Prepare for Winter

Realism must precede optimism or the optimism will collapse as the tsunami of reality comes ashore.

It's time to prepare materially and psychologically for a winter unlike any other in our lifetimes.

Here's the view from 30,000 feet:

1. The stock market and the general zeitgeist of optimism have soared based on expectations that the real-world economy and efforts to suppress Covid would also track a V-shaped recovery.

While GDP did make a V-shaped recovery, GDP (gross domestic product) is a measure of flows and consumption, not a measure of the socio-economic "balance sheet." GDP measures the money flowing through accounts but not the "assets" of a functioning society: functional institutions and infrastructure and the well-being and security of the citizenry.

Thus GDP soars while the real-world economy and society are hollowed out by economic inequality, declining health, financial insecurity, rising prices for essentials, dysfunctional institutions and decaying infrastructure.

Simply put, GDP doesn't measure what's important; it creates destructive incentives to squander resources and borrow staggering sums to support more consumption. This systemic flaw in what we measure has long been recognized by mainstream economists such as Joseph Stiglitz. Measuring What Counts: The Global Movement for Well-Being (Joseph E. Stiglitz et al.)

So the recovery of GDP doesn't mean the real-world economy has been restored to pre-Covid settings. GDP is a deceptive metric that's masking a free-fall in our well-being, security and social cohesion.

2. Just as GDP is a deceptive measure of the economy, counting Covid fatalities is equally deceptive: a declining death count is good news, of course, but that ignores the other effects of Covid, particularly organ damage and "Long-Covid" debilitation, not just in people with pre-existing conditions and the elderly but in healthy middle-aged and even some young people.

As this article from the University of California - San Francisco (UCSF)--one of the world's top healthcare research centers--explains, this is the result of Covid being a hybrid virus. Initially it was thought to be a respiratory virus like influenza, but it is now clear that Covid infects and disrupts many other systems in the body--endothelial, digestive, the heart and other organs. We Thought It Was Just a Respiratory Virus: We were wrong.

What We Know So Far about How COVID Affects the Nervous System (scientificamerican.com)

Risk for In-Hospital Complications Associated with COVID-19 and Influenza (CDC) "Patients with COVID-19 had almost 19 times the risk for acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) than did patients with influenza. The percentage of COVID-19 patients who died while hospitalized (21.0%) was more than five times that of influenza patients (3.8%), and the duration of hospitalization was almost three times longer for COVID-19 patients."

The precise pathways and mechanisms of these long-term consequences are under intense study. Initial estimates are that about 1 in 20 people who came down with Covid are suffering some long-term consequences. These consequences--for example, damage to the heart--are typically only identifiable by exams and tests: superficially, the damage is not visible.

What is known is that Long-Covid affects females more than males, it affects otherwise healthy people who were previously fit and active, and tens of thousands of people have reported long-term symptoms of extreme fatigue, brain fog, etc.

There are no treatments yet and the prognosis is cloudy. There is no clarity yet on how long these problems may last or if damage to organs is permanent.

So the percentage of people dying from complications of Covid may not be the number that most accurately reflects the disease's toll: the number of people with Long-Covid might be the more accurate reflection of the toll and the seriousness of the challenges ahead.

At 12, She's a Covid 'Long Hauler'

3. Many see herd immunity as the eventual solution to Covid. History suggests this isn't as neat and tidy as many expect. The first wave of a novel pathogen may appear to reach herd immunity, only to re-emerge a few years later with renewed contagious vigor.

While it's far too early to reach any definitive conclusions, preliminary evidence suggests natural immunity might decay within 6 months. This is supported by documented cases of re-infection, and in some cases the second infection is much worse than the initial infection. What reinfections mean for COVID-19 (The Lancet)

This evidence suggests herd immunity might not be the solution many expect.

Herd immunity is reached around 60% or higher, which suggests 200 million Americans would need to be infected to reach herd immunity.

4. The death rate for Covid is low for the entire populace, but it rises sharply for those with pre-existing conditions such as metabolic disorders (diabetes, pre-diabetes, etc.) and age (over 65).

A recent study on at-risk patients (ages 60 to 72) in 38 hospitals found about 30% had died within 60 days. Sixty-Day Outcomes Among Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19 (Annals of Internal Medicine)

The problem is these at-risk populations are not small. There are 34 million people with diabetes, and an estimated 88 million Americans are pre-diabetic. 53 million Americans are 65 or older, and roughly 7 million are 80 and over.

There is obvious overlap in these categories--people may be diabetic at age 70--but even with the overlap, these at-risk populations are roughly half the entire population (165 million people).

As this article from Nature.com explains, the infection fatality ratio (IFR) rises from near-zero for young people to 3.1% for 65-74 year olds and 11.6% for those 75 and older. The coronavirus is most deadly if you are older and male — new data reveal the risks (Nature.com)

According to this report from the American Diabetes Association, the data from early reporting indicates the death rate for those with diabetes was 7.3%.

COVID-19 in People With Diabetes: Urgently Needed Lessons From Early Reports (American Diabetes Association)

As a thought experiment, let's apply these death rates to at-risk populations at the "herd immunity" minimum of 60% of the populace:

A. 34 million diabetics X 60% = 20 million X 7% = 1.4 million deaths

B. 65-74 age group (28.6 million) X 60% = 17 million X 3.1% = 553,000 deaths

C. 75-84 group (14.2 million) + 85+ group (6.4 million) = 20.6 million X 60% = 12.4 million X 11.6% = 1.4 million deaths

This adds up to 3.3 million deaths without even counting any deaths in the populace younger than 65 or among the 88 million people with metabolic disorders.

The data suggests that 200 million infected people (60% of the U.S. population) would lead to about 3 million deaths and 10 million cases of Long-Covid.

Let's say better treatments and self-isolation will cut the deaths to 2.5 million. That would be extremely positive, but what about the Long-Covid cases? The system has yet to even start collecting comprehensive data. Thus many of the eventual consequences and costs will remain unknown.

5. Hospitalizations are rising rapidly. Hospitalizations and deaths are trending upward.

Yet experts warn that the variability may simply end with the virus resurging to high levels across the entire country. "I don't see any location in the United States that's going to be free of a major increase in cases," he said. "And I think we're just getting started."

When high case counts emerge in communities, the spillover to surrounding populations is rapid, Dr. Osterholm said. The situation, he noted, can be likened to a "coronavirus forest fire."

"A forest fire never burns evenly everywhere," he said. "But if the embers are still around, they ignite again and then that area does burn eventually. And I think that that's what we're seeing here."

"We're going to see much less evidence of regionalization of this virus over the course of the next several weeks," said Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota. "I think this is going to ultimately end up being an entire country on fire."

6. If you look at the chart of hospitalizations, the healthcare system in many locales was experiencing extreme stress at 60,000 hospitalizations, and so the rise above this level could trigger second-order effects which could cascade into a breakdown.

As this report from the CDC explains, a significant number of healthcare workers have been infected and hospitalized, and many died. COVID-19–Associated Hospitalizations Among Health Care Personnel (CDC)

Should the number of healthcare workers who contract the disease or burn out due to extended shifts and exhaustion rise beyond a certain point, the ability to provide care from everyone who is seriously ill may become severely impaired.

So there are two limiting factors on care as the number of hospitalizations soars: the number of beds available in Covid-secure wards and the number of healthcare workers available to provide care.

If either of these limits are reached, death rates may rise as patients are unable to get all the care they would have received had cases and hospitalizations not exceeded the capacity of the system.

7. There are lag times in effects and reporting:
--3 weeks: infection-to-death
--4 weeks: deaths reporting
--4 weeks: propagation to older age groups
--8 weeks: infection, partial recovery/discharged from ICU, death

Note the almost exponential rise in cases being reported. We can anticipate a surge in hospitalizations, deaths and spread to older populations in the weeks and months ahead.

8. Vaccines: I provided an analysis and numerous links on the many uncertainties surrounding vaccines in Everything You Don't Want to Know About Covid Vaccines (Because You Can't Be Bullish Anymore) (November 11, 2020)

Covid-19 Vaccine Protocols Reveal That Trials Are Designed To Succeed (Forbes.com) by William A. Haseltine

9. The virus remains highly contagious. Wedding and Birthday Party Infect 56, Leaving Nearly 300 in Quarantine (New York Times)

The projections presented here are basic math, yet few seem to have done the simple math, perhaps because the results are sobering and don't fit the desired "optimism."

Realism must precede optimism or the optimism will collapse as the tsunami of reality comes ashore.

No one knows the future, but current trends suggest all the euphoric expectations of a fast, painless recovery were tragically misplaced.

Here is the chart I prepared a week after Covid-19 hit the news in late January. Reality has been tracking my first-out-of-the-gate projection with remarkable coherence.



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Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($5 (Kindle), $10 (print), ( audiobook): Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake $1.29 (Kindle), $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

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"The Great Reset" Already Happened

Put another way: the elites have cannibalized the system so thoroughly that there's nothing left to steal, exploit or cannibalize.

The global elites' techno-fantasy of a completely centralized future, The Great Reset, is addressed as a future project. Too bad it already happened in 2008-09. The lackeys and toadies tasked with spewing the PR are 12 years too late, and so are the critics listening to the PR with foreboding.

Simply put, events outran our understanding of them. The future already manifested while we were trying to cram the present arrangement into an obsolete conceptual framework.

In broad-brush, the post-World War II era ended around 1970. The legitimate prosperity of 1946-1970 was based on cheap oil controlled by the U.S. and the hegemony of the U.S. dollar. Everything else was merely decoration.

The Original Sin to hard-money advocates was America's abandonment of the gold standard in 1971, but this was the only way to maintain hegemony. Maintaining the reserve currency is tricky, as the nation issuing the reserve currency has to supply the global economy with enough of the currency to grease commerce and stock central bank reserves around the world.

As the global economy expanded, the only way the U.S. could send enough dollars overseas was to run trade deficits, which in a gold standard meant the gold reserves would go to zero as trading partners holding dollars would exchange the currency for gold.

So the choice was: give up the reserve currency and the hegemony of the U.S. dollar by jacking up the dollar's value so high that imports would collapse, or accept that hegemony was no longer compatible with the gold standard. It wasn't a difficult decision: who would give up global hegemony, and for what?

Many other dynamics changed around the same time: social, cultural, political. These charts reflect the end of the postwar era and the ushering in of a new era.

Again in broad-brush, the key economic dynamic was the decline of labor's share of the economy in favor of capital. Those who had only their labor to sell lost purchasing power, while those who could borrow or access capital benefited enormously. The charts below tell the story: labor's share of the national income has stairstepped lower for 50 years (since 1970) while the super-wealthy's share has outpaced everyone else 15-fold.

The dominance of financial capital is visible in the third chart, as private-sector financial assets are now 6 times the nation's GDP, double the percentage of the postwar era.

This capital-friendly era was rocket-boosted by financialization in the 1980s, technology in the 1990s and globalization in the early 21st century. You can see each advance of capital's top tier--the top 0.1%--in the chart below: the top 0.1% first pulled away in the 1980s financialization, stutter-stepped in the early 1990s and then exploded higher as technology fueled capital's leverage and exposure to the gains reaped by computers and the Internet.

Alas, these extremes are not stable or sustainable, and so each wave ends in a devastating crash. The income of the top 0.1% took a hit as the dotcom bubble burst, but then China's entry into the WTO saved the day as rampant globalization and additional extremes of financial leverage and fraud boosted their fortunes in the 2000s.

The dual extremes of financialization and globalization created the 2008 bubble, and its collapse almost took down the entire global capital house of cards. Central banks, ultimately financed by the Fed to the tune of $29 trillion, twice the size of America's entire GDP, instituted The Great Reset under the usual guise of "emergency measures" which then became permanent policies.

The Great Reset led to the hyper-centralization of control over the global economy's money as central banks coordinated unprecedented money-printing and financial repression, which includes zero-interest rate policies (ZIRP), as the debt-bubble would pop if rates aren't nailed down to zero.

All the PR being spewed about The Great Reset is the final frantic flailing of a system that's drowning in its own excesses. The 50-year long era of the few enriching themselves as the expense of the many has ended, for the same reason eras of extreme exploitation always end--the elites got too greedy and overshot the economy's ability to sustain their rapidly expanding share of the income and wealth.

Put another way: the elites have cannibalized the system so thoroughly that there's nothing left to steal, exploit or cannibalize. The hyper-centralized global money control has run out of rope as the cheap oil is gone, debts have ballooned to the point there is no way they'll ever be paid down, and the only thing staving off collapse is money-printing, which holds the seeds of its own demise.

Allow me to summarize the only way The Great Reset envisioned by global elites can actually manifest: The Martians arrive towing huge meteorites of pure lithium and gold, and rather than incinerating the global elites, they hand the global elites the meteorites to further their concentration of wealth and power.

Short of that science fiction, this sucker's going down. The Great Reset has already run its course after 12 long years of artifice, fraud and trickery. So global elite shills, lackeys, factotums, toadies and apparatchiks--prepare for your Wil-E-Coyote moment of truth.









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Recent Podcasts:

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A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook coming soon) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
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Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($5 (Kindle), $10 (print), ( audiobook): Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake $1.29 (Kindle), $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

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Everything You Don't Want to Know About Covid Vaccines (Because You Can't Be Bullish Anymore)

In such a highly polarized, politicized environment, is such a scrupulously objective study even possible?

Now that we've had the happy-talk about Pfizer's messenger-RNA (mRNA) vaccine (and noted that Pfizer's CEO sold the majority of his shares in the company immediately after the happy-talk), let's dig into messenger-RNA (mRNA) vaccines which are fast approaching regulatory approval.

Some people have concluded vaccines are not safe, regardless of their source or mechanisms. These people will never take any Covid vaccine.

Others will also decline a vaccine because they've concluded Covid is overblown.

Fair enough. But many other people conclude Covid is dangerous, partly because so little is known about its long-term effects (Long-Covid, Long-Haulers). Covid's low mortality rate may be distracting us from its other more insidious consequences.

Authorities desperate to restart the economy and reassure the populace are poised to approve novel vaccines using a new mechanism to generate an immune response: messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines.

I am not a scientist or clinician but I have followed scientific developments closely for the past 40 years and so I have a basic understanding of this new pathway.

I'm posting links below to articles that describe the mRNA vaccines in greater detail. All these sources are respected journals or media outlets.

Vaccines against viruses work by introducing an inactive virus or viral particle into the bloodstream where this new foreign particle activates our immune system to create antibodies against this specific virus. If the live virus infects us at some later date, our immune systems are already primed to identify and destroy the dangerous virus.

Messenger RNA was only discovered in 1961. DNA is the set of instructions, the "blueprint", and mRNA is a key part of the cellular machinery that copies a strand of the DNA "blueprint" and builds a protein based on the DNA instructions.

Messenger RNA vaccines don't introduce a viral particle to our immune systems--they deliver cellular instructions (i.e. a "blueprint") for a viral particle which our cells reproduce once the mRNA enters our cells and delivers the "blueprint" for assembling the viral particle.

Here's a recent description of this mechanism from The Atlantic magazine:
"Moderna works on RNA vaccines--injecting not proteins but the molecules of nucleic acid that encode the instructions for building the proteins. Your cells use RNA to instruct their builders to make proteins all the time; the RNA is like the blueprints or schematics that tell the workers on the factory floor what to build."
COVID-19 Vaccines Are Coming, but They're Not What You Think. (March 2020)

And here's another description by a doctor writing in the independent.co.uk:
This is the hard-to-swallow truth about a future coronavirus vaccine (and yes, I'm a doctor)
"Moderna's messenger RNA vaccine, on the other hand, is completely new and revolutionary to say the least. It uses a sequence of genetic RNA material produced in a lab that, when injected into your body, must invade your cells and hijack your cells' protein-making machinery called ribosomes to produce the viral components that subsequently train your immune system to fight the virus. In this case, Moderna's mRNA-1273 is programmed to make your cells produce the coronavirus' infamous spike protein that gives the virus its crown-like appearance ('corona' is crown in Latin) for which it is named."

Many in the field see the potential for mRNA to deliver superior vaccines because they can generate T-Cell responses as well as the conventional immune responses to viral particles. They are also easier and cheaper to manufacture, and may be stable at room temperature for a week, unlike the Pfizer vaccine which must be refrigerated at extremely cold temperatures.

The Super Cold Covid Vaccine Distribution Problem

But these are the first mRNA vaccines ever seeking approval for human use, and so there are no long-term studies of what might go wrong down the road.

One concern is the possibility that mRNA vaccines could trigger a generalized immune response (interferon, etc.) rather than just a specific immune response to a specific virus (antibodies, etc.).

Our immune system is extremely complex and I make no claim to have a complete understanding of it. That said, the immune system has several levels of response. A conventional vaccine triggers the production of a specific antibody that "recognizes" a specific invader. In other cases, the immune system can activate an "all hands on deck" generalized response.

The danger is that the mRNA could trigger an "all hands on deck" response that could then cascade into autoimmune disorders in which the immune system goes haywire and starts attacking the body's own cells rather than limiting its destructive capabilities to foreign viruses, bacteria, etc.

One of my MD correspondents recently sent me an email which encapsulates these concerns.

"I've been reading about the Pfizer vaccine.

I've known for a while that it is an mRNA vaccine but it just hit me that it will be the first mRNA vaccine ever approved for human use.

If COVID was a 'Steven King' (kills-everyone) virus, sure, go for it--prevent the deaths and take what comes.

But mortality is low, acute treatments are improving, transmission is preventable, and the greatest risk now appears to be longer term morbidity.

mRNA vaccines by the very nature of their components elicit an interferon response that triggers generalized autoimmunity. This may, in fact, be part of the mechanism of longer term morbidity associated with COVID infection.

Mass introduction of mRNA strands into the populations may indeed reduce acute COVID morbidity and mortality, but how many autoimmune complications will result?

No one knows.

It's never been done before--ever.

It would take years of carefully controlled and limited trials across all ethnic groups to find out.

Is the net good from a vaccine that fewer people die up front but a whole lot more folks suffer long term problems on the back end--especially (as seems likely) boosters will be required.

Shouldn't there be a discussion before 'immunity passports' are mandated?

For that matter, shouldn't we discover how long natural immunity lasts before trying to provoke induced immunity?

I'm dumbstruck that, with the proposed approval timetable, this path is even being considered at a population level, let alone considered without an extensive discussion.

First do no harm."

Indeed. And then there's the self-interest of those seeking rapid approval of the vaccines. As noted in the independent.co.uk article referenced above:
"But perhaps the most important question to ask about Moderna's new messenger RNA vaccine is not scientific nor technical but one of ethics and morality. When it comes to the United States and its private healthcare system, pharmaceutical companies have a long and sordid history of putting profits over people and human lives."

Why would anyone trust that Big Pharma corporations will act in the public good rather than in pursuit of maximizing profits?

The mad rush of profiteering Big Pharma corporations to own the first vaccine approved will create needless and potentially dangerous confusion about which vaccine actually works best over the longer term.

First, A Vaccine Approval. Then "Chaos and Confusion." (NY Times)
"It has not yet dawned on hardly anybody the amount of complexity and chaos and confusion that will happen in a few short months," said Dr. Gregory Poland, the director of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic.

"I can see people reading a lot into even minor differences that could just be statistical chance," said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida."

The FDA has set the bar very low for Covid vaccines: the vaccine only has to be effective for 50% of those taking it to be approved. But as noted above, Big Pharma companies have mastered the art of statistical legerdemain that skew results so they look far more conclusive than they actually are.

If you've actually pored over Phase III drug trial results (I have), you find uncertainties have been papered over with statistical analysis techniques. Many medications are approved that only work less than half of the time in the real world.

Another healthcare professional correspondent recommended the book Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact In America as a source for understanding how study data are manipulated to get the desired results.

The danger here in my view is the poorly-informed, politically polarized general public will assume a Covid vaccine is essentially 100% effective like a measles vaccine, when the real-world efficacy might be considerably less certain. Maybe the vaccines will only work for 75% of the recipients. How will anyone be able to tell if they're one of the 25% for whom the vaccine offers only false confidence?

No one knows how long the immunity generated by these vaccines will last. These two uncertainties generate insurmountable doubts, very likely muddying the waters and making it more difficult to ascertain which vaccines actually work and for how long they offer immunity.

America's choice to optimize healthcare profiteering (a.k.a. "shareholder value") over the public good is about to reap a whirlwind. Our educational deficiencies won't help, as a populace which has a limited grasp of statistics and basic biology has few means to sort the wheat of real-world results from the chaff of self-interested PR.

Maybe the mRNA vaccines will fulfill their promise the first time out of the gate, with near-perfect efficacy and long-lasting immunity. The problem is it will take a long time and careful, de-politicized, independently confirmed studies to reach any trustworthy conclusions.

In such a highly polarized, politicized environment, is such a scrupulously objective study even possible? In a system that rewards self-serving statistical analysis and "first to market," a system where Big Pharma insiders reap millions of dollars selling their stock on the PR of happy-talk, is it even possible to have truly objective studies of a vaccine's efficacy and long-term effects?

It seems doubtful. And that's a problem that extends far beyond the unknowns of mRNA vaccines.

Here are some links on mRNA vaccines:

The Trump Administration Shut a Vaccine Safety Office Last Year. What's the Plan Now?

mRNA vaccines -- a new era in vaccinology (Nature, January 2018)

Five things you need to know about: mRNA vaccines (EU Research, April 2020)

COVID-19 and mRNA Vaccines--First Large Test for a New Approach

RNA vaccines: an introduction

An mRNA Vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 -- Preliminary Report

Immunological considerations for COVID-19 vaccine strategies (Nature)

The Vaccine Tightrope



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.

My new book is available! A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet 20% and 15% discounts (Kindle $7, print $17)

Read excerpts of the book for free (PDF).

The Story Behind the Book and the Introduction.


Recent Podcasts:

AxisofEasy Salon #29: A Deep Dive into the Network State (1 hr)

My COVID-19 Pandemic Posts


My recent books:

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook coming soon) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($5 (Kindle), $10 (print), ( audiobook): Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake $1.29 (Kindle), $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

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


Become a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

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There's No Vaccine for a Terminally Ill Economy

Concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many and you guarantee collapse.

Very few are willing to to face the reality that the U.S. economy was on life support long before Covid came on the scene. In a nutshell:

1. Every layer of the economy is vastly over-indebted, and entire swaths are zombies, unable to service their existing debts without borrowing more at lower rates of interest.

2. Productivity has stagnated for decades as capital has been incentivized to seek productivity-killing monopolies and cartels, and socially-economically destructive speculations rather than investments that increased productivity in a socially beneficial manner.

3. Earned income/wages have been in a 50-year decline as a percentage of the economy. In effect, $50 trillion has been shifted from productive work to unproductive speculative gains. (see chart below) The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%, And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure (time.com)

4. This enormous shift from productive labor to unproductive speculation has mortally wounded our society and economy. When corporations borrow billions from the Federal Reserve's limitless spigot of free money for financiers and use this money to buy back their shares, this enriches the 0.1% who own the majority of shares and the corporate insiders with immense stashes of stock options.

This kind of financial sleight of hand doesn't add a single job or a single dollar of productive investment. Yet this is precisely what the Fed's free money for financiers incentivizes.

5. This tremendous concentration of wealth in the hands of the few has further concentrated power in the hands of the few. Ours is now a completely pay-to-play simulacrum of democracy in which the few buy political influence and power.

An instructive example is Big Pharma's remorseless hawking of dangerously addictive opioids as" safe" and "non-addictive"-- fabrications which cost the American people hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives. Nobody was indicted, nobody went to prison, because America also has pay-to-play simulacrum of justice, a two-tier judicial system where you get the best justice money can buy--no money, no justice.

6. America's elites embraced globalization because it enriched them at the expense of the social and economic public good. Corporate America shifted production overseas to increase its profits, not just from reducing labor costs but by reducing the quality and durability of the goods it produced and sold.

7. America's elites embraced financialization because it enriched them at the expense of the social and economic public good. As I've explained many times, financialization commoditizes once-safe assets into speculative assets, which shoots systemic risk into orbit.

This guarantees systemic crashes like 2008-09 which wipe out the many but further enrich the few, as profits are private but losses are socialized: banks and financiers are free to gamble with Fed money because they get to keep the billions they skim in profits and if they lose--well, the taxpayers fund the bailouts because they're too big to fail or jail.

8. America's elites brought their system of global exploitation, the neofeudal-neocolonial model home to stripmine the domestic economy, i.e. the core economy just as they've stripmined the periphery economies, a.k.a. the developing world.

Welcome to Neocolonialism, Exploited Peasants! (October 21, 2016)

The E.U., Neofeudalism and the Neocolonial-Financialization Model (May 24, 2012)

If you doubt this, please explain the public benefit of the federal government's enforcement of student loan neofeudalism:



9. As a result of this disempowerment and stripmining of the populace, The Ruling Elite Has Lost the Consent of the Governed (October 20, 2016). What few understand is that this is the only possible output of a system that concentrates wealth and power in the hands of the few.

There is no way to rig the system to benefit billionaires and their lackeys, factotums, apologists and apparatchiks and still maintain a political, social and economic order that serves the common good via broad power-and-wealth-sharing enabled by social mobility.

10. As a result of this moral, political and financial rot, America has lost its social cohesion which is the ultimate foundation of any political, social and economic order.

Concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many and you guarantee collapse. There is no vaccine for our terminally ill political, social and economic order. The moral, political and financial rot has decayed every nook and cranny of the economy, and the unelected, totalitarian Fed Politburo can't restore the rot it spread so generously.







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No Wonder the Super-Rich Love Inflation

Asset inflation benefits the super-rich more than anyone else because they own the vast majority of these assets.

With the reflation euphoria running full blast, maybe central banks will finally get all that inflation they've been pining for. So let's ask cui bono--who will benefit from inflation?

The Super-Rich love inflation and the money-printing that generates it. Longtime correspondent Michael M. explains the dynamic behind billionaires' adoration of inflation:

"Why does a game of Monopoly work? Because there is a zero-boundary for every player's net worth.

If you were given endless credit (so negative net worth is allowed without limit), the game becomes pointless.

Is there also an upper bound at Monopoly?

Well, the bank at Monopoly can run out of money, I had that happen a few times while playing. But we didn't treat it as an upper boundary, but wrote the richest player an IOU and took that amount of cash bills from him and put them back in the bank to continue.

Rolling it around in my head, how else could you solve that problem? Confiscate the same amount from every (remaining) player and put it back in the bank instead? That would be pointless if most wealth is with one player and you want the game to continue.

Another option is to go Keynesian [in its true practical implementation] and confiscate 10% of each player's net worth to "re-liquidate" the bank. This is very similar to "printing money," just more explicit. Now we're getting somewhere.

But that's linear (a fixed percentage), so why not go with progressive confiscation rates, and take a higher percentage of the wealthier players' net worth?

Wait a second, did I just stumble over the reason why the filthy rich love Keynesian economics? Because printing money only "taxes" everybody linearly, which is much better for the rich than progressive taxation, which is the global standard in income tax policies."

Let's explore this profound insight a bit more. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) holds that central banks/states can print as much money as they want without any adverse effects. From this, it's a small step to sending every household a monthly stipend (Universal Basic Income--UBI) paid by freshly issued currency.

Given the unfairness of the income tax system, as the super-rich buy tax breaks, tax shelters and subsidies via lobbying and political contributions, it's just one more tiny step to eliminating income taxes entirely and printing all the money the state needs.

Why would this enrich the super-rich and impoverish the rest of us? Printing money in excess of the goods and services being generated creates inflation, which is a "tax" on all cash and wages, both of which have been losing ground for decades.

Inflation is best defined as a loss of purchasing power. With 10% inflation, $1 only buys 90 cents of real-world goods and services. Thus it's the exact equivalent of a 10% tax not just on wages but on all cash.

The super-rich don't rely on wages or cash savings; they own productive assets whose yields rise with inflation. The super-rich own apartments, so they can jack rents up 10%, matching inflation. They own assets which tend to retain their purchasing power even as inflation reduces the purchasing power of cash and wages.

Markets place a premium on any assets that keep pace or outpace inflation, so the value of the assets owned by the super-rich soar, further enriching the few who own these assets.

Asset inflation benefits the super-rich more than anyone else because they own the vast majority of these assets. So money-printing and the inflation it generates is a win-win for the rich. The "tax" rate of inflation / money-printing barely touches their incomes or wealth, both of which are tied to assets that rise along with inflation. All that money-printing pushes the value of their assets higher, making them even richer, which the inflation "tax" impoverishes everyone who depends on wages and cash.

No wonder the super-rich love MMT, money-printing and Keynesian giveaways of freshly printed currency--inflation makes them richer while it makes everyone else poorer. Going back to Michael's analogy of a Monopoly game: inflation takes 10% of every player's cash, but doesn't touch their property holdings. So the wealthiest players' net worth is barely dinted while players with fewer assets will find it difficult to survive as their cash is "taxed" away by inflation.







My new book is available! A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet 20% and 15% discounts (Kindle $7, print $17)

Read excerpts of the book for free (PDF).

The Story Behind the Book and the Introduction.


Recent Podcasts:

AxisofEasy Salon #29: A Deep Dive into the Network State (1 hr)

My COVID-19 Pandemic Posts


My recent books:

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook coming soon) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($5 (Kindle), $10 (print), ( audiobook): Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake $1.29 (Kindle), $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

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.

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

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