Tag Archives: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

The servitude of society to a globalized economy is generating extremes of insecurity, powerlessness and inequality. Does our economy serve our society, or does our society serve our economy, and by extension, those few who extract most of the economic benefits? It’s a question worth asking, as beneath the political churn around the globe, the issues raised by this question are driving the frustration and anger that’s manifesting in social and political disorder. A...

Stripmining the planet to maximize profits isn’t progressive or renewable–it’s just exploitive and destructive. How do we describe the finding that the planet’s most widely-owned super-corporation is destroying the planet to maximize its smartphone sales and profits? Shall we start with “inconvenient?” Yes, we’re talking about Apple, famous for coercing customers to upgrade their Apple phones and other gadgets if not annually then every couple years, as the most...

What’s been normalized are policies and cultural norms that seek to enrich and protect the few at the expense of the many. When the initially extraordinary fades into the unremarkable background of everyday life, we say it’s been normalized. Put another way, we quickly habituate to new conditions, and rationalize our ready acceptance of what was previously unacceptable. Technology offers many examples of extraordinary advances quickly becoming normalized as we...

All the status quo “fixes” only hasten the collapse of the status quo. That economic, social and political conflict is accelerating is self-evident. What’s open to debate are the core drivers of conflict / disorder /unraveling. Here’s the core self-reinforcing dynamic in my view: 1. The status quo elites can no longer mask soaring costs of essentials nor soaring wealth / income inequality between the top .01% (Oligarchs), the top 9.99% who enrich the Oligarchs with...

Can $300 billion, or $600 billion, or even $1 trillion continue to prop up an increasingly risk-riddled, fragile $330 trillion global bubble in overvalued assets? When is “Not-QE” QE? When Federal Reserve Chairperson Jerome Powell declares QE is not QE. We can constructively recall the story that Abraham Lincoln famously recounted in 1862: ‘If I should call a sheep’s tail a leg, how many legs would it have?’ ‘No, only four; for my calling the tail a leg would not...

It’s not too difficult to predict a political rebellion against the machinery of soaring wealth and income inequality. The one constant across the media-political spectrum is an unblinking focus on the stock market as a barometer of the national economy: every major media outlet from the New York Times to Fox News prominently displays stock market action, and TV news anchors’ expressions reflect the media’s emotional promotion of the market as the end all to be all:...

As long as central banks create and distribute trillions in conscience-free credit to conscience-free financiers and corporations, the incentives for sociopathy only increase. “Sociopath” is a word we now encounter regularly in the mainstream media, but what does it mean? Here is a list of 16 traits, many of which are visible in lionized corporate and political leaders and entrepreneurs. One key trait is a lack of moral responsibility or conscience; the sociopath...

The net result is the muddle class has the signifiers but not the wealth, power, capital or agency that once defined the middle class. The first use of the phrase The Muddle Class appears to be The rise of the muddle classes (Becky Pugh, telegraph.co.uk) in January 2007. The “muddle” described the complex nature of defining “the middle class,” which includes education, class origins, accents, and many other financial, social and cultural signifiers. Comedian Jason...

Where is the line between “working class” and “middle class”? Maybe there isn’t any. Defining the “middle class” has devolved to a pundit parlor game, so let’s get real for a moment (if we dare): the “middle class” is no longer defined by the traditional metrics of income or job type (blue collar, white collar), but by an entirely different set of metrics: 1. Household indebtedness, i.e. how much of the income is devoted to debt service, and 2. How much of the...

Even if we don’t measure the erosion of intangible capital, the social and political consequences of this impoverishment are manifesting in all sorts of ways. The central thesis of my new book Will You Be Richer or Poorer? is the financial “wealth” we’ve supposedly gained (or at least a few of us have gained) in the past 20 years has masked the unraveling of our intangible capital: the resilience of our economy, our social capital, i.e. our ability to find common...