Adam Smith (sometimes referred to as "the father of capitalism") wrote in his magnum opusThe Wealth of Nations (the first modern work of economics): "Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things.
The Dow Jones stock average closed early September Friday at 17,137, despite the fact that the payroll jobs report was a measly 125,000 new jobs for August, an insufficient amount to keep up with the growth in the working age population.
This week in outrageous economic shorts we quote insightful articles covering the JPMorgan Chase $13 billion settlement for bundling bad mortgages and pawning them off to unsuspecting investors. The case is due to the actions of two acquisitions made by JPMorgan Chase, Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual.
America has a problem, a big one, the middle class has been wiped out. It is economic genocide and the target is most of America. The statistics just continue to pour in on how poorly America is doing. Even as the great manufactured crisis is over in D.C., the political agenda once again has nothing to do with helping America's middle class. Why jobs are not job #1 by this government we do not know.
When did it become OK to play political Calvin ball with the faith and good credit of the United States of America? Such are the hidden whispers that the debt ceiling will be used as yet another gun to the head of America, a hostage taking bargaining chip, in spite of the claims to the contrary.
The story which should be front page news but is not is income inequality. U.C. Berkeley professor, Emmaneul Saez studies income inequality and has recently updated his research with 2012 figures and the results are astounding. The top 1% breaking records for grabbing America's income gains should be what's blaring across the headlines.
One of my most popular columns was about escaping from the Matrix existence in which Americans live. It is a world of disinformation and misinformation in which facts are fiction, and abstract theories are substituted for empirical reality.
Official government statistics are make-believe. The government makes inflation and unemployment disappear by how it defines inflation and unemployment, and it makes the economy grow by how it defines Gross Domestic Product. The definitional basis determines the statistical result.
We fill our lives with media. Day in and day out the screens and voices spin a tall fictional tale of Americans with good jobs, houses, cars, educational opportunities and money. Frontline brings home the real America, the one we don't want to face. Gone is the American Dream, replaced with foreclosures, food stamps and work that doesn't pay enough to even make the most modest rent. The new America is a wasteland of broken dreams, broken promises and broken people working themselves into the ground and still not even getting by.
There is another round of bad news for most Americans. A study shows the top 1% of America's rich captured 121% of the income gains for the two years after the 2007-2009 recession was declared over. U.C. Berkeley Economist Emmanuel Saez released his study Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States early this month to much press. It truly is astounding. Gone is America's strong middle class where work was rewarded.
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