"20 Signs Of The Staggering Decline Of The American Middle Class Family"

Full screen recommended.

"20 Signs Of The Staggering Decline 

Of The American Middle Class Family"

by Epic Economist

"We just got more evidence that the middle class is being systematically destroyed in America. At this point, millions of people out there have already grown accustomed to barely scraping by from month to month. But that is not what being “middle class” is supposed to be about. Middle-class families should be able to make more money than they have to spend on everyday necessities because is only by doing so that they can build long-term wealth.

Unfortunately, income growth has not kept up with the pace of the rising cost of living, and millions of households have taken massive amounts of debt. At the same time, the labor market doesn't offer good-paying jobs that support middle-class life, and the lack of these positions has been contributing to the decline of this income group all across the country. In the early 1970s, the middle class accounted for around 60 percent of the population, but now middle-income households are rapidly becoming a minority in the United States. And as economic conditions continue to deteriorate, millions of hard-working families all over America are being stretched financially like never before.

“In America, the middle class can no longer afford retirement. Middle-class Americans face sharp economic inequality, with ownership of financial assets highly concentrated among the wealthy,” explained Tyler Bond, NIRS research manager. “Now that we have a retirement system largely built around the individual ownership of financial assets in 401(k) accounts, middle-class Americans are struggling to accumulate sufficient financial assets during their working years. This means the retirement outlook for many in the middle class is bleak at best.”

Since the onset of the health crisis, the U.S. economy has been decaying at an alarming pace. Over the past two years, the middle class has gotten smaller and smaller in this country, and now it seems that another economic downturn is upon us once again. So many families are already living on the edge right now.

Recent surveys have exposed that well over 50% of the population is living paycheck to paycheck and that most Americans don't have emergency savings or a financial cushion to fall back on. When you are living on the edge, there is always a danger that you could fall over. Since 2020, we have never seen so many middle-class Americans falling straight into poverty. In other words, unless dramatic changes happen in America, the middle class is going to be absolutely eviscerated in the next decade. We must wake up now. The middle class is dying right before our eyes, and if we want to save it, we must take action now.

Today, we compiled a series of new numbers that expose the rapid downfall of the U.S. middle-class."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com/

○

Related:

"Inflation Will Price Many Americans 

Out Of Housing And Into Homelessness"

Canadian Prepper, "People Won't Want to Hear This..."

Canadian Prepper, 6/5/22:

"People Won't Want to Hear This..."

"I have a psychological challenge for all my 

viewers to prepare you for hard times ahead."

Musical Interlude: Two Steps From Hell, "Evergreen"

Two Steps From Hell, "Evergreen"

Close your eyes and let your imagination flow...

what images does this music conjure?

"When the Sky Is No More Than Remembered Light:

"When the Sky Is No More Than Remembered Light:

Mark Strand Reads His Poignant Poem 'The End'”

- by Maria Popova

“Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing, 

when the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.”

“It’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention,” the Pulitzer-winning poet Mark Strand (April 11, 1934–November 29, 2014) observed in contemplating the artist’s task to bear witness to the universe. And yet this universe in which we live is predicated on impermanence, and the lucky accident of our existence is crowned with the certitude of its end from the start. Why, then, are we always so shocked by the finitude of all we hold dear and, above all, by our own mortality? Few are those who can say with sincerity, like Rilke did an exquisite 1923 letter, that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.” Instead, we spend our lives shuddering at any reminder of our inevitable end, unsalved by the miracle of having lived at all.

Montaigne articulated the central paradox of being perfectly in 16th-century meditation on death and the art of living: “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.” Still, lament we do, and some of our greatest art gives voice to that lamentation.

That paradox is what Strand explores with transcendent courage and curiosity in his poem “The End,” found in his "Collected Poems" (public library) - the trove of truth and beauty that gave us Strand’s love letter to dreams.

In this hauntingly beautiful recording, courtesy of The New York Public Library, an aged Strand reads his poignant poem shortly before he repaid his own debt to mortality:

"The End"

by Mark Strand

"Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,

Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like

When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,

Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,

When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down

No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.

When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus

And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,

Not everyone knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing

When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end."

- https://www.brainpickings.org/

"A Little Parenthesis In Eternity..."

“We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of Infinity. Life is Eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in Eternity.”

- Paulo Coelho

Moody Blues, "Gypsy"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Stars are sometimes born in the midst of chaos. About 3 million years ago in the nearby galaxy M33, a large cloud of gas spawned dense internal knots which gravitationally collapsed to form stars. NGC 604 was so large, however, it could form enough stars to make a globular cluster.

Many young stars from this cloud are visible in the above image from the Hubble Space Telescope, along with what is left of the initial gas cloud. Some stars were so massive they have already evolved and exploded in a supernova. The brightest stars that are left emit light so energetic that they create one of the largest clouds of ionized hydrogen gas known, comparable to the Tarantula Nebula in our Milky Way's close neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap121211.html

"Two Ways To Be Fooled..."

"There are two ways to be fooled.

One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true."

- Soren Kierkegaard

The Poet: Mark Jarman, "Coyotes"

"Coyotes"

"Is this world truly fallen? They say no.

For there's the new moon, there's the Milky Way,

There's the rattler with a wren's egg in its mouth,

And there's the panting rabbit they will eat.

They sing their wild hymn on the dark slope,

Reading the stars like notes of hilarious music.

Is this a fallen world? How could it be?

And yet we're crying over the stars again,

And over the uncertainty of death,

Which we suspect will divide us all forever.

I'm tired of those who broadcast their certainties,

Constantly on their cell phones to their redeemer.

Is this a fallen world? For them it is.

But there's that starlit burst of animal laughter.

The day has sent its fires scattering.

The night has risen from its burning bed.

Our tears are proof that love is meant for life

And for the living. And this chorus of praise,

Which the pet dogs of the neighborhood are answering

Nostalgically, invites our answer, too.

Is this a fallen world? How could it be?"

~ Mark Jarman

"Are We Headed Into Another Ice Age?"

"Are We Headed Into Another Ice Age?"

by Martin Armstrong

"Our model has projected we are entering another “grand-minimum,” which overtook the sun beginning in 2020 and will last through the 2050s, resulting in diminished magnetism, infrequent sunspot production, and less ultraviolet (UV) radiation reaching Earth. This all means we are facing a global cooling period in the planet that may span 31 to 43 years. The last grand-minimum event produced the mini-Ice Age in the mid-17th century. Known as the Maunder Minimum, it occurred between 1645 and 1715, during a longer span of time when parts of the world became so cold that the period was called the Little Ice Age, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850. In addition, our ML model forecasts a new phase of extended solar minima that began prior to Sunspot Cycle 24 (ca. 2008–2019) and will persist until Sunspot Cycle 27 (ca. 2050 or so).

Click image for larger size.

If Gates blocks the sun as he has been suggesting off-camera, we are looking at not just the reduction of population by 70%, but all life. Gates is surprised about how he and Fauci are the #1 targets. This again only shows his elitist position. Others have used a Deep Learning AI program that can only do one dimension. Nevertheless, applying it to sunspots they interestingly arrived at a similar forecast - Gates & Schwab are DEAD WRONG!

It has been Klaus’ main man in Washington, John Kerry, who is leading the charge on changing the economy entirely. He told coal miners to make solar panels instead, indicative of these elitists who think people can just work like drones. There is no consideration that the miners would have to sell their homes and move near a factor that makes solar panels if they are even hiring. If people do not enjoy what they do, they will never do it well. We all can’t be brain surgeons, a quarterback, or a programmer. We all have different talents and callings. Kerry knows nothing about humanity. You can see he has the same mentality as the Communists. The next job opening is a trash collector - you are next in line.

These people are EXTREMELY dangerous and this threat is the reason behind our model forecasting the collapse of society as we know it by 2032. There is no way people like Macron will ever admit a mistake no less Gates or Schwab. They are steering us over a cliff that is extremely serious."

- https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/

“The Myth of Human Progress”

Full screen recommended.

“The Myth of Human Progress”

By Chris Hedges

“Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth – intellectually and emotionally – and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth – as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury – as well as unrivaled military and economic power – for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.

“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada.

“They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today – about 2 billion – is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.

If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later. If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”

Wright, who in his dystopian novel “A Scientific Romance” paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.

Modern capitalist societies, Wright argues in his book “What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,” derive from European invaders’ plundering of the indigenous cultures in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives. The numbers of those natives fell by more than 90 percent because of smallpox and other plagues they hadn’t had before. The Spaniards did not conquer any of the major societies until smallpox had crippled them; in fact the Aztecs beat them the first time around. If Europe had not been able to seize the gold of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, if it had not been able to occupy the land and adopt highly productive New World crops for use on European farms, the growth of industrial society in Europe would have been much slower. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both pointed to the influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and the start of modern capitalism. It was the rape of the Americas, Wright points out, that triggered the orgy of European expansion. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the Europeans with technologically advanced weapons systems, making further subjugation, plundering and expansion possible.

Wright explained this further on our call. “The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever. It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. 

We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.

And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.”

As Wright told me: “Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away. There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise. They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable – the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun – would disappear.

We all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring. It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the 1950s would return. Look at the way we let oil and gas exploration rip when we knew that expanding the carbon economy was suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change.

If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea.”

- https://www.planetaryphilosophy.com/

Greg Hunter, "Global CV19 Vax Absolute Insanity – Dr. Ryan Cole"

"Global CV19 Vax Absolute Insanity – Dr. Ryan Cole"

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchddog.com 

"Board-certified pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole has treated more than 500,000 patients, and he is an expert in postmortem examination. Dr. Cole has a long resume, including a five-year stint at the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Cole was one of the very first doctors to come out and question the entire Covid19 narrative and the extreme push for CV19 vaccine injections for all. He has been attacked relentlessly and lost half his medical diagnostic business, but he’s still fighting and telling the truth about the huge lies and deadly mistakes by the medical establishment, especially when pushing the CV19 injections. 

Dr. Cole says, “I know there was a lot of coercion, which is very unfortunate because it’s not what we do in medicine, yet, for whatever reason, we went into this mass psychosis societally and said, hey, it’s great to experiment on an entire world population, which is absolute insanity. So, we are using a dangerous gene-based product without long term safety studies. A lot of people have received it. We are seeing damage and autoimmune disease. We are seeing death from all causes at increased rates. Scientifically, we are at the beginning as we go through the complexed mechanisms of what this is doing to the body, I think we are seeing the tip of the iceberg right now. My warning to humanity is don’t get another one of these (CV19 vaccines). It’s a dose dependent poison curve. The more you get, the worse off you are going to be. This is immunological insanity. We need to stop this. Plus, that persistent mRNA, we don’t know when that turns off, and we know that is causing all this immune harm. We need to stop this immediately. We need to stop the FDA and CDC and what they are pushing. We need to wake up and acknowledge there is vaccine harm.”

Dr. Cole goes on to explain, “This shot was a mistake. We rolled it out on humanity as an experiment. We were told it was approved, safe and effective, and they lied to humanity. The problem is it’s a nuclear bomb platform. It’s a Lipid Nanoparticle plus a modified mRNA that you can’t turn off. It’s a nuclear bomb, and we don’t know the long-term safety and outcomes.”

Dr. Cole is seeing dramatic increases in all types of illness such as aggressive cancers, heart disease, strokes, brain problems and autoimmune disease to name a few. Dr. Cole says, “We are damaging the immune system. Why are so many people getting sick with other things right now? Because their immune system is suppressed. Is there malicious intent behind what they are doing? I can’t prove that. Do I think with all the harm we are seeing that there are very unfortunate characters knowing that they are doing harm to people? Yeah, I do. Genocide for profit are strong words, but it’s hard to argue with it at this point. We are seeing so much harm, and we are not seeing anybody stopping it.”

What is the trend line for injuries and deaths from the CV19 injections? Dr. Cole says, “The trend line is going up. We can see that in the data and it is considerable. We are seeing that the people who have gotten the shots are getting Covid at higher rates and other diseases at higher rates. We are seeing all-cause mortality, those who have gotten too many shots, are dying at a much higher rate.”

One thing that is getting stopped is scientific investigations in the form of autopsies. Dr. Cole says only a few thousand autopsies have been done on people killed by the CV19 vax, and there should have been 100,000 autopsies done by now. Dr. Cole points out, “Autopsies are how we learn about disease. When Dr. Fauci said publicly early on ‘don’t do autopsies,’ I thought because you are covering up the findings. You can’t find for that for which you don’t look. To deny this opportunity to the professionals and scientists of the world, or to tell them not to do autopsies, that’s corrupt.”

Dr. Cole says anyone who has a family member, especially a young family member, with an unexplained or mysterious death, should demand an autopsy to find out if the CV19 vax killed your loved one. There is much more information in the one-hour and eight-minute interview."

- https://usawatchdog.com/

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes one-on-one with pathologist

 Dr. Ryan Cole, as he exposes the covid lies that will cost millions their lives.

- https://rumble.com/

○

Related and Essential:

"Unthinkable Thoughts"

○

"Complicity: The data suggests that we may currently be witnessing 

the greatest organized mass murder in the history of our world." 

Freely download "The Vaccine Death Report" here:

- https://indepthnh.org/

The Daily "Near You?"

McAllister, Montana, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

Gregory Mannarino, "Markets, A Look Ahead: Keep Your Eyes On Energy"

Gregory Mannarino, 6/5/22:

"Markets, A Look Ahead: Keep Your Eyes On Energy"

- https://traderschoice.net/

○

New interview with Gerald Celente 6/3/22:

"Prepare For Massive Market Meltdown"

Gonzalo Lira, "What Happens To Europe When Russia Wins"

Gonzalo Lira II, 6/5/22:

"What Happens To Europe When Russia Wins"

"Sanctions On Russia Backfire On The West" (Excerpt)

"Sanctions On Russia Backfire On The West"

by Portfolio Armor

Excerpt: "Our Predictions About Sanctions On Russia: Back in March, we pointed out that Western sanctions on Russia were likely to backfire against the West.

Our sanctions against Russia 🇷🇺 for its invasion of Ukraine 🇺🇦 are hurting America 🇺🇸. What's the endgame?$WEAT $CORN $HAL $OXY https://t.co/svNGplmZja

- Portfolio Armor (@PortfolioArmor) March 13, 2022

Quoting from our March article: "Biden has, in effect, helped launch an economic World War III, imposing unprecedented sanctions on a large and economically important country. Russia isn't an Iran or Libya. It's a continent-spanning country with a population of 145 million, and it is (or was) one of the world's top five exporters of oil, natural gas, nickel, wheat, coal, and other commodities. Let's breakdown why these sanctions are dangerous for us, and close with our investment approach to them."

We'll revisit our investment approach from that article at the end of this post, but before that let's note our follow-up piece in April where we wrote that the West had likely underestimated Russia's economy.

How the West may have underestimated Russia: Atoms versus bits; basic materials versus finance and services. $BTU $USO $CENX $GDXJ https://t.co/Nf2MATmFw9

Quoting from that article: It appears that the laptop class in the West has underestimated the resilience and size of Russia's economy because it's more based on the physical world than ours is."

- Portfolio Armor (@PortfolioArmor) April 11, 2022

The Mainstream Media Starts to Catch On: The mainstream media is finally acknowledging what we predicted then. From Tablet Magazine: "Biden's arrogant anti-Russian sanctions have amounted to a price hike on working class Americans that have so far failed to weaken the Russian economy. His neocon policy accelerates the process of de-dollarization, diplomatic isolation & imperial decline."

 https://t.co/nDA7OewiY5

- Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) June 2, 2022

The Guardian a couple of days ago: "Russia is winning the economic war - and Putin is no closer to withdrawing troops" - Larry Elliott https://t.co/VncVSCZvvt

- The Guardian (@guardian) June 2, 2022

Please view this complete article here:

- https://www.zerohedge.com/news/

○

Ukraine related:

• "Phase Three In Ukraine"

• "Scott Ritter And Ray McGovern on Ukraine, Russia and China"

• "Russia Targets Western-Supplied Tank Depot 

In Kiev In Rare Cruise Missile Attack"

"The Only Absolute..."

"Never perceive anything as being inevitable or predestined.

The only absolute is uncertainty."

- Lionel Suggs

"Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science - by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us."

- Carl Sagan

"Inflation: Lessons From Last Empire's Collapse"

"Inflation: Lessons From Last Empire's Collapse"

by akrainer

"So far, the dreams of 1,000-year empires and stable world domination have eluded the ruling elites throughout history and across the globe. Empires arise, sustain themselves for a century or two and then rapidly decay and collapse. The collapse may appear relatively fast and obvious in hindsight, but in reality it spans decades, may appear as a series of temporary crises and only become obvious very late into the slow-motion train wreck.

Nonetheless, the fatal imbalances that corrode an empire’s political, economic, and social foundations do become discernible well in advance of the ultimate collapse. As a rule these imbalances emerge as consequences of too much war and too much debt. As they decay, empires always degrade their own currency in the process of extracting wealth from the population to funnel it toward the ruling oligarchy and the military. In ancient times this was done by diluting gold or silver content of the coins in circulation. In modern times, it is done through inflation of the currency.

The most recent instance of this process was the collapse of the Soviet Union through the decade of the 1980s. The Soviet Union was a global superpower counting nearly 300 million people and an empire spanning over 40% of Eurasian land mass. In addition to a large, well educated population and a broadly diversified industrial base, USSR controlled a formidable treasure trove of natural resources containing some of the world’s most abundant reserves of natural gas, oil, coal, iron ore, tin, lead, gold, silver, palladium, platinum, diamonds, timber, rare earth minerals and arable land. 

In the post World War II period the USSR developed rapidly and its population even enjoyed a period of relatively high prosperity during the 1960s and 1970s. However, economic growth started to slow down in the late 1970s and from 1977 until its final collapse in August of 1991, the Soviet economy experienced an accelerating economic deterioration leading to the worst post-war economic depression.

• GDP growth: from 1979 through 1982, GDP growth slowed to about 1.4%, picked up slightly, to about 2% in 1983/84 but then declined again, dropping close to zero during most of the 1980s

• Defense spending: defense spending was overstretched at the expense of civilian production; it had grown by 50% from 1965 to 1981, from 45 billion roubles to over 80 billion, bringing the country’s defense burden to nearly 13% of the GDP.

• Constraints to growth: Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to institute reforms of the system and reignite growth were constrained, particularly on the energy front. As the demand for energy grew, cost of offsetting the declining oil production started to rise rapidly.

• Budget deficits: Soviet government spending rose a record 30 billion roubles in 1986 and another 18 billion roubles in 1987 while tax revenues grew only 5 billion roubles. This gave rise to a six-fold increase of the nation’s budget deficit from 1984 to 1987, to 7% of the GDP. CIA’s analysts expressed dismay to find that, “Moscow is essentially financing its deficits by printing money from thin air.” 

• Inflation: while inflation held steady at around 2.2% during the five years from 1982 to 1987, in 1987 it shot up to 9% and continued to creep up during the remainder of the decade.

In spite of the many obvious differences between the USSR and the United States, many of these differences are in fact rather superficial while similarities and parallels may be more structural and relevant. The Soviet government was able to stave off economic collapse and hyperinflation because it had full control over the wholesale and retail prices and over central bank’s monetary policy including money supply and interest rates.

However, controlling all the levers of state power did not exempt the Soviet state from fundamental principles of economics. When price controls were finally abolished on 2nd January 1992, inflationary pressures burst through the open dam and prices of industrial and consumer goods recorded an almost immediate 500% jump. Within the year, inflation reached 2,500%. The inevitable readjustments, delayed over decades of central planning and misallocation of resources, plunged the nation into one of the deepest and longest economic depressions ever recorded.

Today, the economy of the United States is similarly mired in a profound crisis, and unresolved economic imbalances: the empire is overstretched militarily, “defense” spending and budget deficits continue to grow and are being covered by printing money out of tin air - a process that's now entirely spun out of control. While the American government doesn’t practice central planning or price controls, the Federal Reserve has effectively taken over this role by manipulating interest rates and commodity prices. As in the Soviet Union, the Fed’s meddling resulted in massive misallocation of resources spawning a large economy of zombie corporations and unicorns.

There can be little doubt that the American economy is more robust than that of the late Soviet Union. But history is clear on this: no empire, regardless how powerful at its zenith, is exempt from the laws of economics and we should expect more economic pain ahead as the empire’s foundations continue to erode. One very likely outcome of the coming crisis could be the collapse of the currency and an acceleration of inflation."

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

○

Related:

"Americans Will Never Forget The Historic Economic 

Collapse During Joe Biden’s Presidency"

"At The Approach Of Danger...:

“At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other, even more reasonable, says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger, since it is not a man’s power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events; and that it is therefore better to turn aside from the painful subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second.”

- Leo Tolstoy, “War and Peace”

“All our mortal lives are set in danger and perplexity: one day to prosper,

and the next – who knows? When all is well, then look for rocks ahead.”

- Sophoclese, “Philoctetes”

○

Free Downloads:

A little light reading from Tolstoy…

Freely download “War and Peace”, by Leo Tolstoy, here:

- https://pdflake.com/war-and-peace-pdf-book/

Freely download “Seven Tragedies of Sophocles- Philoctetes” here:

- https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/

"Tell Yourself..."

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

- Louise Erdrich

"How It Really Is"

 

"Buying Food And Preps At Costco Today Before It's Too Late; Homebuilder Nightmare"

Full screen recommended.

Jeremiah Babe, 6/4/22:

"Buying Food And Preps At Costco Today Before 

It's Too Late; Homebuilder Nightmare"

Musical Interlude: 2002, "We Meet Again"

Full screen recommended.

2002, "We Meet Again"

Simply beautiful...

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Is our Milky Way Galaxy this thin? Magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4565 is viewed edge-on from planet Earth. Also known as the Needle Galaxy for its narrow profile, bright NGC 4565 is a stop on many telescopic tours of the northern sky, in the faint but well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. This sharp, colorful image reveals the spiral galaxy's boxy, bulging central core cut by obscuring dust lanes that lace NGC 4565's thin galactic plane.

An assortment of other background galaxies is included in the pretty field of view. Thought similar in shape to our own Milky Way Galaxy, NGC 4565 lies about 40 million light-years distant and spans some 100,000 light-years. Easily spotted with small telescopes, sky enthusiasts consider NGC 4565 to be a prominent celestial masterpiece Messier missed.”

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210517.html

"The Pale Blue Dot - Where We Make Our Stand..."

"The Pale Blue Dot - Where We Make Our Stand"

by Carl Sagan

"In the climactic final episode of Cosmos titled "Who Speaks for Earth?" Carl Sagan makes an impassioned plea for nuclear de-escalation. The first nine minutes of the piece are particularly spellbinding, and the introduction draws to a close with Sagan walking along a rocky shoreline where he delivers a historic monologue:

"The civilization now in jeopardy is all humanity. As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and sky. In our tenure on this planet, we have accumulated dangerous, evolutionary baggage propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders, all of which puts our survival in some doubt. We have also acquired compassion for others, love for our children, a desire to learn from history and experience, and a great, soaring passionate intelligence, the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity.

Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet earth. But up and in the cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits. National boundaries are not evidenced when we view the earth from space. Fanatic ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile, blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.

There are not yet obvious signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, and this makes us wonder whether civilizations like ours rush inevitably into self-destruction. I dream about it... and sometimes they are bad dreams."

○

"Carl Sagan was a brilliant scientist, gifted orator, skilled teacher, and effective advocate for his strongly held beliefs. It is no exaggeration to say that Sagan is likely responsible for inspiring more people to pursue a career in the sciences than any other person in history. His 13-part television documentary "Cosmos: A Personal Journey", which first premiered on PBS in 1980 and is still stunningly well-worth watching to this day, is widely regarded as one of the best science-themed series ever produced. Sagan knew how to turn a phrase to enchant an audience and routinely did so with a level of passion and charisma that cannot be faked."

"Even Elon Musk is Getting Worried About the Economy - Prepare Now"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly 6/4/22:

"Even Elon Musk is Getting Worried 

About the Economy - Prepare Now"

"Do you take economic warnings seriously? If the richest man in the world is concerned about the economy over the next few months, shouldn’t you be concerned as well? Farmers are talking about their wheat crops being 25% less than previous years and diesel is at an all-time high. Prepare now."

"Energy Crunch"

"Energy Crunch"

Gas hits new records as oil soars above 

$120 ahead of summer driving season

by Jeffrey Tucker

Copenhagen, Denmark - "Well, if that was the big market bounce cheery optimists were looking for, it was certainly short lived. Stocks in the US went... nowhere this past week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq all ended Friday’s session within one percent of where they began trading Monday. Sideways, in other words. Gold was last seen treading water around the mid $1,850s. It’s up 1.65% for the year in dollar terms.

Oil closed over $120/barrel on Friday, while the national average at the pump clocked another record: $4.67 a gallon, according to the American Automobile Association. On the one hand, persistently high energy prices (like persistently high inflation), is a bane to politicos who depend on happy voters to keep them in office. (The Big Guy’s dismal approval ratings are in no small part a reflection of just such pocketbook issues – turns out American consumers don’t like “everyday higher prices.” Amazing.)

On the other hand, the current energy squeeze provides those waving their big green stick around with the kind of ammunition they need to advance their “energy transition” agenda… the one that Janet Yellen reckons will cost $100 trillion (of money the world hasn’t yet earned and doesn’t have to spend).

Folks like Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm can’t understand why you haven’t solved your $5 per gallon gas problem by simply snapping up a brand-new electric vehicle. (See our column about this here: “Let Them Drive Teslas.”)

Never mind that the average electric vehicle goes for about $20,000 more than the average “deplorable mobile.” And never mind that the component ingredients for those lithium ion batteries are in short supply... or that they’re extremely energy intensive to build... or that the elements come from (ahem…) “unfriendly” places like China and The Congo. Or that the mining required to extract these metals is terrible for the environment. As long as it’s not dreaded carbon-based fossil fuels...

Which brings us to the current state of the energy market, as Dan Denning explained to Bonner Private Research subscribers in his note on Friday. Here’s a choice snippet...

"Oil closed at over $120/barrel today. Gas prices continue to rise across the country. Interestingly enough, the White House announced President Biden would be visiting Saudi Arabia later this month. That’s after OPEC announced earlier this week that it would bring-forward planned output increases to try and curb the loss of Russian oil from international markets.

OPEC says it will increase production by 640,000 barrels per day in July and August. We’ll see if they actually do. But if President Biden expects that lower gasoline prices in time for the summer driving season (and head of the mid-term elections in November) he’s going to be disappointed. Why?

There’s a structural shortage of refining capacity in the United States. Total capacity has actually fallen by 5.4% and almost a million barrels a day (to 17.9 million barrels per day) since the beginning of the pandemic. In 2021, five separate refineries shut down. News reports this week said the Biden Administration was asking companies to re-open some of those closed down facilities.

The refineries that ARE operating are running at near capacity. Even if the President could get the Saudis to pump more oil, it would have to get here on a tanker. And there’d have to be a place where it could be turned into refined fuels. And we’d have to keep those refined fuels here, rather than exporting them to Europe to make up for lack of Russian exports. In other words, the energy sector has been underinvested in for years. No green energy transition will solve the problem this year. Or next. Or the year after that."

- https://bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com/

○

$6.89 Gas Prices Sign Los Angeles California USA June 4, 2022

"Russia Threatens To ‘Strike The West’ If US-Supplied Rockets Hit Its Territory"

Click image for larger size.

"Russia Threatens To ‘Strike The West’

 If US-Supplied Rockets Hit Its Territory"

by Gihadmin

"Following on the heels of the Biden administration announcing it would send longer range rocket systems to Ukraine, the Kremlin has issued a veiled threat that if it's territory is hit it could strike back directly at the West.

"One of President Putin's closest allies has warned that Moscow could target western cities if Ukraine uses rocket systems supplied by the United States to carry out strikes on Russian territory," the UK is reporting. The dire warning was given by close top Putin ally and former president Dmitry Medvedev, who currently serves as the Russian security council deputy chairman. "If, God forbid, these weapons are used against Russian territory then our armed forces will have no other choice but to strike decision-making centers," Medvedev warned in the new statements.

That's when he suggested the following for the first time, marking a severe escalation of rhetoric: "Of course, it needs to be understood that the final decision-making centers in this case, unfortunately..." - with the suggestion being that those Western capitals supplying the advanced arms could come under attack in response. Previously Russia has threatened to hit "decision-making centers" within Ukraine, such as Kiev and Lviv. These cities have been targeted on occasion, but rarely, throughout the war now in its fourth month.

The US confirmed this past week that Ukraine would receive M142 high-mobility artillery rocket systems, which are medium-ranged, capable of striking targets some 50 miles away. President Biden on Tuesday stressed that "we're not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that strike into Russia" - which the Kremlin acknowledged as a "rational" decision, while still condemning the transfer of the systems.

Ukraine's government, meanwhile, has reportedly given Washington "assurances" that it will not uses US-supplied weaponry to target Russian territory, which Moscow has long made clear would mark severe violation of its 'red lines'.

The map shows where HIMARS MLRS M30/M31 rockets can strike on the front line with a range of up to 70 km. Also, M30 / M31 missiles can hit Snake Island, 50 km from the nearest Ukrainian city. pic.twitter.com/idDDNjpK4M

- ТРУХА⚡️English (@TpyxaNews) June 3, 2022

This as Yahoo News has noted that "The West has been increasingly willing to give Ukraine longer-range weaponry, including M777 howitzers, as its forces battle Russians with more success than intelligence officials had predicted." Likely these fresh warnings from Medvedev serve to further warn and enforce over Russia's red line. While the longer range MLRS missiles are apparently off the table for now, which can reach up to 190 miles away, the shorter-range MLRS systems could easily be updated with the larger, more advanced and longer range systems.

#Donetsk - The city center of Donetsk is under heavy shelling from #Ukraine this evening. The exact target is unclear from this footage. pic.twitter.com/8cmwTiaFqc

- OSINT Aggregator (@AggregateOsint) June 4, 2022

On the sanctions and economic war front, Poland officials have on Saturday said the next, seventh round of anti-Russia sanctions are currently being readied - suggesting that for the time being the ongoing Russian-NATO/EU standoff will only escalate further. Negotiations are at the same time stalled completely, and diplomatic openings and communications are fewer and fewer, making the situation even more dangerous."

- https://globalintelhub.com/

○

Related:

"Russia Tests 'Sarmat' Missile Dubbed 'Satan 2';

 Putin Warns West to 'Think Twice'"

"Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception." 

- Carl Sagan

"We are so close to the brink... Russia is reported to have conducted a test launch of the RS-28 (15A28) Sarmat ICBM, which will replace the Soviet R-36M2 Voyevoda missile. This is the worlds largest nuclear missile that includes up to 15 warheads each with high nuclear yield. According to Russian information, on April 24, a Sarmat ICBM test launch took place from Plesetsk in the Arkhangelsk region with the final destination being the Kura training field in Kamchatka. It is worth noting that this information was leaked to the Russian media immediately after the loss of the Moskva cruiser. The Russians note that there is no reason to follow the example of the US, which canceled the test launches of Minuteman III twice in March and April of this year under the fictitious pretext of "non-escalation" of the situation. Launch is only necessary for a complete re-equipment."

RS-28 Sarmat

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat

15 warheads per missile, 11,000 mile range, hypersonic speed of 15,880 mph.

Do we really want to do this?