The spectacle of clueless U.S. media personalities, like George Stephanopoulos, chastising Donald Trump for getting facts wrong would be funny if it weren't indicative of a political-media system failing the American people and what's left of the democratic Republic, writes Robert Parry.
Donald Trump: An Evaluation
Paul Craig Roberts
Donald Trump, judging by polls as of December 21, 2015, is the most likely candidate to be the next president of the US.
Trump is popular not so much for his stance on issues as for the fact that he is not another Washington politican, and he is respected for not backing down and apologizing when he makes strong statements for which he is criticized. What people see in Trump is strength and leadership. This is what is unusual about a political candidate, and it is this strength to which voters are responding.
Back in June, this website first "solved" the "mystery" behind America's missing inflation, when we showed that a record number of US renters are unable to afford housing, suggesting that record amounts of "disposable income" were being diverted for use as a shelter "tax" instead of being spent on true discretionary goods and services, leading (together with the Obamacare tax) to the broad and distressing decline in not only traditional retail sales and moribund consumer spending, and the "secular" economic slowdown observed over the past several years.
A situation is brewing in cities all across the United States while millions of dollars in profits are on the table and hundreds of thousands of jobs are at stake. In the current US neoliberal system, the winners are the few on the inside and the losers are all of the rest of us. This is especially true while the taxi industry undergoes a game-changing transformation.
In September, interbank credit markets flashed a quick and brief warning that something was up... and Janet folded. Three months later and following The Fed's oddly-timed rate-hike, interbank counterparty risk - as proxied by the TED-Spread - has spiked over 45% in 2 days, the most since Sept 2008 (Lehman).