The Keys To Understanding the Collapse of the Status Quo: Credibility and Expectations

When expectations are raised to impossible heights based on the promise of exponential financialization, the credibility of the Status Quo is doomed.

Data is important, but not all trends can be quantified. Longtime readers know that I value data and often use charts to explain the forces of transition/collapse. But there are profound dynamics that are not easily quantified, instances in which quantification may obscure our understanding.

Credibility and expectations are two such dynamics. Both credibility and expectations are very real forces, despite their status as inner states immune to direct measurement.

Beneath the surface of financial statistics, the real bedrock of any political and financial Status Quo is its credibility in the minds of its subjects. Once the people lose faith in the system, it will collapse under its own weight, a process I described inWhen Belief in the System Fades (March 12, 2008).

The corollary to this structural need for highly motivated, dedicated people to work the gears is that if their belief in the machine fades, then the machine grinds to a halt.

The loss of credibility in the European Union, China, Japan and the U.S. is now in full swing. Credibility is like a sand castle; every false promise, every half-truth, every simulacra "solution," every secret deal, every surrender to vested interests, every politically expedient but ultimately disastrous "fix" removes a handful of sand from beneath the sand castle.

When enough sand has been removed, the castle collapses under its own weight.

The most interesting characteristic of this hollowing out process is the apparent stability of the Status Quo until the sudden "nobody saw it coming" collapse. In the current era, the Arab Spring is a regional example of this hollowing out of credibility; in the late 1980s, the process was exemplified by the "nobody saw it coming" implosion of the Soviet Empire. In 2007-08, the exposure of phantom wealth tracked a similar pathway, with apparently "solid" institutions imploding "unexpectedly."

Can anyone seriously claim the European Union, the European Central Bank and its alphabet-soup programs still retain a shred of credibility? Every EU/ECB "save" is fictitious, every "fix" expedient, every promise empty, every face-saving summit a living lie.

Ultimately, all the posturing, promises and saves come down to an impossibility:"rescuing" phantom assets purchased with astounding levels of debt by issuing even more astounding levels of debt.

Does anyone truly believe this absurdity is anything more than a transparent fraud designed to extend the life of a failed, corrupt system constructed on fantasies and lies?

Those with assets are fleeing for less fantastic and dangerous climes. The handful of French millionaires who are supposed to magically bail out a failed-state that absorbs 55% of GDP are busy transferring their assets out of France, a mass exodus of capital that is also playing out in China, where those who embraced the slogan "to get rich is glorious" are transferring their wealth, ill-gotten or well-earned, overseas.

So vast is this outflow of wealth that for the first time the outflow of capital from China exceeds the inflow of investment capital. The smart money is exiting, and the last batch of credulous "China story" rubes are dumping their capital down a rathole.

The same process is visible in global stock markets, where the smart money is selling. The loss of credibility in the digital bucket shop known as the U.S. stock market is evidenced by the outflow of some $200 billion over the past few years. To some degree, this has been offset by the influx of foreign capital desperate to escape the black hole of the euro, but the steady erosion of faith in the U.S. stock market is striking: as noted last week, 80% of the trading is either invisible, officially sanctioned manipulation or computers trading.

If the U.S. legal system weren't hopelessly compromised, the U.S. stock markets would be shuttered as corrupted beyond redemption.

Globally, the erosion of petrocapitalism (more on that later this week, via correspondent Ray W.) and the self-destruction sequence of financialization are laying waste to the credibility of politicos' promises. It was so easy to be a politico when financialization (exponential expansion of debt and leverage) raised the global tide, lifting all boats; extravagant promises based on everlasting "growth" could be issued, votes bought and the vested interests of crony-capitalist cartels and public employees lavishly rewarded.

In this environment, expectations were raised to impossible heights. Expectations are the yin to credibility's yang: together they form a unity, as credibility is linked to the fulfillment of expectations. If expectations are raised and then dashed, credibility is eroded and then lost entirely.

Expectations everywhere have been raised to heights so lofty that the air has become thin: all these expectations are like debt-money claims on the real world: the claims can expand to near-infinity, but the real world remains stubbornly limited.

As lofty expectations are unmet, the credibility of the Status Quo inevitably decays and implodes. We are as yet in the early stages of this process. Let's check back in 2014 to see if the sand castle of the Status Quo has collapsed in a heap of wet sand, or if it is merely sagging in the pre-collapse phase.

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Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change (print $25)
(Kindle eBook $9.95)

Read the Introduction (2,600 words) and Chapter One (7,600 words) for free.

We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: though our financial system seems unsinkable, its reliance on debt and financialization has already doomed it.We cannot know when the Central State and financial system will destabilize, we only know they will destabilize. We cannot know which of the State’s fast-rising debts and obligations will be renounced; we only know they will be renounced in one fashion or another.
The process of the unsustainable collapsing and a new, more sustainable model emerging is called revolution.Rather than being powerless, we hold the fundamental building blocks of power. We need neither permission nor political change to liberate ourselves. A powerless individual becomes powerful when he renounces the lies and complicity that enable the doomed Status Quo’s dominance.

Thank you, William G. ($5/month), for your splendidly generous subscription to this site-- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

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Part 14: The Smitten Negotiators

Here is this week's chapter of my serialized comic novel "Four Bidding For Love."(Those who find absurdist humor and adult situations offensive, please read no further.) 

     Though a bright sun had burned away the last of the morning overcast, a cool breeze negated the ray's warming effects; as Robin and Kylie paused in the shadow of the hulking old warehouse which housed the craft fair, Kylie shivered in her sleeveless blouse. Noticing her discomfort, Robin glanced about for a setting more protected from the breeze and sited in direct sun.
     The wooden pier met the Embarcadero's broad promenade in a narrow concrete plaza enlivened by skateboarders and gaily dressed tourists dodging the skateboarders and a free-ranging mélange of mendicants and musician-beggars who sought to extract some of the visitors' wealth before they hurried past.
     A sidewalk café’s sunny tables attracted Robin's eye, and he gestured to the cafe and said, "I missed lunch today. How about going there?"
     Kylie swung round and her glossy ponytail swished most deliciously behind her. "Actually, I missed lunch too, and I'm absolutely starving."
     "You should have said something," Robin admonished her, and she gave him a smile of satiric amusement. "I didn't want to distract you from these very serious negotiations."
     He chuckled and then assumed a mock sternness. "Don't tell me you're not a serious collector."
     "Perish the thought," she replied airily. "Though I am collecting unemployment checks."
     "Ah, so that's how you can conduct serious negotiations in mid-afternoon."
     "And what's your excuse?"
     Having reached the cafe's sunniest table, Robin pulled a chair out for Kylie and then sat down across from her. "I sell things to independent groceries that people don't really need."
     "Then you should be amazingly wealthy."
     Robin answered with a wan sigh. "Not in this economy. I make enough to rent a tiny studio and pay my taxes."
     "So how do you know Alexia?"
     "We're neighbors. How about you and Ross?"
     "Same."
     "Apparently neighbors make the best negotiators," Robin offered, and Kylie flashed him an exaggerated steely gaze. "Yes, ready and willing to drive the hardest bargain possible."
     Kylie's phone chirped and as Robin glanced at the menu she took the call.
     Ross's voice had a low hard edge. "He better be paying for that fancy lunch," he hissed. "We're on a tight budget. How are the negotiations going so far?"
     Openly facing Robin, she said in a voice easily audible to him, "He's a tough cookie. I don't think we'll get a one-to-one swap."
     Robin glanced up from the sheet and winked in acknowledgement of her tease.
     "Swine!" Ross grumbled. "Well, do your best, but get the T-20Z."
     No sooner had they ordered Vietnamese-style grilled oyster sandwiches with pommes frites than Robin's phone announced an incoming call with the first bars of Beethoven's violin Romance in F.
     "Don't let that little tart soften you up with a cheap lunch," Alexia's voice snapped harshly. "How are things going so far?"
     "We've got a very a tough cookie on our hands," Robin murmured, and Kylie's Mona Lisa smile acknowledged his ploy.
     "Don't tell me she wants something more than the poster?"
     "Let's just say we're very far apart right now," Robin said sternly, and Alexia's frustrated sigh was audible even to Kylie. "It's always the skinny little broads you have to watch out for," she said darkly. "If you get that poster, I'll owe you a huge, huge favor—you name it."
     Both smitten negotiators turned round and scanned the plaza, perhaps sensing the surveillance they could not spot. Ross was still lurking round the fair entrance, while Alexia had moved to a concrete planter and was sitting uncomfortably on the hard, cold rim beside an older German couple who were puzzling over a crisp new map of the city.
     "So how long do you think these difficult negotiations will take?" Kylie asked.
     "I would guess through dessert," Robin replied drolly.
     "I'm supposed to meet your Alexia at four," Kylie explained. "Just in case negotiations fail and I have to deal with the dragon lady herself."
     "Oh, she's not so bad as all that," Robin said. "At least she doesn't think throwing axes into boards is great fun."
     Kylie's amused expression fell into puzzlement before rebounding. "Oh, so you did a little surveillance this morning. Too bad you got it all wrong."
     "How so?"
     "That wasn't Ross tossing the hatchet around—that was his pal Dewey."
     Robin's surprise was evident. "You mean that wasn't Ross? But that's Ross's address."
     "Correct. Dewey dropped by to pick up the cute little axe that Ross had bought him on eBay."
     "Oh, what a tangled web assumptions weave," Robin said self-effacingly. "And so I take it Ross isn't quite as frightening as Dewey?"
     "He's smaller, but maybe scarier."
     "How so?"
     "Let's just say a collector's single-minded obsession can be pretty scary."
     Robin shook his head knowingly. "Funny, he and Alexia are two peas in a pod."
     "Then we'll really have to cut a deal today, won't we?"
     Though she knew it was none of her business, Kylie's curiosity about Alexia's sofa-based business jumped the bounds of politeness and she asked, "So how well do you know Alexia?"
     Robin shrugged. "I don't see a great deal of her, but we're friendly."
     "I know she has her boutique shoe business, but how does she afford such a tony address? Does she meet clients at home?"
     Robin appraised his charming tablemate and smiled. "So you've been doing a bit of sleuthing, too. I'm not around much in the daytime, but I know she only goes to her store in the afternoon."
     "Can she really make that good a living from used shoes?"
     Robin shrugged. "The question's crossed my mind, too. I don't know."
     Fixing a wry gaze on him, Kylie remarked, "She's single and good-looking, Are you sure you don't know her better than you're letting on?"
     Robin's smile was unambiguous, and he answered, "She's sexy, but the web isn't that tangled. How about you and Mr. Ross? Is he young and charming and sure to sweep you off your feet?"
     "No to all three," Kylie answered. "He is amusing, though, in a very neurotic way." As Kylie set off on a highly entertaining description of Ross's impossibly cluttered rooms and his absurd faith in the future value of old Sears catalogs, her mind was clicking through what she'd confirmed: Alexia was sexy, single, home most of the day, and could not possibly support herself by selling used shoes. It all hung together, Kylie concluded with secret satisfaction; I'm not a prude, but still, to see her in action—what would Ross think if he knew his nemesis's true profession?

Next: A Beggar's Banquet 


To read the previous chapters, visit the "Four Bidding For Love" home page.

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A note of thanks to those who buy the book: As an independent writer, book sales are a substantial part of my income. I receive no funding from a university, trust fund, hedge fund, think-tank or government agency. I self-publish my books as a financial necessity, as the small royalties (5% to 7.5% of the retail price) paid by publishers cannot support me during the long months it takes to write a book. Your purchase makes it possible for me to continue sharing ideas on the blog and in my books. Thank you.

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Four Bidding For Love (print, $16.99) 

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Money Down a Rathole: College, Healthcare, Housing

Households are dumping trillions in hard-earned income down ratholes with marginal returns: costly higher education, healthcare and housing.

What happens when households dump huge percentages of their stagnant incomes down marginal-return ratholes? They get less wealthy, which is exactly what we're seeing. The average American household has been persuaded that pouring money into costly higher education, healthcare and housing are all "investments" that offer high yields.

Sadly, the opposite is true: the returns on these stupendously costly investments is marginal or negative. Let's start with higher education, a topic I have discussed at length numerous times.

In essence, a college degree has lost its scarcity value, and in an era of labor arbitrage (a.k.a. offshoring and international competition), automation and relentless pressure to lower costs, even advanced degrees in law, science and business management that once were perceived as guarantees of secure high-paying employment no longer have scarcity value: the number of people with advanced degrees far exceeds the number of open positions.

Meanwhile, the education cartel has raised prices at a rate that is three times the rate of inflation. The credulous "buyers" of expensive higher education continue to pay absurdly inflated prices for degrees that have marginal value in the real-world marketplace.

We can see the trend in the following chart: wages for college-educated workers have stagnated even as the costs of college have skyrocketed.

Banks that build lavish headquarters soon perish. There is something about erecting monuments of self-glorification and excess that exudes a fatal hubris. Please consider the lavish buildings universities have constructed in the supreme confidence that millions of debt-serfs will continue to willingly dump tens of thousands of dollars in hard-earned cash and crushing loans for degrees with increasingly marginal returns.

Sickcare, a.k.a. "healthcare," is another rathole of waste, fraud and malinvestment. I have covered the sickcare cartel in depth; the key metric of this rathole's depth is that we spend roughly twice as much per capita (per person) as competing developed democracies on healthcare and get questionable returns on the trillions spent.

Buying a house was sold as a "can't miss" avenue to build middle class wealth.Instead, it became a $10 trillion rathole that either loses nominal value or stumbles along, unable to keep pace with the rising costs of ownership (property taxes, special assessments, etc.).

When owners finally give up the idea that the housing bubble can be reinflated, the house is sold for less than the mortgage to an investor who offers to rent the home to the previous owner for half the cost of the mortgage he was paying.

As higher education and sickcare costs rise, labor's share of the national income is declining. Households are earning less when measured in purchasing power, and the costs of college and sickcare skyrocket even as the returns on those "investments" become ever more marginal.

With income stagnant and trillions being dumped into the ratholes of higher education, sickcare and housing, it's little wonder that median net worth has plummeted. Americans saw wealth plummet 40 percent from 2007 to 2010: The Federal Reserve said the median net worth of families plunged by 39 percent in just three years, from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010. That puts Americans roughly on par with where they were in 1992.

I am sickened by the vast sums I see households squandering on hopelessly marginal "investments" in expensive higher education, healthcare and housing. I too am caught in the crony-capitalist/State cartel web of waste, skimming and fraud: we have paid tens of thousands of dollars on no-frills healthcare insurance (no eyewear, no dental, no meds, $50 co-pay) in the past decade, and received perhaps 3% of this sum in care.

But to not have health insurance in America is to invite financial ruin should we suffer some serious illness. The same "must-have" argument supports the conventional wisdom about education: a young person "must have" a college degree if they hope to escape a lifetime of poverty. The issue isn't education per se, it's the ever-rising cost of an education that has arguably lost value in a global job market that faces a vast surplus of educated workers and a scarcity of secure, high-paying jobs.

Simply put, minting 10,000 PhD chemists (for example) does not magically create 10,000 jobs for PhD chemists.

I see family after family making enormous sacrifices to send their children to costly colleges or make bloated mortgage payments with little hope of positive return; I see families who did not have health insurance struggling to pay off crushing bills for hospital care. I personally know people with science PhDs and post-doctoral experience at top universities competing for scarce academic/research jobs against fields of 60 or more other qualified candidates.

Yes, education and healthcare are necessary, but cartels have leveraged this necessity into vast skimming operations that yield marginal returns even as their costs balloon without limit.

Housing is also a necessity, but it does not follow that it is a high-yield investment. Rather, it has become a sinkhole for hard-earned, scarce cash.

Ratholes are not investments, regardless of what the cartels profiting from the Status Quo claim.

Entries and email may be sporadic this week due to other commitments.

---

Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change (print $25)
(Kindle eBook $9.95)

Read the Introduction (2,600 words) and Chapter One (7,600 words) for free.

We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: though our financial system seems unsinkable, its reliance on debt and financialization has already doomed it.We cannot know when the Central State and financial system will destabilize, we only know they will destabilize. We cannot know which of the State’s fast-rising debts and obligations will be renounced; we only know they will be renounced in one fashion or another.
The process of the unsustainable collapsing and a new, more sustainable model emerging is called revolution.Rather than being powerless, we hold the fundamental building blocks of power. We need neither permission nor political change to liberate ourselves. A powerless individual becomes powerful when he renounces the lies and complicity that enable the doomed Status Quo’s dominance.

Thank you, Robert B. ($100), for your outrageously generous contribution to this site-- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...

A Common-Sense View of the Stock Market

Common sense leads us to the "obvious" conclusion that the U.S. stock market is a rigged skimming operation that is essentially a form of legalized, officially sanctioned fraud.

Active traders and professional money managers already know how the U.S. stock market actually works, but Joe and Jane Citizen, whose pensions generally depend on the market in some way, typically do not. This entry is for them. Today's financial markets are endlessly complex, and this complexity implicitly serves to mask the true nature of market operations.

Most of this complexity can be boiled away with zero loss of understanding. Indeed, manipulating this complexity is what earns the big bucks on Wall Street, while boiling it away earns the big bucks for commentators and analysts. Thus complexity serves the financial industry extremely well.

The first and most important thing to understand about the U.S. stock market is how few humans are actually involved in the decision to buy or sell large blocks of shares. Machines do most of the trading. High-frequency trading (HFT) computers buy and sell millions of shares in milliseconds: Zero Hedge: From Chicago To New York And Back In 8.5 Milliseconds:

The reason why little if anything can and will be done to fix the persistent threat to capital markets that is HFT is two fold: i) none of the current regulators understand anything about modern market topology, and ii) HFT is so embedded in markets that unrooting it would result in a complete reboot of "fair" stock valuation.That said it is always amusing to observe as more and more people get in on the scam that is the "equity market", now completely dominated by robots which do nothing but accelerate and perpetuate momentum moves - after all it is all they can do in lieu of being able to read financials, or anticipate events. Remember: it is always the market that makes the news, never the other way around.

In essence, HFT is a gigantic skimming operation that exploits tiny differences in the bid/ask prices of stocks to buy and sell millions of shares for slivers of profit that are multiplied by millions of shares traded in seconds. Raging Bulls: How Wall Street Got Addicted to Light-Speed Trading (Wired Magazine, via Zero Hedge).

Other computers are programmed by math-wizard "quants" to trade momentum and technical signals. Since everyone in today's markets has access to the same technical triggers and data, computers are programmed to respond to these signals.

For example, days with large pre-market buying of S&P 500 (SPX) futures contracts tend to open up, so trading robots will buy at the open and ride the momentum up. If the market rallies by 3 p.m., the odds of it closing higher are very high. This is how keying on momentum yields low-risk profits if the trading involves millions of shares that are held for microseconds, seconds, or minutes.

Here's another example: if technical analysis (TA) has identified SPX 1,366 as a key level, then once the market surges above 1,366, the trading robots will buy into the move.

The second important thing to know about the stock market is that central banks and governments intervene as buyers to trigger rallies and put floors under declines. As noted above, huge buying of futures triggers opening rallies. It is a poorly kept secret that central banks or officially sanctioned but cloaked "plunge protection teams" are doing the buying.

Once again it is relatively easy to steer the market because humans and computers alike are keyed on certain well-known technical signals. For example, if the 200-day moving average of the SPX is 1,300, and the index dips down to that level, computers are programmed to sell if it breaks below that support level or buy if it spikes above it.

Authorities need only issue massive buy orders at these critical levels to "stick-save" markets from declines.

As regular folks continue to pull their money out of the market, either tiring of losses and volatility or recognizing it is rigged to their disadvantage, trading volumes have declined, making official but "secret" intervention both cheaper and easier.

Just as the U.S. stock market now depends on high-frequency trading, it also depends on official intervention to stop any decline.

How is it legal for HFT computers to skim profits that are unavailable to human traders? Clearly, this is legalized fraud, or if you prefer, embezzlement.

The third thing to know about U.S. stock market is that its operations are opaque, invisible, and hidden from the citizenry and non-Elite human traders. How much of the market volume is computers skimming via HFT can only be estimated. Official buying to spark rallies or stop declines dead in their tracks is also hidden from the citizenry.

Huge volumes of shares are traded off the public exchanges in so-called "dark pools" that are also hidden from the citizenry and non-Elite human traders.

How "fair and open" can an exchange be when its critical operations are hidden from public view? Answer: it cannot be fair and open. It is rigged to favor Elite players, who are allowed to legally skim billions of dollars in profits by means which are unavailable to non-Elites investors.

This vast skimming operation is enabled, enforced and supported by the Central State and the (privately owned and operated) Central Bank of the U.S., the Federal Reserve.

The Pareto distribution can help us understand how the market really works.Though it may well be that a mere 10% of stock market volume is human-traded shares, let's assume the 80/20 rule applies and 80% of the shares are being traded by 20% of the traders, most of whom are machines.

Taking the distribution one step further, we can estimate that 64% of the volume is executed by a mere 4% of the players.

The fourth and last thing to know about U.S. stock market is that this skimming and intervention have left the market extremely vulnerable to collapse. Official but secret intervention is called the "Bernanke put," meaning that the Fed will intervene to keep the market aloft, regardless of what is happening in the real world of the global economy.

This faith in central-planning manipulation of the market has encouraged an extremely high level of complacency in traders; they confidently trade the market higher, knowing that the Fed will never let it fall.

But this leaves the market exquisitely vulnerable to high-volume selloffs that roll right over the Fed's rather modest buying power.

Since HFT and quant trading robots are programmed to buy and sell at commonly-known technical signals, if certain levels are broken to the downside, the selling will quickly avalanche as trading machines issue sells.

Leaving 80% of the volume to programmed computers leaves the markets extremely vulnerable to cascading momentum selling. If you live by momentum trading, you also die by momentum trading.

If you wanted to design a system that was eventually guaranteed to crash, then you'd design a system that is dependent on opaque official intervention and HFT/quant computer trading for 80% of its volume. That's the system the Central State, the Fed and the financial Elites are supporting and enforcing because it's an enormously profitable skimming operation that is also a supremely useful tool for managing perceptions: if the market trend is always rising, then the economy must be improving.

This is of course a false correlation: the market is hitting highs while the global economy is unraveling.

Beneath the surface stability, the Fed, the State and the financial Elites have constructed a terribly unstable system for skimming unearned wealth and propping up a propaganda facade of economic "improvement."

If watching a tiny Elite skim billions of dollars from the real economy with the aid of the Fed is your idea of "improvement," then by all means, buy the rally. Just be ready to sell in 10 milliseconds.

Entries and email may be sporadic this week due to other commitments.

---

Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change (print $25)
(Kindle eBook $9.95)

Read the Introduction (2,600 words) and Chapter One (7,600 words) for free.

We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: though our financial system seems unsinkable, its reliance on debt and financialization has already doomed it.We cannot know when the Central State and financial system will destabilize, we only know they will destabilize. We cannot know which of the State’s fast-rising debts and obligations will be renounced; we only know they will be renounced in one fashion or another.
The process of the unsustainable collapsing and a new, more sustainable model emerging is called revolution.Rather than being powerless, we hold the fundamental building blocks of power. We need neither permission nor political change to liberate ourselves. A powerless individual becomes powerful when he renounces the lies and complicity that enable the doomed Status Quo’s dominance.

Thank you, Bill S. ($50), for your outstandingly generous contribution to this site-- I am greatly honored by your ongoing support and readership.

Read more...

America 2012: Oh Say Can You Eat

A fast-food ad slogan perfectly encapsulates America's devolution.

A new fast-food marketing slogan, "Oh say can you eat," a play on the national anthem's opening line, perfectly captures the pervasive devolution of America's value system. This advert slogan was undoubtedly designed to be amusing or "cute" in playing off the national anthem, but the campaign's real message is that patriotism is now identified with gorging oneself on junk food.

Our national identity has merged with the consumption of junk food and the wholesale gratification of similar addictions that provide little pleasure beyond satiation, all served up by a marketing complex devoted to stimulating wants based on alienation from body, soul and ultimately from reality itself.

We live in an America that has been persuaded to worship convenience and gratification as the primary drivers of life. Gratification of natural hungers (for food, sex, primacy, etc.) have been transformed by marketing into product lines measured by convenience: real food is bothersome and inconvenient, fast food is gloriously convenient.

One step down the reification ladder leads to the implicit message that anything inconvenient is "bad" and should be replaced by something that is tasty and convenient--including civics, jobs, health and of course eating. Getting a job should be convenient, as in "I have a college degree, now give me a good-paying job." Finding a market need and filling it with a good or service that is faster, better and cheaper is terribly inconvenient, and so having a job delivered like a fast food meal (i.e. with a minimum of delay and effort) has become a "right" that the Savior State should fill.

Health should also be convenient, delivered by a pill or quick procedure, also paid by the Savior State, or some other mysterious source of money (the Martian Central Bank would be welcomed should they offer to pay our 18%-of-GDP Medicare bills).

Becoming fit is horribly inconvenient, not to mention bothersome, and so fitness should be replaced by a pill. If it isn't, then it should be, for someone's inalienable "right" to convenience has been violated.

Convenient gratification of various addictions and the avoidance of any consequence from the pursuit of those addictive conveniences now characterize our national value system. If anything remains inconvenient, such as understanding the causes of our financial and spiritual rot, then it should be packaged into a convenient, tasty confection for our easy consumption. If there are inconvenient consequences from our indulgence, then the "government should do something" to eliminate those consequences, without raising taxes or imposing some other inconvenience on the populace.

Oh say can you eat. This is marketing perfection, but not in the way it was intended. A nation that worships consumption and convenience is well and truly doomed, regardless of the exertions of its Savior State and its corporate marketing prowess.

Entries and email may be sporadic this week due to other commitments.

---

Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change (print $25)
(Kindle eBook $9.95)

Read the Introduction (2,600 words) and Chapter One (7,600 words) for free.

We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: though our financial system seems unsinkable, its reliance on debt and financialization has already doomed it.We cannot know when the Central State and financial system will destabilize, we only know they will destabilize. We cannot know which of the State’s fast-rising debts and obligations will be renounced; we only know they will be renounced in one fashion or another.
The process of the unsustainable collapsing and a new, more sustainable model emerging is called revolution.Rather than being powerless, we hold the fundamental building blocks of power. We need neither permission nor political change to liberate ourselves. A powerless individual becomes powerful when he renounces the lies and complicity that enable the doomed Status Quo’s dominance.

Thank you, Ralph W. ($50), for your superbly generous contribution to this site-- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...