"Economic Expansion"

There are mornings when I'll feel drawn to a headline like this. I don't mean to pick on this firm or this analyst, particularly, but this here is American-style capitalism distilled to its purest, most venomous essence. Net:

After nine straight years of economic growth -- but actually after almost four decades in which capital assets and corporate profits have grown almost uninterrupted, while wages of working people have stagnated at near-zero growth rates -- Wall Street sees incipient "wage gains" not as an abatement in America's savage inequality but purely as a threat to corporate profitability.

After lax accounting and corporate governance standards led to a continuous stream of corporate malfeasance in the Bush years and, ultimately, the 2008 financial meltdown, the orgy of corporate risk-taking is firing up all over again. Underwriting standards, tightened after the Bush-Paulson bank bailouts of 2007-08, have been relaxed again. Another credit deterioration is coming.

Bad news: Wall Street likes the brutally regressive Trump tax reform plan. Good news: Wall Street doesn't think it has a chance of passing, at least not this year.

Wall Street is worried about the deteriorating situation on the Korean peninsula. But while the rest of us worry that Trump's idiotic bluster could inadvertently start a war that would cause 10 to 20 million casualties, Wall Street is worried about the impact on trade.

This is how Capital thinks. This report is basically bullish.

If you actually work for a living, you should invest in a pitchfork. Capitalism has built a great empire in the US. But. It. Has. Stopped. Working. For. You.

Gold leaf

Trump's Supreme Court Justice is in the same league as just about everything else Trump: Gold leaf on the surface, particle board underneath.

I just don't...

Analysis | America’s deadliest shooting incidents are getting much more deadly

washingtonpost.com

I'm not a weapons expert. I don't know the terminology. But one man was able to quietly accumulate the equipment to kill 50 people and wound hundreds more in one act. That seems to have included multiple fully-automatic rifles, with hollow-point bullets that are scientifically engineered to do the greatest possible internal damage to anyone they hit. One apparently quiet white introvert was able to check into the Mandalay Bay with that arsenal. I refuse to accept that our constitution, or anyone's constitution, entitles anyone to amass that kind of firepower. This is a recipe for an escalating bloodbath as anomie spreads through our angry, fragmented, racially divided, frustrated and increasingly unjust society. Whatever pushed this guy over the edge, there's plenty of it to go around in America. I'm not sure I know how to live here any more.