New Class War: What America’s ruling elite fears about the 2016 election →

...But there’s another side to the Trump phenomenon that is less about Trump or his voters than about the elites they are against. Resistance to the bipartisan establishment keeps growing, and even if Trump loses to Clinton in a landslide, he has carried the rebellion further than ever before by winning a major party’s nomination.
Since the Cold War ended, U.S. politics has seen a series of insurgent candidacies. Pat Buchanan prefigured Trump in the Republican contests of 1992 and 1996. Ralph Nader challenged the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party from the outside in 2000. Ron Paul vexed establishment Republicans John McCain and Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012. And this year, Trump was not the only candidate to confound his party’s elite: Bernie Sanders harried Hillary Clinton right up to the Democratic convention.
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The insurgents clearly do not represent a single class: they appeal to eclectic interests and groups. The foe they have all faced down, however—the bipartisan establishment—does resemble a class in its striking unity of outlook and interest. So what is this class, effectively the ruling class of the country?
Some critics on the right have identified it with the “managerial” class described by James Burnham in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution. But it bears a stronger resemblance to what what others have called “the New Class.” In fact, the interests of this New Class of college-educated “verbalists” are antithetical to those of the industrial managers that Burnham described. Understanding the relationship between these two often conflated concepts provides insight into politics today, which can be seen as a clash between managerial and New Class elites...

'The Situation ... Is Truly Catastrophic'; Hurricane Matthew Slams Into Haiti →

At 7 a.m. local time, the eye of Hurricane Matthew sat over Les Anglais, Haiti. The hurricane is so large and powerful that people in a 40-mile radius from its center were under hurricane warnings, and tropical storm-force winds were lashing areas as far as 185 miles away, near the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.

The Divided States of America →

Reading the nonstop coverage of what may well be a close presidential election, one might be forgiven for thinking that political competition is alive and well in America.
But look at the majority of states and congressional races, and a different picture emerges: In most places, meaningful two-party electoral competition is nonexistent. Rather than being one two-party nation, we are becoming two one-party nations.
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Consider some numbers. The House, the supposed “people’s chamber,” is a sea of noncompetition. Out of 435 seats up for election this year, just 25 are considered tossups by The Cook Political Report. In 2014, 82 percent of House races were decided by at least 15 percentage points, including 17 percent that were not contested by one of the two major parties.
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While gerrymandering may explain some of the noncompetitiveness of House races, it can’t explain the Senate or the Electoral College. No amount of nonpartisan redistricting can overcome the fundamental disconnect between place-based, winner-take-all elections and polarized, geographically separated parties.

Americans are flipping homes like they haven't done since before the housing crash →

Home flipping in the US has hit levels not seen since the peak of the housing bubble.
According to Attom Data Solutions, homeowners in the second quarter flipped 51,434 houses, meaning they resold them shortly after purchasing.
Attom based its analysis on sales within 12 months and derived from the data the highest number of homes flipped since Q2 2010.
The number of investors flipping homes set a record that extends further into the past, rising to its highest since Q2 2007, roughly one year after house prices peaked.

The NSA Is Hoarding Vulnerabilities →

The National Security Agency is lying to us. We know that because of data stolen from an NSA server was dumped on the Internet. The agency is hoarding information about security vulnerabilities in the products you use, because it wants to use it to hack others' computers. Those vulnerabilities aren't being reported, and aren't getting fixed, making your computers and networks unsafe.
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Over the past few years, different parts of the US government have repeatedly assured us that the NSA does not hoard "zero days" ­ the term used by security experts for vulnerabilities unknown to software vendors...
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There is a fundamental tension between attack and defense. The NSA can keep the vulnerability secret and use it to attack other networks. In such a case, we are all at risk of someone else finding and using the same vulnerability. Alternatively, the NSA can disclose the vulnerability to the product vendor and see it gets fixed. In this case, we are all secure against whoever might be using the vulnerability, but the NSA can't use it to attack other systems.

The decline of the middle class is causing even more economic damage than we realized →

Op-ed quoted nearly in full:

...The authors — Ali Alichi, Kory Kantenga and Juan Solé — use standard econometric techniques to estimate the impact of declines in middle class incomes on total consumer spending. They find that polarization has reduced consumer spending by more than 3 percent or about $400 billion annually. If these findings stand up to scrutiny, they deserve to have a policy impact.
This level of reduction in spending is huge. For example, it exceeds by a significant margin the impact in any year of the Obama stimulus program. Alone it would be enough to account for a significant reduction in neutral real interest rates. If consumers were spending 3 percent more, there would be scope to maintain full employment at interest rates much closer to normal. And there would be much less of a problem of monetary policy’s inability to respond to the next recession.
What is the policy implication? Principally, it is the macroeconomic importance of supporting middle class incomes. This can be done in a range of ways from promoting workers right to collectively bargain to raising spending on infrastructure to making the tax system more progressive. These are hardly new ideas. And I supported them before seeing this new research. But there is now another powerful argument in terms of mitigating secular stagnation in their favor.