ARE YOU SEEING WHAT I’M SEEING? A disappearing middle class.

Ziv take the blinkers off and shed the cotton wool you've rapped yourself in. There's a high probability of some serious grief coming our way.

The middle east is a real tinder box at the moment and your kith and kin are smack in the middle stirring the pot flat out. I don't expect anything to happen until after the US presidential election if at all but the odds of a strike against Iran if that idiot Romney gets in will go through the roof. Then again the pressure on Obama from your reli's is no small thing either. If that war monger Netanyahu gets his way it'll be all on for young and old and your people get to revisit holocaust version 2.

I hope not because all the big boys have got their fingers in this pot. Meanwhile I'll hope for the best prepare for the worst. 

Taking things out of context again. What?  your family and their history aren't intertwined in the region. 'Your people' refers to those  connections with your birth place and the wider Jewish/Israeli  community you have. You don't get to choose your heritage as far as I know and the term 'your people' is just a phrase. Nothing sinister in it.

The starting point of the lecture is about the single most important economic shift in the second half of the 20th century in the United States. And that is that millions of mothers have been poured into the pool of the full time work force.

Distinguished law scholar Elizabeth Warren teaches contract law, bankruptcy, and commercial law at Harvard Law School.

She is an outspoken critic of America’s credit economy, which she has linked to the continuing rise in bankruptcy among the middle-class.

In this lecture Elizabeth Warren is basically talking about “higher risks, lower rewards and a shrinking safety net,” through historical data analysis and interpretation.

The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class (57:38)

March 8 2007

And its why I keep saying there is no recovery and will be no recovery in the US. The migration of wealth has accelerated over the last 20 years and is continuing to speed up. 

All those rushing to go hard into the US RE market are going to start wondering why they can't get rental yields up and why CG is only viable if the market is constantly supported with QE and fiscal policy thrown in with a good dollop of industry misinformation and out and out fraud.

If you forget your history you're doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.  The graphic says it all.

The scary thing is it's not just the US. Everywhere is the same. I've lost track of them now but there was a good white paper put out by one of the large global institutions, IMF I think, about how wealth distribution can mute or drive an economy. The overwhelming evidence suggested wealth accumulation at the very top could predispose a country to revolution if the size of the group within the poverty class became too large as percentage of the whole. French and Russian revolutions where classic examples of this.

In the US your talking 50% of the population is either in poverty or borderline poverty and the next 20% are at risk should something go seriously wrong. In the last decade you have an increase in food stamp use from 15 – 47million. That's a staggering figure. 50% of Americans can't put $2000 together with 2 weeks, 40% have CC debt larger than savings and so it goes.

They now waffle on about things they call "Growth corridors". What they should be focusing on is how to prevent or restore the economic wastelands that continue to spread throughout the US.

You should read this book;

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (a review by By PHILIPP MEYER NYT)

Anyone who grew up near a postindustrial area — who has seen a middle-class town become a pocket of destitution — will not find any one chapter in this book too shocking. What is shocking is the degree to which this depth of poverty is found everywhere, from rural Indian reservations to near-slave conditions in Florida tomato fields. These are not pleasant stories. They are the very sort of thing we all prefer to forget so that we can focus on our daily lives, and this makes it all the more important that they are recorded.

and if you think the US won't go the way of the French or Russians then your betting against history. 

Hedges is a serious writer and thinker, and as in his seminal work, “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” he is brilliant at depicting human life at the extremes of existence — from war to grinding poverty — and explaining the effects on the human psyche. But if in that book he was more like a teacher, in this one he is high priest. We’re given little room to form our own opinions. “There are no excuses left,” he says in the final chapter. “Either you join the revolt or you stand on the wrong side of history.”

Spanish military are openly discussing a coup d'état while Catalonia seems hell bent on secession. Here it comes. The last war was preceded by the Spanish Civil war. 

Déjà vu?