Trump supporters aren't crazy

Randall Williams and his wife, Brenda, were two of those workers. For three decades, they helped assemble the hermetically sealed motors that power air conditioners sold all across America. At the end, they were each making $16.10 an hour. That kind of money’s just a dream now: Randall fills orders at a local farm supply store; Brenda works in the high school cafeteria. For a while, he said, their combined income didn’t even add up to one of their old factory wages....
Gonzalez doesn’t know much about Nafta and she knows even less about Donald Trump or the way he blames U.S. trade deficits with Mexico and China for the loss of jobs in America. But Williams sure does. He voted for the billionaire in Kentucky’s Republican caucus this month. So did many of his neighbors. In Allen County, a collection of eight towns strewn along the Tennessee border, Trump dominated his rivals, racking up 42 percent of the vote on his way to a narrow victory that night in Kentucky.
It was one of those kinds of results—in the heart of southern Baptist country that was supposed to vote for the conservative Ted Cruz—that revealed the extent to which Trump’s anti-free trade tack has touched a nerve with the millions of working-class Americans who feel financially squeezed...
“Nafta is the worst thing that’s ever happened to the U.S.,” said Beverly Anderson, a Scottsville councilwoman who worked at the electric-motor plant for 28 years....
“Nafta is the worst thing that’s ever happened to the U.S.,” said Beverly Anderson, a Scottsville councilwoman who worked at the electric-motor plant for 28 years.

The Housing Busts Long Shadow

A new report from the Urban Institute's Housing Finance Policy Center offers a valuable glimpse at what has happened to the U.S. population's housing and credit status since the turn of the century. Of particular interest: A group of about 19 million renters who, at some point in the past 16 years, used to be homeowners.
People can become renters for various reasons, such as moving for a job or downsizing in retirement. The data, though, suggest that this group consists largely of people who lost their homes because of unaffordable loans, the housing bust and the subsequent economic slump. They are mostly middle-aged, unusually likely to have foreclosures or other black marks on their credit records, and are concentrated in bubble states such as Arizona, California and Florida....
In short, the picture isn’t pretty. Despite the Federal Reserve's efforts to shore up house prices, despite the tens of billions of dollars in legal settlements paid by mortgage lenders, the housing crisis is still with us -- and probably will be for a long time to come.

Corporate default crisis

So Standard & Poor's, via a report by S&P Capital IQ, just warned about US corporate borrowers' average credit rating, which at "BB," and thus in junk territory, hit a record low, even "below the average we recorded in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 credit crisis."
The one-year average default rate for US companies with a credit rating of B- is 9.8%, according to Standard & Poor's. That's a 1-in-10 chance that the company will default over the next 12 months. Companies getting downgraded deep into junk and issuing more low-grade bonds are precursors to soaring defaults.

Our Syrian policy

Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter 5-year-old civil war.
The fighting has intensified over the past two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other as they have maneuvered through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed.

Once a dirtbag, always a dirtbag

ERIK PRINCE, founder of the now-defunct mercenary firm Blackwater and current chairman of Frontier Services Group, is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal agencies for attempting to broker military services to foreign governments and possible money laundering, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the case.
What began as an investigation into Prince’s attempts to sell defense services in Libya and other countries in Africa has widened to a probe of allegations that Prince received assistance from Chinese intelligence to set up an account for his Libya operations through the Bank of China. The Justice Department, which declined to comment for this article, is also seeking to uncover the precise nature of Prince’s relationship with Chinese intelligence.