Depending upon your age, two standard items in the news for most of your life, if not all of it, have been economic data and the stock market. The economic stagnation starting in the late 1960’s lasting into the 1980’s made the economy the top priority on everyone’s mind. Every election, it was one of the top issues. In the 80’s, Baby Boomers got into the financial markets, so the stock market and your 401K became a strange proxy for general happiness.
Something that has gone unremarked during the Trump era has been the fact that these paramount issues have dropped in priority with the media. On the Left the only thing that has mattered is hating Donald Trump and white people. On the Right, the only thing that matters is the various internal battles over what it means to be on the Right and where Trump fits into it. No one has noticed that the stock market has just about doubled in value during his presidency, despite it all.
Many on this side of the great divide mock public concern for the economy, but that is often just a pose. A primary goal of any human society is the prosperity of the people, as that is the point of human organization. Humans came together in larger and larger groups, in part, because it increased material prosperity. Even the communists were primarily focused on material prosperity. Read the book Red Plenty and you will see that no one is more materialist than a communist.
What’s odd about the sudden lack of interest in the economy and markets by ruling class media organs is that it is a central part of the Covid panic. Government shuttering businesses has to have an impact on the economy. Washington has been hurling money at the economy for a year now. The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is probably going to top $10 Trillion to end the year. The 2020 deficit is over $3 Trillion. More money is promised for 2021, assuming current plans move forward.
Again, the massive economic upheaval caused by the government in response to Covid should be showing up in the economy and that should be news. In many cities, the restaurant industry has collapsed. San Francisco has seen an 85% decline, which is an unprecedented event. Big chains with connections into the ruling elite will survive, but the small ones will never come back. San Fran is hardly unique. The tyrant Cuomo is promising to finish off the restaurant industry in his state.
Of course, it is not all bad news. The nations rich people are doing well, which is no doubt a relief to everyone. Toll Brothers, the luxury home builder, reports they are having their best year in decades. Much of their business is around the Imperial Capital, where it is always good times, so Covid has been manna from heaven. Those trillions in new spending are laundered through Washington, so it means the locals are flush with cash for new cars and new homes.
On the flip side of this, we are seeing food lines turning up in what used to be middle-class parts of the country. Again, you would think this would be at the top of the news, but it gets limited coverage. Usually, it is someone on social media posting a picture of cars lined up at a food bank. The reason we have food lines is we have lots of people without work all of a sudden. It turns out that shutting down businesses and locking people in their homes increases unemployment.
One reason for the lack of interest in the economy is the numbers no longer make any sense to people. How can the stock market be booming when the economy is being cratered by lock downs? How can housing prices be soaring when we have food lines and massive small business failure? The official statistics are little help, as they are mostly wrong now. For a long time, the economic data was a rough approximation of the economy, but now it is just more noise from the system.
The point here is that the economy should be the big story. There are a lot of red flashing lights that suggest 2021 could make 2020 look like good times. Those millions lined up for free food are going to become a story, even if official media refuses to notice it. The collapse of small business will have a huge impact further up the supply chain in the next year. All of those closed restaurants had suppliers and those suppliers have suppliers and creditors.
The elephant in the room, of course, is the growing wealth gap in America. We are becoming a land of very rich people, a minor aristocracy we call the managerial class and then a vast population of peasants. The media is in the minor aristocracy, so from their perspective, things are doing well. They have theirs and their bosses are happy, so why bother talking about the economy? The politicians have no reason to discuss it for much the same reason. They are doing great.
Regardless, realty is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it and our economic reality is increasingly muddled. How long can the Federal Reserve keep buying up assets to maintain asset prices? What happens when those mortgage forbearance plans expire? Delinquency rates remain at levels you see in a severe economic crisis. How about those late rent payments? Those problems are not getting better with jobless claims going up.
The official media could ignore the economy for most of the Trump term, because the public was generally satisfied with what they were experiencing. That’s probably about to change, but they won’t have the orange man to blame for it. One consequence of the selection of the Pretender Biden is that the ruling class has no one to blame. They own it all now and if the people are not happy with the bread or the circuses, they know who is responsible for it.
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MediaMan: So, shouldn’t we be stopping these handouts that are costing us so much?
Economist: Well no. It’s helping those in need – we need to keep the economy going. We are borrowing the money from ourselves, interest rates will be zero for decades and it isn’t actually costing the government that much.
Mediaman: So everything we’ve been told for the last 25 years was wrong?
Economist: Well, that depends on your definition of wrong….
You can safely assume the people “Ok Boomer, muh 401k” mocking on social media have never had a real job or real responsibilities to meet. The economy isn’t everything, but it is something very significant for adults.
What do we need an “economy” for, anyway? To provide us with food, fuel, clean water, electricity, and shelter, obviously. Some people also need medical care. As long as the people who produce and deliver those things keep showing up for work, it doesn’t matter what the rest of us do. We can carry on working at non-essential jobs, or stay home and play Animal Crossing.
The stock market is now just Animal Crossing for rich people. They may get a dopamine rush every time their account balance breaks another million, but they’d probably be happier if they could eat out at nice restaurant, attend a Broadway show, have a big party with other rich people, or take a luxury vacation.
How do we stop this runaway train? Without a banner to rally under, another option would be to infiltrate our local GOP headquarters and influence through sublimating dissident mindset and supporting candidates that resonate with our worldview. It would take time and patience, but it is a method that could be used to flip the script.
It gives us the cover of legitimacy and a functioning political vehicle to institute policy that reinforces our community standards.
Can’t stop it
why you have to JUMP
Today at 4 PM PA Gov Wolf announced a second state-wide lockdown. Among other restrictions the edict barred all inside dining at restaurants, takeaway only beginning Friday at 10 PM.
Although we had planned to stay at home my wife, daughter and I immediately decided to visit one of our favorite places to eat. Influencing our choice was the knowledge that this fine establishment, which has a very nice bar as well, does not do takeout and had been shutdown for months during the first lockdown.
We enjoyed a typically good meal and our waitress was attentive and personable. The restaurant, whose seating was widely separated and whose bar was empty, had few patrons. The two servers were able to handle everyone. But I could not help thinking that only a couple of hours before these nice working people, including those in the kitchen whom we couldn’t see, had found out that they would be out of work after tomorrow. Merry Christmas.
We thanked our waitress as we got up to go and left her a generous tip. We told her we hoped to see her again soon. On our way out I saw the manager standing close to the hostess station. I wished him good luck and told him how sorry we were for what had just been decreed by our moronic governor.
He nodded glumly along with his hostess. I couldn’t help adding that “Anybody who votes for these goddamn Democrats is insane.”
I hope the manager understands that his votes may not be counted correctly and that the Democrats will gladly commit fraud to keep in power or hell treason for that matter.
That is my fear, we won’t be able to vote them out of office because they will not longer allow it , wrecking us with the flick of a switch thus making removal by force the only option. God help us all.
Agreed … if we’ve learned anything from Election 2020, it’s that voting is a joke. Blatant fraud is being ignored by many important people, who could shine a light on it … America is no longer a serious country.
Its a tyranny, period,
Crushing the independent and entrepenreneurial white class was the apex of the plan. Blow up the towers. Chuck the Bill of Rights, go overseas to kill the wrong people and bankrupt the nation. Who’s left who hasn’t submitted to being a nigger on a jew plantation? Give em a plague cooked up in a lab, if that don’t destroy you the shot in your arm will.
White people allowed their culture to be destroyed, the nation to be flooded with immigrants and wages to be arbitraged by more than half measured as percentage GDP since 1973.
The natural impact of those economic choices on the bulk of White Americans who are not entrepreneurial and are just honest workers is what has provoked the economic crisis.
COVID however it came about is just an excuse to try and save an economy in freefall so that the peopel at the top, maybe 10% can stay there at the expense of the rest of us.
It ain’t the economy, brah. They only want your money to humiliate you and break you according to your own value system, where your worth is based on your ability to pay bills.
Good point though I don’t ascribe to those values.
Money means very little to me and while its devastating for a nation, I’m a firm believer in minimalism and where needed MGTOW.
White people seemed to be handicapped by this compulsion to “follow the rules”. The idea of breaking election rules probably seems unthinkable to most of us. If Biden won, fair & square, then I’d suck it up and take it. But the idea that we have people willing to break voting rules, rules that people have died for, makes my blood boil …
All of us feel that way. The trick is to not let the fire go out and to use that heat when called upon.
Not too long ago, I had to travel to Hamburg, Germany, a couple of times for my employer, and I still remember one of the German guys there mentioning that Germans have great respect for the rules. He mentioned that a couple of times, and I don’t know if it was his way of saying that he thought Americans didn’t, but I, of course, agreed. It’s just how we think, and some people take advantage of that.
Z,
You are describing Core Features as Bugs.
Wrong. This is the ideal repressive economy, a tool as old as man himself. Man has been doing this since Cro-Magnon starved out, killed out and bred out Neanderthal.
As for the unhappy people, they’re being written out of the script, and soon to be written off the planet.
“What about late rent payments….?”
It’s called death by exposure to the elements, which works well when combined with starvation.
And No Z, revolutions don’t just happen. Never did.
This one won’t either.
There won’t be a white uprising, we just disappear like the Hittites. America and the West never happened.
Vanishing into extinction is the true price point of a reasonable conversation around a cup of chagra, and mocking those who said to organize and act.
O/T, Maybe.
A Libertarian walks into a Bear.
Yes, Bears.
How Grafton, CT became a Libertarian town…and fell completely apart.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling
“By pretty much any measure you can look at to gauge a town’s success, Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. The town’s legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute.”
“some people just started feeding the bears just for the joy and pleasure of watching them eat.
As you can imagine, things got messy and there was no way for the town to deal with it. Some people were shooting the bears. Some people were feeding the bears. Some people were setting booby traps on their properties in an effort to deter the bears through pain. Others were throwing firecrackers at them. Others were putting cayenne pepper on their garbage so that when the bears sniffed their garbage, they would get a snout full of pepper.
It was an absolute mess.”
We’d have a better economy if there was a wealth cap of say around100x minimum wage (this was the effective rate at which 91% taxes kicked in 1960 at $15 minimum ) and tax incentives to distribute wealth and share work.
The irony is this will increase corporate profits after a few years of debt reduction and shrink the state as well but because of short term thinking and the social status hit , putting such a system in would require a civil war.
I hope if such a thing happens and if the DR and actual Right takes power they’ll stop being gulled by Neo Liberal economics and Libertarian B.S. and realize that an actual Conservative economy is designed around a floor of upper/lower class to a celing of lower/upper class and supports middle and working class yeomanry as an ideal.
Until than it makes the most sense to gin up a half fake race war and flood the nation with immigrants to destroy social cohesion because otherwise depending on who wins you’ll end up with either a populist economic system or actual socialism jammed down throats after the years of knives and lead resolve.
With a handy race way going though? Exist stage left and hopefully the next state will too weak or soft to introduce your hosts the the dilemma, give them over or meet the power of the atom.
No one paid the 1960 tax rates because all expenses related to doing business were fully tax deductible and massive real estate and life insurance loopholes existed on top of that. Effective tax rates weren’t all that different from today. Our current tax code was a late 1970s re-write with additions and other changes.
This is true but in that system all taxes are based on inflation adjusted income over minimum wage and are a flat bracket.
No deductions.
And note its not for revenue, its to limit the wealth gap and to create a ceiling .Unrestricted personal wealth creates the problems we have today.
The big problem we’ve had is artificially low interest rates since the late 80’s and especially the last 20 years and as of today, practically zero. Savers don’t have a chance unless the throw it into the market or buy overpriced real estate. When these bubbles pop, as they did in 2000 and 2008, there goes the “savings.” Smart people see it coming and move their money around, but you shouldn’t have to be a smart person to not get wiped out. Average intelligence hasn’t washed since the 1970s in having a happy, middle class existence. I had a passbook savings account as a kid. They paid you to save? How novel.
Most people cannot save much source
45% of all workers make under $15 an hour (this is inflation adjusted 1968 minimum wage or thereabouts)
20% and change make 30-50K and often as not these workers are in high cost areas.
More importantly we have a glut of savings and a vast surplus of productive capacity.
Everyone wants to produce at low cost which means that its harder to consume.
There are other structural factors but if we want a functional economy and our lite do not, we must get wages up faster than debt and inflation.
Even if trade and economic migration are fixed, technology and demand issues, lack of compelling goods or services, lack of babies born to spur demand make this very difficult.
It may not be possible to fix it which suggest that no matter what policies we pick, the real economy will contract year after year. Th efake economy that props up the elite will be goosed on and on till some faction has had it and destroys enough or collapse comes.
A lot of real estate is not crazily inflated. There are lots of houses that cost less than a car. If someone as the cash, buy one.
Alabama doesn’t count. I’m sure a nice double wide in certain places isn’t much.
I just priced houses in Alabama.
Areas with basic amenities like sewer, running water and Internet that are not too close to the poor huge jogger population (3rd most joggers , 1/4 the population) and are close to work are California prices up to 300+ for a family home.
My snob meter goes to 11
😁
Wouldn’t they just break the “cap” rules and laws they do with everything else? I mean the U.S. Constitution is a great thing, a supreme accomplishment, and yet a lot of people hate it and look to undermine it. A “cap” is comparatively nothing in terms of its stature. Not to mention how one defines wealth. On property for example, it’s not an exact science as to its value.
Rich people or worse corporations buying up property means serfdom not a yeomanry.
OTOH rules limiting income tend to limit the cost of property and when combined with other regulations and after mass reparation create better conditions for that yeomanry.
Income derives from property
if you can’t limit property you can’t accomplish much of anything you want to accomplish
so what I suggest and has actually worked well in the past is to prohibit ((())) from owning property and holding public office
Z – you mentioned it in this podcast (link below) that polls show that self identified democrats don’t care about tax related issues. Maybe we’re in a post-material type of politics.
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=12393
> the stock market has just about doubled in value
No, the fiat currency has lost half its value, because:
> Washington has been hurling money at the economy for a year now.
Yep, but assuming you “own” something of value wrt stocks, you’re better off than with a pile of cash in the bank. Trick is when to get off the horse and cash in—and of course what to do with this wheelbarrow of depreciating currency. Pictures of Weimar Germans with wheelbarrows of currency going to the grocery store come to mind. 🙁
They may use the upcoming solar discharge might be used as an excuse to drop the grid and net.
I agree … timing is everything here. So, I think that if the Prez election can be defrauded, as blatantly as it was, then the Stock Market must simply be a place where our rulers almost print their own money due to coordinated manipulations. These people hate us and hate our Country … they play be their rules. Every bone in my body is telling me to cash-out of the Stock Market, and get on the sidelines soon. The world knows that we now know that America is a joke.
What happens when those mortgage forbearance plans expire? Delinquency rates remain at levels you see in a severe economic crisis. How about those late rent payments? Those problems are not getting better with jobless claims going up.
We are poised to have a housing meltdown that makes 2007-2011 look quite minor. A property manager explained this to me yesterday, and it seems highly likely. Here’s a short summary of what I was told:
When the eviction moratorium lifts either January 1 or after a deadline that is extended expires, Ma and Pa-owned rental houses first will flood the market. Many of these owners depend on their rentals as the only supplemental income to their Social Security, and in addition to making them suffer this year, the moratorium has terrified them about the future of their investment. Corporate owners with numerous houses and apartments, handled by property management concerns, will panic as prices begin to decline. They will slowly, then suddenly, ditch their properties.
That’s the first shoe to drop. The second is the big one. When the mortgage forbearance is lifted, those properties will flood the market as soon as lenders get possession (this also includes a few of the Ma and Pa-owned houses). Already, the forbearance on federally backed mortgages is scheduled to be extended to January 1, 2022 because everyone in the industry is poised to conduct a fire sale after an extraordinary market, coupled with historically low interest rates, resulted in the best seller’s market in modern history. It is postponing the inevitable.
It is not an overstatement that 2022 will be a depression that engulfs the minor aristocracy along with everyone else. The lenders and financial houses will go right down with the housing market.
Be prepared.
I need to add something here, with the caveat I am not bullish on China.
The PRC also see this coming down and will panic in 2022 or shortly before, and ditch their Treasuries. It won’t be due to some fiendish plot but out of pure fear. Other countries will follow. This has the potential to take down the world.
I know the assumption is the uber rich will thrive, but I’m not so bullish on that, either.
The “China Dump Treasuries” bit is overblown. First, the fed will just buy them all if interest rates are threatened, but secondly China sells them and gets dollars, then what do they buy with the dollars? The reason they own treasuries to begin with is because there was nothing to else to buy.
Real estate would be attractive to the degree the United States and Western Europe remain stable. Undercovered in the WuFlu, of course, was the presence of so many Chinese nationals in the villas they had bought in the Trivento region.
The Treasury dump is easily countered by a single MIRV on the Three Gorges Dam at the height of flood season.
I don’t see the Russians getting all that worked up in that scenario, what with all that sparsely populated land on a common border with 1.4 billion Chinese.
As Jack Dobson pointed out, real estate would be a logical move for China since the specter of the Fed increasing their balance sheet could rattle markets. Then, other holders of US Treasuries could get spooked, and the whole thing snowballs. Sure, the Fed can suck up everything with their keyboard purchases, but the market might not approve of this charade. Plus, the Fed will make more money if rates increase … it is owned by banks, right?
” On the Right, the only thing that matters is the various internal battles over what it means to be on the Right ” I would disagree. The only thing that matters to the establishment right are maximizing Mideast wars, minimizing corporate taxes and bringing in as much cheap labor as possible . They also seem to hate the natives of the us.
Umm… the establishment isn’t really Right. That’s all I got.
Oh wait- I think we’re seeing a cultural replay of the early Protestants, and Buckley was our less genocidal Calvin.
The Left is the Usual Suspects they always were, getting revenge on the Romans, and they hired both Calvin and Buckley to redirect regional ethnic nationalism into civil brother wars.
Goshdam. That “we’ve got to force them back into the fold” mindset is exactly what the Judeans, upon their return to Jerusalem, were trying to do to the Israelites who had stayed behind in Babylon, the house of Sin.
The stay-behinds preferred civilization under the goddess rather than land under the heavy theocratic hand of Judah.
The playbook. It’s all in the playbook. The Adversary is clever, camouflaged, but predictable.
(By Usual Suspects above, I mean jews, ok? Trying to keep it off the deep end, new folks, as an early and tiresome offender.)
Our politics is epitomized thus: Trump wasn’t a Russian asset, but the media pretended he was; Biden is a Chinese asset, but the media pretends he isn’t. And both sides are content with Israeli interference.
Biden is not a “Chinese asset”. China is just a convenient distraction from Jewish power.
what you said is a no brainer, but the propaganda on the right(it exists) is very effective.
also, the chinese are the only ethnic group the whites have the right to vent their frustrations at, they won’t get fired if they say chinese created covid and that they are reducing some of those muslim numbers.
White morons also bring up the fact chinese don’t want blacks in their movies as if that’s a bad thing.
As you alluded, the scripts for the Left and Right are written by the same people. So, Whites are free to rant about the Chinese, who, no doubt, will be caricatured by the media in an effort to maximize the vitriol. But don’t you dare insult Blacks or Muslims … that’s a hate crime!
Couldn’t agree more … the media is trying to focus our election frustration/angst on the Chinese, instead of the Jews, who are undoubtedly at the bottom of this ridiculous election fraud. Also, I think that the Covid Hoax is being extended until all of the White folks have exhausted their election frustration emotional reservoirs … just another distraction.
“Big chains with connections into the ruling elite will survive, but the small ones will never come back.”
Another feature. And the real problem going forward? A decline in agricultural output. Our food will cost more. People in the third world may go hungry. Then “Camp of the Saints” gets very real.
COVID economic crisis aside, my entire life I feel like I’ve had plenty of material wealth. My father was an unskilled blue collar worker in the 1980s and I still had a good life materially.
Most things are cheap. Healthcare is not, but it doesn’t have to be expensive.
Here’s the one thing I think is increasingly hard to get. A house in a neighborhood where I don’t have to worry about my sons being beaten up and my daughters and wife sexually harassed or assaulted by Dindus. That’s what I feel my children will be economically deprived of, what Sailer calls affordable family formation, which really means basic real estate far from Dindus. That’s the Holy Grail for me.
Breakdown of NBC News hardcore shilling for the jab:
https://youtu.be/4L7jEjdAWsw
They’re not even trying to hide the fact they’ve taken our freedom and are going to sell little bits of it back to us at exorbitant prices.
Here’s my wife’s former pulmonologist and colleague pleading with the gov’t to quickly review their study on ivermectin.
Evidently this inexpensive generic drug taking prophylactically prevents transmission of covid-19 and in patients who are very sick from covid-19 symptoms cures them.
https://youtu.be/Tq8SXOBy-4w
It’s available without a prescription at any Rural King or Tractor Supply Company. Go look in the section with livestock wormers. You’ll have to do a bit of research and math. I recommend looking for the injectable. I doubt the oral tastes nice. (You can also get needles and syringes at those places.)
Whoa, holy moly. There’s a doctor who cured himself of a bad way as a kid- he availed himself of the family’s livestock supplements, it led to a medical career.
I’m thinking ‘barefoot doctors’, as that’s what we’ll see as more nursing and hospital staff are being laid off in droves (in the midst of a plandemic)- and heritage American medicos are likewise dropping out.
Healthcare and relief will become more and more restricted, it is under assault from multiple fronts.
I’d forgotten about that secret avenue. Thanks, Vizzini, I think you might’ve just saved America.
The economy has always been a big issue. Trump made the economy a top priority in 2016.
“One consequence of the selection of the Pretender Biden is that the ruling class has no one to blame. They own it all now and if the people are not happy with the bread or the circuses, they know who is responsible for it”.
That statement, while true, it is a lead pipe certainty that the Pretender and all his court jesters will afix blame to D Trump, Republicans, and various other deplorables.
Sure, but 80 million people won’t believe a word of it. That’s the problem with breaking the trust of 1/2 the country: false in one, false in all.
The level of success of their blaming Trump will be the real test of whether we are past the point of no return. Blaming your predecessor has become the norm since at least Bush the lesser’s era (9-11 was Clinton’s fault and the financial crisis were Clinton and Carters faults dontcha know) with limited success.
100% agreement with that statement.
0% success rate is my hope.
50 % + success rate is my expectation.
I just hope we all collectively realize that the LGBT mania and negrophilia are intrinsically tied to the the ancien regime we’re living through.
It’d be good to kill two birds with one stone.
I started watching this show called Banshee after hearing how “redpilled” it is lol. The main character is a solid white dude but who are his 3 sidekicks? A gay cross-dressing Asian, a woman, and a black with impeccable morality. I had to turn it off after like 4 episode lolz.
I got through maybe 10 minutes or less of the first episode of Banshee until I realized I was being fed a shit sandwich.
Same here with the first episode of The Watchmen. But I snoozewatched to the end cuz hey, who doesn’t want to see Don Johnson get hanged?
That’s almost as good as seeing Glenn Frey get shot in the head!
https://youtu.be/LSXKyHM133c
“…We are becoming a land of very rich people, a minor aristocracy we call the managerial class and then a vast population of peasants.”
Bingo! I been stating this now for more than a couple of decades, but to deaf ears. The middle class has been hollowed out. We are little different now from those South American countries we love to make fun of—but the joke is on us.
The irony of it all is that the “bad” orange man was the first and only President in the last 30 years who had a policy which might have stemmed the tide—and if continued—might have reversed the trend.
Charles Murray described the situation and its pathologies quite well in his book, “Coming Apart”. A society where only 10% of its population control 80% of its wealth is in its death throws.
…and also death throes.
There’s always one in any group, isn’t there. If the above is your best contribution, you might rethink your postings for today.
Yes there is and today it’s me.
I’ll try to do better.
I’ve been thinking the same, that a new aristocracy is forming. This is the normal way of the world, so maybe we’re not entirely doomed, only diminished, after all.
The dollar can take a punch. It’s still the reserve currency of the world. Despite US leadership that is now less talented than Nicaragua’s. But lately it’s been taking several Mike Tyson circa 1986 punches. When inflation is brought up, it’s always in the context of consumer or or producer prices. At no time is asset price inflation brought up. I love Costco stock. But at a 42PE ratio? Ha! then you have real estate. The Covid shutdowns have smashed small businesses to pieces. Yet the ugly, small, cracker box house from 1960 just sold for a million down the street? All this money being credited from thin air has to go somewhere. We’ve been lucky that it’s been going into asset inflation and not so much price inflation. But this will change. This is why I’m eyeball deep in commodity stocks of all kinds. Oil and gas stocks were at their lowest this year since 1919. We’ve also been lucky that for all the Fed is purchasing it still has to credit bank reserves. This is why inflation isn’t running at 15% or 20% right now. MMT on the other hand is pure, hot money, being spent in the real economy, with no crediting of bank reserves which can’t be spent. It’s funny watching these politicians and economists attempt to open that black MMT box, not realizing what they will unleash. And the TRS crowd will be rooting them on. It’ll work alright. Not as intended. Bond price signals are useless now because the Fed is buying the bonds. They’ll buy stocks too when the asset bubble begins imploding. The Bank of Japan already owns about 20% of the Nikkei. The only market they can’t manipulate is the currency market, which is too big, and is too dangerous for all but the most experienced traders at large banks. End even then. So we’re going down the same road as Japan. But with key differences. 1). Japan has a trade surplus. That’s how it’s been floating itself. We don’t. Quite the opposite. 2) Japan’s debt is held domestically. 3). The yen is important currency but not the reserve currency, so the Japanese traders can retreat to their US dollar positions. What this means is don’t expect us to be able to take on their extraordinary debt level, percentage wise, without cracking. The future is an ugly future. I’m sure the middle class will be vaporized by this confluence of events. And then…watch out. Worst inflation since the Civil War era.
It’s been a while but I’ve seen a few MMT videos from Randall Wray .. they’re interesting. It’s hard to dispute MMT when we’ve gone from $1 trillion debt (circa B. Clinton) to $22 trillion and nobody’s even blinked. I understand that inflation is occurring to luxury items, yachts, jets, etc.
It seems that as long as the US dollar is the reserve currency, these excesses can be sucked up by the global system. I guess if anyone get’s ideas about replacing us as a reserve currency, then they’ll get bombed! But, how much can the Fed buy? When the inflation comes, I wouldn’t be in real estate … higher rates will crush real estate. I like your commodities play …
No one will notice as long as the baby boomers 401k balance grows and I am a baby boomer. I notice all the time that my generation keeps a constant watch on those balances and it’s how the ruling class has gutted private unions and sent our jobs to Asia. That Wall Street 401k just goes up.
Only now it’s all growing along with monstrous national debt and growing unemployment.
Yes, there will one day be a reckoning and it could not happen to a better couple if the reckoning happens under the watch of Kamala and Joe.
there is not going to be a reckoning, at least not in our lifetimes. 401k’s are surging because large companies are generating more profit than ever and interest rates remain low and will stay that way. If companies are making 10-40% profit margins, that is $ that is going to go to shareholders.
The wild card is the new wave progressives, the ones who think Pelosi is too far right. I guarantee you, “nationalize 401(k)’s” is higher up on the list than “ban AR’s.” They want you dead and broke as much as they want me dead and broke; you’ve got more wealth and I’ve got more life, but they want to take it all.
Agreed … it’s gonna be “show me the White privilege” pretty soon, which means show me the $$$. I just heard some talking-head mention the “color of money”, which was to say that its too White. There’ll be some sort of intangible tax to crack the door to 401k confiscation.
401ks are going up because the ‘stock market’ is actually one of the points of injection for newly created money (federal spending being the other). Any it works pretty well too because the old people that own the 401ks aren’t rushing out to spend the new money – which prevents inflation from exploding.
Will the corporations’ global consumer base keep those 401k’s afloat?
Will furriners end up paying for our Boomer retirement?
Maybe some hope here, actually.
As long as we can keep the dollar as our #1 export.
I decided about 15 years ago I wasn’t going to get caught in the 401k trap. You have to put your money where your mouth is.
Remember the big discussion back in March and April about how this was going to be the impetus for repatriating our industry from the Chi-coms? That we couldn’t allow them to have a chokehold on the production of necessities and vital commodities like pharmaceuticals?
A Made-In-China coat hanger was used to remove that clump of cells.
of course nothing came of it
Danielle Booth was just on the Valuetainment YT channel and she mentioned there was a clause in the US-China trade deal that released China from their agreed purchase quantities from the US if China were struck by, “….an Act of God.”
Very true. Other interesting stories are the ones about abuse, depression, substance abuse, rising, while children’s learning is and test scores getting lower.
My state will not test kids this year, they blame Covid. It’s not, they don’t want to expose the rot caused by the lockdowns and online learning.
Yep. There has always been a documented loss or decline in grade level from summer recess to fall startup. Takes some time to review and get students back to grade level where they “should” be. I can imagine the uproar to find that grade levels have not simply declined, but never even advanced for an entire year.
Let me add as I wait for approval that the son of big guy was always his weak point.
One’s own children are their greatest weak point. Get to them, you get to the person of interest.
Biden is toast. Harris and the Progressives are pushing and publicizing the Hunter Biden investigation.
She will push the Great Reset and kick off Civil War. Gong from pickups and ones own house to eating bugs and living in a shipping container is a recipe for civil war.
No propaganda can cover that.
unless trump pulls a miracle, how is he toast .
Biden the Pretender is toast because the New Left is going to eat him alive. They propped him up, they’ll knock him down. If he doesn’t abdicate to Queen Kamala post haste, he’ll get Seth Rich’d/Epsteined before the midterms.
I suspect Biden has a bit of use yet as a front for legislation. After the easy stuff is passed using a White guy front, he’ll go quickly.
Yea … he’s the friendly White guy that assures Whitey that it’ll all be OK … (cue up big toothy grin).
Harris and the ultra crazy left will use threat of prosecution of his son and now brother and the big guy himself to resign for Harris.
Never get in the way of a whores ambition
Propaganda has to have some relation to reality (as Z himself has pointed out) and the people at the government media organs lack the self-awareness to figure that out. For instance, people here are pointing out how Obama blamed Bush for everything up until his last day in office, but left unsaid was how worn out that excuse was even six months in to his administration.
yah, he was actually called on that regularly.
Rush is talking about this right now.
His take, and I agree 100%, is that Obama is the ringmaster orchestrating the election from the shadows- and he’s commanded the newsies to release this story now.
Why? Because shortly after the coronation, Slow will be deposed, and Kommie Harris will be anointed Puppet Queen.
Or, Reset Queen, as Whiskey is correct.
Ahh, I think that Rush is compromised … his bosses at Clear Channel (Bain Capital owns it) are The Usual Suspects, so he’s gotta shine the light somewhere else. It’s the old Red Team & Blue Team false dichotomy … the rabbit trail will lead to “you know who”. I speak in euphemisms cuz this site will dump your comments sometimes if you’re not careful.
Except ain’t nobody gonna take orders from Heels Up.
An even larger more persistent concern of that era was crime. It dominated local and regional politics much more than the economy and was an issue at the national level through proxies such as the death penalty. It’s really quite amazing that the whole thing has been memory holed with low crime rates of the last two and a half decades.
But, make no mistake, it’s coming back in a major way. Crime will be the dining issue of the 2020s and into the 2030s.
Yes, I see it in this Midwestern city, the Soros funded prosecutor has around a 25% prosecution rate. I talk to police officers who tell me they are wasting their time catching criminals because the prosecutors office does not prosecute most of them.
White supremacy and white privilege will be used as excuses to let crime run rampant and if we as middle class whites protect our lives or property we will get the full Monty of the law back at us.
Crime will not be an issue.
Did a crime happen if it is not on Google? The Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Chicago papers will not report on it.
“Poof”: no more crime. Nothing to see here.
According to Google, there wasn’t any election fraud. “Poof”: nothing to see here.
You”ve obviously never lived in a high crime environment.
It effects everyone, high and low, and becomes a part of everyday life that google and the like will be unable to cover up.
The religious faith of negrophilia only goes so far too. Sure the first or second time your house is robbed you’ll excuse it. But when your mom is mugged and injured, and then your cousin raped – well at some point reality has a way of intruding on your fantasies.
And the thing is that it doesn’t just happen to poor people – but everyone to some extent.
But yeah, it will take 3-6 years to get to that point and then 2-3 times that long to get it back under control.
Now if everyone didn’t move (on average) every 2-4 years, then that 3-6 year acclimatization period would be a real winner.
OT: You know, sometimes, when I get a coyote hanging around my goats or dogs, I just shoot it. Then I bury it in the woods. I rarely have much cause to talk about it.
Hey, some Latina State Rep in Texas is proposing legislation that removes the “Castle Doctrine” in Texas. Sure, maybe it has a snowball’s chance, but she put it on the table cuz she says that the robber probably needs the $$$ more than the home-owner … can you imagine someone being that stupid and being in the position to create State law??
Correct-a-mundo … the media will tell you what happened. If The Usual Suspects don’t want you to know, then they won’t tell you, and “it never happened”. In fact, in order to taint alternative views, I think that they’ll create some ridiculous alternative stories, which are later shown to be wrong, so that you give up on any alternatives. This results in a sea of confusion for most people.
Yes, everyone who lost their business, income, or hard-earned equity as a result of the Covidian Hoax is going to be angry and looking to get even, because that is human nature. And more to the point, they will be justified and righteous in wanting to do so because the Feds unleashed this horror with deliberate and malicious intent. So how to fight back? First, become a leech on government’s resources as much as possible. Break their bank with equal seriousness and maliciousness. Second, practice covert civil disobedience. Hurt them every way you can from the shadows. The rule of law is dead and societal trust is non-existent. Use that as a weapon against them.
Tom, I’m sorry to say you are “striking a cord” here.
The stock market, among other things, signifies investor confidence and is not a 1:1 indicator of how well an economy is actually doing, though I’m sure most of us here know that.
Companies that offer online services, like Zoom, have seen their stock shares increase something like 300+% this year, but this mostly the result of a captive consumer base and it isn’t clear if this rate of growth can be maintained (it probably can’t be). As more small businesses go under these services will be heavily affected. As people have to forego Internet services to put food on the table, Facebook and Netflix will be affected.
One of my major sources of optimism through this entire thing is that the confidence shown in market trading likely represents a flash in the pan, and when it starts to stink of a potential non-artificial crash, the ruling class and tech oligarchs will finally have to give up on the “Great Leashing.” Money does, in fact, talk. Big businesses depend on, in a non-trivial way, the success of small businesses.
Of course, if the reigns of power are being guided by a death cult, then all of the above can be safely ignored, and you better start praying.
what is going to be the macro effect on society, of the modern shit-work economy causing household density to increase? whereas each new generation was expected to setup their own home/apartment as soon as they were out of school (say early 20’s), now you see the opposite trend growing. this internal crowding is going to cause (actually already is causing) behavioral changes in the population, similar to the “ratopia” experiments…
Behavioral changes *and* changes to the way GDP and such stat’s are reported. In short, I expect in a decade some interesting argument of our current state of growth and productivity.
Don’t be silly. The Democrats will still blame everything bad on Trump (That will be his legacy if they don’t give him and his family the Romanov treatment) and all the good stuff (mostly made up by deep state statisticians and media bull shitters will be from the benevolence and keen business acumen of the traitor Biden. It’s been that way since Bush and I see no reason for them to stop. Remember how three years into Trump’s Presidency it was still the “Obama recovery”? Times change but commies never do.
I’ll just leave this for those who believe in protests.
“I didn’t back the yellow vests at first but things have only got worse for people in poverty. Nothing’s changed after two years of struggle,” a 53-year-old man calling himself Dodo said at the Toulouse protest.”
If americans bring guns and start shooting antifa, blm and cops who defend antifa and blm then army will be dispatched, which might be a good thing cause generals are a better alternative to israelites and globo homos, unless the generals are also globo homos.
PS I second “Red Plenty.” I could only make it through so much – reading about commies always fills me with murderous rage – but it’s a perfect psychological portrait of why smart people – actually, really high IQ people – go in for socialism. After all, comrades, we know the precise caloric requirements of a 77kg man. We know the exact average yield of a hectare of wheat. We know the average caloric yield of every bushel from that hectare. We know exactly how far a train can run on a given liter of fuel, and we know, down to the millimeter, how far that train must travel to reach People’s Kolkhoz #401. Thus, it’s simply a matter of math to provide everyone with everything they will ever need!
Lol. You can easily tell if someone is an idiot if they talk about “the average X.” While the different concepts of average (mean, median and mode) are useful analytical tools in certain, limited contexts, talking about averages without grasping the concept of variable sequential inputs can lead to serious misjudgements, particularly in food and energy production. (For example, a farmer who uses a ton of fertilizer per acre over a one hundred day growing season isn’t going out every single day to apply twenty pounds per day; he may go out twice during the growing season applying a half time per time. Everything is like this.)
My question is why allow the current crisis to unfold? Are they so sure of themselves that they don’t fear the coming economic crisis? Is there some larger game afoot? Are they completely incompetent? Or am I a moron and missing the obvious?
It is mistake to underestimate how incompetent these people are. They combine this incompetence with a belief they are the smartest people to ever live.
As the old saying goes, pride goes before a fall. Pride has a funny way of blinding you to the disastrous consequences of your actions. It’s that simple.
Crashing the economy in order to bring about the Great Reset seems to be the idea. If our conspiracies are true, it doesn’t matter how big the deficit is now when the Great Reset will happen in a year anyways.
Things that are impossible (welfare state supporting boomers into retirement) will eventually just stop happening.
If you are talking SSI, that can only continue if there are people working, but will continue if there are any paying into the fund—albeit reduced. Medicare is the big boogie man, hence the need for universal health care to mask the problem.
It’s kinda the inverse of emergent behavior: when the building is burning down, the rats grab what they can for themselves, even if it means pawning the fire extinguisher. It’s a “bust out,” they gowna gets theirs. The traders, the Fed economists, the SEC analysts, the AUSA’s, the mayors, etc. all the way down – they’re going to ride whatever grift they’re running till their little lamprey suckers are pulled off or the prey dies. What else are they going to do, get a job at WalMart?
I think the left sensed the ramparts were finally unmanned, and that a small push would cause it all to crumble. And they were correct.
There will always be someone else to blame for poor conditions. They’ll blame Trump, COVID, Nazis, or folks who won’t agree to a case of Bell’s Palsy…I mean take the vaccine. Failing all that, its a democracy, so clearly YOU ALL WANTED THIS.
What’s clear is most people in politics and government are ruthless, but also very stupid. The rich folks realize this, and know with this many idiots in charge collapse is likely. So they are taking their profits while they can. All the government money they are taking will be ours to cover. No one is left to back up the little guy.
The communist where hardcore materialist because that’s all they had.
When I sent out my Christmas cards this year I wished everyone a good 2021 but every time I wrote it I thought how ridiculous it sounded but writing “we all know 2021 to going to be worse but do the best you can” really didn’t seem in keeping with the spirit
“Happy New Year! Hope you aren’t killed in the coming civil war!”
Oh that’s really funny. It makes me laugh every time I read it. I kind of wish I’d written that to a few people
Reason #1001 why I stopped sending Christmas cards and letters about 2006 or so.
If Trump has the luxury of free time for the next four years, the narrative will take a sharp right turn. The left will get brutalized by Trump News Network and social media. The pounding will be unrelenting, and the economy will be on the front burner. Not sure what the consequences will be, unintended or not.
i think trump would do better as a media mogul than as a president, that’s his element, he’d be dumb not to pursue this path.
trump should also become a senator so that he could annoy schumer all day.
I agree Trump would also be great as a media mogul.
I’m actually surprised he didn’t already create his own media empire decades ago.
Not to rush the process, but would not a most likely successor to Rush be Donald Trump?
The “Apprentice”? He was a star before and after, but did not intend to influence anyone. He was not a leader at that time. He could be now.
Democrats never had any real opposition before. Now they do. They’ll be beaten with the stick of their own policies. Can’t wait to watch them detonate the booby traps on the way in.
We need to get over Trump. He had his moment – 2015-2016 roughly – but it’s over. Nobody will really wanna see or hear from him after Biden is inaugurated (and yes it’s gonna happen).
There’s one thing America hates and that’s a loser. And fraud or no fraud, Trump will be seen as a loser after this is all over.
Sadly, I have to agree the MSM has successfully painted Trump as a sore loser in the eyes of most normies.
Not a good place to be in the sphere of public opinion.
Whether Trump continues after Trump is Trump’s decision. There is a vacuum to be filled for Trump supporters. No person better than Trump to fill such (at this time). That you see him as a loser is not important. That others see him as a voice of their frustrations is everything.
Only reason we’re still talking about him is he’s still on office. Once he’s out, even his supporters will move on just like the left moved on from Hillary.
The lesson we should learn from Trump is that we shouldn’t jump at the first guy who starts spouting off “based” things. Trump reeled us in and then left us with blue balls. Plus he’s an idiot. We CAN and SHOULD do better. Much better.
There are so many options to replace Trump. Cruz, or Yeb or Marco or Graham. Certainly.
The fact is Trump is very imperfect but the perfect guys can’t win.
He has been a catalyst for change, breaking the cycle of inertia, creating the conditions for a third alternative. What happens next is up to us.
Perhaps. But even the plebs seem to be cottoning onto the fact that is all just farce. They’ve no option but to hope the credit creation/money printing dream goes on as long as it can. There are steps they can take to protect themselves – but they won’t do it.
For starters:
For years I would speak about the economy with other people. Even then, we freely admitted we didn’t really know what we were talking about; but then again, how can anyone. Focus on your family’s personal economy and prepare. As usual.
They’ll just blame it on white people and climate change, caused exclusively by white people. White people will continue to be the left’s whipping boy. The reason is simple: white people will just take it. So because they are unwilling to stand up for themselves, they make for the ideal scapegoat when life under Biden is worse than life under Trump.
Interestingly, before-tax corporate profits were flat from around 2012 to early 2020 before falling due to Covid lockdown. Yet, the market soared.
The market is now expensive by any measure. Share buy-backs, Fed money and falling interest rates have pushed up the price of stocks, i.e. reduced their future expected return. The same is true for bonds.
The rich had a windfall over the past decade, but odds are very good that they were simply pulling forward returns and will have very low returns over the next decade. The Dems likely will face a slow economy and piss-poor investment returns.
There is only one market rule to remember:
1) Don’t fight the Fed.
The Fed has a fully operational Death Star.
You are not Luke Skywalker. You are not even Lando.
I swing trade momentum. I liken it to being a surfer just trying to catch a good wave.
Agreed. Nothing wrong with buy-and-hold with index funds, but I prefer to keep a decent chunk of money in a simple ensemble trend strategy. AllocateSmartly is a nice place to do that.
Don’t try to figure out “why” something is happening, just ride the waves.
Well, I just attempt to duck in and out of positions and sit in cash most of the time.
This helps limit my exposure to all the overnight and weekend shenanigans where the Market Makers gap equities up or down by 5 or even 10%.
This is why I cringe when people use “value” when they really mean “price.” Stock buybacks artificially inflate the price of stock. It’s worse when buybacks are financed by debt. And it’s even worse when C-suite Execs and Board Members are paid in artificially inflated stock which they then cash out and go on to the next gig.
I think I understand what zman is saying:mortgage everything you own and buy Bitcoin.
yah, it’s super safe place to put your money. even though it is dominated by the chinese; i.e. they control it.
Spread the wealth around… buy gold, silver, bitcoin, carry cash, and of course hold stocks just in case we’re actually crazy and none of these conspiracies are happening.
First G7 sponsored crypto to see the light of day and Bitcoin is history. All the plebs will be trapped in a super-regulated environment that will overnight become illegal and no way to cash out (unfortunately the same thing will happen to physical cash probably at the same time).
Governments do not tolerate competing currencies in the official format.
Barter is of course always a possibility and where not possible, “money” of intrinsic value, should hold up—gold, silver, etc.
Max out the credit cards with cash advances and move to Albania.
Another point you bring up, which I enjoy, is the materialism of the communists. This is not just practically, which they are, but also because Marxist thought is inherently materialistic (in the philosophical sense). Peoples become materialistic, practically, when any devotion to bigger ideals, philosophically, is removed. Ideals such as independence, God, humility, are all replaced by the belief that they arise out of the historical material circumstance – from a marxist angle.
Now, why I find this insightful, is most people in America are materialistic in both senses. Why I think this important is that the loss of ideals are not simply the loss of morality. Ideals allow you to orient yourself in disorienting time because they are above material circumstances and unchanged by them. Regardless of religious views, most of the reads here believe in ideals such as individualism, resourcefulness, logic, ethics, and morality. Most people, in my experience, are not this way.
The implication is that a material populace is easily disoriented by any change in material circumstances. Material circumstance challenges make a mob that can easily be manipulated by clever enough handlers because the only thing gluing the movement together is self-preservation. Thus, a few public examples, a few executions, a few loafs of bread can fracture. An ideal movement is much harder to fracture, but it also is unlikely in an era where being self-centered is often the biggest virtue. The selfie has replaced the panorama, and most agitations in american will begin and end in the future with a palliative that temporarily alters the material circumstance (even if it makes it worse). The death of ideals is the ultimate victory of our elites over the populace. The ideals that are spouted by the propaganda wing are not ideals in the classic sense (racism, privilege, science), but are ersatz versions that serve the interest of the overlords.
I see this loss of morality in ostensibly trivial settings, too — though when people can’t behave with morality in a small thing, they certainly can’t be trusted to do so in a more important circumstance.
Player interaction in multi-player videogames is notoriously awful. On forums about a particular game, people will occasionally try to admonish others to act like decent human beings. The most common response is that “What I did doesn’t qualify as harassment under the game terms of use, so it’s fine.”
The idea that these people should strive for a higher standard of morality and treatment of fellow humans than a corporate terms of service statement seem literally incomprehensible to some of these people.
We’ve raised a generation, maybe two, in which a large swath of the population has literally no grounding in higher morality.
Their entire moral code seems to be: What can I get away with without punishment?
“I see this loss of morality in ostensibly trivial settings, too.”
Agreed. I feel like the roads are filled with drivers who demonstrate the same principle. The loss of all social cohesion is exemplified by the guy crowding my back bumper when I’m already doing 10 MPH above the posted limit.
“Their entire moral code seems to be: What can I get away with without punishment?”
That pretty much describes the attitudes of corporate and political leaders as well. Social collapse is somewhat predicated on the hypocrisy of the leaders, because obeying the rules becomes a sucker’s game. When a leader forget that his role is fundamentally that of moral example for his followers, he’s pretty much done as a leader. That’s why purely technocratic states rarely exist: they have no morality to bind the people together.
All too true. I am, more and more, confused as to where and whatever my sense of morality comes from. This is to me most depressing. I can sense my type of morality—poor as it may be—is on the wane among the populous. It seems a loss as I would like others to behave in such a manner to me.
A moral code of “what can I get away with, what’s in it for me”, would seem a great step backward in the growth of civilization. Hobbesian even.
Poison fruit of the demographic age.
I agree, and would add that they’ve set up an alternate moral code existing of pointless platitudes. Like the incessant ‘have a nice day’ or ‘be kind’ reminders. Or the ‘instafriends’ posted at the entry to every bank or gym (and who will endlessly harass you if you don’t respond to their cheery “HI THERE” using my Christian name without my consent). Or the corporation with ads showing your kids how to become transgender or to miscegenate claiming they always have your welfare in mind.
It’s not just (or even necessarily) morality; it’s the loss of manners that allowed folks from wildly different backgrounds to live w/o overt conflict.
Good, thoughtful post.
We passed the sweet spot where most had enough to be secure but not enough to be lazy.
The plan is to destroy the economy, with a few major corporations such as Walmart and Amazon surviving and in fact doing very well and institute the Great Reset. The impoverished peasants will be provided with a Universal Basic Income check and, in exchange, they must surrender all of their assets to some entity. Cash will be outlawed and all financial transactions will be digital. It’s a hybrid of communism and corporatism.
One reason for the Great Reset is that governments cannot pay their pension liabilities and this is one to avoid them.
Martin Armstrong writes extensively about the Great Reset. Justin Trudeau let the cat out the bag in a speech and more people are aware of the plan.
http://www.armstrongeconomics.com
A retired hedge fund manager friend repeatedly pointed out to me that socialism always leads to communism because the socialists run out of other people’s money to spend.
My resume is online and last February a recruiter that I worked with in the past called. We spoke and I asked “how’s the job market?” “It’s a candidate’s market” was her reply. It seems like a long time ago.
That’s the harsh truth, a great reset is needed because the financial models of the west do not work and will collapse when the boomers get old.
They can either go into extreme austerity to save the current system, or just plunge everyone into poverty with a new authoritarian government. Obviously they choose the latter. The immigrant “solution” obviously failed just about everywhere and will no longer “work” as just about all productive and moderately high IQ peoples are now in low fertility rates.
At the end of the day: low birth rates + welfare state = not possible over time.
you do realize you just described a perpetual motion machine?
For years I’ve joked Amazon should just rename itself, “US Company Store.”
I’m sorry this appears to be coming true.
I believe the Beer Flu vax is being pushed on the elderly as a covert means of reducing the unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities in the US.
Many of the, “frontline workers,” have unions that control underfunded pensions. They will get pushed into the jab as well. Teacher and cop unions are two examples.
Won’t miss the Commissars in Blue, to be frank. They had a big hand in making this feces sandwich, they can take the first bite.
Except for communo-corporatism (trademarked, mine!) I don’t see that future as necessarily bad for the peasantry. If you work for a giant corp like Walmart, Kohls, Hooters or Mattress Firm you don’t mean much to The Machine anyway. You are basically a serf and rugged individualism for all is dead, especially in a country of 350 million people. That’s why working as a tradesman or something crucial like electric or sewer is a good career move now. There are plenty of peasants that will line up for UBI or a shit job at Walgreens; don’t let that be you. Have some creativity and you can stay somewhere outside of communo-corporatism (TM).
around the Imperial Capital, where it is always good times
If only non-essential government workers had been furloughed (at both state and federal level) then this covid nonsense would have ended toot sweet. Every year there’s been a budget impasse we are treated with heart wrenching stories of poor government workers having a couple of paychecks DELAYED.
Where I live, libraries are closed and conducting any business with the city or courts is bogged to a standstill. The employees are still on full pay so nobody but the citizens suffer… and we know they don’t count.
Our Library is closed other than for pickup. I ordered books to be held, set up an appointment, and went over to the drive-in service section for them to drop them off. A sixty-ish year old lady came out with a bag full of the books I ordered. First she snidely told me next to to come up to the curb instead of a parking space, a whopping twenty feet from where I parked. Then she froze when I stood next to the open trunk and told me I needed to stay back. I was literally about eight feet from her. Um, okay, I walked a few steps back. She dropped the books in the trunk and left in a huff.
A shame, since nice and helpful employees managing the service desks when it was fully open were probably furloughed, and we’re stuck with the lazy desk jockeys who eschew any work.
These people like the drama.
There it is. I was badly wrong about Chinky Pox – I was sure it’d go away the minute Karen realized she was stuck inside with her kids for more than 10 minutes a day. But I forgot that these are useless, soulless people, *and they know it.* The lockdowns are the highlight of their lives. Finally, they get to DO something!!! This is their Woodstock. It will never end.
That’s 21st century social capital for you, right there.
I have recently discovered that 95% of librarians are to the left of Pol Pot. I hope you sneezed at her just to rustle her jimmies some more.
Recently? Ever notice how the display sections of books where they do upfront “vignettes” by subject are inevitably MLK/Civil Rights, Indigenous peoples piffle, or feminist garbage?
Indeed. And it’s not just the displays at the libraries. Kids books today are chock-a-block with vibrants and homos.
Wandered around one of the local ‘antique malls’ the other day, and bought a stack of kids’ books to add to all those I already have stored. Books about boys and dogs and boys with dogs and dirt and nuclear families. Try finding anything published in the last 10 years with a White boy as the hero.
Lemme know what you find. One rarity I found is pre-90’s german Wimmelbuchs.
whom do you think is arranging all these tranny reading sessions (for kids), at libraries?
Funny that. My Library has a donation/volunteer staff bookstore where they sell donated books to raise money for the library.
Inside the Library, you get the general mix of (mostly) imperious, condescending, put-out acting, woke county employees. In the attached bookstore, the volunteer ladies have, almost to a woman, are conservative, Christian, gracious older dames (dames in the complimentary way).
I’m waiting for Z-man to finish his book. Once published, I plan on buying a couple copies and placing them in the mini-libraries that some people have in their front yard. In fact, there’s even one just outside the bookstore at the local public college. Either I’ll convert or cause a meltdown. Win-win.
What do you have against firemen, police and teachers? The budget is fungible, but those tropes are always rolled out like clockwork.
I think I said non-essential personnel. If you are being sarcastic I apologize for the following statement… read before responding.
Yes, sarcasm. Just as the lottery was sold as dedicated funding for education, but somehow the general budget saw the increases.
Here is the gist of it. Every budget impasse we’ve had, inevitably we are treated to sob pieces where GS-5 Laqueshia is trundled out to cry about how it is right before Christmas and now her Lit’luns ain’t gonna get presents this year. The reporter sagely nods and manages to blame either a recalcitrant Republican President or Republican Congress depending on whichever “side” they occupy in the dispute.
Here is the reality. Yes, Laquesha will be on a delayed paid vacation. She will not receive her paycheck during the shutdown but neither will she be required to work as she is a non-essential make-work employee. After said period of shut down is over, she will be fully back paid plus extra holiday pay and her vacation balance will remain untouched even though she had a 4-6 week no work schedule. Her Lut’luns will have received their presents (just put on a credit card).
If they were to furlough due to covid, without pay… I guarantee public sector unions would be calling it the “fake plague” loudly and we’d have been back to normal in April.
When our town publishes the list of highest-paid employees it’s cops and teachers (people we’re on the financial hook for, not just for their salaries and benes, but for their pensions.) Because fires are rarer than they used to be, firemen basically run their second businesses from the firehouse and put out a fire every so often.
Most fire calls are for indigent EMS responses. Occurrences of fires are at an all-time historic low, yet we have more firemen than ever before in history. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just re-open the insane asylums?
Keep your eyes on the arbitrage and bond markets. That’s where the damage will show up first.
The Fed is buying up anything that starts to smell of old cheese. You see this in Japan where, after having purchased everything else, they’re left with buying stock index plans: no sizable debt can ever be allowed to go bad ever again with the end result being that everything will be owned by the Fed.
I have to admit that I get kind of confused seeing people in CARS lined up for free food. I’d be more concerned if they were trudging there with hand carts or wheelbarrows.
at last someone noticed!!!!
They aren’t necessarily run down beaters either. Previous generations that would have been ashamed to take handouts have been replaced by those trying to get whatever they can for nothing.
When social cohesion is gone and everyone is looting, refusing to loot based on some old principle is a sucker’s game.
If they’re going to print infinity funny money, might as well get everything not nailed down.
Agreed. As an aside, I had time to kill one day and happened to drive by the local food bank. The line was only two cars so I took my turn at the hand outs to see what I was missing. Man, that stuff was nasty. I don’t mean just unhealthy, which by all accounts it made the walmart brand look like whole foods. But the products (I can’t label it food) were gross tasting. I feel for the folks who really need that stuff.
But who ‘really needs that stuff’? How many skinny people do you see wandering around? Who is truly ‘in need’? When we were genuinely in financial need and I took our younger kid to try to get a free shot, I was one of the only Whites and the only person without a cellphone, and all the vibrants had newer cars than I. I’ll save my sympathy for Whites who are genuinely hurting.
They don’t own the cars.
they might live in them, though 😛
I agree but their ownership of vehicles is probably leftover from when they had jobs. Lots of people are out of work now and we seem to be moving forward on fumes.
Yes – that is a distinct possibility, although even in that case, I’d have to do some math of gas consumption and distance to the food pantry versus the expected value of the food.
Why?
That implies you think they do.
I think what Major Hoopie meant was the cars were financed or leased, like everything else in middle America. They didn’t really own the cars.
Yes. That line got me too. Was this The Z Man’s intended wit? Or am I imagining things?
I’ve been shocked to see previously prosperous people I’ve known for years who are now stocking grocery shelves or working in places like Walmart. I’ve been embarrassed for them. But they are trying to hang on to their homes and keep the kids fed and clothed. And they’re the lucky ones.
Somebody told me long ago – “Never be ashamed of working hard”.
what did that somebody say about the desirability of dropping a couple of social levels?
The stoic philosophers are the only ones I can recall commenting on that phenomena.
Never be ashamed of working hard…cause you won’t have a choice
There is no shame in doing honest work no matter how lowly or menial it may be regarded by society. It is more shameful to not pay your debts because your pride tells you not to do some type of work you consider beneath you.
it’s not about the honesty of the work, it’s about the painfully public loss of social position. with plenty of financial collapse thrown in. somehow working as a box boy doesn’t take the sting away from the total and public collapse of your life.
Fuck off with your blackpilling. Yesterday you were baselessly attacking the NRA, today you’re sowing negativity towards working class people.
There’s no shame in working a McJob if that’s what it takes to support yourself and your family. Period. And fuck anybody who says otherwise, if they quit being friends because of that, they’re not real friends.
He isn’t saying that OTHER PEOPLE denigrate you because of your job.
He is saying that YOU YOURSELF will feel the sting. And I believe he is probably correct.
Observations about human nature may be unpleasant, but dismissing reality as ‘black pilling’ appears counterproductive.
Ol’ Trannypants Walton DGAF about your dignity, now mop the floor where I just spit, white boy.
Real friends would have a non-fragile business to hire him onto for a while till he gets back on his feet. Lineman or someone, back me up here. C-O-M-M-U-N-I-T-Y.
Oh I agree with that.
Realistically most white folks don’t have that. White people in Christian communities might. And also welfare might not cover everything if you’re white.
We should be working towards that. But not everyone has it atm.
So on top of the hot take, B125, you’re missing the other side’s point. The game isn’t fair; hard work ‘n grit will get you an early grave and a Chapter 7, and no more. If you fall for it, you’re just grist for the enemy’s profit-mill. You, we, have to change our mindsets in the new dawning Demographic Age; if you fall on hard times, you gotta milk the system for every dime, get your gibs, get your TANF, extract everything you can from the system because The System is extracting everything it can from you and yours. “Hard work” just feeds that system harder.
100%. My wife and I have always been hardworking Civnats, but have recently taken on the “give me mine” mindset.We got legally divorced last year because it dramatically increases our tax deductions and college aid for our two sons. When it benefits us to remarry for better social security benefits, we will do that.
It goes against everything I (and most other Whites) was taught, but 100% agree. When 65% of the population is composed of alien looters, ‘working hard’ in response is for chumps. These grifters have no shame. Learned that back when we (on financially shaky grounds) used to pick names off our church’s Christmas tree. Half the names were obviously non-White (and I don’t mean just Martinez but Han and pajeet) and they all wanted things we couldn’t buy our own children.
I have never commented on the NRA. And I am not sowing negativity towards working class people. What’s happening is that your poor reading skills have betrayed you once again.
Isn’t this what Rick Wilson wanted? Public humiliation and punishment of Deplorable?
My buddy in Florida, who is in sales, is terrified that he will lose his job. He has not been closing, through no fault of his own.
If he loses his job, he insists that he would not work as a Walmart greeter unless he moved to Wyoming or the Dakotas.
When did the stories of Americans being forced to train their replacements begin? It was a while ago. It’s both infuriating and heartbreaking.
This kind of conduct is why there are often show trials , collective punishment and guilt by association during a revolutionary interregnum.
It sends a dual purpose public message “Son, ya should have known better and done fucked up and were not going to tolerate this treachery.”
Honestly I half way wonder if given a chance the DR shouldn’t do the same. Public humiliation of people like that is good for the national soul.
Oh, of course that’s coming. You don’t get rid of the cancer without chemo and debridement. And a return to public punishments, and replacing fines and confinement with public corporal punishment.
This. Its the highest risk factor for a revolution too. Status is a drug, drop someone too much, take away hope and prosperity and they start wondering if maybe you deserve a trip to the camps.
Frankly when Disney CEO’s are allowed millions in bonuses while the laid off cast has to eat at food banks here this a huge problem and a great way to end up with Commies in charge.
We’ve gotten away with shenanigans because of our unique geography and the dumb Protestantism of Whites but its subject to change as seen by President for Life Roosevelt.
If we can’t change to a developed country and build policies for the 21st century not the 19th we deserve what’s coming,
Nope. Those are the old rules. The new system is rigged, and only a fool plays by the rules in a rigged game. Get what you can, where you can, and flip a lighted cigarette on the heap when you’re done. Sorry, but we now have nothing better than the Law of the Jungle
That isn’t all bad. “Muh stability and Muh Republic are the voluntary chains of the Right.
We need a lot more Jefferson like attitudes these days,
In the early 1990s, New York State joined a handful of other northeastern states in requiring a five cent deposit on bottles and cans, as a way to reduce litter and recycle materials.The garbage bins full of bottles & cans became a magnet for poor people scrounging for “nickels”; I was unfortunate to have one beneath my bedroom. Every wednesday evening there would be a parade of people going through the neighborhood, rifling every bin; only the earliest looter got any booty .. no bottles or cans for anyone else.
Late in the evening, when it was sufficiently dark, an older white woman would drive up in her run-down car, dressed in a cheap house-dress. There was something about her that made me think she was a cancer victim, or had other health issues. If there were any cans, she would retrieve them furtively, obviously embarrassed by her circumstance.
Other than aluminum cans and paper, hardly any of the other garbage is actually recycled. The costs of having seperate trucks for different types of garbage, the manpower needed to make several pickups, the costs of disposing of unwanted steel cans and plastic containers outweighs whatever minor “improvements” in the environment.
But we have created a system where consumers pay another “tax”, which subsidizes the most inefficient way to recycle, and worst of all demeans poor people by telling them the only way for them to make a few nickels and dimes is to go rooting around in other people’s trash. Shame on the Democrats in the northeast who sponsored these laws.
Paper and cardboard recycling is of questionable utility.
Any paper or cardboard that is not pristine is generally not recyclable.
So, forget about all those pizza boxes with the big recycling symbols on them.
Even one drop of grease makes it non-recyclable. Ad flyers aren’t recyclable. Wrapping paper isn’t recyclable. If you can’t get the label and glue off the jar? Not recyclable. Plastics get minimally processed and baled, shipped to Asia, and dumped in the Ocean.
It was in the 80’s that the NYS deposit came into effect. There was a guy, “The Can Man” we called him, who hung around outside our high school, retrieving the cans that all the students carelessly tossed away as they returned to school from their liquid lunches. One smart ass I knew tied fishing line to one and threw it on the lawn outside a classroom and then jerked it away as The Can Man went to pick it up.
KGB. Your anecdote deserves an upvote, but it’s too sad to do so. I’m so confused…
Thumbs up, thumbs down, I can see both sides of the nickel. I still laugh thinking about it, though.
I was recently thinking about how dull today’s kids are. We’d had a dry couple weeks in early November and when I got all the leaves to the curb, there was a gloriously large mound of tinder. When I was a kid in the Reagan years, every fall we lit leaf fires like there was no tomorrow. When my older cousin bought his first car, we went out one night and drove around the neighborhood with me in the passenger seat. He’d pull up to a pile of leaves and I’d crack the door open and use a Bic to try to ignite it, before peeling away. Leaf fires, pool hopping, breaking street lights, we had a healthy enjoyment of all those past times. I see my 17 year old nephew and his buddies today and they’re the sorriest excuse for teenage boys ever! A couple years ago, I was driving down a busy street in my hometown and I passed a couple adolescent boys who were lighting off a Roman candle. I tooted my horn and gave them a thumbs up just to let them know it’s okay to just be a reckless moron once in a while.
Pool hopping! Man thank you so much; that brought back some long forgotten but good memories!
That gets a thumbs up. Thanks.
We did trucking parties. Rent a big flatbed, load it up with furniture from one of the frats (in the summer), ’hide’ a keg under a lampshade and drive around town recruiting people to hop aboard. Stop to jump into pools whenever possible. Spend half the night picking up people and the other half getting them back to their cars. This was in the seventies, and we only got stopped once ‘just to see what you were doing”.
There was a great episode of Seinfeld based on the fact that Michigan has a ten-cent bottle deposit.
A great episode. Hearing Kramer model out a business plan was hilarious.
Then we find out that for decades that the recycling trash that was meticulously separated and trucked was then shipped to China for disposal in their landfills, or for dumping in the ocean. What a scam.
Most people really don’t know this.
You must be my neighbor. (We used to donate our returnables to the local animal shelter, but that lady plowing through our blue bin . . .)
Here in Oregon there weren’t enough cans being turned in for a nickel so the demorats raised the deposit to a dime. My savings account doubled in value. The down side is they make difficult to recycle. Feed cans and bottles one at a time into a unreliable filthy machine and wait in line with the street people to do it.
Look at the people and the type of cars they are driving. They are not old jalopies. People who pre-Covid were living a decent life, but paycheck to paycheck, are now unemployed and falling into poverty. There is potentially a huge crisis coming in 2021.
Don’t forget all the rent, mortgage, and eviction limitations that expire at the end of this month, just in time for the new year.
And those lost payments will roll up to mortgage defaults for owners of rental properties. All implied costs kicked down the road.
Priorities 🙂
My hometown is considered low-income and so for the last two months they have given out free boxes of food every Saturday morning. A nice variety, too. Just a couple years ago, I would have outright refused to take that which I didn’t need, but now? Hell, yeah. These people have forced me to live in an insane asylum this year, and I consider these boxes of food as just a small portion of what I’m owed for the trouble. I take pride in driving up in my 100% paid for car, dressed like a gentleman, and asking the vibrants to load my gibs in the trunk.
I had such an odd experience myself. Wife went to dentist for cleaning and inspection. This is on our dime. We are not poor. We live off of the teat of the State as retirees: SSI, pension, etc. However, our dentist had a room full of crates of food giveaways.
Seems whatever quasi governmental organizations were in charge of such, deemed him a donation center distribution point. These crates were full of perishables, like milk, cheese, etc. He had to give them away pronto to his clients—who were upper class, in an upper class neighborhood.
Wife brought home boxes of stuff, all high quality, but with short shelf life. It was strange to say the least, but not embarrassing. You really can’t embarrass me—only I can embarrass me. 😉
It’s not that mystifying. People don’t own cars, banks do. People lease to own them from the bank. As such, people can’t sell the car (easily, at least) while it’s still under lease. Since the lease payment is due regardless of your cash flow situation, it makes more sense to pay the lease and cut groceries if you can get food for free
…And I’ll bet the majority of people in those cars are overweight. They waited in line for the gibs, not for starving. Keep in mind people waited in line for 14 hours when a new In-n-Out Burger opened. Americans are like Soviets now. They don’t mind waiting in line.
Not all Americans.
I wised up this year (sorry to admit it took decades). My favorite charity, that advertises a meal and a bed for the lost and homeless, decided to have a Covid-19 Thanksgiving Dinner “drive through”! (Hell, if you’ve a car and gas, then go to the nearest McDonalds and buy a Happy Meal.)
Yep, folks were invited to drive up (in their cars) to pick up a bagged, cooked, turkey dinner with all the fixings. I looked at their latest solicitation in my mail, and they still had a picture of haggard looking homeless around a table in their shelter setting eating their Thanksgiving dinners.
That’s it. I’m done keeping this clown world going.
Again, I wised up via our church (obviously inadvertent on the church’s part). Used to buy groceries to donate to the Thanksgiving giveaway, helped sort and pack things, etc. Then one year I volunteered to help deliver the goods and saw the ‘needy’ recipients. And back when we used to get the newspaper (we’re talking about 20 years ago here) the photos they always featured of the ‘needy’ Thanksgiving food recipients eating – all of the POC women with ‘they hay did’ and long fake nails.
Believe it or not many places don’t have public transportation.
Classical economic theory states that pumping new currency into the system will inevitably cause inflation and mass unemployment will cause a decrease in spending and collapse of struggling businesses. So far they’ve been completely wrong except for the businesses government forcibly closed down.
Modern economic theory states we can just pump funny money into the system with no regard to resources actually being created, and everything will be fine. In a simple experiment this is insane, but so far they have been right. It will be interesting when it becomes wrong.
Hate to quote Ayn Rand here, but we can evade reality, but not the consequences of evading reality. I agree with your point: I too am confounded by how the poo hasn’t hit the fan. However, I cannot help but to assume that sooner or later this insanity will tangibly manifest, and it will not go well.
well, the feds put a lot of $$ directly in many persons’ hand, the last 9 months or so. since there was a roughly matching drop in wages earned, no inflation. at this time. maybe never.
Inflation has occurred. In 1964-65, my aunt bought a new car, Ford Mustang. Hot car for the times. $2400 out the door. Try that today. Last year I bought a Ford Ranger truck. $38000. Folks, it’s a damn pickup truck.
Yeah, I know cars are better and all that economist apologetics. How about education?
Certainly, my education was not better than what a serious student can get today in a STEM field. I paid approximately $300 per semester or so for tuition *and* dorm room. Last I looked, $12k or so for the same at the same institution.
What we are seeing today is that inflation has finally exceeded the ability of most wage earners of the working/blue collar classes to keep up. And as Z-man has noted in today’s posting, the middle class is finally hollowed out—exhausted, bankrupt, demoralized, desperate, finished.
We are ripe for despotism or the false promise of socialism.
Now there’s some nostalgia! I always point out to folks that my father, working class, Detroit, retired in 1972 after using his savings to buy a new car (Ford Galaxy sedan) for 3,000 and a new house in the suburbs for 36,000 — all cash, no auto loan or mortgage nonsense. I then went to college for 600 a semester (including room but not board), paid for by the union. So you can see how racked by inflation we were, unlike you lucky folks in 1965!
It is nostalgia—but I hope the right kind, not the discredited “Boomer” kind. I post testament to how most all the generations after me have been royally screwed.
Spot on. Look at how the Japanese got rid of oil when calculating ‘inflation’ a few years back. Official inflation has no resemblance to what the average prole experiences. Lemme follow up – 60 years ago a man working a blue collar job could support wife, kids, house in the ‘burbs, and two cars in the driveway. Is that true now? Not even close. That’s real inflation. And that is the real tax.
This ^
what was that blue collar man’s life expectancy, back then? cancer survival rate?
Surprises me that people cant see the he inflation going on, even among middle classes. Food prices, auto prices, as you say, the latter made to seem more affordable now with 6 and 7 year loans on cars versus what sed to be 3 to 5 years as standard , etc.
Find out why we can’t as a society see it, and you’ll be a billionaire in short order I’m sure. I suspect we have a multi-faceted explanation.
Around that time, we had the creation of the debt economy. I remember the unsolicited credit card my mother got in the mail from the bank—free money (at the price of slavery to the lender). Only “rich” people had credit cards—we must be rich!
Then there was Feminism. A woman was now expected to take her place in the work force, or she was second rate. Viola, two income families. We were doubly rich.
We elected a President (Reagan) who gave us both “guns and butter” via deficient spending and a complicit Congress. Bureaucrats and public welfare programs. More government employment—big paychecks, secure retirement—everyone else, 401k’s.
Finally, came the tech revolution and the movement from manufacturing to high tech and the “knowledge revolution”. Blue collar workers need not apply, high tech, cognitive elites ruled the roost.
The above certainly took a generation or two out of the sting of inflation. But the last generation or so. They’ve gotten the short end of the stick.
don’t forget coinage, Compsci
We used to have coins actually worth something, then even those were taken away. can’t have guys saving coins with silver in them for they might attain some semblance of wealth! God forbid !! Then they might become independent minded!! Oh NO!!!!
This has been a slow never-ending process of extracting wealth from the middle classes (by that I mean, everyone who is not super rich).
Everything worth something has been degraded and devalued so that we can’t rise up. They worked the families (through feminism, as you note), trough cheap money that degrades savings, through inflated asset prices so only the most diligent and fortunate every pay off the mortgage, etc etc
An important part of our thing should be education. I have flirted with th idea of maybe trying to build a private school of some sort for people like us so their kids can learn real economics and so forth and learn how to truly get ahead . In addition to a real education of history, arts, languages, etc
Part of the DR revolution needs to be a resurrection of Western culture and (real) education focused on critical thinking, history, science, and economics. Restoring education (at all levels) needs to be a top priority.
As for coinage, for the very reason you cite, expect the elite to attack crypto-currency as part of their Great-Covid-Reset. They understand as well as well as we do that the US economy is fake and ghey. They know that there’s no reason, other than certain accidents of history starting in 1939, that it should be worth more a few pesos. They also know that a lot of us dissident types are hoping to use the crypto economy to slip out the back door of their new Chinese style tyrannies.
Why are you ranting about the price of 1964 Mustangs?! Obviously there has been inflation going on over the last 50 years. The point of the post is the lack of inflation from the huge budget deficit the fed has been running the last year or so.
Not in my wife’s. She never received her whopping $600-$1200 bonanza.
sucks to be her. I got a couple and spent them on fun stuff.
The real US economy has been contracting for decades. We have been living off of the good names of our grandfathers and by selling off our assets and above all, by abusing the world currency privilege.
We have been running large net trade deficits every single year since the 80s.
All the naysayers have been “wrong” up until now and maybe they are wrong, but things that cannot go on forever usually do not.
yeah, pretty much
running a trade deficit, and growing the economy, are not mutually exclusive.
No, not necessarily. But we are not running deficits because we have so greatly improved our own productive capacity and can afford more foreign luxuries.. We are importing so much stuff because we sent them our productive machinery and are now printing money to buy the goods the machinery produces. Our cities used to be manufacturing powerhouses and now they are just giant slums.
Well, the problem there is that prices/values are determined by collective belief (e.g., I believe that a $10 bill can buy 4 loaves of bread). If you can manipulate belief, you can sustain the vampirazation for a good long while. If I still believe that $10 will buy me 4 loaves of bread, but actually it only buys me 3.9, then next year 3.6, then next year 3.5, but it’s hard to tell because the taxes and sale prices make the actual value hard to calculate, then I can buy 4 loaves the next year for $10 but now they’re 30% smaller than the old size… you can play that game for a long time before people catch on.
One result of people today who only consume CGI blockbusters and find “old” movies — black & white, slow pacing — unwatchable and boring, is that they never notice how prices have changed. Watching Goldfinger last night, sign in the background in Memphis: Eggs 39c/dozen.
Ha! I’ve still got a 60s Safeway newspaper insert:
Rabbit, 19 cents/pound.
I’ll sell you a dozen for 39 cents – in silver coinage.
Shrinkflation, I get it. Well documented. I am just saying that I would have thought the wheels would have come off the bus by now. And I still believe they will. They are just using whatever tools they have to prolong what I believe, sadly, to be an inevitability. Not hoping for it. It breaks my heart to think about the lives my kids will have.
I keep thinking of the scene in Soylent Green where people living in abandoned cars are the ones with a roof over their heads.
“It breaks my heart to think about the lives my kids will have.”
That’s what keeps us in this shitshow, isn’t it.
Yep, inflation is hidden in smaller portions and lower quality
a high quality steak sold for $3.50 a pound before Obama, then jumped to $7. Ok, some people can deal with that, but the quality went down too. A good similar quality steak today is $25 a pound, even though you can find them for $7 to $9 a pound but they’re poor quality, but most people only see the price tag and load them up with salt and seasonings and think they’re living the high life
Love the bread analogy. Our old Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butts, used to go on talk shows with a loaf of break to illustrate where the problem in rising food prices came from and support the impugned farmer.
As an analogy of who was causing price increases (who profited), he opened the loaf of bread and began to remove slices. So many slices for the grocery store, so many for the distributor, so many for the baker, etc. Finally, he reached down and took out the last two slices or so—“…and this is what the farmer gets…”.
His wife was a hoot too. 😉
Collective belief is what this past year has been all about. The media has burned through decades of (misplaced) trust and confidence with the election fraud, the Covid fraud, the racial fraud, etc…
If people stop buying those narratives, how long will they keep buying (literally) the dollar narrative – reserve currency, trust in the fed, default currency for all things globally both legal and illegal…
The Fed has been pumping money into the hands of the rich and financial institutions, not the general economy. The Fed doesn’t buy cars and dinners at restaurants; it buy financial instruments.
You have seen inflation in the price of financial instruments, i.e. stock and bond returns relative to the economy. But that money doesn’t then get put into the general economy because the rich and financial institutions don’t spend it, they save it, which is why the velocity of money has collapsed.
Now, if the Fed ever starts printing money to give to Congress to dole out to the general population, you likely will see economy-wide inflation.
You are absolutely correct, Citizen. The Fed “creates” money credits it’s not “printing” money. Big Difference. It took me a while to understand why we weren’t at 200% inflation 20 years ago but I finally realized the velocity of money concept and the new “digital money” changed the paradigm.
disagree. everyone got a coupe of $1,200 checks, extra unemployment payments, extended unemployment benefit period. now maybe more stimulus checks. big fish got fed too, for sure, but the fed spread a lot of money out all over the working folks.
It’s about the velocity of money. If people get a one-time check, they’re more likely to save it. If they know that check will come each month, they’re more likely to buy things with it.
Look at the debt clock. That debt is money being created and spread – not to the working folks, but to the big cats with the tools to vacuum up this font of money. The few billion we working proles were given is nothing compared to the billions of debt created every single day that does not get to us but is siphoned much higher in the monetary food chain. Every dollar of debt is money being given to someone, and it ain’t going to me!
“Well, those Americans have an average income of $1200 per year.”
You are slightly correct. The velocity of money thing makes he-who-gets-there-first benefit the most. All models of inflation hold as much. If I get the first fake $100, I can still buy $100 worth of stuff with it. The 5th guy to get it can only buy $90 worth (in old money) of stuff, etc. We dirt people are the 200,000,000’th guy to get it, so we get $20 worth of stuff for that Benjamin. Wallstreet/billionaires are making unbelievable fortunes; the rest of us, we get to pay $1,000,000 for a $200,000 house, or pay $50,000 for a $10,000 car.
Good catch.
That’s the thing isn’t it. I see the lack of tax revenue the government will take for the Covid period, due to the closures. I see the businesses failing – both in reality and from the public receivership notices one can find online. Yet ‘it’ continues. And I suspect most people know our money system is farcical, but they have no other option but to ‘believe’. The reality of a plummeting dollar or pound is too harsh to handle.
I don’t believe it can go on forever, but it can evidently go on for a long old time. As usual, it is the case of putting off the immense brutality for a smaller hurt now. But when it does come?
You gotta realize $20,000 in 2000 (just 20 years ago) is now equivalent to $29,000. They claimed the inflation rate in 2000 was about 3.5% and they now claim it’s 2.5%. I call bull shit!.
Probably more on the order of $42,000 in 2000 is now $78,000, according to my proprietary CPI (Corvette Price Index).
One of my guilty pleasures is watching “classic” car shows. It’s amazing how much some vehicles have appreciated in price. Even microcars like the Isetta.
That’s because—like me—you’ve lived long enough to see, and comprehend, the effects of such long term inflation. What you state requires such as it’s that insidious. What people often talk about here is Zimbabwean inflation, which is better termed fiscal collapse. So far, we’ve avoid that.
The 300 million Americans (real and paper) are a tiny sliver of the demand side for dollars.
There are more than 7 billion humans who need to transact business in US dollars, either directly (since local money is used for toilet paper) or indirectly (because of global supply chains). Unless and until the USD is removed as the global reserve currency, the Fed can hit the “print” button and create all of the fiat currency it feels like.
Inflation will rise, but when you are dividing by 7 billion, it will rise everywhere, not just in the US.
There are a many puzzles like this. You don’t have to go back too far to find people saying what we are seeing today could not happen. The truth is, we have no way of knowing what is really happening in the economy. The numbers made public are not the numbers the bankers and oligarchs rely upon. They look at different numbers.
Joe Biden got over 80 million votes.
There are 7 genders.
Ahmaud Arbery was just going for a jog.
We live in clown world, there is no more truth. Truth can be whatever you want. To some, the economy is great, to others, it’s hell. The government can make any number up they want.
John 18:38 KJV “Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.”
Prices seem tied to people’s beliefs rather than reality. As Zman mentioned, the stock market has boomed. All those we know who remained with the government constantly monitor their retirement funds based on stocks and feel financially very comfortable. But said husband’s job involves precious metals, and the prices there have nothing to do with the stocks or reality. Massive election fraud, corona lockdown, and gold prices drop? At the same time, his employer’s profits are rising because they cannot get sufficient product for their customers – most mints have cut staff and production.
gold dropped because it is competing for $$ with bitcoin.
I think it’s right, just not worst case yet. Inflation is there, just not massively. People are working but underemployed. I also hear people are suddenly saving again. The bubble is only starting to pop.
Check out this chart tracking the Consumer Price Index over time: https://tinyurl.com/yyvohy68 Then figure in wage stagnation due to mass immigration and ever-increasing numbers of foreign visa workers. The ruling class has waged war on the American nation.
Economics is still about supply and demand. Right now supply can be adjusted to whatever the elites want. Eventually that will change, and then the dollars will be worth zero to almost zero. I used to think an event related to the petro dollar would cause the crash, now I have no idea, except it will be related to the hubris of the ruling class.
My humble theory is that it can continue as long as the US remains a credible military threat. If it can force you to take its funny money, it can keep pumping it out at will. It’s one reason BRICS is such a threat.
The concept of BRICS may be threatening, but not if one is an HBD adherent. China, yep. India, possibly. SA or Brazil, totally ridiculous. SA is now in a state of impending collapse, explained adequately in HBD terms.
india is a dead culture, and corrupt beyond repair. china is not a dead culture but it is stagnant (or even declining) as well as being even more corrupt than india.
Look into Brent Johnson’s dollar milkshake theory. The basic gust of it is that the dollar remains strong because currency traders trust it more than any other currency. Once a replacement comes in, the dollar is done.
It helps string things along when the guy with his finger on the “go brrrr” button of the money machine also publishes the universally accepted stats on what “inflation” is this last year. Sure, I’ve got some ocean front property in South Dakota….
The money printing is a mask for debt destruction. If I default on my $100,000 commercial real estate loan, but then the Fed prints up $100,000 in some subversive manner to hand to my lender so they don’t go under then there wouldn’t be any inflation, just movement of the debt from the lender’s books to the Fed’s (lots of this).
But also they can’t control where the inflation goes. The stock market is probably the easiest example, but even a trip to the store will reveal pricing disparities. For example I’ve spent a bunch of time at Lowes recently and some of the stuff (plastic buckets, most tools) are comparatively cheap, while anything involving copper or lumber has jumped in prices by quite a bit.
There’s huge inflation
just that many don’t see it but it’s there
Inflation goes where the new money goes, which in this case is among the affluent, and within that sector is huge inflation in the form of home prices and luxury items whose prices are going though the roof, be it yachts, high end appliances, second homes, etc
Food prices are also going way up and have been, partly offset by smaller portions and lower quality, which hides much of it, but it’s there
The Republican gambit to block stimulus spending through congress will prove disastrous over the long term.
Why?
Because the central bank is an entity the left can staff completely with true believers who will move to accomplish leftist policy aims outside of the influence, and more importantly, the understanding of every day Americans.
It is almost certain that a third mandate will be added to the Federal Reserve’s charter – equity. And this will give the progs infinite ammo to give away trillions to minorities.
You’ve read it here first.
Yep. The “equity” mandate (explicit or implicit) will become the norm for every institution. You can already see that with any proposal to spend money in Congress. Front and center is how it will help blacks more than Whites.
Modern Monetary Theory is on its way and racial equity will be its justification.
The only thing which may protect you is crypto currency. But they will outlaw that sooner or later cause… racisms.
The first question is really to consider what can be relied on to have value in the future, and what can be protected in the future.
In this light, the correct skill set can become a great asset. For young men starting out, any dirt job will do. As long as it gets you a skill that keeps wokie in his plush apartment streaming video. Naturally, required skills change over time, but the right one is both valuable and hard to steal (until cheap, willing labour is found).
Gold, silver, palladium, a house you own, land atop a good aquifer, fertile land are also solid investments. When I use the term investment, I don’t mean something that will rapidly appreciate (although it might); rather, something that will always retain some value.
Of course, if we had a polity of like-minded people then we’d not need to worry about most of these things. A big if. Now I think of, social capital is the best form of capital there is.
Value will be in skills and land, like it always is when things start to crumble
Buy land if you can. All cash with no debt.
Whitney Webb just had $10K stolen with a bitcoin account, Coinbase just got vaporized.
Get back to physical metals.
I must recommend bags of pre-1964 silver dimes from your local coin gallery. Still cheap, but suited only for a crash, not daily transactions.
They will embrace crypto-currencies eventually, because they are totalitarian’s dream.
One day, all government currencies will be crypto-currencies and all private/independent crypto-curencies will be simply outlawed.
That’s hardly anything new under the sun. It’s been going on since the Great Society reforms and the War on Poverty.
By then the US won’t be able to fend off BRICS, and we’ll be saved by merciful bankruptcy. At least I hope so.
At that point why not just move to the BRICS or their allies? America is no longer our country so I have no need to go down with the ship.
There is nowhere to move. It is quickly approaching the point where you have to stand and fight.
Oh, you already have a Brazilian passport and immigration papers lined up? ‘Cause you’re going to be applicant #81,236,308 after the floodgates are opened. If you believe your own marketing, GTFO. Otherwise, stop talking out of both sides of your mouth.
You’d be trading one empire for another, surrounded by the same cast of characters. Personally I’d rather be where people are leaving.
just out of curiosity, have you ever traveled outside the county where you were born?
Expanding on your point, just about everything in the US power structure defined by the Constitution can be circumvented by the political or corporate bureaucracy that has developed.
That much is clear. We’ve really advanced to the point where all the rights that matter are at the whims of oligarchical tech people that hate us, want us destroyed and want to inflict us and our children with a weird death cult ideology.
The good news, borrowing from brave men of the past, is that we are surrounded. We know the enemy and we know every action we take against it will weaken it.
They will just blame Trump for four years for all the major decline.
This is a pogrom on the working and middle classes. The numinous minorities? Just like the homeless, homos, trannies etc, they never cared about them either. Just useful idiots to manipulate the soft headed masses.
Trump Derangement Syndrome will linger for a while. Does the media blame the Democrat mayors of big cities for the dysfunction, crime and homeless tent cities? They won’t blame Biden/Harris either for the disastrous national problems.
Being a leftist in America means you never have to say you’re sorry.
“Trump Derangement Syndrome will linger for a while.”
I wonder. Jeffrey Epstein was arguably the biggest scandal in American history. Epstein demonstrated the total compromise of our Political Caste, and his cartoonishly-staged murder demonstrated the total corruption endemic at every level of our cartoonish society. But the media made Epstein disappear in about 2 weeks. They did that by simply refusing to talk about it, and in no time the slaves were emotionally invested in some other, different BS they were told was ultra important. If you bring up Epstein now, the average slack jawed Normiecon will react as though it’s a joke, a choice witticism in the same vein as pointing out that politicians never keep their promises after they are elected. Yup, our politicians are all crooks, hardy har har! Ain’t it funny, Jethro?!
People are so abjectly stupid and mind-controlled now that they will forget about Trump entirely if the media doesn’t mention his name for a span of more than 15 minutes. TDS would be more aptly called Outraged Cuz Told (OCT); it’s not like 99% of useful idiots object to him based on any personal beliefs or principles that guide their opinions. They just wanted to be identified with the cool kids, and so got onboard with the Trump hatin’. Look ma, I’m a cool sophisticate too! They will forget Trump in the same way they forgot Epstein, should our Rulers choose to use their media organs towards that purpose.
On the other hand, I think Trump is hated to the extent that he is by the Cabal because he serves as a proxy for White people and White interests. It doesn’t matter that Trump ultimately stabbed Whites in the back and did nothing to advance their interests; Trump IS the White voter, a scapegoat upon whom all the alleged sins of the Honkey can be pinned. And the Cabal hates White people! They have slated you for dispossession, humiliation, subjugation, and eventually death.
Observing whether or not Trump is memory holed or given a Nuremburg show trial will serve as a useful barometer for just how close to open genocide we have come.
It might linger for a year or so, but the problem every president runs into is that there comes a point where the most reasonable question becomes, what are you going to do about X? Sure, your predecessor may have done bad things, but why haven’t you undone them already?
It never happens for the left because they are shameless and always control the narrative. Biden ran on fixing healthcare, when he was VP for 8 years as Obamacare was sold as magic elixir.
American masses will throw Biden ender the bus in short order. No one really likes him. He will be like a one hit wonder band, makes a big splash then poof. Bye bye.
In her staged congratulatory call to Biden, Kamela was wearing a jogging suit. “I am more healthy than you are, Biden.”
Maybe just a co-incidence. But Biden will be out on his ear in short order. Kamela is effectively the president-elect they’re going after.
Here in silly California they still blame Ronnie for the homeless crisis by closing the mental hospitals as Governor. Ronnie left the Governor’s Mansion on 1/6/1975, I tell silly Progs: “Well, if you’re so adamant, you’ve had 45 years to set things right, you stupid fux!” ……..Silence.
It’s reason five million why Trump should just go balls to the wall. It’s basically guaranteed neither he nor his family will have any peace should he ultimately be replaced by senile joe. At the very least, he’ll get the blame for any negatives during the subsequent administration. At the worst he’ll be hounded mercilessly if not probably worse. Better to go down guns blazing (metaphorically of course).
Exactly. It is, in part, why the “real racists” is such a stupid meme. They. Don’t. Care. If what is termed “racism” works in their favor, as it does with the anti-White BS, they lap it up. If it doesn’t, they are the biggest anti-racists on Earth. All that matters to them is raw power.
It doesn’t matter to them, but it can be used as a wedge issue to split their coalition.
I cannot help but disagree. Most people will not blame Biden. They will blame, with the gentle guidance of media, Covid (with a dash of white supremacy). That is why the masks will not go away. Booster shots will be hyped every few months. The masks make the boogeyman real, and the booster shots make the salvation from government real. The notion that most will be able to think abstractly and pragmatically, by recognizing that this is all manufactured, is unlikely in my estimation. The masks give tangible reminders to a populace so overstimulated by phones that they are unable to understand abstractions like manipulation. They see masks, and they have been pavlovianly conditioned to react with fear and an arm hanging out for another shot. Thus, when start getting restless due to stomach pangs, the government will simply up the data allotment to stream more Netflix and up the dose of anti-anxiety meds.
You can’t run a democracy if half the population does not believe in the legitimacy of the voting process, especially if that half are also no longer listening to the official media. The iron fist is emerging from the velvet glove. Free speech will have to go.
We don’t have a democracy, I would counter. Free speech is gone, in the same way medical autonomy is. You don’t have to require a vaccine to make it mandatory. You just can’t do anything. We won’t make terms illegal, we just won’t let you say them without being cast out.
“We don’t have a democracy, I would counter. Free speech is gone, in the same way medical autonomy is. “
actually those two are the fruits of democracy.
One should not conflate “democracy” with “pathological egalitarianism”. I’d say egalitarianism is the disease we suffer from, democracy is the instrument of its spread. But I do admit a possibility that they are inseparable.
There’s no democracy when there’s no free and fair elections and when one party owns all the media/social information platforms. We had a democratic Republic until the leftists perfected election engineering. Now we have a dictatorship of the connected.
Leftists have perfected nothing. If they perfected election fraud, we’d have nothing to talk about as it would pass unknown.
They have engineered corruption by using the current flaws in the system—indeed they placed those flaws into the system! Point here is that these flaws are known and can be corrected if the political will is there. Alas, it is not there.
So the above perhaps is a distinction without a difference. However, since the flaws are known, since they were warned about, since they have been used, and since they have succeeded, we have another argument to convince Joe Normie as to come over to the dark side.
The left doesn’t care that you know about the fraud. They know it is more demoralizing for our side to see it, but not be able to change it. It’s a dangerous game though, because they are more vulnerable than they think. We have a ways to go, but the ruling class always looks unstoppable until a sudden shift stops them.
You are correct that they no longer care if you know. What will happen if you do? We saw this play out many times where we suffer defeats but declare victories instead. Until meaningful opposition forms, the mask is pretty much off at this point.
I have no disagreement.
“Now we have a dictatorship of the connected.”
Perfect. Perfect description of the New Economy, as well.
What’s more, when the Power Structure decides which candidates are acceptable for us to vote for, and which candidates are beyond the pale, democracy is radically circumscribed. It’s been this way for quite some time but the Couplection to expel Trump only makes it all the more clear.
Or maybe (((circumcised))).
Or maybe castrated.
The voting process??? Pbbfbfbfbfffftttt!!! Most of the nation no longer believes the media, or trusts the courts, the schools, and the police are either being laid off or attacked in the streets.
I disagree with Jim over at Jim’s Blog on most things, but he is right when he says there is a power vacuum in The Imperial Capital … and sooner or later someone will step up to occupy it. It’s just a matter of who. Trump? He is a great business man… but is he a great warfighter? He is going to have to be. There are no real warfighters from the Left… but they do have a lot of mob bosses and psychopaths to function as cannon fodder and useful fools. Their liabilities, though, are all the institutions they pozzed. Those institutions won’t work for them anymore than they will work for us.
I think the Left is mostly a paper tiger at this point. Now that the media has fallen, people are beginning to see them for what they are. The 2A guys are promising them piles of spent brass and body bags and they are in a great position to deliver.
My money is on the right in general, and the dissidents in particular.
Trump isn’t gonna do anything.
I wish he was, but hes a civnat. He’ll probably just run again in 2024.
He’s no Pinochet..
Pinochet was a military general. He had brute force behind him and loyalty and knew how to use such. Trump has people on a payroll. We are seeing which is better.
Agreed. But – the same goes for the Donks, outside of their lunatics and zombies. Hence, the power vacuum I guess.
Petraeus, Mattis et al have shown us the “value” to our side of our connected generals and other flag officers …..
Let’s hope. For they are really our only hope. I just keep remembering those pictures of tranny officers in the military—men wearing dresses, women in pants—and wonder how far up the chain of command the pozz runs.
Probably pretty close to the top. Among others, I still remember the general (I believe – don’t recall the name) who, after the Ft. Hood massacre, was lamenting the potential loss of diversity as being the greater tragedy.
That massacre was preventable. The killer, in Islamic terms of art, essentially described what he was going to do. The inability to stop islamic terrorism is due to the unwillingness to understand their motivations.
Will anyone miss “free speech” if it’s loss also means an end to social media and the general “airing of grievances”?
I sure as hell won’t.
Free speech is only half gone. If you are on the left, you can say anything, steal anything and screw anything, with full political and prosecutorial protection. But for those on the right, they will manufacture crimes, dox you and shut you out of polite society.
Yes, that my point. “Free Speech” has become a weapon used by the powerful against the weak. But does not protect the weak at all. As seen by all of us here clinging to anonymity.
Repression will only buy you some time.
True, we have a great technology to implement such repression as compared to any other time in recorded history. But such technology is a two edged sword. Look at all the high tech hackers causing billions in economic losses using such technology to steal $$$ within the system today. In effect, high tech bank robbers.
What if they decided to simply use such knowledge against the system, for the shear joy of it, or even towards a loftier goal—like freedom.
We shall see.
But how long will money matter? Look at the crap art that is purchased by people for millions. The paper is worthless; the assets matter. And think of the times hackers produce truly insightful material – such as the podesta emails. Most have never even read them to learn that they confirm pretty much every single accusation of corruption against the Clintons, and they hint at a much deeper evil towards kids. Certainly these actions are foodstuffs for fringe folks like ourselves, but take a poll of the average american. Money is 90% have no clue about the emails, or they conflate them with the server benghazi issue.
Sorry to be so dour, and I realize optimism is a necessary component that keeps people like Zman writing, but I have a job that really gives me a rather wide horizontal and vertical slice of america, and I would say that it does not look good. Look at the Pfizer hack that just happened. Even if there is something untoward within it, most will either not know or, even worse, not care.
The example of hackers in the system—contrarian folk for the most part—gives hope that the system can be fought against such that it is not the overwhelming “Big Brother” of Orwell fame. That currently, they primarily rob $$$, is not the point.
But my point is even when they steal information, the currency of the digital era, it is as worthless as fiat. No one (err… most) couldn’t care less.
I don’t want to be “that” guy. Heck, I’m not even an American and I know that America isn’t a Democracy. It’s a Republic. There’s a distinct difference with a Democracy being inferior to a Republic with such an excellent Bill of Rights and Constitution as the the US has.
They’ll also blame Trump. Obama spent his entire presidency blaming “the legacy of the Bush presidency” for anything that was wrong.
Totally. Everything that goes down the toilet during the Pretender’s Interregnum will be blamed on the Legacy of Trump and his Racist supporters. Look how much mileage they get out of redlining, etc.
Those who harbor Trumpism in the hearts are wreckers, and the reason X has failed. They must be rooted out.
When that fails, we’ll have to slaughter ALL the cattle like the Xhosa.
TNB. Ain’t nuthin ever they fault.
Normie is going extinct, thank God. However I fear he’s going to be replaced by the Mob.
“the Mob”- in more ways than one.
What I wouldn’t give for some Catholic Sicilians, or Butcher Bill’s cosa nostra.
Sopranos- “and the Romans, where are they now?”…”You’re lookin’ at ’em, a**hole.”
Guaranteed the seeds are being planted right now, by someone somewhere. That or Portland, right?
Yes, all living things are creatures of habit, and memetic warfare exploits this trait for government indoctrination purposes. And this scheme works best when people are fat and lazy and have most of their needs met. However, when the economic bubble bursts and the gravy train stops running, things will change quickly. That is when a tyranny requires a Jackboot Corp to create forced labor and quell incipient rebellion. Prepare now for the arrival of the Jackboots.
I agree completely. What shape the boots will be in may vary, and I don’t claim to have any idea of how it will operate (from camps to shunning to auto de fe), but it will serve the same purpose.
How long can they blame covid when biden ran on defeating covid. Remember he has a plan and trump didn’t.
Reminds me of the weekly, often daily, “soaring gas prices” story in every Media outlet during the Shrub years, that all mysteriously disappeared in late January 2009. I used to have great fun asking my Leftist colleagues about those. When Shrub was in, I asked when I could expect my victory dividend from the War For Oil; when he was out, I wondered why nobody cared that gas was suddenly 3x more expensive. Such simpler times…
“the weekly, often daily, “soaring gas prices” story in every Media outlet during the Shrub years, that all mysteriously disappeared in late January 2009”
The same thing happened with “The Homeless” in the early 90’s. After hearing endlessly about their plight throughout the 80’s when Reagan was in, they mysteriously disappeared the day Bill Clinton took office.
Remember anti-war mom Cindy Sheehan, she of “absolute moral authority?” She was everywhere in the media, ranting against Bush’s wars. They hadn’t finished sweeping the floor from Obama’s inauguration before she was memory-holed so thoroughly that I had trouble remembering her name just now.
The chief reason she was memory-holed is due to the fact that she stated she was going to primary Pelosi after she gained the speakership, but then refused to defund the Iraq War as she promised. Once Sheehan made that very public announcement, no one would mention her. In a way I feel sorry for her, she lost a child in a meaningless war and many nefarious people used her pain to advance their cause, only to dump her when she was of no longer of use to them.
“… when she was of no longer of use to them.”
Our ruling elites, who are neither elite nor ours any longer, see us as food animals.
I remember Cindy Sheehan. I have to admit I respected her position when Bush was in office – and I also respected the fact that she didn’t back down just because the magic Negro took office. You’re correct, as soon as the left was back in the Offal Office again they memory holed Sheehan in quick time.
At least the Dems learned their lesson and purged those nefarious people so they’d never trample anyone else underfoot again.
I wasn’t a fan of the shrub, who couldn’t seem to utter a sentence w/o a mispronunciation or some other flub. But I didn’t like her either. Yeah, she lost a kid in an ultimately worthless war, but lots of other people did too. Frankly, she was probably an old hippy who got caught up in the cult of her minor celebrity with her over the top antics. As long as she was bashing the right it was cool, otherwise maybe not so much. Never saw the old man around in support as I recall.
This last year has convinced me (though I’ve been leaning this way for years) that our media-consensus reality, while not entirely constructed, is a lot like those accounts I’ve read of what LSD or mushrooms do to perceptions. That fly on the wall is the size of a hippo, the mountains out the window in the distance are small piles of sand in the backyard.
2020? It’s that year the drugs finally catch up with our old junkie of a society. The brain damage crossed a threshold, permanent psychosis is now the prognosis.
I’ve considered the idea that CoVid causes mass insanity somehow. Perhaps the Chicom bastardized figured out a way to make the virus produce prions in some people that causes the equivalent of BSE.
IIRC there is some virus that does that to deer populations.
Well, we do seem to be living in some sort of Tom Clancy novel. We are all just a lame plot device now.
the mass insanity started long before covid showed up.
It was sometime around 2009 (maybe a couple years before) that gas prices did spike, and I believe there was a food price spike too. The MSM was blaming it on China’s and India’s consumption, and also the general use of biofuels. And there was some social unrest as a result. Gas was above $4 a gallon in most of the US, and if I remember correctly, people stopped driving as much. I also heard that the US was the only industrialized country that saw a decline in fossil fuel use during this period. Then just as suddenly, gas prices went down, food prices went down, and have stayed roughly the same ever since, even though India & China are still developing, and biofuels are still widely used. I thought then, and still do now, that our ruling class found out the fail point of social breakdown: it was gas and food prices. If they rose above a certain number, for most of the country, then the population would react severely. So the #1 goal of the ruling class is to stabilize prices, more than anything else. And they know dissident activities will be minimal as long as they do.
That’s why I despair of this ever ending. Give We The People gas (though you can’t actually go anywhere), food (though everything tasty is banned), and sportsball, and we will trudge off to our “jobs” forever. The Left will fuck it up eventually, of course – as the old saying goes, Leftists would run out of sand if you put them in charge of the Sahara – but by that point, the end will be inconceivably more horrible than it needs to be.
Yep, that’s a huge concern. In time, we’ll be forced by hook, crook or other to get the jab. But social distancing, masks and washing our f-ing hands will continue to be the order of the day, regardless. It’s a great f-ing life we can look forward to unless something derails this goddamn shit pretty soon.
Agree, good synopsis, it was 2006 when the Bush family exercised their oil LEAPS options, er, excuse me, when gas prices infathomably doubled. Pappy/Carlyle Group own a huge chunk of Kuwait’s Q8 state oil company, the reason for Desert Storm.
2006 shock and awe led directly to the MBS bond crash in 2007-8, which became the infamous and excessively profitable Mortgage Meltdown.
Pappy had used the 1989 S&L crisis to set up the mortgage tranches, Clinton/Eric holder put a gun to bank heads inflating them with CRA no-doc loans to float the FNMA/FMC bonds and enrich the revolving door class.
I’m certain Pappy’s last, greatest caper was to steal $23 trillion using puts in the Meltdown- the spook spent 20 years setting up the heist of the century. He wanted to be a Rothschild.
(PS- we truckers were rationed fuel, and Chicago/Detroit traffic jams disappeared for the first time in our adult lives.)
No pit in Hell deep enough or hot enough for our ruling class.
PSS- the good news, I am STILL paying down the debt damage from those years. No savings, no insurance, and a butt-ton of unemployed relatives.
Remember when entire “news”-casts were composed of RussiaGate stories? Remember the thrilling “bombshell revelations” that occurred daily?
What’s interesting is that now that the media has anointed Biden, all kinds of ChinaGate stories are coming out — apparently there was/is a whole network of she-spies honeytrapping Congressmen and more, such as the head of the Norwegian wealth fund — but not only are these “bombshells” not comprising entire newscasts, they aren’t mentioned at all. Almost as if it’s not the media crafting custom stories for each admin — “that’s yesterday’s news!” — but that the stories are only aimed in one direction. Sort of like how all those “horrors of war” stories ended when Obama was elected; after all, he was a Nobel Peace Prize laureate!
No, because I never watched the news. I feel kinda bad about that since it means I cannot relate to huge number of people who do, but, I probably wouldn’t be able to relate to them anyway.
Likewise the monthly jobs reports under Obama that were trumpeted by the media and invariably were quietly revised downward the following month.