The Post-Partisan Emporium

An Inconvenient Revolution Charles Hugh Smith It's inconvenient when those whose sacrifices are essential to the system get fed up and find some other way to live. Convenience isn't just about small appliances. It's also about ruling nations.  Let's start with the semantics of ruling nations. Some labels might be viewed as somewhat inflammatory (Kleptocracy, anyone?), so let's stick with the neutral  Ruling Order . Some things have been extraordinarily convenient for the Ruling Order.  Take the life and death of one Jeffrey Epstein, an intel "asset" who assembled a veritable goldmine of dirt on an astounding collection of bigwigs, and then became, well, inconvenient. Very conveniently, the security camera in his cell failed, the guards dozed off and he hung himself in this fortuitous interlude.  This was the acme of convenience. Extending the Surveillance State into Big Tech's planetary-wide social media networks was also convenient , and a bargain to ...

The Monopoly - Labor "Let It Rot" Death Spiral Charles Hugh Smith The only rational response to this reality is to  opt out, lay flat and let it rot. In my previous post,  The Bubble Economy's Credit-Asset Death Spiral ,  I described the self-reinforcing feedback of expanding credit and soaring asset valuations  and how the only possible result of this  financial perpetual motion machine  was a death spiral of collapsing debt service, collateral and credit impulse. But this didn't exhaust the destructive dynamics of this  self-reinforcing wealth-creation machine for the few  who own the vast majority of the assets.  As longtime correspondent T.D. explains, this concentration of the benefits of financialization in the hands of the few also concentrates political power and the wealth to distort every function of the economy to enrich the few at the expense of the many. This concentration of wealth and corruption isn't cost-free.  As I've d...

What Happens When the Workforce No Longer Wants to Work? Workers are voting with their feet, and that's difficult to control. When values and expectations change, everything else eventually changes, too. What happens when the workforce no longer wants to work? We're about to find out.  As with all cultural sea changes, macro statistics don't tell the full story. The sea change is better illuminated by anecdotal evidence: workers constantly quitting to take better jobs; zero loyalty to corporate employers; workers cutting hours from full-time to part-time; workers going out for lunch and never coming back; workers giving up on selling sugar-water for the rest of their lives (echoing Steve Jobs' famous challenge to John Scully:  "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?" ) and giving up on owning an insanely over-valued house. Workers may sell sugar-water but their hearts are no longer in i...

Slack! An Irreverent Proposal John Michael Greer For quite some time now, utterances from the elite classes of the industrial world have had a sidelong relationship at best to the reality that most of us inhabit.  Recent weeks have seen the surreal quality of official pronouncements slam into overdrive, however. I first noted some time ago that the most difficult job in the world these days must be writing satire for online parody websites such as  The Onion  and  The Babylon Bee;  the struggle to come up with stories more absurd than the latest official pronouncements has got to be appallingly stressful. “I can’t be overdrawn, I still have checks left!” At this point, though, I’m sorry to say the  Onion  and the  Bee  have been left behind in the dust. Here in the United States, we’ve got Nancy Pelosi  insisting with a straight face  that expanding federal expenditures without raising taxes doesn’t increase the federal deficit. Her...