Most Voters Say Trump Has Damaged U.S. Standing In The World

The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between September 18th and 21st of a nationwide sample of 1,401 registered voters, with a 3.4 point margin of error. 

The Racial / Ethnic Composition Of The U.S. Electorate

 From the Pew Research Center

The Unemployment Rate Remains At 4.1% For The Month Of August

The Labor Dapertment's unemployment report for August was released a few days ago. It showed the economy had produced about 162,000 new jobs - a big improvement over last month. There was also 115,000 newly unemployed person, so the unemployment remained at 4.1% (for the second month in a row). 

Here are the relevant statistics for August:

SIZE OF THE CIVILIAN WORK FORCE:

169,777,000

OFFICIAL NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED WORKERS:

7,031,000

OFFICIAL UNEMPLOYMENT RATE:

4.1%

DEMOGRAPHIC BREAKDOWN OF OFFICIAL UNEMPLOYMENT:

Adult men...............4.0%

Adult women...............3.5%

Teens (16-19)...............14.!%

Whites...............3.7%

Blacks...............6.0%

Asians...............3.2%

Hispanics................4.8%

No HS diploma...............4.7%

HS graduate...............4.4%

Some college...............3.7%

Bachelor's deg. or more...............2.7%

MARGINALLY-ATTACHED WORKERS (unemployed but not counted):

1,704,000

MORE REALISTIC NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED (official + marginally-attached):

8,735,000

MORE REALISTIC UNEMPLOYMENT RATE:

5.15%

Marijuana Use Is Up While Cigarette Use Is Down

 

The charts above are from the Gallup Poll -- done between July 1st and 19th of a nationwide sample of 1,200 adults, with a 4 point margin of error.

Alcohol Consumption Remains At A Record Low In The United States

The chart above is from the Gallup Poll. It was done between July 1st and 19th of a nationwide sample of 1,200 adults with a 4 point margin of error.

Most See Trump As A Force For Bad And Untrustworthy

 

These charts are from a YouGov Poll -- done between July 1st and 17th of adults in the U.K. (2340), Australia (2003), Canada (2057), France (2109), Germany (2079), Poland (2098), and the U.S. (2039).

Most People Still believe In The Accuracy And Fairness Of U.S. Elections

 

The charts above are from a Pew Research Center survey -- done between July 6th and 12th of a nationwide sample of 3,554 adults, with a 1.9 point margin of error.

The Unemployment Rate Fell To 4.1% In July Even Though The Economy Lost Jobs

The Labor Department released its monthly unemployment report on Friday. It showed the unemployment rate fell by 0.1% in July to 4.1%. But that is not a cause for celebration. The economy actually lost 23,000 jobs during the month. The only reason the unemployment rate fell was because the civilian work force also shrunk - by about 264,000.

Here are the relevant statistics for the month of July:

SIZE OF THE CIVILIAN WORK FORCE:

169,094,000

OFFICIAL NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED WORKERS:

6,916,000

OFFICIAL UNEMPLOYMENT RATE:

4.1%

DEMOGRAPHIC BREAKDOWN OF OFFICIAL UNEMPLOYMENT:

Adult men...............3.9%

Adult women...............3.7%

Teens (16-19)...............12.1%

Whites...............3.6%

Blacks...............6.3%

Asians...............4.0%

Hispanics...............4.6%

No HS diploma...............5.4%

HS graduate...............4.0%

Some college...............3.6%

Bachelor's deg. or more............... 2.7%

NUMBER OF MARGINALLY-ATTACHED WORKERS (not employed but no longer counted):

1,806,000

MORE REALISTIC NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED (marginally-attached + official):

8,722,000

MORE REALISTIC UNEMPLOYMENT RATE:

5.16%

The U.S. Is Experiencing Its Third Oligarchy - And Its Destroying Our Democracy

 The following is just part of an excellent post by Robert Reich:

America has experienced oligarchy three times in its brief history. 

The first was at the nation’s start. Many of the men who founded the United States were slaveholding white oligarchs. America didn’t have much of a middle class. Most white people were farmers, indentured servants, farmhands, traders, day laborers, and artisans. A fifth of the population was Black, almost all enslaved.

 

A century later, a second oligarchy emerged, the robber barons. They were men who amassed fortunes through their railroad, steel, oil, and financial empires — men such as J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Mellon. They ushered the nation into an industrial revolution that vastly expanded economic output. 

They also corrupted government, brutally suppressed wages, generated unprecedented levels of inequality and urban poverty, pillaged rivals, shut down competitors, and made out like bandits — which is why they earned the sobriquet “robber barons.”

World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s eroded most of these robber barons’ wealth. And most of their power was eliminated after the elections of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

For the next half-century the gains from growth were more widely shared, and democracy became more responsive to the needs and aspirations of average Americans.

 

Although America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen, there was still much to do — civil rights and voting rights for Black Americans, wider economic opportunities for them and for women and Latinos, protection of the environment. Yet by almost every measure the nation was making progress.

A third American oligarchy emerged starting around 1980. Since then, the share of the nation’s wealth owned by the richest 400 Americans has quadrupled (from 0.8 percent to 3.7 percent). 

The richest 130,000 Americans and their immediate families now own as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent — 117 million — combined. The three richest Americans own as much as the entire bottom half of the population.

The only other country with similarly high levels of wealth concentration is Russia.

All this has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the political power of the super-wealthy and an equally dramatic decline in the political influence of everyone else.

 

Unlike income or wealth, power is a zero-sum game. The more of it at the top, the less of it anywhere else.

The average American now has little or no effect on public policy. Giant corporations, their CEOs, and a handful of extremely rich people have more influence than any comparable group since the robber barons. . . .

As long as the oligarchy is in control, there will be no antitrust enforcement to puncture the power of their giant corporations. Instead, their corporations will continue to grow larger, raise prices for consumers, and become more politically powerful. 

As long as the oligarchy is in control, there will be no meaningful constraint on Wall Street’s dangerous gambling addiction. The gambling will grow. 

As long as the oligarchy is in control, there will be no limits to CEO pay, and Wall Street hedge fund and private equity managers will rake in billions more. 

As long as the oligarchy is in control, government will dole out even more subsidies, bailouts, and loan guarantees to big corporations, and it will continue to eliminate protections for consumers, workers, and the environment. 

The propagandists and demagogues behind the oligarchy (Donald Trump included) are pouring salt into some of the nation’s oldest wounds. They’re stoking racial resentments, describing human beings as illegal aliens, fueling hatred of immigrants, and spreading fears of communists and socialists. 

This strategy gives the oligarchy freer rein: It distracts Americans from how the oligarchy is looting the nation, buying off politicians, and silencing critics.

The only way to disempower the oligarchy is for the rest of us to join together and take power back. 

This will require a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of working-class, poor and middle-class Americans fighting for democracy and fighting against concentrated wealth, power, and privilege.

We must get big money out of politics. End corporate welfare and crony capitalism. Bust up monopolies. Stop voter suppression. And strengthen the countervailing powers of labor unions, employee-owned corporations, worker cooperatives, state and local banks, and grass-roots politics.

This agenda is neither “right” nor “left.” It is the bedrock for everything else America must do.

The U.S. And Iran Are Fighting A War - And China Is Winning

 

The following insightful post is by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman:

Make America Great Again? Hah. Donald Trump has weakened us with astonishing speed. Under his “leadership” America’s influence, reputation and credibility have peeled away like the liner in the Reflecting Pool.

The disintegration of U.S. power was well underway before Trump started his war on Iran, but the pace of decline has accelerated sharply since the magnitude of our defeat started becoming apparent.

And when future historians write about this tale of self-immolation, they may well do so in Mandarin.

China hasn’t been a direct combatant in the third Gulf war, and its support for Iran has, until recently, been discreet. (China is now reportedly preparing to send Iran advanced munitions — Phillips O’Brien suggests that it is “going in for the kill.”) But China has clearly relished our humiliation. And both the way the war has played out and China’s role have drastically shifted the global balance of power in China’s favor.

China has been a serious geopolitical rival to the United States for some time. China’s manufacturing sector overtook the US in 2010, and the gap has continued to grow (I’ll explain the line labeled “US+EU” shortly):

And China’s role as the workshop of the world inevitably gives it a great deal of geopolitical influence.

However, there were a number of factors that, two years ago, arguably still gave an America a power advantage despite China’s economic weight and manufacturing prowess. These factors included:

· America still led the world in science and cutting-edge technology.

· The U.S. military appeared to have vastly better weapons and leadership than any other nation’s.

· The dollar’s dominant role in international transactions gave the United States enormous financial clout, including the ability to cut other nations out of the global payments system.

· Above all, the U.S. wasn’t alone. We were the leader of history’s most successful alliance system, nations bound together not just by mutual interests but by shared democratic values.

Yet Trump and his lackeys have quickly squandered all of these advantages.

A great deal has been written about the Trump administration’s attack on science, which is a topic largely separate from the Iran war. As one recent discussion put it, Trump officials

have orchestrated a series of attacks on scientists and their laboratories, implemented through funding cuts, grant interruptions, and immigration restrictions. Scientists are gravitating to Canada, Europe, and China, and we are rapidly losing the depth of our innovative and essential scientific community.

The undermining of other U.S. sources of strength was also underway before the Iran war, but the war has accelerated the downward spiral.

Even before the bombing of Iran began, some observers worried about the state of the U.S. military. Had U.S. military leaders adapted to the new world — revealed by the war in Ukraine — of cheap, ubiquitous drones? How much damage had the pro-testosterone, anti-intellectual leadership of Pete Hegseth already done? Now we know the answers to these questions, and America’s military reputation has nose-dived.

Oh, and as a December 2025 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies points out, a Chinese supply chain underpins “the architecture of modern drone warfare.”

America’s dollar-linked financial power has also sharply declined. True, as I wrote a month ago, “The dollar’s role as the dominant currency for ordinary business is not under threat.” However, the war has demonstrated that, thanks in large part to China’s underlying economic power, America’s ability to weaponize the dollar has been greatly reduced:

Iran was able to continue selling oil (until the U.S. temporarily imposed a military blockade) and buying essential imports, despite U.S. financial sanctions, by taking payment in yuan and using those yuan to buy Chinese goods. Ships that paid Iran for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz also paid in yuan (or in cryptocurrency, whose only real use case remains criminal activity.) The details are complicated, but using yuan essentially allows those designated by the U.S. government as rogue actors to fly under our financial radar.

Finally, the war has really put the nail in the coffin of the U.S.-centered alliance system.

America’s alliances have been a fundamental source of global strength since World War II. The line labeled “US+EU” in the chart on manufacturing value added is an indication of how much these alliances used to strengthen us: It shows that even now the US and the democracies of the European Union combined produce more manufactured goods than China, a lead that would be larger if I included the UK, Japan, Canada, etc.

But Trump began torpedoing our alliances on day one. Discussions of the Trump tariffs, even critical ones, don’t emphasize enough the fact that every one of these tariffs broke international agreements made by the United States in the past. So Trumpian tariff policy, by itself, was an announcement to the world that agreements with the U.S. government are worthless. Add to this the demands that Canada become the 51^st state, that Denmark hand over Greenland, and so on, and America had thoroughly lost the trust of its former friends even before the Iran war.

Then came the war. And in the past five months the U.S. has shown itself both erratic and ineffectual. Trump launched a war that, in addition to creating death and destruction, cut off much of the world’s oil supply without so much as consulting other nations. Once the war began, America proved both incapable of imposing its will on Iran and unable either to open the Strait of Hormuz or to protect regional allies.

So now the world neither trusts nor fears us. The chart at the top of this post, drawn from the Pew survey of global attitudes, shows views of the US and China in multiple countries. Even many of our oldest allies, the nations that helped us win World War II and the Cold War, now have a more favorable opinion of China than they do of us.

Let’s be clear: The end of U.S. leadership and China’s growing geopolitical ascendancy are bad things. China is a corrupt autocracy, with little respect for human rights and none at all for democratic values.

But people around the world have concluded that the Chinese are serious people, and that we are not. So America lost the war — and China won.