Full screen recommended.
Tommy Bites Homestead,
"Stores Ration Food! Empty Shelves;
Panicked Shoppers in U.S."
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Related:
So, we rise from the rubble...
Thursday, January 13, 2022
Gregory Mannarino, "The Dollar Is Dying And Here Is The Proof; BlackRock Warns Of Commodity Prices"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 1/13/22:
"The Dollar Is Dying And Here Is The Proof;
BlackRock Warns Of Commodity Prices"
Gregory Mannarino, "Collapse: You Are In One, And The Worst Is Yet To Come. Very Important Updates"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 1/13/22:
"Collapse: You Are In One, And The Worst Is Yet To Come.
Very Important Updates"
"Middle Class Getting Wiped Out - Highest Inflation in 40 Years"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly, AM 1/13/22:
"Middle Class Getting Wiped Out - Highest Inflation in 40 Years"
"We have the worst inflation in 40 years. Nothing makes sense. Experts now say that we cannot raise interest rates because of the damage that’s been done. The Middle Class is finished."
"Hell to Pay"
"Hell to Pay"
by Bill Bonner
Paris, France... "This morning’s headline in the Financial Times: "Four-decade high for US inflation fuels Fed fears over jobs recovery." Yes, dear reader. Inflation didn’t slack off in December. “US consumer price growth rose at the fastest pace in almost four decades in December… "The consumer price index increased at a 7% year-on-year pace last month, a step up from the 6.8% rate registered in November and the biggest jump since June 1982."
The road to ruin includes many twists and turns. And there are plenty of signs along the way to mislead travelers. It wouldn’t surprise us to see the inflation numbers moderate in the months ahead. But the general direction of America’s decline is not likely to change. As we’ve explored in these pages, the people who control US public policy have an agenda. It includes spending a lot of money they don’t have (with much of it going into their own pockets)… and doing a lot of things that could have very unpleasant consequences. The switchover – from ‘dirty’ old fuel to clean, new fuel – is one of them.
Here’s a headline from Reuters. We had to read it three times. Even then we weren’t sure what it meant: "Coal to make up 85% of total US power capacity to be retired in 2022."
(Reuters) - "Coal-fired plants will account for about 85% of total U.S. power capacity scheduled for retirement this year with natural gas and renewables taking a greater share of the supply, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said on Tuesday."
One of our themes here at the Diary is that the feds are cruisin’ for a bruisin’ by meddling in the energy industry. Fossil fuel is what makes modern civilization possible. It keeps the trucks on the road and sustains 7.9 billion people. Take it away suddenly… or clumsily… and there will be Hell to pay. But the word ‘clumsily’ was practically invented to describe the way the government does things. It bullies. It bumbles. It makes the proverbial bull in the china shop look like a ballerina.
Normally, the energy ‘market’ adapts to conditions on the ground, with thousands of producers responding to delicate, real-time price signals in order to furnish 600 quadrillion Btus of energy per year. But when politics and inflation get involved, there is bound to be trouble. “Supply chain disruptions,” for example. Price spikes. Shortages. Cut-offs. Mistakes. Failures. Here’s the news from Berlin: "Thousands of people in the east of Berlin had to get by for hours on Sunday evening without heating and without warm water – with outside temperatures of around three degrees Celsius. A brief power outage at the state’s own electricity network operator Stromnetz Berlin had paralyzed the Klingenberg thermal power station in the Rummelsburg district in the afternoon, as the energy supplier Vattenfall announced. The power plant owned by the company had to shut down."
Europe is leading the way. Since 2,000, in the Old World, oil production has dropped in half. Nuclear reactors are decommissioned. And the price of a gallon of gasoline, when we filled up the tank yesterday near Paris, was about $7.
Click image for larger size.
(Source: Eurostat)
People don’t like running out of power. And they don’t appreciate it when their energy costs go up. In Kazakhstan, the president has given the order to ‘shoot to kill’ protestors. The back story is that after years of controlling the price of fuel, the government decided that it had enough… eliminated the price controls… and the price doubled overnight. This set off some serious objections… in which protestors set fire to the country’s parliament.
Meanwhile, back in the USA, CNN reports: "Grocery store shelves across America are wiped clean, and they're staying empty as stores struggle to quickly restock everyday necessities such as milk, bread, meat, canned soups and cleaning products."
After contending with two years of a pandemic and supply chain-related problems, grocery stores still aren't getting the break they had hoped for. We have no particular insight into any of these news stories. But our hunch is that they are connected to the new ‘activism’ of our leaders… and the corruption of our elites. A further guess is that we’ll see more of them."
“How Are Things Going, Joe?”
“You go up to a man, and you say, “How are things going, Joe?” and he says, “Oh fine, fine… couldn’t be better.” And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn’t be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody’s having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.”
- Kurt Vonnegut
"All Sins..."
"All sins, of course, deserve to be treated with mercy: we all do what we can, and life is too hard and too cruel for us to condemn anyone for failing in this area. Does anyone know what he himself would do if faced with the worst, and how much truth could he bear under such circumstances?"
- Andre Comte-Sponville
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Joe South, "Walk A Mile In My Shoes"
"Coming Market Madness Could Take 70 Years To Recover From"
"Coming Market Madness Could
Take 70 Years To Recover From"
by Egon von Greyerz
"Cervantes famous classic novel "Don Quixote" can in simple terms be described as a fight for liberty and freedom against oppression and against the state. This book is from 1605 and considered to be one of the best books ever written. In the midst of market madness, risk doesn’t exist because lunatics neither see, nor worry about risk. And still, 2022 will be more about risk and survival than anything else. So I will obviously talk more about “The Triumph of Survival” which I discussed in a recent piece.
“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies.”
– Don Quixote
The year 2022 will most likely be the culmination of risk. An epic risk moment in history that very few investors will see until it is too late as they expect to be saved yet another time by the Fed and other central banks. And why should anyone believe that 2022 will be different from any year since 2009 when this bull market started? Few investors are superstitious and therefore won’t see that 13 spectacular years in stocks and other asset markets might signify an end to the epic super bubble.
The Great Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2006-9 was never repaired. Central bankers and governments patched Humpty up with glue and tape in the form of printed trillions of dollars, euro, yen etc. But poor Humpty Dumpty was fatally injured and the intensive care he received would only give him a temporary reprieve.
When the GFC started in 2006, global debt was $120 trillion. Today we are at $300t, rising to potentially $3 quadrillion when the debt and derivative bubble finally first explodes and then implodes as I explained in my previous article.
It is amazing what fake money made of just air can achieve. Even better of course is that the central banks have manipulated interest rates to ZERO or below which means the debt is issued at zero or even negative cost.
Investors Have Found ShangriI-La: Investors now believe they are in Shangri-La where markets can only go up and they can live in eternal bliss. Few understand that the increase in global debt since 2006 of $180t is what has fuelled investment markets. Just look at these increases in the stock indices since 2008:
Nasdaq up 16X
S&P up 7x
Dow up 6X
And there are of course even more spectacular gains in stocks like: Tesla up 352X or Apple up 62X.
These type of gains have very little to do with skilful investment, but mainly with a herd that has more money than sense fuelled by paper money printed at zero cost.
To call the end of a secular bull market is a mug’s game. And there is nothing that stops this bubble from growing bigger. But we must remember that the bigger it grows, the greater the risk is of it totally wiping out gains not just since 2009 but also since the early 1980s when the current bull market started.
The problem is also that it will be impossible for the majority of investors to get out. Initially they will believe that it is just another correction like in 2020, 2007, 2000, 1987 etc. So greed will stop them from getting out. But then as the fall continues and fear sets in, investors will set a limit higher up where they intend to get out. And when the market never gets there, the scared investor will continue to set limits that are never reached until the market reaches the bottom at 80-95% from the top. And thus paper fortunes will be wiped out. We must also remember that it can take a painstakingly long time before the market recovers to the high in real terms.
As Ray Dalio shows in the chart below, the 1929 high in the Dow was not even recovered in real terms by the mid 1960s. Finally it was surpassed in 2000.
Click image for larger size.
This means that it took 70 years to recover in real terms! So investors might have to wait until 2090 to recover the current highs after the coming fall. So looking at the chart, the market is now at a similar overvalued level it was in 1929, 1972 and 2000. Thus the risk is as great as at some historical tops in the last 100 years.
The Epic Bubble Might Not Recover Until 2090: The chart above shows that the 1929 top in the Dow was not reached in real terms until 2000.
As the world is being ever more oppressed and controlled by the state, Cervantes’ message in Don Quixote could not be more appropriate. I am quite convinced that Don Quixote would also have fought against the wokeness that today has become the guideline not only for human behavior but also for justice.
In the UK last week, a court acquitted four people accused of pulling down a statue of a historical figure who had been a major benefactor of the city of Bristol. Yes, he had made money on the slave trade in the late 1600s but where do we stop rewriting history? With today’s woke interpretation of history, virtually every historical king, emperor, government leader, general or businessman, to mention a few, should be put on trial even if they are all dead.
For example, Great Britain, France, Spain were all part of invading North America killing a major part of the Indian population and taking their land. So if we rewrite history, shouldn’t all these Europeans as well as the Africans be pulled out of North America and the land handed bank to the Indians. The same goes for South America of course. The Spanish and the Portuguese must all return and give the land back.
And where do we stop? We should really go back to the Han Dynasty, the Roman, the Mongol, the Ottoman, Spanish, Russian or British Empires. Why just deal with the slave trade in Africa when all these empires ransacked and conquered major land areas, took slaves and stole the riches of the countries they invaded. In a woke and fair world, all these actions must be reversed too. If the world decides to rewrite history, it must be done properly with major restitutions. There must of course be a UN Commission, and EU Commission and many more to deal with this properly. As Don Quixote said: “Who knows where madness lies”.
Easy Money Madness: But it is most probably the total market Madness in the financial world which will have the biggest effect on the world economy in 2022 and onwards. As I have pointed out many times, the US has not had a budget surplus since 1930 with the exception of a couple of years in the 1940s and 50s. The Clinton surpluses were fake as debt still increased.
But the money and market Madness started in the 1970s after Nixon couldn’t make ends meet and closed the gold window. The US federal debt in 1971 was $400 billion. Since then the US debt has grown by an average of 9% per year. This means that the US debt has doubled every 8 years since 1971. We can actually go back 90 years to 1931 and find that US debt since then has doubled every 8.3 years. What a remarkable record of total mismanagement of the US economy for a century!
The US has not had to build an empire in the conventional way by conquering other countries. Instead the combination of a reserve currency, money printing and a strong military power has given the US global power and a global financial empire.
Even worse, since the sinister smart coup by private bankers in 1913 to take control of the creation of money, the US Federal debt has gone from $1 billion to almost $30 trillion. As Mayer Amschel Rothschild poignantly stated in 1838: “Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation and I care not who makes its laws”. And that is exactly what some powerful bankers and a senator decided on Jekyll Island in 1910 when they conspired to take over the US money system through the creation of the Fed which was founded in 1913. Ever since that time the bankers have helped themselves from the self-filling honeypot.
Controlling the Fed has given the bankers an unlimited supply of money and credit to finance their activities. They have used this to acquire assets around the world as well as power. As is the general rule today, debt is never repaid since new debt always makes the old debt insignificant as the currency is constantly debased with all the new money issued.
The debt issued was not only used for the direct financial gain of the bankers. No debt buys enormous power and by creating money to finance profligate governments, the bankers are also buying power and controlling the politicians. What a wonderful position as Rothschild made clear almost 200 years ago."
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Freely download "Don Quixote (The Ingenious Gentleman
Don Quixote of La Mancha)" by Miguel de Cervantes here:
"Are You A "Terrorist"? Take This 50 Question Quiz And Find Out!"
"Are You A "Terrorist"?
Take This 50 Question Quiz And Find Out!"
by Michael Snyder
"Could you be the kind of person that the government is looking for? The U.S. Justice Department has just announced that it will be creating a brand new unit “to counter domestic terrorism”, and they are going to need something to show for all of the time, money and energy that they are going to be putting into this new project. You may be tempted to think that they will be going after the people that have rioted and burned buildings hundreds of times all across this nation over the past couple of years, but that simply is not going to happen. Instead, they are telling us that this new unit will specifically target “extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies”. So if you have been critical of the Biden administration, any of our government agencies, or any of our top public health officials, you could be in really big trouble.
To help you out, I have created a 50 question quiz to help you determine if you are a “terrorist”. Most of these questions are based on statements made by Biden administration officials or on specific government documents that have been publicly revealed. So are you ready? Here we go. For each of the following questions, answer either “yes” or “no”…
#1 Do you ever criticize the government?
#2 Have you ever been banned, shadowbanned or censored on social media for a political opinion that you expressed?
#3 Are you a parent?
#4 Do you attend school board meetings?
#5 Have you ever expressed concern about the education of your children at a school board meeting?
#6 Do you believe in “conspiracy theories”?
#7 Are you suspicious of the FBI?
#8 Do you know who Ray Epps is?
#9 Do you wonder why Ray Epps has never been arrested?
#10 Are you unvaccinated?
#11 Have you ever questioned the efficacy of the COVID vaccines?
#12 Do you have a negative opinion of Dr. Fauci?
#13 Would you consider yourself to be a “constitutionalist”?
#14 Do you believe in “individual liberties”?
#15 Do you know what the 10th Amendment says?
#16 Have you ever referred to anyone in the Democratic Party as a “communist”?
#17 Have you ever referred to any public official as a “globalist”?
#18 Do you know what the “Great Reset” is?
#19 Would you consider yourself to be an opponent of the LGBT agenda?
#20 Have you ever said anything on social media that was critical of illegal immigration?
#21 Have you ever referred to yourself as a “patriot”?
#22 Have you ever used the wrong pronouns when addressing a member of the trans community?
#23 Do you believe that global leaders are conspiring to create a “New World Order”?
#24 Are you a “climate denier”?
#25 Are you opposed to Agenda 21?
#26 Have you ever belonged to a militia group?
#27 Are you worried about “gun control”?
#28 Are you ever critical of the IRS?
#29 Do you ever visit “extremist websites”?
#30 Have you ever attended rallies that promote “extremist causes”?
#31 Do you have “right-wing bumper stickers” on your vehicle?
#32 Would you consider yourself to be a “nationalist”?
#33 Do you believe that your “way of life” is under attack?
#34 Would you consider yourself to be an opponent of Critical Race Theory?
#35 Are you a “prepper”?
#36 Have you ever had any “survivalist training”?
#37 Would you consider yourself to be a “fundamentalist”?
#38 Do you believe that religion should influence politics?
#39 Are you “anti-abortion”?
#40 Are you a military veteran?
#41 Do you believe in a “right to bear arms”?
#42 Have you been involved in stockpiling ammunition?
#43 Have you ever protested at an abortion clinic?
#44 Do you have a negative opinion of the United Nations?
#45 Would you consider yourself to be an evangelical Christian?
#46 Do you ever have questions about the legitimacy of our elections?
#47 Have you lost faith in public health officials?
#48 Are you resentful when you are ordered to wear a mask?
#49 Have you ever said anything negative about the big pharmaceutical companies?
#50 Are you opposed to vaccine mandates?
If you answered yes to none of these questions, you are exactly the kind of citizen that the federal government wants and you have absolutely nothing to worry about.
If you answered yes to between one and ten of these questions, you have some anti-government tendencies but if you start watching CNN a lot more you can still probably turn things around.
If you answered yes to between eleven and thirty of these questions, you are clearly a “troublemaker” and you may be on your way to becoming a terrorist. You are going to need to watch endless hours of MSNBC and playing glowing documentaries about Dr. Fauci over and over again will be very helpful as well.
If you answered yes to between thirty-one and fifty of these questions, there is no hope. You are clearly a terrorist and the government is eventually going to be coming for you. In fact, they are already holding exercises that simulate what it will be like to confront “extremists”. The following is just one example… "A “realistic” guerrilla war will be fought across two dozen North Carolina counties in the coming weeks, with young soldiers battling seasoned “freedom fighters,” according to the U.S. Army.
According to MSN News, The two-week “unconventional warfare exercise” will be staged from Jan. 22-Feb. 4 on privately owned land. And it will be realistic enough to include the sounds of gunfire (blanks) and flares, the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School said in a news release. Exact times, locations, and exercise specifics were not provided. However, advance publicity is intended to make sure civilians - including law enforcement officers - don’t mistake the fighting for terrorism or criminal activity, which has happened in the past."
Let me be serious for a moment. I find all of this to be extremely sad. We should be finding ways to come together as a nation, but instead the Biden administration just keeps finding ways to make our divisions even deeper. A house divided will surely fall, and I am deeply concerned about the future of our country. If we don’t find a way to unite as a nation, we simply are not going to make it. Unfortunately, our leaders in Washington and the mainstream media just continue to stir up more anger and more hate, and that is a recipe for national suicide."
"The Dollar Has Entered A Death Spiral, And A Lot More Inflation Is On The Way" by Michael Snyder
"The Dollar Has Entered A Death Spiral,
And A Lot More Inflation Is On The Way"
by Michael Snyder
"Did anyone out there actually expect things to turn out differently? When the federal government kept borrowing and spending trillions upon trillions of dollars that we did not have, we were warned that this day was coming. And when the Federal Reserve kept pumping trillions upon trillions of fresh dollars into our financial system, we were warned that this day was coming. So why is anybody surprised by what is happening at this point? On Wednesday, it was being reported that in December the U.S. consumer price index rose at the fastest pace in nearly 40 years…
"Inflation rose at the fastest pace in nearly four decades in December, as rapid price gains fueled consumer fears about the economy and sent President Biden’s approval rating tumbling. The consumer price index rose 7% in December from a year ago, according to a new Labor Department report released Wednesday, marking the fastest increase since June 1982, when inflation hit 7.1%. The CPI – which measures a bevy of goods ranging from gasoline and health care to groceries and rents – jumped 0.5% in the one-month period from November."
They keep telling us that the consumer price index was actually increasing at a faster rate back in 1982, but whenever the corporate media makes such a claim they are not being honest. The way that the consumer price index is calculated has been changed more than two dozen times since 1980, and every single time it has been changed the goal was to make the rate of inflation look smaller.
According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if the consumer price index was still calculated the way it was back in 1990, the official rate of inflation would be above 10 percent right now. And if the consumer price index was still calculated the way it was back in 1980, the official rate of inflation would be above 15 percent right now. But 7 percent sounds a whole lot better than 15 percent, doesn’t it?
We can get a better picture of what is really going on out there when we start looking at individual categories. The following category numbers were posted earlier today by Citizen Free Press…
Gasoline up 56%
Heating oil up 42%
Used cars: 37.3%
Car rental: 36%
Natural gas up 31%
Hotels: 27.6%
Beef: 18.6%
Pork: 15.1%
Furniture: 13.8%
New cars: 12%
Unfortunately, it looks like the price of gasoline will soon go even higher. In fact, Reuters is telling us that some analysts are projecting that the price of oil could soon exceed 100 dollars a barrel… "Oil prices that rallied 50% in 2021 will power further ahead this year, some analysts predict, saying a lack of production capacity and limited investment in the sector could lift crude to $90 or even above $100 a barrel." It takes energy to transport virtually all of the goods that we purchase on a regular basis, and so a higher price for gasoline will cause inflationary pressure throughout our entire economy.
Some companies are responding to this crisis by giving their customers less for the same price that they were charging before. For example, if you order chicken wings from Domino’s Pizza you will only get a package of eight from now on… "Domino’s Pizza customers ordering chicken wings will soon get fewer of them for the same price. The pizza chain said it’s cutting the number of wings in its $7.99 carry out offer from 10 pieces to just eight because of rising food and labor costs. Wings will also become an online exclusive, meaning customers can no longer order them via phone."
All around us, there is evidence that our standard of living is rapidly going down. The cost of living is increasing much, much faster than paychecks are, and that is an extremely alarming trend. According to Zero Hedge, real average hourly earnings have now declined for 9 months in a row… "Finally, and perhaps most importantly for Main Street, real average hourly earnings fell (down 2.4% YoY) for the 9th straight month…"
So the next time a politician tries to tell you to be grateful that your wages are going up or you can move to a new higher paying job, just remind him that the surge in the cost of living is outpacing wage gains, thanks to The Fed’s money-largesse and Congress’ lockdown policies and helicopter money have crushed the quality of life for millions. In other words, most Americans are getting poorer.
Meanwhile, the appalling nationwide shortages that have erupted continue to make headlines all over the nation. According to USA Today, the following are some of the most severe shortages that we are witnessing right now…
- Baby formula shortage
- Cream cheese shortag
- Aluminum shortage
- Cat food, dog food shortages
- Chicken tender shortage
- Lunchables shortage
- Toilet paper shortage
- Beer shortage
And it turns out that fear of Omicron has also sparked a really bad shortage of cold medicine… "Stores in the Dallas-Fort Worth area are facing cold medicine shortages as flu season picks up and the omicron variant of the coronavirus continues. “The new toilet paper shortage,” an employee at an East Dallas pharmacy told Fox 4 of the empty shelves.
One pharmacist at a CVS location in East Dallas said that customers with symptoms appearing to be the coronavirus or flu have been buying up cold medicine and cough syrup, while others are coming in to just stock up. So if you were thinking of stocking up on Benadryl for some reason, I would go out and grab some while you still can.
The corporate media seems absolutely stunned that our politicians in Washington and the magicians at the Federal Reserve have lost control of our economy. But we were warned for years that what they were doing would kill the U.S. dollar, and the death spiral that we have now entered is going to become exceedingly painful.
What we are experiencing now is not just another short-term economic crisis. This truly is the beginning of the end for the U.S. economy, and I would recommend that you prepare accordingly."
Wednesday, January 12, 2022
"There Are Days..."
"There are days, there are times, when you feel like you've walked so far, when the voice inside you is complaining that it's all uphill, that it always will be. And then, after all that, way beyond your blue horizon, you see the biggest mountains you've ever seen, and you think, I can't do that. Well, I hope you always have somebody who tells you that you can. Like I'm telling you now. "
- Windy Ariestanty
"Sometimes..."
"Sometimes even to live is an act of courage."
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
"Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether
it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
That ultimately is the question...
Adrian Lester as Hamlet: "To be or not to be..."
William Shakespeare, "Hamlet", Act III, Scene I
"There Arrives A Point..."
"When swimming into a dark tunnel, there arrives a point of
no return when you no longer have enough breath to double back.
Your only choice is to swim forward into the unknown and pray for an exit. "
- Dan Brown
“And It Was Pointless..."
“And it was pointless… to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell… for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn’t changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You’re left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is to go on or not. But if you go on, it’s knowing you carry your scars with you.”
- Charles Frazier
"Do You Believe..."
“Do you believe,’ said Candide, ‘that men have always massacred each other as they do today, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?”
“Do you believe,” said Martin, “that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?”
- Voltaire
"The Real Revolution Is Underway But Nobody Recognizes It"
"The Real Revolution Is Underway But Nobody Recognizes It"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"The general assumption is that revolutions are political. The revolution some foresee in the U.S. is the classic armed insurrection, or a coup or the fragmentation of the nation as states or regions declare their independence from the federal government.
By focusing on the compelling drama of political upheaval we're missing the real revolution, which is social and economic: the Great Resignation, a global movement which in the U.S. has largely unrecognized American characteristics.
The Great Resignation is the real revolution which few if any recognize. The status quo is going to great lengths to dismiss it, for example, "The Great Resignation: Historical Data and a Deeper Analysis Show It’s Not as Great as Screaming Headlines Suggest, because this revolution is not controllable with force and is therefore unstoppable."
The sources of the revolution are in plain sight: you rig the economy to enrich the already-rich top 10% and super-size the already bloated wealth of the top 0.1%, and then you wonder why the bottom 90% are indebted, broke, burned out and disgruntled? The hubris of the ruling elites and their lackeys is off the scale, as this structural exploitation is presumed to be not just acceptable but delightful to the bottom 90%.
Alternatively, the more cynical view of those at the top looking down is: they have to work at the wages we pay in inhuman conditions because they have to: all the debt-serfs and tax donkeys must accept our pay and conditions or starve.
This is neoliberal neofeudalism with the kid gloves of PR removed.
Secondly, it's rather obvious what happens to public protests against systemic exploitation and disempowerment of the bottom 90%: they go nowhere. Anyone remember Occupy Wall Street? This is the fate of any quasi-political movement: co-option, suppression, etc., and then benign neglect as the full-court press eventually wears out the peasants.
So the real revolution takes place out of the spotlight, as one person at a time opts out. They opt out of the unwinnable rat-race, of burnout, of debt-serfdom, of powerlessness, of accepting exploitive work conditions and all the tiresome trappings of neofeudalism.
After 45 years of losing power, the workforce finally has a bit of leverage. Some of the leverage results from demographics - the Baby Boom generation is retiring en masse and so the workforce is shrinking - and from the revolution of opting out, as millions of individuals quit, creating a labor shortage unlike any in living memory.
As millions of workers opt out of conventional employment/exploitation, individuals have leverage due to the labor shortage to reverse the game employers have been winning for 45 years. Corporate America dropped the pretense of rewarding loyalty long ago, and nobody believes the corporate PR about "we're a family" - unless Corporate America is referring to an abusive, dysfunctional "family."
Workers are now in a position to quit and demand better pay and conditions, and then quit again to gain more, and then quit again. The employers are gnashing their teeth at this loss of power, but that's what happens in revolutions: the pendulum swings from one extreme to the opposite extreme.
Workers are realizing that they are powerless to change a rigged system at the ballot box or by conventional means. The only freedom that's still available is to quit amd game the system to the hilt, or drop out into the informal economy, try one's hand at the rigged casino of rampant speculation or give up the whole unattainable dream of the McMansion on the golf course and build yourself a micro-home on a cheap rural parcel and work your own micro-enterprise.
A great many workers are done dealing with the abusive American public who seem to feel they have a right to abuse employees. The government has the monopoly on force but it doesn't have the power to force individuals to tolerate abuse from employers, co-workers or customers.
Those quitting give conventional reasons, obfuscating the revolution. The structural dynamics driving the Great Resignation are not entirely conscious; the awareness that the ground has shifted beneath our feet is not easily discernable or described, but we sense it and act on it nonetheless.
American ingenuity is increasingly turned to playing the players via individual initiative. While the financial elite focuses on stripmining the next rigged game, the workers are focusing on bailing out in one form or another.
Revolutions have a funny characteristic: they're unpredictable. The global revolution is being written off as "transitory" because it's terribly inconvenient for the rigged-against-the-bottom-90% status quo. But it isn't transitory, it's gathering momentum."
"A Look to the Heavens"
"No, hamburgers are not this big. What is pictured is a sharp telescopic view of a magnificent edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 3628, a puffy galactic disk divided by dark dust lanes. Of course, this deep galactic portrait puts some astronomers in mind of its popular moniker, The Hamburger Galaxy.
The tantalizing island universe is about 100,000 light-years across and 35 million light-years away in the northern springtime constellation Leo. NGC 3628 shares its neighborhood in the local Universe with two other large spirals M65 and M66 in a grouping otherwise known as the Leo Triplet. Gravitational interactions with its cosmic neighbors are likely responsible for the extended flare and warp of this spiral's disk.”
"One Summer Night..."
"One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space. Millions of stars blazed in darkness, and on the far shore a few lights burned in cottages. Otherwise there was no reminder of human life. My companion and I were alone with the stars: the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon. It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be seen many scores of nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead; and because they could see it almost any night, perhaps they never will."
- Rachel Carson
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