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Introduction
In an earlier essay on the 1917 Jewish revolution in Russia,[1]Stalin’s Jews
https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/stalins-jews/ I related this quote: “The [Jews] systematically exterminated the clergy, the wealthy, the business class, the intelligent educated class, all the high-achieving segments of the population, leaving Russia with a population of ignorant workers, peasants, and a powerful Jewish ruling elite.”
This is precisely the situation – and the intent – with the US today. The methods are different, but the final result will be the same. It is dispiriting that, while the signs are everywhere to be seen, few seem sufficiently interested or astute to connect the dots. In reading these combined essays on this topic, it will greatly assist your understanding if you keep in mind that the events and circumstances described herein were all deliberately created and implemented. None of what you will be reading about, was an accident of fate or due to “economic circumstances beyond control”. All was contrived for the above transitional purpose, and that transition is perhaps 80% completed in the US today. Read, and form your own judgment.
The United States of Inequality
Among the more indelible impressions burned into my memory from a lifetime of travel is an image from the city center of Caracas, Venezuela, many years ago, seeing the grand display of the wealth of the elite class, with their huge palatial homes and the nearby private airport containing all their private jets. I met one man who had two planes because whenever he needed to take a business trip, his wife had “taken the damn thing to Miami to go shopping again”. That’s half the image. The other half was more or less across the street from the first half, and consisted of the long and steep side of a mountain, with homes covering the slope for as far as the eye could see. But these were not really homes; they were shantytown hovels of only a few square meters in size, cobbled together from scraps of wood, metal, anything. Doors were simple openings in a wall, as were windows. Each home had a single electric light bulb with current supplied by a single cable that threaded its way up the slope between those thousands of residences. There were no roads, a single winding footpath providing the only access. Both toilet and garbage can were one of the downslope windows, the rubbish and excrement eventually making their way to the bottom of the mountain. And it wasn’t only rubbish that made its way to the bottom. During heavy rains, the unanchored hovels would frequently lose their grip on the mountainside and thousands of homes with their occupants would find themselves gathered in a heap on the valley bottom. I have been unable to erase that memory of the opulent wealth and the heartbreaking abject poverty contained in the same single view of that city.
We can find much the same in many parts of America today, the only significant difference being that the US physically separates the two halves of the picture. Most visitors to the US, and indeed most residents of the US, will tend to see one picture or the other, but seldom both. The streets from our landscaped villas to our air-conditioned offices do not pass through the slums and tent cities. With a bit of planning and the absence of an adventurous spirit, it is easily possible to live your entire life in an American city and see only what you want to see. The city of Las Vegas in Nevada is probably the best example of overstated nouveau-rich opulence and gaudy excess in the world today, with the giant casinos casting a long and glitzy shadow. But Las Vegas also has one of the highest rates of home foreclosures and homelessness, not only in the US, but in the world. Almost within sight of the overwhelming wealth and glamour of the strip are some of the estimated 16,000 educated homeless people who have built shelters inside the city’s 500 Kms of underground storm tunnels.[2]Inside the lawless tunnel network below the Las Vegas strip where thousands of homeless people live in fear of being washed away
https://www.insider.com/homeless-people-are-living-i...2019-9[3]Beneath Las Vegas’ Glittering Strip, Homeless People Live In Storm Tunnels
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/las-vegas-homeless-st...e3cac6 Heavy rains are infrequent in Vegas, but when they come, those storm sewers quickly fill with two or three meters of water and flow with as much force as any raging river, washing away every trace of the inhabitants and their belongings. Many die, but nobody knows how many.
These two paragraphs form an appropriate introduction to what in economics we dispassionately refer to as income disparity. It isn’t a matter of you having more money than me, or having a three-story house far removed from my humble bungalow, or finding my ten-year old Ford Pinto parked beside your new Ferrari. This is a matter of living in another world entirely, eerily reminiscent of Caracas then and Las Vegas, Chicago or Detroit today. For 500 years, this disparity defined the urban landscape of the great United States of America, a pattern more or less unbroken except during the time of the new social contract that was born in 1946 and developed a terminal cancer in 1980. You will not be able to correctly understand this without an appreciation of the history of American labor and the 1946 social contract. This is an article I urge you to read.[4]History of America’s Labor Movement
https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/history-of-americas-la...ement/ It is vital.
Joseph Stiglitz wrote a compelling article that originally appeared in Vanity Fair,[5]Joseph Stiglitz – The Price of Inequality: THE 1 PERCENT’S PROBLEM
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2012/05/joseph-stigl...uality on the problem of income inequality in the US, providing an intelligent explanation as to its causes, and a concerned illustration of its dangers to American society and to US political survival. He began by telling us, “It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened”. And what has happened is that the top 1% of Americans now take in 1/4 of all the nation’s income every year, and control 40% of the nation’s wealth. He tells us, and it is clearly true, that as a society becomes more divided in terms of wealth, the wealthy – who control the government – are more reluctant to spend money on what Stiglitz calls “common needs” – things like health care or education. The rich can provide for themselves and they tend to quickly lose empathy for those not as rich or fortunate as themselves. Greed and inhumanity are in control. Since these people control the government through their power, wealth and influence, they invest time and money to keep it weak lest it use its powers for the common good. Stiglitz claims inequality exists because the top 1% want it that way, and his point is impossible to argue.
The most commonly used, and most commonly accepted as fair, method to measure inequality of income or wealth is the GINI coefficient, which ranges from 0 to 1, with 0 being totally equal and anything above 0.5 considered excessive and socially dangerous. New York State is at 0.503, with the nation’s capital, Washington, DC, at an astonishingly high index of 0.534, worse than most banana republics and, according to the US State Department, at a level where imminent revolution or civil war are almost assured.
In his article series on income inequality, Timothy Noah wrote,[6]The United States of Inequality
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the...e.html[7]Slate’s Timothy Noah on income inequality
http://combatblog.net/slates-timothy-noah-on-income...ality/[8]Minding the Gap
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/books/review/the-...h.html “Giving the lie to popular American rhetoric, China, with a Gini coefficient of 0.415, is a significantly more equal society than is the US with a Gini of 0.450. Income inequality is more severe in the US than it is in nearly all of West and North Africa, Europe, and Asia. It is on par with some of the world’s most troubled countries, many embroiled in severe social destabilisation. The US in fact ranks near the extreme low end of the inequality scale, comparable with a quite unflattering list of nations: Cameroon, Madagascar, Rwanda, Uganda, Mexico, Côte d’Ivoire, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Uruguay, Ecuador, Argentina, Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Income inequality is actually declining in many of these nations while it continues to increase in the United States. Today, incomes in the US are more unequal than in China, Canada, Germany, France, the UK and other nations. All my life I’ve heard Latin America described as a collection of failed societies because of its grotesque maldistribution of wealth. Peasants in rags beg for food outside the high walls of opulent villas, and so on. But according to the CIA, income distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Economically speaking, the country that once called itself “the richest nation on earth” is starting to resemble a banana republic. The main difference is that the United States is big enough to maintain geographic distance between the villa-dweller and the beggar.”
During the post-war period until about 1980, the shares of income between the top and bottom remained constant, then the share going to the top 10% rapidly doubled by about 2000, and has increased markedly since then. Many writers have noted that income inequality in the US is at an historic high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, also noting that America has the highest income inequality of all developed nations. There are so many statistics that prove the shocking disparity in the US today, so many ways of presenting essentially the same numbers and conclusions, that the bitter social meaning is lost in the jumble. For example, the wealthiest 1% of all Americans own more wealth than the bottom 95% combined. The wealthiest 400 families in the United States have about as much wealth as the bottom 50% of all Americans combined. The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have a net worth roughly equal to the bottom 30% of all Americans combined. The poorest 50% of all Americans collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.
I have written in several places that the US FED’s booms and busts have been deliberately contrived to facilitate massive transfers of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the top 1%.[9]Let’s Have a Financial Crisis
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/lets-hav...19-2/0 Here are some proofs of my claim: A recent UC Berkeley study demonstrated that “the top 1% captured 95% of the income gains in the first three years (after 2008).” If this isn’t bad enough, in the first two years alone, from 2008 to 2010, the net wealth of the few hundred US Senators and Congressmen increased by more than 25% while the net average asset value of 100 million American families plummeted by 50%, and average family earnings fell by about 10%. This was all part of their planned Great Transformation, begun in earnest during Reagan’s watch.
Li Xiangyang, dean of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences National Institute of International Studies, said that America’s capitalist economic system itself has made the rich-poor gap inevitable. The growing income inequality and declining middle class are perfectly correlated with the implementation of the neoliberal economic system that trashed the social contract that was the source of America’s only real period of social prosperity. Amy Traub,[10]System Defects Lead to an Increasingly Unequal American Society
https://watchingamerica.com/WA/2014/07/03/system-def...ciety/ senior policy analyst of New York-based think tank Demos,[11]Amy Traub
https://www.demos.org/bio/amy-traub said “America’s social contract, the promise to create opportunities and economic security for the hardworking and responsible, has been fundamentally shattered”, as of course it has been. She also pointed out that during the post-war period until the late 1970s, wages grew simultaneously with labor productivity but since then wages have increased only by 5% while productivity increased by 75%.
In 2014, Wu Chengliang wrote in the People’s Daily that US politicians either have little power to resolve income distribution or are afraid to touch the issue. He is correct on both counts. The secret government dictated neoliberalism and its precise effects, with US leaders from the President down not only powerless but genuinely afraid to challenge their handlers. Obama was quickly and soundly condemned in the media for daring to suggest to voters he wanted to “spread the wealth around”, and that was just campaign talk; he wasn’t even serious.
Lest you are tempted to dismiss my comment about the agenda of the secret government, I will remind you here of the statement by Montagu Norman, the Governor of The Bank of England, (in the City of London) in the US Bankers Magazine, Aug. 25, 1924:[12]This was written in the US Bankers Magazine, Aug. 25, 1924.
xhttps://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/9oh5z/thi...ug_25/
“Debts must be collected, mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When … the common people lose their homes, they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of the government applied by a central power of wealth under leading financiers. These truths are well known among our principal men, who are now engaged in forming an imperialism to govern the world.”
In what way does his above comment not reflect the 2008 social disaster in the US?
Income disparity is a popular current topic, with so many commenting on the fundamental inequity in America, all pretending to “search for the causes” but mostly producing utopian mythical nonsense and only further confusing an issue that is at its core blindingly clear. I believe it was Arthur Okun[13]Arthur Okun, Class Warfare, Redistribution, and Income Growth
https://www.aier.org/article/arthur-okun-class-warfa...rowth/ who wrote that “American society proclaims the worth of every human being”, but the real truth is that the elites have so corrupted US economic rules that “the rich can feed their pets better than the poor can feed their children”. According to Stiglitz again:
“None of this should come as a surprise – it is simply what happens when a society’s wealth distribution becomes lopsided. The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security – they can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may once have had.”
Gideon Rachman wrote an excellent column for the Financial Times in which he ignored the myths and the propaganda, and described US economic facts as they are. I was impressed. He wrote that after five years with no recovery, ‘reasonable people’ have begun to wonder if Bernanke’s real objectives were different than those in his official pronouncements. The stock markets have doubled or more while corporate earnings reached an all-time high of $2.1 trillion, and the banks announced record profits of $42 billion in in only one quarter. “And, according to a new study by Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at UC Berkeley, the top 10% of earners in the US captured more than half of total income in 2012, a level higher than any other year since 1917. Meanwhile, 50 million people need food stamps to survive, labor’s share of productivity gains have never been smaller, median household income has plummeted by 7.3 percent since the end of the recession, and 50 million Americans now live in poverty. Inequality – which is already at levels not seen since the Gilded Age – continues to widen at an accelerating pace while the battered and rudderless economy drifts from one crisis to another.”
So, the results are a greater concentration of wealth and political power. Mike Whitney wrote in an article in Counterpunch titled,Crushing the Middle Class”:
“To pretend that the objectives of ZIRP and QE are different than these results they’ve produced, is laughable given the fact that they’ve been in place for more than 5 years without any significant change. This suggests that the Fed’s policies are doing what they were designed to do, shift more wealth: upwards to the uber-rich while political leaders dismantle vital safety net programs which protect ordinary working people from the ravages of unregulated capitalism. The Central Bank and the political establishment in Washington are working hand-in-hand to restructure the economy along the same lines as they would any third world banana republic. And that’s the real goal of the current policy.”
Dean Baker wrote an article in the Huffington Post titled, “Inequality: Government Is a Perp, Not a Bystander”:
Congress and the president have decided to craft budgets that lead to tens of millions of people being unemployed or underemployed. High levels of unemployment put downward pressure on workers’ wages, especially those in the bottom third of the labor force. This means we have a federal budget that limits growth and employment in a way that redistributes income upwards. So, inequality didn’t just happen; it was the result of government policy.
In Timothy Noah’s series on income inequality, he referred to a book (The End of Equality) written by a colleague of his in which it was stated that income inequality was the “inevitable outgrowth of ever more ruthlessly efficient markets”. I would concur with that assessment. However, it isn’t ‘the markets’ that are at fault, but rather those individuals proselytising the amoral bible of free markets, efficiency and profit maximisation, to the total exclusion of all other values. The author of that book, Mickey Kaus,[15]The end of equality : Kaus, Mickey
https://archive.org/details/endofequality00kaus suggested combatting inequality by nurturing egalitarian institutions such as national health care, removing them altogether from the “money sphere”. Again, I would concur, though items like national health care, retirement pensions and social safety nets should be seen as necessary parts of the fabric of a civilised society rather than as weapons in a battle against evil. However, I disagree with his conclusion that you “cannot decide to keep all the nice parts of capitalism, and get rid of all the nasty ones.” Yes, you can. All you need is a government that has retained its social morality and sufficient independence from the influence of private interests – most primarily a Jewish privately-owned central bank (the FED). And, perhaps, the courage to do what needs to be done – in this case, to rein in the nastier parts of both capitalists and their free-market capitalism.
Lastly, it is distressing to see the US media taking pains to distract and mislead the American people with yet more utopian propaganda rather than either remaining silent or telling the truth. The US government and its closest friends have spent the past 40 years reconfiguring the economy to loot the public treasury and every citizen’s bank account and concentrate all that stolen wealth in increasingly fewer hands, taking the nation from one of the most equal to the one today with the greatest income disparity. And the media deal with this travesty mostly by distracting the attention of the increasingly-impoverished, boasting of the US having the largest number of billionaires, and therefore being “the world’s richest nation with the greatest opportunities”. Freedom of the press at its finest.
So Long, Middle Class
Of course , the net result of these policies is the evisceration of the American middle class which is being systematically wiped out of existence. It isn’t only that the rich are becoming richer, but that these Great Transformation policies are predatory in the extreme, deliberately targeting the middle and lower classes who are losing ground at a staggering rate. As mentioned earlier, America’s middle class lost about half of all its wealth and assets after 2007, and half of the entire middle class has already firmly descended into the lower class, a financial and social pit from which there is no likely escape. With the economy still on life support and no recovery in sight after 14 years, with only low-wage and part-time jobs being created, the odds of recovery for those tens of millions of families are slim to non-existent. Ron Unz noted that the entire American middle class now hovers on the brink of insolvency,[16]China’s Rise, America’s Fall
https://www.unz.com/runz/chinas-rise-americas-fall/#...ecline but may have oversimplified in blaming the cost of foreign wars. Privatisations, bank bailouts and other factors bear much responsibility here; the middle class safely survived the Vietnam war and dozens of other expensive military adventures. The root cause is the deliberate launching of a class war, the conscious determination to drain and eliminate the middle class as a class. As bizarre as that statement may seem, the facts are everywhere and especially the FED’s policies can be interpreted in no other way. Deregulation, corporate tax changes, the massive deindustrialisation and outsourcing, Greenspan’s “greater worker insecurity”, Volker’s astonishingly vicious recession, the financialisation of the economy, were all carefully and deliberately planned as a coordinated effort, the eventual results of which were entirely predictable from the beginning.
In his article on the decline of America,[17]Decline of America’s Middle Class: Peter Van Buren Interview
Video Link[18]Peter Van Buren: Regime change in America
http://warincontext.org/2014/05/01/peter-van-buren-...erica/ Peter van Buren wrote,
“What’s happening is both easy enough for a traveler to see and for an economist to measure. Median household income in 2012 was no higher than it had been a quarter-century earlier. Meanwhile, expenses had outpaced inflation. U.S. Census Bureau figures show that the income gap between rich and poor had widened to a more than four-decade record since the 1970s. The 50 million people in poverty remained the highest number since the Census Bureau began collecting that data 53 years ago. The gap between how much total wealth America’s 1% of earners control and what the rest of us have is even wider than even in the years preceding the Great Depression of 1929.” In an especially appropriate comment, he wrote that we can argue over numbers and debate which statistics are most accurate, “or (we can) just drive around America: the trend lines and broad patterns, the shadows of our world of regime change, are sharply, sadly clear.”[19]This Land Isn’t Your Land, This Land Is Their Land
https://tomdispatch.com/peter-van-buren-regime-chang...erica/ Over the last 40 years, a large majority of American workers have seen their real incomes stagnate or decline.
Ron Unz again:[20]China’s Rise, America’s Fall
https://www.unz.com/runz/chinas-rise-americas-fall/#...ecline
“Meanwhile, the rapid concentration of American wealth continues apace: the richest 1 percent of America’s population now holds as much net wealth as the bottom 90–95 percent, and these trends may even be accelerating. A recent study revealed that during our supposed recovery of the last couple of years, 93 percent of the total increase in national income went to the top 1 percent, with an astonishing 37 percent being captured by just the wealthiest 0.01 percent of the population, 15,000 households in a nation of well over 300 million people.”
He added that the wealth of all American households headed by those younger than 35, is now about 70% lower today than it was in 1984. For those who care to know, the British very much followed the Americans down the rabbit hole: In England, the rich are 64% richer today than before the recession, while the poor are 57% poorer.
The statistics become increasingly desperate with each passing year. One writer noted that in 2007, 43% of Americans lived from paycheck to paycheck; in 2008 this figure was already at 49%, and today it is well over 60%. “Not only have food stamps reached an astonishing high of 25% of the population, but more than 35% of American households receive some form of means-tested government help, or what we call welfare payments. As well, bankruptcies skyrocketed after 2007, increasingly catching the retired population in their net. Large numbers of Americans now have no pension plans or other savings and are increasingly postponing their retirements.”
In 2013, the AP reported that four out of five Americans face near-poverty and unemployment, survey data indicating that 80% of all Americans are facing “severe economic struggles”, and that now more than 50 million are living below the poverty line, a number that is almost certainly underestimated. Many economists and analysts have concluded that the current economic structure guarantees that unemployment “will remain unusually high for the foreseeable future”, leading to “an extended period of rising poverty and declining income”. So, the country that boasts of being the world’s wealthiest nation and of having the largest number of millionaires and billionaires, also has the largest number of idle and working poor, both categories increasing by the year.
Another article noted that Americans are no longer at the top of car ownership, either. “According to a new paper on worldwide car usage, produced by the Carnegie Endowment, American per capita car ownership rates are actually among the lowest in the developed world.[21]In Search of the Global Middle Class: A New Index
https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/07/23/in-search-o...-48908 Americans now rank 25th in the world, just above Ireland and just below Bahrain. Car ownership rates are closely tied to the size of the middle class. In fact, the paper actually measures car ownership rates to predict middle class size. Since Americans are buying fewer cars, this is another sign that the American middle class is rapidly declining.”
Poverty, The Great Equaliser
Michael Snyder produced a report in the Autumn of 2011[22]15 Shocking Facts About Poverty In America
https://www.businessinsider.com/15-shocking-facts-ab...2010-9[23]21 Facts About The Explosive Growth Of Poverty In America
https://talkmarkets.com/content/economics–politics/21-facts-about-the-explosive-growth-of-poverty-in-america-that-will-blow-your-mind where he stated
“The number of those living in poverty in America is still growing by several million a year, and that is the largest increase that we have ever seen since the U.S. government began calculating poverty figures back in 1959. However, it is important to keep in mind that the government definition of poverty rises based on the rate of inflation. If inflation was still calculated the way that it was 30 or 40 years ago, the poverty line would be much, much higher and millions more Americans would be considered to be living in poverty.” He noted too that health care costs as a percentage of personal consumption have almost doubled since 1980 and are one of the main reasons Americans are pushed into poverty, stating that “Most of us are just one major illness or disease from becoming financially wrecked, [since] one single medical bill could easily wipe out the finances of most people.”
His report stated that the US child poverty rate, at 25%, is more than twice as high as the European nations, and that the elderly are also falling into poverty in staggering numbers, with sharply increasing bankruptcies. He ended with these words:
“America is fundamentally changing. It cannot be denied that America is getting poorer. Poverty is spreading and hopelessness and despair are rising. We are in the midst of a long-term economic decline. We are entering an era of class warfare. The rich and the moneyed corporate interests and the Republicans in their pockets have been quite bold about this: no healthcare or education for the poor.”
From another report, in the city of Detroit today, 60 percent of all children are living in poverty, and close to 50% of all adults in the area are functionally illiterate. The child poverty rate in Cleveland is 50%, with the entire state of California at a staggering 27%, and Arizona and Nevada each at about 25%. The World Socialist Website stated that “child poverty in America is more widespread than at any time in the last 50 years. For all the claims of economic “recovery” in the United States, the reality for the new generation of the working class is one of ever-deeper social deprivation.” Another survey documented that almost 80% of all Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time, that almost half of all Americans have less than $500 in savings and that almost 30% have no savings whatever. The UK Guardian detailed other studies and surveys concluding that almost 50% of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty. According to the US Census Bureau, an all-time record 49% of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives financial assistance from the federal government, with more than 100 million Americans enrolled in at least one means-tested government welfare program, not even counting Social Security or Medicare payments. The only good news is that the former racial disparities in poverty are apparently dissipating, whites today experiencing poverty almost as much as blacks and other minorities.
In early 2015, an article in the Huffington Post by Rebecca Klein quoted data from a report by the National Center for Education Statistics, documenting that 51% of all school children are living in poverty. She wrote that the report showed a steady increase in low-income households, poverty (and income disparity), growing from around 30% in the late 1980s to over 50% today. A map of this poverty was shocking, with the entire Southern half of the US, and most of the West with a poverty rate of over 50%. It was only the Mid-West and North-East with smaller rates. The report showed Mississippi with 71% of students living in poverty, and New Hampshire with the lowest rate of 27% – in what is supposedly “the richest nation in the world”. These figures are unimaginable to people from all but the world’s poorest nations.
One group produced a documentary titled ‘American Winter’ which, as IMDB wrote in its summary, “presents an intimate snapshot of the state of the nation’s economy as it is playing out in millions of American families, and highlights the human consequences of the decline of the middle class and the fracturing of the American Dream.”[24]American Winter
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2239034/ The producer stated:
“In making American Winter we saw first-hand how stressed and scared these parents are every day by the prospect of losing their homes, and by the daily struggle to pay their bills. However, the most overwhelming part was seeing the kids who have lost hope for their future. How can nearly half of our country be in such dire circumstances and yet our politicians chose this time of the most need in 80 years to cut budgets and social services all across the country? Yet 46% of this country is living in poverty, or near poverty, and today we have the highest number of poor since we began keeping records. Imagine the richest nation in the world having that many people without enough money to buy food for the month. Could it be because the only consistent economic trend that sociologists-economists can find is the concentration of wealth, and power, in fewer and fewer hands?”
An article in the Washington Post[25]Millions of baby boomers are getting caught in the country’s broken retirement system
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/04/b...ement/[26]What if you don’t have enough saved to retire?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/get-there/wp/201...etire/ stated that a majority of Americans are headed toward a retirement in which they will be financially worse off than their parents, an historic shift in a country that experienced generations of improvements in the lives of the elderly. This time appears to be firmly at an end, with few even contemplating cheery encouragements of a recovery. The article suggested that many elderly may be forced to live with their younger relatives. This arrangement is common and often welcome in more human societies as we find in China or Italy, but for an individualistic and selfish culture like that of the US, this may not be workable and would often end in disaster.
The article noted the severe lack of adequate pension benefits, either government or corporate, and that while tax incentives exist to encourage savings, one first requires an income. These incentives provide benefits mostly to upper-income earners who have extra money to save and invest, with most Americans no longer in this position. There are claims that at least 65% of Americans near retirement age are planning to delay retirement for at least another five, and perhaps ten years, due to a lack of money. Part of the cutbacks in social services in the US, as in some other Western countries, is in the national pension systems which are generally substantially underfunded and face the additional strains of longer life expectancy and low birthrate, all combining to make the fulfillment of pension obligations questionable if not impossible. The US, Canada, the UK are raising the retirement age from 65 to 70, thereby obtaining 5 more years of funding while paying out pensions for 5 years less. Countless millions of workers under the age of 50 will be exposed to these new rules. For those now retired, the picture is much bleaker because the die is already cast. High percentages of retirees are having to sell their homes to cover health expenses, and bankruptcies among the elderly are increasing at an alarming rate. And more similar articles in the Washington Times[27]Aging Americans can’t afford retirement
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/2/agin...ement/ and the Guardian.[28]‘At 75, I still have to work’: millions of Americans can’t afford to retire
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/dec/13/americ...curity
The Richest Country’s Empty Plates
In July of 2013, Rose Aguilar wrote a wonderful article for Al-Jazeera,[29]Richest country’s empty plates
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/7/23/richest...lates/ in which she discussed the dire hunger crisis that envelops the US today. In her article, she brought back a memory of something I had long forgotten, an event that so outraged the American public that the government was temporarily forced to respond with more humane policies. That event was a 1968 CBS special hour-long documentary called ‘Hunger in America’,[30]1968 CBS special hour-long documentary Hunger in America
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/hunger-in-america-the-...erica/ in which viewers literally watched a hospitalized child die of starvation. Nixon responded because the public outrage left him no choice, but Reagan quickly dismantled those improvements. When Reagan came to power in 1980, there were 200 food banks in the US; ten years ago, there were more than 60,000, all overwhelmed with demand and forced to ration their dispersals. To help muddy the waters, most websites today list the number of US food banks still at 200, but with more than 60,000 “pantries”. Before 1980, one out of every 50 Americans was dependent on food stamps. Today, it is one out of 4. Before Reagan, there were 10 million hungry Americans; today there are more than 50 million and increasing. A substantial part of the Great Transformation included not only tax cuts and other benefits for the wealthy, but a simultaneous massive reduction in budgets for social programs – in spite of the fact that Reagan and the secret government were creating the conditions that would desperately require those same social programs.
That 50 million hungry Americans today includes the 25% of all children in the US who go to sleep hungry every night. About 25% of the American population today cannot buy sufficient food to remain healthy, with most of these being hungry for at least three months during each year. It is so bad that many college students have resorted to what we call “dumpster-diving”[31]How one grad student eats for just $2.75 a year (really!)
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/college/2016/07/28/how...20073/[32]‘Dumpster diving’ Dublin student explains her quest to help save the planet by fishing food from bins
https://www.dublinlive.ie/news/dublin-news/dumpster-...916077 – looking in garbage bins for edible food.[33]I Am A Dumpster Diver. Here’s What I’ve Learned.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dumpster-diving-food-...eaaf4c[34]Trash or treasure? Student’s dumpster-diving, food-waste research in Toronto
https://www.abington.psu.edu/story/23961/2019/04/19/...oronto[35]Dumpster Diving on a College Campus
Video Link In 2013, America’s largest food bank in New York City delivered more than 35 million Kgs of food, and still 1.5 million of the city’s 8 million inhabitants were hungry. After that CBS documentary and prior to Reagan’s appearance, New York had almost no need for emergency food services, and had only 28 food agencies. Today that number is more than 1,000. The problem is so serious that many agencies fear that desperation for food will lead to increasing violence. By contrast, only about 5% of Chinese said there had been times during the previous 12 months when they had been hungry, while in the US that number is now 25% and still rising. Maura Daly, a social agency spokesperson said, “People have a lot of misimpressions about hunger in America. People think it’s associated with homelessness when, in fact, it is working families, it’s kids, it’s the disabled.”
Perhaps even more alarming was the release of study data in the middle of 2014 documenting that 25% of the US military members are also dependent on food stamps, food banks and other civilian welfare projects for their survival. After compiling four years of data, the nation’s leading domestic hunger-relief charity, released its largest and most comprehensive study which showed, among other things that 15% of all Americans rely on food banks for all their basic nutrition. In other words, no other source of food. But perhaps the most shocking revelation was that 25% of military personnel were in the same financial position. Of course, the Pentagon was quick to take issue with the study’s methodology, using statistical babble to cloak their embarrassment.
Homes and Homelessness
It is difficult to obtain complete and fully reliable information on home foreclosures and repossessions in the US,[36]US home repossessions rocket to record levels
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/aug/13/us-...s-rise[37]US home repossessions hit record high
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/mar/06/sub...crunch various departments or authorities stating incompatible – and in many cases unbelievable – figures for the only apparent purpose of understating the numbers. For example, the total number of foreclosures for the period 2007 – 2014 has been variously stated as anywhere between 4 million and 25 million homes, with additional foreclosure filings between 8 million and 15 million, with estimates of likely future foreclosures also varying widely.[38]U.S. Foreclosure Activity Sets Post Pandemic Highs in First Quarter of 2022
https://www.attomdata.com/news/market-trends/foreclo...eport/[39]Home repossessions to leap more than ten-fold by 2022
https://www.mortgagesolutions.co.uk/news/2021/01/19/...-2022/ I am satisfied that the lower figures are an understatement, and I suspect the higher numbers are much closer to the truth. But this doesn’t tell the full story of home losses. There is a large but probably indeterminable number of homes in default on mortgage payments where the banks have chosen to not initiate foreclosure action for the moment, but all of which will have a bad end. In sum, it appears the circumstances in the US today are worse than those existing during the Great Depression.
And just as during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the US today is experiencing a surge in shantytowns,[40]The shantytowns of America: Inside the shacks, cars, tents and boxes that America’s homeless call home
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4069570/The...e.html[41]LA ‘Tent Cities’ Becoming Shantytowns, Expert Says
https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_la-tent-cities-becomin...3.html with millions of unemployed and underemployed living in dilapidated shelters or in tent cities in parks or other vacant land. Tent cities are neither unusual nor isolated; they have been springing up everywhere throughout the US, a stark testimonial to the desperation of millions of Americans who are no longer able to support themselves properly. The countless millions who have lost their jobs and homes, and who have no options, are buying small tents or constructing makeshift shelters wherever they can. Many of these shantytowns or tent cities are home to more than 1,000 or 1,200 people each, and are still increasing by 50 and sometimes 100 per week. Even with my natural cynicism, I was astonished to see this “New World Order” so easily accepted by the authorities without even token resistance, to the point where California admits that its massive tent cities[42]List of tent cities in the United States
https://wiki.alquds.edu/?query=List_of_tent_cities_i...States[43]Why one of America’s largest tent cities sprang up in Phoenix
https://news.wpcarey.asu.edu/20220401-why-one-americ...hoenix[44]Tent Cities in America A Pacific Coast Report
https://docslib.org/doc/9080269/tent-cities-in-ameri...report spread throughout the state are now “a permanent feature” and must be accepted as a normal and permanent part of the new transformed American society.
One American wrote, “As a New Yorker, I am getting weary of seeing homeless on every street corner and passing ever-growing lines of people waiting for food handouts in midtown Manhattan where the abundance of wealth has failed miserably in its attempts to trickle down.” In 2014, Wu Chengliang from the People’s Daily travelled to Washington, DC’s largest shelter for homeless people and discovered it overflowing not only with the traditional homeless but with “professionals such as lawyers and accountants who are employed but cannot afford to pay rent”. We are accustomed to thinking of the homeless as consisting of single individuals, usually male, sleeping in the streets, but this is not true today for the US where the bulk of the homeless are educated families with children. It is estimated that up to half a million small children are homeless in America today, as are more than a million public school students, a number that has been rising at 10% per year.
In one statistic that puts the lie to claims by the government and the FED of the recession ending in 2009, homelessness is still after so many years, increasing in the US by nearly 10% per year. In a recent comprehensive state-by-state report by both the US Department of Education and the National Center on Family Homelessness, the number of homeless children has surged in recent years to the point where today one child in every 30 in America is sleeping in the streets. The problem is apparently most severe in California, which has 20% of the nation’s homeless children, more than 500,000. According to the reports, child homelessness in America increased by almost 10% from 2012 to 2013, with no sign of slowing, and about 40% of all homeless children are of pre-school age. The reports blamed the nation’s high poverty rate and the lack of affordable housing, claiming the government had done little to help homeless families with children.
William Blum had this gem in one of his articles:
“In 2014 a federal appeals court ruled that the Los Angeles Police Department could not arrest people for sitting, lying or sleeping on public sidewalks because that enforcement amounted to ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ for the city’s huge homeless population. Judge Pamela A. Rymer issued a strong dissent against the majority opinion, claiming that the Los Angeles code “does not punish people simply because they are homeless. It targets conduct – sitting, lying or sleeping on city sidewalks – that can be committed by those with homes as well as those without.”
Or, as Anatole France wrote so beautifully almost 150 years ago,
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
Blum also had this story, not so amusing:
“Now we have, if a photo were available, what could be an iconic image of the US war against the people of America, or at least against their health care – a paraplegic man, no wheelchair or walker, somehow propelling himself along a street in Los Angeles, a broken colostomy bag dangling from his piteous body, clothed in a soiled hospital gown, dragging a bag of his belongings in his clenched teeth.
This human being had been taken by Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center to a homeless mission, which refused to accept him; the man then hurled himself from the hospital van to the street. Witnesses said that the van driver ignored their cries for help and instead applied makeup and perfume before speeding off. This is one of several cases in the recent past of “homeless dumping” in Los Angeles. It’s all very understandable, from a bookkeeping point of view. The homeless missions have only so many beds, the hospitals have a budget and the debits and the credits have to balance. It’s what happens when a free market in a free society guarantees access to Coca Cola but not to health care. There are more people living on the street in Los Angeles County than in any other state in the country. Blocks and blocks of the downtown core are choked with people – not just men and women, but children, too – sitting next to their possessions with nowhere to go.”
True to their ideological roots, American (Jewish-American) authorities deal with a social problem by criminalising it, often charging and arresting those who attempt to help the poor. After Raleigh, North Carolina, legislated food distribution to the poor only twice per year, local police arrested volunteers who were distributing food, the city’s Mayor referring to the volunteers as “food terrorists”. More than 30 American cities have passed such laws that restrict food distribution to the needy, and will heavily penalise those who disobey. Police in St. Petersburg, Florida, instead of arranging for the homeless to relocate, invaded the tent cities and destroyed the tents that were the only home for these families, using box cutters to rip the tents to shreds. And in California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, one of the symbols of all that is great about America, a homeless encampment containing many hundreds of people is being forcibly cleansed of its occupants who were given days to evacuate or be arrested for “trespassing”. These are people who already have nothing, have no incomes and no place to live, and who have nothing to lose. Except their freedom, which is now under threat. Local officials offered to help these evacuees find “some kind of shelter for the night”, but after that they were on their own with no place to live and no place that would permit them to sleep.
During the winter of 2013-2014, a Pentecostal Church in Rockford, Illinois opened a shelter for the city’s homeless, but city officials charged the Pastor with criminal offenses because his church was violating the city’s “residential zoning laws”. In California, cities like Sacramento have declared tent cities illegal, citing concerns about ‘public health and safety’. For those homeless who are fortunate to still have cars, sleeping in them is no longer an option in many US cities because bylaws are increasingly making this practice illegal. In Columbia, South Carolina, officials passed a law giving homeless people – a great many of whom are families with children – the option to either relocate, or get arrested. Tampa Bay, Florida, did the same. This isn’t a complete surprise, since the US has always responded to its homeless in this way.
During the Olympics in Atlanta, local authorities arrested and imprisoned about 10,000 blacks, to keep the streets clean for the television cameras; the internet appears to have been totally scrubbed on this issue. As reported by Reuters, in late 2014 New York state health officials prevented a nonprofit group from providing free medical care to thousands of patients lacking health insurance. The group had raised $3 million and enlisted hundreds of volunteer doctors and other medical workers to offer a range of health services, including dental care, new eyeglasses and other services, and had planned to treat about 7,000 patients. However, the State Health Department told the group that free health services were not needed, in spite of clear facts that at least 20% of New Yorkers lack health insurance and cannot afford medical care. Department officials claimed they “were just doing their job of protecting the public”.
In July of 2014 a church in Los Angeles called police to arrest a homeless man for eating some cookies. The man had entered the church building to ask about free meals, noticed the cookie jar while he was waiting, and ate a few. The Church said they had the man arrested because they had his interests at heart. The arrest would place the man into California’s private prison system “where he could find help”. In another case in Florida, a homeless man showed a reporter a ticket given to him by local police, with the charge of “Feet in Roadway Disturbing Traffic”. Many American cities follow the same process of criminalising poverty and vacuuming up the poor and homeless for the private prison system. The cities deny the claim but the evidence is everywhere of increasing police harassment and yet more mean-spirted laws meant only to drive these people into a forest somewhere or into prison, perhaps for life. Many laws make it illegal for churches and other organisations to serve meals to the homeless, even to families with children. Even simple acts like sitting or lying in a park are sufficient for arrest and imprisonment. America is rapidly becoming one of the most heartless nations in the world.
This is an aside from Canada, but a circumstance which must exist also in the US though I haven’t researched it. Many years ago, the homes built in Canada usually or often had an attic and also often a detached garage also with an attic. These elevated spaces often had separate outdoor entrances, and were rented inexpensively to the unemployed, underemployed and indigent who would otherwise be homeless. And in those days, I cannot recall ever seeing a homeless person in my city in Canada. Then the same cruelty by the same people changed the landscape overnight. Canadian cities uniformly suddenly passed new by-laws declaring residential areas as restricted to “single-family dwellings”, thus making all such rentals illegal, and overnight hundreds of thousands became homeless, with no shelters, no social safety net, and no options other than to sleep in the streets. Of course, they rationalised their actions on the basis of public security, sanitation, humanity and much other nonsense, but the actions were pure evil.
In the US, Canada, and parts of Europe, more than 40% of all young people under 30 now live with their parents, having moved back home because they cannot afford to live on their own. We have very high unemployment rates at this age range and housing costs are still rising appreciably, so many are returning to university, but the high costs of education almost demand parental support. The picture isn’t much better for graduates. But having adult children at home isn’t free, and many parents find they must delay their retirement and continue working to support their adult children and the related education costs.
The UK contains as many shattered dreams as does the US, though we hear little about this in the media. UK home ownership has reached its lowest level in 35 years and the chance of young people buying a home today is becoming slimmer by the month due to the same class warfare as exists in the US, reducing wages and credit. In both countries, owning a home is the privilege of the elites, no longer for the common people. If this isn’t bad enough, UK homelessness has reached a 5-year high, with media articles detailing that people are now living in caves. Manchester has seen an almost 45% increase in homelessness in just one year, and the number of adults and families requesting charity support has more than doubled in only the past three years.
With its rather small population, the UK has more than 50,000 homeless families and another 5,000 families living in temporary bed and breakfast places where they can pay the small fees by the day. One executive said that many UK families were at the “breaking point”. About 30% of all UK residents have had to cut back or eliminate their use of gas and electricity in order to afford their rent or mortgage payments. And 57% of all UK adults, and 65% of all families with children said they were struggling to pay their rent or mortgage. The UK Independent published an article in early 2015 reporting official government figures stating that at least 10% of the population were going hungry, and that “The cost of the basics in life – rent, food and heating – has far outstripped headline inflation, earnings and benefit levels.” And all this was prior to Europe’s new gas war with Russia in 2022. The picture is much bleaker today.
Home Ownership
For decades the US boasted of its high rate of home ownership that was never really as high as the statistics suggested, but nevertheless did increase with increasing wages and the building of the middle class, until the 1980s. The Great Transformation changed that to the point where less than 60% of Americans own their own homes today, with the percentage still falling, and highly unlikely to increase, with no improvement in the economy and only low-wage jobs available. The rate today is commonly stated at about 65%, which would make the US about 50th in the world,[45]List of countries by home ownership rate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_h...p_rate[46]Historical Homeownership Rate in the United States
https://dqydj.com/historical-homeownership-rate-unit...tates/ but from examination of the raw data this rate seems exaggerated to me by as much as 10% to 15%; it is not easy to know for certain, and a cloud of suspicion exists because the US so obviously falsifies all its other economic data.[47]US Economic Statistics
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/3655/
As an indication of the degradation in wages and income from the 2008 disaster, the average family spent about 22% of its income on housing in 1950, but must spend 46% in 2014. The housing market is therefore dead, with purchase offers almost non-existent in many cities, except from hedge funds who are buying up all the homes as rental properties. I still recall Warren Buffett saying that the best investment in the US (after the contrived 2008 housing disaster) would be to buy “a couple of hundred thousand” repossessed homes and put them on the market as rental properties. That was the plan. Think about this.
Home ownership in the US is at the lowest in decades, in a generation, in fact. So many homes have been repossessed that in some states like Ohio, until recently 30 percent of all homes were bank-owned, and in Nevada more than 70% of all homes have mortgages greater than the property’s market value. I have noted elsewhere that the banks and vulture funds are now active in the US real estate market, buying up foreclosed homes at heavily reduced prices, and renting them out – often to the same people who lost them in 2008. Given all this activity and, in what should be a shocking revelation, the banks and vulture funds today own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the US than do individual Americans. By contrast, China’s home ownership rate has increased from 80% in the late 1990s to 93% today, with about 97% of rural dwellers and 85% of urban residents owning their own homes. This is a good place to ask ourselves which country has the more competent and humane government and the best economic policies.
The fallout from the 2008 crisis, and especially the financial destruction from the losses of homes, is far from over and will have a tail extending for perhaps another ten years. It used to be that when a homeowner suffered a financial disaster and could no longer meet mortgage payments, he could simply return the house to the bank and walk away, accepting his damaged credit rating as the price of a fresh start. No longer, because returning a house to a bank is not the same thing as the bank accepting that house – and many are refusing. When a bank completes a foreclosure on a house, it becomes responsible for all taxes, insurance, utilities and maintenance, and of course must then write down its asset – the mortgage – by the reduction in market value it can achieve on a sale. American banks have become increasingly reluctant to take this step, partly to avoid the heavy monthly carrying costs of so many unproductive assets and partly to avoid the heavy write-offs on their financial statements.
The result is that many US homeowners who abandoned their homes (and mortgages) as far back as 14 years ago have been surprised to discover that their bank never did complete the foreclosure requirements – even though the owners were evicted from their homes – and that they still bear full legal liability for mor than a decade of taxes and other expenses which have never been paid. Many, after years of believing that house was in the past, are suddenly finding their wages garnisheed and their tax refunds seized by the banks. It is worth noting here that in the past, an inability to discharge one’s debts in a timely manner was looked upon with scathing religious disapproval and moral condemnation – except for corporations. The banks in particular assaulted financially-troubled homeowners with their moral Christian responsibility to pay their debts, using everything from appeal to honor to threats of eternal damnation to protect their assets. But suddenly, with a crashed housing market and a flood of bad debts the bankers appear to have abandoned religion and are walking away from foreclosures with far more eagerness than homeowners ever had when walking away from mortgages. Ethics, it would appear, are relative. As someone wrote, banks harassed homeowners about “the importance of setting a good example for their children, and even about protecting the values of neighborhoods. Well, good examples and neighborhoods be damned. Now, if it’s not in their economic interest to foreclose, they’re not going to foreclose.”
One sign of the long tail of the 2008 crisis is in the nation’s more than 50,000 storage companies, a kind of condominium warehouse where people can rent space, perhaps 20 square meters, to store their surplus furniture and other belongings they prefer to not sell. The number of these firms has increased by ten times – 1,000% – since Reagan appeared, to the point where there are now more than 1,000 for each state, a truly remarkable development resulting from the losses of homes and forced relocation to smaller accommodation. These facilities probably store contents for something like 25 million or 30 million people. But even more remarkable is that these firms are now holding exploding numbers of auction sales of the contents of all these storage units, where the renters have been unable to pay even the very minimal monthly rental fee on their storage space. After being ejected from their homes in 2008 and 2009, homeowners transferred their remaining worldly possessions to these storage yards in the hope of one day having another residence and being able to continue. Clearly, those dreams are now dead.
Jobs and Labor
US unemployment today is very high, nearly as high as during the great depression if we calculate the numbers without deceit, and yet the number of good jobs continues to shrink at an alarming rate to be replaced by low-wage and low-talent employment. One study demonstrated that there are actually fewer payroll jobs in the US today than there were in 2000, even though the population has grown by more than 30 million people since then. With the rapid and continuous shedding of high-value jobs, the number of the ‘working poor’ is correspondingly increasing rapidly, and the competition for all jobs has become fierce. Many qualified applicants tell of submitting 300 resumes each week, with no result, while even a single low-paying job can attract 1,000 applications. Those who are employed have lost so much financial ground they can no longer maintain a middle-class lifestyle even with their credit cards, and so the mass migrational descent into the lower class is by no means complete, as is true for the bankruptcies. The 2008 recession eliminated primarily high and middle-wage jobs, with almost half of all new employment at the lower end of the spectrum. Half of all American workers today earn less than $2,000 per month. The US government and its media mouthpieces speak of the Great Recession of 2007-2009, but this was always a lie. It is in reality the Great Recession of 2007-2022 and counting. The claims of the recession having ended in 2009 are little more than a cheap propaganda trick to deceive the American people and deflect the blame. But the people do not seem to be fooled. In one recent survey, nearly 90% of respondents believe that (a) there will be no ‘recovery’ and no improvement in unemployment until “many years” have passed, or that (b) there would never be a recovery at all.
In July of 2013, Mortimer Zuckerman wrote a thoughtful and informed article for the WSJ titled The Full-Time Scandal of Part-Time America[48]Mortimer Zuckerman – The Full-Time Scandal of Part-Time America
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mortimer-zuckerman-the-...291652 in which he, a little too gently, devastated the US government’s unemployment statistics by pointing out that the almost 300,000 ‘new jobs’ created in June were mostly smoke, in that full-time jobs plunged by well over 500,000 while part-time labor increased by about 800,000, a distinction the Labor Bureau apparently found unworthy of mention. The sad truth is that low-paying jobs now account for almost half of all employment growth and even with that, less than 60% of Americans have a job of any kind. Zuckerman noted what he called ‘a political contribution’ to the job trend in that, after Obama’s health care act mandated the provision of health insurance to all those working more than 30 hours per week, companies immediately cut workers’ hours to less than 30, often dividing one full-time job into two part-time jobs, to avoid that benefit cost. Keith Hall, a senior researcher at George Mason University, said that 97% of net new job creation was in part-time work, and we have seen much documentation that less than 60% of all employable Americans have jobs; 40% of the entire workforce is currently unemployed. That total is more than 100 million people, and may be worse because the government’s statistical wizardry tells us the 60% is people who either have a job or “are looking for one”. It is only the statistically-induced fraud in the definitions that permits the government to claim a 7% unemployment rate.
We’ve seen some feel-good rhetoric floating around about the US economic recovery, about house prices rising and the unemployment market improving, but that has all been smoke too. Perhaps the greatest fear is that permanent, full-time jobs are passing into history as a feature of the American employment landscape. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of Americans are dropping from the middle class to the lower classes, more than 25% of retirement-age individuals are postponing retirement due to a lack of funds, more than half of all retirees are either selling or fully mortgaging their homes to pay for medical expenses, more than half of young people under 35 are living at home with their parents because they cannot afford to live alone. More than two-thirds of American parents claim their children will have a poorer standard of living than they did. So much for the American dream and the land of opportunity. Europe is not doing well, either, with the overall unemployment rate at 26 percent and youth unemployment rates at very high levels, Spain being the worst at almost 55%. I read reports that the French government was offering to pay 75% of the salaries for young people who are given jobs, but companies still will not hire.
Many large American companies are increasingly outsourcing their labor to temp agencies as a way to maintain worker insecurity, pay low wages and avoid the costs of benefits like Medicare, pensions, and even paid holidays. Many of these so-called ‘temporary’ workers are in fact full-time permanent employees who have been in the same job with the same firm for as long as ten years, but they will never be promoted to regular staff because of the greed for profits. This is one of the methods of profit maximisation firms like Coca-Cola and the American pharmaceutical companies are now importing to China, the same wage theft these firms practice in nations from the US to Guatemala. As I’ve already described elsewhere, American universities, even though flush with cash in their endowment funds, have adopted the same formula for the same reasons, using temporary and contract teachers, so-called “adjunct professors” earning perhaps $20,000 per year.
Another institutionalised form of wage theft that has rapidly gained currency in the US – and which the Americans are desperately attempting to transplant to China – is the curse of unpaid internships.[49]It’s Time to Officially End Unpaid Internships
https://hbr.org/2021/05/its-time-to-officially-end-u...nships[50]It’s Time To Ban Unpaid Internships
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brandonbusteed/2021/05/...76ec8b These are meant to provide valuable work experience for young graduates and enhance their chances for employment, but the system doesn’t work that way. There are countless stories of young people working one unpaid internship after another, but receiving no job training of any kind and of course never being offered a real job. There are now so many of these young unemployed perpetual interns in the US that they have apparently created a new kind of subculture, as someone put it, “like an army of worker ants with a distinct identity”. Ross Perlin wrote a book on internships titled ‘How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little’ in which he noted that Labor Department regulations stipulate vocational education during internships and forbid firms substituting unpaid interns for paid employees. But the corporations find these regulations “highly open to interpretation”, which means nothing will change.
It seems an unfortunate truth that the only real action in the US labor market today is in what is called ‘The Task Rabbit Economy’[51]The Task Rabbit Economy
https://prospect.org/power/task-rabbit-economy/[52]TaskRabbit.com
https://www.taskrabbit.com/[53]“The gig economy helped everyone,” argues TaskRabbit’s CEO
https://fortune.com/2022/01/24/taskrabbit-ceo-on-the...onomy/, that is, an online marketplace for odd jobs and chores. Here, desperate unemployed single mothers can find a few hours’ work walking someone’s dog, weeding a flower garden or cleaning a toilet, and earn enough money to buy some baby milk. According to the website, it is “a marketplace dedicated to empowering people to do what they love.” Right. Unemployed teachers and accountants, cleaning toilets part-time so they can feed their infants – ’empowering me to do work I love’. The American Dream, indeed. These are what the excited media call “contingent” or “alternative employed” workers, which numbered about 20 million in 2005 and are estimated at as much as 60 million today. One columnist, clearly impressed by this new alternative economy, gushed that “What’s diabolically brilliant … is that prospective errand-runners bid against one another for jobs. To get an assignment, an aspiring Rabbit offers to do the chore for less money than he or she thinks other prospective Rabbits are bidding. That’s what makes it a metaphor for the new economy, a dystopia where regular careers are vanishing, every worker is a freelancer, every labor transaction is a one-night stand, and we collude with one another to cut our wages.”
As Robert Kuttner pointed out, “it brings back the 19th century, an era when most people who didn’t farm or own property were casual labor”, and he is precisely correct. Not only the US economy, but the entire American social landscape is being forcibly reverted to the conditions that existed prior to industrialisation, prior to the time when there were real full-time jobs. Another “runaway success story” is an online offering that permits the non-homeless poor to earn a few dollars by renting out a spare room by the day or the week. The website claims to have 350,000 willing hosts which, if true, indicates the US economy is in even worse condition than I imagined.
If the above substitutions for a real job aren’t bad enough, we have a truly gifted offering from Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, in an article that offers a personal, private recession recovery for every American – have a garage sale. Sell the used junk in your house and, if you’re lucky, retire. This is what he touchingly calls “a sharing economy“,[54]Welcome to the ‘Sharing Economy’
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/opinion/sunday/fr...y.html and tells us excitedly – indeed, almost breathlessly – that this is “producing both new entrepreneurs and a new concept of ownership”. According to him, by selling your unwanted junk, you as a consumer “are being “empowered” to value and sell your belongings in ways that weren’t previously possible”. I’m not sure about the last part, because we have had garage sales for as long as I can remember, but let’s not quibble. Also, it appears Friedman’s understanding of the “new concept of ownership” is to sell what little you have and to no longer own anything. But again, let’s not quibble.
Anyway, I’m actually being “empowered” to “value my belongings”. According to Friedman, these junk sales are the E = mc² of the new America: “These risk-takers never got the word that China will eat our lunch or Germany will eat our breakfast, so they just go out and start stuff, and build stuff, and invent stuff. They are part of a budding new economic activity called the sharing economy … which offers a new avenue for the middle class to create wealth and savings.” Well, maybe, but I’ve had garage sales before, and I have to say I didn’t think I was either starting, building, or inventing anything. I thought I was just selling junk. And in the aftermath, I don’t recall having created anything that might have been categorised as either wealth or savings. It was more like take the kids to McDonald’s. I have to say that a garage sale prompted by economic destitution and distress hardly seems to qualify as either entrepreneurial or inventive and innovative, much less wealth-building, but then Friedman is special in ways I won’t even try to explain.
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at:
Notes
[1] Stalin’s Jews
https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/stalins-jews/
[2] Inside the lawless tunnel network below the Las Vegas strip where thousands of homeless people live in fear of being washed away
https://www.insider.com/homeless-people-are-living-in-storm-tunnels-underneath-las-vegas-2019-9
[3] Beneath Las Vegas’ Glittering Strip, Homeless People Live In Storm Tunnels
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/las-vegas-homeless-storm-tunnels_n_5df78f79e4b0ae01a1e3cac6
[4] History of America’s Labor Movement
https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/history-of-americas-labor-movement/
[5] Joseph Stiglitz – The Price of Inequality: THE 1 PERCENT’S PROBLEM
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2012/05/joseph-stiglitz-the-price-on-inequality
[6] The United States of Inequality
[7] Slate’s Timothy Noah on income inequality
http://combatblog.net/slates-timothy-noah-on-income-inequality/
[8] Minding the Gap
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/books/review/the-great-divergence-by-timothy-noah.html
[9] Let’s Have a Financial Crisis
[10] System Defects Lead to an Increasingly Unequal American Society
[11] Amy Traub
https://www.demos.org/bio/amy-traub
[12] This was written in the US Bankers Magazine, Aug. 25, 1924.
xhttps://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/9oh5z/this_was_written_in_us_bankers_magazine_aug_25/
[13] Arthur Okun, Class Warfare, Redistribution, and Income Growth
https://www.aier.org/article/arthur-okun-class-warfare-redistribution-and-income-growth/
[14] Exploring Wealth Inequality
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/exploring-wealth-inequality
[15] The end of equality : Kaus, Mickey
https://archive.org/details/endofequality00kaus
[16] China’s Rise, America’s Fall
https://www.unz.com/runz/chinas-rise-americas-fall/#americas-economic-decline
[17] Decline of America’s Middle Class: Peter Van Buren Interview
[18] Peter Van Buren: Regime change in America
http://warincontext.org/2014/05/01/peter-van-buren-regime-change-in-america/
[19] This Land Isn’t Your Land, This Land Is Their Land
https://tomdispatch.com/peter-van-buren-regime-change-in-america/
[20] China’s Rise, America’s Fall
https://www.unz.com/runz/chinas-rise-americas-fall/#americas-economic-decline
[21] In Search of the Global Middle Class: A New Index
https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/07/23/in-search-of-global-middle-class-new-index-pub-48908
[22] 15 Shocking Facts About Poverty In America
https://www.businessinsider.com/15-shocking-facts-about-poverty-in-america-2010-9
[23] 21 Facts About The Explosive Growth Of Poverty In America
https://talkmarkets.com/content/economics–politics/21-facts-about-the-explosive-growth-of-poverty-in-america-that-will-blow-your-mind
[24] American Winter
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2239034/
[25] Millions of baby boomers are getting caught in the country’s broken retirement system
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/04/baby-boomers-retirement/
[26] What if you don’t have enough saved to retire?
[27] Aging Americans can’t afford retirement
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/2/aging-americans-cant-afford-retirement/
[28] ‘At 75, I still have to work’: millions of Americans can’t afford to retire
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/dec/13/americans-retire-work-social-security
[29] Richest country’s empty plates
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/7/23/richest-countrys-empty-plates/
[30] 1968 CBS special hour-long documentary Hunger in America
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/hunger-in-america-the-1968-cbs-documentary-that-shocked-america/
[31] How one grad student eats for just $2.75 a year (really!)
[32] ‘Dumpster diving’ Dublin student explains her quest to help save the planet by fishing food from bins
https://www.dublinlive.ie/news/dublin-news/dumpster-diving-dublin-student-explains-19916077
[33] I Am A Dumpster Diver. Here’s What I’ve Learned.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dumpster-diving-food-waste_n_5c630523e4b0a8731aeaaf4c
[34] Trash or treasure? Student’s dumpster-diving, food-waste research in Toronto
[35] Dumpster Diving on a College Campus
[36] US home repossessions rocket to record levels
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/aug/13/us-home-repossessions-rise
[37] US home repossessions hit record high
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/mar/06/subprimecrisis.creditcrunch
[38] U.S. Foreclosure Activity Sets Post Pandemic Highs in First Quarter of 2022
[39] Home repossessions to leap more than ten-fold by 2022
[40] The shantytowns of America: Inside the shacks, cars, tents and boxes that America’s homeless call home
[41] LA ‘Tent Cities’ Becoming Shantytowns, Expert Says
https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_la-tent-cities-becoming-shantytowns-expert-says/6176023.html
[42] List of tent cities in the United States
https://wiki.alquds.edu/?query=List_of_tent_cities_in_the_United_States
[43] Why one of America’s largest tent cities sprang up in Phoenix
https://news.wpcarey.asu.edu/20220401-why-one-americas-largest-tent-cities-sprang-phoenix
[44] Tent Cities in America A Pacific Coast Report
https://docslib.org/doc/9080269/tent-cities-in-america-a-pacific-coast-report
[45] List of countries by home ownership rate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ownership_rate
[46] Historical Homeownership Rate in the United States
https://dqydj.com/historical-homeownership-rate-united-states/
[47] US Economic Statistics
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/3655/
[48] Mortimer Zuckerman – The Full-Time Scandal of Part-Time America
[49] It’s Time to Officially End Unpaid Internships
https://hbr.org/2021/05/its-time-to-officially-end-unpaid-internships
[50] It’s Time To Ban Unpaid Internships
[51] The Task Rabbit Economy
https://prospect.org/power/task-rabbit-economy/
[52] TaskRabbit.com
[53] “The gig economy helped everyone,” argues TaskRabbit’s CEO
https://fortune.com/2022/01/24/taskrabbit-ceo-on-the-gig-economy/
[54] Welcome to the ‘Sharing Economy’
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/opinion/sunday/friedman-welcome-to-the-sharing-economy.html
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Weasel words, misdirection, exaggeration, and flat out lies surrounding a few token facts, must be a Romanoff essay.
Remember, this idiot thinks people go to Wal Mart for an “experience”. I doubt he could pour urine from his boots if you wrote the instructions on the bottom for him.
Most everything you point out about the massive disparity between the Rich vs millions of US citizens is true.
Just a little update:
The economist Dr. Michael Hudson recently stated that US home ownership is NOW below 50%. In the 70s, we think it was about 70%.
Much of this change occurred in the 70s with the onset of “Neo-Liberalism” first espoused by Thatcher & Reagan. It was in that time period that the US Financial World started becoming a big factor.
To be a little more specific here:
Current statistics show nearly 40 million US citizens have been completely impoverished. (Shadowstats.com)
A central reason that weighs heavily upon Americans is the astronomical costs of “Services:” health care, auto, home/rental Insurance. Add to that the cost of Social Security, Big Tech costs, and now inflated costs for food.
We think Dr. Hudson recently stated that on a monthly basis, 30+% of an average wage earner goes monthly to paying credit card bills for all of the above.
University costs have also skyrocketed in the last few years. If you want to become a doctor, dentist, or veterinarian, it will take you several years to pay off the college loans. That’s a main reason why we have very few of those professionals.
A recent “Statista” graph showed the combined total of ALL debt by American citizens is now: $15 Trillion $$$s.
It’s called “Perpetual Debt Servitude.”
That is one Hell of an article, and I cannot argue with a word of it, nor lie, and say that it wasn’t shocking!
I’d love to see even more of the data, further exploded and explored (perhaps offered in the many links, which I have yet to explore), but I don’t think they would move the needle on the overall premise.
Dark days indeed, and with nobody working to “fix” any of it, I fear for what our future will look like; Assuming we have a future, which is also in doubt.
Seriously, thanks for writing this, it opened my eyes to a lot of the bullshit I’ve come to believe from the lying press, government, and hucksters, that flood the airwaves with fake stats, stories, and dismissive tripe that assaults the senses.
Cheers!
Many thanks to Romanoff’s invitation to read the linked article on organized labor. From past experience I know very few Americans will ever read them.
Labor, co-ops, and any other system meant to address poverty in the USA always go nowhere.
During the Reagan years, along with federally paid union-busters there were also mangers hired to infiltrate charity organizations. Their most famous caper was turning the Maryknoll Missions into the most antiwhite, Euro-hating organization on earth.
And while many of us who voted for Reagan in 1980 came to despise him, there are doubts the man himself was the problem. As Maggy Thatcher noted right away, Ron was not a bright man.
No, the neocons had the total run of the place in the 1980s. Their media power made all the difference and the nation is poorer for it.
Oh Chrisy –come on over to San Fran and eat the chocolate on Market Street —
That Ronnie Reagan was a con man. He starred with Bonzo and even that chimp was brighter than that former Democrat turned Republican and singing with Brian Mulroney ( the clown who screwed over Canada) with their “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling!” while toppling Grenada and then a photo op in Moscow with Nancy’s hysterical hissy fit “And I want to say something!” and then to be called the Great Communicator.
Fire the air traffic controllers and screw Main Street and the working man–it is “supply-side” economics and Reagan and 1% can apply “trickle down economics ” —urinating from aloft and watching the crowds beg for more — open-mouthed and empty- headed.
Ronald Reagan is what the backroom boys needed –a third-rate dimwit with a golden tongue- emply head.
https://www.unz.com/mhudson/debt-relief-inflation-ukraine-disaster-capitalism-petrodollar-crisis/?highlight=hudson+fire#p_1_173
[These] have essentially transformed the real estate market away from a home-ownership economy into a rental economy, where you’re recreating a landlord class financed by the banking class, and merging between the finance, insurance, and real estate sector, the FIRE sector.
It’s the FIRE sector that has really taken off since 2008. And it’s not simply that the economy has polarized, it’s that the shape of the economy has shifted away from an industrial, manufacturing, agriculture economy into a rentier economy, into a FIRE sector economy.
It’s not even an agricultural economy in the sense that farmers, and dairy people are making money off the farms. It’s the trading companies, Archer Daniels Midland, and the other companies that are essentially the marketing choke points that have made money.
So you’ve had the American economy since 2008 turned into a chokepoint economy.
You need housing; you need food; you need medical care. And all of these have become monopoly rent-gouging opportunities that have essentially paid the wealthy 1% or 10% very, very highly, but squeezed out of the rest of the economy.
Care to elaborate?
One can’t barely watch anything on TV without seeing a mixed couple, black man, white woman, or white man and black woman. THe message is cleared. Black and white are to be mixed. The result is of course brown, as in stupid. With the Chosen at the top, being smart rulers. I think Romanoff has a point. A good point. THe same plan from Russia, modified for the modern age of USA.
1) “Stiglitz claims inequality exists because the top 1% want it that way, …”
2) “…the US FED’s booms and busts have been deliberately contrived to facilitate massive transfers of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the top 1%…” ” This was all part of their planned Great Transformation, begun in earnest during Reagan’s watch.”
3) “…inequality didn’t just happen; it was the result of government policy.”
4) Small government = Rampant capitalism
The person responsible for all these is no other than Chicago U’s nobel prize winning economist, Milton Friedman – the father of free markets. Ronnie and Maggie were eager beavers for his snake oils. Now the whole world is suffering sans those who did not consume Milton’s poison and those who were lucky enough to be cured of this.
Case-in-point :
a) China’s Tiananmen incident was sparked off by Friedman’s advice to then premier Zhao Ziyang that he must free the markets in “one bold stroke”. Ref: https://www.cato.org/policy-report/september/october-2017/little-known-story-milton-friedman-china#)
b) Russia during the Yeltsin years also bought this crap lot, stock and barrel. It was Putin to the rescue by kicking out the western controlled criminal oligarchs.
I wonder why this elephant in the room (Friedman) was not single out for the economic and financial malaise that we have been facing since he appeared on the scene. Is this a case of “herd sleep walking” ?
Can you elaborate? What is inaccurate here?
This hurts. My heart hurts. Could it really be this bad? One quibble – in liberal cities, junkies are free to build tent cities and molest regular citizenry.
I am puzzled by Mr Romanoff argument that more than 60 millions Russians were killed by Jews and Jewish revolution. If the current Russian regime knows about Jewish crimes against Russians, why it blindly and unconditionally supports Israel and successive Israeli fascist regimes? Putin is Israel’s best friend.
It really pains me to complain, for I really like this essay. Right off the bat I saved it to the harddrive, and then I started looking for the more important sources so I could save them for my own future use. That turned out to be a problem in some cases.
It was shocking to learn Cato had any position on inequality besides full approval.
Actual Will Wilkerson article at Cato: Economic Inequality and the Mirage of Injustice https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/10/12/will-wilkinson/economic-inequality-mirage-injustice/
Inequality = No Problem!
The Cato link in the text above says this:
Inequality = No Problem!
Another search found the source for the quote attributed to Wilkerson:
Double Whammy: Income Inequality and Unfair Taxes
https://www.smartcitymemphis.com/2011/11/double-whammy-income-inequality-and-unfair-taxes/
Next:
The text following this was actually written by Mike Whitney.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/25/the-trouble-with-zirp/
Again, I’m not complaining, but just wish Mr. Romanoff would have been a bit more careful with this amazingly good essay.
I really hope something can be done about the inequality issue before the US goes full “French Revolution”. Trying to survive that wouldn’t be any fun at all.
I can’t read Romanoff’s stuff anymore since he wrote that all a person of European ancestry (a “white” person) in the USA has to do to achieve everlasting fame and glory is to kill a black man.
I don’t think Romanoff has ever actually set foot inside the United States. This is one instance in which the esteemed Mr. Unz has dropped the ball.
Mr. Romanoff is woefully misinformed. Doesn’t he know that:
“RUSSIA is the failed state”, as the outstanding ”specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory” Alexander J. Motyl*, professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark and International Advisor, Ph.D. Program in Media Studies, National University-Kyiv Mohyla Academy, Kyiv, 2009-present)? He must know better, because he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction**, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”
*aka Олександр Мотил – Motyl’s Jewish parents emigrated from Lviv.
**And a fiction one: ”The Jew Who Was Ukrainian”.
Adolf Kozlik (“Der Vergeudungskapitalismus“) showed 1966 that the
American malaise was permanent capital overproduction crisis, and the
surplus capital had to be burned off through war since 1810 (!) i.e. GDP was
1:1 dependent on military (=unproductive) spending.
Where I disagree with Mr. Romanoff is the “Social Contract” of 1946;
the prosperity that “lifted all boats” was already parasitic, thanked to the fact
all the competition was bombed flat which was going to end sometime,
hence the Plaza Accord and now the Nord Stream bombing.
Such days We deal out in turn among men, and that God may know who are the believers, and that He may take witnesses from among you; and God loves not the evildoers;
Quran 3:140
and
” They forgot Lord God and He made them forget themselves” Quran
Without turning to Lord God any material activity ( Materialism etc etc ) is void of any meaning or real substance. People who are gushing about China are running towards another illusion .
It would be smart to turn to Lord God, the Initiator, The Creator, before the day comes when there will be no intercession or ransom or pledge that will work that day!
Actually, the Russian Czardom for centuries had a population of serfs exceeding 80% of its overall population. The Anglosphere until the later stage of the industrial revolution had mostly serfs. I wouldn’t romanticise the Anglo’s class system like as though it is like this today, or what it was 60 years ago. After the colonization of other countries, serfdom-hood was moved to the colonies. White superiority was promoted to make sure that there were enough White people to “man” these colonized subjects. There was no such thing as White race, that race and this race before that. Sure there were tribalism, nationalism and obvious observation of differences such as sub-Saharan Africans being physically different and lacking a civilization. There were profound respect for other established civilizations like China, the Persians and others. The mid 1800s was the turning point to Anglo cultural hegemony. That was less than 200 years ago.
Basically, the Anglospherical structure artificially constructed since the late 1800s is crumbling. It amused me to see the White supremacists here wishing to go back to what it was. These folks would be serfs not the elites.
1) Romanoff’s article is a distorted (his is basically what, during the late Gilded Age, was called a muckraker, see The Jungle) but his general assertion — that wealth is getting concentrated in the US — is true. Wealth generally follows a Pareto distribution (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/paretoprinciple.asp I’m appalled by most descriptions; they are either wrong or obviously not understood by the desciptions’ authors. This one is the best of the lot I could find.). Pareto’s law, for example, is not the 80/20 rule that investopedia says it is. It has parameters, and as the parameters vary the 80/20 percent varies.
In practice, most own little and few own much. Pareto found that the more simple the economy, the more resources that the few own. “Simplicity” apparently means the more independent economic actors per capita. Example: An economy that has many small businessmen will have more even ownership of capital than a centrally planned economy. When you think about it, that’s a necessity — the small businesses own a bit of capital, the central planners own all capital.
When the US adopted central planning after WW II, the present concentration of capital became inevitable.
2. The concentration of capital during the late Gilded Age was roughly the same as today, as was the concentration before the Civil War, both North and South.
3. Capital ownership generally reverted back to the general population during WW II, and did so in all participating countries, Axis or Allied. See: Walter Scheidel,
The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, Princeton University Press; Reprint edition (September 18, 2018)
Apparently, this is a general rule. Capital concentrates, then it is mostly confiscated by government during the next big war. After the war, some governments can keep everything confiscated (as in USSR and PRC after WW II), but in the West the money mostly is destroyed, as the goods it was used to produce are used up in the war and anyway are useless in peacetime. This leaves the surviving general population with the agreements they obtained from employers when their labor was crucial to war-fighting, and capital ownership becomes more general.
4, So Romanoff is likely correct in his general trend, and i the present situation you can expect to see large concentrations of capital vanish during the now pending and somewhat ominous reorganization that Turchin predicted.
Informative essay with many statistical facts. Maybe the US middle class is just another species that doesn’t have the drive, intelligence and adaptability to survive. Nature is not a moral debate. The weak will perish. The question is what will replace it.
Larry, may I offer a few words of advice? Sometimes less is more. 11,900 words is a lot to read! Especially on a cell phone.
A skim through the article and, indeed, the title, suggests that there may be a lot to agree with and provide support for one’s own views. But the opening is quite bizarre and makes one wonder if the author wanted to grab the limited attention span of UR’s swarm of rabid antisemites (as contrasted with those who concentrate their ire on the malign influence of AIPAC, the ADL and, generally, the Zionist Lobby. I refer to
I plead guilty to being one of the right of centre “economic rationalists” as what are now traduced as “neo liberals ” used to be calle when we, without a Jew amongst us began to push in the 70s for policies which were largely the core of Reagan’s and Thatcher’s reforms and were also NZ Labour policies and eventually Australian Labor Party too. It hasn’t taken Jews yo work out who benefits most from neo liberal policies and globalism. Australians have been lucky and all boats have been lifted by our trade with China, skilled immigration policy, high minimum wage etc. In America the attitudes of the prosperous may be quite different and a lot tougher but I doubt that it has much to do with Jewish money having bought a disproportionate share of politicians,
Make up your mind Romanoff. Who do you hate more, Jews or Americans? We are getting tired of your deliberate conflations between the two. Take this as an example:
Stiglitz is one of the worst kind of Ashkenazi. Like Marx, all he does is foment their dialectic. Of course here at Unz all the commenters can read between the lines and know that “1% of Americans” in reality is the Jewish oligarchs, their crony Kabal, and their Shabbez goyim followers. Of course the Jewish readers of Stiglitz at Vanity Fair know this too, and they know that he is dogwhistleing to them, and they love it and eat it up.
The only ones who cannot figure out the true identity of these “1%” racial supremacists are being played for fools by Stiglitz. For generations Boobus Americanus have been tortured and battered with charges of racism, sexism and anti-semitism to the extent that they are little more than mind controlled zombies. Of course this is why Vanity Fair continually punishes the goyim with guilt from this Judaic drivel .
If you, Mr. Romanoff, were half as smart as you think you are, you would realize this and stop gas lighting the goyim on behalf of your Jewish overlords.
The great deception in Red China is that 99% of the Chinese believe that they own property in a Judeo-Bolshevik Communist country. Lol. It is the mind controlled Chinese idiots who are property of the Judeo-Communists. We can see how much free will they have by all the videos of “Covid Lockdowns”. Hell, the Chinese no longer have real money, all they have is social credit.
The first thing a prosperous Chinese serf with any remaining brains does is try to get some of his wealth out of the country, preferably into the US. So no matter how big a pathetic joke of a “democracy” the US is, to the Chinese it is still orders of magnitude more credible that Red China.
This is a pretty devastating account of the status of the American people. No doubt commenters will question various points of Mr. Romanoff’s description, perhaps validly. But it’s hard to doubt that he has the big picture in focus.
Only, the author skips writing about very important causal factors. To wit: The Jewish influence over, and control of, so much of the economy. Uncontrolled immigration, both illegal and legal, which raises the cost of housing and lowers wages. Throwing away money on wars that should go to ameliorating the conditions that make life harsh for the lower economic classes and now the middle class as well. Legal bribery of every ethnic group except whites, which further reduces employment opportunities for whites and helps send them to “soft” gulags like tent cities.
I realize that to consider such factors would have made the article so long as to send many readers into a TL/DR coma. I hope, though, Mr. Romanoff will in Part 2 take up the background of the statistics he cites here.
A chronicle of the neoliberal policies that led to the demise of the United States without mentioning the devastating impact the Great Labour Arbitrage had on the American middle class?
When the (((Great barons of Wall Street))) decided to offshore virtually all of the manufacturing plants and manufacturing jobs to China and the IT industry to India, that was the beginning of the the end for America’s middle class, much of whom were left jobless and, thanks in large part to the Sackler family, hooked on opiates.
btw re this – “The number of these firms has increased by ten times – 1,000%”
If something that increases by two times is 100% and by three times is 200%, this means that something that increases by ten times is 900%, not 1,000%.
His essays are ten times longer than necessary, but I fail to notice any lies. Care to point one out?
As for Wal-Mart, I avoid it like the plague, but on the rare occasions I feel the need to go, I do try to make the best of it and treat it as a memorable experience.
We used to have an economy based on creating real wealth. Then the economy moved to maintaining the wealth, and now we have an economy based on screwing people over as real wealth rapidly dwindles.
I don’t care what any of the negative reviews on this article will be. This is truth from my perspective of the world.
From what I have noticed people don’t get mad about their living standards falling. They simply adjust to living with less than they had before, with little to no anger.
I saw through the illusion of “the American dream” once I got into the work force.
My goal is to live as minimally as possible to make it on whatever meager wage I’m living off of, and hopefully that is enough to get me by until death
The only violent revolution I see value in participating in is one again the 1%.
The 1% are all set to jump ship. They’ve secured overseas ‘vacation’ homes, second passports, plus have overseas income (rental property or business investment) independent of what might happen in the US.
You should too. Time for us to vote with our feet.
Agree 100%.
I would add that both the mainstream right and the mainstream left have been deliberately guided into ideologies that are terrible for normal people and excellent for parasitic elites. The right still buys into the bootstraps theory of the American Dream, while the left puts race, sex and sexual deviance above class.
500 years? Either there’s a typo there and Mr. Romannoff meant 50, or he just like hyperbole. Colonial America was very different from America today.
America has poverty and inequality too, but it is — for the moment — still more prosperous than its Latin American cousins. That’s why so many Mexicans and Central Americans move up; they wouldn’t if they had to live in the same slum as back home.
That’s going to change, of course. American prosperity is based on the dollar and military hegemony and that can’t last. Also, as the country becomes more and more mestizo, it’s going to become more similar to Mexico, Guatemala – and Venezuela. Demography makes a country, not geography.
Mr. Mallory;
You are obviously a “gifted” person —“gifted” by our corrupt capitalistic system. And I am sure that you can (and certainly will) pour your urine onto the backs of the unfortunate of our terminal, nasty system for your obvious enjoyment.
Anyway, enjoy your life of plenty while you can — a “hard rain” is going to fall on your supercilious butt. The socialistic Chinese are going to eat your lunch. Strange how you probably have this mental picture in your head of Chinese peasants wearing cheap puffy winter clothing and riding bicycles to work. “Well, that is what they get for being socialists”, is probably your summation from your antiquated, Reagan/Thatcher reasoning. The Chinese masses are now living better than the American masses.
Well – guess what – America will also need to go socialistic – if it is to have a future – (for the 90% that is).
L.R.: “Of course , the net result of these policies is the evisceration of the American middle class which is being systematically wiped out of existence. It isn’t only that the rich are becoming richer, but that these Great Transformation policies are predatory in the extreme, deliberately targeting the middle and lower classes who are losing ground at a staggering rate.”
So whats to be done about all this and more, Larry?
Let me guess; you’re going to eventually conclude that “we” need even _more_ government, right?
Like China, right?
I say:
“This governments grown too big for its boots
We’ve got to cut it back down, back down to the roots
Its taken most all of our freedoms away
There ain’t much freedom left in the US today”
“”We’ve got to start us a new revolution
And get back to the old constitution
We’ve got to stand up and fight for the whole Bill of Rights
Its time to start over again”
[From Song: “New Revolution”:
Regards,onebornfreeatyahoo
So, where’s the punchline? A laundry list of problems but no outright stated opinion on solutions.
Reading between the lines, I can gleen Mr. Romanoff’s preferences and they involve the very thing that causes all these problems. I suspect he wants gov’t to “do something” when it’s the gov’t that’s behind the entire fiasco.
The rich are rich because they reap the benefits from phony money, namely created out of thin air currency, a gov’t policy. Every law that tries to force an employer to cut his own throat is resisted producing unwanted side effects that are not only predictable, but make common sense.
It is gov’t policy that creates these problems by sticking its finger in every issue as though it knows what to do when it is run by the most useless and ignorant people to be found anywhere, the political class.
The rich are rich on paper for the most part. Their stocks and bonds are a temporary illusion of wealth. Paper assets will go to near zero when the SHTF in the not too distant future. The prescription for free this and subsidized that is the very cunning snake oil used to get people addicted to being dependent on someone or something but themselves. It’s the lure of “free stuff” like pensions paid for by someone else, healthcare paid for or subsidized by the employer, medical insurance that’s just a scam to add more cost to the system while offering every incentive for people to misuse medical services, etc, etc, etc. Name any problem and I’ll give you the gov’t cause.
– One of the lessons of the Donner Treck was it is the smartest and the stupidest
who survive – the smart because they can grok the necessity and the stupid
because they don´t give a shit; the mediocre get wiped out.
Well good night, Marie 😀
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_Party
I can describe the resultant society: a stratified society, with different ethnic groups specialising in some or other professions; they live in segregated neighbourhoods, view other groups with suspicion, and believe in unbelievably stupid stories about their own superiority over others; whereas the real top layer that controls other layers, encourage further fragmentation of the society, and incites enmity and violence between different ethnic groups. Access to higher education will be strict; technology will help enslave everyone. Blacks and Hispanics would be shorn of their recently endowed martyr hood, will live like other ethnic groups and some of them may have slightly better life by being the henchmen of the ruling class. In short, US is heading towards a technocratic society with castes.
According to the communist author, America spends very little on schools or medical. The actual situation is opposite. We have vast communist bureacracies in these two sectors, and the bloated budgets give us nothing good, and give us oppressive taxation. No nation spends more on schools or medical than America. The problem lies in the communist system.
Again, according to the author, 25% of American children are starving. I have been here in America over 60 years, on both side of the tracks, and I have never seen a starving child. There is food for everyone. For the nonwhites there is government money, snap, ebt, whatever. Whites are accepted at the tens of thousands of food banks. Free food.
No one is starving or going hungry in America. The author is a flat out liar.
But on the failed state thesis, that is common knowledge. I think just about every white person I know firmly believes America is dead or dying. But if the communist author thinks the Jews did this to us, few will believe him, even though nothing could be more obvious.
I believe God has simply blinded Americans to the JQ, because he has long ago decided America should not continue.
America needs a Hitler.
Eleven thousand nine hundred words to state that Jews are to blame for all our problems?
Another epic piece by Mr. Romanoff.
IMO a clue that the end is near…
Mind you, the end has been “near” for an awful long time now. How much longer can the slide to oblivion be dragged out?
BTW, it looks like Europe is presently poised to leapfrog the USA in the race to the bottom – helped in no small way by Europe’s bestest friend and ally in the whole wide world – the USA itself.
It seems you have the wrong article for that comment.
I wonder why “Americans” get so patriotic about The Second World War? After all, the US Soldiers, and other US Servicemen, who fought and died in The Second World War, did so on behalf of the Soviet Union. They merely destroyed one of Europe’s most infamous tyrannies, namely Nazi Germany, to make life easier for the other of Europe’s most infamous tyrannies, namely Commie Russia! That is all they did, all they accomplished.
Nostalgia for The Second World War is the sickest joke of all. The Soviet Communists, after all, carried out many, many of the very same types of military atrocities and crimes against Humanity usually only associated with the German Nazis. This was especially so, during “The Good War”, under Joseph Stalin. I digress!
Of course, “Americans” do not similarly venerate the US Soldiers, and other US Servicemen, who fought and died either Korea and Vietnam. After all, in Korea and Vietnam, the US Military actually fought against Communism rather than in favor of it! That, of course, is the key to everything. The key to the entire history of the 20th Century. Yes, that is it exactly. And that is precisely why they had to produce such movies as “Platoon”, “Hamburger Hill”, and “Full Metal Jacket”, which, interestingly enough, vilified the US Military rather than the Official Enemy.
“ Debts must be collected, mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When … the common people lose their homes, they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of the government applied by a central power of wealth under leading financiers. These truths are well known among our principal men, who are now engaged in forming an imperialism to govern the world. ”
The issue, which the article should jog minds, is more should recognize the increasing weight of ignorance. Is it failed state, or failure of people to be serious, or both. A problem has been the choice of many to focus on reproducing, and low self, instead of the long future first, to make sure there is one to come back to, and, allowing false ‘money’, and, accumulation of weapons and survielance by those claiming to be ‘state’, and their ‘courts’ which are not what people assume. So, back to paragraph above, people didn’t pay enough attention to kelo v new london, or really, the con of ’eminent domain’, before that. That strangers scribbled the ‘right’ to take what we have, for whatever ‘price’ they dictate which at some point can also be nothing, is a missed focus.
And suppose add to that, at least some ‘states’, don’t know current number, some have tied the ‘pensions’ or retirement of ’employees’ to mortgage-oriented funds, which employees include judges (which are actualy lawyers) -who decide foreclosures. Some have also been shortening to ‘non-judicial’ foreclosures’, supposedly to lessen paperwork, or, one could say to grease the skids. In other words, when a ‘bank’ takes back a property, usually less than value or debt, it benefits those whose ‘pensions’ are in such fund. It doesn’t take even second grade math to do the equation on conflict of interest. Throw onto the pile in article I suppose. There are many in schemes, and, would really be best if more people tossed tv, which I suppose tv is yet another scheme.
In any event Romanoff has done an informative piece, again. Significant, worth sharing link, or copy for personal re-read.
.
The only Ruling Class, in “America”, is the Jews. The WASPs are in steep decline, and their enemies are gloating about it all even now.
Brevity is the soul of wit
I think you have set your sights too high. LOL
That is an exaggeration. He wouldn’t have interfered in Syria to save Assad’s government if this were true.
“Seraphim” – I believe that is YOU who are woefully informed. I was in the workforce for 40+ years, working in various factories as an industrial electrician and I have been a WITNESS to what the late, great United States has become.
Unlike Russia, the United States is now a Banana Republic, with the only things keeping the economy propped up is the unlimited printing of fiat money by the Fed and credit (DEBT) being used to facilitate our so-called “economy.”
The United States has been involved in two world wars, both founded upon lies, so that the military-industrial complex can continue to “make money” and so that the “financial industry” can also profit from them, with both “sides” of the wars essentially being funded by the same groups. Likewise with the Korean War, the war in Vietnam and the wars in Kuwait & Iraq.
The United States basically has stopped producing useful products that consumers can purchase and no longer has these jobs that formerly paid decent wages and had decent benefits. Practically everything has been offshored to “Third World” countries, like which the United States is becoming. We are experiencing record numbers of foreclosures and record numbers of bankruptcies, both personal and corporate.
Most Americans now live from paycheck to paycheck and have record amounts of personal DEBT. The only reason that Americans are able to “afford” what they do purchase is because most of the merchandise is now manufactured in China or some Third World country that uses sweatshop or prison labor. That, and all of the “payments” that they receive from the bankrupt American government.
I keep telling my lady friend that everything in the United States is now either a scam, a conspiracy, or a combination of the two. NOTHING is as it seems, especially as being portrayed by the mainstream media. This “Build Back Better” is the first installment of “The Great Reset” – the latest attempt for the “powers that be” to own and to control everyone and everything in this world. And BOTH the “Democrats” and the “Republicans” are complicit in this, since they are 100% bought and paid for by the “powers that be.”
I hope very much, for Russia’s sake, that Vladimir Putin is not as corrupt as the American politicians seem to be. I am looking forward to what Russia is going to do about the “Great Reset” and the world monetary “system.” From what I have heard and read of Mr. Putin, he seems to be much more honest and well informed than the average American politician. And much more intelligent, also.
You would do well to investigate some new, accurate sources of information, because, obviously, your current sources are woefully inadequate. I am sorry to have “rained on your parade.”
Mr. Romanoff clearly likes hyperbole, but from reading and pics, much of this article makes sense.
In Japan, there were many homeless camps in public parks from late nineties to 2011. However, the residents were clean and not pests.
That year provided the solution, the govt. gave all but a stubborn few jobs on the Fukushima fallout cleanup, booked almost all rooms in nearby business hotels for them.
I don’t really know what has happened since then, but the tent camps haven’t returned, and even the few homeless people with whom I had chatting acquaintance with just a few years ago are not around.
However, the number of people in the casual and dispatch workforce is now well over 50%. Not all of the jobs are terrible at all, but that situation isn’t great unless you want it. Most, not all, would prefer to be formal employees. Of the people I do most of my work for, only those from lower-middle management level and up now are not casual or dispatch workers. Quite a big and not slow change. Proportion of formal employees used to be much higher.
The area I live in had, and still has, much light industry, as far as area, most have accepted offers you no can refuse, many knocked down and overpriced and ugly rent-farms built instead.
I don’t see any libertarian views from the author or commentators.
Without government ownership must compromise with labor, union or not. Better equality results. Our “heroes” would be nonexistent. And no ripoff of peoples earnings. Taxes enable government tyranny.
I am a Lew Rockwell libertarian: God; Family; Private Property. We are a flawed species so no centralization of power. Vide: Jesus.
There is no easier place to earn a living than North America. Learn a trade (plumbing, electrician, mechanic, lineman, nurse, x-ray tech, etc) or get a sweet do-nothing government job with full bennies and retirement. Crappy school teachers in Seattle are making $131k with bennies and recently struck for another 5.5% wage increase….3 months off for summer travel too. The fact that half the human race is botched, hopeless, and incapable of doing anything useful does not mean you have to join them.
Feeding the homeless is like feeding the birds in that it accomplishes nothing except make the feeder feel good and birds wasteful feeders.
You seem to confuse very basic addition and multiplication.
I would assume that U.S. ‘education’ is to blame. If not, whichever place you are from.
I will add to that. Isnt there a statue of Sverdlov somewhere in RUSSIA? If there is what the hell is it doing there if he butchered millions of Russians. Something doesn’t connect right.
Too nihilistic.
Try and find someone of the opposite sex who is compatible. Have and raise a few children.
Larry Romanoff claims to be a retired businessman living in Shanghai. I believe he is a paid shill for the CCP. His articles are filled with quotes with no substantive attribution. No, Ron Unz is not a substantive source.
(In the) “US where the bulk of the homeless are educated families with children.” Proof?
“Meanwhile, the rapid concentration of American wealth continues apace: the richest 1 percent of America’s population now holds as much net wealth as the bottom 90–95 percent, and these trends may even be accelerating.” Proof?
There are many problems in the United States today, and they will get worse with economic collapse, but thousands of migrants from all over the world are taking advantage of our open boarders to seek asylum in this capitalist nightmare.
I would still rather live here than in China.
Ugh!
I dunno, generally I read a lot of what Mr. Romanoff writes. But today I want to talk about a friend who recently passed away; probably from old age as he was either in his early eighties or 86, depending on the day you talked to him.
Funny thing though, when you lose somebody you like it comes back to bite you. You miss him.
Please enlighten me by pointing out my error and correcting it.
The country survived this long in spite of all the missteps by leaders including making blacks citizens and the Great Replacement through immigration and the destruction of the Christian based culture by Jew Marxists. It is over and we are just playing out the string. Sad most people don’t understand that because they are programed to ignore race realities.
Found the Jew.
World War Jew benefited the Jew.
America, Hitler and Germany were THE GOOD GUYS.
Can it be more clear that Germany was RIGHT
After “the greatest generation” licked the Krauts, half of Europe was divided and enslaved under the (((communists))), the other half was infested with Jewish tyranny aka ((( communism))) or any other word to describe Jewish enslavement of the gullible goy. The Jew amped up his game plan in America after the war as well. Holohoax movies, race mixing movies and anti White propaganda. It is the Jew, dum dum.
Nice try, Shlomo.
Hmmm, a search of the interminable essay reveals not a single mention of “metha” (as in “methamphetamine”), “hero” (as in “heroin”), “oxy” (as in “oxycodone”) or “fent” (as in “fentanyl”).
It’s hardly a secret that vast numbers of those “experiencing homelessness” are drug addicts.
BTW many cities bar churches from feeding the homeless because this practice instantly creates homeless encampments in the neighborhood adjacent to the church. NO ONE wants to be anywhere near these festering shitholes, so for fear of losing their jobs the “authorities” prohibit such food terrorism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin_and_antisemitism
“America, Hitler and Germany were THE GOOD GUYS.” Please report on how it’s possible that Hitler and Nazi Germany were the good guys. Tell me more.
Read the link: Jews had no power under Slalin (Trotsky found that out).
You need an enema and a Negro psychiatrist. I’ll ask Affirmative Action Barry for a referral
Likewise, fleas abandon a dog when the animal is terminally sick, Americans will know that their country is on her destruction trajectory when the social bacteria, the leeches move to another body. I think China already got the first batch of social blood suckers.
“It isn’t a matter of you having more money than me, or having a three-story house far removed from my humble bungalow, or finding my ten-year old Ford Pinto parked beside your new Ferrari.”
Actually, Larry, it is a matter of just that.
Poverty in America is relative poverty. Aside from a few thousand bums in a nation of 330 million people, nobody is starving in America. Income disparity indices are thus misleading to the point of being dishonest. At best, what they measure is envy. The lower half in Caracas have no food or sewers, but the lower half in the U.S. are obese and driving Pintos – and. apparently, are supposed to be absolutely enraged about it.
Dressing leftist lies in borrowed robes of jew-truthing is a pathetic move, Larry. No, the (((egalitarian))) poison pill will not go down our goyish throats smoother by coating it with words from The Turner Diaries. Try again, jew.
The real change occurred when the Wasp elite was replaced by you know who!
No, I would like t A Scanner Darkly o, but think it would be better for you to work it out by yourself or with IRL friends, if you’re not just trolling.
Hint: I already said it, and you did a block quote of the point in your reply that I am replying to now.
Have you seen the film or read the book A Scanner Darkly? Both pretty great, and recommended, the characters have a similar fallacy about bicyle gears (additive instead of multiplicative).
Thoughout man’s history the masses have wanted to be the Alpha-male, the King, or the President. Well, that’s just fine for the zero-sum game of the animal world, or man’s version of it, but as for modern technological civilizations, it is a huge drawback.
If you consider that evolution is a feedback mechanism, as with the Red Queen Hypothesis, and if a predator or prey evolves an atvantage, the corresponding prey or predator will evolve a response to be able to survive. Not evolving leads to marginalization or extinction.
If you examine mankind’s relationship of governing (predator) and governed (prey) you will see a predator adaptation of using the prey’s beneficial evolution of a modern technological society against the prey itself. The Enlightenment and technological progress be damned, government predation is supreme.
Everything government touches turns to crap. Ringo Starr
Government as a whole has never been the good guy.
Some are less bad, though.
What “religion” is anti Christ? Will the Anti Christ be a group, a government, a nation or an individual? Will the Anti Christ be a Jew?
Revelation 13:11
Stalin was an interesting historical figure. After all, unlike most of the Communist leadership, Stalin was not a Jew. Rather he was, like Hitler, an anti-Semite.
Anal fixation? Negro?
Found yet another Jew. Place is crawling with Heebs.
Hmmm, I never thought of it like that. (((They))) poisoned Stalin, I suspect, because he was on to (((them))).
This article was worth reading if for no other reason than to get a cheap laugh at the expense of the utterly ridiculous Thomas Friedman.
Thank you Larry.
No, I would like to, but think it would be better for you to work it out by yourself or with IRL friends, if you’re not just trolling.
Hint: I already said it, and you did a block quote of the point in your reply that I am replying to now.
Have you seen the film or read the book A Scanner Darkly? Both pretty great, and recommended, the characters have a similar fallacy about bicycle gears (additive instead of multiplicative).
I re-post because I made a mess of it the first time.
Sure. Here’s my math:
Let’s assume there were 10 firms to begin with. A ten times increase* would mean there are now 100 firms.
(100 – 10)/10 = 9;
9 x 100 = 900%
Let’s see how you arrive at 1,000%.
Original statement by LR: “The number of these firms has increased by ten times – 1,000%”
“Again, I’m not complaining, but just wish Mr. Romanoff would have been a bit more careful with this amazingly good essay.”
Your observations are correct, and I appreciate your taking the time to bring it to my attention. The quote attributed to Wilkinson was actually made by Stiglitz. That one may have been inattention on my part, but not the rest. Somehow, that portion of the file was corrupted because statements from three different persons are mixed together in one paragraph with one attribution, and portions are missing.
When I saw your post, I contacted Gideon Rachman at the FT and he confirms that the quotation is not his, so this part was also contaminated because the quote is definitely from Mike Whitney, with that attribution missing, and more conflation. I will have to rewrite this portion. This is the damndest thing. This has never happened before. It was not something I did, and I cannot account for it. I believe you have identified the corrections necessary, and my thanks again.
Larry Romanoff, while no one can disagree with the actual problem (ie: that there is immense wealth concentrated in the hands of a few while many are living in third world squalor), your extrapolation that this is due to Free Market Capitalism is patently wrong.
What the U.S has is CORPORATE CRONYISM whereby a select few oligarchs have captured government.
In Free Market Capitalism (FMC) there are NO BARRIERS and HINDRANCES erected to prevent new entrants into any particular market.
Picture the situation during the Covid Psyop whereby small and medium sized enterprises (SME’s) were forcibly closed during the lockdowns while Big Box multi-billion dollar enterprises owned by the oligarchs were allowed to stay open and thus INCREASE THEIR MARKET SHARE and PROFITS.
Many of the SME’s went bankrupt, never to reopen again.
The SME’s are the HEARTLAND, they are the path of upward mobility for the middle classes.
But their hopes and dreams, not to mention their finances, were DASHED BY GOVERNMENT EDICT.
WITHOUT GOVERNMENT EDICTS THAT PROTECT AND ENHANCE THEIR MONOPOLISTIC POSITIONS, SAID OLIGARCHS WOULD NOT MAINTAIN THEIR FAMILY FORTUNES FOR LONG.
ONLY those Captains of Industry that CONTINUALLY DELIVERED QUALITY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES AT COMPETITIVE PRICES would survive as hungrier, more innovative entrepreneurs came along with a better mouse trap, with better technology and importantly, more efficient practices that made them LEANER and capable of functioning on a thinner profit margin.
THAT is what TRUE CAPITALISM is about.
Larry, you draw more than a few wrong conclusions as to the cause of the shocking wealth distribution in America.
For example you wrote :
Many associate Paul Volcker, Chairman of the Federal Reserve during most of the Reagan era, as being associated with that administration and the ‘Reaganomics’ of that period.
Now, it’s true that Ronald Reagan stood by Volcker and never once wavered despite a torrent of abuse from the economically illiterate left that high interest rates would be the ‘End of America’.
And credit to Reagan for standing by his man – history PROVED THAT VOLCKER (and REAGAN), WERE RIGHT.
What people don’t know is that Volcker was appointed by the Democrat Jimmy Carter during his tenure.
When Reagan won the Presidency he of course kept Volcker on for one very simple reason. ie: ….
In simple terms, starting with the disastrous policies of the first Jewish President (ie: Lyndon Baines Johnson) and his Guns and Butter policy, which entailed a MASSIVE EXPANSION OF BIG GOVERNMENT coupled with a WAR OF AGGRESSION IN INDOCHINA, and then followed on by the continued profligacy of various administrations that continued to spend beyond their means and financed the shortfall with MONEY PRINTING, this set the U.S on the path of chronic inflation.
There is a reason that the price of gold went from USD $35/oz in August 1971 (when Nixon took the U.S off the Gold Standard) to around USD $ 850/oz a little over 8 years later in January 1980 (a TWENTY FOUR FOLD INCREASE), and that was because INVESTORS HAD LOST CONFIDENCE IN THE USD and the fiscal and monetary policies of the U.S government, and were thus DUMPING USD FOR GOLD.
To LURE investors back into the USD (specifically into U.S treasuries that would finance said government spending shortfalls), THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE AVAILABLE TO VOLCKER THAT WOULD SIMULTANEOUSLY BREAK THE BACK OF INFLATION was for him to raise the Fed Funds Rate to 20%. (ie: 7% or so HIGHER than the rate of inflation).
Yes, such a high rate would hurt many businesses that were overleveraged and cause unemployment, BUT VOLCKER HAD NO CHOICE.
Not doing so would have been FAR WORSE FOR THE U.S ECONOMY in the long run.
When you have interest rates at FAR TOO LOW, for FAR TOO LONG, you encourage speculation into asinine sectors that SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN CONTEMPLATED if we lived in a sane world.
ie: people bought cryptocurrencies, people bought NFT’s (Non Fungible Tokens) and invested in businesses that NEVER MADE A PROFIT and will likely NEVER MAKE A PROFIT before they eventually go bust in the next few years, yet somehow managed to attain NASDAQ listings and command market capitalisations of SCORES OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS.
Remember, there are TWO SIDES to the interest rate game.
YES, low rates help borrowers, they make it easier for businesses to make repayments on borrowings.
BUT the ZERO INTEREST RATES of the last decade or so MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR RETIREES TO LIVE OFF THEIR SAVINGS.
Instead, they are FORCED to put their saving in more speculative investments (like the U.S stock and bond markets in the search for some yield and possible capital gains) and, as we’re seeing now, this is going to END VERY BADLY INDEED as that House of Cards, otherwise known as the U.S Stock and Bond Market, IMPLODES AND LOSES MOST OF ITS VALUE.
It’s happening right now and it’s going to get a LOT WORSE I can promise you as ‘reversion to the mean’ undoes the decades of speculative excess.
There was a time when a couple with $200,000 in retirement savings could earn 10% interest on savings. Added to their old age pension they could live out a decent retirement and LEAVE A NEST EGG FOR THEIR CHILDREN WHEN THEY DIED.
In a ZERO INTEREST RATE ENVIRONMENT they are forced to draw down their savings to live and soon enough it is exhausted, leaving them completely dependent on the government.
THIS IS BY DESIGN. The ZIO CABAL that owns the Federal Reserve INTENTIONALLY wants to IMPOVERISH THE MIDDLE CLASS and ENSURE THAT NO SAVINGS (or as little as possible) are passed down to the next generation.
Simply put, higher interest rates :
1) ENCOURAGE PEOPLE TO SAVE
2) DISCOURAGE PROFLIGACY and spending like a drunken sailor. (After all, you’e getting no interest in the bank, and inflation is going through the roof so that consumer item you want will be more expensive next week, so WHY NOT BLOW THIS WEEK’S SALARY TODAY – thus encouraging people to live paycheque to paycheque and ultimately become :
MORE DEPENDENT ON THE ‘WISE OVERLORDS’ IN GOVERNMENT.
For all the fuss about immigration, I am surprised I am not hearing about people leaving America!
“This is precisely the situation – and the intent – with the US today. ” Yes the Bolsheviks use the same Playbook over and over. But they have had LOTS of help from the Useful Idiots and the Political Wh#res in D.C.. But the REAL obstacle is too few of the potential victims care or are even aware they have been targeted for termination. The sight of a White person promoting the Racist, hate-filled crud the Modern Bolsheviks promote is startling in its stupidity. This is about a Race War motivated by a deep, bitter Hatred.
>>>>the economy has shifted away from an industrial, manufacturing, agriculture economy into a [finance, insurance, and real estate] sector economy.
It’s called progress.
The Industrial Revolution began the process of farming out (no pun intended) basic agriculture to the sort of people who are best at it, leaving the rest free to concentrate their energies on ever more complex things. Not everyone had to shove pig shit or work in rice paddies anymore.
Ditto factory work. Not everyone had to work 12 hours a day putting screws in widgets.
The division of labor is highly inegalitarian, that’s true. It is the opposite of leveling. It is the means of rising above universal prehistoric poverty – the means, in other words, of climbing out of the bucket. The other crabs aren’t too happy about that, but men aren’t crabs, and even the poorest common man of today lives a life of material abundance that his ancestors could not even dream of.
The crabs – i.e., (((communists))) – yearn to reduce the goyim back to the Stone Age. “You will own nothing and be happy,” they snarl when they aren’t busy spitting terms like “rentier” from Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto.
The (((Reds))) never went away. The just moved to the U.S.
>>>>the economy has shifted away from an industrial, manufacturing, agriculture economy into a [finance, insurance, and real estate] sector economy.
It’s called progress.
The Industrial Revolution began the process of farming out (no pun intended) basic agriculture to the sort of people who are best at it, leaving the rest free to concentrate their energies on ever more complex things. Not everyone had to shove pig shit or work in rice paddies anymore.
Ditto factory work. Not everyone had to work 12 hours a day putting screws in widgets.
The division of labor is highly inegalitarian, that’s true. It is the opposite of leveling. It is the means of rising above universal prehistoric poverty – the means, in other words, of climbing out of the bucket. The other crabs aren’t too happy about that, but men aren’t crabs, and even the poorest common man of today lives a life of material abundance that his ancestors could not even dream of.
The crabs – i.e., (((communists))) – yearn to reduce the goyim back to the Stone Age. “You will own nothing and be happy,” they snarl when they aren’t busy spitting terms like “rentier” from Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto.
The (((Reds))) never went away. The would-be Rosa Luxemburgs just moved to the U.S.
“I hope very much, for Russia’s sake, that Vladimir Putin is not as corrupt as the American politicians seem to be… he seems to be much more honest and well informed than the average American politician.”
Brad,
No…he is just frugal. On a $157,000 reported yearly salary, he has been able to, by pinching whatever the hell the Russians call pennies, and carrying bag lunches to work, amass a reported net worth of 70-200 Billion dollars.
We NEED that kind of fiscal responsibility.
No mention of mass immigration in this long essay–the single most important cause of the ongoing third-worldization of America, by suppressing wages, undermining unionization, driving up housing costs, and breaking down cultural cohesion and social structures.
No mention that the predatory oligarchy that controls the state uses the lowest segment of the population (urban blacks) as a weapon against the middle class. And that this lumpenproletariat is in fact awash in welfare, which has led to its current abject degradation.
Bertrand Russell, in his book ‘The Impact of Science on Society’ (1953) gave a clear indication of the long term goals of the Satanic ‘elite’:
“Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organised insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton.”
Larry is a jew. What did you expect?
Income is NOT a zero sum game. The Waltons being extremely wealthy does not prevent me from gaining my own fortune. Wealth inequality is merely a tool used by socialists and communists, who want to bring everyone (except the chosen) down to the same level.
kauchi-potato writes :
How do you know that ?
Truly small government, as existed during the 130 or so years from the beginning of the republic to the formation of the Zio owned Federal Reserve in 1913, resulted in :
That was what Small Government achieved.
Well, there’s universal agreement that what we have now is a disaster.
And pray tell, what environment was the present situation achieved under ?
You guessed it. This is all happening in an environment of CRUSHING BIG GOVERNMENT, an environment of crushing regulatory burden that was DESIGNED TO DISPROPORTIONATELY BENEFIT THE OLIGARCHS AND PROTECT THEIR MONOPOLIES while creating an impossible regulatory burden for Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SME’s).
Concurrent to that, Big Government :
1) Micromanages every aspect of our lives
2) It tells me when and where to wear a face mask
3) It advise me as to whether or not my business is ‘essential’ during these bogus epidemics, so I can shut down the operation and lose my life savings and my house (which I’ve put up as collateral for my business). And with the business shut down and unable to generate income to service my loan repayments to the bank, I’m toast.
(Thanks Big Government – your concern for we proles is touching).
4) It advises me to engage in Socialist Distancing and stipulates that we leave our elderly parents ALONE in a nursing home without interaction from their next of kin – so that they can die in misery.
THANKS BIG GOVERNMENT – I know you’re doing this because you care.
5) Prevents me from travelling/re-entering the country unless I’ve received that experimental mRNA gene therapy that’s killed and injured countless millions – and will likely sterilise scores of millions more (biodistribution studies show that the toxic jabs accumulate in the ovaries etc), and prevent those of child bearing age from procreating (and that’s assuming they don’t have an early demise from myocarditis in the interim).
Kauchi-potato, you are CLUELESS.
Bottom Line: ALWAYS and EVERYWHERE where it’s been practised in human history, BIG GOVERNMENT has led to impoverishment of the masses and abject misery – with NO EXCEPTIONS to that rule.
Well said Hitch. Right on the money.
(Same can be said about Paul Krugman, Larry Summers and a few other disinformers).
Stalin turned on the Jews only after Israel was founded and he’d begun to question Jewish loyalty to their Russian ‘homeland’. The fact that he had been using Jewish doctors to discreetly bump off some of his enemies didn’t assuage his mistrust. The Great Purge took down mainly Jews because the Bolsheviks were largely made up of Jews.
I wouldn’t got so far as to call it ‘food terrorism’. But there are definitely fairly well off people standing in those food lines. I did it myself but only one time. It was suggested by a couple in Vancouver who rented me a room to live in. They had much more money than I did, but they went and took advantage of food lines all the time. Because it was free and they had no decency. I did it once and vowed never to do it again. Because there are other people in that line who obviously *need* that food. To stay alive, to support their children, just from day to day.
They are not terrorists, they are not ‘druggies’, many of them are just unfortunate people who have come across hard times and just need a little help for a little while.
Nothing that can’t be fixed by more mass immigration!
Scroll up to my comments above in this thread Big Daddy and I’m sure you’ll agree, that I haven’t held back as far as Libertarian commentary is concerned.
I used to provide Libertarian commentary in the Michael Hudson articles here in the UR, based on the only true economic school of thought – none other than the Austrian School (as propagated by the likes of Dr Ron Paul, Peter Schiff, Tom Woods and Lew Rockwell – to name just a few).
But, after embarrassing the Troyskyist Hudson time and again and exposing him as an economic charlatan, he BANNED ME from posting there. (I believe he’s done likewise to a few others as well – seeing as he has a propensity for being surrounded by sycophantic yes men and women and is incapable of absorbing critical feedback).
Those that are unable to defend their beliefs in a public forum resort to that sort of behaviour.
Hudson’s voodoo economics have no foundation as far as real world outcomes go, and thus he’s unable to make a cogent case for the nonsense that he propagates.
So, like FaceBook, Twitter and You Tube (all tools of the Zio establishment), Michael Hudson resorts to muzzling his opponents.
A truly craven coward, if ever there was one.
Meanwhile, good to see a fellow Libertarian here – especially seeing as it’s the very BEST subset there is (ie: a Ron Paul/Lew Rockwell libertarian).
I look forward to crossing paths with you again Big Daddy.
Stalin did persecute Zionists (the “Hechaluz”) even while relying
exclusively on Jews to the end (much like Lenin forbade them from forming
a Jewish Section of the RSDLP(b) – good, that would have comprised 98% of
the Party 😀 ).
Alright. I see, the multiplicative way of stating increases is incorrect, your point is very good, since the usual way of expression omits the starting point, and only has the multiplication.
agree 100%, his administration set the stage for the v.p. running the show from the shadows. daddy bush then repeated the scenario with his idiot son and cheney pulling the strings. don’t forget to include p.c.r.’s role in crafting the voodoo supplyside economics and tinkle down theory.
Many Christians, so called, are more loyal to The State of Israel than they are to “America”!
“America’s – Shining Beacon of Light On a Hilll – best days are ahead of it.”
–
Ronald Reagan
Many of the truly poor standing in that line are poor people who absolutely HATE having to stand in that line.
Tax the rich. Bring back the higher rates for the rich that was their fair share of the burden back in the mid 70’s, the Nixon years…and with no loopholes.
Article? Too frigging long, read the first part then just inferred. (Grin)
A serious issue is the baby boomer question, including the failure of the baby boomers to pass on power and privilege. As the boomer-millennial wealth gap shows, they owned about ten times the amount of wealth when they were the same age as millennials. When they entered the workforce, they had free college, but even a high school dropout could own a home and start a family with single unskilled, entry-level job. They rigged the system largely for their benefit, creating the student debt crisis while replacing the jobs of young American with foreigners and H1B Visas, while they plan to drain the system through social security and medicare younger generations will never receive. They started the trend of housing as an investment, and when they retire in large numbers, they price out young people through NIMBY laws just to keep the value of their home many times what they purchased it for. They could have easily repealed the Hart-Cellar act, but chose not to.
Video Link
https://keithmoulton.com/unraveling-the-mystery-of-boomer-sociopathy/
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/03/08/bruce-gibney-sociopaths-baby-boomers
https://www.demos.org/blog/how-baby-boomers-stole-trillions-dollars-millennials
Thx, so are you comfortable with the statement that a ten-fold increase is tantamount to a 900% increase, not 1,000%?
Another Jew blaming Baby Boomers.
Try again, Heeb.
Cue: Sympathy For The Devil by The Rolling Stones
Wouldn’t it be great if the Billionaire class could only add to their show of wealth by creating free hospitals and schools in their name? More on how to do that down below… But first, I want to say Thanks Larry!
Thanks Larry that was ANOTHER excellent essay. Larry’s prose was clear, but that just made it all the more very painful to read. Its all to true. So I can say Larry I agreed with your assessment and analysis of the situation. But I disagree with your implied or stated solution of getting government MORE into education and MEDICINE.
Yes, even after reading your essay Larry, still want government OUT of Medical Care completely and I want government OUT of Education completely. I say this as a self described “America First patriot” who while agreeing fully with your essay, I STILL does not want government to “provide” more “services” of any kind.
Why is that? Well there are several reasons, but lets start with this simple one.
Reason One: As you spelled out clearly in your other wonderful essays, The American State is controlled by the mega rich and a highly placed cabal of jews or worse, a mafia family of Jews. So why should we working middle class and poor place your mind and health in the hands of the Government that has proven itself owned and controlled from high above? Why should even the well-off do this to their children and themselves? That is kind of like just begging to be owned and controlled slaves and serfs to the ruling elite classes. Klaus Schwab and other globalist elites are dreaming up biological control systems to be paired with brainwashing control systems. These systems run so deep and are so strong that giving “asking” for “Medicine & Education” and giving them control of that is beyond stupid.
I’ll take my chances with my own health care and own education thank you much. Giving these elites control over Medicine & Education is like walking into a room with very sticky walls and discover that the floors have been flooded with fresh super glue. Yes, you’re stuck, you’re trapped, you are owned fully and completely, mind & body.
What they are planning to do to the human population is a thousand times worse than their imagined room 101 – a personal Zyklon B shower. While they milk their feelings of victimhood, they are not going to settle for a simple Orwellian boot smashing repeatedly into to the human face.
No what they are pining for and scheming , is a dog-like obedience (via government enforced medical & mental training) where your puppy love for the elites is thoroughly & completely unconditional and your bark & bite is not even yours but always at their command. Forget speaking reason to power, you won’t have that capacity by age 10, barking and biting upon command is all you’ll know. And even if you somehow could try to bark or bite in your own defense and you will be put down immediately, at the push of a button.
So that is perhaps reason number one. No Government provided health care or education. Lets agree to find another way forward.
Life is not fair and the 80/20 rule always seems to hold true. The question is “how do we get around the 80/20 rule and get a social outcome that 80% want, & even the 20% wants?
First, what is the 80/20 rule? I’ll answer that from this website: BetterExplained.com
[Understanding the Pareto Principle (The 80/20 Rule)
Originally, the Pareto Principle referred to the observation that 80% of Italy’s wealth belonged to only 20% of the population.
More generally, the Pareto Principle is the observation (not law) that most things in life are not distributed evenly. It can mean all of the following things:
20% of the input creates 80% of the result
20% of the workers produce 80% of the result
20% of the customers create 80% of the revenue
20% of the bugs cause 80% of the crashes
20% of the features cause 80% of the usage
And on and on…
But be careful when using this idea! First, there’s a common misconception that the numbers 20 and 80 must add to 100 — they don’t!
20% of the workers could create 10% of the result. Or 50%. Or 80%. Or 99%, or even 100%. Think about it — in a group of 100 workers, 20 could do all the work while the other 80 goof off. In that case, 20% of the workers did 100% of the work. Remember that the 80/20 rule is a rough guide about typical distributions.
Also recognize that the numbers don’t have to be “20%” and “80%” exactly. The key point is that most things in life (effort, reward, output) are not distributed evenly – some contribute more than others.
Life Isn’t Fair: What does it mean when we say “things aren’t distributed evenly”? The key point is that each unit of work (or time) doesn’t contribute the same amount.
In a perfect world, every employee would contribute the same amount, every bug would be equally important, every feature would be equally loved by users. Planning would be so easy.
But that isn’t always the case. The key point is that most things are not 1/1, where each unit of “input” (effort, time, labor) contributes exactly the same amount of output.
So Why Is This Useful?
The Pareto Principle helps you realize that the majority of results come from a minority of inputs. Knowing this, if…
20% of workers contribute 80% of results: Focus on rewarding these employees.
20% of bugs contribute 80% of crashes: Focus on fixing these bugs first.
20% of customers contribute 80% of revenue: Focus on satisfying these customers.
The examples go on. The point is to realize that you can often focus your effort on the 20% that makes a difference, instead of the 80% that doesn’t add much.
In economics terms, there is diminishing marginal benefit. This is related to the law of diminishing returns: each additional hour of effort, each extra worker is adding less “oomph” to the final result. By the end, you are spending lots of time on the minor details.
The Pareto Principle is an observation, not a law of nature. (But it is darn close!). The point of the Pareto principle is to recognize that most things in life are not distributed evenly. Make decisions on allocating time, resources and effort based on this.”]
And here is Dr. Jordan Peterson doing a lot of talking and talking on the 80/20 rule. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Jordan+peterson+on+80%2F20+rule
As much talking about it that he does, Jordon doesn’t suggest a good solution, but I will below.
My own life has been nothing but real estate since 1987. In real estate office after real estate office, and in state after state, the same thing holds. About 20% of the agents carry the company. 50% of the agents are “really struggling” and perhaps 15% just give up. As a real estate office owner/manager, and knowing the 80/20 rule up close, I asked myself how can get around the 80/20 rule in such a ways as to make the over all office BETTER?
Answer, I capped the top. And to my shock, the top did not STOP. Twenty house sales put you in the top 20% producer. If you hit that mark, big vacation to Cabo for a 5 day all expense paid get away for 5 people. So if you hit 20 house sales during the year, you not only could take it, you HAD to take that vacation. Next, if you hit 25 sales you earned a $10,000 bonus that you could take as either (1) another vacation, (2) add to 401k retirement, (3) add to health Insurance, (4) add as an equity stake in the Company. And once you hit 30 sales however, you could ONLY GIVE that benefit away to someone else in the company. Yes, you had to GIVE DOWN.
GIVING DOWN, THE CAP, and SOCIAL APPLAUSE. Now you might think that top sales people would stop but they did not. Their output was so busy that that the thought of stopping just cause they hit 30 sales was next to unthinkable. They did think about leaving however. The thought of leaving was constant, but it I got around that too — with what I call DEEP APPLAUSE and SOCIAL APPRECIATION. This is not to say I did not loose 2 of my top producers, I did, but to my shock they soon came back — For the Deep Applause and Social Appreciation. As they would say upon returning, “I sold 45 houses at that place and the owners are in some other state and don’t know my name! Other agents there couldn’t care less about me. They were all just into themselves. So guys, I am back!”
The first effect was agent retention. Those at the bottom 15% started staying longer, quickly becoming “best buds” with those top performers. Best of all, their performance got better. Many times top earners “threw a house listing” — a bone — “Oh please, no applause, I did it because I am just too busy”. Yeah right. Anyway the top performer ALWAYS got was SOCIAL APPLAUSE, literally & figuratively. These big social hugs and slaps on the back were done at every monthly company meeting and at every kind of social occasion. It was “community in action” and it sounded a lot like this:
“Everyone! Everyone! Please stop. Ok as you know, this firm as so much love for Jim. Lets take a minute to applaud Jim Branco, top house seller again with 35 house sales! Applause. No Jim tell you’ve already had your Cabo vacation from hitting the 20 sales and your Cash bonus from 25 sales, what you plan to do with this bonus?” And from there Jim would choose who to award his bonus too. Someone that he felt deserving. I can tell you seeing such “teamwork generosity” even though the “company policies” really gets deeply touching. Soon, everyone in need was deeply grateful and everyone not in need feared being given anything and worked harder because they now wanted to be so big a producer as to become a Giver. This was the over all social effect of getting around the 80/20 rule by CAPPING the top and FORCING giving.
The Millionaire and Billionaire and Trillionaire classes could be treated just the same. That is, CAPPING and FORCED GIVING into the Charitable Social Division of Society. That is, not the Governing Social Division, but the Charitable Social Division section of Society. Let me explain.
Now few realize that human society always as has 3 naturally occurring 3 social divisions. These three social divisions are always present and there from the largest industrialized society all the way down to the two hundred member tribal stone age groups of the past.
These 3 social divisions are:
The Producing/Trading social division. (from farming, production & trade)
The Charitable/Giving social division. (from schools to health care to little leagues)
The Governing/Legal social division. (from police, to courts, to national defense)
Now we get what we feed but we can and do become unbalanced socially.
The best social division arrangement is this percentage:
60% The Producing/Trading social division. (from farming, production & trade)
30% The Charitable/Giving social division. (from schools to health care to little leagues)
10% The Governing/Legal social division. (from police, to courts, to national defense)
Now of course every natural social state of a people (State) will find their life’s situation in flux because of one or two reasons;
1) Their natural environment is in flux — hurricanes, droughts, fires, etc change for the worse or better
2) Their social environment between other people (State) is in flux — the technology of power changes.
These 1) & 2) changes above cause a Human Social States (HSS) to adjust these social percentages below. For example with a big negative change to the natural environment, a Human Social State (HSS) could make these changes all with the aim of surviving. (HSS1n)
50% The Producing/Trading social division. (from farming, production & trade)
40% The Charitable/Giving social division. (from schools to health care to little leagues)
5% The Governing/Legal social division. (from police, to courts, to national defense)
For example with a big positive change to their competitive environment between other people (State) in flux — ie a Positive change in the technology of power…. might look like this:
70% The Producing/Trading social division. (from farming, production & trade)
5% The Charitable/Giving social division. (from schools to health care to little leagues)
25% The Governing/Legal social division. (from police, to courts, to national defense)
Here (HSS2p) meant that this human State found themselves in possession of a new technology of power that gave advantage over rival human States. Perhaps that new technology of power was moving from stone age rocks and long spears to bows n arrows. Or perhaps it was from armies walking on foot to armies sitting up high upon horses…. Or it perhaps it was a thousand other things any of which increased the Technology of Power a degree or more over their competitor Human Social States. Better weapons means MORE for us and LESS for them. When Jewish-Dutch slave traders gave the local black tribes a few guns and a couple hundred bullets in exchange for black prisoners to take to the Americas for trade, suddenly to the local black tribes they had an immense increase in their technology of power over local neighboring tribes HSS. Most likely their internal social arrangement changed by increasing their governing legal social division to 25% or more to increase slave trading but also increase their territory and with that, their access to both more food and many more fertile women. And to the other neighboring tribes, without access to their new Technology of Power, they could not mount a defense and had to flee or suffer slavery and death.
So one can build a matrix of sorts with these concepts.
HSS1n and HSS1p for natural environment
HSS2p and HSS2n for natural environment
HSS1n and HSS1p for social environment
HSS2p and HSS2n for social environment
And then note the social adjustment that will be made to Human Social divisions of Producing, Charitable & Legal divisions. Hint, if you know the country next to you is building a technology of Power greater than yours, then maybe you should give more to defense than to charity.
Once could watch a 3 minute video of just border maps of European Countries for the last 1000 years. While watching it, ask yourself, what technology of power changes where there that might have caused this to unfold. What changes to the environment could have factored in. And what technology of power tells other tribes that your god is supreme? The power of super charged story telling?
Now if one takes these concepts above and looks at the age old Great Game of the Past, one can see the same thing happening.
And if one takes these concepts above and looks at the current 2022 Great Game that is being played today. One might see that the stakes are just as high with the western Jewish Cabal, having lived off of its fiat banking system for over one hundred years, is being threatened by yet a new change in technology of power. The game is changing.
Yes the game is in flux again, with the technology of money changing. The old fiat paper dollar system is a dead letter dinosaur. The most recent petrodollar has been seriously challenged by both Russia and China taking up that new technology and so the danger arises like a neighboring tribe with rifles while you have bows and arrows.
As you know, Iraq’s president Saddam tried to get off the oil-dollar-system and was two years later hanged. Libyan President tried to get off the oil-dollar-system and was murdered a year later. But what has happened lately? After the fall of Afghanistan, both Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, two oil producers, said to Russia we will trade our oil for your gold-backed Rubbles and said to China we will trade oil for your gold-backed yuan’s. Booom!
Next, the American Fiat Empire has moved Gold from a Tier 3 asset class, up to a Tier 1 asset class. Booom!
Next, what is backing the dollar today? Gold? Nope, just oil and not “the world’s oil” either. Suddenly this Technology Of Power is getting weaker — the Jewish Cabal is weaker, not gold backed and not digital…. its a dinosaur to China who is all that and more. And with its Road n Belt initiative, 75% all the people in the world live and fall within, the future of world trade right now looks like it will be done using THEIR TRIBES technology of Power, ie the natural asset backed Yuan. Other countries are in, the Brics and more are in for a change with Venezuela happily waiting in line. Oh no, it doesn’t look good for the Western Oligarchs and the Jewish Cabal.
But…. but…. hold it… all hands now are on deck. The MSM and the Washington/Nato puppets has started a proxy war on behalf of their Jewish cabal mafia puppet masters with the super resource rich Russia and if….. if….if you could collapse Russia…. THEN you could turn to both Saudi Arabia and Nigeria and say once again, “ALL OIL trades in DOLLARS that we and we alone Create”. China and its gold-backed yuan would be forced to trade with the world in Dollars ONCE AGAIN.
But will that happen? One thing is clear, when the technology of power in currencies change, societies change. Usually the Social Division effect the most is the charity section — less education, schools, medicine, retirement, little leagues, etc and everything is poured into the Legal Division of warfare.
Get ready for war and poverty.
Or is that all to the story? ….. The Technology of Power is forever changing, and for that reason, holds out promise of a better tomorrow for all of us with out it. But even here, there is also another cleave or wrinkle to be well aware of.
WHEN the Technology of Power is very costly, only large States arise.
Costly power means a larger and larger Human Social State (State). The optimal size ironically corresponds to the cost of the technology of power itself. Today its the nation state, but tomorrow it could be so costly that the optimal size demanded will be a dreaded World Government.
But WHEN when the Technology of Power is very cheap, say 3 months wages of an average human being on the planet, then the optimal size of the Human Social State (State). Think of the late 1700s and 1800s and the cost of a colt45. The Colt45 for a man’s life time was all he needed. But today as Joe Biden says, you need F-35s jet fighters to take on the State.
Well Joe, maybe not F-35s, but maybe some powerful software, something that say transforms the internet fundamentally in an instant, and thus making Google and Facebook and all other tracking platforms, obsolete as a textile plant in Troy New York or a Roman foot soldier facing a Mongol hoard using stabilizing little leather stirrups to ride around them at 40 miles per hour.
Yes, the internet, must fundamentally change and change for all of us to equally enjoy Freedom, Autonomy, Privacy, & Anonymity. Now that would be a game changer that even digital-asset money could not escape.
Born ’39, now 83; seen LOTS of changes.
Mr. Romanoff is far more right than not – far more.
Gentlemen, these purists, deterministic, materialistic, mechanical and finite models ultimately do not work. It takes a broader base of factors to run a successful culture. Your “Climate Models” are like saying, “My engine is perfect. I’ve tested in on the dyne under all conditions and it performed wondrously.
But, there is no transmission, drive train, chassis, tires, etc. Even many engines have proven to be extremely flawed in direct working application. I feel sad to have to burst your balloon, but sadder that you belief your own hubris and hyperbole.
Here’s your homework: seek what the Collective Conscious is, what it requires, and relate that to the Individual Consciousness. Sounds easy? Once you start reading, questioning, meditating, and searching in Buddhism and Carl Gustav Jung, you will be ready to make a complete set of proposals and framework.
Literal Clown World.
They should just turn D.C. into a one big circus with giant tents replacing buildings.
Even late-stage Fellini couldn’t dream up something so freakoid.
Icy Blast,
I question the article author’s intent and objectivity, but not that of Mr. Unz, for this reason: it is good to read and engage with opposition as mental practice. You come up with good stuff!
Like this:
1) If democratic capitalism is failing the USA, principally due to financial and economic shenanigans by bankers (some of whom are Jewish), how does that make a one-party dictatorship with a gulag better?
2) Is it beyond the understanding of socialists and their shills that disparity in income within a county, state, or nation, could be very great while still providing relative wealth to “the poor” compared to the poor in other places? Poor people in the USA are overweight and have big screen TVs.
3) Many of the economic “problems” of America are related to massive legal and illegal immigration of people who are, on average, poor when they arrive. All the percentage changes since 1980 would vanish if immigrants were excluded from the data. How much immigration does China get, again? No one wants to go live in a racist communist dictatorship? Shocking.
4) The West still has the problem of globalism and white ethnomasochism. China or no China, globalism and white ethnomasochism will end Western civilization if allowed to continue. Those hidden hands on the wheels of power are pushing that agenda for that purpose. They intend to rule over the ruins. We should probably do something about that.
This boomer finds this statement factually not true, … “When they entered the workforce, they had free college, but even a high school dropout could own a home and start a family with single unskilled, entry-level job.”
This is an interview on leftist Salon and this is a lie meant for the twenty-forty something year old who lean left and wants to feel better by demonizing an older white Americans who are a conservative class of people. It is as if there cannot be a leftist boomer and a conservative boomer. While he condemns massive debt, it was leftist spending that got this through. A conservative class by the way that fought against, warned against and suffered from the 1960s/70s free love free drugs mindset that much later voted for big welfare transfers that further hurt and help ruined society.
So what is really going on here is a young leftist author complaining about how things are today that were all caused by leftist success from the past. Authors like this are necessary for the the young leftists to NOT learn from their old boomer leftist successes that are really big failures.
The Federal Reserve Bank is an Organized Crime Syndicate that is using monetary policy to inflate asset bubbles that mainly benefit the billionaires and the top ten percent loot holders. The billionaires and the top ten percent loot holders get the asset price inflation and regular Americans of modest means get the price inflation in housing, food, fuel, and much else besides.
The Federal Reserve Bank is a privately-controlled financial entity that exists solely to funnel loot and power to the globalizer billionaire plutocrats and the multi-millionaires and the greedy, money-grubbing Upper Middle Class Snot Brats.
The Federal Reserve Bank is an organized crime syndicate that works with other globalized central banker shysters to concentrate loot and power in fewer and fewer hands while using mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration to attack and destroy cultural cohesion and nation-state sovereignty.
The Federal Reserve Bank electronically conjures up dollars out of thin air and the common usage of printing for that act of electronic currency creation could also be called digitally creating the dollars.
The QUANTITATIVE EASING highly accommodative monetary policy of the privately-controlled FEDERAL RESERVE BANK is entirely to blame for INFLATION.
We would need at least five planets worth of resources to keep any significant chunk of humanity living at the level of a US middle class family circa 1980, and even that would be temporary.
The 1% and US political leadership have shown us their hand since the Reagan-Thatcher Counter-revolution in the 80’s, with the whole swaggering “there is no society” thing. As Romanoff describes in this piece.
What remains to be seen is if regular US citizens hold different values. The track record is not good, but the Gospel ain’t going anywhere, and repentance is still an option.
Stalin relied exclusively on Jews to the end? None of his later years ruling clique, Molotov, Beria, Khrushchev, Zhdanov, Voznesenskii, Bulganin or Malenkov were Jewish. Kaganovich was but he had been relegated to an administrative position in the early fifties.
https://original.antiwar.com/Ron_Forthofer/2022/09/26/suppression-of-contrarian-voices/
https://thecradle.co/Article/Investigations/15142
Obviously the nation was built by opportunistics whose common aim was to feather their nests at any cost and at any time as long as cost was borne by domestic non-elite players and foreigners.
There was no overarching ,transdencing ideology guiding its creation or sustenance or , now we can add . its future.
They sleep with Nazi ,Fascis,ISIS,Al Quiada . Sometiems tehy craete them ( Al Quiada and ISIS) ,sometimes they offer the ideological backgrounds ( Nazi ) . Then they kill them to sleep with the worst versions of those .Along the way facetiously convincing the morons how extremly honest ethical moral and good the country has alwyas been while making money from the dirty projects.
Right now it is stealing oil from Syria .
What do these Republican boomers conserve exactly?
And frankly, the statement isn’t that controversial, when the boomers entered the workforce, a single income and no education was all that was required to afford a household. The intellectual and political elites of the boomers are guilty of embracing policies that enriched boomers at the expense of younger generations while demolishing the American middle class. Both left-leaning and conservative boomers are at fault. For instance, it was largely Republicans who embraced Reaganism, “Trickle Down economics,” cutting R&D, and deregulation which really screwed over the working and middle class, while doing nothing to stop the left’s open-border policies, which they find desirable due to the cheap labor they get from this.
The (((anti Boomer))) & (((Yellow fever beats White women))) is pure Jew horseshit. Hell, they pitted early Boomers vs. their beloved (((greatest generation ever))) on that old Jew swill titled, “All In The Family.” Anyone with 2 brain cells knows even the early Boomers did not gain power until the mid to late 80s at the earliest. The late Boomers (1958-1964) did not come into play until the turn of the century. (((The greatest generation))) gave Jewish Tyranny the victory over Germany, Whites and Nationalism. The real culprit is the Jew, BUT if anyone can be blamed for being asleep at the wheel, it is the Silent Generation and (((greatest generation.)))
And lets not get started on the Millennials , Zoomers or whatever these clowns call themselves. Not all but a HUGE portion of these clowns are JUST LAZY COWARDS, like the big strong White dude who ran away from the negro beating the shit out of the mixed race Hispanic lady in NYC. Or like the young, strapping shemales that watched 3 Black guys gang rape a female in broad daylight during Spring Break a few years back in Panama City, Fla. Not many White Baby Boomers lived with mommy and daddy at 30 years old and I sure don’t see too many Boomers marching with (((Antifa/BLM.)))
If you want to know how the future will look like, just take a peek at Argentina, that is the future of the West. Argentina was the testing lab of the elite, since it’s “independence” from Spain.
Greedy White Geezers Born Before 1965 Got Bought Off By Monetary Policy Extremism
This nutcake nonsense with monetary policy extremism and low interest rates and zero interest rates and negative interest rates and asset purchases and the like is to save the financial bacon of Greedy White Geezers born before 1965. The damn transnational globalizer plutocrats and those born before 1965 are the main beneficiaries of all this horrid monetary policy extremist horseshit.
Greedy White Geezers born before 1965 must be financially liquidated. The Greedy White Geezers born before 1965 should have been financially wiped out back in 2008, but the Federal Reserve Bank bailed them out.
Zero Interest Rate Policy; asset purchases; money printing; dollar swaps; ballooning the balance sheet of the privately-controlled Federal Reserve Bank with worthless mortgage-backed securities; all this was done to save the Greedy White Geezers. The Greedy White Geezers used mass immigration, globalization, financialization and monetary extremism to steal the future away from future generations.
The Greedy White Geezers born before 1965 are evil and they will deserve the curses of those who come after.
The plutocrat globalizers bought off the brain dead Greedy White Geezer nation-wreckers born before 1965 with government debt and asset bubbles that enriched them. White Core American Patriots born after 1965 must gain control of the privately-controlled Federal Reserve Bank and then immediately implode all asset bubbles in the USA and the rest of the globe.
Once the asset bubbles are imploded immediate deportations of all illegal alien invaders and citizenship revocations can be used to remove 50 or 60 million foreigners and their spawn.
It was a moral test to go to a debt-based fiat currency system and those born before 1965 failed miserably. God will send those Greedy White Geezer bastards born before 1965 straight to the hottest pits of fiery HELL!
All I am saying is give asset bubble implosions a chance!
NATIONALIZE THE FEDERAL RESERVE BANK NOW!
QUANTITATIVE TIGHTENING NOW!
ASSET BUBBLE OBLITERATION TO SAVE THE WHITE CORE AMERICAN NATION!
“I used to provide Libertarian commentary in the Michael Hudson articles here in the UR … But, after embarrassing the Troyskyist Hudson time and again and exposing him as an economic charlatan, because of his “voodoo economics” and for the “nonsense that he propagates”, he BANNED ME from posting there. So, like FaceBook, Twitter … Michael Hudson resorts to muzzling his opponents.”
Not exactly. Michael Hudson banned you because you are rude, mouthy, obnoxious, and almost never have any idea of what you are talking about. And you are one ignorant comment away from being banned here for the same reasons.
And don’t forget ”to wear some flowers in your hair” when you come for the ”love-in” (in the rear).
Thank you for the reply. I would like to know where you received the information that Mr. Putin is worth between $70 – $200 billion.
Just for what it’s worth, I sat down with a loan officer at a major bank branch where, at the time, I was doing my banking. This was 90 miles west of Chicago. The bank officer’s first name was Ilya and he was an emigrant from Russia. He was very nice and spoke impeccable English. I told him of my hobby of amateur radio (ham radio) and the fact that I communicate with Russians frequently, usually using Morse code as the method of communication. He thought that was pretty neat and I asked him if I might be able to ask him one question and that I would like an honest answer.
He told me to ask away and my question to him was an inquiry as to whether the average Russian was better off under communism, or are they better off now, with “capitalism”? He told me that the average Russian was much better off under communism, but that since Vladimir Putin had been elected to office, things are changing and peoples’ lives are getting much better now.
He alst told me that the “money men” had looted Russia of billions of dollars (roubles) but that Mr. Putin has put a stop to it and things are improving. He said that Putin’s popularity rating is so high because of what he has been doing for the people.
Thank you.
Of course scads of Americans live in poverty. They just waded across the border last year. They have no papers, no marketable skills, don’t speak English, eat like hogs and came for the gibs. That’s what’s missing from this essay. We imported a huge underclass so we have a huge underclass; surprise, surprise. If they had stayed home–where they belong–then American labor may have had a chance at collective bargaining. The American Dream died with our porous border.
They are leaving. I moved to Panama, as have many other expats from the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
Inequality is good. The more total wealth you have, the greater inequality is.
The middle class is bad. Getting rid of it is impossible though, unfortunately. Attempts to crush it plan to fail. Rather, it’s about the fact the middle class demands oppression, and oppression must be supplied.
The homelessness is a dysgenics issue, not an economy issue. Getting off the streets is trivial. If you can’t do it, you have extremely serious brain problems, and no amount of “equality” solves very serious brain problems.
Don’t worry, the average genetic load will continue to increase, and thus homelessness will continue to increase. Idiocracy is a fairly decent documentary. (It’s more about lowering death rates than failure to breed, though. The latter is an effect, not a cause, though it certainly doesn’t help.)
Speaking of death rates,
The trash stupid enough to try this are taking themselves out? Too little too late, but it’s something, I suppose.
Secure your shit, retards.
Point 1: Gini is not a precise measure (even if it wasn’t backwards). 4.15 is barely beyond the error bars of 4.5
Second, this is again a genetics issue. America imports a bunch of rich folk, because the Imperial centres are there and you need to wrangle your assigned bureaucrat, which is much easier face-to-face.
E.g. Elon Musk is an absolute master of wrangling his bureaucrat. And, notably, not from America.
Meanwhile, America also imports a bunch of very low IQ human traffick, for suburb-funding and Impact reasons.
Guess what happens when you preferentially import the very competent and the very incompetent.
Wealth concentration does happen in America, but only for Imperial kings and their courts. You’re talking like 100,000 individuals at absolute maximum, well less than 0.1% of the population. Talking about the absurdly overbroad 1% is a comically Demotist distraction. The absolute number of dollars involved is inconsequentially small due to the tiny population that successfully embezzles from/defrauds the State.
A journalism, reversing cause and effect. Reality: “Equality, the great povertizer.” Turns out Envy really is a sin, and really is a very serious sin.
If America had real famines again it would reverse the Idiocratization.
In shocking news, Communism makes you poor.
Fun fact: the great depression was also a Communism surge. If you wanted to be a journalist or bureaucrat you could call it [State overrreach]. I prefer to call a spade a spade. If it’s irresponsible, contravenes property rights, and considered legitimate because it’s State action, it’s Communism.
I know that’s kinda a white way of lookin’ at it but that is my way of lookin’ at a lot of things.
To ‘The Vampire Squid’ everything comes down to money. The lowest common denominator. They scoff at or disregard the concept of patriotism and nationalism. They feel that anything or anyone can be bought off.
Putin has all the satisfaction he desires as the leader of his beloved nation. If he had to live in a hut in Siberia in order to defend and/or fight for the betterment of the Russian nation and defend her interests, he would.
Thank you Rubicon for supplying Hudson’s statistic on the present proportion of “home ownership” in America — which is certainly closer to accurate.
However, to say that 50% of American heads of household are “home owners” is grossly deceptive. In 2016 25% of Americans owned their own homes — that is, owned them outright, which is what “own” means. Surely this percentage is smaller today.
The other 25%+ of what Hudson’s statistic calls “home owners” are in fact mortgage holders; their bank owns their home until (if) they pay it off. And in the majority of these cases, the bank owns the majority share.
The other 50% of us are renters. Or homeless.
It would be revealing to hear what proportion of the 90% or so of Chinese who are “home owners” own their homes outright, and what level of interest they are paying, and how much of home prices represent the cost of building, and how much represent the cost of speculation, nominally in land.
We need to start making a fundamental distinction between the right to own one’s own home and the supposed right to own other people’s homes, which is a form of legalized predation.
That “history is freakin’ cool!” comment made me laugh nearly as much as that landwhale. These freaks know nothing of history. They’re even more clueless than the general public.
Agreed, it’s a literal circus. James Madison would probably kill himself if he saw this. What a joke.
Don’t letarry look after your money. He is radically innumerate (cp. 200 million Indians killed by the Brits as his star effort). Try Googling for the population of Russia on 1917 and you get
You should understand that the US economy is also propped up by lots of cheap labor and a ruthless attitude to looking after ther bottom 50% so as not to make the “defense” budget and inefficiencies like the health system and support for Israel’s ME policy unaffordable.
Quote:
Some early US studies that claimed children were going to bed hungry have been debunked because their method was to informally ask children before bedtime whether they wanted more food. The children in those studies were not weighed or medically tested for malnutrition.
I would not be surprised if 25% of US children turned out to be malnourished. However, many of the malnourished children might also be obese and given to chronic over-eating of junk food. So I would like to see a more biology-based definition of “hungry.”
No,no. His commenting on UR keeps him from actually damaging activity.
You really hit the nail on the head!
Argentina is the poster-child of what the bleak future holds for the West. Inflation is running at 100% this year (will be at the end of this year). Argentina declared bankruptcy in 2001 over $93 billion of its external debt. The “great” United States creates about that much debt each month now!
When GMO seeds were first invented in the “great” United States, guess which country was first to put it into practice on a large scale?
The 1% in Argentina controls in total the mass media, the judicial system, and the so-called “blue dollar” (currency speculation against the Argentino peso with the USD) which is the main cause of Argentina’s high inflation rate.
Currently, over 35% of the population (36.5%) are in poverty due to the corrosive and debilitating effects of Argentina’s high inflation rate. This means that “people [are] sleeping in the street, selling disposable tissues in bars, traffic lights and businesses, ringing bells to ask for money, clothes or a plate of food.” Also, it means that these people are buying less and less food each month, even though they are gainfully employed.
This is what the sheeple in the “great” United States get to look forward to.
Why isn’t he in Ukraine then? Even as a publicity stunt?
I’m sure he loves his country but there are limits to what leaders will do. Though he’s too old now, there’s no record of Putin ever having been in active duty. I doubt he even knows what a real war is like. His main interest, like most people, is himself and his own power and wealth. So I don’t think he’ll do anything for Mother Russia.
Leaders used to fight but times have changed. The most brainwashed and/or loyal to their nations are usually soldiers themselves. Leaders and the “higher-ups” only have some or even no loyalty. Putin is probably more loyal than most though.
Hmmmmm. I wonder if Argentina has the same family-run setup as Honduras?
Excerpt from, The Jewish families that run Honduras:
The Jewish population in Argentina is second only to the USA! Guess which fields they dominate in?
Media. Judicial* system. Money Exchange Casas.
Pharmacies are like McDonald’s. Almost every street corner in the major cities has one. Guess who are the majority of owners of these pharmacies?
The main synagogue in Buenos Aires has a huge battery of interesting antennas that Mossad would envy . . . now, why would a synagogue have a huge battery of antennas?
*Ever wonder where the “judicial system” comes from? Jury. Justice. Judge. Did I miss anything?
“It would be revealing to hear what proportion of the 90% or so of Chinese who are “home owners” own their homes outright, and what level of interest they are paying, and how much of home prices represent the cost of building, and how much represent the cost of speculation, nominally in land.”
The culture in China is very different from that in Western countries. For one thing, Chinese people “do not like the feeling” of being in debt. Also, family and connections play a very different role in China, and are much deeper than can be easily explained. They have a flavor of trust and responsibility that exists nowhere else in the world, at least not to my knowledge.
As one example, a good friend was purchasing a new house for her parents and wanted to pay the full price in cash with the signing of the contract so as to benefit from an attractive discount. She was $200,000 short and called to ask if I would lend her the money to complete the payment. I agreed without even having to think about it, and transferred the money to her account the same day. If I recall correctly, she gave me an IOU at one point but I have no idea what I did with it, and the loan was repaid. This would never occur in the US. I covered this and some other items in an article titled “Understanding China”, which you may care to read.
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/3307/
Not many people in China have house mortgages, though that percentage is increasing today. Almost always, the first approach is through the family – parents, grandparents, uncles, cousins . . . who can most often assemble the cash, and the house is paid in full. The loans are interest-free and the young people pay them off as they can. There are no worries about default, and there is no mortgage on the property.
There has at times been speculation on housing prices, and 20 years ago some people made great profits. But the government frowns on housing speculation, maintaining that a house is a place to live. Thus, various restrictions dampen this activity. Still, prices do rise over time, but generally from real demand.
For families with children, demand is highest near good schools and, for almost everyone, demand is higher near subway stations and other good public transport. Also, in a city like Shanghai, a 3-bedroom house might cost $1.5 million in the downtown, but only $200,000 in an outlying area – if you don’t mind a 1.5 or 2.0 hour commute.
The housing market in China is quite sane, but very different from that in the West because the culture and thinking are very different.
The real laboratory country has been Uruguay : it used to be called the New World’s own Switzerland. It did deserve that title up to about 1955 and then it slid decade after decade, without any hiccup that might have awaked the frog out of the soup pot, into absolute under-development under the governance of the same banks that has once made the country rich. Now it is poorer than nearly Brazil and Argentina. It once had one the most performing (pre-dumbing-down) educational system, nearly tuition-free at all level, and nearly free healthcare. All those who could learned English (or French) to perfection and got the hell to the US (which benefitted from the brain drain) or to Europe. In essence, the country failed to keep abreast of industrialization, like the US with their rustbelt, while all clever people were enticed into tertiary high-qualified but parasitical trades.
What’s the difference from when government runs business or business runs government?
Forgive me, but you sound like a cross between a broken record and a one-trick pony. You deposit the identical rhetoric onto every article on this website. Everyone already knows what you think because you have made more or less the same post about 1,800 times. Maybe write something else for a change. Or, maybe just stop.
It is not a “failed” state, but a government captured state.
More than half of U.S. adults in 2022 (55 percent) say they believe the U.S. Constitution is “inspired by God,” while 36 percent of Americans and 49 percent of Republicans in 2020 say the U.S. “is and has always been a Christian nation.” Sixty-four percent of Republicans and 71 percent of white Evangelical Protestants agree that “God has granted the U.S. a special role in human history,” compared to half as many independents (35 percent) and less than a third (32 percent) of Democrats.
https://www.deseret.com/faith/2022/4/22/23036178/many-americans-say-god-inspired-the-constitution-except-that-part-about-guns-pew-research-marist
https://www.prri.org/research/amid-multiple-crises-trump-and-biden-supporters-see-different-realities-and-futures-for-the-nation/
There is not much hope left for the morons anymore.
It is true that Mr. Romanoff’s essay are pretty threadbare and prolix.
They’re just so tediously long and extremely repetitive. He repeats obvious facts almost so as to avoid their distrubing causes. But when he does venture into causality he’s immediately out of his depth. Not always. But often enough. This would explain his tendency to pin the tail on donkeys that are as safe as they are predictable.
He operates pretty much out of the same Hate America/Love China template and never verges from it once. He doesn’t take any real risks or ever question his own assumptions. The same thing over and over again. It’s like going to an Eagles concert.
Just compare the country the baby boomers grew up in to how it is now. The boomers basically killed it off for the sake of their greed and narcissism. America is just a gerontocracy and a scam for boomers, who are dead set on working millennials to death to fund their retirement, even a they want to keep up the supply of immigration for cheap labor and to suppress wages. They hope it dies off after they’re dead, thought at this point it’s doubtful.
https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-versus-boomers-wealth-gap-2020-10?op=1
https://sunnatru.substack.com/p/generation-saturn
https://www.amerika.org/politics/pull-the-plug-on-baby-boomers/
IIRC – Iclandic econ students in the 80’s bought Friedman’s baloney, grew into the goverment, and nearly destroyed Iceland’s economy. It is possibly the only country who closed down the criminal banks, got their fisheries back, etc. Poor Ireland was too stupid to do anything but pay the banks’ fraudulent bills. Like us, I guess…
LOL. TV never gets it. Seriously, how do you get banned by Michael Hudson? You have to be really obstreperous.
“Let me guess; you’re going to eventually conclude that “we” need even _more_ government, right?
Like China, right?”
No.
Like America:
US government is a collection of people some elected, most are selected and all are controlled by big businesses , foreign lobby ,and certain moral holdovers from 15 th century.
Its a government that consistently disagrees and ignores the top concerns of the country on war, economic policies, defense spending, infrastructure developments ,public transport, public health ,education, and entanglements in foreign wars ,and on access to information .
Size doesn’t matter .
Some can be documented as most glaring examples of divergences :
1- Iran doesn’t behave the way Israel wants- Sanction Iran
2- Israel doesn’t like this BDS. Make anti BDS laws across states and prevents people getting government job or business from gov
3 Love Israel so much. Send the elected and government employed officials travel to Israel to conduct government business and oath taking.
4 Israel doesn’t like certain thing. Well , agree with Israel that it is anti semitism and enact laws to counter it.
5 Patriot Act
6 AUMF
7 311 at airport ,remove shoes and belt and everything from the pocket including boarding pass and wallet
8Mandate signing up for health insurance
9 FBI investigating anti-war movement
10 FBI entrapping young over terrorism after actively supplying and inducing them do it.
11 Police picking up occupy wall street for removal and jail ing
12 Corrupt judicial systems
13 Empowerment of government officials to evade accountability and abuses of the citizen.
Quick jump to Ukrainian jokes: “did you hear about the Ukrainian magician who could not pull a rabbit out of his hat ( reminds me of Bullwinkle on the Rocky and His Friends ” cartoon series” ) so he pulled a hair ( hare?) out of his a**hole !
The Prince and Dukes, looting the people and the ‘Commons’ is not new. Study the Protestant Revolution as described by William Cobbett’s ‘History of the Protestant Reformation’. Martin Luther was admonished, ‘you work for the princes’. For decades, while the MSM has been stealing our focus and setting the social policy imperatives, Poverty, caused by the Fed/Wall St. system, is the actual US national security crisis. Jimmy Carter wrapped in altruism’s cardigan sweater, brought the prototype Great Reset to the ‘not listening’ American people. Then the more robust Reagan administration unleashed corporate and financialization’s systemic rape and pillage on workers wages, rights, and standard of living. The great Looting Forward proceeded, while everyone was looking out for number 1; little did we know the implications and repercussions of turning on the poor.
Mr. Romanoff describes the Rape of America no one noticed and is obviously still an ongoing project under the cover of Woke’s Bolshevik rampage. Yet the MSM informed, political Establishment, the elite and their Straussian educated cadre, can’t understand Trump’s appeal. The 1%, having everything, inexplicably have decided on WWIII ‘for Israel’ at Europe’s expense of course; a good war, to settle everything, and throw America’s best and brightest into the furnace as a matter of providing and ensuring their own security.
No one is going to save us, the American people must perform the necessary political intervention that will commence the reorganization of the Fed/Wall St. system, the funding and implementation the economy platform, the Redevelopment of North America. There are no other options; after all ‘they’ do not own us, we own them.
Once again… a couple of examples, please?
China has a big government.
It is this big government that imposes masks on people, make each inbound traveller do 7-21 PCR tests on a quarantine period of 21 days and sealing entire cities that enables it to JUST register a few thousand deaths (around 5,000 and I stand corrected). This is against a population of 1.4 billion. Did you give any thoughts on how tough this can be achieved without a big government ?
It also tells its businesses and industries how they should operate under such dire conditions and therefore maintain the world’s critical supply chains functioning even during the height of the Delta variant. China (thankfully) did not pander to the “personal freedom” diktat as expounded by you and your ilk.
The chinese government also intervened when the Evergrande group over-reached on their businesses. The group was forced to hive off a large part of their unsustainable businesses and china averted a Lehman Brothers moment.
When Alibaba tried to list Ant Financial with the hope of leveraging their USD 35 billion IPO into trilllions of RMB, china’s regulators smelled another Lehman Brothers stench. They rightfully killed it.
China maybe capitalistic but nothing is too big to fail. With china, it will always be “socialism with chinese characteristics”.
How’s that for big government huh?
Oh,and by the way, china with such a “huge government” produced on the average 2 new billionaires every week as of last year (depending on which publication you read). It has more billionaires than the empire now and counting.
Oh dear, looks like I’ve struck a nerve there, in light of your knee-jerk defence of your Trotskyist friend Hudson.
As for my alleged ‘rudeness’ and ‘obnoxiousness’, the constructive criticisms I posted in the Michael Hudson articles BEFORE I was banned are there in the UR archives for ALL TO SEE.
Readers can see for themselves that Hudson is a petulant little boy that runs off sulking whenever his views are challenged.
As for me being banned from commenting on your threads, that is something that I have no control over. Before I was banned from the Hudson threads, they were getting a pretty decent view count (well, as decent as you’re likely to get in view of Hudson’s tedious and monotonous monologues that dragged on interminably).
UR readers would tune in to feast on those regular eviscerations of Hudson that I would routinely dish out.
Since I left, the comment counts in the Hudson articles are well down and, to the extent that there are any at all, is due to the fact that various lackeys and Marxist sycophants of Hudson post multiple inane comments to boost up the comment count.
People who tell the truth, NEVER FEAR DISSENTING OPINIONS and go out of their way to engage in robust debates in a public forum.
Punch Drunk Brother writes :
One get’s banned for TELLING THE TRUTH and challenging falsehoods – as I did.
Of course, obsequious yes men and women like you, that are devoid of critical thinking faculties, will never get banned.
Well good for you.
Go back to the Hudson threads, you and the few dozen or so other rabid Marxists/Big Government Statists that actually read anything Hudson has to say, and enjoy his long-winded and tedious voodoo economics rants.
Actually, it is a parasitic elite captured country. The ‘gubmint’ is a collection of corrupt and incompetent moral ciphers owned, lock, stock and barrel, by the rich rulers.
The places where Jews and goyim coexisted peacefully, often for centuries, were places where the central authorities protected minorities, and where those minorities were prevented from engaging in the exploitation of others. Do it again today, and most ‘antisemitism’, and the real deal, Judeophobia, would disappear. Plenty would be invented, as happens now, but not for long, as people ceased being intimidated.
In the 130 years before 1913 the USA had massive natural endowments of vast fertile lands, great rivers and lakes, huge forests, minerals and fossil fuels to exploit. Plus the labour of millions of slaves, indentured white labourers and poor European immigrants. To have NOT prospered would have been virtually impossible, yet they also became an expansionist, genocidal, Imperial power in Latin America and the Philippines, caused several Depressions, produced vast inequality of wealth, hideous poverty amidst the riches, and the beginning of the ecological Holocaust eg the passenger pigeon. At least more and more here recognise you for the libertarian buffoon that you are.
A very well researched article that dwells mainly on the symptoms rather than the root cause of the litany of American miseries. The one important fact that the article does not home in on is government. And while government means different things from one country to another, what is beyond doubt is that government is evil and big government is the ultimate evil.
The U.S. government is the guardian and enforcer of special interest and it largely caters to the needs of the latter while making sure that the population at large is kept under control by providing for a subsistence level of living and by using the police and the deep state to make sure any attempt at real change is nipped in the bud.
Basically, the three main rackets in the American society are the welfare, warfare and medical establishments. Try to get these removed and the level of parasitical government bureaucracy will be greatly reduced along with the corresponding taxes that weigh most heavily on the American middle class. And the thousands of pages that govern taxation rules in America puts the burden of taxation on those who cannot afford the legions of tax accountants and lawyers to game the system into paying the least amount of taxes.
And to claim that the U.S. is a capitalist free market economy is the biggest scam of all. If she was so, then the bailout of the most powerful banks would not have been during the Great Financial Crisis. Those banks morphed into gambling casinos after the Talmudic coup against the Glass Steagall act. The U.S. government bailout amounted to socialism for the rich and market discipline for the middle class and the rest. Had the government let the banks fail, the real estate price of those assets that those banks were mortgaging would have dramatically fallen and made it more affordable to most Americans.
Add the nefarious role of the Federal Reserve that was created to supposedly control the business cycle, a pipe dream that anyone familiar with basic economics knows is just an impossibility, and America got on her hand a chronic problem of inflation that was determined by the bureaucrats to be idealistic at 2%, without forgetting their creative accounting and massaging of the numbers to constantly make inflation appear below its actual rate.
So where should the solution start. First and foremost abolish the FED. Then force fiscal discipline through balanced budgets where spending is in tandem with tax collection. That would force a big slim down of the Federal bureaucracy and greatly curtail the size of the welfare state. Then deregulate the health industry by giving people to right to chose whatever medical treatment they prefer to adhere to and remove the restrictions on the admissions of doctors by the medical industry.
An area where regulation might help is the rate of interest that banks are allowed to charge on credit cards. That would remove the two tier credit system that endows the rich and powerful to get charged minimal preferential rates for the sake of their speculative financial investments while burdening the middle class with exorbitantly usurious rates.
Then reform the tax code to a flat rate while exempting the bottom 50% who are eking out a subsistent level of living from any tax payment.
Do these simple proposals have any possibility of being implemented? Fat chance. Without the total collapse of the system and its rebuilding from scratch, any true constructive reforms are nothing more than a mirage.
Uh…our GINI coefficient is the same as Mexico, Suriname, Congo, and Cambodia because the United States is now in fact Mexico, Suriname, Congo, and Cambodia. Mass immigration is solely responsible for the destruction of the United States by its hostile ruling-class regime. Unbelievable that he does not even tangentially reference this obvious-as-a-fireplace-poker-in-your-eye-socket fact in the current year 2022.
I love these articles. The premise is usually solid and comes out strong, “the wealthy are strip mining the middle class”….and then it crashes on the rocks using evidence that proves a different thesis.
“New hampshire has the lowest poverty and mississippi has the most”, “washington DC has the highest wealth disparity”
All of these things are true, but they are all more easily explainable by the black populations in those areas. If the thesis is “america is failing to uplift its black underclass”, these examples would be salient.
“More people dependent on foodstamps than ever, more food pantries than ever”
Blacks are simultaneously the biggest users of food assistance per capita, and the fattest group in america. So the problem here isnt hunger. I can go to a local food pantry on the weekly handout day and see cars not at all old and beaten lined up idling, waiting for it to open.
“25% of soldiers are now on food stamps”
25% of them are also black. But that aside, being familiar with the spending habits of troops, this is not a surprise. They are already provided housing and healthcare, and the troops themselves many meals. Their disposable income tends to be disposed of at the various liquor, tattoo, and strip clubs located right off base.
Anyhow, the central premise is good, the wealthy are strip mining the middle class, but blacks and problems clearly related to them, have no dog in that fight. There is an arguement to be made that they were used as a battering ram to chase middle class people out of the cities however, which is why people like say, Fred Reed, grew up middle class in the DC area, back when such a thing was possible.
Per the US Constitution, there are only two classes of taxes, direct and indirect. The Income Tax is an excise tax, not applicable to most citizens. The establishment political parties, led by the Democrats have been doing us, the workers, for decades. The Income tax is fine if it were administered properly on the corporations, specific properties, goods, services, subjects, and activities where designated by law. I would put the breaks on the Flat Tax, that is neither direct or indirect, a tax that our Founding Fathers, with memories of the old country, feared; or any law or amendment that would substantially alter the US Constitution as it is. The US Constitution must be known and understood and must be asserted in every sector of the government’s operations, the national economy, to protect the sustainability and perpetuation of our lives and families. I’m sure the Wall St. bailouts are not constitutional.
I have NEWS for you, Sunshine!
It wasn’t the “boomers” who got the USA into both world wars, and the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, using lies and deception. It wasn’t the “boomers,” who, upon the nearing of World War II’s end, had divided the tremendous stockpile of armaments that had been amassed, for the invasion of mainland Japan and which were not needed, that stockpile divided in half and each half being sent to Korea and Vietnam, as “they” already had the NEXT WARS PLANNED and which armaments were USED AGAINST American troops.
It wasn’t the “boomers” who got the Federal Reserve and the national income tax implemented. I could go on but, if you have the slightest amount of intelligence, you should be able to “get the picture.”
Yes, but only when expressed in terms of percentage increases or similar. It doesn’t apply to expression just as a multiple.
Thx., it’s a good and simple point, I just never bothered thinking abt. it before.
In every other country, “rights” are actually “permissions” which can be revoked by those in power (governments) at any time.
Look at Canada, which ran roughshod over its citizens’ charter of rights with the “truckers’ protest” by seizing bank accounts, trucks and even children over the truckers’ refusal to disperse from their legal protest just because they could.
The Constitution of the united States of America is a “charter of negative rights”, something that the O’bama and Ruthie Ginsburg complained about. O’bama complained about the Constitution limiting government while Ruthie Ginsburg stated that the Constitution of South Africa was a better document.
It starts out stating: “Congress shall make NO LAW…”
The Constitution is (supposed to be) a limiting document on government power but has been so bastardized, set upon, and basically ignored by all three branches of the federal government that its true meaning has been pretty much obliterated.
Add to that, the “dumbing down” of the citizenry, (public schools) stating that the Constitution “grants rights” It does no such thing–“rights” are (supposed to be) inherent in us being human and are (supposed to be) our “birthright”.
The “beginning of the end” of true Constitutional Republicanism occurred with “Marbury vs. Madison”, when the “Supreme Court” established its “supremacy” to deem “constitutionality” of laws. It placed itself above the legislative and executive branches of government.
The executive and legislative branches (still) DO have the power to fight back by putting areas of judicial responsibility for certain laws “off-limits” as well as having the ability to refuse to enforce the court’s orders. This power has almost never been used.
The “slide” continued with the “War of Northern Aggression” in which the primacy of the federal government was (unconstitutionally) established in which the states became “serfs” to the federal government. Prior to the “War of Northern Aggression” the only federal officials seen were from the Post Office, and the occasional “revenuer” and “customs officials”. The federal government almost never intruded into private individual’s lives. In fact, before the “War of Northern Aggression” citizens of the united States considered themselves to be citizens of their respective states, NOT citizens of the united States. In fact, the word “united” was never capitalized, recognizing that the federal government was (supposed to be) subordinate to the states. That all changed with the summation of the “War of Northern Aggression”.
Enacting of the Federal Reserve Act “sealed the deal” when monetary policy and the power to “coin money” was taken away from Congress and placed in the hands of unelected banksters, many of them foreigners. No longer did Congress have authority over the money supply, the Federal Reserve System being a private corporation, unaccountable to the American public and Congress. In fact, the Federal Reserve charges “interest” on any money printed by the U S government.
Passage of the 16th Amendment took taxation from being apportioned by population to an individual mandate to pay ones’ taxes without regard to apportionment, with loss of 5th Amendment protections against self-incrimination. Tax law was used to prosecute and incarcerate “gangsters” who could not be prosecuted for other crimes, clearly an abuse of the system. This illegal taxation tactic (punishing political enemies by using the tax system against them) was recently used against conservative groups to deny them “tax exempt” status.
The 17th Amendment to the Constitution further eroded the “checks and balances” in our original federal system by reducing and even eliminating the power of the states to affect federal policy. Previous to the enacting of the 17th Amendment, Senators were appointed by state governors, thereby giving states “a place at the table”. That was destroyed with the direct election of senators.
The 18th Amendment, while repugnant to many, was actually the correct way to effect Constitutional change. Congress had no power to ban substances; hence, the Constitutional Amendment banning alcohol was required to put alcohol prohibition in place.
Compare that with the “war on (some) drugs”, given new impetus in the 1930s in which marijuana and other substances were summarily banned without going through the (correct) Constitutional process by Constitutional Amendment.
This erosion was furthered in the 1960s when the so-called “war on (some) drugs” reached new heights, giving unelected federal bureaucrats the power to summarily enact their own prohibitions without input from Congress.
Constitutional erosion has been going on for a very long time. Education is the key, but sad to say, most people do not have any idea of what Constitutional principles are about.
Kauchi-potato writes :
China has the world’s second largest GDP so even if its government was just 1 % of GDP, that would be TOO BIG for my liking.
That said, as a percentage of GDP, China’s government is MUCH SMALLER than that of the U.S.
More importantly, the RAW FIGURES are misleading. They compare the percentage of the U.S Federal government Vs the CENTRAL GOVERNMENT in Beijing and all that it funds.
On the other hand, in the U.S we have state and local governments which employ countless unproductive parasites as well and squander untold resources on boondoggles like those bird chopping Wind Turbines and other Green Energy alternatives that are economically unviable.
Certainly China has local government agencies as well but they are FAR LESS PARASITIC and squander far fewer resources than their U.S counterparts.
IF we were to add the TOTAL GOVERNMENT in the U.S (ie: Federal, State and Local) and compare that to the TOTAL Government in China at all levels, the gap BLOWS OUT EVEN MORE.
In relation to your question asking ‘have I thought about how tough it would be to impose all the Covid Tyranny without Big Government’, my answer is : YES I HAVE (unlike you).
And because I have thought about it, that is ALL THE MORE REASON THAT WE ALL DEMAND SMALLER GOVERNMENT.
Granted, MORE PEOPLE ARE DYING NOW than died before the ‘vaccination’ rollout and these deaths DUE TO THE VACCINE (blood clotting, myocarditis etc) are being labelled as Covid deaths in many jurisdictions.
I’m guessing Kauchi-potato, that you’re one of those DUPES who stood in line to take those experimental mRNA gene therapies that masquerade as vaccines.
Well, I’m a PURE BLOOD. No toxic vaccines in my bloodstream – and likewise for most of my family.
And, I NEVER WORE A MASK FOR EVEN ONE SECOND IN THE LAST 3 YEARS, even though all manner of mask mandates existed in Australia for indoor venues, public transport and the rest.
If we all stood up, threw the masks on the ground and said :
‘This is all B.S, we WON’T be going into lockdown, we WON’T be shutting down our businesses which were arbitrarily deemed to be non-essential, we WON’T be doing any Socialist Distancing, then this whole scam would have ended in the first few weeks, as the Powers-That-Shouldn’t-Be would have backed down.
Australia, Canada and Argentina also prospered fabulously during this period and they had NEXT TO NO SLAVES.
Mulga, your Marxist claptrap is exposed again. These latter three countries had one thing in common with the U.S and that was :
Almost unfettered FREE MARKET Capitalism during the nineteenth century and the early part of the 20th century.
As the 20th century progressed, Argentina adopted Socialism – the sort that you identify with Mulga.
And, in no time, what had once been a country with Top 10 in the World per capita GDP statistics, descended into a Bankrupt Socialist Hell-hole.
Mulga writes of me :
I’d much rather be a Libertarian buffoon than an economically illiterate MARXIST BABOON, as you evidently are.
Your second chart only proves that the richest making more $$ did not detract from what the poorer half or the top 10% already had.
Wel now we know why the US is a failed state, now we know all the reasons why, the question is what will individuals do about it. The answer is NOTHING.
There are people who will fall into misfortune. This is a regular occurrence. However, many people put themselves in danger by earning $10 and spending $30. When hard times come along, and they always do, they:
1. Have no cushion to tide them by
2. They do not know how to live cheaply
3. They are locked into an image of success (the cars, houses etc) bought on credit which ultimately destroys them.
For example, I cannot remember how many times the housing market has crashed and people being ruined. Yet, once the bad time has passed, folks go right back to buying property they do not need, they cannot afford and bidding up the price. Instead of buying a good used car for $7K they must tool around in the 6 Litre SUV costing $80K. They also spend a lot of time and money impressing their “friends on FB/Instagram touting their fake life of success and glamour with endless daily photos of their clothes, their toys and exotic travel all financed by the credit card.
So while many end up on the streets through no fault of their own, many also end up there through their own fault. The Tribe and their antics notwithstanding, each one of us has to look to the way we live and ensure we have that nest egg. Those who dont are screwed !
Mumbo Jumbo Brain aka Mulga, is a complete asshole. I dont know why anyone responds to his nonsensical comments.
Mumbo loves China but lives in Australia and trashes the West. He wont live with his own dog snatchers but hangs with Whitey who feeds him and whose hand he bites. The guy must be a Dink Hasbara !
Mumbo Jumbo is just a Chink Troll. Ignore him and like the other Slope Shits that used to be on UR, he will dry up, like dog shit in the summer , and blow away. They were all cunts and Mumbo is the biggest !
The 16th amendment established the Federal Income Tax in 1913. This tax was declared for the purpose of levying minimal tax rates of 1% on the rich. But it soon morphed into a monster that startled sucking the bone marrow of Americans with some businesses charged taxes in the 85% rate during FDR‘s mandate. Now, the American government recruited 87 thousand armed IRS agents for the declared purpose of enforcing the super rich to pay their fair share of taxes. The U.S. has around six hundred billionaires and a few thousand multi millionaires. Would the rich and powerful require that boost in the number of IRS agents or it is small businesses that will be the low hanging fruits of this criminal enterprise.
Excise tax has been part of the system of tax collection since George Washington’s presidency and it triggered the Whiskey Rebellion which was put to rest by a large militia formation. Most of the rebels were previous veterans of the American War of Independence. Americans at the time were totally inimical to state imposed taxation.
Benjamin Franklin stated that “ we have to live with death and taxes”. This is incontestable but the question that arises is who should have the ultimate word when it comes to imposing taxes. And here I am of the opinion that taxes should be voted upon by the public directly. That would take away the taxing power of the of the U.S. government where most politicians make promises to the electorate based on handing out freebies at the tax payer’s expense.
People directly voting on taxation should be the most constitutional form of taxation and a flat tax is what most people understand.
Thank you for speaking the truth. Most Quebecers and Canadians know who these sadistic people are.
They want electricity to feed New York and her pals of City of London and Bordeaux. They sold Hydro-Quebec to New York. One thing these sadistic people don’t seem to understand is that electrical power installations are much more complex to design and implement than gas and oil pipelines. Controlling electrical power generation and distribution in a reliable and efficient way is also much more complex.
Everybody knows who these people are. With the Internet, everybody can see their war crimes, see how badly they want us to believe their lies, how pathetic and incompetent they are, and how low the cowards can get. These war criminals are not particularly competent in sciences. We’ve seen that since 911, but particularly since 2020.
Seriously? You think people were commenting on Hudson’s articles because of YOU? You can’t really be this delusional.
Hudson has all sorts of people commenting on his articles, including those who disagree with him. As far as I’m aware, you’re the only one he’s ever banned. That should tell you something.
“ Constitutional Amendment banning alcohol was required to put alcohol prohibition in place.”
When the Federal government imposed a ban on alcohol, the people should have rebelled and forced the government to back down.. This was the most egregious infringement on personal liberty for it destroyed the principle that every person is the uncontested master of his body, for human kind are born with a free will. And one’s body is not the domain of the government to prohibit substances from going into it or mandate that others go in like the vaccine.
Correct!
This was exposed by an insider who was there on the docks in Japan when the armaments were being re-shipped (redirected) to Korea and Vietnam. His name was Leroy Fletcher Prouty (January 24, 1917–June 5, 2001) and he would later serve as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy.
Colonel Prouty authored two important books:
The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World in 1973
JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy in 1992.
Yeah, it’s always the usual suspects involved(throughout history)
Video Link
Thank you for the post; I have read both of those books my Mr. Prouty!
Brad
“Since I left, the comment counts in the Hudson articles are well down . .”
So, after Michael Hudson banned you, his readers and commenters have plummeted? And if I ban you, the same will happen to me?
Well, maybe, but on the radio many years ago there was a popular song titled, “I got along without you before I met you; I can get along without you now.”
The miserable state of the Main St. economy, when factoring in the demands of Globalization, that took the tax burden from excises, tariffs, and imposts, and placed the burden upon the native domestic population does not justify the present present Income Tax system which is already an excise tax, unconstitutionally applied directly upon most people’s wages and/or stated ‘income’, that is the generic term, Not taxable income. The Flat Tax would not accomplish much in the reality. Globalization, and the Fed’s demand for low wages via high unemployment that impedes economic growth for Wall St.’s profit, has yet to enter our consciousness. It’s a little more complicated.
to portray Kirchner’s government as an ally of Iranian-backed terrorism with Paul Singer, the billionaire hedge fund manager who’s seeking to force Argentina to repay the full amount of the defaulted debt held by his firm.
As Jim and Charles noted, linking Singer to AIPAC and FDD doesn’t require an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. It simply requires following the money. Singer contributed $3.6 million to FDD between 2008 and 2011. In 2010, Singer’s personal and family foundations contributed a combined $1 million to AIPAC’s fundraising arm, the American Israel Education Foundation.
https://lobelog.com/following-paul-singers-money-argentina-and-iran-continued/
https://lobelog.com/the-nisman-murder-and-the-amia-bombing-a-tangled-thread/
Poor Alberto Nissam was murdered by the Isareli assassin to make it look like Argentina has got rid of one of its Isareli -lobing critics .
Bingo! The 60s was the turning point. The Jews openly attacked and castigated the WASPs, and they did nothing but cower. In 1960, the Jews were paddling furiously beneath the surface, but WASPs still had a significant degree of power over the country. But, by the end of the 1960s, the Jews were in the ascent and WASPs were grovelling, apologizing for the sins of others, and seeing their numbers dwindle in the elite strata of government and elsewhere. Lack of smarts, lack of tribalism, lack of courage. They were not tough enough or united enough to stand up for themselves and the society they built. And the Jews game-planned it all: they knew white women were resentful about putting hubby through school (even if it paid off in a comfortable upper-middle-class or upper-class lifestyle), and they pricked away at that envy until white women turned on their own men. And they knew incoherent blacks hated whitey, and were aching for a violent release. Over the last half-century, the black hatred of whites has only increased, and now they are emboldened. If Whites had stayed committed to one another and to their society, they might have survived, since they had much more institutional power than they do now, and had numerical superiority over their enemy. But they caved, and Shlomo proved quite a ruthless new master. The destruction of white men is the real holocaust in American history, and white women then have the temerity to wonder where all the good white men have gone. A lot of white men and women took glee in the fall of the WASP male, but it never occurred to them that their fail presaged their own. I get the sense that working-class white women know this better than their better-educated female counterparts, because now they find themselves vulnerable and a target, too. Someday, these highly-educated gender feminist white females will see their time come just as it did for the men they excoriated. A wise man would help speed it along.
James Madison would kill Lizzo.
What sick men these are. They make the followers of Islam look rational by comparison. No wonder Christianity has had such a hard time in the modern world. Most people can’t even conceive of such evil.
Russia is being punished for not wholeheartedly embracing the neo Weimar Republic which puts the original one to shame in terms of decadence
True story: Decades ago, a friend of mine, Arthur Fonzarellie, lived in a room above the garage of a house owned by Howard Cunningham. Both Arthur and Mr Cunningham would be criminals under the current fad for single-family zoning laws.
Hello Nancy
Fair enough.
For examples of Larry’s Hate America/Love China! template just read his essay titles. They read like a string of ad hominem attacks. And even when they don’t read like ad hominems they’re often misleading.
For the ad hominems:
Dumber Than The Average Human
Americans Are Criminally Insane
The American Dream (presented of course as a complete lie and total nightmare).
A good example of the misleading would be this essay that we’re commenting on now.
Life In A Failed State A more accurate title would be Life In A Destroyed State.
Even Larry begins the essay by calling out Jews, or what I refer to as Jewish Supremacy Inc. (in part because JSI includes white and poc paid proxies and useful idiots). In the second paragraph he writes that the events and circumstances described herein were all deliberately created and implemented. I couldn’t agree more. So then, why call it a Failed State? It would be like saying the Twin Towers collapsed all by themselves. Nor is this analogy inapt, since JSI was responsible for the destruction of both.
This happens often in Larry’s work. Speaking of which, and just for the record, though I often find myself in disagreement with him, I’ve become a regular LR reader, though relatively new to his work.
In any event, regarding this article, it’s not only misleading to call the US a failed state, it’s also imperceptive to direct attention to income inequality and leave it at that. Again, it would be far more accurate to talk about power inequality. Because one follows the other. The explanation for this is that the sharp divide in power comes first and can be seen throughout the entire culture, not just the economy, important as that is.
This is where his America Bad/China Good comes through. Because China is run by a group of people who are as much above criticism as JSI is in the United States (and both are certainly working together on The One Belt and Road Initiative). So, talk about the income gap being less in China doesn’t mean much if the power gap is as great as it obviously is.
It’s also worth pointing out that Larry’s not the only person who knows people in China, or Chinese people living in other parts of the world. So he’s hardly the final word on the matter, though he give the impression he thinks he is. That’s why much of his work reads more like propaganda than journalism or social commentary.
Of course, you might not agree with any of this Nancy. Again, fair enough. And it is just a quick sample. I’m sure you have your own thoughts on his work and look forward to reading about that should you decide to respond. Til then, this ought to do it for now.
Lost me at more white people falling into poverty as ‘good news’
Perhaps because calling out the Jews is a not very successful or subtle strategy. to blunt their overwhelming power?
Have you ever faced a situation where you were the underdog? Brains not brawn are your first line of defense.
When Jews control perhaps 55% of the wealth in western societies, you have few alternatives. If you rely on Jews who have some sense of fellow feeling, you’re not playing the odds. Ergo, Meloni in Italy and DeSantis in FL. You’ve got to have at least some [rich] Jews on your side.
When even the bastion of oligarchy the Financial Times of London can run an article this month with the title “The UK is a poor country with some very rich people”, then you can see that, over a Glenlivet and Perrier, the rich are very aware of the facts. And they like the facts.
A truly clueless comment by someone who’s never even talked to, or known a wealthy person (“all paper assets”)….you wish, envious peon.
Bottom Line : Anyone with even half a brain knows that :
1) Face Masks do MORE HARM THAN GOOD as far as airborne coronaviruses are concerned and do next to nothing to prevent spread of this Flu-By-Another-Name.
[ This can only be produced by some one with half a brain. A pathogen that is transmitted thru microscopic droplets of fluid expelled from the lungs even during normal breathing cannot be easily avoided no matter how much precaution one takes. The only way to stop such infection is to put up a physical barrier against it – hence the mask. This was already being tried successfully in northeast china between the end of 1910 to the first quarter of 1911 in what is now known as the Manchurian plague. The doctor who pioneered this was a Malaysian Chinese doctor called Wu Lien teh who was educated in the Emmanuel school of medicine in Cambridge. His makeshift mask at the time managed to stop the infection within 6 months and the death toll was contained at 60,000. Prior to that, people who were infected dropped like flies. The design of the mask is the precursor of today’s N95 mask. Dr. Wu was nominated for a nobel prize in medicine in 1935 ]
2) The PCR test, run at cycle thresholds (CT’s) of 35 – 40 (as they almost all are throughout the world), PRODUCE 97 % FALSE POSITIVES.
In other words, PCR tests are worthless.
[ Any researcher who is involve in biological research can tell you that no test is definitive in a first try. Even for well known diseases, doctors still have to go thru various tests and reviews before they are certain of the actual cause. The PCR test is no different. That’s why in China they do multiple tests to ensure whether one is positive or negative. ]
3) We ALL KNOW that the inventor of the PCR test, Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis, said himself that the PCR test SHOULD NOT BE USED TO DIAGNOSE infection.
[ Kary Mullis died in August 2019, some 4-5 months before COVID-19 was discovered and identified. His comments on the PCR test was in relation to the possibility of HIV being the cause of AIDS, which he denied. He never said anything about PCR cannot be used for testing COVID19 for the SIMPLE FACT that he was dead months before COVID19. Please do some more detail homework before you shoot your mouth off. Its just like the case of IVERMECTIN. Some infected people were actually cured by it. I should know because my own 88 year-old father who was infected last year was cured by taking IVERMECTIN. And the drug was designed to cure parasitic infections !]
4) The COVID PSYOP was just that – a psyop and a hoax.
It was a hoax in the sense that it was NO WORSE than a typical flu season – a little worse in some places and less severe in others.
The alleged mortality due to Covid has been exaggerated by an order of magnitude at least, as most ‘Covid Deaths’ were those that died WITH Covid as opposed to FROM Covid.
[ Yeah, just because you are still living and kicking doesn’t mean you have earned the bragging right to talk down to those who have suffered COVID. If well trained and experienced virologists stepped up to tell the whole world that this is not your normal case of a flu, who are you to question them. If this is a normal case of flu, how come the death toll now stands at 6.5 million worldwide in less than 3 years ? Whether these deaths were WITH covid or FROM covid is immaterial. The fact is Covid hastened them to an early grave. Don’t we all have a right to life ? ]
So please rid us off your arrogance, ignorance and stupidity. Only people with half a brain can say things like the above. I think I have wasted enough time with you. Bye bye.
“China maybe capitalistic but nothing is too big to fail”
Including China. How are the lockdowns going? Western leaders may be stupid but nowhere near as stupid as your beloved Winnie the Pooh. Have fun with the totalitarianism.
And the landwhale, preferably with a harpoon. Then he gets his flute back and disinfects it.
Reading Larry’s columns leaves one kind of depressed about the state of the USA but the facts and figures he outlines are impeccable – I have seen lots of people dissing Larry but not one of those morons are able to show counter facts or figures which shows if it’s a lie or not – The hegemon is going rapidly towards oblivion and deserves to also because a nation that doesn’t care about it’s poor and destitute doesn’t deserve to be a nation at all – Hopefully a new order will arise from the ashes but I am not hopeful because the people seems unwilling or unable to make the necessary changes
Our constitutionally ordered, US republican government, is oligarchical, the SCOTUS is that oligarchical power over the national government. However the Marbury vs. Madison decision, limited the Court’s jurisdiction and yet founded and solidified the Supreme Court’s status as the ultimate arbitrator/interpreter of the Constitution. It was Republican President Lincoln’s second, anti-oligarchical, revolution that asserted America’s government was created, of the People, by People, and for the People and shall not perish from the earth. The DNC/Democratic Party is obviously antithetical to Lincoln’s decree on behalf of the American people.
With regard to the Federal Reserve ACT, created by Congressional legislation, it was brilliant. If not for the fact that the Fed, the US government’s Bank, controlled by the private member banks, can only organize America’s wealth, money, and credit to wage war. Ever since Bernard Buruch made over $400,000,000 million dollars in the aftermath of WWI, the United States has been on a Perpetual War Policy, War is profitable has been the driving force of the Fed’s existence. Imagine the same bank with a new charter, new bank members, that would commence a new policy; veracity, peace, and prosperity, through development.
The 16th Amendment did not create a third class of taxes, it changed nothing regarding the Constitutionally provided two classes of taxes and their operations. Brushaber vs. Union Pacific. It is its’ application though political/legal skullduggery and MSM reinforcement that took the Income Tax beyond its’ original intention and parameters.
The 17th Amendment did not seem so repugnant since the Federal government sometimes acted like a regulator of the several, local, state oligarchies. Nevertheless, since democracy is easily bought, the direct vote just made the local oligarchy’s choice more expensive.
The 18th Amendment was a corporate/gangster plot, that worked like the Covid Mandates. Whiskey, Beer, and Liqueur manufacturers/distributers were put out of business to be bought up for pennies on the dollar; eventually all controlled by about five families.
An ‘Opium War’ is conducted against the United States, the US standard of living is in uncontrollable collapse, millions have died, and the rich get richer and you go ‘libertarian’?
>>the current fad for single-family zoning laws
That’s a funny way of describing a current necessary condition of having a middle-class.
You Libertarians *intend* Mexicans and Americans living 20+ to a house. Many of you *celebrate* it – in the name of economic opportunity.
But think ahead. Opportunity to do what? Get ahead, meaning rise out of poverty. But where will you go with your money when every neighborhood, every town, every city is a slum? Because there will always be far more people outside the lifeboat than the lifeboat can hold.
Perhaps you think you can make enough money to move to the moon, with Bezos.
I agree that the Volstead act was dead wrong and unconstitutional on it face, BUT it was a difficult amendment to get through…
That being said, if the politicians had to create an amendment to outlaw certain drugs in the second “drug war” in the country instead of by legislative fiat, none of the drugs deemed to be harmful (marijuana, heroin, cocaine, etc.) would have ever been made illegal. There would have been no way to get the “several states” to agree…in any case, the process would have taken years…
The really bad Jews, and Israel, are now far stronger and more influential since the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. So I guess Stalin’s Jews weren’t all that bad.
” For 500 years, this disparity defined the urban landscape of the great United States of America..”
You pen idiocies like this but have ‘the Jews’ all figured out.
This is a nauseatingly truthful article. It jams all the grim statistics into a rancid stew of economic horror. Thank you Mr Romanoff for having the courage to lay out this ghastly reality.
Notice how the right wing billionaires and their church poodles constantly harp on socialism and Marxism as an excuse not to ameliorate any of these devastating problems.
America is a gigantic Madison avenue glossy but stinking fraud. We will all be blessed when Putin lets the nukes fly.
And speaking of nukes, the one omission in this tragic article is the role of the military industrial complex to suck resources out of society. We’re on the verge of a government shutdown but no one questions the propriety of 100s of billions of dollars to Ukraine to support its bogus government and its dubious War provocation against Russia.
speaks well of unz that they continue to host this shill for commie cannibal savages….
in response to this _massive_ word salad, I really only have two observations….
(1) there is NO DOUBT that America is in decline. but the embellishments, exaggerations, lies, distortions, and cherry-picking of data that this idiot engages in is breathtaking. we are only discussing every single hideous foible and hangnail and defect in America warts and all because, in spite all the ugly spectacle of msm MIC-capture… America still has one of the most diverse media spheres in the world. in other words, we can elaborate on America’s many foibles because we are ALLOWED to…. compare this to China, where this treasonous piece of shit resides and NOTHING can be discussed openly. NOTHING. and the best way to live in China as a treasonous lickspittle is to sell your own country down the road to commie cannibals.
(2) there is a deep-seated neeeeeeed in China to pull America down. this treasonous scum fulfills that need. the most simple salient fact you SHOULD focus on is the fact that Larry the Traitor Scumbaganoff posts HERE… but we cannot post THERE. This is all you need to know. FULLSTOP. end of story.
revoke this scumbag’s passport or arrest him for treason. I volunteer for the firing squad.
“. . . worth pointing out that Larry’s not the only person who knows people in China . . . So he’s hardly the final word on the matter, though he give the impression he thinks he is.”
You are of course correct that I am in no way the only person who knows people in China, or who knows much about China. However, there are few readers here who have lived in China or actually know anything real about the country or the people. Yet it is they who post all the comments, their “knowledge” based on media rubbish or imagination, or perhaps just wishful thinking. In any case, almost everything posted here about China is wrong. I don’t apologise for my statements of correction.
Every person or country has a right to be defended against slander. China is no exception.
“China is run by a group of people who are as much above criticism as JSI is in the United States (and both are certainly working together on The One Belt and Road Initiative).”
These statements are just rubbish. I rest my case.
False dichotomy.
Touché!
Well implied!
Mohamed
Stalin’s Jews are dead and gone. It’s the ones around today we have to worry about.
Paying a living wage is communism. Providing health care to the citizens is communism. Giving jobs to everyone is communism. Educating people is communism. Feeding and housing the poor is communism. Can’t have any of that now can we?
The rich getting richer from impoverished masses burdened with debt is anti-communism so that’s what we must have. And all the right-wing commentariat of UR agrees. Down with communism! All power to the billionaires! And they have the nerve to call America and its billionaires “communist” and “left wing”.
A foolish self important and self indulgent fantasist who makes up facts like the oddball behind the moniker Larry Romanoff has now taken to censorship in flagrant abuse of Ron Unz’s charitable hospitality and the free speech allowed to the deviant. You will probably cop it soon if you insist telling truths about Larry. It’s hard to say whether your vigorous expression might protect you against a hissy fit from Larry.
Exactly. That the billionaires the politicians and other greedsters would behave this way is not a surprise. The biggest problem is the corruption of the church from promoting a message of compassion to one of competition.
Check out this cartoon by Al Franken called SUPPLY SIDE JESUS:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-pCSBDRVf-JK0bqcwFWs0u_oAPv19nNf/view?usp=drivesdk
You have lost your moral compass if you can’t see that the last good thing the chaotically imperfect state that is America may do for the world is to stop the pretend superpower’s white IdiAmin (without the syphilis) from getting away with invading weaker neighbours against law and the preference of the inhabitants,
In my twenty years wandering in Christendom, I’ve seen that the church will invariably support corrupt power structures over workers and citizens. I’ve long wondered why this is so, but then I realized that the church’s obsession with human evil leads to a simple calculation that it’s better to support 1 corrupt CEO and 12 corrupt Board of Directors who manage and control 10,000 evil workers than to champion human rights. The church will even cooperate with brutal regimes like the Fascist Dictatorships in Latin America and the Soviets in Russia, so long as society is stable and secure.
I think you can even see this concept in the words of Jesus and Paul as recorded in the New Testament: subservience to ruling authority and living below the radar at almost all costs.
I’ve watched many youtube clips — over many years — of Putin speaking. He clearly is articulate, intelligent, thoughtful, fair minded, and virtuous. He has pleaded with the West to allow Russia full partnership in global leadership, but the Jewish neocons who run American foreign policy, and indirectly NATO and the EU, reflexively hate all things Russian, imagining erroneously that Putin is a latter-day reincarnation of the Czar.
But nothing could be further from the Truth. Putin has shown enormous support for both Russian Jewry and for Israel. That’s no Czar. I suspect the Israelis are hoping Putin will teach America a bitter lesson, and maybe even destroy us, to bring about the long-held Israeli desire to milk America dry and to see her wither away. And then the Israelis will happily join the BRICS bloc where they naturally belong as part of the Asian continent.
I think Putin is the most distinguished and capable leader in the world today. He puts American politicians to utter and eternal shame as selfish greedy ignorant quislings.
The preference of the inhabitants was expressed in the referendums, not only recently, but in 2014 as well.
There are more firearms in gentile hands than the U.S. than there are jews, by a few orders of magnitude.
Yeah, I think we’ll keep jew-truthing, thanks.
You seem to be an expert. So tell me: are bangers and mash kosher?
Your comment about the Israelis is chilling. But in support of it is the fact that they accepted the destruction of European Jewry in world War II in exchange for their Jewish homeland in the Mddle East. So all the more so would they be willing to see the destruction of the American goy superpower.
You seem to resent the messenger for bringing such a bad message about a nation in decline. We all should be very grateful to Mr Romanoff. Certainly America’s “diverse media spheres” will never tell us things like this. Instead they have us focus on the bread and circus spectacles of television movies and professional sports. Anything to keep Americans in a drunken soporific somnolent state of self-inflicted ignorance.
The only freedoms the NRA types would defend are their freedom to buy weapons and to practice at the range. They don’t give a damn about any of the genuine problems facing our society. They are a bunch of brain dead manipulated morons. And pussies to boot.
I know S. Korea very well. I’ve visited Japan a few times. My stay in China extends to four hours inside Beijing Int’l Airport. Broadly speaking, S. Korea feels like a village compared to Japan. Japan feels like an extremely fun amusement park with deep racial sympatico. China just feels in a different league. It has a size and populational depth that is not relatable to anyone. Except maybe the Indians.
There is no equivalent feeling in the USA that exists in all these countries. The feeling of density, and shared experience. It’s a race. Get it through your dense heads. Possibly there are other “western” countries that have that feeling. And I’m not so sure that the USA can be considered a “western” country any longer. I mean, it can be. It’s all in your head as text. But to consider it a “western” country has lost all practical value. So, what’s the point?
Anyway, what logic, consideration, book-learning, insults can not advance and bring about, simple arithmetic is leading the way. Whites are a small minority of world population. That leads to, creates understanding.
This is something I’ve been searching for a long time: President Putin’s view that if Russia instigates an all-out nuclear conflict and is destroyed, then faithful Russians will go to paradise. The RU link is from a New York Times article on growing concern in Washington about Putin’s nuclear threats:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/world/europe/washington-putin-nuclear-threats.html
“He has trumpeted its world-destroying potential in his state-of-the-nation speeches and has insisted that in the event of a nuclear war, “we would go to paradise as martyrs, while they would simply perish.””:
http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/58848
[When you open this webpage there should be an option to translate into English. I urge you to do so because so far as I know Putin is speaking extemporaneously without any prepared notes. Can you fathom an American politician able to speak in this manner even 1% of what Putin said? This man clearly is a genius and an idealist and he’s mocked by the vulgar forces of American political society and the Jewish neocon elites who reflexively hate everything Russian.
[The following is the passage the New York Times is referring to. By the way the Times claims in the above article that Russia has a first strike nuclear doctrine. But notice in this interview Putin completely denies it. And in fact it’s America that has a first strike option that was enunciated by President Bush ii. America also has an explicit policy of using nuclear weapons on non-nuclear states. In other words to pick on the little guy and to fight the war that you’re guaranteed to win:]
Here are some more quotes from Putin in the conference carried by the Russian website. I’m almost speechless at the breadth of his knowledge and his articulate manner of speaking. It frankly nauseates me how he is constantly demonized by American elites. My impression is Putin is a godly person, deeply religious, and woe to our society that mocks and scorns such a decent human being. Perhaps nuclear annihilation is the best we deserve:
The date of the final exam isn’t September 30.
In any case, you would have failed it because it wasn’t a true-false exam and you only wrote down an “F”.
Your comment suddenly makes me realize that there’s very little individual or collective experience enjoyed by the posters here with regard to China — which suggests a source of the irritation with Larry Romanoff here.
Having done business in Asia (China, Japan, Taiwan), it’s puzzling why so many posters here are off base, but the virtually complete ignorance of what is going in China is due, in part, to the lack of direct observation — at whatever level.
In the world of finance, it’s thoroughly unlikely that anyone who’s done work in China would write the unbalanced comments that are routine here, and for which Mr Romanoff’s articles are positive offsets.
A sad, delusional comment — if the Jews wanted all the weapons in the country, they’d own them.
They’re nearing absolute financial control, absolute media control, and absolute ownership of America. Your water pistols will, naturally, be useless.
There’s a vacuum there. It’s notable it’s a Jew that’s the middleman between China and America. Jews derive enormous power in their middleman role- blacks, whites, Asians, women, hetero, homo, men, rich, poor, the religious, the atheist, the exalted, the insulted, the in, the out. LR is no exception. Economic, political, and social arbitrage.
It’s a remarkable skill. One that non-Jews need to get on board with, or be continually taken advantage of.
Your answer is puerile. The Jew is the only middleman? L Romanoff is a Jew?
Whether he is or is not matters only to the nitwits who are puzzled by everything including their bowel movements.
L Romanoff has written more substance in one of his articles than the collective detritus of the many autists stalking UR.
Needless to add, these people have never shown the level of capability to be charged with the responsibility to represent stakeholders in any global context.
I did finally figure this out thanks for to your previous post.
No. Not puerile. How about that? Nyah, nyah.
Let’s ask Larry. Larry are you a Jew or ex-Jew? How about mom and dad? You don’t have to answer, of course.
Mr Romanoff
perhaps I must barely speculate, it may be a developmental issue. You indulged in poverty pornography, you enjoy humiliating the usa
how is it your Part 1 gives no clue about the deficiencies or a foreward
no mention of the rampant capital gains benefiting the uberclass
no mention of the no risk junk mortgages, which professional class benefited
where is the overspending and the beneficiaries of the elephant, the mic which police’s the dstate. but you get credit at least a token fig mentioning the occupied FED (..occupiedby ?)
where is any reference to the union workforce that in another era advocated for parity, and then gave us a mid-class. but at least you mentioned the adjunct professors earning 20k, no mention of the grad TAs, earning even less on a student visa. Which labor relations Board allowed that. Who polluted the labor law (the banksters maybe..)
why won’t you dissect the H1 J1 skilled migrants and the illegals replacing our dominant and ever talented workforce. why won’t you refer to the prostitues in philippines, india doing our customer service, card services and tech support
why won’t you refer to why 40% of the street minors are preschool, because the patrons you favor are glad to benefit from the next wave to be human-trafficked. ie white slavery, all slavery
why won’t you comment on the judicial system, your patrons have gamed, where parity for the Common man plaintiff is ridiculed by the Tribe while they muscle the legal profession, they that bribe the judges.
please ask your grad students to sodomize you with the ample porn stats. after that you’re welcome to join my discovery tour where you can observe the latent talent and the rising spirit of this land. . Surely the CCP free press won’t publish a seething dissent against predatory capitalism giving the rulers a bounty of export revenue. How nice, you prosper with pseudo academics. amuse us with part2
For all the eye-glazing statistics – too many – the article ultimately renders itself worthless BY SAYING NOT A WORD ABOUT THE *DEMOGRAPHIC* BULLET SHOT BETWEEN THE NATION’S EYES.
Do I really have to utter the low, low tier info about the destruction of our nation by the savages that have plagued us from the beginning and now are completely off the chain? The simians are the most shockingly, visibly obvious but the flood gates were open to next in line for societal, national destruction – the myriad browns and the further invasion of blacks from the Caribbean and the dark continent itself. Then add the dozens of Asians from all parts of the East. All this madness of course was engineered by the Tribe that Jesus twice described as a Synagogue of Satan. Indeed, they are. And they have brought the entire house down that our Fathers and Mothers created for themselves “and [their] posterity.” And yet…not a word spoken of all this. Just the “economic” symptoms of the fatal disease. Talk about PURPOSEFUL deceptions. How can this article, in the end, not be a purposeful deception when a word about the DISEASE itself IS ENTIRELY LEFT OUT?
“where is any reference to the union workforce that in another era advocated for parity, and then gave us a mid-class.”
I covered this part in detail in the article below.
America’s Labor Movement and the Post-War Social Contract
https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/americas-labor-movement-and-the-post-war-social-contract/
As to the rest of your inexcusably-rude comments, I have two observations to make. The first is that this essay is already long enough to deter readers. You are asking for a book. I cannot cover all that material in one article.
My second observation is less pleasant. I do not actually “enjoy humiliating the usa” as you suggest, but you are evading a most important point. I am from a part of the 96% of the world that is non-USA, the 96% part that your country has beaten, kicked, impoverished, destroyed, raped, looted, sanctioned, strangled, bankrupted, threatened, invaded, and pissed on in every way, for the past at least 200 years. If you want sympathy, you won’t find it in me.
That’s true. All younger Americans should unite in solidarity against them. As soon as they can, they should vote to cancel their social security and medicare, and confiscate their ill-gotten assets. And ban “seniors” from voting or holding office.
https://www.amerika.org/politics/pull-the-plug-on-baby-boomers/
Canada is a fake democracy. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) uses $1.5 billion/year extorted from the taxpayer to fuel pseudo-revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and now in Iran, on Facebook.
The CBC systematically deletes or discredits all posts that do not go along their views (and agenda).
Canada is unable to tolerate a single protest, such as the peaceful trucker’s protest. The Canadian government can find many ridiculous reasons to justify the intervention of the police, military, or paramilitary.
Canada has zero tolerance for protestors. During G7 meetings, protestors are intimidated and agents provocateurs often dissimulated in the rcmp use violence to discredit legitimate protests.
The CBC is currently portraying Iran as a monstrous killer of women, when their scarves aren’t adequately draped.
However, here i hear another point of view from an Iranian woman, presented by Mr Blumenthal. Fortunately, the world is not populated only by morons like Irwin Cotler.
Video Link
‘Sadeghi also addresses the impact of US sanctions on Iranian women, and details civil disobedience by Iranian women that has never registered in Western media.’
… and yet… here we are.
weird how that works.
Mr Romanoff had to leave something for you to write about in your next critically acclaimed book.
Disappointed you couldn’t show a little more passion in your post.
In what way are they rubbish? But you can’t say.
Instead all you offer is an ad hominem.
What case? You haven’t said anything.
In fact, all you did was prove my point.
Beyond hu$tling, USians don’t do much else. Do they strive to help others? Do they work at something creative? Of course not, and this describes virtually all of the US empire culture. Outside of science and technology, wh/are heavily funded, USers aren’t leaders in anything.
Can Americans compare w/music, art, literature, poetry, etc.? How cd they, when the entire way of life is organized around business, hu$tling, and making money-getting rich? The literature on the Russians is so vast, and full, Usians heads are too focused with tushies and celeb gossip, and oh, some elderly WASP “queen” dying. USians have no Moussorgsky or Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky; they have no Pushkin or Lermontov or Dostoevsky; we have no Diaghilev; we have no Kandinsky or Chagall; basically, they don’t have shit-except for porno.
The US empire’s focus has been wrong, the values are wrong, and the resulting “culture” is pretty shabby. It’s basically a turkey culture, and inasmuch as the population consists of turkeys, they couldn’t care less. They try to make money; “reading” consists of staring into cell fones. Trumpino is no accident: he is a perfect representative of who USers are. There’s no ‘external’ force, the reason why America failed was bc of Americans.
The US empire was and is a massive mistake (Freud). A failed “nation” of hu$tlers and hucksters. 335 millions buffoons wanting to get their piece of the pie. They are not ‘angry’ at the 1%, they ‘want’ to be the 1%. Just ask any starry eyed/propagandised USian immigrant-it’s all $ – business talk-and, teevee repeating.
Or, chat with a subordinate in a vassal colony of the US empire; e.g., Japanland, “South Korean”, “EU” –most ‘want’ to be like USers. CONsumption, and status. Sick and vile. That’s the US’ blight on the world+endless war mongering.
How will that happen? If this, if that, we should, we ought to’s etc.? USians were dumber than shit. There’s NO action plan in the sinking US empire. All empires close fail eventually. It’s the USers turn now.
Now, what will USians do? They will stare at their phones and thk about celeb tushies, how to get rich, and sports. Post on your bathroom mirror: I am surrounded by 335 million morons.
This is simply whataboutism. That post said absolutely nothing about the federal reserve and the national income tax.
The boomers are disproportionately to blame for killing off the middle class in the US, for ruining the economy for future generations, and for many of the developments that this article covers. This is all covered quite eloquently in the book, “A Generation of Sociopaths,” among others. Most of these developments stem from neoliberalism, the ideology of choice for boomers of both the mainstream left and right.
Yes, organized assault, on purpose, to cause the most suffering – not to make the electorate docile and easy to govern. More like constantly kicking the general population, then putting a boot on their neck, then constantly stabbing them with pikes.
Here’s a recent example: Chipmaker Micron to build $20 billion N.Y. factory amid semiconductor boom (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/04/micron-chip-factory-new-york/). How much would you like to bet big NY REITs have been purchasing real estate to set up housing in advance to drain labor’s wages. It’s just like when Amazon proposed a huge warehouse in NY (… the one AOC nixed), … the NY real estate developers had already purchased a lot of property in the area for employee housing, to drain wages even before the warehouse was given the construction go-ahead.
And, of course, it’s not just REITs, there’s medical infrastructure, construction infrastructure, business infrastructure – all taking their skim of labor’s wages – but by far the real estate rentier class is the most predatory (then medical industrial complex). Seems the skimmers are immune from other skimmers, according to government policy, so money only flows up from labor – never down.
Predator nation – doesn’t pay to put out an effort anymore.
I had to check the date line on the article more than once. So much information going back decades. The relevance is questionable.
As someone else has noted, people in the United states are not starving. Not even close. Maybe their diets suck, but poor kids are usually fat asses.
I also, think you need to recognize a great reason for wealth inequality is IQ. Blacks are always going to be sloven dipshits. The government subsidizes it. How many spics do we have in the country that are anchor babies or illegal aliens? Why would you assume their families would achieve instant wealth. My immigrant ancestors were coal miners and factory workers. It took two generations for the offspring to achieve wealth.
Ok, you hate Regan. How about providing some context as to why.
I’m 75, with a social work/geology BS from MTSU and have wondered how much the divorce fad which began when the corporations moved offshore is a big part of our economic collapse.
The corps abandoned paying taxes, and where was the missing money to come from? DIVORCE. It put homes, assets, costs of relocation, child support, second families, etc. all income producers front and center in supporting state economies.
I haven’t seen any supporting evidence but there had to be a significant impact. Probably why there are not more paid off homes today. I further disagree that there is even 50% home ownership in America today as I suspect fully 20% or more are MOBILE HOMES ON RENTED LOTS. I have tried and nowhere have I found a report that separates mobile homes on rented lots from owned property/lots that have residences on them.
The employed were the first to become aware of the divorce scam and now the low income workers often do not marry, as if to avoid the state awarded child support. So the usefulness of Family Court is now to collectively direct the extended family to care for the individual. Previously the grandparents were 95% of ‘foster’ placements who paid for health care, etc. with an onus to the attached property.
America has pulled itself down. Imagine —a Debt of 31,000,000,000,000 and the audacity to point the finger at Putin. USA LIED —-NATO LIED –check the score sheet ” We will not move one inch against Moscow !” NO —-NATO moved hundreds of kilometers NOW about all this refugee crisis. Teh USA had made more refugees in the past 35 years than any previous Empire. 775 military bases worldwide and pointing the finger at China and Russia. I suppose you are a practicing Christian–a conformed Jesus with HIS BLUE eyes Presbyterian – Methodist – Wesleyan- United _ Episcopalian- Reformed – Dutch and Cornerstone Converted- Mormon and Reformed – Baptism by Desire- Cathedral of Crystals Fentanyl and Raptured Orthodox Reformed Catholic who are in union with JEWS at Tel Aviv.
That said ——USA was baptizing many in Afghanistan for 20 years and 2 Trillion in the collection basket —robbing the oils in Syria —-flattening Iraq for more oil —-bashing Libya and of course the hysteria over 911—- Building 7 falling and being announced 45 on BBC prior to it collapsing.
America deserves to COLLAPSE —-245 year old monster —–222 years at war.
NOW–it must collapse —and Tel Aviv as well ——Revelation is a book of nonsense—hell –USA dropped more atomic bombs over Bikini atoll than Carter has liver pills———now if only Amtrak can move headquarters to Ottawa —Chrystial Freeland could be freed up to replace the kipper gobbler in Brussels and NATO —–it warrants a big THUD —
who the fuck do you think you are to call the people working at call centers in the Philippines and elsewhere “prostitutes”?
If you’re American, you’re helping to reinforce the image of the arrogant hateful Ugly American who sees nonAmericans to be animals with no dignity, rights or interests.
I’m against the outsourcing of these jobs and wouldn’t even allow it. But you’re a vicious scumbag.
Let’s see your kids called “prostitutes” when the usa is down for the count and they desperately take any job — such as a call center job if there are any left here.
I know, right? That’s the biggest problem with the unz commentariat: we hold back too much and are afraid to speak our minds 😉
“who the fuck do you think you are to call the people working at call centers in the Philippines and elsewhere “prostitutes”?”
A realist. Have you been to the Philippines?
Seen it too !!! Here in Mousebreath Kansas —there is lots of grub and grits for everyone and it’s been this way for at least 90 years !!!
How are things in the latine at the CIA?
This was predicted 1991 —after some country had a big fall—and the source was from Ottawa and then I realized —that in 40 years 40% of children will be raised in poverty—and Canada a rich country –complete mismanagment —but the elite have never had it so good??
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/453486-military-spending-has-many-points-of-contention-closing-overseas/
That an estimate of $150 BILLION that could be spent reviving the
local bases and local economies here in America.
And consider: isn’t it a dangerous precedent to have a SEPARATED military isolated from each other?
Can you please link English translation of this book by Kozlik? I cannot find it on internet. But it seems very interesting research. I need to read on his data and how he reached this conclusion.