47 Percent Of Americans Cannot Even Come Up With $400 To Cover An Emergency Room Visit - Michael Snyder THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG

47 Percent Of Americans Cannot Even Come Up With $400 To Cover An Emergency Room Visit

Posted: 20 Apr 2016   Michael Snyder  THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG

If you had to make a sudden visit to the emergency room, would you have enough money to pay for it without selling something or borrowing the funds from somewhere?  Most Americans may not realize this, but this is something that the Federal Reserve has actually been tracking for several years now.  And according to the Fed, an astounding 47 percent of all Americans could not come up with $400 to pay for an emergency room visit without borrowing it or selling something. 

Various surveys that I have talked about in the past have found that more than 60 percent of all Americans are living to paycheck to paycheck, but I didn’t realize that things were quite this bad for about half the country.  If you can’t even come up with $400 for an unexpected emergency room visit, then you are just surviving from month to month by the skin of your teeth.  Unfortunately, about half of us are currently in that situation.

Earlier today someone pointed me toward an excellent article in The Atlantic that discussed this, and I have to admit that The Atlantic is one of the last remaining bastions of old school excellence in journalism that you will find in the mainstream media.  Of course I don’t see eye to eye with them on a lot of things philosophically, but there are some really hard working journalists over there.

The article where I found the 47 percent figure comes from The Atlantic, and it is entitled “The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans“.  It was authored by Neal Gabler, and he says that he can identify with the 47 percent of Americans that don’t have $400 for an unexpected emergency room visit because he is one of them…

I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week. I know what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can pay others. I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5—literally—while I wait for a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs. I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn’t know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil.

To me, this is yet more evidence that the middle class in America is dying.

Last year, it was reported that middle class Americans make up a minority of the population for the very first time in our history.

But back in 1971, 61 percent of all Americans lived in middle class households.
So what happened?

Well, the big corporations started shipping millions of good paying manufacturing jobs overseas.  Millions of other good paying jobs were replaced by technology, and the competition for the good jobs that remained became extremely intense.

During the good times, the U.S. economy still created new jobs, but most of those jobs were low paying service jobs.

At this point, a majority of American workers have jobs that would be considered low paying.  In fact, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year according to the Social Security Administration.

And once you account for inflation, the truth is that our incomes have been going down for years.  According to a study that was released by Pew Charitable Trusts, median household income in the United States decreased by 13 percent between 2004 and 2014.

That isn’t “progress” any way that you slice it.

If you go all the way back to 1970, the middle class took home approximately 62 percent of all income in the United States.

Today, that number has fallen to just 43 percent.

So the fact that 47 percent of Americans can’t even pay for an unexpected emergency room visit is not exactly a surprise.  To be honest, a whole host of other surveys have come up with similar numbers.  Here is more from Neal Gabler…

A 2014 Bankrate survey, echoing the Fed’s data, found that only 38 percent of Americans would cover a $1,000 emergency-room visit or $500 car repair with money they’d saved. Two reports published last year by the Pew Charitable Trusts found, respectively, that 55 percent of households didn’t have enough liquid savings to replace a month’s worth of lost income, and that of the 56 percent of people who said they’d worried about their finances in the previous year, 71 percent were concerned about having enough money to cover everyday expenses.

What all of these numbers tell us is that the middle class is disappearing.  I tend to compare it to a game of really bizarre musical chairs.  With each passing month more chairs are being pulled out of the circle, and those members of the middle class that haven’t fallen into poverty yet are just hoping that a chair will still be there for them when the music stops.
Even during the “Obama recovery”, we have seen poverty in America absolutely explode.  In fact, some brand new numbers just came out that are quite startling.  The following comes from another author for The Atlantic named Gillian B. White…

Recently, the Brookings Institution published a report looking at the same idea but giving it a different name. The paper, builds on research from the British economist William Beveridge, who in 1942 proposed five types of poverty: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease. In modern terms, these could be defined as poverty related to housing, education, income, employment, and healthcare, respectively. Analyzing the 2014 American Community Survey, the paper’s co-authors, Richard Reeves, Edward Rodrigue, and Elizabeth Kneebone, found that half of Americans experience at least one of these types of poverty, and around 25 percent suffer from at least two.

To underscore this point, let me just run five quick facts about the growth of poverty in this country by you…

–The number of Americans that are living in concentrated areas of high poverty has doubled since the year 2000.

–In 2007, about one out of every eight children in America was on food stamps. Today, that number is one out of every five.

–46 million Americans use food banks each year, and lines start forming at some U.S. food banks as early as 6:30 in the morning because people want to get something before the food supplies run out.

–The number of homeless children in the U.S. has increased by 60 percent over the past six years.

–According to Poverty USA, 1.6 million American children slept in a homeless shelter or some other form of emergency housing last year.

That last number really gets me every time.

How can “the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet” have more than a million homeless children?

This is one of the reasons why I hammer on our ongoing economic collapse over and over and over.  It is affecting real families with real children that have real hopes and real dreams.
This is not the way our country is supposed to work.

It is supposed to be “the land of opportunity”.

It is supposed to be a place where anyone can live “the American Dream”.

But instead it has become an economic wasteland where the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world is being systematically eviscerated.

So no, the U.S. economy is not doing “just fine” – anyone that tries to tell you that lie is simply peddling fiction.

*About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog. Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.*

23 Percent Of Americans In Their Prime Working Years Are Unemployed - Michael Synder THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG

23 Percent Of Americans In Their Prime Working Years Are Unemployed Posted: 27 Mar 2016  Michael Synder  THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG Did you know that when you take the number of working age Americans that are officially unemployed (8.2 million) and add that number to the number of working age Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force” (94.3 million), that gives us a grand total of 102.5 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now?  I have written about this before, but today I want to focus just on Americans that are in their prime working years.  When you look at only Americans that are from age 25 to age 54, 23.2 percent of them are unemployed right now.  The following analysis and chart come from the Weekly Standard… Here’s a chart showing those in that age group currently employed (95.6 million) and those who aren’t (28.9 million): “There are 124.5 million Americans in their prime working years (ages 25–54). Nearly one-quarter of this group—28.9 million people, or 23.2 percent of the total—is not currently employed. They either became so discouraged that they left the labor force entirely, or they are in the labor force but unemployed. This group of non-employed individuals is more than 3.5 million larger than before the recession began in 2007,” writes the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee. Clearly, we have never recovered from the impact of the last recession. But let’s try to put these numbers in context. Below, I would like to share two charts with you.  They show what has happened to the inactivity rates for men and for women in their prime working years in the United States in recent years. In order to be considered “inactive”, you can’t have a job and you can’t be looking for a job.  So this subset of people is smaller than the group that we were talking about above.  The 23.2 percent of Americans in their prime working years that are unemployed right now includes those that are looking for a job and those that are not looking for a job. These next two charts do not include anyone that has a job or that is currently looking for a job.  These charts only cover “inactive” people in their prime working years that are not considered to be in the labor force. As you can see in this first chart, the inactivity rate for men in their prime working years exploded higher during the last recession and then continued to go up even after the recession supposedly ended.  At this point, it is hovering near all-time record highs.  Does this look like an “economic recovery” to you?… For women, we see a similar thing.  In this next chart, you can see that the inactivity rate for women in their prime working years rose during the last recession and then just kept on rising.  At this point, it is also hovering near all-time record highs… What are we to make of all this? For both men and women in their prime working years, the inactivity rate is even higher than it was during the last recession and is hovering near the all-time record. All of these people neither have a job nor are they looking for one. So what in the world is going on here? Are they independently wealthy? Have these people found rich spouses to marry so they don’t have to work? No, the truth is that the middle class in America is steadily eroding and poverty is absolutely exploding.  Credit card debt has soared to a new record high, and 48 percent of all U.S. adults under the age of 30 believe that “the American Dream is dead”. The issue isn’t that people don’t want to work. The issue is that people cannot find enough work. And even if you have a job, that does not mean that you are on easy street.  According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year. Tens of millions of Americans are now among the ranks of “the working poor”.  So many families are watching their expenses soar while their paychecks go down or stagnate.  If you are in this situation right now, then you probably know how exceedingly stressful it can be. Just look at what is happening to the cost of health insurance.  The following comes from Fox News… Health insurance premiums have increased faster than wages and inflation in recent years, rising an average of 28 percent from 2009 to 2014 despite the enactment of Obamacare, according to a report from Freedom Partners. And I am not exactly sure where they got those numbers.  Personally, I know that my health insurance rates have gone up far faster than that. Two years ago, my health insurance company wanted to double the health insurance premiums for my family even though we never get sick.  So I switched to another insurance company that offered a policy that was only about 30 percent higher than my last one.  But then when it came time to renew, that insurance company wanted to raise my rate by another 50 percent. Thanks to Obamacare, American families are being absolutely crippled by the cost of health care.  And of course we are seeing the rising cost of living so many other places as well.  Our paychecks are being squeezed harder and harder, and this is absolutely killing the middle class.  In fact, the middle class in America is now a minority for the first time ever. And now for the real bad news – this is about as good as things are ever going to get in this country.  As you can see from what I have shared above, we never really had any sort of meaningful “economic recovery”, and now we have entered the early phases of the next major downturn. So where do we go from here?  Unfortunately, our debt-fueled prosperity has provided us with a massively inflated standard of living that is not even close to sustainable.  As this bubble bursts, the economic pain is going to be absolutely unprecedented. But it won’t be just economic pain that we are facing.  In my new book, I detail the things that I believe that are coming to this country, and I explain why the entire planet will soon be facing incredibly challenging times.  It is going to be one of the most controversial Christian books of 2016, because it directly challenges many of the things that are being taught in mainstream churches today.  My book is an ominous message of warning and an inspiring message of hope, and I truly believe that it is the most important thing that I have ever written. No matter how you may see the future, the key is that we all learn to love one another.  The years ahead are going to be extremely challenging, and those that want to chase everyone else away and survive as lone wolves are going to have a very rough time.  We all need each other, and those that have friends, family and communities around them are going to be in a much better position to weather the coming storms. So let us hope for the best, but let us also prepare for the worst…

Prescription Painkiller Crisis: Why Do Americans Consume 80 Percent Of All Prescription Painkillers? - Michael Snyder THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG

Prescription Painkiller Crisis: Why Do Americans Consume 80 Percent Of All Prescription Painkillers? Posted: 14 Mar 2016  Michael Snyder  THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG If Americans are so happy, then why do we consume 80 percent of the entire global supply of prescription painkillers?  Less than 5 percent of the world’s population lives in this country, and yet we buy four-fifths of these highly addictive drugs.  In the United States today, approximately 4.7 million Americans are addicted to prescription pain relievers, and that represents about a 300 percent increase since 1999.   If you personally know someone that is suffering from this addiction, then you probably already know how immensely destructive these drugs can be.  Someone that was formally living a very healthy and normal life can be reduced to a total basket case within a matter of weeks. And of course many don’t make it back at all.  According to the CDC, more than 28,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2014.  Incredibly, those deaths represented 60 percent of all drug overdose deaths in the United States for that year… A report released by the US Centers for Disesase Control and Prevention (CDC) in January revealed that drug-overdose deaths reached a new high in 2014, totaling 47,055 people. Opioids, a type of powerful painkiller that requires a prescription, were involved in 60% of those deaths. Many Americans that start out on legal opioids quickly find themselves moving over to heroin because it is often cheaper and easier to obtain, and the U.S. is now facing a tremendous epidemic of heroin abuse as well.  In fact, the number of Americans that die of a heroin overdose nearly quadrupled between 2000 to 2013. Finally, the federal government has started to take notice of this crisis.  A bill was recently passed to spend more than a billion dollars over the next two year fighting this problem. But as long as doctors are writing thousands upon thousands of new prescriptions for these painkillers each year, this crisis is not going to go away any time soon. In the Appalachians, these prescription painkillers are commonly known as “hillbilly heroin“, and all of the attention that the New Hampshire primaries received focused a lot of attention on how this crisis is destroying countless numbers of lives up in the Northeast.  But one survey found that the states with the biggest problems with painkiller addiction are actually in the West… The National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a survey of approximately 67,500 people across the United States, found that the states with the highest rates of narcotic painkiller abuse were in the West – Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington. Unless you are about to die, I would very strongly recommend that you resist any attempt by your doctor to put you on these “medications”.  Just consider what happened to one stay-at-home mother named Norah Mangan… I am an educated, suburban wife and stay-at-home mother of four. Life had been good to me until a fateful visit with an orthopedic physician, my chief complaint being mild arthritic pain in my toes. My physician handed me the first of many monthly prescriptions for Oxycodone and what followed that appointment was a rapid descent into hell. Within six months, I had become a raving drug addict. Before too long, Norah had to turn to means that were less than legal in order to keep fueling her addiction.  Her life was turned into a complete and utter disaster by drugs that were legally prescribed to her… It wasn’t long before my legal monthly prescription fell woefully short in terms of keeping my life altering pain at bay. In the interest of not incriminating myself, I’ll simply share that when procured through other means, Oxycodone generally sells for one dollar per milligram. I was draining our savings and was out of my mind. I was so tortured that I didn’t care about the deterioration of my moral values, in fact, I didn’t even notice.  It’s hard to imagine that in such a short period of time I had morphed from a Mrs. Cleaver, baking hot cinnamon buns in anticipation of my children’s arrival home from school, to Scarface crushing pills on the glass top of the executive desk in our home office while thinking to myself as I heard them arrive from school…why oh why are they home already? You can read the rest of her amazing story right here… The truth is that we are the most drugged people on the face of the planet.  It has been estimated that 52 million Americans over the age of 12 have used prescription drugs in non-medical ways, and this problem gets worse with each passing year. According to research that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 59 percent of all U.S. adults are currently on at least one prescription drug, and 15 percent of all U.S. adults are on at least five prescription drugs.  And the numbers are far worse for older Americans.  The following statistics come from one of my previous articles… –According to the CDC, approximately 9 out of every 10 Americans that are at least 60 years old say that they have taken at least one prescription drug within the last month. –There is an unintentional drug overdose death in the United States every 19 minutes. –In the United States today, prescription painkillers kill more Americans than heroin and cocaine combined. –According to the CDC, approximately three quarters of a million people a year are rushed to emergency rooms in the United States because of adverse reactions to pharmaceutical drugs. –The percentage of women taking antidepressants in America is higher than in any other country in the world. –Children in the United States are three times more likely to be prescribed antidepressants as children in Europe are. –A shocking Government Accountability Office report discovered that approximately one-third of all foster children in the United States are on at least one psychiatric drug. –A survey conducted for the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that more than 15 percent of all U.S. high school seniors abuse prescription drugs. We are a deeply unhappy nation that has been trained to turn to pills as a “quick fix” for our hurt and our pain. Yes, there are medical situations that call for prescription pain relievers.  But what we are seeing in America today goes far, far beyond that.  We are a nation of addicts that is always in search of a way to fill the gaping holes that we feel deep in our hearts.  This prescription pain killer crisis is just another symptom of a much deeper problem. So what is the solution?

Plunging Manufacturing Numbers Mean That It Is Time To Hit The Panic Button For The Global Economy - Michael Snyder THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE

Plunging Manufacturing Numbers Mean That It Is Time To Hit The Panic Button For The Global Economy Posted: 01 Mar 2016 Michael Snyder  THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE We haven’t seen numbers like these since the last global recession.  I recently wrote about how global trade is imploding all over the planet, and the same thing is true when it comes to manufacturing.  We just learned that manufacturing in China has now been contracting for seven months in a row, and as you will see below, U.S. manufacturing is facing “its toughest period since the global financial crisis”.   Yes, global stocks have bounced back a bit after experiencing dramatic declines during January and the first part of February, and this is something that investors are very happy about.  But that does not mean that the crisis is over.  All bear markets have their ups and downs, and this one will not be any different.   Meanwhile, the cold, hard economic numbers that keep coming in are absolutely screaming that a new global recession is here. Just consider what is happening in China.  Manufacturing activity continues to implode, and factories are shedding jobs at the fastest pace since the last financial crisis… Chinese manufacturing suffered a seventh straight month of contraction in February. China’s official Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) stood at 49.0 in February, down from the previous month’s reading of 49.4 and below the 50-point mark that separates growth from contraction on a monthly basis. A private survey also showed China’s factories shed jobs at the fastest rate in seven years in February, raising doubts about the government’s ability to reduce industry overcapacity this year without triggering a sharp jump in unemployment. For years, the expansion of the Chinese economy has helped fuel global economic growth. But now things have shifted dramatically. At this point, things are already so bad that the Chinese government is admitting that millions of workers are going to lose their jobs at state-controlled industries in China… China’s premier told visiting U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew on Monday his government is pressing ahead with painful reforms to shrink bloated coal and steel industries that are a drag on its slowing economy and ruled out devaluing its currency as a short-cut to boosting exports. Premier Li Keqiang’s comments to Lew on Monday were in line with a joint declaration by financial officials from the Group of 20 biggest rich and developing economies who met over the weekend in Shanghai. They pledged to avoid devaluations to boost sagging trade and urged governments to speed up reforms to boost slowing global growth. Across all state-controlled industries, as many as six million workers could be out of a job, with almost two million in the coal industry alone. But it isn’t just China.  Right now manufacturing activity is slowing down literally all over the planet, and this is exactly what we would expect to see if a new global recession had begun.  The following chart and analysis come from Zero Hedge… As the below table shows, 28 regions have reported so far. Seven saw improvements in their manufacturing sectors in February, twenty recorded a weakening, and India was unchanged.  This means that over 70% of the world saw manufacturing sentiment deteriorate in February compared to January. In terms of actual expansion, there were 21 countries in positive territory and 7 in negative. In particular, Greece moved from neutral to contraction territory, while Taiwan dropped below breakeven from expansion. Unfortunately, most Americans don’t really pay much attention to what is going on in the rest of the world.  For most of us, what really matters is what is happening inside the good ole USA. And of course the news is not good.  There were more signs of trouble for U.S. manufacturing in the February numbers, and this continues a trend that stretches back well into last year.  The following is what Chris Williamson, the chief economist at Markit, had to say about these numbers… “The February data add to signs of distress in the US manufacturing economy. Production and order book growth continues to worsen, led by falling exports. Jobs are being added at a slower pace and output prices are dropping at a rate not seen since mid-2012. “The deterioration in the manufacturing sector’s performance since mid-2014 has broadly tracked the dollar’s rise, which makes US goods more expensive in overseas markets and leads US consumers to favour cheaper imported goods. “With other headwinds including the downturn in the oil sector, heightened uncertainty due to financial market volatility, global growth worries and growing concerns about the presidential election, it’s no surprise that the manufacturing sector is facing its toughest period since the global financial crisis.“ Over the past couple of decades, the U.S. economy has lost tens of thousands of manufacturing facilities.  We desperately need a manufacturing renaissance – not another manufacturing decline. As good paying manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas, they have been replaced by low paying service jobs.  As a result, the middle class is shrinking and the ranks of the poor are exploding. It is hard to believe, but today more than 45 million Americans are on food stamps, and a significant percentage of those individuals actually have jobs.  They are called “the working poor”, and it is becoming a major crisis in this nation. And no matter what Obama may say, unemployment remains a major problem in the United States as well.  At this point, unemployment rates in 36 states are higher than they were just before the last recession hit in 2008. Of course a lot of people are going to look at this article and will point to the stock market gains of the past couple of weeks as evidence that “things are getting better”.  It is this kind of clueless approach that is keeping the American people from coming together on solutions to our problems. The truth is that the United States has been experiencing economic decline for decades.  Our economic infrastructure has been gutted, the middle class is steadily deteriorating, and we have amassed the biggest pile of debt in the history of the world. Anyone that believes that things are “just fine” is in a massive state of denial.  Consuming far more wealth than we produce is not a formula for a sustainable economy, and it is just a matter of time before we find this out the hard way.

How the Nine Traits of the Messianic Generation are Coming Alive in the Modern World By Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz - BREAKING ISRAEL NEWS

A page from the ‘Gemara’, which when combined with the Mishnah constitutes the Talmud, the Oral law of Judaism. (Photo: Mendy Hechtman/FLASH90)

How the Nine Traits of the Messianic Generation are Coming Alive in the Modern World

By Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz February 23, 2016  BREAKING ISRAEL NEWS

“There shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time; and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book. And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to reproaches and everlasting abhorrence.” 
Daniel 12:1-2 (The Israel Bible™)

In the search for signs of the onset of the Messianic era, many look to the Bible and Prophets. The rabbinic sages who wrote the Talmud, a collection of Jewish biblical commentaries, were also granted a modicum of prescience. One section of the Talmud describes, in detail, the characteristics of society preceding the Messiah. In many ways, it is a disturbingly accurate description of our culture today and its unique traits, never seen  before in history.

This description, found in the tractate of Sotah, folio 49b, lists nine traits of the days preceding the Messiah.

1) Insolence will increase and honor dwindle

The internet has drastically changed the dynamics of modern society, making fame a more a matter of shock value than merit. The web has given rise to a culture of shamelessness and permissiveness in which freedom of expression manifests in internet trolling and bizarre viral videos. The phenomenon even received the presidential seal of approval when President Barack Obama met with Glozell Green, a woman whose claim to fame was eating cereal from a bathtub.

2) The vine will bear its fruit but wine will be dear

Today’s global economy has led to a situation in which a fertile country could go into debt and be unable to feed its population. This is precisely what Venezuela is experiencing today. Hoarding food and prepping became illegal in 2013. Last year, the government instituted rationing of electricity and forced farmers and food manufacturers to sell 30-100 percent of their goods to the state at set prices. Today, there are long lines for basic commodities and serious concerns that Venezuela may be on the verge of a catastrophic economic collapse, leading to an economically-induced famine. Given the state of the global economy, this is dangerously close to becoming a common phenomenon.

3) The government will turn to heresy and there will be none to offer them reproof

Without touching on US President Barack Obama’s ambiguous religious life, he has often been criticized for political heresy in his harsh treatment of the Bible of the United States: the Constitution. Discussions about gun control make no reference to the second amendment, and his executive order granting amnesty to illegal immigrants is in litigation for its questionable legality. Obamacare has several points which are criticized for violating basic constitutional points. Yet Obama has placed himself above reproof by issuing executive orders with impunity.

At the same time, the ongoing Republican campaign for the presidential nomination has taken on a religious dimension, with nearly all of the candidates emphasizing a strong religious aspect to their platforms. It seems that many Americans have decided they would like to see less heresy and more religion in the White House.

3) The meeting place of scholars will be used for immorality

American universities were created to transform students into successful, educated contributors to society, yet morality on today’s campuses has taken a sharp and disturbing downturn. Studies have shown that as many as 40 percent of college students can be defined as alcoholics, and more than half of all university students will use illicit drugs. Even more disturbingly, sexual assault is rampant in today’s universities. Some studies estimate that 19-27 percent of college women and 6-8 percent of college men are sexually assaulted during their time in college.

4) The dwellers on the frontier will go about begging from place to place without anyone to take pity on them

Today’s refugee issue has become a modern epidemic. 14 million Syrians have fled their homes, and six million of these were forced to leave their country – four million in the last year alone. At least 340 children have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea since September and officials claim the actual figure may be much higher with many bodies lost at sea. Despite international efforts, the situation has grown beyond any ability to cope with it, and taken on social dimensions that have become the focus of debate.

5) Youths will put old men to shame, the old will stand up in the presence of the young

In today’s culture of youth, achievement at a young age is idolized and lauded, and older generations, despite having built the foundation of the modern world, are pushed aside as they age out of technological advancement and relevance. In 2014, Forbes wrote in its annual ‘Under 30 list’ highlighting the achievements of young entrepreneurs, “This is the time to be young and ambitious. Never before has youth been such an advantage.” It seems that lifetime achievement awards have gone out of fashion.

6) A son will revile his father, a daughter will rise up against her mother….and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household

Last month, a 20-year-old Syrian man personified this disturbing forecast when he  killed his mother in the city of Raqqa because she urged him to leave ISIS. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights stated that there have been several cases of sons killing their father for similar reasons, but this was the first documented case of matricide.

7) The face of the generation will be like the face of a dog

Sometimes the simple reading is the most poignant. Hillary Clinton shocked many at a recent campaign speech in Reno when, while making a point, she began barking like a dog.

8) A son will not be ashamed before his father

The rabbinic commentary describes this as a condition in which the young take over the roles of authority traditionally held by society’s elders. This is certainly true in today’s marketplace in which uber-rich youngsters rule over men and women with decades of education and experience. Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, reset the biological business meter when he founded Microsoft at the age of 20, making Steve Jobs (born the same year as Gates) seem over the hill when he waited until the age of 21 to found Apple. At 23, an age when most people are coping with the very beginnings of their career, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, was a self-made billionaire. David Karp, a high-school dropout, founded Tumblr when he was 20 and now, at the ripe old age of 26, has a personal worth of more than $200 million.

9) The wisdom of the learned will degenerate, fearers of sin will be despised, and the truth will be lacking

Nowhere is the fulfillment of this prediction more evident than in the blatantly unfair treatment of the State of Israel on today’s world stage. The dialogue surrounding the conflict in Israel is dominated by outright lies, including claims – now widely accepted – that deny facts previously undisputed. Despite the absolute absence of any historical Palestinian nation, opponents of Israel claim that the Palestinians have been a nation in the land of Israel for thousands of years, with historical and religious ties to the Temple Mount. This view was even propagated by one of the world’s premiere journalistic sources, the New York Times, which stated that proof of the Jewish Temples “proved elusive”.

The Israel debate is mired in absurdity. The world’s top thinkers, politicians and religious world leaders who should know better, blindly vilify the Jewish State and support its enemies. The attempts of Israeli security forces to protect Jews and citizens from Palestinian terrorists have been called “extrajudicial executions”. The United Nations has censured Israel, the only democratic nation in the Middle East, more times than any other country in the world. Pope Francis has crowned PA President Mahmoud Abbas an “Angel of Mercy”, despite Abbas’s blatant incitement of violence against Israelis.

One must look no further than the worldwide rejection and condemnation of the Jewish State, a beacon of democracy, faith, and light, to see the truth of this forecast.

Dot-Com Bubble 2.0 Is Bursting: Tech Stocks Are Already Down Half A Trillion Dollars Since Mid-2015 - Michael Snyder THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE

Dot-Com Bubble 2.0 Is Bursting: Tech Stocks Are Already Down Half A Trillion Dollars Since Mid-2015

Posted: 07 Feb 2016 Michael Snyder  THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE

Do you remember how much stocks went down when the first dot-com bubble burst?  Well, it is happening again, and tech stocks are already down more than half a trillion dollars since the middle of 2015.  On Friday, the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped to its lowest level in more than 15 months, and it has now fallen more than 16 percent from the peak of the market. 

But of course some of the biggest names have fallen much more than that.  Netflix is down 37 percent, Yahoo is down 39 percent, LinkedIn is down 60 percent, and Twitter is down more than 70 percent.  If you go back through my previous articles, you will find that I specifically warned about Twitter again and again.  Irrational financial bubbles like this always burst eventually, and many investors that got in at the very top are now losing extraordinary amounts of money.

On Friday, tech stocks got absolutely slammed as the bursting of dot-com bubble 2.0 accelerated once again.  The following is how CNBC summarized the carnage…

The Nasdaq composite fell 3.25 percent, as Apple and the iShares Nasdaq Biotechnology ETF (IBB) dropped 2.67 percent and 3.19 percent, respectively.
Also weighing on the index were Amazon and Facebook, which closed down 6.36 percent and 5.81 percent, respectively.
LinkedIn shares also tanked 43.63 percent after posting weak guidance on their quarterly results.

Overall, LinkedIn is now down a total of 60 percent from the peak of the market.  But they are far from the only ones that have already seen their bubble burst.

Many of the biggest names in the tech world have gotten mercilessly hammered over the past six months of so.  Just look at some of the famous brands that have already lost between 20 and 40 percent of their market caps…

Yahoo (YHOO) shares are off 39%, and Netflix (NFLX), the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 last year, is now off by 37% from its 52-week high.
Likewise, Priceline.com (PCLN) is off 31% and eBay (EBAY), 22%.

But there are other very big tech companies that have seen stock collapses that completely dwarf those numbers.  Here are some more absolutely stunning statistics from USA Today…

Twitter and Groupon are the biggest dogs of this boom, both off 70% from 52-week highs and well below their IPO prices.
FitBit shares have collapsed 70%, while Yelp’s valuation has shrunk by two-thirds.
Box, which has the distinction of posting quarterly net losses in excess of revenue, is down by half.
Match.com, the holding company for dating sites owned by parent Interactive Corp. that went public late last year, is down 39% from its high.

When your stock loses 70 percent of its value, that is a complete and utter collapse.
In the past, I have specifically singled out Twitter, Yelp and LinkedIn as tech stocks that were irrationally priced.

Hopefully people listened to those warnings and got out while the getting was good.
At the top of this article, I mentioned that tech stocks have already fallen in value by more than 500 billion dollars.  The financial crisis that began in the middle of last year is now greatly accelerating, and Wall Street is starting to panic.

As stocks crash, many hedge funds are being absolutely pummeled.  The following are just a few of the high profile names that are experiencing massive losses right now…

Some of the biggest names to get trounced include:
►Pershing Square Capital Management, the publicly traded investment vehicle of billionaire hedgie Bill Ackman, fell 11% last month following a 20% decline last year, data from the web site shows.
►Larry Robbins’ Glenview Capital, famous for picking stocks that could benefit from Obamacare, dropped 13.65% in January following a decline of 18% last year, according to data from HSBC’s Hedge Weekly report, a copy of which was obtained by USA TODAY.
►Marcato International, a well-known activist fund run by Ackman protege Mick McGuire, fell 12.1% last month following a 9% loss last year, according to HSBC.

When you lose more than 10 percent of your money in a single month, that is not good.
And if I am right, this is just the beginning of our troubles.

And of course I am far from the only one warning that big problems are on the horizon.  In fact, analysts at Citigroup just made international headlines by warning that the global economy was now trapped in a “death spiral”…

Some analysts — including those at Citi — have turned bearish on the world economy this year, following an equity rout in January and weaker economic data out of China and the U.S.
“The world appears to be trapped in a circular reference death spiral,” Citi strategists led by Jonathan Stubbs said in a report on Thursday.
“Stronger U.S. dollar, weaker oil/commodity prices, weaker world trade/petrodollar liquidity, weaker EM (and global growth)… and repeat. Ad infinitum, this would lead to Oilmageddon, a ‘significant and synchronized’ global recession and a proper modern-day equity bear market.”

Signs of a significant economic downturn are all around us, and so many of the exact same patterns that played out during the last two stock market crashes are happening again, and yet most people continue to refuse to acknowledge what is taking place.

If you are waiting for this new dot-com bubble to crash, you can stop waiting, because it has already happened.

When your stock falls by 50, 60 or 70 percent, the game is already over.

But just like 2001 and 2008, many people out there will end up being paralyzed by indecision.  Once again the mainstream media is insisting that there is no reason for panic and that everything will be just fine, and once again millions upon millions of ordinary Americans will be wiped out as the financial markets implode.

This is now the third time this has happened since the turn of the century.

How clueless have we become?  The exact same thing keeps happening to us over and over and yet we still don’t get it.

Only this time around there isn’t going to be any sort of a “recovery” afterwards.

This is essentially our “third strike”, and the years ahead are going to be extremely bitter and painful for most people.

But if you want to believe that one of these politicians is going to come along and save America, you go ahead and keep on believing that.

Most people believe what they want to believe, and the capacity that many Americans have demonstrated for self-delusion is absolutely remarkable.

Kansas Post Office Takes Down 'God Bless America' Banner - CBN NEWS

Kansas Post Office Takes Down 'God Bless America' Banner

CBN News 02-01-2016

Residents of Pittsburg, Kansas, are buying signs and banners proclaiming "God Bless America" after the local post office removed a banner over complaints that its message violated separation of church and state.

The Joplin Globe reports the post office removed the "God Bless America" banner this week after the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation filed complaints.

The foundation, which has more than 22,500 members, has also been trying to get Missouri sheriffs to remove "In God We Trust" bumper stickers from department vehicles and "In God We Trust" from U.S. coins and currency.

"It's a shame that 23,000 people can control the desires of millions of other Americans," Martin Dickson, Pittsburg resident, told Joplin Globe. "I recognize the separation and the reason for it. But I also realize that we need God's blessing more now than ever."

Madeline Ziegler, a legal fellow at the foundation, wrote that the First Amendment prohibits government sponsorship of religious messages. The group also noted that it had received complaints about the banner from a local resident.

But that is not stopping Pittsburg residents from raising their banners and signs.

Dickson, owner of Jayhawk Signs & Graphics, said he and his wife decided to cut prices on signs and banners saying "God Bless America" just a few hours after the banner was removed at the post office.

"We're not doing it for the business," said Dickinson, who is also a priest at All Saints Anglican in Chicopee. "We're doing this to promote America."

Pittsburg postal workers paid for the 12-foot-long vinyl banner after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Post Office says the postal service took the banner down because policy prohibits the placement of notices on postal property unless they're official government notices.

Resident Stephen Hipfl bought a banner he planned to put up.

"We're Americans," Hipfl said. "Soldiers."