Saturday, October 19, 2019

What We've Lost

This is only a partial list of what we've lost to globalism, cheap credit and the Tyranny of Price which generates the Landfill Economy.
A documentary on the decline of small farms and the rural economy in France highlights what we've lost in the decades-long rush to globalize and financialize everything on the planet-- what we call Neoliberalism, the ideology of turning everything into a global market controlled by The Tyranny of Price and cheap credit issued to corporations and banks by central banks.
After Winter, Spring (2012) was made by an American who moved to a small village in the Dordogne region of France to recover something of her childhood on a small Pennsylvania farm.
The farmers--self-described as paysans, peasants in English, (a translation I don't consider entirely accurate, for reasons too complex to go into here)-- describe the financial difficulties of earning enough to survive without outside jobs.
One young farmer who is taking over the family dairy from his aging parents encapsulates the economic reality of small farms: in the 1960s, they had 3 or 4 cows, now they have 100, but their income is the same.
Corporate mega-farms can produce huge quantities of agricultural products of questionable quality because they have the scale, access to cheap credit and expertise to deal with the voluminous bureaucratic paperwork imposed by the EU and the French government. (One slip-up on a form and you're sunk if you're a one- or two-person operation.)
Artisanal producers can't compete, and will never be able to compete in a global marketplace where there is always a cheaper source. (Up to half a small farmer's income comes from EU subsidies, which the EU is trying to cut.)
Financial survival requires one spouse have an outside job, or the farmers must operate farm tours, an onsite auberge (restaurant) or equivalent higher-margin business, all of which increases the capital they must borrow to fund the expansion and the risk of bankruptcy should the venture fail to cover its costs.
The documentary echoes the themes of an earlier French documentary, Profils Paysans, a three-part series of which only the third film Modern Life (2008) has English Subtitles.
The financial uncertainties and endless hard work are running up against generational realities: relatively few young people have the necessary passion for farming and the appetite for risk and hard work. Across the developed world, from Japan to the U.S. to France, there are few (if any) successors in line to take over the small family farms.
The small family farm--and the knowledge of how to grow food and raise animals--is dying away with the passing of our elderly farmers. The average age of farmers in many nations is well above 60. Many of the paysans (male and female) profiled in these documentaries are in their 80s.
The land is sold for residential development (i.e. exurb sprawl, overwhelming infrastructure such as roads, water systems, etc. designed for much small populations) or abandoned.
These documentaries only partially capture the enormous distance between "modern life" and the human-Nature relationship required to make land sustainably productive.
It's important to preserve wilderness, but we don't eat what grows or roams in wilderness. Wildlife can't survive solely on isolated preserves, either; Corporate Big Ag monoculture fields offer little to no habitat for wildlife.
Corporate Big Ag doesn't maintain the polycultures needed to support insects, birds and other wildlife; small farms provide niches and habitats for all sorts of life that doesn't serve a direct financial interest of the owners.
The widening divide between the modern lifestyle--completely ignorant and dismissive of rural productive polyculture--and those who still hold knowledge of artisanal, small-scale, localized production of high quality food--is already unbridgeable.
One elderly farmer described how his non-French neighbor complained about the cowbells on his few cattle. This resident's dogs could bark freely, but the cowbells were an annoyance beyond tolerance?
This is a manifestation of the complete alienation of "modern life" from the production of food. The modern urban/exurb resident doesn't want to smell hay (hay fever!) or manure (oh my, all animal poop should vanish instantly or I can't bear it) or any other exposure to the realities of raising livestock, killing animals so we can eat them or any other reality of food. All of these processes should be done thousands of miles away, and the food shipped by air in nice plastic containers to our supermarkets.
Neoliberal economists insist nothing has been lost; the plastic food in the plastic containers is "market efficiency" (never mind the dependence on cheap credit and cheap jet fuel). As for all the intangible economic, social and cultural capital that's been lost--it has no value in globalized Neoliberal economies.
One almost hopes that Corporate Big Ag disappears due to mono-crop plagues and people start going hungry to the point that they begin to take an interest in relearning all that's been cavalierly tossed away in favor of plastic food in plastic packaging and endless hours slumped on sofas "consuming" videos and "engaging" social media.
We've lost so much in the conquest of localized, small-scale polycultural farming by Neoliberal globalism and the dominance of cheap-credit-fueled Corporate Big Ag, yet we're only dimly aware of what's been lost because it isn't measured or valued in Neoliberal economies.
We've lost the knowledge of even partial self-sufficiency; we've lost a diversified local economy that can feed itself; we've lost "food security," the resilience provided by food grown locally rather than being flown in from thousands of miles away; we've lost the cultural habits of helping neighbors bring in their harvest, of celebrating the shared work around a communal table; we've lost any Nature-based cultural identity; we've lost the cultural and economic capital of interwoven small farms; we've lost the habitats for wildlife that are unique to polyculture farming, and we've lost any meaningful connection to the land and Nature.
It's not just small farms that are being lost--it's the entire rural economy of villages and towns that are supported by farm income and products.
This is only a partial list of what we've lost to globalism, cheap credit and the Tyranny of Price which generates the Landfill Economy: always buy the cheapest corporate product-- price is all that matters, even if the quality is appalling. Just throw the low-quality items and food in the Landfill and buy new stuff on credit.)
These documentaries link directly to a 1,180 page two-volume work by historian Fernand Braudel, his last work:
I realize relatively few other readers would tackle a 1,200 page series with the same relish I have, or feel the same regret that I've finished the books, for my understanding of France, the history of agriculture, modern capitalism and prosperous rural economies is immeasurably richer.
What we've lost is a localized, resilient, diverse rural economy with a wealth of cultural and practical skills and wisdom. We only have a few years to save this immense wealth from complete and irretrievable loss.
What we've lost, whether we measure it or not is the subject my new book, Will You Be Richer or Poorer? Profit, Power and A.I. in a Traumatized World; (Read the first section for free (PDF). The book explores all the forms of wealth that we've lost or squandered. This applies not just to rural life and the rural, localized economy, but to our urban life, our society, our culture and our economy.



My recent books:
Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).


If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.
NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.
 
Thank you, P. Murphy ($30), for your superbly generous contribution to this site-- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership.
 

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Posted by Charles Hugh Smith at 9:56 AM

Thursday, October 17, 2019

Welcome to the USSR: the United States of Suppression and Repression

We're all against "fake news," right? Until your content is deemed "fake news" in a "fake news" indictment without any evidence, trial or recourse.
When propaganda is cleverly engineered, people don't even recognize it as propaganda: welcome to the USSR, the United States of Suppression and Repression. The propaganda in the U.S. has reached such a high state that the majority of people accept it as "pravda" (truth), even as their limbic system's BS detector is sensing there is a great disturbance in the Force.
Inflation is a good example. The official (i.e. propaganda) inflation rate is increasingly detached from the real-world declines in the purchasing power of the bottom 80%, yet the jabbering talking heads on TV repeat the "low inflation" story with such conviction that the dissonance between the "official narrative" and the real world must be "our fault"--a classic technique of brainwashing.
To give some examples: healthcare is over 18% of the nation's GDP, yet it makes up only 8.7% of the Consumer price Index. Hundreds of thousands of families have to declare bankruptcy as a result of crushing healthcare bills, but on the CPI components chart, it's a tiny little sliver just a bit more than recreation (5.7%).
Then there's education, which includes the $1.4 trillion borrowed by student debt-serfs--which is only part of the tsunami of cash gushing into the coffers of the higher-education cartel. Yet education & communication (which presumably includes the Internet / mobile telephone service cartel's soaring prices) is another tiny sliver of the CPI, just 6.6%, a bit more than fun-and-games recreation.
As for housing costs, former Soviet apparatchiks must be high-fiving the Federal agencies for their inventive confusion of reality with magical made-up "statistics." To estimate housing costs, the federal agency in charge of ginning up a low inflation number asks homeowners to guess what their house would rent for, were it being rented--what's known as equivalent rent.
Wait a minute--don't we have actual sales data for houses, and actual rent data? Yes we do, but those are verboten because they reflect skyrocketing inflation in housing costs, which is not allowed. So we use some fake guessing-game numbers, and the corporate media dutifully delivers the "pravda" that inflation is 1.6% annually--basically signal noise, while in the real world (as measured by the Chapwood Index) is running between 9% and 13% annually. How the Chapwood Index is calculated)
As the dissonance between the real world experienced by the citizenry and what they're told is "pravda" by the media reaches extremes, the media is forced to double-down on the propaganda, shouting down, marginalizing, discrediting, demonetizing and suppressing dissenters via character assassination, following the old Soviet script to a tee.
(Clearly, the CIA's agitprop sector mastered the Soviet templates and has been applying what they learned to the domestic populace. By all means, start by brainwashing the home audience so they don't catch on that the "news" is a Truman Show simulation.)
In 2014, Peter Pomerantsev, a British journalist born in the Soviet Union, published Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia which drew on his years working in Russian television to describe a society in giddy, hysterical flight from enlightenment empiricism. He wrote of how state-controlled Russian broadcasting “became ever more twisted, the need to incite panic and fear ever more urgent; rationality was tuned out, and Kremlin-friendly cults and hatemongers were put on prime time.”
Now, he’s written a penetrating follow-up, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality that is partly an effort to make sense of how the disorienting phenomena he observed in Russia went global. The child of exiled Soviet dissidents, Pomerantsev juxtaposes his family’s story — unfolding at a time when ideas, art and information seemed to challenge tyranny — with a present in which truth scarcely appears to matter.
“During glasnost, it seemed that the truth would set everybody free,” he writes. “Facts seemed possessed of power; dictators seemed so afraid of facts that they suppressed them. But something has gone drastically wrong: We have access to more information and evidence than ever, but facts seem to have lost their power.”
"Facts" are a funny thing when the data sources and massaging of that data are all purposefully opaque. Again, inflation is a lived-world example of how "official facts" are clearly massaged to support an essential narrative--that inflation is so low it's basically signal noise, while in the real world it has impoverished the bottom 95% to a startling (but unmentionable) degree.
This is the reality as inflation has eaten up wages' purchasing power: Families Go Deep in Debt to Stay in the Middle Class Wages stalled but costs haven’t, so people increasingly rent or finance what their parents might have owned outright Median household income in the U.S. was $61,372 at the end of 2017, according to the Census Bureau. When inflation is taken into account, that is just above the 1999 level.
We're all against "fake news," right? Until your content is deemed "fake news" in a "fake news" indictment without any evidence, trial or recourse. This is what happened to this site in the bogus PropOrNot propaganda campaign of 2016, in which every alternative-media website that questioned the "approved narratives" was labeled "fake news" in a classic propaganda trick of labeling dissenters as propagandists to misdirect the citizenry from the actual propaganda (PropOrNot), which by the way was heavily promoted on page one by Jeff Bezos' propaganda mouthpiece, The washington Post. (Who's your daddy, WP "journalists"?)
Meanwhile, back in reality, the primary source of data here on oftwominds.com is 1) the Federal Reserve data base (FRED) 2) IRS data and 3) content and charts posted by the cream of the U.S. corporate media Foreign Affairs, Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
Fake news, indeed. Those individuals who support the "approved narratives" and orthodoxies win gold stars, and so virtue-signaling is now the nation's most passionate hobby. (Shades of the Stasi...)
In the wake of the 1976 Church Committee revelations on the institutional lawlessness and corruption of the FBI and CIA, the idea that former CIA propagandists and spy masters would be on TV as "commentators" would have been laughed off as a bad joke. Yet here are Clapper, Brennan et al, the "most likely to lie, obfuscate, rendition and propagandize" individuals in the nation welcomed as "experts" who we should all accept as trustworthy Big Brother. (Ahem)
What if every employee in the corporate media who was paid (or coerced) by the FBI, NSA, CIA etc. had to wear a large colorful badge that read, "owned by the FBI/CIA"? Would that change our view of the validity of the "approved narratives"?
Welcome to the USSR: the United States of Suppression and Repression, where your views are welcome as long as they parrot "approved narratives" and the corporate-state's orthodoxies. "Facts" are only welcome if they lend credence to the "approved narratives" and orthodoxies.
For example, corporate earnings are rising. Never mind estimates were slashed, that was buried in footnotes a month ago. What matters is Corporate America will once again "beat estimates" by a penny, or a nickel, or gasp, oh the wonderment, by a dime, on earnings that were slashed by a dollar when "nobody was looking." Meanwhile, back in reality, the bottom 95% have been losing ground for two decades. But don't say anything, you'll be guilty of "fake news."



My recent books:
Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).


If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.
NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.
 
Thank you, Brian M. ($20), for your brilliantly generous contribution to this site-- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership.

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Posted by Charles Hugh Smith at 8:01 PM

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Economic Decay Leads to Social and Political Decay

If we want to make real progress, we have to properly diagnose the structural sources of the rot that is spreading quickly into every nook and cranny of the society and culture.
It seems my rant yesterday (Let Me Know When It's Over) upset a lot of people, many of whom felt I trivialized the differences between the parties and all the reforms that people believe will right wrongs and reduce suffering.
OK, I get it, there are differences, but if the "reform" doesn't change the source of the suffering and injustice, it's just window-dressing that makes the supporter feel virtuous. Want an example? Let's take the the "cruel and unusual punishment" for drug-law offenders, many of whom are African-American males whose lives are effectively hobbled by felony convictions and long sentences in America's Drug War Gulag.
You want a "reform" that actually gets to the root and solves the source of the injustice? It's simple: decriminalize all drugs and recognize drug use as a medical and social issue rather than a criminal-justice / Gulag issue. But that won't happen because too many people are making too much money off the Gulag, which is now a public and private-prison Gulag.
(Other advanced nations have had success with this structural change. Maybe we could learn something from their examples?)
If you're not ready to demand the full decriminalization of all drugs, then you're not really interested in solving the problem; you're just seeking virtue-signaling "reforms" that don't upset the power structure. And since any real solution necessarily disrupts the power structure benefiting from the status quo, all the painless "reforms" are ineffective.
In other words, either go big and change the power structure or go home and stop promoting your own virtue. This is why the economy is floundering despite all the warm and fuzzy headlines about stocks rising due to the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates: we collectively refuse to consider structural changes in the way "money" is created in our perverse system--perverse because the way "money" is created guarantees soaring inequality.
If you don't change the way "money" is created and distributed, you change nothing. Did the thousands of pages of financial regulations passed after the 2008-09 debacle reverse wealth and income inequality? The answer is no, wealth inequality is rising even faster after all the feel-good "reforms." The net result of the "reforms" is the costs of compliance for banks went up substantially, and that regulatory moat simply pushed risky lending outside the banking system.
In other words, the sources of systemic instability and wealth inequality weren't even touched by the "reforms." If the financial system were actually stable, why was the Federal Reserve only able to "normalize" interest rates and its bloated balance sheet for a few months after a decade of "growth"? Why is the Fed reverting to "emergency measures" again after a few brief months of "normalizing"?
If all these "reforms" were worth more than a bucket of spit, why isn't wealth inequality reversing?
Here's the way our "money" system works: banks borrow trillions of dollars into existence and loan it to debt serfs at high rates of interest. Central banks create "money" out of thin air and distribute it to the very top of the wealth-power pyramid: banks, financiers and corporations.
The only way to change this corrupt, exploitive system that generates inequality as its only possible output is to eliminate central banks and fractional reserve banking, and ban the aggregation of "too big to fail" entities: a system of 1,000 small banks is structurally far less vulnerable than five mega-banks that are tightly bound to virtually every risk-on asset in the entire system.
if you don't change the way "money" is created and distributed, you change nothing.
Since we're incapable of changing the sources of financial instability, fragility and inequality (because it would destabilize those benefiting from the status quo), we're doomed to watch our social and political systems decay and implode.
If we're honest--an increasingly rare and hazardous condition--we'd admit that the purchasing power of wages has fallen sharply for the bottom 95% in the past 19 years, while the concentration of wealth in the hands of the top .01% has skyrocketed, leaving the bottom 80% with few if any meaningful assets and only the top 5% reaping the gains in our "winner take most" economy.
This systemic decay in social mobility, positive social roles and financial security has eroded the social fabric as the implicit social contract between the powerful and the disenfranchised has unraveled: all the phony "reforms" of the past 19 years simply locked in insiders' "legal" pillaging.
The failure of the political system to recognize and rectify the broad-based decline of America's economy as experienced by the bottom 80% has eroded trust in politics as a "solution." Instead, people see the same powerful corporations buying influence with both parties, and tens of thousands of lobbyists in Washington DC writing the legislation passed by both parties (recall Nancy Pelosi's brief flash of honesty: "We have to pass the bill to know what's in it."). Anyone who believes this manifests the ideals of democracy is delusional.
To those I offended: please pardon my frustration with all the phony "reforms" that change nothing and thus serve to tighten the grip of the self-serving power structure on the throat of the nation.
Here's the unpalatable reality: The financial rot spread to the "real" economy two decades ago, and now the economic rot is decaying the social and political orders.
If we want to make real progress, we have to properly diagnose the structural sources of the rot that is spreading quickly into every nook and cranny of the society and culture. If we're not willing to disrupt those reaping the outsized benefits from the existing structures of wealth and power, we're deluding ourselves if we believe we're solving any problems at the source.
If you're still pissed off at me, please read the first pages of my new book (the first section is free); maybe you'll be less pissed off once you see where I'm coming from: Will You Be Richer or Poorer? Profit, Power and A.I. in a Traumatized World.



My recent books:
Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).


If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.
NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.
 
Thank you, Edward C. ($15), for your most generous contribution to this site-- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.
 

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Posted by Charles Hugh Smith at 6:41 PM

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Let Me Know When It's Over

Maybe it's my cheap seat or my general exhaustion, but the whole staged spectacle is beyond tiresome; I've had my fill.
Let me me know when it's over: yes, all of it: the impeachment, the trade dispute with China, U.S. involvement in Syria, the manic stock market rally and the 2020 election.
I'm not interested in following every twist and turn of the endless trauma-drama because none of it changes anything: Swapping Pence for Trump changes nothing, and then swapping Warren for Pence in 2020 doesn't change anything, either: the rot is too deep for any one person to do much beyond feel-good virtue-signaling and symbolic gestures (tax the billionaires, etc.)
The entire political process has devolved to staged battles in the Bread and Circuses Coliseum, entertainment that is highly profitable for the corporate media that whips the partisan mobs into a frenzy and highly useful for the status quo, as the sound and fury signifying nothing serves to distract the restive audience from the decline of everything of value: civil liberties, free expression, social mobility, free markets and so on.
The nation is in the deadly grip of cartels, monopolies and bureaucracies tasked with increasing and protecting the continuing concentration of wealth and power in financial and political elites.
We are eating our seed corn while borrowing profligately from the future to create an illusion of growth--an illusion that requires ever greater levels of intervention / manipulation and propaganda. Dissent must be buried or silenced, as the absurd disconnects from reality reach new extremes.
China is in the same boat, having borrowed $40 trillion into existence to fund a vast permanent construction project that has completed everything that is remotely useful and is now lumbering onward building ghost cities, stadiums, malls, highways across deserts, etc. because that worked so well for 30 years and policy makers don't have any sustainable alternatives. That malinvestment leads to default and bankruptcy is That Which Cannot Be Spoken, lest the entire financial house of cards collapses.
In other words, a trade agreement won't change anything: the world's major economies are careening toward a demographic / financial / energy cliff that can't be reversed with a trade deal or any other policy tweaks on the margins.
As for all our foreign entanglements--there's no ending them, no matter how disastrous because the Imperial Pretensions / Project has no intention of ceasing the multi-level interventions of postmodern imperialism, regardless of who's president.
Look, the clowns are harassing a chained bear--it's the Stock Market Circus, led by head clown Powellus Absurdus. The must-always-levitate-higher stock market is the comic relief for the dismal slaughter of innocents that makes up the rest of the entertainment. Ha-ha, what fun the clowns make of the enraged bear, until the bear break loose and then ha-ha, the clowns scatter.
The mood of the mob is fast becoming ugly; even the victors of the staged games are being booed. The attention span of the audience has dwindled to the point that few even wait for the outcome of the contest to scream for somebody's blood. The crowd is no longer satiated by gore or drama, and even the comedic interludes no longer mask the sense that the mob is one spark away from taking their rage and frustration out on each other--the vicarious thrills are no longer enough.
Maybe it's my cheap seat or my general exhaustion, but the whole staged spectacle is beyond tiresome; I've had my fill. So let me know when it's all over: the impeachment entertainment, the trade war drama, the stock market comedy, the election circus, all of it.
Until then, I'll look to the real world for amusement and distraction. The Bread and Circuses Coliseum is feeling increasingly deranged and dangerous.



My recent books:
Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).


If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.
NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.
 
Thank you, Derek T. ($5/month), for your splendidly generous pledge to this site-- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.
 

Read more...
Posted by Charles Hugh Smith at 10:56 PM
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