I spent the last two days away from home on a job site in Tulsa. One of my clients was considering switching to a competitor. I have a "resource recovery" company---or, put another way, we scrounge the back lots of industrial plants looking for commodities which can be recycled and re-used. Our employees are well trained and long term and they do well on earnings. They drive our trucks and equipment to remote locations. and my insurance company requires drug testing. Because we control costs and like to make a bit of a profit there is a limit on how much we'll spend for a motel. When I'm on the road, which I don't enjoy, I stay where my workers stay.

Heartbreak Motel sits on the intersection of two truck routes. The four corners are a stark melding of the food chain and the employment ladder. On one corner is a convenience store and cash-only gas station---the bottom rung of life in a gritty America.  Outside, behind the store, four homeless people stand around a compressor smoking and making ready for the night with pieces of card board to sleep on. A police car idles two hundred feet away, pointed in their direction. I say to hell with it and walk over to the store. A small bottle of milk and some cookies might come in handy if I wake up at the motel in the middle of the night and have the creeps. As I try to go into the store a guy forces me off the sidewalk. I ignore him. Coming back out a woman blocks my path, "Are you stayin' over there for the night?"

The current wave of mass protest against Wall Street excess has completely reframed the public conversation in the United States.  The “deficit problem” with which Washington was consumed in the first half of 2011 has not vanished from the political agenda, but its resolution will now have to be achieved against the background of a growing understanding of the sheer scale of current income and wealth inequality. If the Republicans in Congress have their way, the politicians may yet cut entitlements programs for the poor while declining to raise taxes on the rich. But if that is how the deficit problem is eventually resolved, that resolution will be more extensively recognized as class-biased in its character and impact than would have been the case before the OWS protests began. The super-rich are invisible no more, and are now being held to account.

Between applauding the death of uninsured Americans, booing gay soldiers and cheering mass executions in Texas, the Republican presidential primary race has been quite a shock to those who understood “conservatism” to mean “pro-life” and “pro-military.”

Apparently “compassionate conservatism” retired the same year as George W. Bush.

It’s moments like these that have highlighted not only the moral decay of the conservative constituency but also the depths to which Republican presidential primary candidates will dive in order to woo the teabagger demographic.

According to yesterday's GDP numbers the engine of American Consumption is back on the tracks and rolling along at a surprising clip. The odd thing is that Consumer Confidence still remains at a near historic low. Typically an increase in consumption is preceded by a rise in confidence. So why is the spending train rolling along while confidence is like a caboose sidetracked in the train yard?

A Sept. 15th report by Ross DeVol at the Milkin Institute not only predicted good GDP and consumption numbers for the 3rd Quarter but explained the root cause of the precipitous drop in consumer confidence over the Summer and its disconnect from actual consumer behavior which kept chugging along underneath.

If you're thinking that the decline in confidence had some connection to our national politics you'd be right. DeVol correlates the decline in confidence to a decline in the approval ratings of -- the Congress!