The Comey Confrontation: In Our New Third-World America, Corruption Is A Feature, Not A Bug

 

The WaPo Editorial Board's opinion (A) when Comey pronounced Clinton clean, and (B) after he found out she wasn't.

 

James Kirkpatrick

With its usual impressive Stalinist discipline, the Main Stream Media/ Democrat complex is promulgating the Party Line that the issue is not Hillary Clinton’s clearly felonious carelessness in handling classified information but FBI Director James Comey’s daring to mention the discovery of new emails. And of course it’s not yet clear what political impact this will have [Election Update: Comey Or Not, Trump Continues To Narrow Gap With Clinton, by Nate Silver, October 31, 2016]. But in the end, the election is going to come down to the fundamentals of politics – identity and demographics. The unmentionable fact: in our new Third World America, corruption no longer matters:

• Eric Holder, a archetypical representative of the Minority Occupation Government, he of the Fast and Furious gun scandal (which led to him being held in contempt of Congress) and one of the key instigators of the bloodbath plaguing American cities, is now being treated by the Main Stream Media as a respected elder statesman, furrowing his brow about Comey’s violation of American “tradition” [Comey Made ‘Serious Mistake,’ Former AG Holder Writes in Op-Ed, Bloomberg, October 30, 2016].
• Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who once recognized mass immigration’s negative impact on Americans, is now defending the candidate of Open Borders by declaring Comey may have violated the law, and, more explosively, that the FBI is covering up ties between Donald Trump and the Russian government [Harry Reid: Comey may have violated the Hatch Act, by Caroline Kenny, CNN, October 31, 2016]. Even Graham Vyse at the Left-wing New Republic, has called Reid’s actions “a disgrace” [Republicans are right: Harry Reid should be ashamed of himself, October 31, 2016].

In the must-win state of North Carolina, Hillary Clinton is counting on strong minority turnout and new residents, Yankee and immigrant, to overwhelm Trump voting conservatives. She recently used a visit by Michelle Obama to help turn out her (black) base. Albert Hunt at Bloomberg smirks:

Demographics are destiny in this purple state. In 2008, a little more than half of the voters were born in-state and Obama was defeated among that group; he won by taking those that had moved to North Carolina. This year, more than half of the electorate will be voters who’ve moved to the state, and a good percentage will be college-educated. Both characteristics advantage Democrats.
[North Carolina Is The Real Bellwether State, October 30, 2016]

Clinton’s supporters already know she is corrupt. They just don’t care [CBS Battleground Poll: Reaction to Latest Clinton Email News Breaks Down Along Party Lines, CBS, October 30, 2016]. Corruption isn’t going to discourage them from voting for her any more than it stops African-Americans from monolithically supporting candidates who join “the conscience of the Congress,” the Congressional Black Caucus, that get arrested for corruption a few years later.
Many in the FBI do care. The organization is apparently at war with itself about how to respond to Clintonian sleaze. [FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe, by Devlin Barrett, The Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2016]
Note, however, the background to this civil war: the pressure on the agency to succumb to the Diversity Uber Alles mantra which has already gutted the Justice Department. It was only a few months ago that FBI Director Comey called the lack of diversity within the FBI and the growing number of white special agents a “crisis”. [FBI Director Comey Calls Agency’s Lack of Diversity a ‘Crisis,’ by Devlin Barrett, The Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2016]
The Politically Correct agenda from which Comey failed to protect his own agents could be one of the hidden factors driving what analysts are calling a “revolt” by disaffected FBI agents against him—essentially forcing him into reopening the investigation. [Exclusive: Resignation letters piling up from disaffected FBI agents, his wife urging him to admit he was wrong , by Ed Klein, Daily Mail, October 30, 2016]
But if this revolt is suppressed, we can already see what a reconstituted, “diversified” FBI will look like by examining Jeh Johnson’s Department of Homeland Security: it spends its days importing new threats to Americans rather than protecting us.
Of course, MSM journalists, the self-proclaimed check on government corruption, are rushing to defend the status quo. In the Bizarro World media culture of The Current Year, a taped private conversation featuring Donald Trump talking bawdy about women years ago is cutting-edge journalism [Martin Baron: ‘We took Donald Trump seriously from the beginning,’ by James Silver, The Guardian, October 30, 2016]. But an investigation into official corruption is inappropriate.
Effeminate hysteric Isaac Chotiner at Slate is infuriated such questions are even being raised when the MSM should be doing more important things, like calling Trump racist. “[T]he entire press corps has shifted its focus to a relatively minor issue at a time when Donald Trump remains the primary threat to American democracy,” he shrieks. “Journalism is about choosing what to cover as much as it is deciding how to cover something” [Donald Trump Is on the Ballot Next Week. Why Are We Talking About Emails? October 31, 2016].
Leftist columnist E.J. Dionne suggests Comey’s actions were “appeasement” and warns, “History shows appeasing bullies never works” [The Costs of Comey’s Appeasement, Real Clear Politics, October 31, 2016].
Thus investigating corruption is one step away from Literally Hitler!
Consider the revealing jokes made by shills such as Michael Moore and Bill Maher.
Maher sneered:

“I don’t know what they’re going to find and I don’t care. She’s got a server in her basement? I don’t care if she’s got JonBenet Ramsey in her basement, I’m still not voting for Donald Trump.”
[Bill Maher rips Anthony Weiner over Hillary Clinton email investigation, by Christopher Rosen, EW, October 29, 2016]

And Moore who inadvertently provided one of the best viral ads for The Donald’s candidacy when he described a potential Trump Administration as the ultimate “f*** you” to elites, nonetheless wants the unemployed workers he ostensibly champions to suck it up and vote for the woman who helped destroy their lives, saying he hopes Hillary Clinton did kill Vince Foster because that’s “badass” .
[Michael Moore in surprise “Movie” called “Trumpland”: Hate Hillary? Vote for Her Anyway, by Roger Friedman, Showbiz 411, October 18, 2016]
Corruption is justified in the eyes of the American Left because of the larger meta-narrative which drives the entire movement. Trump is seen as a kind of tribal leader of the privileged, masculine, European-American patriarchy responsible for the ills of the world [Beyond the pale: White privilege thy name is Donald Trump, by Chauncey Devega, Salon, October 12, 2016]. Stopping him by any means necessary is inherently moral and justified.
Hillary Clinton, the wife of the former president, the pro-war darling of the Democratic (and much of the Republican) Establishment, the candidate of Wall Street and the Ruling Class, is thus transformed into a heroic figure somehow Fighting The Power.
Leftists like Noam Chomsky, who have spent their entire careers ostensibly challenging corporate liberalism, are nonetheless begging their followers to vote for its exemplar [Chomsky: I’d “absolutely” vote for Hillary Clinton, by Nolan McCaskill, Politico, January 25, 2016]
Celebrities who traffic in degeneracy and pseudo-edgy rebellious posturing unashamedly declare their solidarity with the Democratic nominee without fearing they are endangering either their image or hers. [Whores of Babylon, by Hunter Wallace, Occidental Dissent, October 30, 2016. Warning: NSFW].
Bringing up issues of corruption or profiteering is actually an immoral act on behalf of the accuser—because you are providing aid and comfort to racist forces.
For example, reporter Michael Tracey, who has passionately condemned Clinton’s history of corruption and war-mongering, is consistently accused of being part of the Alt Right even though he has specifically condemned Donald Trump (and may well not be a friend of VDARE.com!) [Why I Do Not Support Donald Trump: A Brief Personal History, by Michael Tracey, Medium, October 12, 2016].
Can corruption stop Crooked Hillary? No more than it stops Democrats from automatically winning the black vote by margins last seen in Baathist Iraq. In an age of identity politics and intensifying Cultural Marxist totalitarianism, questions of “good government” fade to irrelevance.
And as the American Left blithely declares its indifference to criminality, self-identified conservatives who are concerned about this “rule of law” we hear so much about need to start confronting a hard truth: First World standards of government can only last in a country with First World demographics.
 

http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-comey-confrontation-in-our-new-third-world-america-corruption-is-a-feature-not-a-bug

The Economy's Coal Mine Canary

 

A downturn in the restaurant industry could spell recession.

The restaurant industry saw a 2.8% decline in business this past fiscal year, and turned in its weakest performance since 2009. Economic analyst Paul Westra sees the downturn as a looming “restaurant recession.” The Wall Street Journal reports that “in the last 10 months, eight major restaurant companies … have filed for bankruptcy.” So what’s to blame for the decline? The usual culprit is an increase in the price of gasoline leading to increased food prices. However, gas prices have declined significantly for over a year now. Instead, it appears that the number one reason is ObamaCare. According to a Civic Science survey of Americans, of those who ate fast food regularly, there was a cutback of 47% due to rising health insurance costs. In other words, Americans are really beginning to feel ObamaCare’s pinch on their pocketbooks. (That’s not to mention restaurant owners themselves.) An April survey conducted by the National Restaurant Association found that nearly 45% of Americans are eating out less than they prefer.
Even some Democrats acknowledge the mounting costs of ObamaCare. Minnesota Democrat Governor Mark Dayton recently stated, “The Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable to increasing numbers of people.” Bill Clinton called it “the craziest thing in the world” where Americans “wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half.” The truth is, it never was affordable — by design, as its architect, Jonathan Gruber, recently remarked. Unfortunately for the nation, the ObamaCare-created “restaurant recession” is the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” for the rest of U.S. economy. Many economists now fear another recession on the horizon as ObamaCare’s impact is felt across the broader economy. The number of Americans who hate this law will only continue to grow.

https://patriotpost.us/posts/45649

Pope says he believes ban on female priests is forever

The Lefties are going to hate him for this. The Left will support the Catholic Church only so long as the Catholic Church supports the Left’s “social justice” agenda.

 

==============================================================

Pope Francis said on Tuesday he believes the Roman Catholic Church's ban on women becoming priests is forever and will never be changed, in some of his most definitive remarks on the issue.
He was speaking aboard a plane taking him back to Rome from Sweden, in the freewheeling news conference with reporters that has become a tradition of his return flights from trips abroad.
A Swedish female reporter noted that the head of the Lutheran Church who welcomed him in Sweden was a woman, and then asked if he thought the Catholic Church could allow women to be ordained as ministers in coming decades.
"St. Pope John Paul II had the last clear word on this and it stands, this stands," Francis said.
Francis was referring to a 1994 document by Pope John Paul that closed the door on a female priesthood. The Vatican says this teaching is an infallible part of Catholic tradition.
The reporter then pressed the pope, asking: "But forever, forever? Never, never?
Francis responded: "If we read carefully the declaration by St. John Paul II, it is going in that direction."
Francis has previously said that the door to women's ordination is closed, but proponents of a female priesthood are hoping that a future pope might overturn the decision, particularly because of the shortage of priests around the world.
The Catholic Church teaches that women cannot be ordained priests because Jesus willingly chose only men as his apostles. Those calling for women priests say he was only following the norms of his time.
In August, Francis set up a commission to study the role of women deacons in early Christianity, raising hopes among equality campaigners that women could one day have a greater say in the 1.2 billion-member Church.
Deacons, like priests, are ordained ministers and must be men. They cannot celebrate Mass, the Catholic Church's central rite, but they are allowed to preach and teach in the name of the Church, and to baptise and conduct wake and funeral services.
The Church barred women from becoming deacons centuries ago.
Scholars debate the precise role of women deacons in the early Church. Some say they were ordained to minister only to other women, for instance in baptismal immersion rites. Others believe they were on a par with male deacons.
(Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/pope-says-he-believes-ban-on-female-priests-is-forever/ar-AAjHmi9?li=BBnbfcL&ocid=spartandhp

Vox Popoli: "Meritocracy" in America

 

Thomas Frank at The Guardian observes the way the Podesta emails reveal how America's ruling class really operates:

This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for themselves or their kids, points us toward the most fundamental thing we know about the people at the top of this class: their loyalty to one another and the way it overrides everything else. Of course Hillary Clinton staffed her state department with investment bankers and then did speaking engagements for investment banks as soon as she was done at the state department. Of course she appears to think that any kind of bank reform should “come from the industry itself”. And of course no elite bankers were ever prosecuted by the Obama administration. Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that the people at the top tier of American life all know each other. They are all engaged in promoting one another’s careers, constantly.

Everything blurs into everything else in this world. The state department, the banks, Silicon Valley, the nonprofits, the “Global CEO Advisory Firm” that appears to have solicited donations for the Clinton Foundation. Executives here go from foundation to government to thinktank to startup. There are honors. Venture capital. Foundation grants. Endowed chairs. Advanced degrees. For them the door revolves. The friends all succeed. They break every boundary.

But the One Big Boundary remains. Yes, it’s all supposed to be a meritocracy. But if you aren’t part of this happy, prosperous in-group – if you don’t have John Podesta’s email address – you’re out.

I don't so much mind the corruption and nepotism. It has always been thus, in every human culture. Francis Fukuyama has even coined a term, repatrimonialization, to describe the process, and in his excellent The Origins of Political Order, argues that one of the chief challenges of a society, and one of the causes of the rise and fall of civilizations, is the never-ending battle between the aristocratic class to increase its wealth and privileges at the expense of the common people, and pass them on to its children, and the state, which attempts to interfere with that process.

In the USA, the state, and the people, have clearly lost that battle, because the financial aristocrats captured the throne, which has historically allied with the common people against the aristocracies.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/11/meritocracy-in-america.html

Democrats Playing Class Card To Split the White Vote

Actor Thom Hanks (net worth $350 million) mocks working class whites on Saturday Night Live

 

by Clayton Bishop

(For the purposes of this blog, since the Main Stream Media is openly acting as the mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, I will refer to both the Democratic Party and the MSM as “Democrats”)
Democrat strategy for winning national elections: split and depress the white vote, because whites still comprise most of the electorate [There Are More White Voters Than People Think. That’s Good News for Trump by Nate Cohn, The New York Times, June 9, 2016]. Of course Democrats overwhelmingly win the votes of minorities:  71% of Hispanics, 73% of Asians and over 93% of blacks voted for Obama in 2012. But the critical component of Obama’s victory: even though some 59% of whites voted for Romney, white turnout, which has been declining since 2004, was extremely low at only 64.1%.
To split whites, Democrats notoriously play the “Woman Card.” Less noticed is their “Class Card”—they pit working-class whites against upper-middle-class whites. In 2016, immigration is playing a role: upper-middle-class whites are portrayed as the “good guys;” working-class whites are the “bad guys.”
Needless to say, Democrats actually have as much contempt for upper-middle-class whites  as they do for working-class whites [Check your privilege, upper middle class By Richard Reeves, Washington Post, October 5, 2016]. But they play to the egos of the upper-middle-class whites by flattering them about their educational status and “enlightened” views on immigration, simultaneously disparaging working-class whites as “uneducated”, “ill-informed,”  “low-information” racists and bigots. They purposely ignore the fact that upper-middle-class whites are largely insulated from the negative consequences of immigration policy. Upper-middle-class whites are receptive to this tactic because they want to be viewed as one of “the good guys,” eager to join in on MSM-generated elite snickering.
Once the minority population grows large enough, the Democrats won’t have to employ this trick any longer, There simply will not be enough white voters for Republicans to even compete in national elections.
Republicans need both groups of whites. When the Republicans nominated Romney in 2012, the upper-middle-class whites got their candidate, but the working-class felt left out and largely stayed home in critical swing states—what Steve Sailer dubbed the “Slippery Six.”
Donald Trump is facing the reverse effect: strong support among working-class whites. lagging with upper-middle-class whites who have been gaslighted by the Democrats into abandoning Trump. [Trump May Become The First Republican In 60 Years To Lose White College Graduates, by Harry Enten, FiveThirtyEight, July 6, 2016]
Republicans have done nothing to counter this: in fact, GOP leaders are blatantly colluding with it.
It is incredible that Republicans waste so much effort on fruitless minority outreach while either ignoring or actively subverting any attempt to appeal to white-working class. Republican pundits like Rick Wilson have convinced themselves that they can belittle the backbone of Trump’s support and somehow still create a winning coalition. Of course, the only reason Wilson is regularly featured on The Bill Maher Show and published in The Daily Beast is that he’s doing the Democrats’ work for them.
The GOP must abandon their arrogant rhetoric demonizing working-class white voters, embrace Immigration Patriotism to get them onboard— and stop letting the Democrats fool them into splitting their core voters.

http://www.vdare.com/posts/democrats-playing-class-card-to-split-the-white-vote

Vox Popoli: The last days of #NeverTrump

 

No matter how the election turns out, the #NeverTrump crowd have permanently discredited themselves:

Now that we seem to be having a non-stop stream of evidence (as if we needed it) that the Obama and forthcoming Clinton administrations are basically a crime syndicate, stretching from the Department of Justice, through the FBI, and into the IRS -- and an international one at that, with tentacles, via the Clinton Foundation, all the way to Moscow and Riyadh -- it's time for the NeverTrumpers to take a final look at their position.

Do they want to enable such a crime syndicate to be running the U.S. government? And if so, how do they expect it ever to end, if not now? Through litigation? Under whose auspices? Do they not think, if Hillary is elected, that the paramount goal of her administration will be to further entrench the syndicate, making it impermeable to change, turning the USA into the ghost of itself? These things happen in history.

Not simple, is it?

If I were writing my book on moral narcissism today, I would have to add a chapter on the NeverTrumpers, because -- like it or not -- their stance, while once idealistic, at this point seems rather too substantially based on self-regard. They want to have "clean hands" to avoid any tarnishing by the unseemly Mr. Trump.

Well, fine. But where does that leave the rest of us? Where does that leave the country?

I don't know how it is going to be possible for anyone on the right to take the cucks and neocons seriously again. I certainly hope conservatives will show better sense than to listen to them or give them credence in the future.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-last-days-of-nevertrump.html

Will Hillary Clinton Be Taken Down By Cookstoves? -

 

 

 by Anonymous Conservative

She used her influence at State to advance the distribution of a cheap dinky cookstove that broke down and used dirty fuel:

If these cookstoves don’t achieve the stated goals, why is Clinton such a proponent? As Christine Lakatos, whom I have worked with on dozens of green-energy, crony-corruption reports and who alerted me to this dirty story, found in her Green Corruption File report that Alliance work was a high priority during Clinton’s time as secretary of state. The project spanned eleven federal agencies and, so far, totals more than $114 million.

Clinton’s involvement risks, as the Washington Times points out: “Raising questions about where she drew the line between official business and aiding the family charity run by her husband and daughter.”

The answer to Clinton’s involvement, and the possible conflict of interest with her role at the State Department and “aiding the family charity,” deserves further investigation. But a hint can be found on the Alliances’ own website: carbon credits. It states: “In addition to being one of the fastest growing offset types in the voluntary market, cookstoves credits are selling for some of the highest prices observed in the voluntary carbon market.”

If Clinton becomes president, her energy policies will likely enact a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax—which would suddenly make her cookstove project profitable. Rather than helping bring modern power to the world’s poor, she’s, as Kreutzer calls it, “prolonging energy poverty for millions upon millions in the developing world.”

And that is the dirty story behind Clinton’s clean cookstove campaign.

This is just one case they know about.

Again, rabbits see the world differently. This was a great way to facilitate a world of free resources for Hillary and her foundation. That was the only metric her amygdala judged it by.

Unfortunately for her, amygdala deficiency also entails an inability to foresee future consequences. Now many are talking about a RICO case, and Trump is about to take the Presidency.

It is tough being a rabbit in a K-selected world.

Share this:

http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/will-hillary-clinton-be-taken-down-by-cookstoves/

When It Comes To Household Income, Sweden & Germany Rank With Kentucky

 | Zero Hedge

It has nearly reached the point of dogma with many leftists that European countries enjoy higher standards of living thanks to more government regulation and more social benefits. What the data really suggests, however, is that even after social benefits are incorporated into the income data, the median American still has a higher income than most European countries.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-31/when-it-comes-household-income-sweden-germany-rank-kentucky

Replacing a Lightbulb with a Drone Is a Fun Way to Break Lightbulbs

 

Of course one day soon the drone WILL be able to replace the light bulb.

=================================================================

 

There are better ways to replace a broken lightbulb, but where's the fun without a challenge?

http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/drones/a23515/replacing-lightbulb-drone/

Vox Popoli: She's in trouble

 

And the Democrats know it. This isn't something that the media can simply paper over:

Hillary Clinton’s allies were cast into a state of anger and disbelief over the FBI’s stunning announcement that it is reviewing new emails “pertinent” to Clinton’s use of a private email server. That shocking development — revealed in a letter to Congress by FBI Director James Comey — pushed some of Clinton’s allies past the boiling point.

They said they were “dumbfounded” by the revelation that the new FBI review may have been spurred by a separate investigation into Anthony Weiner sending lewd texts to a minor. Weiner is separated from wife Huma Abedin, one of Clinton’s closest aides.

And they worried that Clinton’s unconventional email arrangement had finally caught up to her and might imperil her presidential bid less than two weeks before Election Day.

“I'm livid, actually,” one Clinton surrogate told The Hill. “This has turned into malpractice. It's an unforced error at this point. I have no idea what Comey is up to but the idea this email issue is popping back up again is outrageous. It never should have occurred in the first place. Someone somewhere should have told her no. And they didn't and now we're all paying the price.”

And October isn't over yet....

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/10/shes-in-trouble.html

The two reasons it really is harder to get a job than it used to be

 

It used to be pretty easy for most people in America to get a job. But no longer.

It used to be that jobs returned swiftly after a recession. But since the 1990s, the labor market seems to have lost much of its natural buoyancy. The past three downturns caused extended periods of underemployment. Years after economic output had fully rebounded, there were still fewer people at work.
Economists have struggled to explain the forces behind these so-called “jobless” recoveries. A popular view is that recessions are times when companies clean house and find ways to become more efficient. In recent decades, that has often meant replacing employees with computers. This could explain why the jobs we lose in a recession don’t seem to return anymore: The positions became obsolete.
New evidence says there might be another reason for these stubborn spells of low employment: After a recession, the remaining job openings may become harder to fill because employers start to demand people with better skills, who can adapt to new technologies in order to be more productive.
In other words, it’s not just that many jobs go extinct during a recession. Even the surviving jobs sometimes shift beyond recognition — and beyond the reach of many.
These are the jobs that are never coming back
Both of these theories are significant because they link jobless recoveries to another unsettling trend — the replacement of manpower by machines, which has contributed to the hollowing out of the middle class.
A striking chart comes from economists Nir Jaimovich and Henry Siu, who find that job losses in recent recessions came almost entirely from occupations defined by “routine” tasks. These are the modest but sturdy occupations that once formed the bedrock of the American middle class — think secretaries, bank tellers and machine operators.
In the past, employment in those kinds of routine jobs would always snap back after recessions. But starting with the 1991 downturn, many of these occupations started to vanish permanently, as this chart from the economists shows.

© Provided by WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post Source: http://www.thirdway.org/report/jobless-recoveries

Non-routine professions, on the other hand, have been much hardier. These are, by definition, the jobs that are harder to automate. In today’s society, they tend to be either highly paid or lowly paid: analysts and janitors, lawyers and home health aides, Silicon Valley programmers and Starbucks baristas.
What these workers have in common is that they all have to think flexibly and creatively throughout the day, whether that involves debugging a section of code or helping a customer choose between different kinds of seasonal lattes.

© Provided by WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post

And these are the jobs that are evolving
But it’s not just that many automatable jobs are disappearing. The latest research finds that all our jobs seem to be more demanding of intellectual and social skills.
We know this thanks to new work analyzing millions of online job listings before and after the Great Recession. If it seems like it’s harder and harder to get a job lately, in part that’s because employers have gotten much pickier since the recession. Increasingly, they are looking for better-educated workers with more advanced qualifications — which might be one reason companies have been so slow to fill openings in recent years.
There are two ways to interpret this trend. Economists Alicia Sasser Modestino, Daniel Shoag and Joshua Ballance believe that employers became choosy during the Great Recession in order to take advantage of the abundance of people looking for work and to screen out low-achievers. They call the process “opportunistic upskilling,” and they have shown that it happens whenever there’s a glut of labor.
In a recent paper, they find that the troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, which periodically brought waves of veterans back to the United States, caused employers to raise job requirements in industries such as logistics, where veterans are disproportionately likely to look for work.
The same phenomenon seems to have occurred nationwide during the recession. It makes basic economic sense, Modestino said. With so many job-seekers, employers could afford to raise the bar. “I’ve sat in a room where people were writing these job postings expecting Jesus to walk through the door,” she said. “Recruiters saw the recession as a great time to acquire new talent.”
But economists Brad Hershbein and Lisa Kahn say that something else is also going on. They believe that the recession also accelerated how technology is changing how we work. Companies aren’t raising the bar because they want to but because they have to, in order to remain competitive.
“You’ll see the shift among salespeople, who are now required to use big data analytics to better target their clients,” Kahn said. Or quality control operators, she said, who are moving into more strategic roles now that machine vision technology has taken over watching production lines.
In a new working paper, the economists find that in areas most affected by the recession, job requirements rose permanently. Kahn and Hershbein looked not only at the desired education and experience levels but also for keywords involving critical thinking and computer skills.
Increasingly, employers have been asking for people with the ability to perform research, do their own analyses and make decisions. This chart from the paper shows how in the hardest-hit areas, the recession caused employers to be about two percentage points (or 12 percent) more likely to mention critical thinking in their job listings.

© Provided by WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post

By 2015, the unemployment rate had fallen to nearly its pre-recession low, and workers were becoming harder and harder to find. Yet Hershbein and Kahn find that employers remained picky about people’s skills and experience. This suggests that the new skill requirements weren’t optional or opportunistic; they reflected how the jobs themselves had become more challenging.
What this means
The big picture here is that people need to develop skills that will complement what computers are bringing to the table now and in the future. Recessions have become excruciating in recent decades because they are causing longer periods of unemployment. In part, that’s because some jobs now just disappear permanently. And in part that’s because some jobs are changing permanently. We can ease both of these problems with better training and retraining.
It’s a moving target. Hershbein believes that everyone should be preparing for the day when technology comes for their profession. “People need to constantly be learning and keeping their skills up to date as technology changes and evolves,” he said. “If you learned how to do one thing and do it well for 15 or 20 years, and that’s all you really learned how to do — you’re going to be hard-pressed when you lose your job.”

http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/the-two-reasons-it-really-is-harder-to-get-a-job-than-it-used-to-be/ar-AAjw2pP?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp

Hillary Clinton demands answers and Democrats call foul as FBI reopens email investigation over files found on sexting congressman's computer

 

The FBI has announced it is investigating new emails sent by Hillary Clinton on a private server during her time as Secretary of State, sending her campaign into panic mode just eleven days before the presidential election.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/28/fbi-probe-newly-discovered-hillary-clinton-emails-and-reopen-inv/

Economist On Rising ACA Costs: You're Going To Have 'Riots'

 

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – Economist Chris Butler discussed the rising cost of health insurance plans rising next year under the Affordable Care Act, saying he expects the populace to express more outrage as they learn they will be priced out of health care options.
Butler told Chris Stigall on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT to expect more public demonstrations of anger as prices move upward.
“Right now, I think you do have to say that A, it’s failing and that B, I think next year, you’re going to have a bunch of people that don’t get the subsidies that make the premiums a little bit more affordable that are just going to riot because it’s just too expensive for most people if you don’t qualify for subsidies.”
He stated he still objects to court rulings siding with the government requiring individuals to purchase insurance or pay a penalty.
“You can go back to the Supreme Court decision on this. I’m still shocked that we are being told that our constitution says that it is allowable to force to people to buy something. When I hear people talk about forcing them, not only to buy something, but to make the penalty stiffer if they don’t, I just get queasy.”
Butler also thinks there could be simple solutions to lower costs and cites buying plans across state lines as an example.
“Do you know what New Jersey is anticipating, their’s in considerably less, as I recall, than Pennsylvania, yet we are not allowed to cross state borders to buy insurance. There are a lot of states, by the way, that have big cities on borders that are actually going to have huge increases but they border on a state that is quite reasonable in its growth in premium costs. We talked about that while all of this was being discussed back in 2010, some of the quick fixes you could make that would have a difference to our healthcare system, that was one of them, allow people to buy insurance across state lines to help equalize some of this stuff.”

http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2016/10/28/economist-aca-costs-riots/