A nurse must portray a sincere sense of caring, but more than that, a calm, unemotional competence. They want to create the impression that everything is under control, even when death is certain. The job of a palliative care worker is to create the illusion of health for those who are dying, to make the symptoms of death as invisible as possible right to the end. Indeed, palliative comes from the Latin word palliare, meaning “to cloak.” Today, pain management is done with drugs. But drugs do not simply take away pain, they numb the capacity to feel anything. A death where nothing is felt, nothing at all, is considered desirable in our culture.
There are palliative care workers everywhere in our society, ready to create the illusion of health and vibrancy, but they don’t all work in healthcare. Many of them work in the US government and in the media. They know the country’s economy is doomed to permanent degrowth. They know the country’s finances are a ponzi scheme. Like all good bureaucrats, they maintain an unemotional, distanced professionalism. Their drugs of choice include low interest rates, permanent war, media circuses, and gigantic deficits – all to keep the patient calm and sedated for a controlled and managed descent.
Despite their efforts, the collapse continues, most recently in the form of customer credit and retail. The rejection of credit applications for March showed that the US has undergone a credit crunch not unlike the one we saw in 2009. It has since been “revised” back to stable. Simultaneously, major retail outlets are expected to close approximately 6,000 stores within the next few years according to About.com’s compilation of recent press reports. Here are some highlights:
180 Abercrombie & Fitch (by 2015)
75 Aeropostale (through January 2015)
150 American Eagle Outfitters (through 2017)
223 Barnes & Noble (through 2023)
340 Dollar Tree/Family Dollar
400 Office Depot/Office Max (by 2016)
100 Pier One (by 2017)
63 Pep Boys (“in the coming years”)
The list goes on and on and includes Radioshack (over 1,700 stores) and other companies currently facing bankruptcy. It also includes stores in Canada like Target (133 stores). Regardless, the rot is well spread. With these store failings will go all the low paying (but up till now, still plentiful) unskilled jobs. This means less aggregate demand, and more store closures. It is a structural problem, an endless cycle.
Recessions are defined by cyclical fluctuations in the overall health of the economy. In a depression, the problems are structural and require structural solutions, not short term capital stimulus or minor changes in the law. All the growth we’ve seen over the last three decades has been bought with debt. This has given us time, but the price has been our national inheritance and our dignity. As Ellen Brown notes, you cannot taper a ponzi scheme. Nothing, not a new president, or mass protests or even revolution can’t stop this avalanche.
It’s the job of the president, the ratings agencies, and the establishment media to cloak and obscure these portents with calm reassurance and cautious optimism — the drugs of our time. There will come a point, not so far in the future, when all the pronouncements of strong job growth and quarterly earnings are exposed in their audacity. And when this massive fraud is exposed, when it no longer works to keep people passive because their bank accounts have been emptied, force is all they will have left to secure their advantage.
This will end badly, but until then, I guess, enjoy the drugs.
There are always solutions if one looks hard enough.
“the bb” plan
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this one seems really reasonable
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Don’t know Stucky ,I’m at the point of willing to try just about anything.
Tighten your seat belts boys, the plane is getting ready to hit the mountain.
This wouldn’t be hard to fix. The price is the dream of the global economy. It’s devolved into a race between the ‘just give it a little more time and it will take off’ blinders crowd, and the masses that after 25 years of this bullshit, have had enough. Clintonomics was treason, nothing more
This is old news! I guess Ross Perot was right after all. To all you mushrooms in America, ya, the ones fed bullshit and kept in the dark and you loved it, your life is about to change in a very unpleasant way.
Too, bad! That’s what happens when you trade in your ‘thinking cap’ for a ‘dunce cap’. The more I think about it, the more I think that maybe Llpoh is right–get the hell out of Dodge.
Retail store closings are the rumblings portending an impending massive, cataclysmic, earth shaking, calamitous financial leveling. Better head for high ground on solid granite.
Stockpile what you can because the places that you now get your goodies, may just dry up. You may not even have any gas to get there anyway.
Socialism in the early stages is really great, just peachy. That’s because socialism is built on a previous stage of ‘free marketism’ where capital has been built up. . It’s the latter stages that are hell. That’s where all the capital has been squandered and spent. The productive capacity of society has been destroyed. Like locusts, the eaters, the 50% on gov handouts have gorged themselves without producing. Winter is setting in, the grasshoppers are dying. I hope that you are an ant.
Great post homer.
bb–says “Don’t know Stucky ,I’m at the point of willing to try just about anything.” bb, think about what you just said. That is what the Germans said in 1926. That is what the French said, just before Maximilien Robespierre.
We, as a nation, have tried theft, waging war to get what we want, and immorality as a basis of our relations one with another. Yes, bb, Social Security is theft. What happened to the American Indian Trust Fund? What happened to our sound coinage? On and on!
News Flash, bb, why don’t we try morality, a rule of law, lawful trade, sound money, and living up to the Ideals set by our Founding Fathers? Why don’t we teach these thing to our children? I guess we are too busy watching the Kardashians and TWD.
I guess TWD is a mirror view of our society.
Homer don’t know , in my humble opinion we have committed a type of Spiritual Idolatry that is hard to come back from. This spiritual adultery has led to our economic and social degradation. This has led to a collapse of our Personal moral virtues that was once based on Christian principles that informed Western Civilization.
You are right about the similarities between the US now and Germany in 1926 but Germany was united
racially , culturally and finally politically under Hitler. We are to divided here.America will probably break down and then break apart racially .That’s my best guess.
You are also right about prepping and preparing for a low standard of living. I think Americans are once again going to know true suffering.Maybe real hunger .
Yes, bb, what you say is true. Just another way of saying it. But, I say coming back is easy. All it takes is repentance, not in the religious sense, but in the Spiritual sense with the commitment to sin no more. I guess, you first have to have a realization that you sinned before a comeback is possible.
Not living in humility, but in hubris, leads to an awaking when the consequences of our conduct can no longer be suppressed. That is what pain and suffering is all about–a return to humility.
Our realization is, I fear, upon us.
Meanwhile, here in Northern Virginia, no less than a dozen new 10-story office buildings are going up in the Tysons Corner area, along with high-end restaurants and condos. Out my way, about 10 miles west, new Harris Teeter grocery stores are being built with lots of tract housing homes at $500k+. And a new hospital to boot. And of course they are widening the major roads to handle the anticipated traffic.
I continue to scratch my head wondering where the jobs are that support that lifestyle.
Rise Up–Maybe all the Washington bureaucrats are going to move there. Perhaps, merely, more stimulus money courtesy of the FED, a miss-allocation of resources.
Homer, a lot of the DC bureaucracy lives in Northern VA, along with the lobbyists and lawyers who support the establishment. Take away DC and this place would crumble like a stale cookie. I just hope it holds for five more years when I can make my break to the hills a couple hundred miles south.
Rise Up–You better Rise Up and get movin’ because I don’t think you have 5 years, maybe 5 months.
Rise Up, peel back your local onion, and five will get you ten that every single new office building, apartment complex, hospital, or retail establishment you see going up there got a multi-million dollar subsidy from your municipal or state government to build it. Those subsidies come in a huge variety of forms- TIF districts, tax abatements, and outright gifts, and these days, almost nothing of substance gets built without them. Target and Walmart flatly will not build a store without getting a tax-funded gimme worth $5m or more to do it. In one Arkansas town, a highway spur was laid for the benefit of a new Walmart.
Local politicians do this for the sake of “economic development’, the idea being to finance development that will, presumably, pay back the “investment” in increased revenues down the road. This almost never happens. The beneficiary businesses have learned to adroitly play one municipality off against the other to score evermore lenient terms, like shorter commitment to remaining in place, a bigger subsidy, more taxes forgiven. You can see the results- one power center is built with the help of the local government just to be vacated replaced in 3 years, or 5 years, by a bigger one a few miles down the road in another suburb who has offered a juicier enticement. Thus are municipalities caught up in a race to the bottom to see who can give away the most to the extortionist retail chains, and then their august leaders wonder why, a decade later, their tax revenues have gone through the floor, their treasuries are empty, and they’re stuck with a bunch of ugly, deteriorating, empty single-purpose structures that can be put to no ther use…. and the remaining residents are stuck with catastrophic tax increases. This has happened to several suburbs and “edge cities” such as Schaumburg, IL, where more shopping malls have been built in the past 2 decades than almost anywhere else in the area, many of which are now starting to empty, blighting the area and the residential taxpayers having to offset the promised tax revenue that never materialized. I read recently that taxes for a modest house worth $250K are now about $10,000, which is beyond confiscatory.
So, figure that YOU and other homeowners will be the ones stuck with the bills for all this glitzy new building.
Homer says: Rise Up–You better Rise Up and get movin’ because I don’t think you have 5 years, maybe 5 months.
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You could be right but I’m stuck here for now. I do hear that the shit may hit the fan this September.
Something about the Shemita?
ECONOMIC INCIDENTS IN THE PAST 40 YEARS
1973 Recession
1980 2nd Recession
1987 Stock Market Crash
2000 Dot-Com Bubble Crash
2007 “Great Recession”
ALL incidents happened in shemita years, seven years apart.
https://sites.google.com/site/cathoderaytubeland/thanksgiving-from-hell/the-mystery-of-the-shemita