has run its course.

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Healthcare: Inflation Hidden in Plain Sight

2016-11-24

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2016-11-24

Charles Hugh Smith shows how health care costs are exploding in the United States and how this will lead sooner or later to inflation.

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Why Reshore Manufacturing? It’s the Only Way to Avoid Defective Pirated Parts

2016-11-23

by

2016-11-23

macro-analytics
If you want to lose your brand, your pricing power and your customers, by all means, rely on a global supply chain filled with defective parts that cannot possibly be detected. Reshoring the entire supply chain so it can be trusted is the low-cost solution once you add up the total lifecycle costs of a hopelessly counterfeit global supply chain.

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The Age of Disintegration: Political Disunity and Elites At War

2016-11-21

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2016-11-21

Distribution of Wealth in the US Since 1917
Historian Michael Grant identified profound political disunity in the ruling elite as a key cause of the dissolution of the Roman Empire. Grant described this dynamic in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire. The chapter titles of the book illuminate the complex causes of profound political disunity in the ruling elite: The Gulfs Between the Classes: a.k.a. soaring income/wealth inequality: check.

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The Great Con: Political Correctness Has Marginalized the Working Class

2016-11-19

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2016-11-19

Shares of Gross Domestic Income
So when the protected class of well-paid institutional "progressives" speak darkly of "reversing 40 years of social progress," what they're really saying is we're terrified that the bottom 95% might be waking up to our Great Con of identity politics and political correctness. To understand the Great Con of political correctness, we must first grasp the decline of the working class (self-described as "the middle class"), i.e. those who must sell...

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Rising Immigration but no Jobs

2016-11-17

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2016-11-17

New immigration was higher in the most recent decade, even though there were no jobs
The list of pundits jostling for air time to add their two cents to discussions of hot-button issues such as immigration is endless. The airwaves and social media are overflowing with people wanting to comment on hot-button social issues, but when it comes to the the one truly critical dynamic that will shape the future--everyone's strangely silent.

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The Source of Trump’s Success: The Bigger and Bigger Wage Gap

2016-11-16

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2016-11-16

Shares of Gross Domestic Income
There are many sources of rage: injustice, the destruction of truth, powerlessness. But if we had to identify the one key source of non-elite rage that cuts across all age, ethnicity, gender and regional boundaries, it is this: The Ruling Elite is protected from the destructive consequences of its predatory dominance.

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Seven Suggestions for President-Elect Trump

2016-11-12

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2016-11-12

Donald Trump
Make sure your administration is as diverse as America. No single act will give your enemies more ammo than populating your cabinet and administration with the Usual Suspects: Caucasian elites from Ivy League universities. These privileged "experts" have bankrupted the nation financially, morally and spiritually while enriching themselves and their privileged cronies.

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Who Lost: A Biased Media, Pundits, Pollsters, Political Parties, Warmongers, the Corporatocracy, Pay-to-Play Grifters, Neoliberals

2016-11-10

by

2016-11-10

Corporatocracy
Let's start with the Corporatocracy, which expected to once again wield unlimited influence by funding political campaigns with millions of dollars in contributions and speaking fees. A biased mainstream media. My mom-in-law was watching CBS all night, so that's what we watched. All the pundits/anchors spoke in the hushed tones of a funeral.

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Hillary Is The Perfection of a Corrupt System

2016-11-06

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2016-11-06

Exposing the Clintons' perfection of a corrupt political system won't change the conditions and incentives that created the Clintons' harvester of corruption. Let's set aside Hillary Clinton as an individual and consider her as the perfection of a corrupt political system. As I noted yesterday, Politics As Usual Is Dead, and Hillary Clinton is the ultimate product of the political system that is disintegrating before our eyes.

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The Bankrupt U.S. Healthcare System

2016-10-30

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2016-10-30

The mainstream became mainstream because it worked: the mainstream advice to "go to college and you'll get a good job" worked, the mainstream financial plan of buying a house to build equity to pass on to your children worked, the mainstream of government regulation worked to the public's advantage at modest cost to taxpayers and the mainstream media, despite being cozy with government agencies such as the C.I.A. and operating as a profit machine...

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Could Inflation Break the Back of the Status Quo?

2016-10-29

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2016-10-29

Consumer Price Index
Political resistance to the oligarchy's financialization skimming operations will eventually cripple central bank giveaways to the financial sector and corporate oligarchs. That inflation and interest rates will remain near-zero for a generation is accepted as "obvious" by virtually the entire mainstream media.

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Ending a Taking Economy and Creating a Giving Economy Part 2

2016-10-28

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2016-10-28

There no longer seems to be a rational alignment between economic cost and value. This means questioning so-called conventional wisdom and critically considering whether or not to own property or even to go to college.

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The Secrets of Self-Employment: Overhead and Capital Accumulation

2016-10-25

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2016-10-25

There are still opportunities to not just earn a wage, but the overhead, profit and capital skimmed by global corporations. So how can someone earning $15 an hour as an employee get ahead? The short answer is: they can't. One worker earning $15/hour will struggle to get ahead, which I define as building capital that generates an income stream.

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Two Sets of Solutions as the Status Quo Crumbles

2016-10-24

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2016-10-24

Two charts illustrate Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform: this chart of the S-Curve of financialization, leverage, debt, central planning, regulatory capture and globalization--that is, the engines of modern "growth"--depicts the inevitable stagnation and decline of these dynamics as overcapacity, debt saturation and diminishing returns take hold.

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Fed GDP Projections

2016-10-23

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2016-10-23

“It is not surprising the Fed once again failed to take action as their expectations for economic growth were once again lowered. In fact, as I have noted previously, the Federal Reserve are the worst economic forecasters on the planet.

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The Ruling Elite Has Lost the Consent of the Governed

2016-10-23

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2016-10-23

Brimming with hubris and self-importance, the ruling Elite and mainstream media cannot believe they have lost the consent of the governed. Every ruling Elite needs the consent of the governed: even autocracies, dictatorships and corporatocracies ultimately rule with the consent, however grudging, of the governed.

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