Americans' confidence in all three branches of the U.S. government has fallen, reaching record lows for the Supreme Court (30%) and Congress (7%), and a six-year low for the presidency (29%). The presidency had the largest drop of the three branches this year, down seven percentage points from its previous rating of 36%. These data come from a June 5-8 Gallup poll asking Americans about their...Read More

John Zogby: 'Is it all over for Obama?' … President Obama is suffering from down in the dumps approval ratings. President Obama's approval numbers are in the cellar, a new Quinnipiac University survey just dubbed him the worst president in six decades, so maybe it's no surprise that analyst and pollster John Zogby is asking: "Is it all over for him?" – Washing...Read More

Class V shares would grant their owners extraordinary voting powers, akin to the 10 votes per share that Google, GoPro or Facebook Class B shares carry. But unlike B shares, this would only last for a defined period, say 10 years. In that sense, they would resemble voting options that need to be exercised before they expire. After a decade, Class V stock would simply convert into regular Class A c...Read More

9 answers about Facebook's creepy emotional-manipulation experiment … Facebook's explosive study on user feelings and the newsfeed reads like something straight out of a bad sci-fi movie. There's "emotional contagion." Dire ethical qualms. The cold, thoughtless manipulation of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable humans by the oppressive Facebook machine. It's terrif...Read More

Central Bankers, Worried About Bubbles, Rebuke Markets … An organization representing the world's main central banks warned on Sunday that dangerous new asset bubbles were forming even before the global economy has finished recovering from the last round of financial excess … The organization also had harsh words for corporations, which it said were not taking advantage of booming...Read More

Obama plans to go it alone on immigration reform … With Republicans refusing to take up a bill, the president says he will move forward with executive actions … President Obama announced Monday that in the absence of congressional action, he plans to move forward with his own executive actions to address the long-stymied issue of immigration reform … Obama, as he has done in the...Read More

Dawn of the Age of Oligarchy: the Alliance between Government and the 1% … Thanks to their cozy relationship with the Obama administration, a new class of super-wealthy oligarchs keeps getting more powerful while the country's middle class shrinks. When our current President was elected, many progressives saw the dawning of a new epoch, a more egalitarian and more just Age of Obama. Inst...Read More

Six Months of Legal Marijuana And Colorado Has More Cash And Less Crime … With the passage of Amendment 64 in November 2012, Colorado made history and became one of the first two states to approve legal regulation of the cultivation, manufacture and sale of marijuana for adults 21 and over. Colorado has become a proving ground to demonstrate the positive impacts of regulation instead of proh...Read More

Bank of England cracks down on mortgages … Mark Carney outlines measures to keep lid on housing market at the Bank's Financial Stability Review … The Financial Policy Committee (FPC), which is in charge of financial stability, stressed that – while household indebtedness did not pose an "immediate threat" to the economy – it wanted to stem an increase in the n...Read More

The war on drugs is lost – legalise the heroin trade … I did not believe it before I went to Afghanistan. But it's now clear that prohibition is no answer to this deadly scourge … – Editorial by William Patey/UK GuardianDominant Social Theme: Let us regulate drugs worldwide. The UN can do it.Free-Market Analysis: Our attention was first drawn to this apparent dominant s...Read More

The stock market is rigged and here's how individuals can play it … The stock market is rigged and always has been says Heidi Moore, the U.S. economics and finance editor at The Guardian. That's why many investors are staying clear of stocks even though U.S. markets are trading at all-time highs. An April Bankrate.com survey found that 73% of investors are "not more inclined to...Read More

The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% – ex CIA spy …The man who trained more than 66 countries in open source methods calls for re-invention of intelligence to re-engineer Earth. Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, is a man on a mission. But it's a mission that frightens the...Read More

Is this Obama's 'malaise' moment? … President Barack Obama's situation is getting perilously close to President Jimmy Carter's in 1979. Americans see little evidence of an economic recovery, more and more workers are giving up hope of ever finding a job, the burden of student loan debt — now larger than credit-card debt — is crushing the hopes of young people,...Read More

The al Qaeda-linked army now conquering territory in Syria and Iraq ultimately wants its new Islamic state to be a launching pad for attacking the U.S. homeland, says a new congressional report. Four experts at the Congressional Research Service (CRS) make that assessment, citing intelligence assessments and the words of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant...Read More

Norway's $880 Billion Wealth Fund to Target Frontier Markets … Norway's $880 billion wealth fund, the world's largest, will broaden its scope of investments to target "frontier markets" and add more currencies to generate higher returns. The fund will broaden its "exposure to different sources of return and seek to exploit time-varying investment opportunities,&quo...Read More

The scandal of fiddled global warming data …The US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. The...Read More

Can Yellen Float Above Politics? … There's a growing consensus that central banks need to develop a new tool – so-called macroprudential policy. This involves politics too. The basic idea is that financial regulation is connected to monetary policy … Financial rules affect the economy in the aggregate. With that in mind, they could and should be tweaked during the course of t...Read More

Italy to push for 'United States of Europe' when it holds the EU presidency … Italy will use its presidency of the European Union to push for a "United States of Europe," the prime minister has said . Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, has said that Italy will push for a "United States of Europe" during its six-month EU presidency, in a move likely to raise...Read More

Today's South is boldly moving backward …We used to call it the "New South." That was the era after Reconstruction and before the Civil Rights laws — when the states of the old Confederacy seemed most determined to preserve a social and economic order that encouraged low-wage industrialization as they fought to maintain Jim Crow. What was then distinctive about the South...Read More

Why pot is the new pizza … Dope to your door … EVAN COX used to deliver pizza. But 18 months ago, as he was running out of money at college in Seattle, he had a new business idea. The state of Washington was in the process of legalising the sale of marijuana, but he guessed it would take time for pot shops to open. So he set up Winterlife, a marijuana-delivery service. Delivering dope...Read More