There are many sources of rage: injustice, the destruction of truth, powerlessness. But if we had to identify the one key source of non-elite rage that cuts across all age, ethnicity, gender and regional boundaries, it is this: The Ruling Elite is protected from the destructive consequences of its predatory dominance. We see this reality across the entire political, social and economic landscape. If I had to pick one...
Read More »Seven Suggestions for President-Elect Trump
President-Elect Trump, more policy tweaks, more promises of more government free money and more symbolic gestures won't fix anything. [clear] Though I am just another powerless peon, I'd like to offer seven suggestions to President-Elect Trump and his transition team: 1. Make sure your administration is as diverse as America. No single act will give your enemies more ammo than populating your cabinet and...
Read More »Who Lost: A Biased Media, Pundits, Pollsters, Political Parties, Warmongers, the Corporatocracy, Pay-to-Play Grifters, Neoliberals
Fake Progressives are perfectly fine with soaring inequality and corrupt governance, as long as everyone’s public utterances are politically correct. Sometimes who lost is more important than who won. Let’s review who lost the election: 1. Let’s start with the Corporatocracy, which expected to once again wield unlimited influence by funding political campaigns with millions of dollars in contributions and speaking...
Read More »Hillary Is The Perfection of a Corrupt System
Exposing the Clintons’ perfection of a corrupt political system won’t change the conditions and incentives that created the Clintons’ harvester of corruption. Let’s set aside Hillary Clinton as an individual and consider her as the perfection of a corrupt political system. As I noted yesterday, Politics As Usual Is Dead, and Hillary Clinton is the ultimate product of the political system that is disintegrating before...
Read More »The Bankrupt U.S. Healthcare System
The good news is there is a way to avoid failure and stagnation: avoid the mainstream like the plague. The mainstream became mainstream because it worked: the mainstream advice to “go to college and you’ll get a good job” worked, the mainstream financial plan of buying a house to build equity to pass on to your children worked, the mainstream of government regulation worked to the public’s advantage at modest cost to...
Read More »Could Inflation Break the Back of the Status Quo?
Political resistance to the oligarchy’s financialization skimming operations will eventually cripple central bank giveaways to the financial sector and corporate oligarchs. That inflation and interest rates will remain near-zero for a generation is accepted as “obvious” by virtually the entire mainstream media. The reasons for this are equally “obvious”: central banks have the power to suppress interest rates...
Read More »Ending a Taking Economy and Creating a Giving Economy Part 2
Here is Part 2 of the guest essay by Zeus Y. There no longer seems to be a rational alignment between economic cost and value. This means questioning so-called conventional wisdom and critically considering whether or not to own property or even to go to college. Here are some examples: • In my own life, I owned a Florida vacant lot that would normally (and did actually significantly appreciate) in value, but the...
Read More »The Secrets of Self-Employment: Overhead and Capital Accumulation
There are still opportunities to not just earn a wage, but the overhead, profit and capital skimmed by global corporations. So how can someone earning $15 an hour as an employee get ahead? The short answer is: they can’t. One worker earning $15/hour will struggle to get ahead, which I define as building capital that generates an income stream. A family with four adults working full-time at $15 an hour with benefits can...
Read More »Two Sets of Solutions as the Status Quo Crumbles
We are about to start a painful learning process about what is “impossible” and what is inevitable. Two charts illustrate Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform: this chart of the S-Curve of financialization, leverage, debt, central planning, regulatory capture and globalization–that is, the engines of modern “growth”–depicts the inevitable stagnation and decline of these dynamics as overcapacity, debt...
Read More »Welcome to Neocolonialism, Exploited Peasants!
The U.S. peasantry has been stripmined exactly like the powerless colonial peasantry in the old colonial model. In my latest interview with Max Keiser, Max asked a question of fundamental importance: (I paraphrase, as the interview has not yet been posted): now that the current iteration of capitalism has occupied every corner of the globe, where can it expand to for its “growth”? We all know how old-fashioned...
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