Generation Zero

'The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.'
-Winston Churchill

'If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.'
-C.S. Lewis

'The truth, of course, is that a billion falsehoods told a billion times by a billion people are still false.'
-Travis Walton

'Whenever you have truth it must be given with love, or the message and the messenger will be rejected.'
-Mahatma Gandhi

'The first reaction to truth is hatred.'
-Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus

Posted previously, a top ten list as to why this ends in tears or (hopefully not) fireworks:

10. Nancy Capitalists in a Sovereign Democracy that are Hell Bent to Seek Rent.
9. Although we walk through the Valley of Debt we fear 'No Easing'.
8. Socialized Guts will lead to diminished glories.
7. Failure to liquidate the insolvent banksters has led to the liquidation of a large part of the productive economy.A taxpayer financed bailout of rich folks' bad speculative bets has resulted in zombie banks and zombie customers... a fiscal tide that lifts no boats.
6. The cold hard fact of our age is that the bankrupt ideology of the rich that had greatly succeeded in drafting the inner monologue of regular folks so that they would vote against their self-interests is colliding head-on with a Mr. Market that is a bit pissed off that we've inflated it out of the business cycle for the last quarter century.
5. Mr. Hand's strong dollar policy is the chimera of currency debasement masquerading as America's wealth exporting machine that is regularly promulgated by our leaders as an exceptional example of America's resiliency.
4. Yes Virginia, there is no collateral.
3. The government is 'all in' and can't pull out.
2. Employment, inflation, productivity, GDP, and other sundry stats are massaged into irrelevance ... the markets are rigged.
1. After World War 2, our blessed leaders, impressed by German 'organizational' skills crafted a policy of manufacture of consent.Over time these techniques moved to the economic realm in an attempt to manufacture content.Federales now risk the manufacture of contempt, for it is only a Great Depression if they say it is.

Will reference these as 'AM rules' as the next few years unfold.

Rule#2 was on display with the latest unemployment pablum. All you really need to know is that the labor force declined by over 660,000. To provide the proper scale that is about the population of Alaska. The latest disappearance of folks being counted that started with the Clinton Administration. Without this blue pill stat the U3 measure would have been 10.4%.

Unemployment is of course not 10%. If we were to measure unemployment utilizing the same metric as we did during the Great Depression we would surpass the high water marks of 23.53% in 1932, 24.75% in 1933 and 21.6% in 1934.

That is empirical and irrefutable.

The debate is not inflation versus deflation it is debasement versus deflation. Your money Mr. Federales has no velocity here for the band of The Hand can only conjure a Potemkin demand. Organic wage growth, absent for the last decade, comes from ... wait for it ... the productive allocation of capital when a free market pins winners and chooses losers. See Rule #8.

We have doubled down on a lost decade in order to, hopefully, achieve a generational workout. The banksters are too bankrupt to go broke, the rot is deep and pervasive. The Big Lie which is always in plain sight, is institutionalized, and needs to be perpetuated ad infinitum lest the foundation is found to be sand not rock.

Outrage may coalesce into a third party, yet history shows, that such a movement will quickly be co-opted into one of the majors. A new election, a new page being turned, a new burst of optimism ... cyclical bravado without secular substance.

Truth be told, this time is the same. The story is that of empire. Empire stretched by foreign adventurism and debt. The decline is inevitable.

As a red-blooded American cognizant of how the financial freedom afforded to me is a function of receiving the blessings of being born in a country where with guts and sweat one can create whatever life one desires, there is still optimism that great opportunities await our children. Yet we are making it so much harder on ourselves than it need be. Success teaches one little, failure displays true character. The collective failure of our Amerikantura to realize that with great power and wealth comes great responsibility has shown our solons to be weak, greedy, and venal.

According to quantum mechanics somewhere in the multiverse there is a reality where the upcoming State of the Union would go like this :

'Mr. & Mrs. America the greatest war we face today is a war with the future. To secure victory I hereby announce a 20% across the board cut on the federal budget and ask you to mobilize behind me to inform your representatives that unless they support this initiative you will fire them. Furthermore, we will break up any bank too big too fail, institute financial reform that is clear, unambiguous and without loophole, remove all American troops save from current theaters of war, and bulldoze K street. In other words, long Constantine and short Nero. For those that feel these measures are too tough, may I remind you that two billion folks live on less than 2 bucks a day in this world and one billion folks live on less than a buck a day... so please spare me the tales of woe. 'Tis time to cowboy up lest this great nation of ours rides into the sunset in the manner that all empires before us have done. We will make this coming century the greatest American century because we can and because we must. Make no mistake that in this war with the future we will be victorious.'

I had a dream that a progressive liberal intellectual would institute reform. Either Barry finds it within himself to be a hero, or it is generation zero.

Mah money is on the latter.