Work Unchained News Today

The weblog, feature articles and books of Charles Hugh Smith

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

If America somehow managed to educate millions of college students without burdening them with $2 trillion in debt in 1993, why is it now “impossible” to do so, even as America’s wealth and gross national product (GDP) have both rocketed higher over the past 27 years? Predators thrive on Americans’ short memories. Student loans in their present scale did not exist prior to 1994. According to the Federal Reserve FRED database, the student loan balance was zero in 1993. From zero in 1993...

So go ahead and say whatever you want around all your networked devices, but don’t be surprised if bad things start happening. I received another “Our Terms Have Changed” email from a Big Tech quasi-monopoly, and for a change I actually read this one. It was a revelation on multiple fronts. I’m reprinting it here for your reading pleasure: We wanted to let you know that we recently updated our Conditions of Use. What hasn’t changed: Your use constitutes your agreement to our Conditio...

Great swaths of the American workforce are already on strike or slipping away from the dead-end treadmill. America’s labor shortage is complex and doesn’t lend itself to the simplistic expectations favored by media talking heads. The Wall Street cheerleaders extol the virtues of “getting America back to work” which is Wall-Street-speak for  getting back to exploiting workers to maximize corporate profits. Long-term demographics have combined with cultural changes and Covid-Lockdown ep...

As I often note here, when you push the pendulum to an extreme of wealth and income inequality, it will swing to the opposite extreme minus a tiny bit of friction. The depth of America’s indoctrination can be measured by the unquestioned assumption that Capital should earn 15% every year, rain or shine, while workers are fated to lose ground every year, rain or shine. And if wages should ever start ticking upward even slightly, then the Billionaires’ Apologists are unleashed to shout that ...

All debt-fueled speculative bubbles pop, even as cheerleaders claim otherwise. The expansion of Housing Bubble #2 is clearly visible in these two charts of house valuations, courtesy of the St. Louis Federal Reserve database (FRED). The first is the Case-Shiller Index, which as you recall tracks the price of homes on an “apples to apples” basis, i.e. it tracks price movements for the same house over time. Note that this is an index chart where the index is set at 100 as of January 2000. It...

The unraveling of social cohesion has consequences. Once social cohesion unravels, the nation unravels. My recent posts have focused on the systemic financial risks created by Federal Reserve policies that have elevated moral hazard (risks can be taken without consequence) and speculation to levels so extreme that they threaten the stability of the entire financial system. These risks are well known, though largely ignored in the current speculative frenzy. But there is another systemic risk w...

Democracy is fundamentally about advocacy: the people are free to  advocate for their interests and form groups to represent their shared interests. In the broadest scope, the people are free to advocate for what they hold as the  common good, policies and programs that benefit the entire populace rather than one special-interest group. Since the state (all levels of government) concentrates wealth and power via taxation and a monopoly on force, groups advocate/lobby the state to recognize ...