Labor

The FBI have released new information that implicate themselves and the Memphis Police Department in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., on the 50th anniversary of the civil rights leaders’ death.  The admission by both agencies suggests that the agencies themselves or members of the agencies facilitated and directly caused Dr King’s death. Thefreethoughtproject.com reports: During a rainstorm on February 1, 1968, two black sanitation workers in Memphis lost their lives when the truck’s compactor accidentally triggered.

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

This erosion of a self-employed, independent middle class was an important pre-condition for the collapse of Rome and the French Revolution.

I have devoted many blog posts to the erosion of the middle class, for the specific reason that when the middle class--the layers of the economy between the Power Elites and landless laborers/state dependents--erodes away, the nation/empire is destabilized and descends into crisis.

After the worst two-week start to US stock trading in history, bulls need some cheering up. So here, courtesy of Citi's Brent Donnelly, is some levity: this is what China's Curriculum Vitae would look like if it was applying for a job. It is also a great summary for those who need a simple cheat sheet of where China was, where it is, and where it is going.

So would you hire it?

One of the recurring themes in Obama's final State of the Union address was describing the strength of the economic recovery as witnessed by the number of job gains over the past 6 (if not exactly 7) years, clearly a purely quantitative metric. There was no discussion of the qualitative component of these job gains for one simple reason: as we have explained for years, the bulk of new labor has gone to undereducated, minimum wage (and often part-time) workers.

Brazilian civil servants have discovered the world’s oldest living man still going on strong at the age of 131 and drawing a pension. The man lives with his wife who is 69 years his junior, eats three meals a day and has three children, including a daughter aged thirty. Mail Online reports: The Guinness Book of Records recognises 112-year-old Yasutaro Koide from Japan as the oldest person alive. And Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who died aged 122 in 1997, holds the record for the world’s longest living person.