Another guest essay from our super smart friend, Charles Hugh Smith, cross-posted from his essential Of Two Minds blog. If you like what he writes here, please share it on social media.

Here’s a thought: How much would it cost to buy congress back from special interests who now own it?

We all know special interests own the U.S. Congress and the Federal machinery of governance (i.e. regulatory capture). How much would it cost the American citizenry to buy back their Congress? The goal in buying our Congress back from the banking cartel et al. would not be to compete with the special interests for congressional favors—it would be to elect a Congress which would eradicate their power and influence altogether.

A tall order, perhaps, but certainly not impossible, if we’re willing to spend the money to not just match special interest contributions to campaigns but steamroll them.

A seat in the U.S. Senate is a pricey little lever of power, so we better be ready to spend $50 million per seat. Seats in smaller states will be less, but seats in the big states will cost more, but this is a pretty good average.

That’s $5 billion to buy the Senate.

A seat in the House of Representatives is a lot cheaper to buy: $10 million is still considered a lot of money in this playground of power. But the special interests—you know the usual suspects, the banks, Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big Tobacco, the military-industrial complex, Big Ag, public unions, the educrat complex, trial lawyers, foreign governments, and so on—will fight tooth and nail to maintain their control of the Federal machinery, so we better double that to $20 million per seat. Let’s see, $20 million times 435….

That’s $8.7 billion to buy the House of Representatives.

It seems we’re stuck with the corporate toadies on the Supreme Court, but the President could scotch the people’s plans to regain control of their government, so we better buy the office of the President, too.

It seems Obama’s purchase price was about $100 million, but the special interests will be desperate to have “their man or woman” with the veto power, so we better triple this to $300 million.

Add these up and it looks like we could buy back our government for the paltry sum of $14 billion. This is roughly .0037% of the Federal budget of $3.8 trillion, i.e. one-third of one percent. That is incredible leverage: $1 in campaign bribes controls $300 in annual spending—and a global empire.

Once we bought back our government, what would be the first items on the agenda? The first item would be to eradicate private bribes, a.k.a. private campaign contributions and lobbying.

If you allow $1 in campaign contributions, then you also allow $10 million. There is no way to finesse bribery, so it has to be cut and dried: no member of Congress can accept any gift or contribution of any nature, monetary or otherwise, and all campaigns will be publicly financed.

Is this system perfect? Of course not. There is no perfect system. But the point here is that a system which allows even a $1 private contribution to a campaign cannot be restricted; after the courts have their say, then all attempted limitations prove worthless.

So it’s really all or nothing: either we put our government up for auction to the highest bribe, or we ban all gifts and private campaign financing and go with public financing of all elections in the nation.

That is the only practical and sane solution. Any proposal that seeks to finesse bribery will fail, just like all previous attempts at campaign finance reform.

Any member of Congress who accepts a gift, trinket, meal, cash in an envelope, etc. will lose their seat upon conviction of accepting the gift. Once again, you can’t finesse bribery. It has to be all or nothing, and the only way to control bribery is to ban it outright.

As for lobbying, thanks to a Supreme Court dominated by corporate toadies, it will be difficult to ban lobbying outright. However, that doesn’t mean Congress shouldn’t try to force the toadies on the Supreme Court to make a distinction between a corporation with $100 billion in assets and billions to spend on bribes and a penniless citizen.

(Those two are not coincidental; in a nation run by and for corporations, the citizens all end up penniless unless they own or manage said corporations, or work for a Federal fiefdom which can stripmine the nation at will.)

Congress should pass a law banning paid-for lobbying. If a citizen wants to go to Congress and advocate a position, they are free to do so—but they can’t accept money to do so. If they receive any compensation from any agency, enterprise, foreign government, other citizen, you name it, from any source, then they will be sentenced to 10 years of fulltime community service in Washington D.C., picking up trash, etc.

If the Supreme Court toadies strike down that law, then here’s another approach:

Require all paid lobbyists to wear clown suits during their paid hours of work.

In addition, all lobbyists are required to wear three placards, each with text of at least two inches in height.

The first placard lists their total annual compensation as a lobbyist.

The second lists the special interest they work for.

The third lists the total amount of money that special interest spent the previous year on lobbying, regulatory capture, bribes to politicos and political parties, etc.

Every piece of paper issued by lobbyists must be stamped in large red letters, “This lobbying paid for by (special interest)”, and every video, Powerpoint presentation, etc. must also be stamped with the same message on every frame.

The second item on the agenda is a one-page tax form. The form looks like the current 1040 form except it stops at line 22: TOTAL INCOME. A progressive flat tax is then calculated from that line. Once again, you cannot finesse bribery or exemptions, exclusions, loopholes and exceptions. Once you allow exemptions, exclusions, loopholes and exceptions, then you’ve opened Pandora’s Box of gaming the system, and the financial Elites will soon plow holes in the tax code large enough to drive trucks through while John Q. Citizen will be paying full pop, just like now.

The entire charade of punishing and rewarding certain behaviors to pursue some policy has to end. Any deduction, such as interest on mortgages, ends up creating perverse incentives which can and will be gamed. It’s really that simple: you cannot finesse bribery or exemptions, exclusions and loopholes, because these are two sides of the same coin.

The tremendous inequality in income, wealth, power and opportunity which is distorting and destroying our nation all flow from the inequalities enabled by bribery and tax avoidance. The only way to fix the nation is to eliminate bribery (campaign contributions and lobbying) entirely, and eliminate tax avoidance entirely by eliminating all deductions, exemptions, loopholes, etc. State total income from all sources everywhere on the planet, calculate tax, done.

When you think about how tiny $14 billion is compared to the $3.8 trillion Federal budget and the $14.5 trillion U.S. economy, it makes you want to weep; how cheaply we have sold our government, and how much we suffer under the whip of those who bought it for a pittance.

Another guest essay from Charles Hugh Smith, cross-posted from his Of Two Minds blog. If you like what he writes here, please share it on social media.

 
A guest essay from Charles Hugh Smith, cross-posted from his Of Two Minds blog:

If we dare look at the plain facts of the matter, we have to conclude the U.S. is a kleptocracy not unlike Greece, only on a larger and slightly more sophisticated scale.

Yesterday, I noted that Greece Is a Kleptocracy; the U.S. is a kleptocracy, too. Before you object with a florid speech about the Bill of Rights and free enterprise, please consider the following evidence that the U.S. is now a kleptocracy worthy of comparison to Greece:

1. Neither party has any interest in limiting the banking/financial cartel. The original Glass-Steagal bill partitioning investment banking from commercial banking was a few pages long, and it was passed in a few days. Our present political oligrachy spends months passing thousands of pages of complex legislation that accomplishes essentially nothing.

As Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City President Thomas Hoenig recently noted (in a rare admission by an insider—I wonder how long it will be before he “resigns to pursue other opportunities,” i.e. is muzzled):

The problem with SIFIs (“systemically important financial institutions,” a.k.a. too big to fail banks) is they are fundamentally inconsistent with capitalism. They are inherently destabilizing to global markets and detrimental to world growth. So long as the concept of a SIFI exists, and there are institutions so powerful and considered so important that they require special support and different rules, the future of capitalism is at risk and our market economy is in peril.

Do you really think Dodd-Frank and all the other “fooled by complexity” legislation has accomplished anything? Hoenig cuts that fantasy off at the knees:

As late as 1980, the U.S. banking industry was relatively unconcentrated, with 14,000 commercial banks and the assets of the five largest amounting to 29 percent of total banking organization assets and 14 percent of GDP.

Today, we have a far more concentrated and less competitive banking system. There are fewer banks operating across the country, and the five largest institutions control more than half of the industry’s assets, which is equal to almost 60 percent of GDP. The largest 20 institutions control 80 percent of the industry’s assets, which amounts to about 86 percent of GDP.

In other words, nothing has really changed from 2008 except the domination of the political process and economy by the financial cartel has been masked by a welter of purposefully obfuscating legislation. This is of course the exact same trick Wall Street used to cloak the risk of the mortgage-backed derivatives it sold as “low risk” AAA rated securities: by design, the instruments were so complex that only the originators understood how they worked.

That is the current legislative process in a nutshell. Much of the 60,000 pages of tax code are arcane because they describe loopholes and exclusions written specifically to exempt a single corporation or cartel from Federal taxes.

The U.S. is truly a kleptocracy because its political leadership actually has no interest in limiting the banking/financial cartel. When questioned why their “reforms” are so toothless, legislators wring their hands and bleat, “Honest, I wanted to limit the banks but they’re too powerful.” Spoken like a true kleptocrat.

2. Our stock markets are dominated by insiders. It is estimated that some 70% of all shares traded are exchanged in private “dark pools” operated by the TBTF banks and Wall Street, and the majority of the remaining 30% of publicly traded shares are traded by high-frequency trading machines that hold the shares for a few seconds, or however long is needed to skim the advantages offered by proximity to the exchange and speed.

If that’s your idea of an “open market,” then you’re the ideal citizen for a kleptocracy.

3. The rule of law in the U.S. has been divided into two branches: one in name only for the financial Elites and corporate cartels, and one for the rest of us mere citizens. Between corporate toadies on the Supreme Court who have granted corporations rights to spend unlimited money lobbying and buying legislators as a form of “free speech”—ahem, how can something that costs billions of dollars be “free”?—and vast regulatory brueacracies that saw nothing wrong with MERS and the complete corruption of land and mortgage transfer rules, the U.S. legal system is now a perfection of kleptocracy.

As economist Hernando de Soto observed in The Destruction of Economic Facts, the ForeclosureGate mortgage mess is not just a series of petty paperwork mistakes—it is the destruction of the entire system of trustworthy transfer of property rights for non-Elites:

Knowing who owned and owed, and fixing that information in public records, made it possible for investors to infer value, take risks, and track results. The final product was a revolutionary form of knowledge: “economic facts.”

Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts. The very systems that could have provided markets and governments with the means to understand the global financial crisis—and to prevent another one—are being eroded. Governments have allowed shadow markets to develop and reach a size beyond comprehension. Mortgages have been granted and recorded with such inattention that homeowners and banks often don’t know and can’t prove who owns their homes. In a few short decades the West undercut 150 years of legal reforms that made the global economy possible.

The results are hardly surprising. In the U.S., trust has broken down between banks and subprime mortgage holders; between foreclosing agents and courts; between banks and their investors—even between banks and other banks.

Frequent contributor Harun I. summarized the reality of this political and financial coup by kleptocrats:

As described by Georgetown University bankruptcy expert Adam Levitin, in testimony to subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee, “If mortgages were not properly transferred in the securitization process, then mortgage-backed securities would in fact not be backed by any mortgages whatsoever, [and] could cloud title to nearly every property in the United States.” It would also raise the question of the legality of the resulting millions of foreclosures on American homeowners, since the banks cannot prove “ownership” of the foreclosed property.

The statement above gets to the elemental issue that apparently is lost on many otherwise intelligent people. This is not about frivolous claims based on technicalities. This is about securities fraud (theft) on a ludicrously massive scale. These so-called securities were sold to governments, pension funds and other financial institutions globally. Trillions were made by banks selling what is becoming clearly understood to be worthless pieces of paper and when the jig was up, which ultimately led to the destruction of economies globally, they made ordinary citizens the losers by sliding their worthless pieces of paper to the balance sheet of taxpayers worldwide.

And while some are quibbling over whether someone should get a free house, those who have perpetrated the greatest swindle in the history of mankind are about to get away with it, because they are “systemically important”, code for TBTF (too big to fail).

You think money laundering and tax evasion is a specialty only of Caribbean island “banking centers”? Think again; we have corporate oversight equivalent to that of Somalia. U.S.A. a haven for corporate money laundering: A little house of secrets on the Great Plains:

Among the firm’s offerings is a variety of shell known as a “shelf” company, which comes with years of regulatory filings behind it, lending a greater feeling of solidity. “A corporation is a legal person created by state statute that can be used as a fall guy, a servant, a good friend or a decoy,” the company’s website boasts. “A person you control… yet cannot be held accountable for its actions. Imagine the possibilities!”

“In the U.S., (business incorporation) is completely unregulated,” says Jason Sharman, a professor at Griffith University in Nathan, Australia, who is preparing a study for the World Bank on corporate formation worldwide. “Somalia has slightly higher standards than Wyoming and Nevada.”

The U.S. was declared “non-compliant” in four out of 40 categories monitored by the Financial Action Task Force, an international group fighting money laundering and terrorism finance, in a 2006 evaluation report, its most recent. Two of those ratings relate to scant information collected on the owners of corporations. The task force named Wyoming, Nevada and Delaware as secrecy havens. Only three states - Alaska, Arizona and Montana - require regular disclosure of corporate shareholders in some form.

4. Just as in Greece, taxes are optional for the nation’s financial Elites. In Greece, you don’t mention your swimming pool to avoid the “swimming pool tax.” Here in the U.S., that sort of tax avoidance is against the law (smirk). Here, you hire a Panzer division of sharp tax attorneys and escape taxation legally (well, mostly legally—whatever it takes to win).

If you are unfortunate enough to be a successful small entrepreneur who nets $100,000 a year, you pay 15.3% self-employment and 25% Federal tax on the bulk of your income, a combined rate of 40.3%, and a combined rate of 43.3% on all income above $82,400.

Those who net millions pay less than half that amount, somewhere between 17% for the top 1/10th of 1% and 21% for the top 1%: Citizens for Tax Justice, which looks at all taxes paid including federal, state and local taxes, said that in 2010 the top 1 percent of earners will pay 21.5 percent of taxes.

Note that the 21.5% paid by the top 1% includes all state and local taxes. Here in California, the small businessperson earning $100,000 pays between 5% and 9% state tax, so their combined state and Federal tax burden on their highest earnings is a whopping 50%. Then there are property taxes and the 9.5% sales tax, and endless junk fees skimmed from small business. Add all that together and the total taxes paid rises to the 60% level, or roughly triple what the top 1% pay.

(Bitter note from a tax donkey: To all those tax-and-spenders who whine that California has “low taxes,” please pay my “low” property tax bill, will you? It’s “only” $11,000 a year.)

Super Rich See Federal Taxes Drop Dramatically:

The Internal Revenue Service tracks the tax returns with the 400 highest adjusted gross incomes each year. The average income on those returns in 2007, the latest year for IRS data, was nearly $345 million. Their average federal income tax rate was 17 percent, down from 26 percent in 1992.

Eric Schoenberg says to sign him up for paying higher taxes. Schoenberg, who inherited money and has a healthy portfolio from his days as an investment banker, has joined a group of other wealthy Americans called United for a Fair Economy. Their goal: Raise taxes on rich people like themselves.

Schoenberg, who now teaches a business class at Columbia University, said his income is usually “north of half a million a year.” But 2009 was a bad year for investments, so his income dropped to a little over $200,000. His federal income tax bill was a little more than $2,000.

“I simply point out to people, ‘Do you think this is reasonable, that somebody in my circumstances should only be paying 1 percent of their income in tax?’” Schoenberg said.

Do you really think you don’t live in a kleptocracy? Why? Because the truth hurts?

A guest essay from Charles Hugh Smith, cross-posted from his Of Two Minds blog:

 
A guest editorial courtesy of our super smart friend, Charles Hugh Smith. This essay is cross-posted from his essential Of Two Minds blog. Buy his book, Survival+

The guilty are powerful and free, the innocent burdened and oppressed: that is injustice.

There is a fundamental injustice that is poisoning the soul of the nation, and if it is not openly addressed then the nation will face the explosive consequences of institutionalized injustice.

Simply put, it is this: those responsible for the nation’s financial crisis and its catastrophic after-effects are not paying for the consequences of their actions—it is the innocent, those who were not responsible, who are paying the price.

You can call it whatever you want: the Anarchy of the Super-Rich (as per Paul Farrell), the Financial Power Elite, the financial Oligarchy, Plutocracy or Corporatocracy, or the unprecedented concentration of financial wealth and political power in a financialized post-industrial economy. Whatever you call it, we all know this class of financiers and its minions got away with high financial crimes.

Do the crime, do the time—unless it’s “white-collar” financial crime on a vast scale. Then you might pay a wrist-slap fine (a few million dollars from your treasure of embezzled hundreds of millions) and then you’re free to go on your merry way.

The after-effects are not just the losses which can be totalled on a calculator: the really catastrophic losses are to the foundations of democracy and the economy. Democracy has been subverted—oh please, spare us the happy-story propaganda about “reform” and “the system worked”—and the economy has been incentivized to favor poisonously addictive financialization and the shadow institutions of corruption, fraud, embezzlement, favoritism, collusion and misrepresentation of risk. This might be summarized as the protection of vested interests, engineered and overseen by the partnership of the ever more intrusive Central State and the nation’s Financial Power Elite.

The Central State, designed to protect the citizenry from an oppressive monarchy or Elite, now protects this Elite from the citizenry. That is how thoroughly the injustice has been institutionalized.

There is a second part to this fundamental injustice: look who will pay for the bailouts, guarantees and the interest on the borrowed trillions. Not the banks and bankers, to be sure. Who will pay? Those who the Central State can easily tap: taxpayers who earn most of their income from wages, and those politically weak players dependent on government payments.

Now that the bills of the bailout are coming due, the State isn’t going after GE for more taxes. Heavens no—if you try that, the Panzer Division of GE’s tax avoidance army would overrun you. No, the politically easy thing to do is raise taxes on wage earners and trim entitlements, because all the government needs to do is send down the orders and it is done: the taxes are withheld and the bennies trimmed.

To go after the Power Elite is just too difficult. They have the tax attorneys, the lobbyists, the campaign fundraisers, and all the rest.

The U.S. is just a third world kleptocracy on an Imperial scale. I explored the parallels with the Roman Empire in Survival+: the Elites increasingly avoided military service and taxation, the bedrock of Roman power, while the taxes on the middle class rose to such heights that this productive class was basically driven into serfdom. The bottom layer of State dependents was placated and made complicit with bread and circuses—yes, Rome had a vast “welfare state” and much of Rome’s population received free bread to keep them quiet and pliant.

That is of course a road to ruin: let the Elite plunder at will, protected by the Imperial Central State, tax the productive class to fund the armed forces and free bread, and then buy off the lower class with bread and circuses.

The only successful model of reconciliation and justice we have is the “truth commissions” in other post-oppression autocratic kleptocracies. In countries that were deeply divided and poisoned by institutionalized injustice and exploitation, the healing process requires a public, transparent “truth commission” in which the guilty are brought forth to confess their sins against the innocent and face the consequences of their actions.

If a society cannot rouse itself to cleanse the fundamental injustice at the heart of its institutions, then it is effectively choosing self-destruction.

So far, the U.S. is pursuing the Roman Imperial model with an institutional zeal unmatched since Rome’s fall.

Embedded institutional injustice has a price, a price which rises with every passing day of propaganda and prevarication. Some day the bill will come due and a terrible price paid in full. For those in power, the only concern is that it not be today or tomorrow.

Below, Charles Hugh Smith discusses his book Survival +
 

 
Does it seem odd to you that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is still north of 10,000 despite the fact that no one has any jobs, the economy is puking blood and a bruised and battered mainstream America long ago exited the stock market?

Why wouldn’t the stock market be thriving while the rest of us are on food stamps and living in tents? Wall Street and the banks got the bailout, they aren’t going to lend anybody anything and they are paying themselves FAT BONUSES with your tax dollars. Let there be no mistake about it. The financial class have tied up all the productive capital in this country and are skimming off the top to enrich themselves. That’s the way the game works. It’s all legal!

And it’s obscene. If the general population would stop watching Fox News and worrying about a “mosque” (that isn’t even a mosque) long enough to figure out how they’ve been fucked up the ass sans lube by the plutocrats, there would be rioting in the streets. Instead they think that what we really need are an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and to repeal healthcare reform. (Shudders).

That’s why this new thought experiment/essay, by my super smart pal Charles Hugh Smith is so important to read and share with others. I was thrilled when I read this and I think you will be, too. Talk about a dangerous mind. Wow.

Think what this thought bomb, injected into the national conversation would do. Talk about this idea with your friends, post the essay on Facebook and call talk radio to seed this into the dialogue there.

Imagine if a meme like this spread and took hold. It could—easily—happen. It would turn the national conversation upside down! Now do your part!

What if the Fed and Treasury distributed $1.3 trillion directly to households rather than disburse it to prop up bank lending? At least some households would use the funds to pay down debt, meaning the money would flow to the banking sector anyway, but with one critical difference: household debt would actually decline, leaving household balance sheets in better shape and owing less interest every month.

With quantitative easing, the idea is to increase the debt load on households; with a helicopter drop of fresh cash, the idea would be to reduce the debt load that is crushing many households. Banks would benefit, too, as more consumer debt would be paid off in full compared to the current policy of promoting heavier debt loads. The negative consequences of pushing more debt on households is also obvious: more loans become uncollectible and go into default, creating more loan losses for banks.

If the cash transfers were broadly distributed, the subsequent spending would be more representative of sustainable demand than other means of stimulus, such as costly and ineffective “job creation” programs.

Most importantly, the status quo monetary policy distorts economic activity towards debt-based financial assets and debt-financed durable goods such as the “cash for clunkers” program to boost auto sales.

According to the status quo, adding more debt to households is the cure to our economic malaise. But for most households, high debt is the disease, not the cure, and adding more debt to “stimulate spending” is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.

Some might argue that a direct deposit of freshly issued cash into households would be inflationary. But other economists argue that if inflation is a monetary issue, and a helicopter drop of cash is fundamentally fiscal, then the worry over sparking inflation is misplaced.

What seems clear is that expanding bank credit through quantitative easing policies of funneling trillions of dollars into banks isn’t working. Putting the same money thrown into banks ($4 trillion) into households’ accounts would certainly put the money where it could either be spent or used to pay down debt—both of which are direct “cures” to over-indebtedness and a no-growth economy.

The sums of money squandered on bailing out banks are difficult to grasp. So I’ll make it easy: if the Treasury printed up $1.3 trillion in cash, that would be enough to give $10,000 to all 130 million households in the U.S.

Even $10,000 to each household would enable a lot of debt to be paid off. Those without any debt could save/invest/spend it. That would certainly do more for the economy than throwing another $1.3 trillion to “extend and pretend” the banks’ insolvency.

Would such a distribution set up a political expectation for another $10,000 next election cycle? Very likely. Would that be positive? No. But all policy is a series of trade-offs, and a helicopter drop could be “sold” as one-time only.

Would it trigger massive inflation? Doubtful. The national debt is about $13 trillion, so adding 10% to it with a “helicopter drop” is not going to change the long-term debt problem much. The GDP is around $13-$14 trillion as well, so it would amount to a one-time 10% boost in GDP. Total personal income is around $8.4 trillion, so a $1.3 trillion helicopter drop of cash would be about a 15% boost to personal income.

Would it really do much to lower indebtedness of the American consumer? No. Total debt in the U.S. is about $52 trillion—governmental, corporate and private. Mortgage debt is around $10 trillion, and consumer debt is around $2.4 trillon. (These are approximate; a web search will confirm the round numbers.)

While $1.3 trillion won’t do much to change the outlook for inflation or future debt crises, it sure would give a lot of households one last chance to set things on a more positive course. $10,000 could wipe out a high-debt credit card without wiping out the creditworthiness of the household, or it could finance a move to a locale with more employment. It could replace a vehicle on its last legs with a better used car.

Would some people squander a one-time “last chance to set a new course” helicopter drop? Of course some people will. But that’s not the point. The point is that the nation has received zero value from trillions in quantitative easing, and so if even 10% of the 130 million households do something useful with their $10,000 in cash then that would be one heck of a lot more than we’ve gotten from the trillions thrown down the rathole of a venal, corrupted, insolvent banking sector.

Throwing money at banks hasn’t done anything but reward financial Power Elites via privatizing their gains and transferring their losses to the taxpayers. Throwing money at households won’t solve the nation’s problems either, but it would give households a one-time chance to do something useful with a chunk of cash. If 90% of the households blew it, then it would still end up somewhere in the economy, which is more than can be said of the trillions thrown away on QE.

In the long run, it wouldn’t make much difference to the nation’s fiscal situation, but to households on the edge, it might make a very significant difference.

Read the entire essay
What If We Ditched Quantitative Easing and Just Printed (and Distributed) Cash? (Of Two Minds)

 
Dangerous Minds pal Charles Hugh Smith has posted an open letter to the folks belonging to the so-called Millennials and Gen Y generations. Many older readers will probably agree with his thoughts on the matter, while younger readers will either be pissed off or agree themselves. I think this is one of those things where there’s never going to be agreement across the various age groups. If you’ve ever had conversations about this and similar “generation gap” type topics, you’ll know why I say this! Surely this is a controversial subject no matter what age you are.

Take it away, Charles:

Here are my first-hand observations of Millennials:

1. They can’t/won’t recycle. Here in a “green” capital of activism, very few American students can be bothered to recycle cardboard, paper or even aluminum. They stuff a cardboard box (unfolded) into a trash container, filling the container, and then pile the garbage on the side since they are too lazy to recycle the box (the recycling containers are right next to the trash cans) collapse the cardboard box or even press it down to make room for more garbage.

2. The males generally own their own vehicles; on my street, that includes Mustangs and Jeep SUVs sporting bumper stickers like “The environment is all we have.” The Millennial owner is apparently blind to the irony.

Most of the students who recycle with any sort of consistency (i.e. demonstrating their belief via actual action instead of bumper stickers) are Europeans.

3. At the end of the Spring semester, Millennials stuff dozens of huge 20-foot long containers with their waste and tossed-out “stuff”—trash bags full of barely worn shoes, perfectly good beds, desks, books, etc. I have no direct knowledge that any graduating student took all their perfectly good shoes, etc. to the Goodwill, a few blocks from the university. From my informal dumpster diving, I can attest they throw out tons of high-quality food—whole unblemished fruits, canned goods, etc. Based on my direct observation, I would say the Millennials are the most wasteful, profligately consumerist generation in history.

4. My brother-in-law reports that the vast majority of his students are in active denial about the economy or the interlocking problems of the nation and world. They express little to no interest in environmental issues or actions, or in Peak Oil, etc., even though it will most certainly impact them.

5. Local “progressive” politics is still completely dominated by Boomers and Gen Xers. If there is a Millennial political movement or zeitgeist, it is currently invisible in one of the great political hotbeds of the nation and world.

6. The over-arching emotion of the Millennials I have met and observed is fear: fear that they won’t get a cush job with bennies, fear that the “good life” which apparently means a secure job with high pay might not open up, fear that life might not work out easily.

It’s over, so move on to something better. The whole cheap oil, Savior State, consumerist/media/facebook solipsism has no future. Clinging to it in the hopes you can extract some meaning, security or swag is a losing proposition. Where is the excitement about changing things, rather than fearfully hoping the swag lasts long enough for you to get your share? Fearfully clinging to Mommy, Daddy and the Savior State is no path to greatness.

I even make an appearance at one point in the essay. Read more of Charles Hugh Smith’s An Open Letter to the Millennials/Gen-Y: Where Are You? (Of Two Minds)
 

Author Charles Hugh Smith discusses his latest book Survival+, an indispensable guide to understanding global turmoil and transformation, weaving a full spectrum of intellectual disciplines—history, political economy, ecology, energy demands, marketing, investing, health and the psychology of happiness—into a uniquely comprehensive book that offers practical principles, not just for surviving, but prospering in the difficult decades ahead.
 

Dangerous Minds pal Charles Hugh Smith announces the publication of his new book Survival+ at his Of Two Minds blog. You can buy Survival + as a physical book, as an Amazon Kindle file, online in HTML or download the text in the form of a free PDF. Here’s what some respected thinker such as our current Dangerous Minds guest Michael Panzner have to say about Survival+:

“I’ve been a big fan of Charles Hugh Smith’s insights since the day I first stumbled across his Of Two Minds blog. In Survival+, he sets out a thoughtful and provocative vision of our future that should not be missed.”     Michael J. Panzner, author of When Giants Fall and Financial Armageddon

“Charles Hugh Smith is the savviest blogger in the USA these strange days. Nobody puts out a consistently wiser, truer, better-written message, day after day, than CHS. His views on surviving the hardships we face in economy and society are of the highest value and could not be more timely or astute.”     James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and World Made by Hand

“Charles Smith provides a balanced, thoughtful, and prescient view regarding the dilemmas facing our fragile economy. From the collapse in the housing market to the growing power of the banking sector, our economic landscape is changing. Mr. Smith?

Our super smart friend Charles Hugh Smith posts another must-read essay at his Of Two Minds blog:

When it comes to post-bubble retraces, the fundamental reasons may not matter as much as the technical case for a full reversion to pre-bubble prices. We all know the fundamental reasons why housing shot up—a credit bubble of epic proportions plus securitization, fraud and low interest rates, to name but a few factors—and why housing has plummeted: foreclosures and inventory are rising, tightening of credit standards by private lenders, etc.

But the ultimate predictor of price is technical: speculative bubbles retrace to their pre-bubble prices, or in many cases even crash below those levels.

Those arguing the fundamentals are always grasping at various straws to support the case that prices won’t drop all the way back to pre-bubble levels, and they’re always wrong.

Read more at Of Two Minds

 
I am somebody who watches the price of gold rather closely—it’s actually the second thing I look at in the morning. We have no clocks in this house, so the first thing I do when I get out of bed is glance at the time in the corner of my computer, then click on the gold price widget on my desktop. When the price of gold wildly shoots upwards, it tends to mean that bad things are coming. But many times, such rocket-like fluctuation can be ascribed to group-think investor paranoia—or some barely justified Wall Street exuberance when gold drops in price—rather than any game-changing economic event. To be clear, I am very pro-gold, and think it’s a good solid investment, but I have watched it closely enough over the past few years to see the price drop even as the fundamentals of the economy got worse and worse. The opposite is supposed to happen. The price of gold does not change as “whimsically” as stock prices do, although gold is still most certainly subject to investor “moods”—moreso than any other commodity. That’s sort of the point, I suppose.

Lately gold has been on a bit of a tear with all of the doomsday “High Noon for the Dollar” type headlines and the rumors of China, Russia and the Arab states ending the US dollar’s almighty place in the scheme of “things” as the world’s reserve currency. (I’d wager Matt Drudge and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard must both have sizable gold holdings!).

Dangerous Minds pal Charles Hugh Smith presents a more nuanced view of the dollar’s fate at his Of Two Minds blog:

As the “news” continues to trumpet the decline/collapse of the U.S. dollar, many observers seem to have forgotten that the U.S. dollar is the defacto “shared currency” of the world’s largest economy and its biggest rising-star economy. Yes, the U.S. and the PRC—China. China’s currency (officially the renminbi, a.k.a. yuan) is transparently pegged to the U.S. dollar at about 6.8 yuan to the dollar, down from 8+ a few years ago.

Given that Japan is the world’s second-largest economy by most measures, and that the yen is informally pegged to the U.S. dollar (trading in a band of 90-110 yen for years on end), then it could be argued that the world’s three largest economies all “share” the U.S. dollar.

—snip—

Let’s establish the primary context of China’s leadership: 1 billion poor citizens seeking a better job/wage/life. Here is a puff piece by former U.K. prime Minister Tony Blair which makes one key point: most of China’s citizens are still very poor, and thus the leadership is obsessed with “growth” and jobs above all else: China’s New Cultural Revolution: The world’s largest country has a long way to go, but there’s no question it’s changing for the better. (WSJ.com)

Superficial stories about China are accompanied by glitzy photos of Shanghai skyscrapers and other scenes from the wealthy urban coastal cities, but the fact is that the consumer buying power of China is roughly equivalent to that of England (51 million residents).

Thus those who believe the vast Chinese manufacturing-export sector can suddenly direct its staggering output to domestic consumers in China are simply mistaken: Chinese consumption is perhaps a mere 1/10th of that needed to absorb the mighty flood of goods being produced by China.

Put yourself in the shoes of China’s leadership: what do you care about more: $2 trillion in U.S. bonds or creating jobs for 100 million people? It’s the jobs that matter, and despite its very public complaints about the slipping dollar, perhaps China doth protest too much—or more accurately, for domestic public consumption.

The consequences of a weakening dollar are neutral for Chinese exports to the U.S. but positive for exports to Japan and the European Union. Chinese exports to the EU and Japan have risen sharply in the past nine years, and a weak dollar keeps Chinese goods cheaper than rival exports in these key global markets.

Read More: The Forgotten Peg: Chinese Yuan and U.S. Dollar by Charles Hugh Smith

Dangerous Minds’ super smart pal Charles Hugh Smith has penned another must-read essay over at his Of Two Minds blog (we’re dangerous, but he’s got two!) about the issue that no one seems to want to talk about, structural unemployment. That’s what happens when the jobs that were lost never come back:

In “normal prosperity” then an uptick in unemployment is not too worrisome because people find another job within a year. But when the economy sheds jobs relentlessly, then people become long-term unemployed: they can’t find a job this year, or next year, or the year after that. This is also called structural unemployment.

What few are willing to accept is that the U.S. economy is entering a decades-long period of structural unemployment in which there will not be enough jobs for tens of millions of citizens. My January analysis remains conservative; given the end of the credit/debt bubble and other structural issues, it seems very likely that the U.S. economy might have about 100 million jobs in a few years—leaving some 35 to 40 million people without formal full-time work or employer-paid benefits.

Since we’re already at 26.3 million unemployed/under-employed, losing 10 million more jobs is really not much of a stretch. That would leave 36 million people without full-time work or any work at all and about 100 million still employed.

That’s just the set-up. It gets much bleaker!

Unemployment: The Gathering Storm by Charles Hugh Smith

Dangerous Minds pal Charles Hugh Smith has posted another must-read essay at Of Two Minds:

I just Googled “demand exhaustion” and came up with an obscure real estate paper from South Korea. Therefore I am claiming the right to coin this phrase as a general description of the end-state of global over-capacity and the saturation of U.S. consumer “demand” for more stuff.

Classic economic theory holds that consumer “demand” is insatiable and can never be completely filled. While that is true of the FEW resources (food, energy and water) and essential items which eventually wear out like say, tires, the “demand” for everything else appears to be largely artificial now, an urge prompted by relentless advertising and the accessibility of instant credit for more purchases (credit cards).

How much of the “demand” is organic, that is, flows from human desires for additional comfort and amusement? It could be argued that all of this is “organic demand”—or in the case of the dog bed and treats, “projected demand” (since the beloved pet probably would be just as happy or even happier with an old pillow and blanket).

On the other hand, it could also be argued that the returns on investment are increasingly marginal for most of these consumer goods. How much comfort and amusement can you wring from a second or third TV or your 40th shirt? How about that spa which gets used less and less as time marches on? Shall we label this “marginal demand” because the returns are increasingly marginal?

Every Day Is Christmas in America (as long as you have credit)

Following on from yesterday’s essay about the seismic changes in Japanese politics, today Dangerous Mind pal, Charles Hugh Smith wonders if a Third Party voter’s revolution would be possible in America. His conclusions are thought provoking and may surprise you:

Here are the key ingredients of a viable new party:

1. The usual suspects which fund the Old Guard must not find a new home: that would be the unions and all the other Power Elites: the investment banks, the pharmaceuticals, the “Defense” industry, the trial lawyers, etc. Their money and their participation must be politely rejected lest they co-opt and thus destroy the new party.

2. A few break-away Old School politicians who could provide credible leadership while the party grew.

3. Consumer advocates—middle-class citizens of all ages who are tired of being lied to and manipulated, tired of being ripped off, etc.

4. Young activists who are willing to devote their energies to investigating and exposing all that the political and corporate/banking Elites strive to keep obscured and secret. When the corruption, cronyism and collusion have been exposed, year after year after year, then eventually the general public—poorer, more insecure and frustrated than ever—will finally let go of the comforting illusion that they share any real interests with either of the two corrupt parties of collusion.

5. Insiders willing to expose the machinery of collusion and cronyism. The Status Quo will move rapidly and violently to suppress whistleblowers, but without these courageous citizens then the full extent of the rot cannot be exposed.

If these parts slowly self-assemble, a viable national party could become possible. We should note that it took 15 years for the process to reach critical mass in Japan; there were many half-starts and disappointments along the way.

Could a Viable Third Party Emerge in the U.S.? by Charles Hugh Smith

Dangerous Minds pal Charles Hugh Smith has posted an essential essay to read today at Of Two Minds if you want to understand the voter’s revolution that just occurred in Japan. The ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) is out, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) is in and over 50 years of domestic and foreign policy is about to be turned on its head:

Transparency has no place in central planning. The major banks were crippled with massive bad debts, yet the planners moved glacially to force write-offs and renunciation of impaired debt. Even now, no one really knows how much uncollectable debt remains on the books in Japan, Inc.

One reason is cultural. Declaring a bank insolvent is a major loss of face for everyone involved. Thus the preferred solution was to keep “zombie banks” alive as a face-saving measure.

The tricks used were plentiful and clever. Say a commercial real estate loan went south and the borrower stopped paying. Hmm, that looks bad; why not loan the firm more money, as long as they agreed to use part of it to make some token payments which would allow the bank to keep the loan off the “in default” ledger?

Never mind the additional loans only made matters worse; face was saved and time was bought.

After 20 years of malaise, the citizenry’s patience finally ran out. Things are dire for the Japanese economy and nation: the birth rates have fallen dramatically, social security costs on the exploding elderly population are climbing, and an entire generation of younger workers has been relegated to dead-end part-time jobs at 7-11. Like other global manufacturers, to remain competitive Japan’s firms moved production to China and other parts of Asia; automation in Japanese factories eliminated many of the remaining domestic jobs.

Japan’s Bloodless Coup: Devolution of the Export/Central Planning Model

This is a caption about the video and what?