Free Republic

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts, As readers know, I have seen some optimism in voters support for Trump and Sanders as neither are members of the corrupt Republican and Democratic political establishments. Members of both political establishments enrich themselves by betraying the American people and serving only the interest of the One Percent. The American people are being driven into the ground purely for the sake of more mega-billions for a handful of super-rich people. Neither political party is capable of doing anything whatsoever about it, and neither will. The optimism that I see is that the public’s support of...

The white working class is a zombie that doesn’t know it’s dead. Or if it’s not fully zombified yet, its members are all too busy cleaning their AR-15s and posting racist comments on YouTube to vote for a progressive. That is, if they’re not already on the Trump bandwagon, which they probably are. At least that’s what the Democratic Party wants you to believe.

In cities across America, the middle class is hollowing out. A widening wealth gap is moving more households into either higher- or lower-income groups in major metro areas, with fewer remaining in the middle, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center. In nearly one-quarter of metro areas, middle-class adults no longer make up a majority, the Pew analysis found. That’s up from fewer than 10 percent of metro areas in 2000. Pew defines the middle class as households with incomes between two-thirds of median income and twice the median, adjusted for household size and the local...

(CNN)The forces of Occupy Wall Street, splintered and faded in the aftermath of their 2011 demonstrations, are getting the band back together to boost Bernie Sanders ahead of next week's critical New York primary. Nearly five years since Occupy was evicted from Zuccotti Park, blocks from the New York Stock Exchange in lower Manhattan, a coalition of organizers, labor leaders and progressive activists who lined up under the banner of "the 99 percent" are renewing their efforts in pursuit of a more traditional cause: Getting voters to the polls on April 19.

There is a story the media likes to tell about American economic and cultural history. It goes something like this: Once upon a time, decades ago, working-class Americans enjoyed a glide path to prosperity. Fathers and sons worked side-by-side at the mill or the plant or the quarry. They could expect high wages and lifetime employment. They could build and support families. Then, the mill closed. Jobs fled to China or automation rendered them superfluous. Families were cast upon a safety net shredded by heartless politicians, and with few prospects and no financial security, despair settled in... ...The Post’s piece...

A San Diego-area high school teacher has been suspended after a student recorded video of him browsing images of lingerie during class.

The Washington political establishment has hit the panic button. Not because they are afraid of any one individual or candidate, but because they are afraid of losing their own political power. The Washington political establishment has hit the panic button. This town is filled with well-intentioned people who believe they are doing the right thing, but far too many have lost their way after years in Washington. Politicians pay more attention to special interests groups and powerful lobbyists writing checks to their next campaign, than listening to the people back home who sent them here in the first place. This...

... In December, we never left Washington, D.C., until the day after Christmas. Never. Mr. Bush and his wife, Laura, would always depart the White House a few days before the holiday and hunker down at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland. After a few years, I asked a low-level White House staffer why. I still remember what she said: "So all of us can be with our families on Christmas." ... By the way, some years, I got holiday duty, which meant I was off to Waco, Texas, the day after Christmas. But once again, the Bush White...

People who disagree with Obama's policies have been smeared as racists, Islamaphobes, bible thumpers and gun clingers If he weren’t so busy driving golf balls on his latest sunny, multi million dollar Hawaiian holiday, and having the New York Times putting the finishing touches to his newfound sainthood, President Barack Hussein Obama would likely be throwing darts at smiling pictures of Donald J. Trump. The gall of a president who goes so far out of his way to racially divide Americans to pull the race card and accuse Trump of “exploiting the resentment and anxieties of working-class men to boost...

The law of the land, regrettably, is that the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution protects an individual’s right to own a gun. But not a blanket right to own any kind of gun, and the San Bernardino killings showed yet again the kind of fast, massive carnage that comes with firing military-style weapons with magazines of cartridges at defenseless victims. That such guns can be sold legally to civilians is an atrocious idea, and renewing the federal assault weapons ban that lapsed in 2004 would be a good place to start attacking the problem.

For years, the cities have been robbing the suburbs but they now have a scheme that will quickly end in a takeover of the suburbs by a leftist federal government. HUD announced enforcement of its new 377-page rule called the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule which will allow them to move people from poor crime-ridden areas into “wealthy” suburbs. It was announced by leftist Julian Castro Monday. The rule has force behind it. Federal monies will be withheld and lawsuits accusing residents of racism will be filed. Any town that takes federal funds will be transformed. It is not only...

“To learn who rules over you, find out whom you are not allowed to criticize.” — Voltaire If you’re wondering what Americans can do as our ruling class sets about enforcing its redefinition of marriage, start by looking back at what it did to the citizens of Indiana when their legislature raised the possibility that someone might object to joining in celebrations of homosexual marriage. Support for homosexual unions was incidental to the insistence of the likeminded folks atop society’s commanding heights on punishing Indiana. What incurs their ire has less to do with any substantive matter than with the...

“First, widening inequality is a very long-term trend, one that has been decades in the making. The degree of inequality we see today is primarily the result of deep structural changes in our economy that have taken place over many years, including globalization, technological progress, demographic trends, and institutional change in the labor market and elsewhere. By comparison to the influence of these long-term factors, the effects of monetary policy on inequality are almost certainly modest and transient.” That’s what Blogger Ben Bernanke (who is of course distinct from PIMCO advisor Ben and Citadel co-conspirator Ben) had to say earlier...

Social scientists have found that by the time children enter kindergarten, there is already a large academic achievement gap between students from wealthy and poor families. We still don't know exactly why that's the case. There's a sense that it at least partly has to do with the fact that affluent mothers and fathers have more intensive parenting sytles—they're more likely to read to their kids, for instance—and have enough money to make sure their toddlers grow up well-nourished, generally cared for, and intellectually stimulated. At the same time, poor children often grow up in chaotic, food-insecure, stressful homes that...

(CNSNews.com) - "In this town, being middle class is not viewed as a compliment -- it means you’re not sophisticated," Vice President Joe Biden told a gathering in Washington on Wednesday. He was touting the virtues of middle-class economics when he made the comment at the National Press Club. "Today, not only have we walked the long road back, but we’ve built the foundations, in my view, on which our economic futures continue to be built and that has to be a future where the middle class is dealt back into the deal, where there’s really opportunity and jobs you...

When Barack Obama was first elected president, a number of my readers were in deep despair about American politics and the state of our culture. So I set out to compile an inventory of what is still going right with our culture, the reserves of strength we were going to have to draw on to survive the Obama era. One of my examples was Mike Rowe’s show “Dirty Jobs.” That led to some further ruminations about why people on the right tend to gravitate to shows like his, which celebrate the value of work. Rowe himself has been understandably cautious...

I first encountered the upper middle class when I attended a big magnet high school in Manhattan that attracted a decent number of brainy, better-off kids whose parents preferred not to pay private-school tuition. Growing up in an immigrant household, I’d felt largely immune to class distinctions. Before high school, some of the kids I knew were somewhat worse off, and others were somewhat better off than most, but we generally all fell into the same lower-middle- or middle-middle-class milieu. So high school was a revelation. Status distinctions that had been entirely obscure to me came into focus. Everything about...

Midway through the last game of the 2013 Carolina League season, after he’d swept peanut shells and mopped soda off the concourse, Ed Green lumbered upstairs to the box seats to dump the garbage. Green was already 12 hours into his workday. He rose at dawn to lay tar on the highway. As the sun sank, he switched uniforms and drove to BB&T Ballpark, where he runs the custodial crew for a minor-league baseball team. Now it was dark and his radio was crackling. It was his boss, asking him to head back downstairs. Green walked onto the first-base line...

One day in 1967, Bob Thompson sprayed foam on a hunk of metal in a cavernous factory south of Los Angeles. And then another day, not too long after, he sat at a long wood bar with a black-and-white television hanging over it, and he watched that hunk of metal land a man on the moon. On July 20, 1969 — the day of the landing — Thompson sipped his Budweiser and thought about all the people who had ever stared at that moon. Kings and queens and Jesus Christ himself. He marveled at how when it came time to...

Vice President Joe Biden said Wednesday that people in Washington don’t think it’s a good thing to be labeled as middle class. Speaking at the American Association of Port Authorities convention in Houston, Biden reminded attendees of his nickname, “Middle-Class Joe.” “In Washington, that’s not meant as a compliment–it means you’re not sophisticated,” Biden said.