America

Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Central Valley of California is an agricultural powerhouse producing nearly 50% of all fruits and vegetables grown in the United States, including over 90% of popular items like almonds, carrots and table grapes.  But producing all those fruits and vegetables is extremely labor intensive requiring up to nearly 500,000 laborers each year.  The problem is that those jobs are extremely seasonal (see chart below) and extremely difficult requiring hours of back-breaking work in the 100-degree California sun.

Submitted by Andrew Napolitano via LewRockwell.com,

Over the New Year’s weekend, President Barack Obama’s chief policy adviser and closest strategist, Valerie Jarrett, told a talk show host that her boss would have a happy legacy because there was an absence of scandal in his administration.

 

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Profits are faltering for structural reasons that are not easily resolved..

The bedrock assumption of the Bull market is that corporate profits will keep rising indefinitely. Hiccups are allowed, but current stock market valuations are implicitly based on profits expanding.

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

The rising hysteria about Russia is best understood as fulfilling two needs for Official Washington: the Military Industrial Complex’s transitioning from the “war on terror” to a more lucrative “new cold war” – and blunting the threat that a President Trump poses to the neoconservative/liberal-interventionist foreign-policy establishment.