The State of Reality

Obama will give his State of the Union address later this month. If politicians were capable of telling the truth, below is what he would say. However, unfortunately, because we live in a shrink wrapped bubble inflated by cheap debt, society is overrun by child-like dunces in leadership positions who spend their entire time convincing us that reality can be ignored indefinitely. The stewed masses of course willfully believe that these factors all belong to that indefinite future. So when the bubble bursts, we can expect plenty of shock and awe from the Idiocracy, when they realize that the future just got here ahead of time:

1) We face a stagnant and bloated economy which is no longer self-sustaining and hence totally dependent upon ongoing debt accumulation

2) A stagnant jobs market with fewer jobs today than six years ago, despite a larger population. Fools and apologists say we added 5 million jobs since 2008, however, the U.S. accumulated $5 trillion in debt in the meantime which works out to $1 million per job.

3) A bloated and dysfunctional post-secondary education system now bankrupting its own students

4) A bloated and corrupt military industrial complex which has doubled its size in the past decade, and is sucking the lifeblood out of the political and economic system

5) Medicare and Social Security programs that are totally unfunded, now facing an overwhelming rise in recipients at the same time as the number of payers into the system is falling off commensurately

6) A totally dysfunctional political system that ignores all of the larger issues and focuses all of its attention on campaigning, partisan bickering and legal contrivances with an ever-dwindling half life

7) An incoherent foreign policy with troops in 140 countries while geopolitical instability verges on spinning out of control

8) A clueless corporate media focused on amusing, entertaining, confusing, obfuscating and otherwise ignoring the underlying causes or solutions to the major problems of the day

10) An oblivious general populace stewed in junk food, junk culture, and Prozac. Now becoming mentally unstable as the overwhelming issues of the day exert their inevitable toll on mental health

11) A rising trend towards mass violence propagated by 300 million guns floating around in god knows whose hands.  A too-little-too-late gun control movement just enough to light a fire under gun owners who are considering taking up arms against their own government

12) A massively leveraged stock market levitated by Central Bank debt monetization programs, now strongly diverging from economic reality

And the biggest issue of all which is that none of these issues are being confronted or addressed head on in any meaningful way, as society's overwhelming preoccupation at this juncture is to hide from reality.

Other than that, everything is A-Ok...