Desperately seeking food in California

This might be news to CCN and Karen, god bless her muckraking soul, but not to me or anyone else who has read my posts here during their 90 second life spans or elsewhere on the internet where they survive and thrive amidst a non purse-lipped, pink-faced, old lady knitting circle readership.

You were all sold a load of fool’s gold disguised as the notion that home values and financing would provide a lifelong source of lucre, allowing you to have every material thing you wanted, whenever you want it. You believed the lie that endless credit card debt could be wiped out with endless home refi’s and true wealth could be easily created by point-and-click house flipping. You believed that debt could always be repaid with yet more debt. You believed that loaning people money that they had no hope of ever repaying was a legitimate and sustainable business model. You believed that filing your nails and drinking coffee as a pubic employee was a legitimate guarantee of lifelong job security, big yearly pay increases, and a fat pension at 55. You believed that money was a deep river that ran right to your doorstep. You bought the illusion of wealth without work.

You are still to this very day encouraged to indulge in all kinds of hopes and delusions, and the main one crackling through the American mainstream now is the wish that our lives will resume once again the expansion of goodies that most citizens now regard as baseline normality – namely, a never-ending orgy of credit card spending, pay increases, pensions and real estate flipping. In other words, you are now being sold yet another barrel of snake oil disguised as the notion of an economic “recovery”. Though most of you vaguely understand how badly dysfunctional and unsustainable our economy was and how ludicrous your past notions were, you cannot see the folly of now believing that we are about to return to those same false salad days.

Here’s some news you can use – THERE IS NO RECOVERY.

Let’s clarify here that “recovery” is generally taken to mean resuming a prior state. Consequently, are we to believe that the US will return to an economy based solely on the fraudulent securitization of reckless debt and pandemic consumer psychosis?

Come now.

So, if a “recovery” is not in the cards, then what exactly is going on out there?

Stated simply, we’re headed into the wildest king-hell debt workout that the world has ever seen, which will propel a lot of people accustom to working in air-conditioned cubicles into a different world. We march every day into a reality with mortgages going unpaid, credit cards getting cancelled, personal wealth disappearing while fears and grievances mount.

At the same time that the US economy is in slow-motion, dry heaving convulsions, we are also seeing an epic, comprehensive failure of leadership in every sector and every level of American life – in politics, business, banking, education, news media, medicine, and religion. All are determined to pretend that we can somehow continue the habits and behaviors of the pre bust era. They are all wholly unwilling to face reality, and are all engaged in mutually supporting each other’s infantile, idiotic fantasies.

The profound nausea spreading through the homes and offices of America is simply the recognition of exactly where we are in all this; off the cliff. Look me in the eyes and tell me the average Joe isn’t standing bug-eyed and frozen with fear, terrified of losing his job, or of finding a new one. Finally, in the teeth reality and rationality, our shining leadership has rededicated itself to the worst action it could take under the circumstances; a campaign to sustain the unsustainable. This is what’s meant in the foolish term “recovery.”

I suggest you all reflect for a while on your self-surrender to the tyranny of everything that diminishes you to mere “consumers.”