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The weblog, feature articles and books of Charles Hugh Smith

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 to $1.728 trillion in 2021: this is the predatory financialization of higher education which has en...

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 Conditions of Use. We own all the content you create on our platform, devices and networks, and are free to ...

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 epiphanies to completely re-order America’s labor force beneath the superficial surface of “re-ope...

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 higher wages means higher inflation, which will kill the economic “recovery.” Said another way:�...