Rumours of an economic recovery in the US seem to be greatly exaggerated.
The mainstream media, Wall Street, and Washington have expanded their policy of 'extend and pretend' to 'if it bleeds, it's buried.'
h/t to Michael David White's Housing Story for the charts and the tag line.
"The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. Power will achieve its murderous potential. It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."
R. J. Rummel, Mass Murder and Genocide, 1994