Hillary Clinton’s once-commanding lead among young voters has collapsed as millennials look toward third-party candidates, a development that helps explain why the presidential race has tightened substantially in recent weeks. Young voters are a pillar of the Democratic coalition, and the Clinton campaign。
Key swing states such as Nevada, North Carolina and Florida have seen some of the weakest income growth in the country since the last non-incumbent presidential contest in 2008, new census figures show.
A Wall Street Journal analysis of state-by-state income data set for release on Thursday shows that more than half of the 13 states where the presidential race appears closely contested have seen below-average income growth since 2008. Among the eight laggards, three states saw the lowest wage growth in the U.S. during that time—Nevada, Georgia and Arizona.
The new data show how America’s uneven economic recovery is adding another layer of unpredictability to an already volatile electoral map. The traditional realm of battleground states has expanded, putting into play states such as Arizona and Georgia, which haven’t gone to a Democratic presidential candidate in at least 20 years.
The Census Bureau also said income inequality across the country increased in 2015. The recovery’s income gains have been concentrated in central cities, with suburbs and rural areas largely lagging behind for years.
“You actually see the bottom and the top pulling apart a little bit more in some of these keys states,” said David Damore, professor of political science at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
On a national basis, most states still haven’t seen income recover to pre-recession levels. Americans’ median household income in 2015 was 2.6% lower than in 2008, census figures show. A separate set of census figures released earlier this week showed that the income picture brightened considerably in 2015, with the typical family seeing its first significant raise since 2007, though that didn’t eliminate the gap left by the last two recessions.
In Nevada, the median household income plunged 15.5% between 2008 and 2015 to $52,431 when adjusted for inflation, census figures show. The higher-paying construction jobs that were wiped out during the recession have been replaced by lower-paying service jobs, and the state has yet to recover from the broad hit of its housing collapse.
Polls showing a surprisingly tight presidential race in Georgia and Arizona may have more to do with the influx of Latinos and other minorities in those states than any economic factors, Mr. Damore said.
In North Carolina, one of the most closely divided swing states this year, the inflation-adjusted median household income has fallen 6.7% since 2008 to $47,830 for 2015. Massive job losses in banking in Charlotte and at furniture makers in rural parts of the state haven’t been fully offset by a crop of new technology and financial-services jobs concentrated in metropolitan areas. Its income growth was the sixth-lowest of any state and the District of Columbia since 2008.
In Florida, which has also recovered slowly from its housing-market collapse, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6% between 2008 and 2015 to $49,426. That gives it the seventh-lowest income growth in the country for that time period.
Colorado and Iowa are the only two electoral battlegrounds where incomes showed notably above-average income gains. Median household income in Colorado rose 1.9% to $63,909 between 2008 and 2015 as the state benefited from a Western energy boom, among other things.
Urban areas have seen incomes hold up better than rural areas since the recession, with urban median household incomes decreasing 1.7% between 2008 and 2015, while such rural incomes fell 6.1% during that period. But there are signs that pattern may be changing, as urban incomes rose 3.7% in 2015, while rural incomes rose 3.9%.
What is notable is that income growth in metropolitan suburban America continues to lag behind that of central cities, census figures show. Highly educated millennials have flocked to downtowns in search of walkable lifestyles and entertainment.
“It’s possible that the American dream of the suburbs has eroded,” said Linda Lobao, professor of rural sociology at Ohio State University. “It’s difficult to get to work, infrastructure hasn’t been kept up.”
Gallup reports: The percentage of Americans who trust the media dropped to its lowest level since Gallup launched an annual series monitoring American attitudes towards the media in 1997, according to results posted Wednesday.
“Republicans who say they have trust in the media has plummeted to 14 percent from 32 percent a year ago,” wrote Art Swift, Gallup’s managing editor, accounting for the generally sharp fall in public confidence.
“This is easily the lowest confidence among Republicans in 20 years,” he said.
7:45: Trump seems energized by his good poll numbers. He’s talking about rebuilding the country’s infrastructure. Trump promises to take care of our miners and steel workers. Trump says “American hands” will rebuild our nation and American energy will power our nation. He says we will put new American steel into the spine of our country. He says he will fight for every neglected part of our nation and to bring everyone together as “one American people.” He says there is no greater threat to democracy than when a politician puts her office up for sale. He says Clinton’s tenure as State Department was “one of historic failure” because “everything went wrong” around the world.
7:25: Trump pushes for America-first trade policies and slams Clinton for her support for TPP. He talks about how real wages have gone down for Americans and older Americans have to work harder for less. He says he is working hard campaigning and wonders if Clinton can stand up here for an hour.
在主持人反问：“您是否将美国过去10多年经济增速放缓都追究于中国入世时”，纳瓦罗将话锋转至自己拍摄的一步纪录电影。这部电影的名字叫《来自中国的扼杀》（Death By China）。纳瓦罗认为，中国加入世贸组织后，违反了相关规则，比如非法出口补贴，窃取知识产权和汇率操纵等，让美国损失了就业岗位，导致十多年来经济增速下滑。
According to RealClearPolitics, just 28 percent of Americans believe that the country is heading in the right direction, while 63.4 percent think we’re heading down the wrong track. The Pew Center found that 56 percent of Americans view the current economic situation as “bad,” while just 40 percent see it as “good.” As the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) says of Americans’ attitudes, “Their insecurity about the economy remains palpable.”
Indeed, Gallup calculates that the true unemployment rate is 9.7 percent—double the US government’s officially posted unemployment rate. Moreover, according to Pew, 62 percent of Americans think that the economic system “unfairly favors powerful interests.”
Time is of the essence: As we seek our unifying Roosevelt—Teddy, Franklin, or maybe both—we need a vision, starting in 2017. Yes, we need a plan for growth and jobs and unity. I’ll bet that most Democrats would agree.
So that’s the 60 Percent Solution: a vision of a center-right commonsense majority.
When oil prices first plunged in 2014, there was hope that cheap gasoline would be a giant stimulus for the U.S. economy. Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen cited a statistic that the average household would save $700 in fuel costs.
Two years on, it’s not at all clear that oil prices provided a major net boost to economic growth. As oil prices declined, many U.S.-based oil producers were forced to sharply curtail their drilling activity. Waves of layoffs followed in the oil and gas industry. The drop presented both good and bad news for the overall U.S. economy.
A new paper, being presented Friday at a Brookings Institution conference, crunched the numbers to show just how closely these two factors offset each other. The paper estimates that higher discretionary income, thanks to low oil, boosted consumption by 0.61%. They estimate that the collapse of oil drilling reduced investment by 0.62%. In plain English, the boost to consumer-spending power from low oil prices almost exactly equaled the hit to investment from low oil prices.
The paper from University of Notre Dame economist Christiane Baumeister and University of Michigan economist Lutz Kilian finds “the net stimulus since June 2014 has been effectively zero.”
General Election: Trump vs. Clinton vs. Johnson vs. Stein CBS News/NY Times Clinton 42, Trump 42, Johnson 8, Stein 4 Tie General Election: Trump vs. Clinton CBS News/NY Times Clinton 46, Trump 44 Clinton +2 General Election: Trump vs. Clinton vs. Johnson vs. Stein Rasmussen Reports Clinton 40, Trump 42, Johnson 7, Stein 2 Trump +2 General Election: Trump vs. Clinton vs. Johnson Rasmussen Reports* Clinton 40, Trump 42, Johnson 7 Trump +2 General Election: Trump vs. Clinton LA Times/USC Tracking Clinton 41, Trump 47 Trump +6 North Carolina: Trump vs. Clinton vs. Johnson Civitas (R) Clinton 42, Trump 42, Johnson 5 Tie Texas: Trump vs. Clinton vs. Johnson vs. Stein Texas Lyceum Trump 39, Clinton 32, Johnson 9, Stein 3 Trump +7 Texas: Trump vs. Clinton Texas Lyceum Trump 42, Clinton 36 Trump +6
WSJ首页大图片新闻 The Great Unraveling In Places With Fraying Social Fabric, a Political Backlash Rises [url=http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-places-with-fraying-social-fabric-a-po...... ScottishFold 发表于 9/15/2016 11:30:47 AM
WSJ首页大图片新闻 The Great Unraveling In Places With Fraying Social Fabric, a Political Backlash Rises [url=http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-places-with-fraying-social-fabric-a-po...... ScottishFold 发表于 9/15/2016 11:30:47 AM
In Places With Fraying Social Fabric, a Political Backlash Rises Donald Trump gets strong support where churches, civic groups and safety net are in trouble; discombobulated Reading, Pa.
READING, Pa.—This coal and steel region was thriving when Gary Martin started working construction sites in the mid-1970s. Ironworkers jammed the local union hall, the union sponsored a big picnic each spring, and business groups were flush with volunteers for charity drives.
Mr. Martin’s extended family attended church, as it had for generations, in an area called Irish Valley in neighboring Schuylkill County. Two-parent families were the norm, and fatal drug overdoses were so rare that some county coroners didn’t bother tallying them.
No longer. Working-class neighborhoods, in particular white ones hit hard by the decline of the U.S. industrial base, are crumbling under the weight of deepening social problems.
Mr. Martin, 63 years old, retired last year as head of Ironworkers Local 420 but financially supports three grandsons—22, 21 and 19—because his daughter became an addict. The oldest grandson turned to heroin, too, and Mr. Martin and his wife got divorced in another casualty of the stress, they say.
“Rather than spending my retirement half-time in Ireland as I planned, I moved back to the house with a dirt-floor basement where I grew up to try to help raise my grandchildren,” he says.
The buckling of social institutions fundamental to American civic life is deepening a sense of pessimism and disorientation, while adding fuel to this year’s rise of political populists like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Here and across the U.S., key measures of civic engagement ranging from church attendance to civic-group membership to bowling-league participation to union activity are slipping. Unlocked doors have given way to anxiety about strangers. In Reading, tension between longtime white residents and Hispanic newcomers has added to the unease.
For Mr. Martin, social and economic setbacks led him to support Mr. Sanders, who he figured would stick it to the big businesses Mr. Martin feels have sold out working people. Other people here find resonance in Mr. Trump’s message that the U.S. has skidded so far off course that it needs to lock out immigrants and block imports to recover an era of greatness.
“When you lose the family unit and you lose the church community, you are losing a whole lot,” says Bonnie Stock, a retired teacher in Reading and Trump supporter, who says the church where she was baptized is dying from lack of young members. “People are looking at Trump because most of us see this [country] isn’t working,” she says.
Ms. Stock figures Mr. Trump’s business experience would help him better attack societal problems like drug addiction.
Across the U.S., the Republican presidential nominee has his firmest support among the white working class. In the Republican primaries, he carried all but nine of the country’s 156 counties where at least 85% of the adult population was whites without four-year college degrees. Mr. Trump won 64% of the vote in Berks and Schuylkill counties, where noncollege whites were 66% of the adult population as of 2014.
In Berks County, once famous for the Reading Railroad stop on the Monopoly board game, social ills have been exacerbated by a 30% decline in manufacturing jobs and 6% fall in inflation-adjusted median income since 1995.
In 2014, 55.2% of the white women in Berks County who gave birth hadn’t finished college and were unmarried, up from 16.5% in 1980, according to Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research. Single mothers had a median income of just $22,378 in 2014, less than half that of the typical household in Berks County and the U.S. overall.
Gustave Meyer III, who oversees Lions clubs in Berks County, says members try to help some single parents with food, rent and utilities, but it’s tough because the district’s membership has declined 43% to 1,284 from 2,251 in the past 20 years, while the community’s needs have grown. To attract new members, the Lions club district has done away with mandatory meeting requirements and waived initiation fees for veterans.
Ruth Gonzalez, 44, is getting help from the Lions Club in trying to renegotiate the two mortgages on her house, which is facing foreclosure. She fell behind on her payments because of mounting medical bills for her wheelchair-bound, 18-year-old son and repair costs for the van she uses to transport him.
She earns $11.75 an hour as a sewing-machine operator and is estranged from her husband.
The number of civic, professional and business organizations in Berks and Schuylkill counties declined to 131 in 2014 from 156 in 2000, according to Pennsylvania State University’s Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development. The number of unions and other labor groups fell to 29 from 41. Some economists say the decline of institutions that fortify communities has a negative impact on household income. Without the strong support system from those networks, known as social capital, some people miss work more often during times of need, and their children have fewer extracurricular activities and other ways to get ahead.
For decades, Pottsville, a Reading suburb of about 14,000 people where the coal economy has evaporated, has relied on a volunteer fire department. Fire Chief Todd March says the number of active firefighters has shrunk to about 120 from 400 in 2000 because training requirements increased and stressed-out volunteers, juggling work and family demands, didn’t have time to fight fires.
About 15 years ago, five of the eight fire companies in Pottsville hosted annual block parties with amusement-park rides, beer and hot dogs to raise money and cement neighborhood ties. Now just one fire company is carrying on the tradition, Mr. March says.
“It’s hard getting volunteers, and people don’t have money to spend,” he says.
At Pottsville’s Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, membership is down by more than half since 2000. Three other Kiwanis clubs nearby have closed. Takeovers of local banks left fewer executives with the time for organized charitable efforts, say club officials.
Social problems in white working-class communities nationwide started to escalate in the 1970s. The number of single parents in those places rose, and so did divorces and the number of men who dropped out of the workforce, says Charles Murray, a political scientist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who has worked to quantify the decline of working-class America.
Those problems seemed to ease briefly in the late 1990s as the economy expanded and the crime rate dropped. President Bill Clinton and lawmakers revamped the U.S. welfare system in 1996 to focus more on jobs. The nationwide divorce rate stabilized, as did the percentage of children born to unwed mothers. Regular church attendance held steady.
That masked a constant decline in other barometers of the white working class. In southeastern Pennsylvania, longtime residents say they have become wary of their neighbors, especially as the percentage of Hispanics from outside the region has increased. In Reading, non-Hispanic whites are 25% of the city’s population of 88,000, down from 82% in 1980. Thousands of white Reading residents have moved to the suburbs.
Some people feel discombobulated by not knowing the newcomers, fear they are soaking up government benefits and think they are deepening the area’s drug problem, even though 83% of overdose deaths in Berks and Schuylkill counties last year were of whites, according to the Pennsylvania State Coroners Association.
Some whites and blacks still recall the 2005 raid of a Wal-Mart Stores Inc.distribution center under construction near Pottsville, where 125 workers from Mexico and Central America were arrested for working in the U.S. illegally. The incident left a sense among non-Hispanics that their community was under siege from outsiders.
“There aren’t too many opportunities for jobs,” says Stanley Blair, 41, a warehouse laborer who used a day off to repair his house near Reading High School. “I walk out and I don’t hear English. It’s like I’m in a foreign land.”
Stephen Weber, 61, says he remembers Reading’s heyday when the shopping district on Penn Street was hopping and residents put on dresses and suits to shop. Vagrants now loiter there in the middle of the day. Mr. Weber says his neighbors in the 1960s and 1970s, including German immigrants, turned a gravel-filled lot into a neighborhood park and installed basketball equipment, monkey bars and swings.
Mr. Weber, a carpenter, moved to the Berks County suburbs. During visits to his old neighborhood, he sees the park often filled with trash and people sometimes buying and selling drugs, he says.
Many Hispanics have lived in the Reading area for decades, moving here for jobs as agricultural workers, and say they belong in the community as much as anyone else.
Some community groups try to bridge the gap between whites and Hispanics, but the results sometimes fall flat. Reading’s Downtown Improvement District co-sponsors free outdoor concerts during the summer, but a concert in August attracted a nearly white-only audience.
Evan Siegel, a former mortgage broker with two white teenage daughters and a Hispanic teenage stepson, says the two communities “don’t coexist socioeconomically.” He wasn’t surprised that Hispanics stayed away from the concert, which he described as “two white bands from the ’90s.”
Deepening the sense of alienation is the inability of Reading and nearby cities to stem their drug problems, especially overdoses of heroin and prescription drugs. Berks County had 69 drug-related deaths last year, triple the total in 2001.
Berks County Prosecutor John Adams says it is a rare day when police officers don’t have to respond to a drug emergency. They carry the overdose-reversal medication naloxone in their patrol cars.
rinceton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton say the surge in drug deaths and suicides among middle-aged whites nationally began around 2000, when the economy fell into recession, Chinese imports began to surge and manufacturing jobs started to decline sharply.
Laid-off workers turned increasingly to Social Security disability payments and got prescriptions for painkillers to treat back pain from years of factory work. Mr. Deaton, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2015, sees a “strong correlation” between declining employment locally and deaths from suicide, drugs and alcohol.
Dozens of prayers are scribbled in ink on poster boards at St. John’s German Lutheran Church in downtown Reading, imploring spiritual help for jobs, a chance to finish school or escape from the ravages of drugs.
“Pray for my aunt’s addiction,” said one prayer. Another: “I pray that my dad overcomes his addiction.” And another: “Pray for Harrisburg and Reading.” Like churches across America, those in Reading face declining attendance, particularly among younger and less-educated people. In 2014, about 26% of Americans surveyed by the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey said they don’t attend religious services, up from 9% in 1972.
Michael Kaucher, executive director of Reading Berks Conference of Churches, estimates that 75% of the area’s population don’t belong to a church. Millennials are less likely to attend church, and young families shuttle their children to sporting events rather than Sunday school.
Churches often rely on a concentrated cadre of volunteers. Fewer members means fewer people who can help out in the surrounding community. The First United Church of Christ, founded in Reading in 1753, had 700 members in the 1960s. Last year, 70 was a good crowd, and there have been fewer than 30 on some recent Sundays. The congregation is deciding whether to shut down.
“These downtown churches aren’t neighborhood churches anymore” because the neighborhoods have fallen apart, says Ms. Stock, the former teacher. First United Church of Christ hosts Alcohol Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings downtown, close to a drug-counseling center.
In Pottsville, former heroin addict Travis Snyder, 34, leads a volunteer drug-recovery group called “The Skook Recovers,” using a nickname for Schuylkill County. Along with two dozen other recovering addicts, Mr. Snyder picks weekly community projects, such as cleaning up parks, organizing antidrug marches and speaking at high schools. Participants crave a sense of community, he says, which gives them a way to contribute to a place that might otherwise dismiss them as failures.
“We pick up trash and make things look pretty,” Mr. Snyder says. “You don’t need a college degree for this; you don’t need a lot of skills. But you’re getting together with people you don’t know to bring about a common purpose.”
The physical occurred on Friday, Sept. 9, 2016 — before Hillary Clinton’s health episode on Sunday — with Trump’s doctor, Dr. Harold N. Bornstein.
“We are pleased to disclose all of the test results which show that Mr. Trump is in excellent health, and has the stamina to endure — uninterrupted — the rigors of a punishing and unprecedented presidential campaign and, more importantly, the singularly demanding job of President of the United States,” states the Trump campaign press release disclosing the medical results.
12:26: Trump promises to only negotiate trade deals that will put American workers first. He now talks about rebuilding the country’s infrastructure. “American hands will rebuild this nation,” he says, echoing what he said last night in Ohio. “American workers will be hired to do the job.”
12:25: Trump again promises that Mexico will pay for the wall. He says the wall is “peanuts” compared to our massive trade deficit with Mexico.
12:19: Trump says he will renegotiate NAFTA or terminate it until a better deal can be signed. He slams China as a “grand master” currency manipulator and vows to impose tariffs on those who manipulate their currency. Trump says just enforcing intellectual property rules will also create plenty of American jobs. Trump promises to stop the “outflow” of jobs from American and open up a “new highway” that will bring jobs back. Trump speaking about “dynamic growth models” and says his economic plan is the most pro-growth plan in the history of the country.
12:17: Trump says many of the special interests funding Clinton’s campaign favor terrible trade deals while the so-called “experts” advising her were in favor of disastrous deals like NAFTA. He says all of these special interests and experts have been proven wrong but the media leap at the chance to interview them regardless. Trump says our manufacturing base has crumbled and households are making less today than in 2000.
12:10: Trump slams needless and job-killing regulations and proposes a “moratorium” on regulations that “are not compelled by Congress or public safety.” He says he will eliminate all needless and job-killing regulations on the books, “and there are plenty of them.” He speaks of various environmental regulations that will shut down coal-powered plants. Trump reminds the audience that Clinton wants to shut down miners and steel workers and “we’re not going to let it happen.”
12:01: Trump says “just look at the math, it works.” He says his economic plan will result in 3.5% annual growth. He is now speaking about his bold tax reform plan that will exempt millions from paying taxes until they start to earn enough to do so. His plan, he says, will offer tax relief to working-class Americans along with his childcare plan. Trump says people earning $5 million, “like the people in this room,” won’t see their taxes change that much and won’t get much of a break.
Trump says under his plan, people making, for example, $5 million — like the people in this room — don't get a new income tax break
11:52: Trump says his economic plan rejects the “cynicism” that says our labor force will keep declining and the pessimism that says our “standard of living can no longer rise.” Trump says today’s economy is one of “no growth and redistribution of wealth. And that’s not going to work.”
11:50: At the Economic Club in New York, Trump first cites his great poll numbers that have clearly put him in a great mood. Trump speaks to the “silent nation of jobless Americans” and says it’s “disgraceful” that politicians allow companies like Ford get away with moving all of its production of small cars to Mexico.
Donald Trump forecasts substantial economic growth if he’s elected President of the United States.
The Republican nominee says it’s time for “a national goal of reaching four percent economic growth,” and that all economic policies during a Trump administration will be tested on whether or not American jobs are created.
“Under this American System, every policy decision we make must pass a simple test: does it create more jobs and better wages for Americans?” he declared at an event hosted by the Economic Club of New York at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City on Thursday.
“Colin Powell, he’s an amazing guy, amazing service, but he’s actually, you know, as a footnote in history, he’s going to be always struggling for his credibility because of the statement that he made to the United Nations that brought us into the war in Iraq,” Flynn said.
In one leaked email top Democrat donor Jeffrey Leeds told Colin Powell Hillary Clinton HATES Barack Obama. The Daily Caller reported:
Democratic mega donor Jeffrey Leeds told Colin Powell in two separate emails the Hillary Clinton’s legal troubles would not make President Barack Obama, a man she apparently “hates,” upset and cited concern for Clinton’s health back in March of 2015.
The world’s leading experiment in monetary easing is floundering, and its engineers are divided over how to get it on track.
It is part of a larger unease in the central banking world, where years of easy monetary policy have failed to achieve goals in Europe as well as Japan, and the U.S. Federal Reserve is struggling with how and when to follow through on a long-advertised tightening.
The suspicion that central-bank firepower is reaching its limits finds support in Japan, where the BOJ has yet to generate steady inflation despite buying nearly $800 billion of bonds annually since late 2014, plus billions of dollars worth of exchange-traded funds. Economic growth is fragile, while the yen has been on a tear—the opposite of what the central bankers wanted and of what Japan’s exporting companies need. Japan’s stock market is down 12.7% this year.
The BOJ is due to publish an assessment of these policies at its meeting next week..
Trump said, “The only people who get rich under Hillary Clinton are the donors and the special interests, but bad for our country. In Hillary Clinton’s America we have surrendered our status as the world’s great economy, and we have surrendered our middle class to the whims of foreign countries. We take care of them better than we take care of ourselves. Not one single idea she’s got will create one net American job, or create one new dollar of American wealth for our workers. The only thing she can offer is a welfare check. That’s about it. Our plan will produce paychecks, and they’re going to be great paychecks for millions of people now unemployed or underemployed.”
Actor James Woods is fed up with the way the NFL has handled Colin Kaepernick’s National Anthem protest — so much so that he has vowed never to watch a league game ever again.
Democrats’ Deplorable Emails How much to buy an ambassadorship? The answer is in the latest hacked messages.
If the 2016 election is remembered for anything beyond its flawed candidates, it will be recalled as the year of the Democratic email dump. Or rather, the year that the voting public got an unvarnished view of the disturbing—nay, deplorable—inner workings of the highest echelons of the Democratic Party.
What makes the continuing flood of emails instructive is that nobody was ever meant to see these documents. Hillary Clinton set up a private server to shield her communications as secretary of state from the public. She gave top aide Huma Abedin an account on that server. She never envisioned that an FBI investigation and lawsuits would drag her conversations into the light.
The Democratic National Committee and Colin Powell (an honorary Democrat) likewise believed their correspondence secure. But both were successfully targeted by hackers, who released the latest round of enlightening emails this week.
These emails provide what the public always complains it doesn’t have: unfiltered evidence of what top politicians do and think. And what a picture they collectively paint of the party of the left. For years, Democrats have steadfastly portrayed Republicans as elitist fat cats who buy elections, as backroom bosses who rig the laws in their favor, as brass-knuckle lobbyists and operators who get special access. It turns out that this is the precise description of the Democratic Party. They know of what they speak.
The latest hack of the DNC—courtesy of WikiLeaks via Guccifer 2.0—shows that Mrs. Clinton wasn’t alone in steering favors to big donors. Among the documents leaked is one that lists the party’s largest fundraisers/donors as of 2008. Of the top 57 cash cows 18 ended up with ambassadorships. The largest fundraiser listed, Matthew Barzun, who drummed up $3.5 million for Mr. Obama’s first campaign, was named ambassador to Sweden and then ambassador to the United Kingdom. The second-largest, Julius Genachowski, was named the head of the Federal Communications Commission. The third largest, Frank Sanchez, was named undersecretary of commerce.
Keep in mind what an earlier leak revealed: a May 18, 2016, email from an outside lawyer to DNC staffers in which the attorney suggests a call to “go over our process for handling donations from donors who have given us pay to play letters.” Add this to what the Clinton and Abedin emails have shown to be a massive pay-to-play operation at the Clinton Foundation, in which megadonors like the crown prince of Bahrain got special access to the secretary of state.
And there are also all those Clinton speeches, for which they were paid millions. News comes this week that despite the Clintons’ promises to distance themselves from their foundation, they will first be holding what sounds like one last fire sale on future presidential access: a belated birthday bash for Bill Clinton, with a glitzy party at the Rainbow Room in Manhattan. A donation of $250,000 gets you listed as “chair” of the party, while “co-chair” costs $100,000. Foundation officials are refusing to say who has donated, or how much.
So which political party is all about money, influence and special access? The Republican Party held a true, democratic primary. Seventeen candidates battled it out, and the voters choose a nominee that much of the party establishment disliked.
Leaked emails show that the Democratic Party hierarchy retreated to a backroom to anoint Hillary Clinton and then exercised its considerable power to subvert the primary process and kill off the Bernie Sanders campaign. In one email, Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall suggested sliming Mr. Sanders on religion: “Can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.” How’s that for deplorable?
Perhaps most revealing are Mr. Powell’s emails, which show, undisguised, how Clinton supporters think. Specifically, the emails demonstrate that this crowd recognizes the Clintons as a menace—and yet they are willing to excuse away anything. “I would rather not have to vote for her,” Mr. Powell wrote to a friend. “A 70-year person with a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still [sleeping with] bimbos at home.”
Unpack that. Mr. Powell is saying that Hillary is old; that she is a scandal factory; that she will cut any corner to win and do anything for a buck; that she won’t help the country; and that her husband remains a liability. And yet other emails suggest Mr. Powell nonetheless was (is?) debating giving her a boost with a well-timed endorsement in the fall.
This is the modern Democratic Party. The more it has struggled to sell its ideas to the public, the more it has turned to rigging the system to its political benefit. Don’t take Republicans’ word for it. Just read the emails.
MSM被Trump免费给新的Trump Intentional 以及新增44将军们对Trump的endorsement作现场直播。这事妙就妙在，Trump一点都没有撒谎，只是在 tweeter上说：“I am now going to the brand new Trump International, Hotel D.C. for a major statement.“ 哈哈
Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of Colin Powell’s hacked Gmail account saga is that dozens of messages contain insider details of the famed Bohemian Grove — a place the Washington Post once described as “where the rich and powerful go to misbehave.”
Millennials Have Cooled on Hillary Clinton
Polls show young voters have turned toward third-party candidates, particularly Gary Johnson
http://www.wsj.com/articles/millennials-have-cooled-on-hillary-clinton-forcing-a-campaign-reset-1474038301
Hillary Clinton’s once-commanding lead among young voters has collapsed as millennials look toward third-party candidates, a development that helps explain why the presidential race has tightened substantially in recent weeks. Young voters are a pillar of the Democratic coalition, and the Clinton campaign。
Many Presidential Swing States Lag Behind in Income Gains
http://www.wsj.com/articles/many-presidential-swing-states-lag-behind-in-income-gains-1473912060
Key swing states such as Nevada, North Carolina and Florida have seen some of the weakest income growth in the country since the last non-incumbent presidential contest in 2008, new census figures show.
A Wall Street Journal analysis of state-by-state income data set for release on Thursday shows that more than half of the 13 states where the presidential race appears closely contested have seen below-average income growth since 2008. Among the eight laggards, three states saw the lowest wage growth in the U.S. during that time—Nevada, Georgia and Arizona.
The new data show how America’s uneven economic recovery is adding another layer of unpredictability to an already volatile electoral map. The traditional realm of battleground states has expanded, putting into play states such as Arizona and Georgia, which haven’t gone to a Democratic presidential candidate in at least 20 years.
The Census Bureau also said income inequality across the country increased in 2015. The recovery’s income gains have been concentrated in central cities, with suburbs and rural areas largely lagging behind for years.
“You actually see the bottom and the top pulling apart a little bit more in some of these keys states,” said David Damore, professor of political science at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
On a national basis, most states still haven’t seen income recover to pre-recession levels. Americans’ median household income in 2015 was 2.6% lower than in 2008, census figures show. A separate set of census figures released earlier this week showed that the income picture brightened considerably in 2015, with the typical family seeing its first significant raise since 2007, though that didn’t eliminate the gap left by the last two recessions.
In Nevada, the median household income plunged 15.5% between 2008 and 2015 to $52,431 when adjusted for inflation, census figures show. The higher-paying construction jobs that were wiped out during the recession have been replaced by lower-paying service jobs, and the state has yet to recover from the broad hit of its housing collapse.
Polls showing a surprisingly tight presidential race in Georgia and Arizona may have more to do with the influx of Latinos and other minorities in those states than any economic factors, Mr. Damore said.
In North Carolina, one of the most closely divided swing states this year, the inflation-adjusted median household income has fallen 6.7% since 2008 to $47,830 for 2015. Massive job losses in banking in Charlotte and at furniture makers in rural parts of the state haven’t been fully offset by a crop of new technology and financial-services jobs concentrated in metropolitan areas. Its income growth was the sixth-lowest of any state and the District of Columbia since 2008.
In Florida, which has also recovered slowly from its housing-market collapse, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6% between 2008 and 2015 to $49,426. That gives it the seventh-lowest income growth in the country for that time period.
Colorado and Iowa are the only two electoral battlegrounds where incomes showed notably above-average income gains. Median household income in Colorado rose 1.9% to $63,909 between 2008 and 2015 as the state benefited from a Western energy boom, among other things.
Urban areas have seen incomes hold up better than rural areas since the recession, with urban median household incomes decreasing 1.7% between 2008 and 2015, while such rural incomes fell 6.1% during that period. But there are signs that pattern may be changing, as urban incomes rose 3.7% in 2015, while rural incomes rose 3.9%.
What is notable is that income growth in metropolitan suburban America continues to lag behind that of central cities, census figures show. Highly educated millennials have flocked to downtowns in search of walkable lifestyles and entertainment.
“It’s possible that the American dream of the suburbs has eroded,” said Linda Lobao, professor of rural sociology at Ohio State University. “It’s difficult to get to work, infrastructure hasn’t been kept up.”
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/15/l-times-tracking-poll-donald-trump-six-points/
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/14/gallup-32-confidence-in-media-an-all-time-low/
Gallup reports: The percentage of Americans who trust the media dropped to its lowest level since Gallup launched an annual series monitoring American attitudes towards the media in 1997, according to results posted Wednesday.
“Republicans who say they have trust in the media has plummeted to 14 percent from 32 percent a year ago,” wrote Art Swift, Gallup’s managing editor, accounting for the generally sharp fall in public confidence.
“This is easily the lowest confidence among Republicans in 20 years,” he said.
http://business.sohu.com/20160914/n468424349.shtml
Clinton Collapse: Massive Lead Erased in CBS/NYT Poll
CBS/NYT Poll: Donald Trump Tied With Hillary Clinton
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/15/cbsnyt-poll-donald-trump-tied-hillary-clinton/
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/14/5031256/
7:45: Trump seems energized by his good poll numbers. He’s talking about rebuilding the country’s infrastructure. Trump promises to take care of our miners and steel workers. Trump says “American hands” will rebuild our nation and American energy will power our nation. He says we will put new American steel into the spine of our country. He says he will fight for every neglected part of our nation and to bring everyone together as “one American people.” He says there is no greater threat to democracy than when a politician puts her office up for sale. He says Clinton’s tenure as State Department was “one of historic failure” because “everything went wrong” around the world.
7:25: Trump pushes for America-first trade policies and slams Clinton for her support for TPP. He talks about how real wages have gone down for Americans and older Americans have to work harder for less. He says he is working hard campaigning and wonders if Clinton can stand up here for an hour.
Merkel Demands German Firms Hire Unqualified Migrants Quickly
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/09/15/merkel-demands-german-firms-hire-unqualified-migrants-quickly/
默克尔反对全面禁止布卡
http://cn.rfi.fr/%E6%94%BF%E6%B2%BB/20160914-%E9%BB%98%E5%85%8B%E5%B0%94%E5%8F%8D%E5%AF%B9%E5%85%A8%E9%9D%A2%E7%A6%81%E6%AD%A2%E5%B8%83%E5%8D%A1
据美国NBC新闻报道，周三，教皇弗朗西斯敦促宗教领袖们告诉所有跟随他们的信仰者，那些所有以上帝的名义进行杀戮的人都是“魔鬼”。
教皇在纪念85岁的牧师雅克·哈默，并为他作弥撒时，说出了这番话。牧师雅克·哈默在七月份位于法国北部一间教会里，被效忠于ISIS的青少年持枪扫射杀害身亡。
“以上帝的名义杀人就是恶魔撒旦，”在梵蒂冈的圣多莫斯教堂仪式上，教皇告诉记者。“我想让所有的宗教就此表明，以上帝的名，去杀人者既为魔鬼撒旦。”有来自法国的数十名朝圣者参加了弥撒活动。
今年7月26日，两名年仅19岁的ISIS追随者，持枪冲进了法国北部的圣艾蒂安笃（Rouvray）教堂，挟持了包括牧师雅克·哈默在内的六个人。事后警方击毙了这两名劫持者。
五毛又来上班了。
五毛又来上班了。
一个贴几毛钱？
一个贴几毛钱？
一个贴几毛钱？
相比特朗普的其他经济顾问，纳瓦罗看上去更受特朗普“恩宠”。纳瓦罗的影片《来自中国的扼杀》用贸易数字、人物采访，将美国经济和制造业所面临的困境矛头指向中共。它其中一句解说甚至提到，美国人要区别中共当局和中国公民，因为美国经济和中国公民都是中共当局的牺牲品。
他是67岁的美国经济学家纳瓦罗（Peter Navarro），主要负责特朗普竞选团队的贸易、经济、外交（亚洲）和中国议题。
纳瓦罗是美国加州大学欧文分校的经济学教授，一直以来都坚称中国是美国经济产生问题的根源。他在上世纪90年代至2002年，曾四次以民主党人的身份竞选公职（圣迭戈市长、市议员、国会议员等），但均宣告失败。他最近才和特朗普碰面，并出席了提名特朗普的共和党党代会。也正是认识他后，特朗普才正式宣布了自己的顾问团队。
除了纳瓦罗和库德洛外，特朗普顾问团队主要有房地产行业的高管、私募股权和对冲基金经理人、银行或石油大亨以及里根政府时期官员等组成。
纳瓦罗是特朗普顾问团队当中唯一一位哲学博士，自称是“一位很早以前就被中共的经济、贸易和外交政策圈抛弃的里根-特朗普式民主党人。”如果纳瓦罗声音在共和党内部占据主流，共和党必将由此前的“亲共贸易关系”转至对中共相对较冷的经贸路线。从他近年发表的言论和撰写的书籍也可以看出，纳瓦罗是一名典型的反共经济学家。
8月24日，纳瓦罗接受PBS谈话节目NewsHour采访时表示，中国加入世贸组织是美国在过去100多年犯下的最严重的政治和经济错误。虽然它很难同大萧条相提并论，但它的影响则更为持久和深远。
在主持人反问：“您是否将美国过去10多年经济增速放缓都追究于中国入世时”，纳瓦罗将话锋转至自己拍摄的一步纪录电影。这部电影的名字叫《来自中国的扼杀》（Death By China）。纳瓦罗认为，中国加入世贸组织后，违反了相关规则，比如非法出口补贴，窃取知识产权和汇率操纵等，让美国损失了就业岗位，导致十多年来经济增速下滑。
纳瓦罗所提到的影片《来自中国的扼杀》用贸易数字、人物采访，将美国经济和制造业所面临的困境矛头指向中共。它其中一句解说甚至提到，美国人要区别中共当局和中国公民，因为美国经济和中国公民都是中共当局的牺牲品。
他说：“我们和中国真正的最大问题就是存在不公平的贸易行为，比如中国操纵人民币汇率、非法出口补贴和窃取知识产权...。如果你去过中国，你会发现，中国100多个城市当中，环境污染极其恶劣，每年有6万人死在中国工厂，因为他们并没有任何安全法规的保障，这是一种灾难。”
他写的书《即将到来的中国战争》（The Coming China Wars）充满了对中共的攻击，比如经济欺诈，奴役劳动。
他的书《卧虎：中国军事化对世界的意味》(Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means for the World）更是认为中共军事技术的提升离不开窃取美国军事武器系统。
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-trump-could-win-the-white-house-while-losing-the-popular-vote/
要点是指出了对TRUMP不利的主要人群(Latinos, well-educated whites)集中在深蓝而非摇摆州，还指出Trump可能OH FL PA IA ME 1st to get 280
https://guccifer2.wordpress.com/2016/09/15/dems-internal-workings/
http://www.goldtoutiao.com/post/1571419
A Manifesto for the 60 Percent: The Center-Right Populist-Nationalist Coalition
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/11/manifesto-60-percent-center-right-populist-nationalist-coalition/
First of two parts
1. The 60 Percent Solution
According to RealClearPolitics, just 28 percent of Americans believe that the country is heading in the right direction, while 63.4 percent think we’re heading down the wrong track. The Pew Center found that 56 percent of Americans view the current economic situation as “bad,” while just 40 percent see it as “good.” As the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) says of Americans’ attitudes, “Their insecurity about the economy remains palpable.”
Indeed, Gallup calculates that the true unemployment rate is 9.7 percent—double the US government’s officially posted unemployment rate. Moreover, according to Pew, 62 percent of Americans think that the economic system “unfairly favors powerful interests.”
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/14/a-manifesto-for-the-60-percent-the-center-right-populist-nationalist-coalition/
Time is of the essence: As we seek our unifying Roosevelt—Teddy, Franklin, or maybe both—we need a vision, starting in 2017. Yes, we need a plan for growth and jobs and unity. I’ll bet that most Democrats would agree.
So that’s the 60 Percent Solution: a vision of a center-right commonsense majority.
It sure beats what we have now.
Job openings and internships go unfilled because of language deficiencies, government bottlenecks
http://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-efforts-to-integrate-migrants-into-its-workforce-falter-1473948135
The boost to consumer-spending power from cheaper oil almost exactly equaled the hit to investment, a new study says
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/09/15/why-the-stimulus-from-low-oil-prices-never-really-boosted-the-economy/
When oil prices first plunged in 2014, there was hope that cheap gasoline would be a giant stimulus for the U.S. economy. Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen cited a statistic that the average household would save $700 in fuel costs.
Two years on, it’s not at all clear that oil prices provided a major net boost to economic growth. As oil prices declined, many U.S.-based oil producers were forced to sharply curtail their drilling activity. Waves of layoffs followed in the oil and gas industry. The drop presented both good and bad news for the overall U.S. economy.
A new paper, being presented Friday at a Brookings Institution conference, crunched the numbers to show just how closely these two factors offset each other. The paper estimates that higher discretionary income, thanks to low oil, boosted consumption by 0.61%. They estimate that the collapse of oil drilling reduced investment by 0.62%. In plain English, the boost to consumer-spending power from low oil prices almost exactly equaled the hit to investment from low oil prices.
The paper from University of Notre Dame economist Christiane Baumeister and University of Michigan economist Lutz Kilian finds “the net stimulus since June 2014 has been effectively zero.”
http://wallstreetcn.com/node/263038
就这人气，估计能吓死希婆。Canton OH 09/14/16
General Election: Trump vs. Clinton vs. Johnson vs. Stein CBS News/NY Times Clinton 42, Trump 42, Johnson 8, Stein 4 Tie
General Election: Trump vs. Clinton CBS News/NY Times Clinton 46, Trump 44 Clinton +2
General Election: Trump vs. Clinton vs. Johnson vs. Stein Rasmussen Reports Clinton 40, Trump 42, Johnson 7, Stein 2 Trump +2
General Election: Trump vs. Clinton vs. Johnson Rasmussen Reports* Clinton 40, Trump 42, Johnson 7 Trump +2
General Election: Trump vs. Clinton LA Times/USC Tracking Clinton 41, Trump 47 Trump +6
North Carolina: Trump vs. Clinton vs. Johnson Civitas (R) Clinton 42, Trump 42, Johnson 5 Tie
Texas: Trump vs. Clinton vs. Johnson vs. Stein Texas Lyceum Trump 39, Clinton 32, Johnson 9, Stein 3 Trump +7
Texas: Trump vs. Clinton Texas Lyceum Trump 42, Clinton 36 Trump +6
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/15/clinton-foundation-throw-birthday-fundraiser-bill-manhattan/
The Clinton Foundation is going ahead with plans for a big fundraiser Friday celebrating former president Bill Clinton’s 70th birthday at Manhattan’s Rainbow Room on Friday, featuring performances by Jon Bon Jovi, Barbara Streisand and other stars.
Technology news outlet Wired has attacked the free speech-orientated social network startup, Gab, in a new article, criticizing the platform’s stance against censorship and branding it as the “alt-right’s very own Twitter” despite its openness to all users of various political beliefs.
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/09/15/wired-dubs-gab-alt-right-twitter-for-lack-of-stipulations-against-hate-speech/
欧洲议会议长舒尔兹：川普当选是全世界的问题
http://news.ltn.com.tw/news/world/breakingnews/1827529
http://www.breitbart.com/california/2016/09/14/l-a-times-stunned-by-diversity-during-visit-to-trump-h-q/
The Great Unraveling In Places With Fraying Social Fabric, a Political Backlash Rises
http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-places-with-fraying-social-fabric-a-political-backlash-rises-1473952729
White working-class neighborhoods in cities such as Reading, Pa., beset by deepening social problems, are throwing their support behind Donald Trump.
http://global.dwnews.com/news/2016-09-15/59768961.html
维基解密Guccifer 2.0称，奥巴马将公共职位出售给向他捐款的人。
文章说，9月13日，维基解密遵守了自己将会进一步发布民主党全国委员会（DNC）内幕的承诺。这次是来自黑客Guccifer 2.0的。民主党和希拉里竞选阵营为了使自己不受这些爆料的影响，指责这些都是由俄罗斯政府组织的。
在这些泄密的文件中包括一份2008年的显赫捐款者的名单，以及他们因为向DNC以及奥巴马“行动组织”（OFA）捐款而获得的相应的大使职位的名 单。从根本上来说就是，在希拉里当任国务卿期间，奥巴马拍卖那些大使职位以及其他的公共职位。最大的捐款者是巴镇（Matthew Barzun），他捐款总额超过了350万美元，2009年至2011年他担任了美国驻瑞典大使，现在担任美国驻英国大使。
文章还指出，排名第二的是格纳考斯基（Julius Genachowski)，他向DNC和OFA的捐款在350万美元以下，奥巴马2009年任命他担任美国联邦通信委员会主席。排名第三的是桑切斯 (FranciscoJ.Sanchez)，捐款大约340万美元，奥巴马2010年任命他担任美国商务部主管国际贸易事务的副部长。
In Places With Fraying Social Fabric, a Political Backlash Rises
Donald Trump gets strong support where churches, civic groups and safety net are in trouble; discombobulated Reading, Pa.
READING, Pa.—This coal and steel region was thriving when Gary Martin started working construction sites in the mid-1970s. Ironworkers jammed the local union hall, the union sponsored a big picnic each spring, and business groups were flush with volunteers for charity drives.
Mr. Martin’s extended family attended church, as it had for generations, in an area called Irish Valley in neighboring Schuylkill County. Two-parent families were the norm, and fatal drug overdoses were so rare that some county coroners didn’t bother tallying them.
No longer. Working-class neighborhoods, in particular white ones hit hard by the decline of the U.S. industrial base, are crumbling under the weight of deepening social problems.
Mr. Martin, 63 years old, retired last year as head of Ironworkers Local 420 but financially supports three grandsons—22, 21 and 19—because his daughter became an addict. The oldest grandson turned to heroin, too, and Mr. Martin and his wife got divorced in another casualty of the stress, they say.
“Rather than spending my retirement half-time in Ireland as I planned, I moved back to the house with a dirt-floor basement where I grew up to try to help raise my grandchildren,” he says.
The buckling of social institutions fundamental to American civic life is deepening a sense of pessimism and disorientation, while adding fuel to this year’s rise of political populists like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Here and across the U.S., key measures of civic engagement ranging from church attendance to civic-group membership to bowling-league participation to union activity are slipping. Unlocked doors have given way to anxiety about strangers. In Reading, tension between longtime white residents and Hispanic newcomers has added to the unease.
For Mr. Martin, social and economic setbacks led him to support Mr. Sanders, who he figured would stick it to the big businesses Mr. Martin feels have sold out working people. Other people here find resonance in Mr. Trump’s message that the U.S. has skidded so far off course that it needs to lock out immigrants and block imports to recover an era of greatness.
“When you lose the family unit and you lose the church community, you are losing a whole lot,” says Bonnie Stock, a retired teacher in Reading and Trump supporter, who says the church where she was baptized is dying from lack of young members. “People are looking at Trump because most of us see this [country] isn’t working,” she says.
Ms. Stock figures Mr. Trump’s business experience would help him better attack societal problems like drug addiction.
Across the U.S., the Republican presidential nominee has his firmest support among the white working class. In the Republican primaries, he carried all but nine of the country’s 156 counties where at least 85% of the adult population was whites without four-year college degrees. Mr. Trump won 64% of the vote in Berks and Schuylkill counties, where noncollege whites were 66% of the adult population as of 2014.
In Berks County, once famous for the Reading Railroad stop on the Monopoly board game, social ills have been exacerbated by a 30% decline in manufacturing jobs and 6% fall in inflation-adjusted median income since 1995.
In 2014, 55.2% of the white women in Berks County who gave birth hadn’t finished college and were unmarried, up from 16.5% in 1980, according to Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research. Single mothers had a median income of just $22,378 in 2014, less than half that of the typical household in Berks County and the U.S. overall.
Gustave Meyer III, who oversees Lions clubs in Berks County, says members try to help some single parents with food, rent and utilities, but it’s tough because the district’s membership has declined 43% to 1,284 from 2,251 in the past 20 years, while the community’s needs have grown.
To attract new members, the Lions club district has done away with mandatory meeting requirements and waived initiation fees for veterans.
Ruth Gonzalez, 44, is getting help from the Lions Club in trying to renegotiate the two mortgages on her house, which is facing foreclosure. She fell behind on her payments because of mounting medical bills for her wheelchair-bound, 18-year-old son and repair costs for the van she uses to transport him.
She earns $11.75 an hour as a sewing-machine operator and is estranged from her husband.
The number of civic, professional and business organizations in Berks and Schuylkill counties declined to 131 in 2014 from 156 in 2000, according to Pennsylvania State University’s Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development. The number of unions and other labor groups fell to 29 from 41.
Some economists say the decline of institutions that fortify communities has a negative impact on household income. Without the strong support system from those networks, known as social capital, some people miss work more often during times of need, and their children have fewer extracurricular activities and other ways to get ahead.
For decades, Pottsville, a Reading suburb of about 14,000 people where the coal economy has evaporated, has relied on a volunteer fire department. Fire Chief Todd March says the number of active firefighters has shrunk to about 120 from 400 in 2000 because training requirements increased and stressed-out volunteers, juggling work and family demands, didn’t have time to fight fires.
About 15 years ago, five of the eight fire companies in Pottsville hosted annual block parties with amusement-park rides, beer and hot dogs to raise money and cement neighborhood ties. Now just one fire company is carrying on the tradition, Mr. March says.
“It’s hard getting volunteers, and people don’t have money to spend,” he says.
At Pottsville’s Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, membership is down by more than half since 2000. Three other Kiwanis clubs nearby have closed. Takeovers of local banks left fewer executives with the time for organized charitable efforts, say club officials.
Social problems in white working-class communities nationwide started to escalate in the 1970s. The number of single parents in those places rose, and so did divorces and the number of men who dropped out of the workforce, says Charles Murray, a political scientist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who has worked to quantify the decline of working-class America.
Those problems seemed to ease briefly in the late 1990s as the economy expanded and the crime rate dropped. President Bill Clinton and lawmakers revamped the U.S. welfare system in 1996 to focus more on jobs. The nationwide divorce rate stabilized, as did the percentage of children born to unwed mothers. Regular church attendance held steady.
That masked a constant decline in other barometers of the white working class. In southeastern Pennsylvania, longtime residents say they have become wary of their neighbors, especially as the percentage of Hispanics from outside the region has increased. In Reading, non-Hispanic whites are 25% of the city’s population of 88,000, down from 82% in 1980. Thousands of white Reading residents have moved to the suburbs.
Some people feel discombobulated by not knowing the newcomers, fear they are soaking up government benefits and think they are deepening the area’s drug problem, even though 83% of overdose deaths in Berks and Schuylkill counties last year were of whites, according to the Pennsylvania State Coroners Association.
Some whites and blacks still recall the 2005 raid of a Wal-Mart Stores Inc.distribution center under construction near Pottsville, where 125 workers from Mexico and Central America were arrested for working in the U.S. illegally. The incident left a sense among non-Hispanics that their community was under siege from outsiders.
“There aren’t too many opportunities for jobs,” says Stanley Blair, 41, a warehouse laborer who used a day off to repair his house near Reading High School. “I walk out and I don’t hear English. It’s like I’m in a foreign land.”
Stephen Weber, 61, says he remembers Reading’s heyday when the shopping district on Penn Street was hopping and residents put on dresses and suits to shop. Vagrants now loiter there in the middle of the day. Mr. Weber says his neighbors in the 1960s and 1970s, including German immigrants, turned a gravel-filled lot into a neighborhood park and installed basketball equipment, monkey bars and swings.
Mr. Weber, a carpenter, moved to the Berks County suburbs. During visits to his old neighborhood, he sees the park often filled with trash and people sometimes buying and selling drugs, he says.
Many Hispanics have lived in the Reading area for decades, moving here for jobs as agricultural workers, and say they belong in the community as much as anyone else.
Some community groups try to bridge the gap between whites and Hispanics, but the results sometimes fall flat. Reading’s Downtown Improvement District co-sponsors free outdoor concerts during the summer, but a concert in August attracted a nearly white-only audience.
Evan Siegel, a former mortgage broker with two white teenage daughters and a Hispanic teenage stepson, says the two communities “don’t coexist socioeconomically.” He wasn’t surprised that Hispanics stayed away from the concert, which he described as “two white bands from the ’90s.”
Deepening the sense of alienation is the inability of Reading and nearby cities to stem their drug problems, especially overdoses of heroin and prescription drugs. Berks County had 69 drug-related deaths last year, triple the total in 2001.
Berks County Prosecutor John Adams says it is a rare day when police officers don’t have to respond to a drug emergency. They carry the overdose-reversal medication naloxone in their patrol cars.
rinceton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton say the surge in drug deaths and suicides among middle-aged whites nationally began around 2000, when the economy fell into recession, Chinese imports began to surge and manufacturing jobs started to decline sharply.
Laid-off workers turned increasingly to Social Security disability payments and got prescriptions for painkillers to treat back pain from years of factory work. Mr. Deaton, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2015, sees a “strong correlation” between declining employment locally and deaths from suicide, drugs and alcohol.
Dozens of prayers are scribbled in ink on poster boards at St. John’s German Lutheran Church in downtown Reading, imploring spiritual help for jobs, a chance to finish school or escape from the ravages of drugs.
“Pray for my aunt’s addiction,” said one prayer. Another: “I pray that my dad overcomes his addiction.” And another: “Pray for Harrisburg and Reading.”
Like churches across America, those in Reading face declining attendance, particularly among younger and less-educated people. In 2014, about 26% of Americans surveyed by the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey said they don’t attend religious services, up from 9% in 1972.
Michael Kaucher, executive director of Reading Berks Conference of Churches, estimates that 75% of the area’s population don’t belong to a church. Millennials are less likely to attend church, and young families shuttle their children to sporting events rather than Sunday school.
Churches often rely on a concentrated cadre of volunteers. Fewer members means fewer people who can help out in the surrounding community.
The First United Church of Christ, founded in Reading in 1753, had 700 members in the 1960s. Last year, 70 was a good crowd, and there have been fewer than 30 on some recent Sundays. The congregation is deciding whether to shut down.
“These downtown churches aren’t neighborhood churches anymore” because the neighborhoods have fallen apart, says Ms. Stock, the former teacher. First United Church of Christ hosts Alcohol Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings downtown, close to a drug-counseling center.
In Pottsville, former heroin addict Travis Snyder, 34, leads a volunteer drug-recovery group called “The Skook Recovers,” using a nickname for Schuylkill County. Along with two dozen other recovering addicts, Mr. Snyder picks weekly community projects, such as cleaning up parks, organizing antidrug marches and speaking at high schools. Participants crave a sense of community, he says, which gives them a way to contribute to a place that might otherwise dismiss them as failures.
“We pick up trash and make things look pretty,” Mr. Snyder says. “You don’t need a college degree for this; you don’t need a lot of skills. But you’re getting together with people you don’t know to bring about a common purpose.”
Facebook to Gather Questions for Moderators of Presidential Debate
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/09/15/facebook-to-gather-questions-for-moderators-of-presidential-debate/
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/09/14/american-psycho-bret-easton-ellis-sjw-monologue/
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/15/donald-trump-releases-medical-evaluation-report/
The physical occurred on Friday, Sept. 9, 2016 — before Hillary Clinton’s health episode on Sunday — with Trump’s doctor, Dr. Harold N. Bornstein.
“We are pleased to disclose all of the test results which show that Mr. Trump is in excellent health, and has the stamina to endure — uninterrupted — the rigors of a punishing and unprecedented presidential campaign and, more importantly, the singularly demanding job of President of the United States,” states the Trump campaign press release disclosing the medical results.
http://www.wenxuecity.com/news/2016/09/14/5598253.html
☆ 发自 iPhone 华人一网 1.11.08
据Suffolk民调：在美国俄亥俄州，共和党总统候选人特朗普和民主党竞争对手希拉里的支持率分别为42%和39%。
Ohio: Trump vs. Clinton vs. Johnson vs. Stein Suffolk Trump 42, Clinton 39, Johnson 4, Stein 1 Trump +3
美国911遗址显神迹 纪念光柱现耶稣？
http://hk.on.cc/int/bkn/cnt/news/20160915/bknint-20160915224500105-0915_17011_001.html
照片被分享至社交网站上，不少网民认定是个神迹。有当年痛失爱儿的家属表示，倍受照片感动。虽然备受关注，但有人质疑照片是否经修改。但摄影师强调没有“动手脚”，同时表示当晚拍下的照片，只有一张出现这个神奇的影像。
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/15/5036397/
12:26: Trump promises to only negotiate trade deals that will put American workers first. He now talks about rebuilding the country’s infrastructure. “American hands will rebuild this nation,” he says, echoing what he said last night in Ohio. “American workers will be hired to do the job.”
12:25: Trump again promises that Mexico will pay for the wall. He says the wall is “peanuts” compared to our massive trade deficit with Mexico.
12:19: Trump says he will renegotiate NAFTA or terminate it until a better deal can be signed. He slams China as a “grand master” currency manipulator and vows to impose tariffs on those who manipulate their currency. Trump says just enforcing intellectual property rules will also create plenty of American jobs. Trump promises to stop the “outflow” of jobs from American and open up a “new highway” that will bring jobs back. Trump speaking about “dynamic growth models” and says his economic plan is the most pro-growth plan in the history of the country.
12:17: Trump says many of the special interests funding Clinton’s campaign favor terrible trade deals while the so-called “experts” advising her were in favor of disastrous deals like NAFTA. He says all of these special interests and experts have been proven wrong but the media leap at the chance to interview them regardless. Trump says our manufacturing base has crumbled and households are making less today than in 2000.
12:10: Trump slams needless and job-killing regulations and proposes a “moratorium” on regulations that “are not compelled by Congress or public safety.” He says he will eliminate all needless and job-killing regulations on the books, “and there are plenty of them.” He speaks of various environmental regulations that will shut down coal-powered plants. Trump reminds the audience that Clinton wants to shut down miners and steel workers and “we’re not going to let it happen.”
12:01: Trump says “just look at the math, it works.” He says his economic plan will result in 3.5% annual growth. He is now speaking about his bold tax reform plan that will exempt millions from paying taxes until they start to earn enough to do so. His plan, he says, will offer tax relief to working-class Americans along with his childcare plan. Trump says people earning $5 million, “like the people in this room,” won’t see their taxes change that much and won’t get much of a break.
Trump says under his plan, people making, for example, $5 million — like the people in this room — don't get a new income tax break
11:52: Trump says his economic plan rejects the “cynicism” that says our labor force will keep declining and the pessimism that says our “standard of living can no longer rise.” Trump says today’s economy is one of “no growth and redistribution of wealth. And that’s not going to work.”
11:50: At the Economic Club in New York, Trump first cites his great poll numbers that have clearly put him in a great mood. Trump speaks to the “silent nation of jobless Americans” and says it’s “disgraceful” that politicians allow companies like Ford get away with moving all of its production of small cars to Mexico.
Poll: Trump pulls close to Clinton in Virginia
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/296134-poll-clinton-trump-deadlocked-in-virginia
谈经济政策
Trump & Pence at Economic Club of New York 9/15/16
说要用Americanism替代Globalism，Trump的团队厉害，数据准备的很扎实
Obama finally spill the beans about Crooked Hillary undercover dealings and record of corruption
http://redstatewatcher.com/article.asp?id=37574
媒体现在作弊也无法掩盖川普不断升高的支持率了。
Poll: Trump up 8 points in Iowa
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/296149-poll-trump-up-8-points-in-battleground-iowa
The Republican nominee says it’s time for “a national goal of reaching four percent economic growth,” and that all economic policies during a Trump administration will be tested on whether or not American jobs are created.
“Under this American System, every policy decision we make must pass a simple test: does it create more jobs and better wages for Americans?” he declared at an event hosted by the Economic Club of New York at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City on Thursday.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/09/15/general-vs-general-powell-flynn-feud-over-hacked-email-slams.html
“Colin Powell, he’s an amazing guy, amazing service, but he’s actually, you know, as a footnote in history, he’s going to be always struggling for his credibility because of the statement that he made to the United Nations that brought us into the war in Iraq,” Flynn said.
Leaked papers appear to reveal Dem 'pay for play' scheme
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/leaked-papers-appear-to-reveal-dem-pay-for-play-scheme/article/2601866
NEW DOCUMENT LEAK: List Shows Top Democratic Donors Were Awarded Ambassadorships And Federal Posts
http://www.hannity.com/articles/hanpr-election-493995/new-document-leak-list-shows-top-15106726/
YouTube Has Quietly Begun “Censoring” Journalists Who Criticize Government
http://theantimedia.org/youtube-censoring-journalists/
Guccifer 2.0 DNC Emails: Top Democrat Donor Tells Colin Powell Hillary ‘HATES’ Obama
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/09/guccifer-2-0-dnc-emails-top-democrat-donor-tells-colin-powell-hillary-hates-obama/
In one leaked email top Democrat donor Jeffrey Leeds told Colin Powell Hillary Clinton HATES Barack Obama.
The Daily Caller reported:
Democratic mega donor Jeffrey Leeds told Colin Powell in two separate emails the Hillary Clinton’s legal troubles would not make President Barack Obama, a man she apparently “hates,” upset and cited concern for Clinton’s health back in March of 2015.
German State TV Encourages White Women to Wear Hijab
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pu9K2TCON58
☆ 发自 iPhone 华人一网 1.11.08
https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump/posts/10157698735525725:0
The Commerce Department is investigating whether Aluminum Shapes helped Chinese metals giant China Zhongwang evade U.S. tariffs by importing disguised products
http://www.wsj.com/articles/new-jersey-factory-linked-to-chinese-aluminum-probe-1473963640
她连这样的机会都不会有
BREAKING NEWS：Japan's effort at radical monetary easing is stumbling and the BOJ is divided on how to get it on track
http://www.wsj.com/articles/japans-central-bank-splits-over-easing-program-1473962028
The world’s leading experiment in monetary easing is floundering, and its engineers are divided over how to get it on track.
It is part of a larger unease in the central banking world, where years of easy monetary policy have failed to achieve goals in Europe as well as Japan, and the U.S. Federal Reserve is struggling with how and when to follow through on a long-advertised tightening.
The suspicion that central-bank firepower is reaching its limits finds support in Japan, where the BOJ has yet to generate steady inflation despite buying nearly $800 billion of bonds annually since late 2014, plus billions of dollars worth of exchange-traded funds. Economic growth is fragile, while the yen has been on a tear—the opposite of what the central bankers wanted and of what Japan’s exporting companies need. Japan’s stock market is down 12.7% this year.
The BOJ is due to publish an assessment of these policies at its meeting next week..
Under investigation is how companies determine the value of the credits
http://www.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-probe-tax-incentives-received-by-solar-energy-firms-1473967056
http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2016/09/15/caddell-democrat-voters-worried-hillary-clintons-health-issues/
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/09/15/black-lives-matter-activist-changes-tune-on-police-following-robbery.html
A University of Houston grad student active in the local Black Lives Matter movement is suddenly all for police patrols in his neighborhood — after he was robbed at gunpoint outside his apartment.
希拉里出来了，说了20分钟就走人了。
http://truthfeed.com/breaking-yuge-news-according-to-new-poll-trump-has-19-of-the-black-vote/23728/
America becoming third-world nation of ‘Terror, Riots, Mobs, Chaos’
http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2016/09/15/michael-savage-hillarys-deplorables-backbone-america-bill-clinton-gutted-jobs-deported-factories-china-profit/
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/09/15/trump-the-only-thing-clinton-can-offer-is-a-welfare-check/
Trump said, “The only people who get rich under Hillary Clinton are the donors and the special interests, but bad for our country. In Hillary Clinton’s America we have surrendered our status as the world’s great economy, and we have surrendered our middle class to the whims of foreign countries. We take care of them better than we take care of ourselves. Not one single idea she’s got will create one net American job, or create one new dollar of American wealth for our workers. The only thing she can offer is a welfare check. That’s about it. Our plan will produce paychecks, and they’re going to be great paychecks for millions of people now unemployed or underemployed.”
Tech Giants More Powerful Than Countrieshttp://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/15/michael-savage-facebook-google-mini-fascist-states-crush-opposition-viewpoints-taken-anti-trust-legislation/
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/15/emerson-poll-donald-trump-lead-hillary-clinton/
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/15/ford-ceo-trump-wrong-about-mexico-move-we-are-a-global-company/
哈哈哈，我也要
说时间长了药效过了怕是又要晕倒
Problems Unsolved and a Nation Divided - Harvard Business School
http://www.hbs.edu/competitiveness/Documents/problems-unsolved-and-a-nation-divided.pdf
A new round of state polls shows Donald Trump suddenly has a path to 270 electoral votes.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/donald-trump-electoral-college-polls-228249#ixzz4KNYBBYMW
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/15/nydp-officers-attacked-by-man-with-meat-cleaver/
Donald Trump: ‘Obama Was Born in the United States, Period’
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/16/donald-trump-obama-born-united-states-period/
FLASHBACK: Hillary Clinton, Not Trump, Started the ‘Birther’ Movement Against President Obama
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/03/10/flashback-hillary-clinton-not-trump-started-the-birther-movement-against-president-obama/
UPI/CVoter poll: Donald Trump maintains steady 1 point lead over Hillary Clinton
http://www.breitbart.com/news/upicvoter-poll-donald-trump-maintains-steady-1-point-lead-over-hillary-clinton/
This seven-day span includes data collected from Sept. 8 to 14, when 1,851 individuals were surveyed. Of them, 1,265 identified themselves as likely voters.
James Woods: ‘I Will Never Watch the NFL Again’
http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2016/09/16/james-woods-im-boycotting-nfl/
Actor James Woods is fed up with the way the NFL has handled Colin Kaepernick’s National Anthem protest — so much so that he has vowed never to watch a league game ever again.
Obama Recruits Kasich, Paulson to Sell Struggling Trade Deal
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-09-16/obama-recruits-kasich-paulson-to-sell-struggling-trade-deal
Kasich on Voting for Trump: ‘Very Unlikely — Too Much Water Under the Bridge’
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/09/16/kasich-voting-trump-unlikely-much-water-bridge/
没有完全静音,希望还有良知的媒体慢慢跟上：
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/leaked-papers-appear-to-reveal-dem-pay-for-play-scheme/article/2601866
http://www.hannity.com/articles/hanpr-election-493995/new-document-leak-list-shows-top-15106726/
好呀，wsj也开始报道了。wsj可是美国销量第一的报纸：
http://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-deplorable-emails-1473981664
这个大丑闻要是捅破了，就算稀拉痢退选的话，Dem换别人，也一样完蛋。
Democrats’ Deplorable Emails
How much to buy an ambassadorship? The answer is in the latest hacked messages.
If the 2016 election is remembered for anything beyond its flawed candidates, it will be recalled as the year of the Democratic email dump. Or rather, the year that the voting public got an unvarnished view of the disturbing—nay, deplorable—inner workings of the highest echelons of the Democratic Party.
What makes the continuing flood of emails instructive is that nobody was ever meant to see these documents. Hillary Clinton set up a private server to shield her communications as secretary of state from the public. She gave top aide Huma Abedin an account on that server. She never envisioned that an FBI investigation and lawsuits would drag her conversations into the light.
The Democratic National Committee and Colin Powell (an honorary Democrat) likewise believed their correspondence secure. But both were successfully targeted by hackers, who released the latest round of enlightening emails this week.
These emails provide what the public always complains it doesn’t have: unfiltered evidence of what top politicians do and think. And what a picture they collectively paint of the party of the left. For years, Democrats have steadfastly portrayed Republicans as elitist fat cats who buy elections, as backroom bosses who rig the laws in their favor, as brass-knuckle lobbyists and operators who get special access. It turns out that this is the precise description of the Democratic Party. They know of what they speak.
The latest hack of the DNC—courtesy of WikiLeaks via Guccifer 2.0—shows that Mrs. Clinton wasn’t alone in steering favors to big donors. Among the documents leaked is one that lists the party’s largest fundraisers/donors as of 2008. Of the top 57 cash cows 18 ended up with ambassadorships. The largest fundraiser listed, Matthew Barzun, who drummed up $3.5 million for Mr. Obama’s first campaign, was named ambassador to Sweden and then ambassador to the United Kingdom. The second-largest, Julius Genachowski, was named the head of the Federal Communications Commission. The third largest, Frank Sanchez, was named undersecretary of commerce.
Keep in mind what an earlier leak revealed: a May 18, 2016, email from an outside lawyer to DNC staffers in which the attorney suggests a call to “go over our process for handling donations from donors who have given us pay to play letters.” Add this to what the Clinton and Abedin emails have shown to be a massive pay-to-play operation at the Clinton Foundation, in which megadonors like the crown prince of Bahrain got special access to the secretary of state.
And there are also all those Clinton speeches, for which they were paid millions. News comes this week that despite the Clintons’ promises to distance themselves from their foundation, they will first be holding what sounds like one last fire sale on future presidential access: a belated birthday bash for Bill Clinton, with a glitzy party at the Rainbow Room in Manhattan. A donation of $250,000 gets you listed as “chair” of the party, while “co-chair” costs $100,000. Foundation officials are refusing to say who has donated, or how much.
So which political party is all about money, influence and special access? The Republican Party held a true, democratic primary. Seventeen candidates battled it out, and the voters choose a nominee that much of the party establishment disliked.
Leaked emails show that the Democratic Party hierarchy retreated to a backroom to anoint Hillary Clinton and then exercised its considerable power to subvert the primary process and kill off the Bernie Sanders campaign. In one email, Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall suggested sliming Mr. Sanders on religion: “Can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.” How’s that for deplorable?
Perhaps most revealing are Mr. Powell’s emails, which show, undisguised, how Clinton supporters think. Specifically, the emails demonstrate that this crowd recognizes the Clintons as a menace—and yet they are willing to excuse away anything. “I would rather not have to vote for her,” Mr. Powell wrote to a friend. “A 70-year person with a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still [sleeping with] bimbos at home.”
Unpack that. Mr. Powell is saying that Hillary is old; that she is a scandal factory; that she will cut any corner to win and do anything for a buck; that she won’t help the country; and that her husband remains a liability. And yet other emails suggest Mr. Powell nonetheless was (is?) debating giving her a boost with a well-timed endorsement in the fall.
This is the modern Democratic Party. The more it has struggled to sell its ideas to the public, the more it has turned to rigging the system to its political benefit. Don’t take Republicans’ word for it. Just read the emails.
tweeter上说：“I am now going to the brand new Trump International, Hotel D.C. for a major statement.“ 哈哈
Media Outraged After Trump Tricks Them To Cover Endorsements From Military Heroes
http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/16/media-outraged-after-trump-tricks-them-to-cover-endorsements-from-military-heroes/
呵呵，TRUMP已经赢了，因为TRUMP有好的POLICY. 稀拉拉民调一路下滑，年轻人，黑人，西裔都在抛弃她，几个白人脑残也救不了稀拉拉。稀拉拉任何POLICY都说不出来，就知道侮辱人，然后倒下，已经完蛋啦。
http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2016/09/16/colin-powells-hacked-emails-reveal-insider-details-secretive-bohemian-grove-summit-worlds-elite/
Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of Colin Powell’s hacked Gmail account saga is that dozens of messages contain insider details of the famed Bohemian Grove — a place the Washington Post once described as “where the rich and powerful go to misbehave.”