Charles Hugh Smith once posed the question - who will endure the coming downturn better - urban "progressives" or rural "regressives". The answer should have been obvious - the ones who survive will be the ones who adapt, not the farmers getting buried under the lie that trade wars are "good and easy to win". MAGA is the opposite of adaptation, it's ossification, the abject unwillingness to change. Mass denial.
“A series of genuine, penetrating shifts have been happening at warp speed through the last decade,”
The average gross domestic product for Democratic districts, near parity with Republican ones in 2008, has grown 50% higher. Output per worker has followed the same pattern"
Part of adaptability is to properly assess risk and otherwise recognize con men.
ZH: Partisan Divide On Implosion As Stark As Its Politics
What should have become abundantly clear to everyone over the past decade is that the ways of the past are not sustainable, in every direction, but primarily human mental and physical health, financial stability, and environmental degradation. We can thank corporations for this dead-end way of life, however we must remember, the self-destructing downfall of corporate Disney World is a left-wing conspiracy. Enter the antidote for change, "MAGA", and its slavish devotion to the self-destructing ways of the past aka. instant gratification. Not seeing it ending is apparently a critical part of the euthanasia experience for this ossified Idiocracy.
As I've said many times, the locus of risk is first and foremost the Potemkin financial markets, which exhibit all signs of a Ponzi scheme. It speaks to the overall quality of this MAGA con job that those closest to retirement are the most heavily exposed to stocks. Again, not seeing it ending is a critical part of this overall con job. Here Trump has done an excellent job of rolling back the protections that were put in place after the global financial crisis. In order to assure that it happens again:
"What’s left of the Dodd Frank Act is being dismantled, leaving the economy vulnerable to grotesque financial concentration, excessive risk—and a repeat of the 2008 collapse."
President Trump has merged the White House with Wall Street and adopted big finance’s priorities as this administration’s top priorities."
As always at the top, we see insiders cashing out at public expense. Ahead of economic implosion. After all, who better to know what is coming than those running the world's largest corporations?
"The last time the markets saw that much selling that many times in a year was in 2006 and then again in 2007 — right before the stock market imploded in late 2008"
"It's also quite telling to note where much of the selling is taking place: tech stocks."
The second order risk is human physical and mental health, another vector of widely ignored collapse. This is where the intersection of corporate junk food, corporate deathcare, and corporate pharmaceuticals combine into a lethal kill zone of maximized corporate profit. This is by far the most effective killing machine ever devised, expertly marketed as an indispensable "way of life".
Once again, Trump has done everything possible to accelerate the corporate harvest. First and foremost by undermining public healthcare, and secondly by setting an excellent example of someone who is profoundly personally irresponsible with his own health. Papering over the damage with ever-thicker coats of orange lacquer. Aging like a human Twinkie wilting in the sun.
No description of this dead-end way of life would be complete without the complicit role of corporate media in infotaining the comatose masses while they are being harvested. Here we see what remains of the Learning Channel is a toxic waste dump of brain dead reality TV garbage:
Last but not least, environmental degradation.
It was a telling week when millions of children worldwide led climate change protests while Trump rolled back California emission standards and gave tariff exemptions to plastic straws. Cheered on as always by his useful Idiocracy.
Carbon is by no means the only problem. Desertification, plastic pollution, wildlife extinction are among the other assiduously ignored problems. This week we learned that North America has lost 3 billion birds in the past 50 years.
It's almost overwhelming. To the point where we should invent a fantasy way of life that pretends none of it's happening. And then ride denial into the sunset while eating ourselves to death.
Or, just wait for the self-destruct virus to snuff itself out while subsidizing over-consumption of fossil fuels to the tune of a quarter trillion dollars.
“While hundreds of billions of dollars of benefits have accrued to hundreds of millions of people, the amount of shareholder value destruction registers in the hundreds of billions of dollars,” he said. “The industry is self-destructive.”
A 2017 estimate from the WSJ found $280 billion in negative cash flow between 2010 and 2017. It’s incredible when you think about it – despite the record levels of oil and gas production, the industry is in the hole by roughly a quarter of a trillion dollars."
The industry is at a bit of a crossroads with Wall Street losing faith and interest, finally recognizing the failed dreams of fracking"
“There will be a reckoning and the only questions is whether it happens in a controlled manner or whether it comes as an unexpected shock to the system.”
Recession is not an option.
