American Dream Died With Gen-Xers As Retirement Nightmare Unfolds

Via ZeroHedge

The “forgotten generation,” about 64 million Americans born between 1965 to 1980 and known as Generation X, are unprepared financially for retirement, according to a new study, warning about their “dismal retirement outlook.”

The National Institute on Retirement Security wrote in a report that Generation X was the first generation to enter the labor market following the shift from defined benefit pension plans to 401(k)-style defined contribution accounts.

Author of the report and NIRS research director, Tyler Bond, wrote in a statement, “When looking at median retirement savings levels for Generation X, report finds that the bottom half of earners have only a few thousand dollars saved for retirement, and the typical household has only $40,000 in retirement savings.” Shockingly, the study found approximately 40% of the generation have saved not even a single cent towards retirement.

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FOURTH TURNING ELECTION YEAR CRISIS

“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.” – Strauss & Howe The Fourth Turning 

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“There is no darkness but ignorance. The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” William Shakespeare

I read The Fourth Turning in 2006, after seeing it described in John Mauldin and Doug Casey’s newsletters as an uncannily accurate assessment of American history based upon generational configurations which recur on eighty-year cycles, a long human life. Strauss and Howe wrote the book in 1997 and used their generational theory to predict the Crisis that would begin in the mid-2000’s and come to an indeterminate climax in the mid-2020’s.

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NO ONE TOLD YOU WHEN TO RUN, YOU MISSED THE STARTING GUN

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

Pink Floyd – Time

I stumbled across two mind blowing charts yesterday that had me pondering how generations of Americans had frittered their lives away, spending money they didn’t have  on things they didn’t need, utilizing easy to acquire debt, and saving virtually nothing for their futures or a rainy day. We are a nation of Peter Pans who never grew up. While I was driving home from work, one of my favorite Pink Floyd tunes came on the radio and the lyrics to Time seemed to fit perfectly with the charts I had just discovered.

We were all young once. Old age and retirement don’t even enter your thought process when you are young. Most people aren’t sure what they want to do for the rest of their lives when they are in their early twenties. Slaving away at your entry level low paying job, chasing the opposite sex, getting drunk, and having fun on the weekends is the standard for most young people. But you eventually have to grow up. Because one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one tells you when to grow up. And based on the charts below, tens of millions missed the starting gun.

I graduated college in 1986 and started my entry level CPA firm job, making $18,000 per year. I did live at home for a year and a half before getting an apartment with a friend. I was able to buy a car, pay off my modest student loan debt, go out on the weekends, and still save some money. I was in my early 20’s and had opened a mutual fund account at Vanguard. Anyone who entered the job market from the mid 1970s through the mid 1980’s, which would be the late Baby Boomers and early Generation Xers, had job opportunities and the benefit of low stock market valuations.

P/E ratios of the market were single digits in the late 70s and early 80s, versus 20 today. Dividend yields on stocks averaged 5% for the S&P 500, versus 1.9% today. The Dow bottomed out at 759 in 1980, while the S&P 500 bottomed at 98. A 20 year secular bull market was about to get under way. Baby Boomers and Generation Xers had the opportunity of a lifetime. Even after six years of the bull, when I graduated from college the Dow stood at 1,786 and the S&P 500 stood at 521. I had just begun to invest when the 1987 crash wiped out 20% in one day. It meant nothing to me. I didn’t have much to lose, so I just kept investing.

The 20 year bull market took the Dow from 759 to 11,722 by January 2000. The S&P 500 rose from 98 to 1,552 by March 2000. You also averaged about a 3% dividend yield per year over the entire 20 years. Your average annual return, including reinvested dividends, exceeded 17%. Anyone who even saved a minimal amount of money on a monthly basis, would have built a substantial nest egg for retirement. If you had invested in 10 Year Treasuries, your annual return would have exceeded 11% over the 20 years. Even an ultra-conservative investor who only put their money into 5 year CDs would have averaged better than 7% per year over the 20 years.

Even with the two stock market collapses since 2000, your average annual return in the stock market since 1980 still exceeds 11%. That’s 34 years with an average annual total return of better than 11%. Every person who had a job over this time frame should have accumulated a decent level of retirement savings. That is why the chart below is so shocking. Over 15% of all people 60 and older and 23% of people 45 to 59 years old have NO retirement savings. None. Nada. Zilch. This means 25 million Boomers and Xers are stuck living off a Social Security pittance and choosing between keeping the heat on or eating a feast of Ramen noodles and Friskies. It seems they let 30 years get behind them. They missed the starting gun.

http://www.mybudget360.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/retirement-savings.png

I’m not shocked that over 50% of 18 to 29 year olds have no retirement savings. With the terrible job market, declining real wages, massive levels of student loan debt, two stock market crashes in the space of eight years, and 4% annual returns since 2000, young people today have neither the means nor trust in the system to save for retirement. Their elders had no such excuse. Just a minimal amount per paycheck saved over the last 30 years would have compounded to well over $100,000, even at modest salary levels. It is disgraceful that 25 million people over the age of 45 have saved nothing for their retirement. Far more disgraceful is the median household retirement balance of $3,000 for all working age households. There are 122 million households in this country and 61 million of them have $3,000 or less in retirement savings.

http://www.mybudget360.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/20130620__figure9.jpg

The far worse data points are the $12,000 median retirement balance of aged 55 to 64 households and the $10,100 median retirement balance of aged 45 to 54 households. These people are on the edge of retirement and have less than one year’s expenses saved. There is no legitimate excuse for this pitiful display of planning. These people had decades to save, strong financial market returns, and if they worked for a decent size organization – matching contributions to their retirement accounts. They didn’t need a huge salary. They didn’t need to save 20% of their salary. They didn’t have to be an investing genius. A savings allocation of just 3% to 5% would have grown into a decent sized nest egg after a few decades of compounding.

We know from the data in the chart, it didn’t happen. The concept of delayed gratification is unknown to the millions of nearly broke Boomers and Xers, shuffling towards an old age of poverty, misery and regret. A 64 year old has a life expectancy of about 20 years. They’ll have to budget “very” frugally to make that $12,000 last. The question is how did it happen. I don’t buy the load of crap that you can’t judge people as groups. I judge people by their actions, not their words. I know you can’t lump every Boomer and Xer into one box. Individuals in every generation have bucked the trend, lived within their means, saved for the future, and accumulated significant nest eggs for their retirement. But the aggregate numbers don’t lie. The majority of those over the age of 45 have squandered their chance at a relatively comfortable retirement. These are the people who most vociferously insist the government do something about their self created plight. It’s their right to free healthcare, free food, subsidized housing, free utilities, higher minimum wages, and a comfortable government subsidized retirement. They are wrong. They had a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It was up to them to educate themselves, get a job, work hard, and accumulate savings.

The generations of live for today, don’t worry about tomorrow Americans over the age of 45 have no one to blame but themselves. They bought those 4,500 sq foot McMansions with negative amortization 0% down mortgages. They had to keep up with the Jones-es by putting in granite counter-tops, stainless steel appliances, home theaters, Olympic sized swimming pools, and enormous decks. They have HDTVs in every room in their house and must have every premium cable channel, along with the NFL package. They upgrade their phones every time Apple rolls out a new and improved version. They pay landscapers to manicure their properties. They lease new BMWs every three years. They have taken exotic vacations on an annual basis. They haven’t packed a lunch for themselves since they were 16 years old. Eating out for lunch and dinner has been a staple of their existence for decades. That morning Starbucks coffee is a given. A new wardrobe of name brand stylish clothes for every season is a requirement because your neighbors and co-workers are constantly judging you. Nothing proves you’re a success like a Rolex watch, Canali suit, Versace boots, or Gucci handbag. The have it now generations got it then and have virtually nothing now because they acquired all of these things with debt.

Real cumulative household income is up 10% since 1980. Consumer debt outstanding has risen from $350 billion in 1980 to $3.267 trillion today. That is a 933% increase. We’ve had decades of faux prosperity aided and abetted by Wall Street shysters, corrupt politicians, mega-corporation mass merchandisers, and Madison Avenue maggots trained in the methods of Edward Bernays to convince willfully ignorant consumers to consume. And consume we did. Saving, not so much. You can blame the oligarchs, bankers, retailers, and politicians for the fact you didn’t save, but it rings hollow. No matter how much propaganda is spewed by the ruling class, we are still individuals with free will. The older generations had choices. Saving money requires only one thing – spending less than you make. Most Boomers and Xers chose to spend more than they made and financed the difference. When the average credit card balance is five times greater than the median retirement account balance, you’ve got a problem. The facts about our consumer empire of debt are unequivocal as can be seen in these statistics:

  • Average credit card debt: $15,593
  • Average mortgage debt: $153,184
  • Average student loan debt: $32,511
  • $11.62 trillion in total debt
  • $880.3 billion in credit card debt
  • $8.05 trillion in mortgages
  • $1.12 trillion in student loans

I don’t blame those in their 20’s and 30’s for not having retirement savings. Anyone who entered the workforce around the year 2000 has good reason to not trust the system or their elders. There have been two stock market collapses and every asset class is now extremely overvalued due to the criminal machinations of the Federal Reserve. There are far less good paying jobs. Real wages keep declining. They were convinced by their elders to load up on student loan debt, leaving them as debt serfs. The Wall Street/Federal Reserve scheme to boost home prices and repair their insolvent balance sheets has successfully kept young people from ever being able to afford a home. So you have young people unable to save, invest or spend. You have middle aged and older Americans with little or no savings, mountains of debt, low paying service jobs, and an inability to spend. The only people left with resources are the .1% who have captured the system, peddle the debt, and reap the rewards of consumption versus saving. They may be able to engineer a stock market rally to further enrich themselves, but they can not propel the real economy of 318 million people. Our consumer society is dying – asphyxiated by debt – shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

I’d love to offer some sage advice on how to fix this problem, but it’s too late. Too many people missed the starting gun. More than ten years got behind them. No one is going to come to the rescue of people who never saved for their future. The Federal government has already made $200 trillion of entitlement promises it can’t keep. State governments have made tens of trillions in pension promises they can’t keep. They can’t tax young people who don’t have jobs. Older generations who think the government is going to rescue them from their foolish shortsighted choices are badly mistaken. Their benefits are likely to be reduced because the unsustainable will not be sustained. The 45 to 64 year old cohort who chose not to save can run and run to try and catch up with the sun, but it’s too late. It’s sinking. Their plans have come to naught. They are destined for lives of quiet desperation. There is nothing more to say.

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Every year is getting shorter; never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I’d something more to say.

Pink Floyd – Time

GENERATION WUSS

By Brett Easton Ellis via Vanity Fair

In February I gave an interview to Vice UK to help promote a film I had written and financed called The Canyons—I did the press because there was still the idea, the hope, that if myself or the director Paul Schrader talked about the film it would somehow find an audience interested in it and understand what it was: an experimental, guerilla DIY affair that cost $150,000 dollars to shoot ($90,000 out of our own pockets) and that we filmed over twenty days in L.A. during the summer of 2012 starring controversial Millennials Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen.

The young journalist from Vice UK asked me about the usual things I was preoccupied with in that moment: my admiration of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street—the best film I saw in 2013 (not great Scorsese, but better than any other American film that year) and we talked about the movie I’m writing for Kanye West, my love of Terrence Malick (though not To The Wonder), a miniseries I was developing about the Manson murders for FOX (but because of another Manson series going into production at NBC the miniseries has now been cancelled), the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast (link), the possibility of a new novel I had begun in January of 2013 and that I lost interest in but hoped to get back to; we talked about my problems with David Foster Wallace, my love of Joan Didion, as well as Empire versus post-Empire (link) and we talked about, of course, The Canyons. But the first question the young journalist asked me wasn’t about the movie—it was about why I was always referring to Millennials as Generation Wuss on my Twitter feed. And I answered her honestly, unprepared for the level of noise my comments caused once the Vice UK piece was posted.

I have been living with someone from the Millennial generation for the last four years (he’s now 27) and sometimes I’m charmed and sometimes I’m exasperated by how him and his friends—as well as the Millennials I’ve met and interacted with both in person and in social media—deal with the world, and I’ve tweeted about my amusement and frustration under the banner “Generation Wuss” for a few years now. My huge generalities touch on their over-sensitivity, their insistence that they are right despite the overwhelming proof that suggests they are not, their lack of placing things within context, the overreacting, the passive-aggressive positivity, and, of course, all of this exacerbated by the meds they’ve been fed since childhood by over-protective “helicopter” parents mapping their every move.

These are late-end Baby Boomers and Generation X parents who were now rebelling against their own rebelliousness because of the love they felt that they never got from their selfish narcissistic Boomer parents and  who end up smothering their kids, inducing a kind of inadequate preparation in how to deal with the hardships of life and the real way the world works: people won’t like you, that person may not love you back, kids are really cruel, work sucks, it’s hard to be good at something, life is made up of failure and disappointment, you’re not talented, people suffer, people grow old, people die. And Generation Wuss responds by collapsing into sentimentality and creating victim narratives rather than acknowledging the realities of the world and grappling with them and processing them and then moving on, better prepared to navigate an often hostile or indifferent world that doesn’t care if you exist.

I never pretended to be an expert on Millenials and my harmless tweeting about them was solely based on personal observation with the reactions to the tweets predictably running along generational lines. For example, one of the worst fights my boyfriend and I endured was about the Tyler Clemente suicide here in the United States. Clemente was an 18 year-old Rutger’s University student who killed himself because he felt he was being bullied by his roommate Dharun Ravi. Ravi never touched Tyler or threatened him but filmed Tyler making out with another man unbeknownst to Tyler and then tweeted about it. Embarrassed by this web-cam prank, Tyler threw himself off the George Washington Bridge a few days later.

The fight I had with my boyfriend was about victimization narratives and cyber-“bullying” versus imagined threats and genuine hands-on bullying. Was this just the case of an overly sensitive Generation Wuss snowflake that made national news because of how trendy the idea of cyber-bullying was in that moment (and still is to a degree) or was this a deeply troubled young person who simply snapped because he was brought down by his own shame and then was turned into a victim/hero (they are the same thing now in the United States) by a press eager to present the case out of context and turning Ravi into a monster just because of a pretty harmless—in my mind—freshman dorm-room prank? People my age tended to agree with my tweets, but people my boyfriend’s age tended to, of course, disagree.

But then again my reaction stems from the fact that I am looking at Millenials from the POV of a member of one of the most pessimistic and ironic generations that has ever roamed the earth—Generation X—so when I hear Millenials being so damaged by “cyber-bullying” that it becomes a gateway to suicide—it’s difficult for me to process. And even my boyfriend agrees that Generation Wuss is overly sensitive, especially when dealing with criticism. When Generation Wuss creates something they have so many outlets to display it that it often goes out into the world unfettered, unedited, posted everywhere, and because of this freedom a lot of the content displayed is rushed and kind of shitty and that’s OK—it’s just the nature of the world now—but when Millennials are criticized for this content they seem to collapse into a shame spiral and the person criticizing them is automatically labeled a hater, a contrarian, a troll.

And then you have to look at the generation that raised them, that coddled them in praise—gold medals for everyone, four stars for just showing up—and tried to shield them from the dark side of life, and in turn created a generation that appears to be super confident and positive about things but when the least bit of darkness enters into their realm they become paralyzed and unable to process it.

My generation was raised by Baby Boomers in a kind of complete fantasy world at the height of the Empire: Boomers were the most privileged and the best educated children of The Great Generation, enjoying the economic boom of post-World War II American society. My generation realized that like most fantasies it was a somewhat dissatisfying lie and so we rebelled with irony and negativity and attitude or conveniently just checked-out because we had the luxury to do so. Our reality compared to Millennial reality wasn’t one of economic hardship. We had the luxury to be depressed and ironic and cool. Anxiety and neediness are the defining aspects of Generation Wuss and when you don’t have the cushion of rising through the world economically then what do you rely on? Well, your social media presence: maintaining it, keeping the brand in play, striving to be liked, to be liked, to be liked.

And this creates its own kind of ceaseless anxiety. This is why if anyone has a snarky opinion of Generation Wuss then that person is labeled by them as a “douche”—case closed. No negativity—we just want to be admired. This is problematic because it limits discourse: if we all just like everything—the Millennial dream—then what are we going to be talking about? How great everything is? How often you’ve pressed the like button on Facebook? The Millennial site Buzzfeed has said they are no longer going to run anything negative—well, if this keeps spreading, then what’s going to happen to culture? What’s going to happen to conversation and discourse?

If there doesn’t seem to be an economic way of elevating yourself then the currency of popularity is just the norm now and so this is why you want to have thousands and thousands of people liking you on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumbler—and you try desperately to be liked. The only way to elevate yourself in society is through your brand, your profile, your social media presence. A friend of mine—also a member of Generation Wuss—remarked that Millennials are more curators than artists, a generation of “aestheticists…any young artist who goes on Tumbler doesn’t want to create actual art—they either want to steal the art or they want to BE the art.”

I forgot about the Vice interview but was reminded of it due to a minor explosion that occurred after it was posted and the term Generation Wuss received an inordinate amount of press and I was immediately asked to appear on talk shows and podcasts and radio programs to discuss “the phenomenon” of Generation Wuss. The people who agreed with my casual, tossed-off assessments skewed older but I was surprised by the number of young people who agreed with me as well, Millennials who also had complaints about their generation.

The older people wanted to share examples: a father related a story how he remembered watching in frustration as his son participated in a tug-of-war game with his classmates on the field of his elementary school and after a minute or two the well-meaning coach announced the game was officially a tie, told the kids they did a great job, and everyone got a ribbon. Occasionally there were darker stories: guilt-ridden parents chastising themselves for coddling kids who when finally faced with the normal reality of the world drifted into drugs as an escape…from the normal reality of the world. Parents kept reaching out and told me they were tormented by this oppressive need to reward their kids constantly in this culture. That in doing so they effectively debilitated them from dealing with the failures we all confront as get older, and that their children were unequipped to deal with pain.

I didn’t appear on any of the talk shows because I don’t pretend to be an expert on this generation any more than I feel I’m an expert on my own: I don’t feel like that old man complaining about the generation supplanting his. As someone who throughout his own career satirized my generation for their materialism and their shallowness, I didn’t think that pointing out aspects I noticed in Millennials was that big of a deal. But in the way that the 24-48 hour news cycle plays itself out I briefly was considered an “expert” and I kept getting bombarded with emails and tweets.

What the Vice interview didn’t allow was that because I’ve been living with someone from this generation I’m sympathetic to them as well, remembering clearly the hellish year my college-educated boyfriend looked for a job and could only find non-paying internships. Add in the demeaning sexual atmosphere that places a relentless emphasis on good looks (Tinder being the most prevalent example) in such a superficially nightmarish way it makes the way my generation hooked-up seem positively chaste and innocent by comparison.

So I’m sympathetic to Generation Wuss and their neurosis, their narcissism and their foolishness—add the fact that they were raised in the aftermath of 9/11, two wars, a brutal recession and it’s not hard to be sympathetic. But maybe in the way Lena Dunham is in “Girls” a show that perceives them with a caustic and withering eye and is also sympathetic. And this is crucial: you can be both. In-fact in order to be an artist, to raise yourself above the din in an over-reactionary fear-based culture that considers criticism elitist, you need to be both. But this is a hard thing to do because Millennials can’t deal with that kind of cold-eye reality. This is why Generation Wuss only asks right now : please, please, please, only give positive feedback please.

AND THE BAND PLAYED ON

A confluence of events last week has me reminiscing about the days gone by and apprehensive about the future. I’ve spent a substantial portion of my adulthood rushing to baseball fields, hockey rinks, gymnasiums, and school auditoriums after a long day at work. I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed every moment. Watching eight year olds trying to throw a strike for two hours can become excruciatingly mind-numbing. But, the years of baseball, hockey, basketball, and band taught my boys life lessons about teamwork, sportsmanship, winning, losing, hard work, and having fun. There were championship teams, awful teams and of course trophies for finishing in 7th place. As my boys have gotten older and no longer participate in organized sports, the time commitment has dropped considerably. Last week was one of those few occasions where I had to rush home from work, wolf down a slice of pizza and head out to a school function. It was the annual 8th grade Spring concert.

My youngest son was one of a hundred kids in the 8th grade choir. I think it was mandatory, since none of my kids like to sing. As my wife and I found a seat in the back of the auditorium where we could make a quick escape at the conclusion of the show, neither of us were enthused with the prospect of spending the next ninety minutes listening to off-key music and lame songs. I’ve been jaded by sitting through these ordeals since pre-school. But a funny thing happened during my 30th band concert. I began to feel sentimental about the past and sorrowful about the future for these Millennials.

The Millennial generation was born between 1982 and 2004. Therefore, they range in age from 9 years old to 31 years old. There are approximately 87 million of them, or 27.5% of the U.S. population. In comparison, the much ballyhooed Boomer generation only has 65 million cohorts remaining on this earth. The Millennials will have a much greater influence on the direction of this country over the next fifteen years than the currently in control Boomers. There has been abundant scorn heaped upon this young generation by their elders. In a fit of irrationality befit the arrogant, hubristic, delusional elder generations, they somehow blame a cohort in which 54 million of them are still younger than 21 years old for many of the ills afflicting our society. This disgusting display of hubris is par for the course among these delusional elders.

Are Millennials addicted to their iGadgets, cell phones and Facebook pages? Probably. Do they spend too much time on the internet and playing PS3 & Xbox? Certainly. Have they been indoctrinated in social engineering gibberish like diversity and planet worship by government run public school bureaucrats? Absolutely. Are they young, foolish, immature, irrational and not respectful towards their elders? You betcha. Teenagers have acted like this forever. You acted like that. The ongoing crisis in this country and our unsustainable economic system are in no way the result of anything perpetrated by the Millennial generation.

Can the Millennial generation be blamed for the $17 trillion national debt, $222 trillion of unfunded un-payable social obligations promised by corrupt politicians, $1 trillion of annual deficits, undeclared wars being waged across the globe on behalf of the military industrial complex arms dealer mega-corporations, economic policies that have resulted in 48 million people dependent on food stamps, tax policies that enrich those who write the code, trade policies that benefit corporations who gutted the industrial base and shipped jobs overseas to slave labor factories, or monetary policies that have destroyed 96% of the dollar’s purchasing power? They had no say in the creation of our untenable welfare/warfare state.

There are no Millennials among the 535 corrupt bought off politicians slithering down the halls of Congress. There are no Millennials running the Too Big To Control Wall Street banks. There are no Millennials in charge of the mega-corporations that buy and sell our politicians. There are no Millennials at the upper echelon of the Military Industrial Complex or in the upper ranks of the U.S. Military. But, and this is a big but, they have done most of the dying in the Middle East over the last ten years in our multiple undeclared preemptive wars of aggression. They have died under the false pretenses of a War on Terror, when they are truly dying on behalf of the crony capitalists who profit from never ending war. They have been fighting and dying to protect “our oil” that happens to be under “their sand”. If the energy independence storyline was true, why is our military perpetually at war in the Middle East?

The Millennials will also be required to do the heavy lifting over the next fifteen years of this Fourth Turning Crisis. The Silent Generation is dying off rapidly. The Boomer generation has done some hard living and some hefty eating and with the oldest of their cohort hitting 70 years old, their supremacy will begin to diminish over the coming fifteen years. At 87 million strong, and millions yet to reach voting age, the Millennials will become more influential by the day regarding the future course of this nation. The question is what will be left of this country by the time they assume control. They are saddled with $1 trillion of student loan debt, peddled to them by the government and Wall Street with the false promise of good paying jobs and the opportunity for a better life than their parents lived. They have obediently followed the path laid out by their elders, but they have been badly misled. This American dream has been shattered upon an iceberg of debt, delusion, deception and denial. The unsinkable American empire’s hubris and arrogance are leading to its demise. The Millennials are coming of age during a Crisis that will reach momentous magnitudes over the next fifteen years, and they had nothing to do with creating the circumstances which will propel the chaos and anarchy that ensues. But, they will bear the brunt of the dreadful consequences.

Generational Bridge

“The Boomers’ old age will loom, exposing the thinness in private savings and the unsustainability of public promises. The 13ers will reach their make or break peak earning years, realizing at last that they can’t all be lucky exceptions to their stagnating average income. Millennials will come of age facing debts, tax burdens, and two tier wage structures that older generations will now declare intolerable.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The kids on the stage at the 8th grade Spring concert were all around 14 years old. They are unaware they are in the midst of a twenty year period of Crisis. The boys are at that gawky looking stage with pimply faces and gawky limbs. The girls mature quicker than the boys at that age. These youngsters have barely begun their lives. I was amazed at their proficiency with a wide variety of musical instruments. They displayed poise and talent. The soloists exhibited composure well beyond their years. The performers were all musically endowed and proved that hard work and practice pays off. They were clearly enjoying themselves. They were all dressed in their Sunday best. I found myself enjoying the show despite my jaded attitude upon entering the auditorium. Even my son, wearing one of my ties, actually appeared to be singing during the choir performance. What I saw were hundreds of bright eyed Millennials with their hopes and dreams for a bright future intact. They have no idea what trials and tribulations await them.

I reached a milestone on the age chart last week that had me ruminating about yesteryear and contemplating the future. I reached the half century mark. Birthdays generally do not faze me, but the intersection of the 8th grade concert and my landmark birthday had me pondering my purpose for inhabiting this world. I’ve likely realized two-thirds of my life. The final third of my life will be spent trying to maneuver through the minefields of this Fourth Turning. I’m a father to three Millennial boys. I consider it my duty to defend and support them during this Crisis. Strauss & Howe wrote their book in 1997 and predicted a Great Devaluation in the financial markets around the time Millennials were entering their twenties. This Crisis began in September 2008 with the worldwide financial collapse created by Wall Street “Greed is Good” Boomers, as the oldest Millennials entered their twenties. It continues to worsen as more Millennials approach their twenties. We’ve reached a point in history when the elder generations need to sacrifice in order to insure younger generations have a chance at some form of the American dream.

I believe each generation has an obligation to future generations. We are bridge between preceding generations and future generations. We have a civic obligation to manage the resources of the country in a prudent manner. It’s our duty to leave the country in a financially viable condition so younger generations have an opportunity to live a better life than their parents. Every generation that preceded the Millennials has achieved the goal of having a better standard of living than their parents. I don’t believe my boys will enjoy a better life than I’ve lived. We’ve lived well beyond our means for decades. Government, Wall Street banks, corporations and individuals have run up a $56 trillion tab and are sticking the Millennials with the bill.

The $17 trillion national debt accumulated by elder generations to benefit themselves and $222 trillion of unfunded entitlements promised to themselves is nothing but generational theft. It’s immoral and possibly the most selfish act in human history. I’m ashamed that my generation and older generations have committed this criminal act of theft. Deficit spending today with no intention of repaying that debt is a tax on future generations. This egotistical abuse of power by the current and past regimes must be reversed voluntarily or it will be done by force. I’m 50 years old and will dedicating my remaining time on this earth fighting to create a sustainable future for my kids and their kids. The lucky among us get eighty years on this planet to make a difference. When did the definition of success become dying with the most toys and spending your life screwing your fellow man by accumulating obscene levels of wealth at their expense? If Boomers and Generation X have any sense of guilt about what they have done, they would be willingly offering to sacrifice their ill-gotten entitlements.

Not only are those currently in power not proposing to scale back their spending, debt accumulation, or entitlement transfers, but they have accelerated the pace of each in the last five years. An already unsustainable corrupted economic structure is being driven towards collapse by psychopathic central bankers and cowardly captured politicians. These are acts of treason against the youth of this country and larceny on a grand scale. It will lead to generational warfare and these crooks will pay for their transgressions. Strauss & Howe suspected in 1997 the elders might cling to their illicit profits acquired at the expense of the Millennials:

“When young adults encounter leaders who cling to the old regime (and who keep propping up senior benefit programs that will by then be busting the budget), they will not tune out, 13er – style. Instead, they will get busy working to defeat or overcome their adversaries. Their success will lead some older critics to perceive real danger in a rising generation perceived as capable but naïve.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The elders who represent the status quo do perceive real danger in the rising Millennial generation. The initial skirmishes occurred in the midst of the Occupy protests. The young protestors initially focused on the true culprits in the crashing of the financial system and vaporizing of the net worth of millions – Wall Street bankers and their sugar daddy at the Federal Reserve. In a display of status quo bipartisanship you had liberal Democrat mayors in cities across the country call out their armed thugs to beat the millennial protestors into submission while being cheered on by Fox News and the neo-cons.

The existing status quo regime provides the illusion of choice, but both political parties are interchangeable in their desire to control our lives, flex our military might around the globe, indebt future generations and write laws to favor their corporate and banking masters. The establishment is showing contempt for the futures of our youth. Their solutions to the criminally created financial crisis have been to reward reckless debtors and bankers at the expense of future generations. Their doling out of hundreds of billions in student loan debt and artificial propping up of home prices has effectively made it impossible for millions of young people to get their lives started. Boomers have done such a poor job saving for their retirements they are unable to leave the workforce. Since January 2009, despite adding $400 billion of student loan debt, Millennials have a net loss in jobs, while the Boomers have taken 4 million jobs.

Strauss & Howe anticipated that older people would be anguished to see good kids suffer for the mistakes they had made. They thought the elders couldn’t possibly be shallow enough, selfish enough, or immoral enough to deny the Millennial generation a chance at the American Dream. They were wrong. The old regime has no plans to step aside or sacrifice on behalf of younger generations. The implications of this resistance will be dire.   

“The youthful hunger for social discipline and centralized authority could lead Millennial youth brigades to lend mass to dangerous demagogues. The risk of class warfare will be especially grave if the 20% of Millennials who were poor as children (50% in inner cities) come of age seeing their peer-bonded paths to generational progress blocked by elder inertia.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The social mood in this country continues to deteriorate as the sociopathic financial elite accelerate their pillaging of the working middle class, steal money from senior citizens through zero interest rate inflationary policies, and enslave our youth in the chains of crushing debt and promise of dead end jobs. When the next leg down in this ongoing depression strikes like an F5 tornado, the simmering anger in this country will explode in a chaotic frenzy of violence and retribution. The chances of class and generational warfare have increased exponentially due to the actions of the elderly regime over the last five years.

Generational Sacrifice

You got your whole life ahead of you, but for me, I finish things.” – Walt Kowalski – Gran Torino   

  

A couple days after the Spring concert I was flipping through the 650 channels on my TV with nothing worth watching when I stumbled across the 2008 Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino. This was the third episode within the week that had me thinking about the future of my kids. It was his highest grossing film in history. Eastwood played a bigoted tough guy Korean War veteran whose Detroit suburban neighborhood had deteriorated into a dangerous gang infested Asian war zone. The movie did not follow the standard Eastwood plot where he kills dozens of bad guys. He grudgingly befriends two young Millennial teenage Laos refugees who live next door. He had lost his wife of 50 years. He was in his 70s and dying from some undiagnosed illness. I viewed the movie as an allegory for the generational sacrifice that should be taking place now.

Eastwood’s character, Walt Kowlaski, decided to finish things his way. He realized the two Millennials would never find peace or have a chance at a better life until the criminal gang running the show in the neighborhood were confronted and defeated. He knew he was too old to kill six gang members singlehandedly, so he made a choice to sacrifice himself and be gunned down in cold blood in front of multiple witnesses so the perpetrators would go to jail and allow his Millennial companions to have a chance at a better life. He sacrificed his life for the good of young people who weren’t even related to him.  This message has not connected with the elder generations who control the purse strings and political system in this country. The media propaganda machine supporting the existing regime continues to peddle a storyline that debt doesn’t matter, consumption is good, saving is for suckers, and passing the bill for unfunded entitlements to future generations is not immoral and cowardly. Walt Kowalski displayed courage, bravery, and valor that is sorely lacking in the elderly generations today.

At the age of 50 I have a choice with my remaining 20 or 30 years. I can choose to keep accumulating material goods with debt, voting for politicians who promise never to cut my entitlements, believing deficits growing to infinity are beneficial to the economic health of the nation, supporting the military industrial complex as they wage undeclared wars across the world, applauding the Orwellian fascist surveillance measures instituted to give the illusion of safety while sacrificing freedoms and liberties and selfishly looking out for my best interests. Or I can stand up to the corporate fascist old boy regime and lure them into a violent response that will ultimately lead to their downfall. I’m willing to sacrifice what is supposedly “owed” to me on behalf of my kids and all Millennials. They don’t deserve to start life in a $200 trillion hole created by their parents and grandparents. It is disconcerting to me that more Boomer and Generation X parents are unprepared, unwilling or too willfully ignorant to forfeit entitlements awarded them under false pretenses in order to preserve a decent standard of living for their children and grandchildren. The Bernaysian propaganda programmed into their brains over decades by the sociopathic central planning status quo has created this inertia.

The inertia will be replaced by frenzied activity when this unsustainable system ultimately fails. Time seems to be standing still. People have been lulled into a false sense of security even though history is about to fling us into a chaotic transformational period in history. How do I know this is going to happen? Because it happens every eighty years like clockwork. The best laid plans of the men running the show will be swept away in a whirl of pandemonium, violence, war and reckoning for sins committed against humanity. There will be no escape.

“Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning the way you might today distance yourself from news, national politics, or even taxes you don’t feel like paying. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted. The Fourth Turning necessitates the death and rebirth of the social order. It is the ultimate rite of passage for an entire people, requiring a luminal state of sheer chaos whose nature and duration no one can predict in advance. The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war. Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

Our country has entered a period of Crisis. We may or may not successfully navigate our way through the visible icebergs and more dangerous icebergs just below the surface. The similarities between the course of our country and the maiden voyage of the Titanic are eerily allegorical.

The owners of the ship (Wall Street, Washington politicians, crony capitalists) are arrogant and reckless. They declare the ship unsinkable, while only providing half the lifeboats needed to save all the passengers in case of disaster in order to maximize their profits. The captain (Ben Bernanke) has been tendered the greatest cruise liner (United States) in history. The initial voyage across the Atlantic Ocean has drawn the financial elite ruling class (financers & bankers) onboard, occupying the luxurious state rooms on the upper decks. But, the lower decks are filled with young poor peasants (Millennials) who are sneered at and ridiculed by those in the upper decks. A maiden voyage should always be approached cautiously. A prudent captain would not take undue risks.

Our captain (Ben Bernanke) wants to make his mark on history. He considers himself an expert in navigating dangerous waters (Great Depression) because he studied dangerous waters at his Ivy League school. It doesn’t matter that he never actually captained a ship in the real world.  He declares full steam ahead (reducing interest rates to 0% and throwing vast amounts of fiat currency into the engine room boilers). Midway through the voyage, the captain is handed a telegram warning of icebergs (potential financial catastrophe) ahead. If he slows down the vessel, he will not set the speed record and receive the accolades of an adoring public. He ignores the warning and steams on to his rendezvous (eternal disgrace) with destiny.

In the middle of the night, the lookouts (Ron Paul, John Hussman, Zero Hedge) cry iceberg!! But, it is too late. The great ship (United States) has struck an enormous iceberg (debt & currency crisis). At first, it seems like everything will be OK. The captain and crew assure the passengers that everything is under control and their evasive action has saved the ship. But below the waterline, the great ship (United States) is taking on water (toxic levels of debt, un-payable entitlement promises, trillion dollar deficits, political & financial corruption). The engine room (Federal Reserve) works frantically to alleviate the damage (QE to infinity). The captain is sure the compartmentalization of the ship will save it. One of the designers of the ship (David Stockman) sadly declares that the ship will surely sink. The captain orders the band (CNBC, Fox, MSNBC, CNN) on deck to distract the passengers from their impending fate with soothing music. The owners of the ship (Wall Street, Washington politicians, crony capitalists) aren’t worried. They collected their fees upfront and over-insured the vessel. They anticipate a windfall when the ship sinks. It worked last time.

To avoid mass panic, the crew (government apparatchiks) has locked the youthful poor peasants (Millennials) below deck. The captain and his crew are content to let them go down with the ship. They’ve decided the women, children, and senior citizens (Middle Class) can also be sacrificed. The financial elite ruling class (financers and bankers) are piling into the boats with the ship’s jewels, escaping the fate of the peasants. The captain (Ben Bernanke) has no intention of going down with the ship. In a cowardly act, he leaps onto the 1st lifeboat to be launched. We are on a voyage of the damned. The great cruise liner (United States) has a fatal wound and is headed for a watery grave. Are we going to let the owners, captain and crew dictate who will be saved in the few lifeboats or will we rise up and throw these guilty parties overboard?

 

It comes down to the abuse of power by a few evil men and their henchmen as they have centralized their control over our financial, political, economic and social institutions. The existing social order is an ancient, rotting, fetid swamp of parasites that will be drained during this Fourth Turning. The Millennials are rising and will be the spearhead of the coming revolution. As each day passes they will become a more powerful force and the power of the existing regime will wane. Meanwhile, the band will play on as the ship of state descends into the abyss.

WILL A PROPHET ASSUME COMMAND?

“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.” – Strauss & Howe The Fourth Turning

Strauss & Howe wrote these words in 1997. They had predicted the arrival of another Crisis in this time frame in their previous book Generations, written in 1990. This wasn’t guesswork on their part. They understood the dynamics of how generations interact and how the mood of the country shifts every twenty or so years based upon the generational alignment that occurs as predictably as the turning of the seasons. The last generation that lived through the entire previous Crisis from 1929 through 1946 has virtually died off. This always signals the onset of the next Fourth Turning. The housing bubble and its ultimate implosion created the spark for the current Crisis that began in September 2008, with the near meltdown of the worldwide financial system. Just as the stock market crash of 1929, the election of Lincoln in 1860, and the Boston Tea Party in 1773 catalyzed a dramatic mood change in the country, the Wall Street created financial collapse in 2008 has ushered in a twenty year period of agony, suffering, war and ultimately the annihilation of the existing social order.

We have experienced the American High (Spring) from 1946 until 1964, witnessing America’s ascendancy as a global superpower. We survived the turbulent Consciousness Revolution Awakening (Summer) from 1964 until 1984, as Vietnam era protests morphed into yuppie era greed. The Long Boom/Culture Wars Unraveling (Fall) lasted from Reagan’s Morning in America in 1984 until the 2008 Wall Street/Federal Reserve spawned crash. The pessimism built to a crescendo as worry about rising violence and incivility, widening wealth inequality, and the splitting of the national consensus into extremes on the left and right, led the country into a winter of discontent. The Global Financial Crisis (Winter) has arrived in full fury and is likely to last until the late 2020’s. It will be an era of upheaval, financial turbulence, economic collapse, war, and the complete redefinition of society, as the existing corrupt status quo is swept away in the fury of powerful hurricane winds of change. History is cyclical and we’ve entered the most dangerous season, when the choices we make as a nation will have profound long lasting implications to the lives of future unborn generations.

The linear thinkers and so called progressives who believe that history charges relentlessly forward and human ingenuity overcomes all obstacles as the world becomes progressively richer, advanced, and humane ignore the lessons of history that have been re-written every 80 to 100 years for centuries. Generational theory is so simple that even an Ivy League intellectual economist, corrupt congressman, or CNBC anchor bimbo could grasp the basic concept. The four turnings in the ongoing cycle of history match a long human life. There is a reason we forget the lessons of the past. Those who remember the lessons die off after 80 years. The linear thinking status quo keep predicting an improving economy based upon their beliefs that the next fifteen years will proceed in a similar fashion to the last fifteen years. They refuse to acknowledge we’ve entered a new era that cannot be reversed to a previous point in time. Once you’ve experienced the harsh bitter winds of the Winter, you have to deal with months of depressing darkness, harsh conditions, and stormy weather before experiencing the return of the warm breezes of Spring. The tranquil days of autumn are long gone. This dynamic can be clearly visualized by comparing our economic situation in 2007, prior to entering this Fourth Turning, to our economic situation today:

End of Unraveling in 2007 versus fourth year of Crisis in 2012

  • In 2007, the unemployment rate was 4.6%; 146 million people, or 63% of the working age population, were employed; and 78 million Americans were not in the labor force. Today, after three years of “recovery”, the unemployment rate is 7.9%; 143 million people, or 58.8% of the working age population are employed; and 88 million Americans are not in the labor force.
  • Real median household income was $55,039 in 2007. It has fallen by 8.2% to $50,502 today.
  • BLS reported inflation has risen by 12% since 2007. True inflation has risen at twice that rate.
  • Median net worth in 2007 was $126,400. By 2010 it had fallen to $77,300, a 39% drop in three years. As of today, it may be a few thousand dollars higher as stock prices have risen and home prices have stopped falling.
  • In 2007 there were 5.7 million existing homes sold at a median price of $218,900. Today there are 4.3 million existing homes being sold at a median price of $183,900. Over 1 million of these home sales are foreclosures or short sales, as 30% of all the homes with a mortgage in the country owe more than their house is worth.
  • Federal government spending in 2007 was $2.73 trillion. Federal government spending today is $3.8 trillion, a 39% increase in five years. GDP in 2007 was $14.2 trillion. Today GDP is $15.8 trillion, an 11% increase in five years. Approximately 25% of the GDP increase is due to increased government spending.
  • Government entitlement transfers totaled $1.7 trillion in 2007. Today they total $2.4 trillion, a 41% increase in five years. Interest income paid to senior citizens and savers totaled $1.25 trillion in 2007. Today interest income totals $985 billion, a 21% decrease in five years. Wall Street bankers needed the money to pay themselves bonuses, so Ben Bernanke obliged.
  • The annual deficit in 2007 totaled $161 billion. Today, the annual deficit is $1.1 trillion. We add $3 billion per day to the national debt as a gift to unborn generations.
  • The national debt in 2007 was $9 trillion. Today the national debt is $16.3 trillion, an 81% increase in five years. The national debt will reach $20 trillion during the next presidential term. Normalization of interest rates to 2007 levels would result in annual interest expense of $1 trillion, or 40% of current government revenues.

There is nothing normal about our current economic situation. The unfunded liabilities at the Federal, State and local levels of government accumulate to over $200 trillion. Do the facts detailed above lead you to believe we can return to pre-2007 normal in the near future, or ever? Not only has the economic situation of the country deteriorated enormously, the very culprits who created the disaster are more powerful than they were before the global catastrophe caused by their criminal risk taking. The largest Wall Street banks control 74% of all the deposits in the country, up from 66% in 2007, and double the levels from the mid-1990’s. These bastions of capitalism wield all of the power in this country, dictating who wins elections, who writes the laws, and who benefits from the distribution of wealth. Only in a corrupt, crony-capitalist, citadel of kleptocracy could the perpetrators of the greatest theft of national wealth in the history of mankind be rewarded with taxpayer financed bailouts, the ability to borrow an unlimited amount of fiat currency at 0% from a Central Bank they control, write the new banking regulations and be applauded by their corporate mainstream media for becoming even Too Bigger to Fail. This Fourth Turning will ultimately come down to a clash between the people and the Wall Street filth.

 

Those in power today are using their ample wealth and control over the legal, economic and political systems to pretend that an epic crisis does not beckon at our doorstep. Propaganda and media spin cannot avert the brutally hard choices that must be made over the next fifteen years. The existing system is unsustainable. It can either be changed by choice or after a complete collapse. We haven’t reached the point of regeneracy yet when civic purpose begins to strengthen. The outcome of this presidential election will determine the next phase of this Crisis. Strauss & Howe described the normal course of a crisis in 1997:

“A CRISIS arises in response to sudden threats that previously would have been ignored or deferred, but which are now perceived as dire. Great worldly perils boil off the clutter and complexity of life, leaving behind one simple imperative: The society must prevail. This requires a solid public consensus, aggressive institutions, and personal sacrifice. People support new efforts to wield public authority, whose perceived successes soon justify more of the same. Government governs, community obstacles are removed, and laws and customs that resisted change for decades are swiftly shunted aside. A grim preoccupation with civic peril causes spiritual curiosity to decline. Public order tightens, private risk-taking abates, and crime and substance abuse decline. Families strengthen, gender distinctions widen, and child-rearing reaches a smothering degree of protection and structure. The young focus their energy on worldly achievements, leaving values in the hands of the old. Wars are fought with fury and for maximum result.” The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

Clearly this country has not reached a common consensus and is split 50%/50% on most important issues. Debates about the role of government are waged with vitriolic passion, but the reality is that, as in past Fourth Turnings, the government has already assumed a greater level of power and control over our lives. The majority believe that government can protect them, provide for them, and pay their way. This is a delusion which will be revealed as fraudulent and mathematically impossible. The incompetent government preparation prior to Superstorm Sandy and the dysfunctional, bureaucratic and painfully slow response afterward are opening the eyes of many people. The decisions which are yet to be made are what kind of society shall we be and who will be required to sacrifice to achieve a positive outcome at the end of this Crisis. Turnings are driven by a mood change in the country and the constellation of generations at that point in time. The generations are now aligned as they always are during a Crisis:

  • Boomers entering elderhood
  • Gen-Xers entering midlife
  • Millennials entering young adulthood
  • Homelanders entering childhood

History does not repeat but it does rhyme, because of the cyclical nature of human experience. The specific events that drive this Crisis are unknowable, but the generational response to these events can be predicted with uncanny accuracy. Each generation will play its assigned role during this Crisis. The current generational configuration will propel events and create a feedback loop that will change the course of human history on a scale consistent with the Depression/World War II, the Civil War and the American Revolution.

“What will propel these events? As the saeculum turns, each of today’s generations will enter a new phase of life, producing a Crisis constellation of Boomer elders, midlife 13ers, young adult Millennials, and children from the new Silent Generation. As each archetype asserts its new social role, American society will reach its peak of potency. The natural order givers will be elder Prophets, the natural order takers young Heroes. The no-nonsense bosses will be midlife Nomads, the sensitive souls the child Artists. No archetypal constellation can match the gravitational of this one – nor its power to congeal the natural dynamic of human history into new civic purposes. And none can match its potential power to condense countless arguments, anxieties, cynicisms, and pessimisms into one apocalyptic storm.” The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

The mood of the country continues to blacken. A simmering anger boils beneath the surface of an everyday façade of normalcy. The middle class majority is being squeezed in a vice, with the rich powerful plutocrats on Wall Street and in Washington DC stealing their hard earned net worth through financial scams, the gutting of our industrial base and a tax system designed to benefit those who write the laws on one side and the parasitic willfully ignorant underclass that is sustained only through the extraction of taxes from the working middle class on the other side. Our society has become a hunger games tournament, with the few benefitting while the many scramble to survive. The stench of class warfare is in the air. The generational resentment and rage is palatable as the Millenial generation has taken on a trillion dollars of student loan debt at the behest of the Federal government, Wall Street and older generations, only to graduate into a jobless economy. The generational contract has been broken, as the older generations will not or cannot leave the workforce due to their own financial missteps. Younger generations are being denied entry level positions, even as the older generations expect them to fund their retirements and healthcare. This presidential election will only exacerbate the anger, disappointment, bitterness and fury among the populace, no matter who wins.

Prophets & Nomads

Can generational theory predict who will win the presidential election? Probably not, but based upon historical precedent, during times of Crisis the country usually turns to a Prophet generation leader who provides a new vision and summons the moral authority to lead. This leader may not have the right vision or have the backing of the entire population, but he is not afraid to take bold action. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was despised by many, but he boldly led the country during the last Crisis. Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election with only 39.8% of the popular vote, but he unflinchingly did whatever he thought was necessary to achieve victory and preserve the union. Prophet leaders like Samuel Adams and Benjamin Franklin offered the sense of moral urgency required to sustain the American Revolution. Strauss & Howe give a historical perspective on Prophet generations.

“Prophet generations are born after a great war or other crisis, during a time of rejuvenated community life and consensus around a new societal order. Prophets grow up as the increasingly indulged children of this post-crisis era, come of age as narcissistic young crusaders of a spiritual awakening, cultivate principle as moralistic mid-lifers, and emerge as wise elders guiding another historical crisis. By virtue of this location in history, such generations tend to be remembered for their coming-of-age passion and their principled elder stewardship. Their principle endowments are often in the domain of vision, values, and religion. Their best-known historical leaders include John Winthrop, William Berkeley, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Polk, Abraham Lincoln, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt. These were principled moralists, summoners of human sacrifice, and wagers of righteous wars. Early in life, few saw combat in uniform; later in life, most came to be revered more for their inspiring words than for their grand deeds.” The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

 

 

Barack Obama was born in 1961. According to the Strauss & Howe generational distinctions, this makes him an early Gen-Xer. His life story matches that of the Nomad archetype. His chaotic early life, confused upbringing by an array of elders, frenetic alienated early adulthood as a community organizer, and his rise to power through his public speaking talent and pragmatic ability to achieve his agenda is a blueprint for a Nomad. Mitt Romney was born in 1947 and grew up during the American High. His childhood was idyllic and privileged. His moral Mormon youth as a missionary eventually devolved into his yuppie “greed is good” career at Bain Capital acquiring companies, making them more efficient (firing Americans & hiring Asians), and spinning them off, while siphoning millions in fees. He has tried to convince Americans to vote for him, based upon his business acumen and moral lifestyle, as the cure for what ails America. With the continued downward spiral of societal mood, record low trust in Congress and 60% of Americans thinking the country is on the wrong track, the odds should favor the Prophet candidate. The 40% of Americans who think the country is on the right track are a tribute to our awful government run public education system or are smoking crack.

The Barack Obama presidency has many similarities to the one-term presidencies of Herbert Hoover and James Buchanan. Both men were overwhelmed by rapidly deteriorating events, an inability to understand the true nature of the Crisis, and failure to inspire the American people to rally behind a common cause. Both men drifted off into obscurity and are overwhelmingly acknowledged as two of the least successful presidents. The men who succeeded them are ranked by historians at the top of the list, even though they are both despised by more libertarian minded citizens as proponents of big government solutions and control. Libertarians will not be happy with developments over the next fifteen years. This Crisis is an era in which America’s corrupt social order will be torn down and reconstructed from the ground as a reaction to the unsustainable financial pyramid scheme which is an existential threat to the nation’s very survival. Civic authority will revive, cultural manifestation will find a community resolution, and citizens will begin to associate themselves as adherents of a larger cluster.   

Barack Obama has fallen short as a Crisis leader, just as Buchanan and Hoover fell short. Buchanan also tried to maintain the status quo and not address the key issues of the day – secession and slavery. His handling of the financial Panic of 1857 led to annual deficits that exceeded 13% of GDP during his entire presidency. His legacy is one of failure and hesitation. Hoover was a technocrat with an engineering background who failed to recognize the extent of the suffering by the American people during the early stages of the Great Depression. It is a false storyline that he did not attempt to use the power of the Federal government to address the economic crisis. Federal spending increased by over 20% during his term and he was running a deficit when Roosevelt assumed power. Hoover was an activist president who began the public works programs that FDR expanded and dramatically increased taxes on the rich and corporations in 1932.

Obama inherited a plunging economic situation and proceeded to make choices that will make this Crisis far worse than it needed to be. He has failed miserably in addressing the core elements of this Crisis that were foreseen by Strauss and Howe over a decade before the initial spark in 2008. Debt, civic decay, rising wealth inequality due to the rise of our plutocracy, and global disorder are the underlying basis for this Crisis. Obama’s response was to run record deficits driving the national debt skyward, failing to address the unfunded entitlement liabilities that loom on the horizon, bowing down before the Wall Street mobsters and paying their ransom demands, layering on more complexity and unfunded healthcare liabilities to an already teetering government system, and extending our policing the world foreign policy at a cost of $1 trillion per year. A Crisis requires a bold leader who makes tough choices and leads. Obama has proven to not be that leader. Based on historical precedent and the rapidly deteriorating mood of the country, it would be logical for the country to select Romney, a Prophet generation leader.

No Escape   

“Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning the way you might today distance yourself from news, national politics, or even taxes you don’t feel like paying. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted. The Fourth Turning necessitates the death and rebirth of the social order. It is the ultimate rite of passage for an entire people, requiring a luminal state of sheer chaos whose nature and duration no one can predict in advance.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

No matter who wins the election, there will be no turning back. It isn’t Morning in America anymore. It is more like Midnight in America on a bitterly cold dark February night as the gale force winds begin to gust, foretelling the approach of an epic winter blizzard. There are no easy solutions. The opportunity to alleviate the impact of this Crisis was during the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, and we made all the wrong choices. Now we will pay the price. An era of depression and violence will be ushered in by an economic calamity that will make 2008 look like a minor blip. The next president will still be presiding over a country divided 50%/50%, with little or no common ground on most of the key issues that must be confronted. But, as we’ve seen in previous Crisis periods, bold leadership and history making decisions did not require consensus or even majority support. Only 10% of the colonial population drove the American Revolution. Lincoln was despised by half the country and not exactly loved by everyone in the North. FDR’s popular support progressively declined during his four terms in office. It is the Fourth Turning events, not the nation, which elevates the person to the apex of power. The regeneracy of the nation will occur during the next presidential term.

“Soon after the catalyst, a national election will produce a sweeping political realignment, as one faction or coalition capitalizes on a new public demand for decisive action. Republicans, Democrats, or perhaps a new party will decisively win the long partisan tug of war. This new regime will enthrone itself for the duration of the Crisis. Regardless of its ideology, that new leadership will assert public authority and demand private sacrifice. Regardless of its ideology, that new leadership will assert public authority and demand private sacrifice. Where leaders had once been inclined to alleviate societal pressures, they will now aggravate them to command the nation’s attention. The regeneracy will be solidly under way.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The Millenial generation is coming of age faced with the burdens of $1 trillion of student loan debt, a stagnant job market clogged by the Boomer generation that can’t afford to retire because they never got around to saving, ever increasing taxes to fund the promises made to their elders by politicians, and an unfunded entitlement liability of $100 trillion for healthcare and pension benefits they will never see. The mathematical impossibility of sustaining our economic system is absolute. It will require courage, sacrifice, fortitude and a dramatic shift of our egocentric selfish culture to a culture of sustainability and caring about future generations. We’ve made many bad choices over the last few decades. Choices matter. These are the times that will try men’s souls. The choices we make as a nation over the next few years will determine whether this Fourth Turning ends in a renewal of our founding principles or tragedy. Glory or ruin – the choice is ours.

“Thus might the next Fourth Turning end in apocalypse – or glory. The nation could be ruined, its democracy destroyed, and millions of people scattered or killed. Or America could enter a new golden age, triumphantly applying shared values to improve the human condition. The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis; all they suggest is the timing and dimension.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The next stage of this Crisis is likely to be ignited by a downward spiral of societal trust caused by the next financial implosion, which is certain to occur. A world built upon debt, false promises, interconnected webs of deceitful derivatives, fiat currency backed only by the promises of lying politicians and captured central bankers, and a diminishing supply of easy to access natural resources, is hopelessly dependent upon the willful ignorance of the masses. As long as people want to be lied to rather than facing the truth, those in power can maintain the status quo. Once the jarring realization of reality overwhelms the propaganda and lies of the oligarchs, the battle for middle earth will begin. What will trigger the next phase of this Crisis? No one knows for sure, but based on the fault lines already evident, these are a possibility:

  • The inevitable breakup of the European Union with the consequences of massive bank defaults in Europe triggering worldwide bank defaults as the interconnected trillions of derivatives are lit like a string of firecrackers.
  • A sudden Greece like surge in interest rates on Japanese bonds results in a collapse of their debt ridden economic system, with reverberations throughout the world.
  • The Middle East tinderbox explodes as Israel attacks Iran and the law of unintended consequences takes hold. Alliances and treaties would draw Turkey into war with Syria and Iran. Russia and China could side against the U.S. Iran and their vassals would unleash terrorist attacks and disruption of Middle Eastern oil would drive prices over $200 per barrel, crushing the American economy.
  • A showdown on the debt ceiling and/or fiscal cliff results in a stock market crash, derailing the pitiful fledgling recovery created by Ben Bernanke’s QE to infinity measures.
  • A tipping point is reached with regards to the amount of debt that can be accumulated by our Federal, State and Local governments. A cascade of defaults could lead to a loss of faith in the U.S. dollar and a surge in interest rates. The defaults and increased interest on the national debt could lead to mass depression or in a worst case scenario – hyperinflation.
  • A large terrorist attack in one or more American cities would cause chaos, panic and fear, leading to more government control over our daily lives. This could trigger a counter response by those fed up with an overbearing government presence.
  • A catastrophic natural disaster or series of natural disasters would reveal the fragile nature of our just in time economic system. A breakdown of our logistical and infrastructure systems would lead to chaos and mass hysteria as the citizens who believed their government leaders would keep them safe, secure, warm, and fed realized it was all a sham. Their leaders were in it for the power and riches, not looking out for the best interests of the common folk.

No one knows for sure what will trigger the next leg down during this Crisis, but I can guarantee you that things will not be getting better in the near future. Don’t believe the mainstream media or politicians who tell us life in the good old U.S. of A will be back to normal in the near future. And those who predict a long slow gentle decline of the American Empire that can be managed by the oligarchs are badly mistaken. That is not how things roll in a Fourth Turning. Transformative change, chaos, desperate measures, and total war will propel our nation through this cataclysmic saeculum and a positive outcome is not assured. An armed conflict – class war, sectional war, religious war, or war for oil – will be waged at some point and fought to the finish. Fourth Turning wars do not end inconclusively. Each Fourth Turning war has resulted in greater destruction and more horrendous numbers of human casualties. The trials and tribulations that await this nation over the next fifteen years will challenge every living generation to play their roles and bravely confront the tasks needed to reach a new High, just as their ancestors did.

“History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong – the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Losing in the next Fourth Turning could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence – perhaps even our nation – might never recover.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

For those who doubt generational theory and believe history is a linear path of human progress, I would point to the last week of chaos, disarray, government dysfunction, and misery of those who didn’t prepare for Superstorm Sandy, as a prelude to the worst of this Crisis. The lack of preparation by government officials and citizens, death, destruction, panic, anger, helplessness and realization of how fragile our system has become is a perfect analogy to our preparation for this Fourth Turning. The brittleness of our infrastructure and lack of redundancy in our systems has left us vulnerable to any large storm. Building mansions yards from a dangerous unpredictable sea is akin to allowing Wall Street bankers to create interconnected financial derivatives which will ultimately result in a great worldwide flood that will obliterate billions of wealth. Going decades without upgrading our power grid, transportation systems, or storm protection is akin to allowing our unfunded entitlement liabilities to accumulate to such an extreme level that it will be impossible to honor and the coming storm will swamp those depending on those promises. The lack of foresight by citizens in having food, water, and backup sources of power and heat in case of an emergency is akin to the millions of people that have lived the good life in debt up to their eyeballs while never saving for a rainy day or their retirement. When the rainy day arrives they panic and demand to be saved by an inept bureaucratic government.

Winter has arrived. The gathering storm is about to strike. Are you prepared?

“Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. The sky darkens. Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. One by one, your links to the machine age break down. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impossible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle. Day to day vestiges of modern civilization – bank machines, mutual funds, mass retailers, computers, satellites, airplanes, governments – all recede into irrelevance. Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years. Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a saecular winter. Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.” – Strauss & Howe The Fourth Turning

survival seed vault

FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE – PART ONE

Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared. For a Few Dollars More

 

“Tell me, isn’t a sheriff supposed to be courageous, loyal and, above all, honest?” – Man with No Name – For a Few Dollars More

Whenever I get an idea for an article I plan to keep it short and sweet. But it never seems to work out that way. Once I start typing, the articles tend to grow exponentially. It happened again with my attempt to make sense of how the United States of America managed to screw our finances up so badly, that an epic collapse is within view to people with their eyes open to facts and the truth. You don’t end up in the predicament we find ourselves in today due to a couple minor mistakes over a short time frame. It took thousands of horrible choices, colossal doses of delusion, a heaping of stupidity, and a mountain of denial over decades to put us on the brink of economic collapse. An unholy amalgamation of demographics, fiat currency, debt, taxes, power and greed have led us to this point. Next we experience collapse, revolution and ultimately, retribution.

Since I’ve identified four major rationales for our impending doom, I’ve decided to write a four part series that can be read in small doses, rather than one enormous article. I don’t want anyone to miss tonight’s episode of Dancing With the Stars, get distracted from the Royal Wedding preparations, or skip the best reality TV show ever – Ben Bernanke’s press conference, while reading an 8,000 word article about the end of America. The four part series will have a Clint Eastwood theme. For a Few Dollars More will address the Baby Boomer impact on America’s decline. A Fistful of Dollars will examine how the creation of the Federal Reserve and the income tax in 1913 set us on a path to ruin. Outlaw Josey Wales will scrutinize the looting of America by a small group of powerful, connected, super rich men lurking in the shadows, but pulling the strings on our puppet politicians. Lastly, Unforgiven  will detail the impending collapse of our economic system and the retribution that will be handed out to the guilty.

Over the last few weeks there seems to be consensus among many financial bloggers, whose credibility is far more trustworthy than the corporate mainstream media, that the country is teetering on the verge of economic collapse due to the complete capture of the government, financial, regulatory, and media by a small group of oligarchs. They have also been described as the super rich, plutarchs, ruling elite, and scum sucking leeches. The bloggers that I have the utmost respect for, including Jesse, Charles Hugh Smith, Mike Shedlock, Yves Smith and Gonzalo Lira have all come to the logical conclusion the horrific economic situation of the country is a direct result of the greed, corruption, fraud, and plundering by a powerful connected group of rich financiers operating without fear of being brought to justice by the authorities.

While pondering the ruminations of these dedicated truth tellers, I was reminded of the Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western For a Few Dollars More. The quotes above are representative of living in the USA today. There are supposed to be courageous, loyal and honest sheriffs that protect the citizens from crime, corruption and evil doers. But, just as we saw in the Old West of Clint Eastwood movies, the sheriffs are always corrupt and bought off by the evil cattle barons. In a world where life has no value and you can’t rely on law enforcement to protect your interests, the citizens eventually will need to turn to bounty hunters to take care of the bad guys. The bounty hunters of truth reside on the internet. They reside at Zero Hedge, Jesse’s Café Americain, Of Two Minds, Mish, Chris Martenson, and dozens of other anarchist websites. When you can’t trust your government, your bankers, your church, your media, or mega-corporate CEOs, you need to seek the truth where it can be found. The insightful bloggers who courageously print the truth on a daily basis have unanimously concluded that a small band of powerful elite have accumulated undue influence and control over this country, having brought it to the verge of economic collapse. How did this happen? Who is responsible? Why were they permitted to gain this power?

Boomers Come of Age

“If those in charge of our society – politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television – can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.” – Howard Zinn

Whenever I direct any blame for our economic woes towards the Baby Boom generation they react as expected. They blame the GI Generation for creating the welfare state. They declare that Generation X and the Millenials are just as greedy and self centered as the Boomers. Boomers are great at blaming, ridiculing and acting pompously, while taking no responsibility for their actions and more importantly their inaction. This generation cannot avoid their responsibility for the state of affairs. They like to take credit for their stand against the Vietnam War and their protests against the man during the 1960s. They don’t like to take credit for turning into materialistic, greedy, selfish, short-term focused bastards. When a generation of 76 million people decides to go in a particular direction, the country will go in that direction. While blaming FDR and the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy for creating the unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities, the Boomers have been voting since the mid-1960s and have been in control of corporate America and the levers of government since the early 1980s.

The U.S. Congress is dominated by Baby Boomers today and has been dominated by this generation since the 1990s. The Senate has 60 Boomers out of 100, while the House of Representatives has 254 Boomers out of 435 members. Boomers occupied the White House from 1992 through 2008. They have had the political power and control of the agenda for two decades and have failed miserably. Rather than do what was best for the country for the long-term, they took the expedient, easy, vote getting route. Promise more than you could ever deliver and let future generations worry about the consequences. Not one true noble statesman has arisen from this generation of myopic, self centered “Me Generation” political hacks. Even as the country nears the precipice, they continue to address the great issues of the day with talking points supplied by other Baby Boomer PR maggots from Park Avenue. These weasels care not for the country, but worry only about poll numbers and the next election cycle. An apathetic public, dominated by the Baby Boom generation, has the attention span of a gnat. As long as they can make the lease payment on their Escalade, use one of their 15 credit cards at the Mall, be entertained by 600 cable TV stations, play with the latest iSomething, live in their McMansion for two years without making a mortgage payment and consume massive quantities of fast food, then any thoughts of future generations or civic duty are unnecessary. Live for today has been the rallying cry for the Boomer generation. Pot was their drug during the 1960s. Debt has been their drug since 1980.

The drug (debt) dealer for the Baby Boom generation has been the Wall Street mega-banks, coincidentally, run by Boomers. The entire corrupt financial industry is being run by Boomers. The CEOs, CFOs, and the thousands of Harvard MBA VPs that created the fraudulent derivative scheme to bilk billions from clueless municipalities, pension funds and American taxpayers are all Boomers. It is no coincidence that the great debt delusion began in the early 1980’s. Jim Kunstler captured the essence of Boomer transformation:

“The Baby Boomers came back from the land, clipped their pony tails, discovered venture capital, real estate investment trusts, securitization of “consumer” debt, and the Hamptons. Greed was good.”

The Boomer CEO hall of scam has been built on the brilliance and financial acumen of Lloyd (god’s work) Blankfein, Charlie (keep dancing) Prince, Jamie (friend of Obama) Dimon, and the king of the Boomers, Hank (the system is sound) Paulson. These mainstays of crony capitalism led the Boomer charge of greed, greed and more greed. The Baby Boomer generation has been the proverbial pig in a python working its way through the decades as presented below. By 1985, Boomers had entered the work force in full force with the entire generation between the ages of 25 and 42. It will be a great day when the python craps this pig of a generation out the other end.

It is not a coincidence the National Debt growth has far outstripped GDP growth since 1980. Boomers had been spoiled their whole lives and felt they deserved the goodies today while passing the bill to future generations. They voted for politicians who promised them more benefits, more programs, more subsidies, more tax breaks, more military adventures, and more pleasure. And this was “paid for” with more debt. Thirty five years of government debt declining as a percentage of GDP was reversed over the next thirty years starting in 1980, pushing it past the 90% tipping point in the last year. The country is over-indebted to the tune of $9 trillion on a current basis and $100 trillion on a long term accrual basis.

There is no better picture of Boomer decadence and myopia than an historical view of the national savings rate. The parents of the Boomers understood the meaning of sacrifice and investing in the future of the country. During World War II they bought US War Bonds to support the cause. From 1950 through 1985, the savings rate consistently ranged between 7% and 12%. Americans had this odd notion that if you saved more than you spent, you actually got ahead in life. Excess savings were used to invest in new plants and equipment that were used to produce goods and employ more Americans. By 1985, the Boomers considered these notions as quaint and old fashioned. The savings rate methodically declined until it went negative in 2006, just prior to the worldwide financial conflagration. Our inspirational Boomer president George (Mission Accomplished) Bush while waging two wars of choice, asked for the ultimate sacrifice from the Boomers. He solemnly urged them to buy a GM SUV with $0 down and 0% interest for 7 years, so we could defeat the terrorists. The Boomers who ran GMAC were more than happy to make loans to people with no income so they could “purchase” a $40,000 ostentatious gas guzzling hog. They were doing their patriotic duty for the good of the nation. It brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it.

The Boomers not only heeded George’s call, but they did him proud by buying 8,000 sq ft McMansions with $0 down and negative amortization ARMs. Luckily, the executives at the mortgage origination sweatshops were Boomers. They found no good reason to verify income or assets before loaning someone $600,000, because they knew their fellow Boomers at the rating agencies would rate the bundles of these toxic shit loans as AAA so the Boomers on Wall Street could sell them to greater fools. GMAC’s exemplary subprime mortgage arm – Ditech, did a bang up job getting migrant Mexican workers into $450,000 homes in California’s inland empire. As the tsunami of bad debt swept toward shore, delusional Boomers across the land borrowed $500 billion against the inflated value of their McMansions and installed granite counter tops, stainless steel appliances, home theatres, elegant patios, Olympic sized pools, and with the excess home equity, leased a BMW or two. The first devastating tsunami wave hit in 2008 and wiped out billions in faux Boomer wealth. Instead of learning a brutal lesson and reverting back to saving and frugality, the “never say sacrifice” Boomers ventured out to where the waves had subsided looking for more trinkets and treasures.

Tsunami Warning by Mobile Phone

The next tsunami wave is on its way. The delusional Boomers will be surprised again.

The Boomer persona has been formed over the last five decades and the country will deal with the consequences for decades to come. The clean cut Beaver Cleaver children of the 1950s turned into the pot smoking Dobie Gillis of the 1960’s, then into the slimy Gordon Gekkos of the 1980s and ultimately into the eternal wealth seeking Gollums of today.

 

  

This Boomer debt orgy over the last thirty years would have made Caligula blush. Of course, none of this could have happened without the Creature from Jekyll Island. I will address this aspect of our fate in Fistful of Dollars – Part Two.

Now for the righteous indignation from the Boomers that think I have unfairly lumped them all together as one. Their reactions are predictable. Even though they have had the means, the power and the time to reverse the course of USS Titanic, they plowed full steam ahead into the abyss. The GI Generation is dead. Generation X doesn’t hold the reins of power. The Boomer generation needs to look in the mirror to recognize who is to blame.  I’m sure there are a few good Boomers out there somewhere, but as a generation they have failed this country and our unborn generations miserably.

GENERATION SCREWED

Neil Howe with another thought provoking post. He posted this on the same day that a Millenial named James Holmes committed one of the most horrific mass murders in history. Howe’s description of Millenial beliefs and hopes fits perfectly with my thesis about why Holmes snapped. Millenials have very traditional views on success and the American Dream. They believe education will lead to a good job, which will lead to a good income and a nice house in the burbs. Well reality sucks. Howe doesn’t address the current state of affairs, but shifts the discussion to the 2020s when Millenials may get the chance to succeed. That doesn’t cut it in my book. How do the Millenials get through the next ten or fifteen years with staggering student loan debt, lack of good jobs, miniscule income and no chance to buy a house? What does this do to their beliefs and minds? We’ve seen what it did to James Holmes. How many more Millenials will snap?

I was happy to find out that my Generation is actually the most screwed. But that’s alright, we expected it. Gen X relishes being crapped on. We don’t expect much and our expectations keep getting met.

Howe seems to have his own cognitive dissonance. His own books reveal clearly that Fourth Turnings are always violent and bloody, but he doesn’t seem to want to go there. Even when I met him, he didn’t want to talk about that aspect of the current Fourth Turning. I believe the levels of getting screwed that are happening in our society will lead to violence, social unrest and civil war in this country. But I’m Gen X and always expect the worst.

 

Generation Screwed and Unscrewed

Are Millennials the Screwed Generation?” asks Joel Kotkin in Newsweek.  A professor of urban studies and an astute observer of social trends, Kotkin answers his own question in the affirmative.

He describes a gauntlet of economic challenges facing today’s under-30 Americans that are, I think, pretty well known to readers of this blog.  Some of the adverse trends he cites are mostly of recent (post-2008) origin: High unemployment, falling real median personal and household income, falling median household net worth, a sharply rising share who are living with their parents, a falling share who own their own homes, and (symptomatically) a sharp decline in birthrates by younger moms.

Yet other trends prejudicial to youth, most of which he mentions, have been underway for much longer: a declining national saving rate; rising fiscal deficits; college tuitions rising faster than family incomes; a widening spread between the relative wealth and income of older versus young households; and the steady rise in the share of public spending that goes to the entitled old (pensions, health care)—versus a declining share that goes to future-oriented investment (infrastructure, research, education).

Sounds depressing, I know.  But the reason I emphasize how long many of these trends have been at work is to cast a bit of doubt on whether Millennials are really as screwed as all that.  Keep in mind that back in the early 1980s, many economists and policymakers commented on the “declining fortunes” of late-wave Boomers who came of age during the energy crises and stagflation.  At the time, experts thought that demographic size was the problem: Numbers-driven competition among young workers was depressing Boomer incomes.

Then came the early 1990s, when economists discovered that Gen-Xers–often, at that time, called “Busters”–were even more screwed than Boomers.  (Since there were relatively few of these Busters, the demographic explanation was quietly dropped.)  From the very beginning, a “reality bites” fatalism about diminished economic possibilities emerged as a cornerstone this generation’s very self-image.  Over the next twenty years, as first-wave Gen-Xers moved into their 30s and then their 40s, evidence of “living-standard decline” in their age brackets (despite two-income households and working around the clock) has steadily mounted.

So is there still a good case for calling Millennials yet more “screwed” than these two older generations?  I suppose one could argue that Millennials are uniquely penalized because the adverse trends cited above—savings decline, young-old divide, fiscal bias, etc.—are more advanced and pronounced today than when Xers or Boomers were young.  One could also point to the extreme severity of the recent recession’s impact on youth—for example, the highest unemployment rate over the most months for young adults than during any downturn since the Great Depression.  We know from abundant economic research, starting with Glen Elder’s great book (Children of the Great Depression) that extended unemployment early in life has an impact on future income that lasts long into a person’s career.

On the other hand, of course, one would have to note the even harsher impact of the Great Recession on Gen-Xers and late-wave Boomers (households today age 30 to 60), as I pointed out in my earlier blog post.  And who hurts most during a great famine—the guy who thinks he might someday have a home and kids, or they guy who actually has a home and kids?

One would also have to weigh in the balance certain collective advantages Millennials have enjoyed early in life that their elders did not.  These include arriving as newborns in an era when mothers were more likely to say their newborn was “wanted” and growing up in an era when parents and families (if not always government) spent more time with them, more money on them, spurred them to achieve, and protected them more from harm.  Today, as a result, Millennials have become a generation of youth who commit less crime, cooperate more with each other, take fewer personal risks, and get along much better with their parents.  They are also on track to have the highest educational attainment ever (following college completion rates that actually backtracked for late-wave Boomers and early-wave Gen-Xers).

What’s more, most Millennials already know that history favors them.  Interesting factoid: When asked if being a young person is harder today than it was when your parents were kids, a growing majority of young people since the late 1990s say no, it’s actually easier being a kid today—after decades of polls (in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and early ‘90s) that leaned the other way, with Boomers and Xers bemoaning, year after year, how much harder being a kid is for them.

Kotkin asserts that this generation still believes in a very conventional definition of life success—most aspiring to a stable career and to owning a home in the suburbs.  I agree.  The data I’ve seen point in the same direction.  My favorite recent survey on this topic is the 2011 MetLife Study of the American Dream, which shows that Millennials are significantly more likely than Xers or Boomers to say that a college degree, acquiring wealth, owning a home, and (yes!) even marriage is “essential” to realizing the American Dream.  Most Millennials have a fairly concrete idea of what they want in life, together with benchmarks for getting there, and thus far most surveys (admittedly, not the depressing Rutgers survey cited by Kotkin) indicate that they remain confident that they will someday get there.

But to me, the most persuasive argument for not regarding Millennials as America’s most “screwed” generation is simply this: They are still young.  Even if the economy continues to deteriorate, a steady recovery that gets underway by the early 2020s will still save the future for most of them.  At roughly age 20 to 40, in this case, most Millennials will still be able to launch successful careers in an expanding economy.  Moreover, they will be able to buy homes at record-low prices and buy stock portfolios at record-low P/E ratios.  Which means, by the time they fully occupy midlife in the late 2040s (at roughly age 45 to 65), they may be doing far better at that time, relative to other generations, than people that age are doing today.

So who really is the most screwed generation?  When it comes to aggregate economic security and upward mobility, I think the most screwed generation already know who they are: Generation X.  Consider the scenario described above.  More chaos followed by a steady recovery starting a decade from now would come too late for most Xers—who by then (their first-wavers hitting their early 60s and thinking about retirement) may be looking at senior benefits programs whose generosity has just been cut way back in the name of fiscal austerity and renewed economic growth.  Any Xer protest is likely to be weak and ineffectual.  Most Boomers will be grandfathered, and most of the public’s attention will be focused on saving America’s future for the Millennials.

As Bill and I forecast twenty years ago back in 13th-Gen (I’ve changed the “13ers” here to “Gen-Xers”):

Reaching midlife, the Gen-Xers’ economic fears will be confirmed: They will become the only generation born this century (the first since the Gilded) to suffer a one-generation backstep in living standards.  Compared to their own parents at the same age, the Xers’ poverty rate will be higher, their rate of homeownership lower, their pension and healthcare benefits skimpier.  They will not match the Boomers’ inflation-adjusted levels of disposable income or wealth, at the same age.  Gen-Xers will also experience a much wider distribution of income and wealth than today’s older generations, with startling proportions either falling into destitution or shooting from rags to riches…  Finding their youthful dreams broken on the shoals of market-place reality, Xers will internalize their disappointment.  Around the year 2020, accumulated “hard knocks” will give midlife Xers much of the same gritty determination about life that they gave the midlife Lost during the Great Depression or the Gilded during Reconstruction.

Twenty years later, I think this prediction still stands.  As I read back over it, the only adjustment I would make is to say “early-wave Boomers” where we wrote “Boomers.”  But now let me move on to something else about Xers—the fact that the economy will recover, in part, precisely because Generation X chooses not to insist on its rightful public entitlement in old age.  We wrote about that in 13th-Gen, as well:

Nor will Gen-Xers ever effectively organize or vote in their own self-interest.  Instead, they will take pride in what they don’t receive, in their lifelong talent for getting by on their own, and in their ability to divert government resources to help the young.  Policy experts who today worry about the cost of Social Security and Medicare past the year 2025 seldom reflect on the political self-image of those who will then be entering their late sixties.  Entitled “senior citizens”?  Hardly.  Like Lost Generation elders in 1964–who voted more for Goldwater than any younger generation even after he promised to slash their retirement benefits—old Xers will feel less deserving of public attention than richer and smarter young people who lack their fatalism about life.

Even back in 1993 we had the concepts of generational archetypes firmly in mind.  As readers of The Fourth Turning know, Gen-Xers belong to same (Nomad) archetype as the Lost Generation.  The location in history of both generations, which manifests so many obvious parallels early in life, will continue (I think) to track each other moving forward.  Who is getting hurt worst in the current age of stagnation and deleveraging?  Late-wave Boomers (born after 1950) to some extent, mostly by have their home and retirement assets values hit hard; Generation X most of all; and early-wave Millennials to some extent, mostly by delayed career starts.  Who got hit worst in the Great Depression?  Late-wave Missionaries (born after 1870) to some extent, mainly by losing their savings in failed banks in the early 1930s; the Lost Generation most of all; and early-wave G.I.s to some extent, mostly by having their careers put on hold until VE- and VJ-Day.  Same archetypes, same patterns.

Koktin points out that today’s hard times are pushing most Millennials in the developed world politically toward the left—that is, toward a greater commitment to national collective action by government.  We’ve witnessed this trend in every election globally since 2008—including of course the massive 2-to-1 margin by U.S. Millennials for Obama in 2008.  (In the fall of 2012, U.S. Millennials will almost certainly give another large margin for Obama, but it will be smaller than in 2008 and whether it will be enough to win the election is uncertain; this is an issue I will handle in a future post.)

These political trends also have interesting parallels in the last saeculum.  The Lost Generation, as we document in Generations and The Fourth Turning, leaned Republican and libertarian all its life.  The Lost hated President Wilson for the fiasco of World War I; voted heavily for Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover (though it turned against Hoover with the Bonus Army); comprised the most visible and colorful opponents of FDR; and voted GOP after WWII all the way to Goldwater.  The party valence turned sharply the other way, however, for cohorts born after 1900—those who missed WWI, who belonged (like John Steinbeck) to entirely different artistic circles than the likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and who were disposed to mobilize around a new trust in community after the Crash of ‘29.

Although no one collected age-graded polling back in the 1930s, some historians estimate that a very large majority—perhaps 85 percent—of voters under age 35 voted for FDR and the Democratic Party in 1936.  It is widely agreed that this is the first election in which a clear majority of young African-Americans voted for the Democratic Party rather than the party of Abraham Lincoln.  Consulting our own American Leadership Database, we are able to confirm that 28 out of 32 (88 percent) of G.I. senators, representatives, and governors sent to Congress in 1936 were Democrats.  By 1940, 75 percent of incoming G.I.s were still Democrats.

Read the numbers, Republicans, and weep.  That is, unless your new Mormon, whiz-kid, C-suite candidate is able to project a stronger, more hands-on image of strong national leadership than Barack Obama—which may not be setting the bar too high.  Anything is possible.

One last point.  To most Millennials, the whole whiney victimization card (look at me, I’m screwed!) seems like such a stale trope of Boomers and Gen-Xers, that they instinctively recoil from it.  And right on cue, a bona fide Millennial offers a cocky and defiant reply to Kotkin in the Washington Post (“Generation Unscrewed”)—though in a sardonic (“It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)”) tone that may leave all generations mystified.

RON PAUL – THE OBI-WAN KENOBI & GREY CHAMPION OF THIS FOURTH TURNING

Great article on the Lew Rockwell site. This guy would fit in real well on TBP. It seems his definition of Generation X is spot on.

The X and Y Generations and Ron Paul: An Alliance for Our Age

by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD

Members of Generation X, born 1962 to 1981, and Generation Y, 1982-2004, are rallying behind Ron Paul in his run for president. Media commentators find it odd that people under the age of 40 in the X Generation and especially voters under age 30 in the Y Generation are so taken with this unassuming, soft-spoken 76-year-old candidate. Ron Paul is in the Silent Generation, whose members are now 70 to 87 years of age (born 1925-1942).

Exit polls show that Ron Paul won the majority of voters under age 40 in the Iowa caucus and in the New Hampshire primary. He received 21.4 percent of the votes in Iowa (first-place Rick Santorum got 24.6 percent) and came in second in New Hampshire with 22.9 percent of the votes (first-place Mitt Romney got 39.3 percent). More voters under age 30 chose Ron Paul over the other candidates in the South Carolina primary and Nevada caucus. He garnered 41 percent of the under 30 vote in Nevada – Mitt Romney got 36 percent; Newt Gingrich, 16 percent; and Rick Santorum, 7 percent. But only a small minority of older people has voted for him, as was especially evident in the Florida Republican primary.

In Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584-2069 (1991) and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997), William Strauss and Neil Howe examine the four main generations alive today, including the Boom (“Baby Boomer”) Generation, born 1943-1961. They show how these generations mirror ones in the past. They note that a “Young Hero and Elder Prophet” pairing occurs repeatedly in history, myth, and art, as with Joshua and Moses in the Old Testament, the Gray Champion in Colonial America, King Arthur and Merlin in Celtic myth, Tolkien’s Frodo and Gandalf, and Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. In Star Wars, Episode IV, Obi-Wan Kenobi instructs Luke in the ways of the Force and in Episode VI tells him that killing Darth Vader (his father) is the only way to destroy the evil Galactic Empire. And as Joseph Campbell, the American mythologist, notes, the young hero’s close bond with a wise elder is essential to his ultimate success.

The “Gray Champion” precipitated the Boston Revolt of April 1689, mounted to protest King James II’s increasingly autocratic rule of the British-American colonies. As Nathaniel Hawthorne describes it in his Twice-Told Tales, the King-appointed governor of New England marched British troops through Boston to intimidate the public and quell any thoughts of colonial self-rule. Hawthorne writes:

“Suddenly, there was seen the figure of an ancient man, who seemed to have emerged from among the people, and was walking by himself along the center of the street, to confront the armed band. He wore the old Puritan dress, a dark cloak and a steeple-crowned hat, in the fashion of at least fifty years before…” 

This elderly champion with a manner “combining the leader and saint” commanded the soldiers to stop; and “at the old man’s word and outstretched arm, the roll of the drum was hushed at once, and the advancing line stood still.” Then, “inspired by this single act of defiance, the people of Boston roused their courage and acted. Within the day, Andros [the governor] was deposed and jailed, the liberty of Boston saved, and the corner turned on the colonial Glorious Revolution.” This revolt led to the American Revolution 85 years later.

Ron Paul is the Obi-Wan Kenobi and Gray Champion of our time, and the Darth Vader of our U.S. Empire is the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve System, with its network of twelve regional private banks, was established in 1913. The Fed is the country’s third central bank (the first two, established in 1791 and 1816, each lasted for 20 years). The Fed issues token coins and paper dollars, and creates and transfers unlimited amounts of computer-generated digital money. Manufacturing money this way, during its 99-year existence the Fed has destroyed 98.8 percent of the value of the dollar, as calculated by the Shadow Government Statistics (SGS)-Alternate-Consumer Price Index (CPI). Using this measure of inflation, a basket of goods and services that cost $100 in 1913 now costs $8,204! (Even the Bureau of Labor Statistics admits that the dollar has lost 96 percent of its value since 1913, with that $100 basket of goods and services now said to cost $2303.) Using the more accurate SGS-Alternate-CPI, the greatest drop in the dollar’s value, 95.1 percent, has occurred since 1971, when president Nixon severed the dollar’s last remaining link with gold, turning it into an effortlessly issued fiat currency. (A fiat currency is one that has no hard asset backing it such as gold and derives its value from government edict.) Like a virulent virus, the Fed has infected the U.S. dollar and made it grow like a cancer.

The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1921 killed somewhere between 20 to 40 million people (including my 22-year-old grandmother and my wife’s 23-year-old grandmother). What the Fed is could result in an equally dire hyperinflationary economic collapse, similar to what happened in the Weimar Republic, Austria, and Hungary in the 1920s, Argentina in 1989, and Zimbabwe. (A practical definition for hyperinflation is that the country’s largest pre-inflation bank note – for the U.S., the $100 bill. – becomes worth more as toilet paper, or for stoking a fire, than as a currency. The currency remains “current” but no longer serves as a medium of exchange.)

Dr. Paul prescribes an Austrian cure for our country’s economic problems (see below). A professor at the University of Vienna, Carl Menger (1840-1921), founded the Austrian School of Economics, which is named for its country of origin. (Government officials and economists in Austria do not follow or endorse “Austrian Economics.”) This branch of economics studies the action of individuals in the marketplace and puts forward a subjective theory of value. It explores important subjects like marginal utility (the amount of benefit derived from consuming one additional unit of a product or service, a concept that debunks the labor theory of value), moral hazard (where being covered against loss increases risk taking – executives at the leading investment banking and securities firm, Goldman Sachs, make a bad, multibillion dollar investment in AIG, and the government, i.e., U.S. taxpayers, bails them out), and malinvestments (making the wrong kind of investments, like building too many shopping malls, encouraged by Fed-set artificially low interest rates). Austrian economists don’t spin their wheels constructing mathematical models of the economy on a large, “macroeconomic” scale, something that Keynesian economists like to do and which have little bearing on the real world of human action. In contrast to pump-priming, big government Keynesianism, Austrian economics stresses the importance of free markets and a stable currency for economic calculation and setting prices.

Starting at a young age, Americans need to learn the basics of Austrian Economics and appreciate how it restores economic health. But government schools do not teach Austrian economics or the concomitant Jeffersonian vision of individual liberty. These subjects make a compelling case for limited government and are thus politically incorrect.

The primary role of government schools, where 90 percent of U.S. children are educated, is to inculcate, in the words of John Calvin, “the duty of obedience to rulers.” Government-employed bureaucratic officials determine what political and economic ideas children are to be taught. Compulsory government schooling has become a zero-tolerance, one-size-fits-all, dumbed-down operation that focuses on social engineering rather than on learning and individual achievement. James Ostrowski, in Government Schools Are Bad for Your Kids, puts it this way: “[The government school] produces barely literate, historically ignorant, uncultured lovers of big government.” Sadly, public schools have evolved into prison-like indoctrination centers that children and adolescents in the Y Generation currently endure – six and seven hours a day for thirteen years. For a sobering assessment of what our nation’s public schools have turned into, watch the online documentary on tagtele.com titled “War on Kids,” available HERE.

Nevertheless, there is reason for hope.

The outpouring of support by young people for Ron Paul is truly heartening. In Texas, for example, students at the Hudson Middle School in Hudson overwhelmingly cast ballots for Ron Paul in the school’s mock GOP primary, “after spending weeks studying the candidates’ views on the issues and watching debates among the hopefuls” according to a newspaper account, which reported: “They liked Paul’s anti-war stance, as well as his willingness to talk straight and not attack his opponents to make a point. ‘He’s just like this down-to-earth dude who just seems like he knows what he’s doing,’ seventh-grader Danielle Heidkamp said.”

Generation Y members like Danielle will carry the Ron Paul banner forward. The Y Generation is also named the “Millennial Generation,” coming of age as it is at the beginning of a new millennium. This generation must cope as young adults with the unfolding global financial crisis. When the Baby Boomer generation was growing up in the 1950s and 60s U.S. government debt increased $2.5 Billion a year. Life was good. Today, with the Millennial Generation coming of age, U.S. government debt increases by $2.5 Billion every 16 hours.

After the housing boom peaked in 2006 and foreclosures began to mount, the so-named “Millennial Crisis” began in February, 2007 when the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) announced that it would no longer buy subprime mortgages or mortgage-related securities (collateralized debt obligations). The Y Generation facing this crisis today bears some likeness to the GI Generation, born at the beginning of the last century (1901-1924), who became young adults during the last big crisis in U.S. history, the Great Depression and World War II. Strauss and Howe see the GI and Y generations as both manifesting a “Hero” archetype – can-do heroes and competent pragmatic managers who possess confidence and optimism.

Strauss and Howe name Generation X the “13th Generation” because it is the thirteenth one to call itself “American,” beginning with the Awakening Generation born 1701-1723. The Glorious Revolution (Revolution of 1688) brought this about, which dethroned King James II and led Parliament to pass the 1869 English Bill of Rights, called “An Act declareing the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Setleing the Succession of the Crowne.” This Act enabled people in the American colonies, emboldened by the Boston Revolt and this Bill of Rights, to see themselves as distinctly American and not servile British subjects.

Progressives view human history as a linear process. Beginning with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson early in the last century, progressives have sought to expand government power and use it to effect what they consider to be beneficial social, political, and economic change. They are notable for launching the FED, an income tax, World War I, Prohibition, and the New Deal. Linear thinkers, which include politicians, the mainstream media, and CEOs of big corporations, work to maintain the status quo and their power and wealth. Rather than progress in a linear fashion, however, human history has a more seasonal, cyclical nature. As Mark Twain observed, “It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man’s character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.” Twain is also alleged to have said something like, “Although history doesn’t repeat itself, it often rhymes” (source unknown). Whatever “rhyme” or “repetition” that might have helped bring about the Millennial Crisis, having a linear-thinking progressive president will only serve to make things worse. That includes President Obama and all the Republican presidential candidates except Ron Paul. He alone knows what is really going on, understands it, predicted it, and knows how best to deal with it.

Not counting the earlier crisis that caused the colonial Glorious Revolution and its Boston Revolt (1675-1704), there have been four crises in American history: the American Revolution (1773-1704), followed 66 years later by the Civil War (1860-1865), 64 years later by the Great Depression and World War II (1929-1946), and 61 years later by the current Millennial Crisis (2007-?). Each crisis has been worse than the previous one. There were 25,000 deaths in the American Revolution. Some 600,000 to 800,000 people died in the Civil War. And in World War II 50 to 70 million people died (civilian and military). In the American Revolution hyperinflation of the Continental Dollar rendered it worthless, and in the Civil War the Confederate Dollar suffered the same fate.

In The Fourth Turning, William Strauss and Neil Howe predicted, in 1997 when the book was published, that the next period of crisis in our country’s history, the “Fourth Turning” (following the first three crises) which they named the Millennial Crisis, would begin in 8 to 10 years. They were spot-on predicting when it would begin, 10 years later (in 2007), and this is what they say about its course:

“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. Thus might the next Fourth Turning end in apocalypse – or glory. The nation could be ruined, its democracy destroyed, and millions of people scattered or killed. Or America could enter a new golden age, triumphantly applying shared values to improve the human condition. The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis [the one we are experiencing now]; all they suggest is the timing and dimension.”

One thing is certain. This crisis, now in its 6th year, will not be over anytime soon. How bad it becomes will depend on whether or not our country heeds the teachings of Ron Paul and his advocates.

Unfortunately, the establishment media tries to ignore Ron Paul and pretend he doesn’t exist. Jon Stewart, on The Daily Show, skewers the media’s talking heads on this score, asking “How did Ron Paul become the 13th floor in a hotel?” in “John Stewart Shows How Ron Paul Is Feared By The NWO Mafia Controlled Mainstream Media,” which can be seen on YouTube HERE. But other wiser heads can see and appreciate his true worth.

Bill Buckler, Captain of the financial newsletter The Privateer, published in Australia, has this to say about Ron Paul:

“Dr. Paul’s great and merited attractiveness to a growing number of admirers has a very simple source. He is that rarest of creatures – a FREE man. He is beholden to nobody. He has developed his ideas and his convictions over a long and fruitful life of independent thinking. He does not compromise. He homes in on the fundamental issue and principle of any political issue and serves it up without salt or other ‘seasoning.’ He says what he means and he means what he says. He is the living embodiment of the ‘dream’ that most Americans have long since given up on as they saw it slip further and further beyond their grasp. He is the only prominent person who is doing everything he can to turn the non-debate which masquerades as the ‘mainstream’ in the US and global political economy into something of substance. That, far more than presidency, is his goal.”

Ron Paul wants to legalize freedom and have the government stop punishing people for using the freedom that is rightfully theirs (as long as you, of course, do not encroach on other persons and their property). All the other leading candidates who want to be elected president are pro-big government and seek power. Mitt Romney is Wall Street’s Republican candidate, with the investment banking and securities firm Goldman Sachs being his biggest contributor. There is little difference between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, except perhaps that Romney is even more pro-war than is Obama. I highly recommend Andrew Napolitano’s YouTube video “Judge Napolitano What if the Government Has Been Lying to You” where he portrays Republicans (excluding Ron Paul) and Democrats as “two wings of the same bird of prey.”

Ron Paul is different. As the YouTube video What Is It About Ron Paul? affirms,

“Once you get hooked on Ron Paul you can no longer bear listen to a man who wants power. You become instantly disgusted whenever they begin to speak. Before they were just boring, but now they’re revolting. Listening to a Romney, or a Gingrich, or a Bush, or Obama makes you sick; and you just don’t understand how Ron Paul can get through those debates without getting nauseous. You see a political veneer in these politicians that is so transparent, like a ghost flapping its ethereal tongue at you.”

A poster shown in the video states, “Once you get hooked on Ron Paul you can no longer bear to listen to a man who wants power.”

People all over the world are getting hooked on Ron Paul. A Canadian citizen, Terry Neudorf, for example, writes this in a blog titled “Ron Paul Shakes the World”:

“When the name Ron Paul is mentioned to my grandchildren, a smile will creep across their faces, and they will recall, and speak with excited tones about a time where an idea was born, a message was spread, and a revolution took hold that shook the world. That’s the time I’m living in right now. I will treasure every moment. Thanks for all you do.”

Young Americans are joining The Ron Paul Movement, like those manning phone banks to promote and raise funds for his campaign. (Don’t expect Goldman Sachs to contribute any money to Ron Paul’s campaign.) Leaders of the X and Y Generations allied with Ron Paul are our best hope for the future – and for coming through the Millennial Crisis without war. A third world war, with nuclear weapons in play, could well prove to be even more devastating than was World War II. But even if he is not elected president, all is not lost. Like Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ron Paul’s spirit and teachings will live on and guide a new generation of Luke Skywalkers, including his son, X-Generation Rand Paul, to lead our country safely through this time of economic and social peril.

The Austrian Cure for Economic Illness

Dr. Paul’s Austrian treatment for the Millennial Crisis comprises six parts:

1) End the Fed – close down the central bank. “Unplug the machinery of the Fed,” as Ron Paul puts it in his book End the Fed (see also the other three books he has written on government and liberty in “Suggested Reading” below). The market must be free to set interest rates without a central bank artificially lowering them and inflating the money supply. Banks should once again exist as free-enterprise institutions without privileges or bailouts from the state. ATMs, Web-based systems of funds transfer like PayPal, and online trading can function perfectly well without a Fed. 2) Restore sound money to the economy – privatize the country’s monetary system, abolish legal tender laws, and allow the free market to determine the forms of money it prefers.3) Lower taxes and cut government spending – close military bases that the U.S. maintains in more than 130 countries around the world and bring the troops home; defund unconstitutional departments like Education, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, etc.; abolish the personal income tax. 4) No bailouts – the economy needs to liquidate all the malinvestments and mistakes made during the boom in order to be able to move on and recover from the bust.5) Allow prices and wages to fall to levels the market sets – propping up prices stifles recovery, as the Great Depression proved. 6) Regulate the government, not private property and markets – entrepreneurs and investors will only make long-term investments that spur recovery and boost employment if they feel that their property is secure. (Fifteen cabinet-level departments control different parts of the economy, along with 100 federal regulatory agencies that have produced more than 81,000 pages of regulations, not including those set by state and local governments.)

Disclosure:

Like Ron Paul, I am a member of the Silent Generation.

Suggested Reading:

Articles

Books

By Ron Paul

Others

February 9, 2012

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com



 

BAD MOON RISING

I see the bad moon arising.
I see trouble on the way.
I see earthquakes and lightnin’.
I see bad times today.

Creedence Clearwater Revival – Bad Moon Rising

 

“Human history seems logical in afterthought but a mystery in forethought.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

The above statement by historians William Strauss and Neil Howe is very significant as we try to make sense of the events unfolding before our very eyes in today’s world. On September 17, a mere six weeks ago, a few hundred young people showed up in Zucatti Park in Lower Manhattan to protest our corrupt, broken and Wall Street manipulated economic and political system. That first night, approximately 100 protestors occupied the park and were outnumbered by the NYPD in full riot gear. The idea to Occupy Wall Street began circulating on the internet in late August. The Millennial Generation used their social networks and put their tech savvy talents to work. Before long, thousands of protestors showed up in cities across the U.S. The model for this movement was the successful demonstrations in Egypt and Tunisia, earlier in the year.

 

The initial reaction among mainstream media and politicians across the land was bemusement. A bunch of young hippy throwbacks were going to make a meaningless statement and then fade away. The attention span of Americans is as long as the commercial break between contestants on Dancing With the Stars. Everyone knows the Millennials aren’t to be taken seriously. They are a bunch of spoiled, coddled, lazy college kids who need to get a job. But a funny thing happened during the commercial break. The kids held their ground. They didn’t leave. More young people arrived. More young people began protesting in cities across the country. Middle aged people began to get involved. Even some older people joined the cause. Before long there were thousands of people getting involved. It spread to Europe, with young people occupying London and Rome. Donations and supplies began to pour in from around the world. There’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.

The six weeks since September 17 have been chaotic, venomous, confusing, and verging on deadly. Wall Street gyrated wildly with stocks falling 8% by October 3 and rebounding by 15% by October 28 and plunging again this week. The Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) declared the country was headed back into recession on September 30:

“It’s important to understand that recession doesn’t mean a bad economy – we’ve had that for years now. It means an economy that keeps worsening, because it’s locked into a vicious cycle. It means that the jobless rate, already above 9%, will go much higher, and the federal budget deficit, already above a trillion dollars, will soar. Here’s what ECRI’s recession call really says: if you think this is a bad economy, you haven’t seen anything yet. And that has profound implications for both Main Street and Wall Street.”

The ECRI has called the last three recessions with no instances of false alarms. Last week, the Conference Board announced the Consumer Confidence Index plummeted to two and a half year low of 39.8, last seen in March of 2009. The Dow Jones was trading at 6,500 in March 2009, some 47% below today’s level. It is an interesting dichotomy between how the average American feels about the world and how the Wall Street elite feel about their Ben Bernanke sheltered world. The Consumer Confidence Index was 110 in 2007 and 140 in early 2001. We’ve come a long way baby.

During these past six weeks the European Union has teetered on the verge of disintegration. Non-stop negotiations, agreements, plans, declarations, special purpose vehicles, bailout funds, and lies have poured forth on a daily basis. Greece still lives – on a ventilator – as it has been brain dead for months. The sole purpose of all the public relations efforts, press conferences, summit meetings and lies has been to keep European banks, their stockholders and bondholders from accepting the consequences of their irresponsible lending to the PIIGS. Essentially, the German people have been put on the hook for losses that should have been born by the stockholders and bondholders of the biggest French, German, Belgian and English banks. The EU has put a tourniquet over a cancerous tumor. The entire world is awash in bad debt and until this debt is liquidated, we will stagger from crisis to crisis like a drunken sailor. John Hussman describes the master plan:

In effect, European leaders have announced “We have agreed to solve our debt problem, leveraging money we do not have, to create a fund, which will then borrow several times that amount, in order to buy enormous amounts of new debt that we will need to issue.”

As politicians and central bankers around the world desperately try to keep their debt drenched ponzi scheme going for awhile longer, the mood darkens among the populations of developed countries around the world. I came across a quote from, of all people, Vladimir Lenin that describes how the last six weeks seemed to me: 

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

It seems like history is accelerating. Momentous events have been occurring regularly since 2007. Our political and financial leaders are blindsided on a daily basis by each new crisis. The majority of the American public continues to be apathetic, willfully ignorant, and constantly absorbed by their array of electronic gadgets and mindless drivel spewed at them by media conglomerates. Rather than think critically, most Americans allow left wing and right wing mainstream media to formulate their opinions for them through their propaganda and misinformation operations. Linear thinkers, who make up the majority of the political, social, media and financial elite in this country, believe the world progresses and moves ever forward. In reality, the world operates in a cyclical fashion, with generations throughout history reacting to events in a predictable manner based upon their stage in life. The reason the world has turned so chaotic, angry and fraught with danger since 2007 is because we have entered another Fourth Turning. Strauss & Howe have been able to document a fourfold cycle of generational types and recurring mood eras in American history back 500 years. They have also documented the same phenomenon in other countries.

The housing collapse, near meltdown of our financial system, revolutions in the Middle East, economic turmoil in Europe, poisoned political atmosphere in Washington DC, and most recently the Occupy Wall Street movement are part of a larger cycle. The four living generations have each entered the phases of their lives that will lead to a convulsive upheaval and destruction of the existing social order. We’ve entered a twenty year period of Crisis as described by Strauss & Howe:

“A CRISIS arises in response to sudden threats that previously would have been ignored or deferred, but which are now perceived as dire. Great worldly perils boil off the clutter and complexity of life, leaving behind one simple imperative: The society must prevail. This requires a solid public consensus, aggressive institutions, and personal sacrifice. People support new efforts to wield public authority, whose perceived successes soon justify more of the same. Government governs, community obstacles are removed, and laws and customs that resisted change for decades are swiftly shunted aside. A grim preoccupation with civic peril causes spiritual curiosity to decline. Public order tightens, private risk-taking abates, and crime and substance abuse decline. Families strengthen, gender distinctions widen, and child-rearing reaches a smothering degree of protection and structure. The young focus their energy on worldly achievements, leaving values in the hands of the old. Wars are fought with fury and for maximum result.” – Strauss & Howe

History is Cyclical, not Linear

“There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt  

  

I’ve been trying to decipher which direction this Fourth Turning will lead, and the last six weeks has started to crystallize my thinking. I’ve been fascinated by the intense reactions, opinions and arguments that have taken place across the airwaves and internet regarding the true nature of the Occupy movement. Some of the reaction is based upon pure ideological grounds, with media outlets like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, NY Post and CNBC, disparaging, ridiculing and demeaning the movement. The anti-rich tone of the protests may not sit well with the multi-billionaire owners (Rupert Murdoch, Mort Zuckerman, Roberts Family) of these mega-media corporations. The liberal media such as MSNBC, Huffington Post, and CNN have sometimes been fawning over the movement in an effort to co-opt it into liberal Tea Party for the benefit of Obama and the Democratic Party. The propaganda and misinformation coming from both these ideological camps is easy to discern for a critical thinking person. Sadly, the nation is filled with people that don’t want to think. Therefore, they let their opinions be formed by talking heads on a TV screen.

These reactions were predictable. What caught my attention was the generational reaction to Occupy Wall Street. I know all the rugged individualists out there chafe at being lumped into a generational cohort, but the fact remains that groups of people born during the same time frame encounter key historical events and social trends while occupying the same phase of life. Because members of a generation are molded in lasting ways by the eras they encounter as children and young adults, they also tend to share certain common beliefs and behaviors. Aware of the experiences and traits that they share with their peers, members of a generation also tend to share a sense of common perceived membership in that generation. To deny the reality that large clusters of human beings tend to act with a herd mentality is contrary to all visible evidence. The herd mentality can be observed in the Dot-com bubble, Americans unquestioningly allowing passage of the Patriot Act, the housing bubble, the mass hysteria over the latest iSomething, Black Friday riots at retail stores to obtain the “hottest” toy or gadget, and the slaves to the latest fashions and trends as directed by the corporate media machine. The masses don’t realize they are being manipulated by the few who understand the power of propaganda:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” – Edward Bernays – Propaganda – 1928

The Occupy movement is being driven by the Millennial Generation. They have used their superior technological and social networking skills to organize, educate, and inspire people to their cause while befuddling and confusing the authorities. They continue to rally more young people to their fight against Wall Street and K Street tyranny. The generational lines of battle are being drawn. The Baby Boom Generation, who is at the point of maximum power in society, fears this movement. They control Wall Street, corporate America, Congress, the courts, academia and the media. They have reached their peak of influence and power, which will rapidly wane over the next fifteen years. They see the Occupy movement as a threat to their supremacy and control of the system. The cynical, alienated, pragmatic Generation X is caught between the Boomers and the Millennials in this escalating conflict. It is likely the majority of this generation will side with the Millennials, realizing the future of the country depends on them and not the elderly Boomers. To clarify, not every Boomer, Gen Xer, or Millennial will act in concert with their generational cohort. But it doesn’t matter if a few cattle stray from the herd, when the herd is stampeding in one direction.

The chart below details the Strauss & Howe configuration of generations and turnings for the last two Saeculums in American history. They describe their generational theory in the following terms:

“Turnings last about 20 years and always arrive in the same order. Four of them make up the cycle of history, which is about the length of a long human life. The first turning is a High, a period of confident expansion as a new order becomes established after the old has been dismantled. Next comes an Awakening, a time of rebellion against the now-established order, when spiritual exploration becomes the norm. Then comes an Unraveling, an increasingly troubled era of strong individualism that surmounts increasingly fragmented institutions. Last comes the Fourth Turning, an era of upheaval, a Crisis in which society redefines its very nature and purpose.” Strauss & Howe

Each new generation is born approximately three years prior to the next turning. This results in Strauss & Howe having a slightly different generational grouping than government demographers.

Great Power Saeculum (82)
Missionary Generation Prophet (Idealist) 1860–1882 (22) High: Reconstruction/Gilded Age
Lost Generation Nomad (Reactive) 1883–1900 (17) Awakening: Missionary Awakening
G.I. Generation Hero (Civic) 1901–1924 (23) Unraveling: World War I/Prohibition
Silent Generation Artist (Adaptive) 1925–1942 (17) Crisis: Great Depression/World War II
Millennial Saeculum (67+)
(Baby) Boom Generation Prophet (Idealist) 1943–1960 (17) High: Superpower America
13th Generation Nomad (Reactive) 1961–1981 (20) Awakening: Consciousness Revolution
(a.k.a Generation X)
Millennial Generation(Generation Y) Hero (Civic) 1982–2004 (22) Unraveling: Culture Wars, Postmodernism, Digital Technology
New Silent Generation (Generation Z) Artist (Adaptive) 2004–present (6+) Crisis: Great Recession, War on Terror, Declining Superpower, and Globalization

There is nothing mystical about their theory. Strauss & Howe are historians who have created a framework for understanding why people act a certain way to events differently, depending on which stage of life they occupy. The theory is so logical because it is based upon the average 80 year life cycle of a human being. A human being goes through four stages during their life: childhood, young adulthood, midlife, and elderhood. During each of these stages, you will react to the same event in a very different manner. During an 80 year cycle, there will be four generations at different stages of their life. The interaction between the generations at each 20 year turning determines how history is steered through the events of that cycle. The life cycle stages can be seen in this chart:

  Prophet Nomad Hero Artist
High Childhood Elderhood Midlife Young Adult
Awakening Young Adult Childhood Elderhood Midlife
Unraveling Midlife Young Adult Childhood Elderhood
Crisis Elderhood Midlife Young Adult Childhood

Strauss and Howe compare the saecular rhythm to the seasons of the year, which inevitably occur in the same order, but with slightly varying timing. Just as winter may come sooner or later, and be more or less severe in any given year, the same is true of a Fourth Turning in any given Saeculum. The theory does not predict the events which drive history, but it does predict the generational reaction to events depending upon their age. We entered the Fourth Turning Crisis in 2007 with the housing collapse and the implosion of our financial system. The configuration of elder self righteous Boomers at 60 years old, midlife pessimistic Gen Xers at 40 years old, and coming of age Millennials at 20 years old is an explosive mixture that will provide the impetus and fury to this period of catharsis and pain. Winter has arrived. There is no way to avoid it. The bitter winds have begun to blow. The first harsh front arrived in 2008 with the near meltdown of the worldwide economic system. There has been a lull in the biting gale force winds of this Crisis through the shoveling of massive amounts of newly created debt into a system already drowning in debt. The Occupy movement and the impending collapse of the European Union charade will usher in the next blizzard of pain and suffering. We hurdle towards are rendezvous with destiny.

“The ‘spirit of America’ comes once a saeculum, only through what the ancients called ekpyrosis, nature’s fiery moment of death and discontinuity.  History’s periodic eras of Crisis combust the old social order and give birth to a new. A Fourth Turning is a solstice era of maximum darkness, in which the supply of social order is still falling—but the demand for order is now rising.  It is the saeculum’s hibernal, its time of trial. Nature exacts its fatal payment and pitilessly sorts out the survivors and the doomed.  Pleasures recede, tempests hurt, pretense is exposed, and toughness rewarded—all in a season.” Strauss & Howe

Millennials Rising

Over the last six weeks I’ve watched as the young protestors around the country have been called: filthy hippies, losers, lazy, coddled, socialists, communists, spoiled college kids, parasites, useful idiots, and tools of the left. Most of the wrath being heaped upon these young people for exercising their Constitutional right to free speech and freedom of assembly has been from the Baby Boom Generation, who are at the peak of their power in our society. Sixty percent of the Senate is made up of Baby Boomers, with the next closest generation being the Silent Generation with twenty five percent. Over 58% of the House of Representatives is made up of Baby Boomers, with the next closest generation being Gen Xers at 27%. They occupy the executive suites of the Wall Street banks (Blankfein, Dimon, Pandit, Monihan) and the Federal Reserve (Bernanke). They make up the majority of judges, local politicians and school boards. They run the Federal government agencies. And they dominate the airwaves as the high priced mouthpieces for their corporate bosses. This Prophet generation will lead the country through the trials and tribulations of this Fourth Turning.

The disdain and contempt for these Millennial protestors flies in the face of the facts about this generation. They use drugs at a lower rate than their parents did at the same age. Teen crime rates and teen pregnancies have declined. They will have the highest level of college education in U.S. history. They were protected during their youth as organized sports taught them teamwork. They are the most technologically savvy generation in history. They volunteer at a higher level than previous generations. They have been more upbeat and engaged than their predecessors (Gen X). And they are much closer to their parents than Boomers were at the same age. They reject the negativism and cynicism of their parents and believe positive change is possible in our society. They have shown respect for authority up until the last six weeks. They were primed to be led by Boomers that could articulate a positive vision of the future based on reality and a better tomorrow. They were ready to make sacrifices in order to create a brighter future. But a funny thing happened. The Boomer generation failed to deliver on their part of the bargain.

Prior Hero Generation Americans had braved the winter at Valley Forge and stormed the beaches of Normandy as Prophet leaders like Ben Franklin and Franklin Roosevelt provided inspirational guidance and the vision of a better tomorrow. Strauss & Howe accurately assessed the Millennial Generation in their book Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, published in 2000 when the 1st Millennials were graduating high school:

“As a group, Millennials are unlike any other youth generation in living memory. They are more numerous, more affluent, better educated, and more ethnically diverse. More important, they are beginning to manifest a wide array of positive social habits that older Americans no longer associate with youth, including a new focus on teamwork, achievement, modesty and good conduct. Only a few years from now, this can-do youth revolution will overwhelm the cynics and pessimists … will entirely recast the image of youth from downbeat and alienated to upbeat and engaged — with potentially seismic consequences for America.” – Strauss & Howe

The youth of America listened to their parents and stayed in school. They’ve racked up over $1 trillion in student loan debt getting college educations. Meanwhile, our Baby Boomer leadership had an opportunity to address the country’s unsustainable fiscal path by accepting the consequences of a thirty year debt binge and liquidating the banks that took extreme risks with extreme leverage. An orderly liquidation (aka Washington Mutual) would have punished the stockholders, bondholders and management of the Wall Street banks, while leaving the depositors whole and purging the system of debt that can never be paid off. Our politicians could have ended our wars of choice in the Middle East and cut our war spending by hundreds of billions without sacrificing one iota of safety for the American people. The political leadership could have put the country on a deficit reduction path that would have insured the long-term viability of our republic.

Instead of doing the right thing, our Baby Boomer leaders did the exact opposite of the right thing. They held the American taxpayer hostage and absconded with trillions of their tax dollars and handed it over to the same Wall Street banks that had run the largest fraud scheme in world history and blew up the worldwide financial system. The Boomer Chairman of the Federal Reserve decided to not only save the Wall Street banks but to purposefully try to pump up the stock market, while destroying the lives of savers and senior citizens with his zero interest rate policy. His policies have led to a surge in energy and food prices and contributed to revolutions in the Middle East. The Wall Street banks have used the accounting gimmick of relieving loan loss reserves to create fake profits over the last two years. Wall Street celebrated by paying themselves $60 billion in bonuses between 2008 and 2010. The poster boys for the .1% Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein “earned” $23 million and $19 million respectively in 2010.

The politicians borrowed trillions from future unborn generations to inflict a Keynesian nightmare of solutions on the American economy that included: an $800 billion porkulus program, $22 billion pissed down the toilet on a homebuyer tax credit as home prices are now lower, $3 billion for Cash for Clunkers that cost $24,000 per car sold, loan modification schemes, tax credits for windows, doors and appliances, and payroll tax cuts. The result of all the Federal Reserve and politician “solutions” has been to increase the National Debt by $5.3 trillion in three years, a 55% increase. It took the country over 200 years to accumulate the first $5.3 trillion in debt. Everything done thus far has benefitted only the top 1%. The real unemployment rate is 23%. The real inflation rate is between 5% and 10%. The economy is headed back into recession. But at least the top 1% are doing well, as the stock market has risen 84% from its 2009 lows. Somehow, the oligarchy that runs this country is taken aback by the protests growing increasingly contentious across the country. It is not a surprise to those who understand the cyclical nature of history and the darkening mood in this country, which has been deepening since the Tea Party protests of 2009.

Hope You Are Quite Prepared To Die

Hope you got your things together.
Hope you are quite prepared to die.
Looks like we’re in for nasty weather.
One eye is taken for an eye.

Creedence Clearwater Revival – Bad Moon Rising

  

It seems the young people in this country have realized they have no future when the system is run for the benefit of an oligarchy consisting of Wall Street banks, mega-corporations, media conglomerates, and puppet politicians in Washington D.C. These people will stop at nothing to retain their wealth and power. Not only do they want to retain it, they are actively trying to increase it. They have achieved their goal beyond all expectations, and are still able to convince a large portion of the population through their propaganda machine they deserve every penny. The chasm between the “Haves” and “Have Nots” has never been greater in U.S. history. The truth is that Americans have always admired entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who created businesses, created jobs, and ended up with vast wealth. But, that is not the wealth protestors on Wall Street and across the country are angry about. They are angry at the hyper-concentration of wealth in the hands of men that have rigged the system in their favor through bribery (lobbying & contributions), fraud (no-doc loans & AAA rated toxic derivatives), accounting schemes (special purpose vehicles & suspending mark to market) and holding the American middle class hostage (TARP & zero interest rates). When the 400 wealthiest Americans own more than the “lower” 150 million Americans put together, you have a system that is badly broken.

Do the Millennials have a right to be angry? The table below shows how the economic solutions of the oligarchy have worked out for the youth of our country. There are 19 million young people between the ages of 18 and 29 that are not working. Some are still in college, but most are not. That is a lot of potential Occupiers.

Age Group %  not employed
18 to 19 65%
20 to 24 40%
25 to 29 27%

After observing the reactions to the OWS movement over the last few weeks, I’m more convinced than ever that different generations view the same event through the prism of their own life experiences, beliefs, prejudices, and biases. I’ve found the Baby Boomers have generally been doubtful of the protestors’ motives, condescending towards their intelligence, scornful about their appearance, and derogatory regarding their flaunting of authority. This is fascinating considering that Boomers love to reminisce about their glory days protesting the Vietnam War. The Boomer generation was at this same age configuration in 1970. Their GI Generation parents probably had the same opinions about the long haired, drug using, sex crazed youthful Boomers in 1970. Now the Boomers are the establishment and they don’t like seeing their authority challenged by these naïve troublemakers. Strauss & Howe saw the likelihood of this conflict back in 1997 when the oldest Millennials were only 15 years old:

“When young adults encounter leaders who cling to the old regime (and who keep propping up senior benefit programs that will by then be busting the budget), they will not tune out, 13er-style. Instead they will get busy working to defeat or overcome their adversaries. Their success will lead some older critics to perceive real danger in a rising generation perceived as capable but naïve.” –  Strauss & Howe

The Millennials spearheading these protests are most certainly capable. In a matter of six weeks they have created a worldwide movement occupying every major city in the world. The biggest complaints coming from the Boomers is they are naïve, misguided, immature, and don’t understand the real problem. The bitter condemnation of the protestors for breaking a myriad of minor administrative laws, regulations, ordinances, and curfews is beyond laughable. Fox News, CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, NY Post and the other mouthpieces of the ruling oligarchy are apoplectic about the young protestors camping out in public parks, but they were not too concerned by the Wall Street banks systematically defrauding millions of people by creating mortgage products designed to deceive.

They weren’t irate when Wall Street held Congress hostage for a $700 billion ransom. They weren’t enraged when Ben Bernanke bought a trillion dollars of toxic mortgage debt from the Wall Street banks at 100 cents on the dollar. They weren’t furious when the government officials forced the FASB to abandon mark to market rules, allowing the Wall Street banks to falsely report their financial statements. But, they are outraged by young people exercising their right to free speech and right to assembly. When their paid armies of thugs attack the protestors with tear gas and billy clubs, they declare the protestors had it coming. It seems the 150 year old American tradition of civil disobedience to protest unjust laws, defined by Henry David Thoreau, is not too popular among Boomers or the corporate mainstream media.

“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?” –  Henry David Thoreau 

Many of the protestors are naïve, misinformed about the true causes of the financial crisis, impulsive, and seeking solutions that would result in more government control. Their critics say they should be in Washington DC, not on Wall Street. The Boomers don’t like their flaunting of rules and regulations imposed by local authorities. Again, the older generations have conveniently forgotten how naïve, impulsive and rebellious they were at the age of 20. The amazing thing to me is this generation never showed this side during their younger years. Their slogans like “Tax the Rich” are misguided. They need assistance from older generations, but instead they are getting beaten and arrested by the older generation. Some Boomers, like William Black, have opened a dialogue with the protestors, but the majority of Boomers are resistant to the movement. In prior Fourth Turnings, the Hero archetype followed the orders of the Prophet archetype. I fear the Boomer Generation, through their intransigence and refusal to proactively address our structural problems, have set in motion a revolutionary chain of events that will lead to class warfare and possibly civil war in this country. The real danger, as experienced in other countries (France, Russia, China), is that a demagogue could gain control. Strauss & Howe envisioned that possibility in 1997:

“This youthful hunger for social discipline and centralized authority could lead Millenial youth brigades to lend mass to dangerous demagogues. The risk of class warfare will be especially grave if the 20% of Millenials who were poor as children (50% in the inner cities) come of age seeing their peer-bonded paths to generational progress blocked by elder inertia. Unraveling era adults who are today chilled by school uniforms will be truly frightened by the Millennials’ Crisis-era collectivism.” –  Strauss & Howe

The most outrageous accusation made against the protestors is they are somehow responsible for their current plight. The Boomers declare they are spoiled kids who need to get a job. A critical thinking analysis of the Millennial Generation demographics reveals how ridiculous it is for Boomers to blame Millennials in any way for our current economic debacle. There are 97 million Millennials and 54 million of them are under the age of 20. Another 21 million are between the ages of 20 and 24, barely getting started in the real world. Only 39 million of them were eligible to even vote in the last Presidential election. It should be clear to even the most dense CNBC anchor that the young people protesting in the streets are not to blame for the raping and pillaging of the U.S. economic system by the barbarians on Wall Street over the last thirty years, with the consent and encouragement of the bought off politicians in Washington D.C.

Generation Age Total Pop.(mil)
G.I. 86–109 6
Silent 69–85 22
Boomer 51–68 73
Gen-X 30–50 83
Millennial 7–29 97
Homeland – 6 29

After placing the living generations in their assigned age buckets, I was shocked to see the Millennials being, by far, the largest generation. I had assumed it was the Baby Boom Generation. At their peak in 1970 they totaled 76 million and made up 37% of the U.S. population. But, time has not treated them well. Approximately 3 million have left this earth and they only make up 24% of the population. Both Gen X and the Millennials now outnumber the Baby Boomers. They will continue to see their power wane as the years roll by. The Millennial power will grow as the Fourth Turning progresses, since they make up 31% of the population today and will see that ratio grow as the G.I. and Silent generations die off. There are very few people remaining that lived through the last Fourth Turning. The initial phase of this Crisis has revolved around the Wall Street induced housing collapse with the consequences of not enforcing the rule of law by liquidating insolvent banks and prosecuting the white collar criminals that reaped ungodly profits by committing fraud on an epic scale. This has left the country with an unsustainable level of debt, a hollowed out economy, and unemployment at Great Depression era levels, while Wall Street bankers, media titans, and career politicians reap compensation packages fit for kings. Jesse from Jesse’s Café Americain describes our political system perfectly: 

Kleptocracy:“rule by thieves” is a form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often without pretense of honest service.No outside oversight is possible, due to the ability of the kleptocrats to personally control both the supply of public funds and the means of determining their disbursal. 

The Millennials were raised by parents who believed government could solve all our problems. The welfare-warfare state became monolithic during the Boomer reign of error. Therefore, it is understandable these young naïve revolutionaries still cling to the belief the government can solve our problems through more taxes or new programs. The point being missed by all the doubters and detractors of the OWS movement is these young people have zeroed in on the right culprits. They are not stupid. They understand these basic facts:

  • The $15 trillion National Debt, headed to $20 trillion by 2015, is the gift we are leaving to the Millennials.
  • The $100 trillion of unfunded entitlement liabilities will never be honored by the time the Millennials retire.
  • The Millennials know the $1 trillion per year spent maintaining our military empire is more than the next 18 countries’ spending combined, and it benefits only the corporations peddling armaments, while making us less safe.
  • The soldiers getting killed and wounded in our wars of choice in the Middle East are predominantly Millennials.
  • There are 14,000 professional lobbyists in Washington D.C. representing mega-corporations, unions, trade groups and other special interests, which have doled out $30 billion over the last decade influencing (bribing) politicians to write the laws in their favor, and not one lobbyist was working for the Millennials.
  • Millennials know Wall Street has spent $154 million on political contributions and $383 million on lobbying in the last decade. The buying of political influence by our bastions of crony capitalism was as follows: Goldman Sachs – $46 million; Merrill Lynch – $68 million; Citigroup – $108 million; J.P. Morgan Chase – $65 million; Bank of America – $39 million.
  • The Millennials know the 71,000 page Federal tax code and 140,000 pages of Federal regulations are written to protect the interests of the few, not the many.
  • Millennials know the financial industry consciously created products designed to induce mortgage fraud, knowingly packaged toxic mortgages into derivatives, bribed the rating agencies to rate them AAA, sold these worthless instruments to their customers, shorted these same derivatives, and pocketed billions in fees and ill gotten gains. After blowing up the financial system and costing taxpayers trillions, not one person has gone to jail.
  • Millennials know how to read a chart:

  • Millennials know that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are the same face of a never changing oligarchy. Change brought about through opposing political parties and elections has been rendered obsolete as the oligarchy chooses the candidates, uses their wealth to create policies and programs, and is able to control the masses with their propaganda message machines.

So here we stand, about five years into this Fourth Turning, with protests in the U.S. growing increasingly violent and intense. The calls for civility after the Gabrielle Giffords assassination attempt in January of this year went unheeded as the political vitriol has grown increasingly nasty. January seems like a lifetime ago. Revolutions have overthrown rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Unrest and bloodshed continues in Syria, Gaza, Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The European Union is disintegrating before our very eyes and violent protests against austerity measures flare up on a daily basis in Greece, Italy and Spain. There is no doubt we have entered the 2nd stage of this Crisis – the more violent and dangerous stage. I can sense fear and uneasiness among the more connected members of society. The drones, which constitute a large portion of America, are highly focused on Kim Kardashian’s divorce after 72 days and a $10 million wedding. The Millennials leading the protest movement are connected. They understand what is at stake. Strauss and Howe had it figured out 14 years ago:

“Of all today’s generations, the Millenials probably have the most at stake in the coming Crisis. If it ends badly, they would bear the full burden of its consequences throughout their adult lives. Yet if the Crisis ends well, Millenials will gain a triumphant reputation for virtue, valor and competence.” – Strauss & Howe

So what happens next? The truth is that no one knows what will happen next. We can only try to connect the dots and peer into a foggy future. We know that our leaders have not solved any of the financial imbalances that existed in 2007. They have made them worse, as have leaders across the world from China to Japan to Europe. We await the next Lehman moment, except this time it will be a sovereign nation and the contagion will be ten times greater than the 2008 meltdown. Our already fragile economy will be brought to its knees in a replay of the 1930s. As nations plunge into economic chaos, civil strife will likely lead to authoritarian figures rising from the ashes of the turmoil. Could Russia and China take advantage of this turmoil to acquire new resources through military means? Possibly. When the American middle class sees their remaining wealth dwindle to nothing, will they take to the streets? Revolution seems too remote to fathom, but it seemed remote in 1764 and 1855 too. When people have nothing left to lose, anything is possible. The collapse of our economic system is baked in the cake. Our current fiscal path is destined to end in fatality. Strauss & Howe knew the outcome of this Fourth Turning would depend upon the wisdom, strength and fortitude of the American people:

 “The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. Thus might the next Fourth Turning end in apocalypse – or glory. The nation could be ruined, its democracy destroyed, and millions of people scattered or killed. Or America could enter a new golden age, triumphantly applying shared values to improve the human condition. The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis; all they suggest is the timing and dimension.” – Strauss & Howe

Winter has arrived. There will be difficult hurdles with many trials and tribulations in front of us. You may have to choose sides in a generational war. No one wants to face bitter choices. No one wants bloodshed and war. But it really doesn’t matter what we want. There is no real justice in a country that attacks and incarcerates young people for exercising their right to free speech and dissent, while allowing a psychopathic Wall Street banking cartel to wreak havoc upon our nation. The generational alignment is such that the existing social order will be swept away in a violent manner. What replaces the existing order will be up to the American people. You may lose your wealth, security, freedom, or life during the coming struggle. The years ahead will require steely determination and courage like our forefathers exhibited on the frigid barren fields at Valley Forge, the undulating wheat fields at Gettysburg, and the bloody beaches of Normandy. I have three teenage sons at home. My choices will be dictated by what I feel will be best for their futures. I will do WHATEVER it takes to secure a better tomorrow for my boys. If that means standing beside them in battle, so be it. Lines are being drawn. You will not be able to avoid choosing sides, just as you cannot avoid Winter if you ever want to see the dawn of another Spring.

 

“History offers no guarantees. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Since Vietnam, many Americans suppose they know what it means to lose a war. Losing in the next Fourth Turning, however, could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence – perhaps even our nation – might never recover.” – Strauss & Howe