United States

There has been an odd shift when it comes to US sentiment toward home ownership: while in the past, the higher home prices rose the greater the demand was for housing (leading ultimately to the housing debt bubble of 2006), this time around we are getting increasingly more frequent indications of just the opposite.

Some have started to notice: as we noted one week ago, in its traditionally cheerful assessment of the US housing market, the NAR's Larry Yun snuck in an unexpected warning:

Submitted by Claire Bernish via TheAntiMedia.org,

“I think Smedley Butler was onto something,” Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former George W. Bush administration heavyweight, told Salon in an exclusive interview.

Major General Smedley Butler earned the highest rank in the U.S. Marine Corps, accumulating numerous accolades as he helped lead the United States through decades of war. He later became an ardent critic of such militarism and imperialism.

Herding cats is a notoriously difficult task, but Janet Yellen served notice on Tuesday that no matter what emanates from other members of the US monetary politburo, there’s only one house view and that’s her’s. “As she spoke, I couldn’t help picturing a mother lion swatting her misbehaving cubs back into line,” Bloomberg’s Richard Breslow wrote this morning.

While there’s something disturbing about picturing the “diminutive” Fed chair as a “mother lion,” the analogy seems apt.

At the end of the day, it was all about the dollar.

The LA Times have uncovered evidence that both CIA and Pentagon-backed militias in Syria have been ordered to fight each other, exposing the fake U.S. war in the region.  According to the article: The fighting has intensified over the last two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other while maneuvering through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed.