Three years ago this month just ahead of the presidential election, my blog stats peaked. Then as right now, the global monetary heroin high was wearing off. There was a consensus that the big, fat, ugly bubble was ending badly. But we all know what happened next - the "saviour" got elected and deregulated corruption. The casino was "saved" due to record misallocation of capital. Which extended the vacation from reality a few years longer. All it took was wholesale abandonment of responsibility - to the children, the future, the environment, the economy, and of course the rest of the world.
The biggest con job in human history
The biggest con job in human history
I could have been Zerohedge. I just needed more UFO stories and my own dedicated audience. An echo chamber of like-minded dunces. But the truth has no audience anymore. Now, everyone subscribes to their own brand of bullshit. Their own version of what won't happen. Quite like religion. When truth is no longer a limiting factor, then the sky is the limit for monetizing useful idiots. When they are used to being brainwashed by fake beliefs and ideologies, so much the better.
Ironically, China and the U.S. are similar. China doesn't believe in freedom of speech and the U.S. doesn't believe in the truth. This era has punished the truth in ways we never thought possible. Aided and abetted by Disney markets which have provided the sole single dimensional measure of "success" in today's corporate Disney World: fake wealth. Today, story-telling has replaced facts.
The biggest lies are embedded in the underlying assumptions. In particular, the all-important assumption of the indefinite status quo. This assumption has harvested more carbon in the past ten years than all others combined. And that was a mere down payment on what is owed. Sadly, lies don't age well. There is a "hidden" cost to believing things that are patently untrue. It's called malinvestment. The allocation of time and money to those things that have no real ROI. Only an imagined ROI.
The biggest lies are embedded in the underlying assumptions. In particular, the all-important assumption of the indefinite status quo. This assumption has harvested more carbon in the past ten years than all others combined. And that was a mere down payment on what is owed. Sadly, lies don't age well. There is a "hidden" cost to believing things that are patently untrue. It's called malinvestment. The allocation of time and money to those things that have no real ROI. Only an imagined ROI.
The biggest economic issue of our time is the one that is never ever discussed. It's underemployment - people working in jobs that are beneath their education and level of training. It's a direct consequence of the continuous corporate job churn, and the swapping out of high paying jobs for low paying jobs. It's also a consequence of young people graduating with four year degrees and working as bartenders. The never-discussed underemployment crisis lies hidden behind the always-mentioned "lowest unemployment in history" statistic. The quantity of jobs has never been higher, concealing the fact that the quality of jobs has never been lower.
This is just one of many crises wrought by this Lord of the Flies strip-mining operation that today's apologists for corporate criminality call the economy. This era has been a con man's paradise. A denialist wet dream. This era has punished truth, punished reality, punished sanity, punished savers, punished responsibility, punished workers, punished the planet, and punished the future.
All so that billionaires could remind us that things have never been better.
Not to be confused with the last time it was the best time to be the last man standing.
