Better to build an Apocalypse bunker than share the wealth?

Your entire pay raises went to rent

The cost of rent rose 3.7% compared to a year ago in March, the Labor Department said Thursday. That was the fourth straight month with such a strong gain, the highest since before the financial crisis.
On the 2015 median income of $56,746, a 1.4% gain would translate to about $66 more a month, before taxes. Across the nation, the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $1,300, according to Apartment List. A 3.7% rent rise, or about $48, would swallow up pretty much all of that salary gain.

Actually it would swallow up all of it after taxes.

I've got a great idea. Let's start a war with China.

US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter today announced the US will be escalating its “regular rotations” of troops and warplanes into the Philippines, though despite a growing number of troops in the country at any given time, he insisted this was not an increased “permanent footprint.”
300 Air Force commandos, along with a number of additional US combat aircraft are heading to the Philippines this go around, with an eye on escalating tensions with China over maritime claims in the South China Sea.

Last high-ranking Sunni ejected from Iraqi government

After delaying the vote on a new cabinet from Tuesday to Thursday, Iraq’s parliament cancelled the vote entirely today, following up a fist-fight dominated Wednesday session with one in which they fired the speaker of parliament, Salim al-Jabouri.
Jabouri’s ouster was seen primarily as a move against Prime Minister Hayder Abadi, but also riled the nation’s Sunni Arab minority, as he was materially the last high-ranking Sunni Arab government figure left...
Abadi’s position is seen as extremely tenuous, with most of his own bloc predicting his ouster for months, and his faction’s real leader, former PM Nouri al-Maliki, seeking to have him replaced.

The Ghost of Gordon Gekko

Asher Edelman is an art collector and financier. He worked on Wall Street from 1962 to 1988 and taught a course at Columbia University School of Business titled Corporate Raiding: The Art of War. He is one of the inspirations for the Gordon Gekko character in the film Wall Street.
Banking is the least understood, and possibly most lethal, of all the myriad issues at stake in this election. No candidate other than Bernie Sanders is capable of taking the steps necessary to protect the American people from a repeat of the recent debacle that plunged the nation into a recession from which we have not recovered.
The potential for a depression looms heavily on the horizon. As a trained economist who has spent more than 20 years on Wall Street – and one of the models for Gordon Gekko’s character – I know the financial system is in urgent need of regulation and responsibility. Yet Hillary Clinton is beholden to the banks for their largesse in funding her campaign and lining her pockets. The likelihood of any Republican candidate taking on this key issue is not even worthy of discussion.

The biggest blackhole of taxpayer funds

In 1990 Congress passed the Chief Financial Officers Act, which required every federal agency to be auditable. Since then every agency has complied—except for the Department of Defense. Instead, there’s been a saga of audit readiness plans and billions spent to upgrade out-of-date financial systems—plans and upgrades the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated in 2010 wasted nearly $6 billion. After significant pressure from Congress, particularly then-Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta set a 2014 deadline for all components and the DoD as a whole to have auditable records of incoming budget resources, referred to as Statements of Budgetary Resources (SBR).
In its guidance to agencies on auditing SBRs, the GAO highlighted auditing SBRs as key to making sure that the Pentagon is spending money as authorized by Congress. “The SBR and related disclosures provide information about budgetary resources made available to an agency as well as the status of those resources at the end of the fiscal year,” said the GAO. Auditing the SBR, along with other budget information, “provides a means to help assess the reliability of budgetary data reported in the President's Budget.”
At the beginning of 2014 it looked like the Department had made significant progress after the Department of Defense Inspector General (DoD IG) gave the Marine Corps a clean audit opinion, making the Marine Corps the first and only branch of the military to receive an unqualified audit opinion. But the DoD IG rescinded that opinion last spring. A Reuters investigation into that decision found that IG leadership had pressured its auditors to support an outside accounting firm’s clean audit opinion, despite the auditors believing that the Marine Corps had actually not been qualified to receive it. A subsequent review by the GAO also found the IG’s process for issuing that opinion was deeply flawed. In a Floor speech on the GAO’s report, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) argued that the political pressure led to a process that rushed to declare victory without adequate documentation to show the clean audit opinion was “worth the paper it was written on.”
The Department failed to meet its goal for 2014, and as it stands, no DoD component is likely to meet it in the next year. “I think we are on the right track,” DoD Comptroller Mike McCord said last winter. “[But] it will take a couple more years.”

Victory over ISIS will be temporary

An organization like the Islamic State can kill and destroy. It can create fear. It cannot create a viable, sustainable and appealing state....
Yet even if the Islamic State’s unraveling continues and the organization is defeated on the battlefield, that will not end the problem, because there is little chance that the Iraqi government will engineer a sustainable, long-term solution to the political and economic problems that fueled the group’s rise....
Even more importantly, Iraq has not transcended the idea that leaders hold political power to benefit themselves and their affinity group—defined in Iraq by ethnicity and sect. Politics is a spoils system, where winners use the government to impose their will on the losers, rather than to reconcile differences and build consensus. Some brave Iraqis have attempted to move beyond this, but they face intense resistance from their countrymen who benefit from the current system. To take one example, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s attempt to reshuffle his government’s Cabinet to address corruption and mismanagement generated intense opposition from the entrenched political parties and leaders who have developed a vested interest in both practices.
Most Iraqis who have been ruled by the Islamic State despise the extremists but fear the Iraqi government and, particularly, the Iranian-backed Shiite militias that the government relies on as much or even more. Like most people do when they are caught up in internal war and insurgency, Iraq’s Sunni Arabs seek the lesser evil, knowing that both the Iraqi government and the Islamic State will prey on them. But even if it can defeat the Islamic State on the battlefield, the Iraqi government will be unable to break the power of the Shiite militias.
Nor is there any sign that Baghdad is serious about addressing the political and economic grievances of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs despite being implored to do so by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and high-ranking officials from many other nations. Even if it was, Baghdad does not have the resources to repair and rebuild the great damage done by the Islamic State or provide jobs in the Sunni Arab areas, particularly in the face of a national economic crisis driven by mismanagement and the low global price of oil. Kerry and others are attempting to raise global interest in providing reconstruction support, but the world’s response is likely to be tepid given the Iraqi government’s disinterest in Sunni Arab regions.

REfugee influx shifts from Greece to Libya

Almost 6,000 migrants and refugees have sailed from Libya to Italy in the past three days in what appears the start of a wave of at least 100,000 and "possibly many, many more" this year, the International Organization for Migration said on Friday.
The report may fan fears of a huge resurgence of migrant numbers reaching Europe via Italy by sea from Libya now that a shorter, safer route via Greece has been blocked, with Austria preparing to stop unhindered travel over its border with Italy in anticipation of more migrants bound for the heart of the EU.
Only a few hundred of the people who crossed the Mediterranean to Europe in the past three days entered via Greece, a massive reversal from the pattern seen until a March deal between the European Union and Turkey to stop the flow.
The voyage by boat from Libya is far longer and associated with much higher death rates than between Turkey and Greece, though Libya's lack of functioning government and lawlessness make it easy for people traffickers to operate with impunity.