It's the 65th anniversary of the first battle between the US Military and aliens over Roswell NM in 1947. That's as good of a story as any. It might explain the many trillions spent on "defense" since. Surely the critics who say we have just been supporting the lifestyles of a few hundred millionaires with all that money are wrong.

After all, President Eisenhower gave several speeches warning us against dangers the Alien Industrial Complex, and how we needed massive diversions of money away from schools and hospitals to combat it.

In June, the private sector added 84,000 and government cut 4,000 jobs. The good news is that with government revenues stabilizing, there are signs that the massive losses in public employment may be coming to an end. Still, since May 2010, the government sector has cut 1.04 million jobs. At the same time, since February 2010, the private sector has added 4.35 million jobs. The thing is that most of these government job cuts occurred in the Red states, and they are same states that aren’t producing private sector jobs either. Blue states are even adding government jobs as their economies start to recover.

Another part of the problem with slow job creation is the lack of skilled workers, but businesses refuse to provide job training, or pay high enough wages to allow workers to go to school. Raise taxes to support education? Of course not.

Initial Jobless Claims are down again this week putting in doubt the prognostication that we’re going into the double dip recession. That would be the recession that the Republicans have been working so hard to engineer before the election. Jobless Claims are in fact down 15% from this time last year. This is of no comfort for those who have become permanently unemployed under the universal corporate policy of never hiring people who are unemployed. A permanent oblivion that workers can be cast into focuses the minds of the Neo-feudal serfs.

Gasoline prices continue fall putting cash in the hand of consumers, and retailers are hoping this will trigger a huge surge in back to school sales. There is a certain amount of pent up consumer demand, and the urge to buy stuff for the kids is usually a leading indicator of renewed consumer confidence.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is after the our friends over at JP Morgan Chase for rigging wholesale electricity prices to the tune of $73m. You thought that activity went away with the collapse of Enron? These crooks will steal anything that isn’t nailed down, well okay, they will pry up the nails too. They aren’t the only people the FERC has been going after, Obama was delayed in appointing people by Republicans in the Senate, but things are finally starting to happen.

The FERC has been going after other “banks” (that’s a questionable term) for stealing hundreds of millions by illegal trading schemes. And, this is only the low hanging fruit. More complex schemes, and strategies that were de-criminalized by Reagan, and his successors, have cost us billions if not trillions.