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The Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly estimate of jobs openings showed another decline in unfilled positions in November, leading a series of key data reports that could suggest the job market is weakening further. The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, known as Jolts, showed that around 8.79 million positions went unfilled over the month of November. That's down from the revised total of 8.85 million recorded in October and the lowest overall tally since March 2021. The headline Jolts tally hit an all-time high of 12.027 million in March 2023. The quits rate, which tracks workers leaving their jobs...

Introduction We are living in a time of grassroots demands to transform our built environment and our relationships with one another and the earth.2 To abolish prisons and police, rent, debt, borders, and billionaires.3 To decommodify housing and healthcare and to decolonize land.4 To exercise more collective ownership over our collectively generated wealth.5 Some of us are reimagining the state. Others are dreaming of moving beyond it.6 But these are more than dreams. These are demands for a democratic political economy. These demands increased in volume this year as the violence of policing continued, the fires burned in California and...

Try to buy anything these days – at a grocery or department store, at a discounter or specialty shop alike, from low end to high end – and you will likely have the same experience, especially in the busy hours of lunch hour, the early evening after work, and of course the weekend: You are going to stand in line longer than you remember from before the so-called pandemic of 2020. Why the difference? Why has so much changed in just a few short years? We all have the same experience – more often in blue states than in red,...

Minimum-wage workers in 22 states are going to see more money in their paychecks in the new year. Those increases will affect an estimated 9.9 million workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which estimates that those bumped wages will add up to an additional $6.95 billion in pay.

With 60% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, most U.S. households could use a raise. But an arbitrary, one-size-fits-all increase in the minimum wage imposed by lawmakers in Washington would only exacerbate the struggles of these households. According to a new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, proposed legislation to increase the federal minimum wage to $17 per hour by 2029, a jump of 134%, would reduce employment and increase prices, interest rates, and federal deficits. Any one of these consequences of the so-called Raise the Wage Act of 2023 would be bad news; all four together would add insult...

Legal groups and individuals have shaken the foundation of diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring practices across the country with dozens of lawsuits and civil rights complaints. Sometimes, hiring based on race or gender is used as an incentive program to reward hiring managers who meet quotas. Such is allegedly the case with IBM, whose executives have been exposed for incentivizing the hiring of "underrepresented" minorities and genders. Doing so "leads to a plus on your bonus," said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna. IBM was subsequently hit with a federal civil rights complaint over race-based hiring practices. Leading the charge was former...

Twenty-two states are set to increase their minimum wages at the start of 2024. Come January 1, nine states as well as DC will have minimum wages of at least $15, according to an analysis by DailyMail.com. Washington State will introduce a minimum wage of $16.28 an hour, making it the nation's highest. Next is California which will have a minimum wage of $16.00 an hour. There is no state minimum wage law in five Southern states: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, or Tennessee. In those states minimum wages therefore default to the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour -...

CEO of IBM Arvind Krishna admits to using coercion to fire people and take away their bonuses unless they discriminate in the hiring process. “You got to move both forward by a percentage that leads to a plus on your bonus," Krishna said about hiring Hispanics, "and by the way if you lose, you lose part of your bonus.” After pulling ads from X for 'racism,' IBM chief Arvind Krishna says he will fire, demote or strip bonuses from execs who don't hire enough blacks, Hispanics — or hire too many Asians "Asians are not an underrepresented minority in tech...

Christmas is supposed to be the most wonderful time of year for toy manufacturers. But in Joe Biden’s economy, toy sales are suffering thanks to runaway inflation and other pressures, forcing one of the world’s largest toymakers to deliver lumps of coal to employees just ahead of December 25. Hasbro said this week that it is eliminating a whopping 1,100 jobs, or close to 20 percent of its workforce. The stunning announcement is on top of the 800 jobs the company slashed earlier this year. CEO Chris Cocks delivered the bad news in an employee memo filed with the SEC....

The Labor Department will provide a key piece to the increasingly complicated job market puzzle Friday when it publishes the hotly-anticipated November payroll report at 8:30am ET, but it's unlikely to fill out what has become a confounding issue on Wall Street. Bond markets are acting in a way that suggests both a serious near-term recession risk by bidding-up benchmark 10-year Treasury bonds, pushing their overall yield to multi-month lows, while at the same time keeping short-term rates elevated amid Federal Reserve vows to maintain its fight against inflation. That competing dynamic has widened the gap between 2-year and 10-year...

The New York City Police Department continues to see a massive wave of retirements and departures, shrinking the force to its smallest in decades, according to the New York Post. There have already been 2,516 departures from the NYPD this year and recruitment is so slow, and New York City Mayor Eric Adams' budget cuts are so deep, the next five police academy classes have been canceled, according to the report. The 2023 exodus is the fourth highest total thus far in the past decade and represents a 43% increase over the 2018 total, which is before massive crime influx...

19 months in a row! The Conference Board’s index of leading economic indicators has now fallen for 19 months in a row. When something happens for 19 consecutive months, that is definitely a trend. The economy is clearly in big trouble, and conditions are getting worse with each passing day. But the mainstream media continues to insist that the economy is doing just great. They tell us that inflation is low, but if it was still measured the way that it was back in 1980, the official rate of inflation would be well into double digit territory. And they tell...

Tucker Carlson, the far-right former Fox news host known for his incendiary takes, might have actually made himself the darling of liberal Gen Zers. During a recent appearance on comedian Theo Von’s “This Past Weekend” podcast, Carlson, 54, took an unexpected angle: Supporting young workers who are exasperated by thankless work. “I just so hate that culture that treats people like they're not people,” Carlson said. “And for what?" -snip- Carlson went on to reference a video posted by a recent college graduate that went viral on TikTok. The poster, struggling with time management and work-life balance, told viewers she...

Illegal Chinese marijuana grows have taken over much of rural Maine. The government is either incapable — or unwilling — to do anything about it. The Maine Wire has identified more than 100 properties that are part of a sprawling network of Chinese-owned sites operating as unlicensed, illicit cannabis growing operations in rural Maine. According to an unclassified memo from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) obtained by the Maine Wire, the illicit grows are operated by Asian Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs). The properties cover Somerset County, Penobscot County, Kennebec County, Franklin County, Androscoggin County, and Oxford County. The...

Recruitment and retention challenges have led the U.S. Coast Guard into a system-wide service retreat. A 3500-person shortfall—a nearly 10% shortage in the enlisted ranks—is forcing the Coast Guard to take ten cutters out of service, transfer five tugs to seasonal activation, and shutter 29 boat stations. The moves, couched as a bland “AY 24 Force Alignment Initiative”, present an unprecedented loss of maritime capability at a time when the United States is facing an array of complex challenges at sea. But the Coast Guard simply “cannot maintain the same level of operations” going forward. Behind the scenes, the service...

Well, here I am minding my own business, working on a boring venture capital post, when here comes the Bureau of Labor Statistics announcement of October jobs data. The BLS has been working toward a Nobel prize for fiction writing all year, but you can only carry that so far. Maybe they figured that everyone is distracted by Ukraine and Israel or just the latest TikTok videos, but their house of cards can only be towered upward so far, and today’s announcement begins the downfall to reality. “Expectations” were for 180,000 new jobs, according to the survey of businesses. Reality...

*The US economy is lurching toward a recession, according to Jeff Gundlach. *The DoubleLine Capital chief pointed to a "de-inverted" bond-yield curve and the rising unemployment rate as signs of a looming slump. *Layoffs are coming," he warned. The US economy is clearly headed toward a recession, veteran bond investor Jeff Gundlach has warned. The DoubleLine Capital CEO said Wednesday that the yield curve – a bond-market gauge that measures the gap between 2-year and 10-year Treasury yields – is signaling that a downturn is coming. "The shape of the yield curve is extremely unstable at this time," Gundlach told...

Privacy Notice An Alaska Airlines passenger inside the cockpit attempted to seize control of a plane headed from a Seattle airport to San Francisco on Sunday, the airline said. A pilot told air traffic controllers a person riding in the cockpit of flight 2059 attempted to turn off the aircraft's engines in flight. An airline's pilots, or pilots at other airlines, will occasionally ride a cockpit "jump seat" when traveling in an official capacity or commuting to another airport. The passenger, who has not been named, was an off-duty pilot and has been arrested by Port of Portland Police Department,...

President Joe Biden will speak about the surprising September jobs report on Friday, October 6. As Breitbart News reported, America added 336,000 jobs in September, while the unemployment rate stayed the same at 3.8 percent: The much-better-than-expected surge in employment puts pressure on the Federal Reserve to hike again at its two meeting that starts on the final day of October. The Fed decided at its last meeting in September to hold rates steady to see how earlier rate increases are affecting the economy. Prior to today, the market was pricing in around a 20 percent chance of a hike...

The US is experencing a slow down. The massive Federal government and Federal Reserve Covid stimulus has worn out and we are left with a sagging jobs report and soaring credit card delinquencies. After ADP’s reports printed almost perfectly in line with BLS last month (+177k vs +187k), all eyes are on today’s print, which was expected to decline to +150k. Instead it plunged to just +89k – that is the lowest jobs addition since Jan 2021. Credit Card Delinquency rates at small banks have reached 7.51%, the highest level ever recorded.