IMHO, Republicans go on making a play for Plutocratic rule.
They push radical wackos in their primary elections - people who aren't very likely to win in the general election. And they have to know their wacko candidates don't appeal to most voters.
So it would seem they really are counting on a Jim Crow style scheme to keep people away from the polls.
With all the shit they're trying to pull - the campaign against Mail-In, threatening to order the USPS not to deliver ballots, vote roll purges, closing polling places, threatening to post armed "officers" at polling places, and and and. They're working hard to carve off a few percentage points - votes that would normally go to the Democrats - in order to eke out a few wins here and there.
It's the ugliest kind of politics, and I don't blame anybody for being repulsed by the process, and more than a little reluctant to participate.
It's amazing - over a million Americans have been caught red-handed committing fraud, but I guess the supremely sympathetic Trump DOJ just couldn't bring themselves to indict anybody for it?
She references Whirlpool CEO Mark Bitzer using the phrase "other recessionary periods" like the economy is already in recession.
Mark Zandi warns America is ‘close to the edge’ with 40% recession risk — and says US stocks are detached from reality
With stocks soaring to fresh highs, recession may be the last thing on investors’ minds. But according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, America is uncomfortably close to one.
In a recent interview with TheStreet, Zandi said the odds of a U.S. recession over the next 12 months are now sitting at 40%.
“Just for context, in a typical economy, what economists would call the unconditional probability of recession is closer to 15%,” he said. “So, 40% is very elevated, very uncomfortable — it gives you a sense of how close I think things are to the edge here.”
Zandi’s warning came even after a better-than-expected jobs report, with the U.S. economy adding 115,000 jobs in April while the unemployment rate held steady at 4.3% (2).
But the headline number didn’t change his view.
“The labor market is still a vulnerability in the economy, still very soft,” he said, adding that recession risks remain “very high.”
Zandi said businesses remain reluctant to hire, with hiring rates “still very low across most industries.” Hours worked also remain depressed, which Zandi said is “kind of consistent with what you’d see in a recession.”
He also pointed to falling labor-force participation — meaning fewer people are actively working or looking for work — as a warning sign. If participation had stayed steady over the past year, Zandi said, the unemployment rate would be closer to 5%.
At the same time, inflation is becoming a bigger concern. Zandi said price pressures are picking up because of the Iran war, higher energy prices, tariffs and other factors — and that is eating into household purchasing power.
“Real disposable income — that’s after tax, after accounting for inflation — is no higher today than it was a year ago,” he said. “So, there’s been no growth in purchasing power, and that’s going to get worse and start declining.”
That pressure is already showing up in the choices consumers are making.
Zandi noted that wealthy households are drawing down savings to supplement their purchasing power and maintain spending. But lower- and middle-income households don’t have the same cushion.
“They’re living more paycheck to paycheck,” he said.
If Americans have to put more of their paychecks into the gas tank, he warned, they have less left over for everything else — from gym memberships to food choices.
“You’re gonna have to trade down. You can’t have beef — you gotta have chicken,” he said.
Stocks are not the economy
Meanwhile, Wall Street has been telling a very different story. Both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite have recently climbed to fresh highs.
To Zandi, that disconnect is part of the problem.
“The stock market’s not the economy,” he said. “In my 36 years as a professional economist, the stock market’s never been more disjointed from the economy.”
He attributed much of the market’s strength to artificial intelligence, especially large tech companies.
“What’s driving the stock market train is these big hyperscalers and chip companies,” he said, adding that the AI trade “runs on its own dynamic” and “has nothing to do with the economy.”
Zandi also said investors appear to be betting that President Donald Trump will pivot if the economy or markets start to wobble.
“Stock investors are looking at the president, the president’s looking at the stock market,” he said. “That doesn’t feel like a stable… equilibrium — it’s kind of like a hall of mirrors.”
⬆︎ That's a big red flag - if you're expected Trump to behave like a normal rational human being, you're in for a rude surprise.
Zandi also warned that valuations are stretched.
“Valuations are awfully high,” he said, noting that price-to-earnings multiples are near historic highs, “except for perhaps during the internet bubble, which didn’t end so well.”
Zandi isn’t alone in sounding the alarm. Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones has said that the market “feels exactly like 1999.”
Meanwhile, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway now holds $397.4 billion in cash — a record amount that many investors interpret as a signal of caution in an expensive market (3).
To be sure, markets are inherently volatile, and no forecast is guaranteed. But with valuations stretched and recession risk elevated, now may be a good time to consider how to diversify beyond traditional stocks.
The "Thucydides Trap" is a political theory popularized by Graham Allison describing the high risk of war when a rising power (eg: China) threatens to displace an established ruling power (eg: US).
Named after the ancient Greek historian who observed that the rise of Athens and the fear it instilled in Sparta made the Peloponnesian War inevitable, this dynamic suggests that structural tension - rather than sheer accident - makes conflict likely, as the established power takes defensive actions and the rising power demands recognition.
Trump has said publicly that he doesn't think about the effect on you, or me, or anybody, or anything else when he makes "decisions" about his stupid little war with Iran.
Politicians are telling us not to trust politicians because politicians took our money and lost it, so let's just take a politician's word for it that the politicians want to do what's best for us.
We're seeing the Balkanization of the entire world.
Welcome to the new old world order, and the dawning of the age of the Plutocratic Fiefdom, where the Global Poker Game is dominated by rank amateurs and Dunning-Kruger dilettantes.
You fight a war in order to change the landscape - to make things more conducive to furthering your policy objectives.
Trump has handed Iran the perfect means to raise their stature on the world stage, prove their potential to exert influence, and show us all that as long as we're dependent on the largesse of the Dirty Fuels Cartel, we will never be free from the grip of whoever chooses to be the biggest asshole.
We've been watching Iran beat Trump like a rug at spring cleaning, and his biggest failure may be that he's got a fair bunch of people in the world thinking that Iran has somehow become the good guys.
