An Update On The Final Times In The Corporate State

I started penning another post and this was part of it.  Then, it became too large so I’m posting this separately.  I want to remind existing readers and highlight to new readers that for the past 15 years, the overarching theme on this blog has been that we are in a cycle of volatility.  And, that volatility was not just in society or the economy but in nature.  Because manmade systems are a reflection of natural forces. And, that this cycle could also be termed the end of big.  Big centralized government, U.S. empire, big corporations, the massive U.S. military expenditures and on and on and on. And, that this is not a U.S. phenomenon but is reflective of the entire world.  Now those forces are really starting to reveal themselves.

I posted as the 2008 crisis unfolded that the world as we know it was over.  I’m going to follow up on that with some detailed posts and data in support of it but it’s important to understand the shocks to the system we have seen over the last thirty-odd years are not isolated incidents. They are continuous phases in the disintegration of society.  The massive fraud in the S&L crisis that ended in the mid 1990s, the 2000 collapse in stocks was driven by a massive fraud of pushing concept companies with no earnings onto the public, the 2008 crisis that kicked 5 million Americans out of their homes and cost the U.S. $29 trillion, the 2020 crisis that has exposed 20% of all public companies have debts so great their profits cannot pay their bill and on and on.  Each of these shocks narrowed the participation rate in the underlying economy and creates a larger and larger dislocation and despondency of citizens. 

The 2020 crisis is not about the pandemic. It’s about the fragility and lack of resiliency of the U.S. and global economy.  It’s about how a corporate-captured government continues to decimate democracy, public policy, economic policy and the like.

I want to highlight a few key points on how everything since 2008 has essentially been driven by fraud-

1. The U.S. economy grew by 50% since 2008 yet the stock market is up 500%. Money isn’t going into the economy because its broken. It’s going into speculation. How would the U.S. economy even still exist without massive faux wealth created by the greatest financial bubble of all time that masks the underlying rot?
2. Corporate debt doubled since 2008. Again, as noted in prior posts, in capitalism the value of goods produced is far greater than wages, so eventually poor people run out of money to buy its endless overproduction.  The debt bubble is a reflection of that.
3. Earnings in the U.S. have flatlined for eight years.  To have a stock market at all-time highs under this dynamic has never happened in history. The illusion of wealth is maintained by corporations, politicians and central banks attempting to inflate away the rot that they have created.
4. Trump’s multi-trillion dollar tax cut for corporations and the rich could do nothing to revive earnings.
5. Since 2008, small and new business creation has collapsed 50% since 2008 and flatlined there. So much for Trump’s greatest economy.  Click on this link and tell me the economy didn’t collapse in 2008 and never recover.   I have the data going back since before Reagan was president. Since Reagan’s election, new business creation has been on a straight trend to zero. It has dropped 90% since his election.
6. $12 Trillion in stock buybacks happened since 2008.  Companies used additional Trump tax breaks to line their own pocks. Public corporations are looting mechanisms for pathology.  They always have been. They steal from workers and society and leave devastation in their wake.
7. The Federal Reserve added $4 trillion to its balance sheet between 2008 and 2019, thus highlighting our corporate banking system is insolvent. This $4 trillion was pumped into insolvent Wall Street in times of supposed unprecedented prosperity per Trump and Obama.
8. The labor participation rate flatlined after 2008 and is at the lowest level in history.  The unemployment rate wasn’t the lowest in history under Trump.  The labor participation rate was the lowest in history.  He inherited this but his pathological lying is also denying it. 
9. 60+ million people have applied for unemployment this year.  30 million people are receiving pandemic or unemployment assistance.  30 million were denied.  Is that the sign of a resilient society when we are told the unemployment rate was the lowest in history just a matter of months ago?
10. The U.S. government has added nearly $20T in debt since 2008, most of which happened before this pandemic.
11. Mergers and acquisitions, destructive activity that kills local economies, decimates people’s lives and hollows out our society, hit rampant levels in the last 12 years and amounted to what appears to be over $10 trillion
12. In the last two years, thousands of additional companies have left the U.S. and gone to China.
13. Regardless of Trump’s yammering, 98% of all U.S. companies doing business in China have said they aren’t leaving. How is he going to fix this as he said he would four years ago?  The entire corporate state and both political parties are against him.
14. Consumers have piled on massive debts in the last twelve years in an effort to try to maintain their lifestyle, to orgy on consumption and to simply pay their bills.
15. U.S. company balance sheets are at unprecedented levels of fraud and corruption.  The level of intangible asset valuations versus true wealth of companies is staggering. What people don’t seem to realize is one of the contradictions of corporate capitalism is that to continue to provide returns to investors, or the ruling economic elite, greater and greater rigging of the system is necessary.  That includes outright fraud, greater and greater useless debt, destroying pensions, finding cheaper labor and the like.
16. Productivity reported by the government turned negative soon after 2008 meaning we need more debt and people than ever to keep the economy rigged to corporate power.  This is very important because it tells us corporate capitalism is in systemic failure.  It means the return on investment of private capital is negative.  That corporations are in systemic failed ability to deliver higher profits and as a result, must take on greater debts to survive.
17. The fact that the Federal Reserve opened the liquidity spigot in 2020, and even the last twelve years, and corporations chose to put it in the stock market rather than the economy is a portent. This and the Federal Reserve bailout of corporations while local businesses and communities were shafted highlights that the corporate takeover of our society is complete. It tells us the underlying economy is in a state of systemic failure. Rather than take liquidity provided by the Federal Reserve and make more bread or create more widgets, corporations decided it was best to speculate in financial markets.  This is profoundly important. The economy is on life support and that was the case well before this pandemic.
18. Don’t kid yourself. The entire world is a mess. Much of this because of U.S. empire but as much or more because of their own struggles against evil. 

The system is operating exactly as it is supposed to.  Free market capitalism is based on self-interest.  Each party is acting as they should.  Politicians are wealthy patricians who bailed out their own self-interest.  Corporations are acting in their own self-interest.  The military-industrial complex getting even larger handouts are acting in their own self-interest.  Poor people, working people and local businesses don’t pay the bills for the politicians.  Corporations do.  So, why do they care if the little people are taken care of?

I noted this in an earlier post but the Sanders’ presidential bid was a slave revolt similar to those seen in the Roman Empire.  So are the Black Americans who are marching in the streets.  Sure, there are other parties involved but look through the media propaganda on both sides, the establishment propaganda trying to paint this as Marxists destroying our nation.  Corporations did that for us by destroying 100 million jobs or sending them to their international slave labor camps.  Someone on Fox News highlights that a founder of BLM may have stated they are a Marxist and all of a sudden, we have the most neoliberal, right wing nation in history fanning the flames that all of those poor sonofabitches marching in the street are Marxists.  Neither the people fanning the flames nor the poor marching in the streets even know what a Marxist is.  The poor protestors simply want dignity, self-determinism, meaningful work and democracy to work for them.  They want an end to violence against them and want to participate in a just and decent society. They could care less about Marxism. 

The reality is our society has been in greater and greater collapse for decades.  One has to start to view events on a continuum as part of a control system.  They are not isolated. They are chained events that are linked together.  They are part of the endless contradictions of corporate capitalism as an economic control system.  Similar shocks too were felt as communism and other control systems failed. 

People who are surprised that there are riots in 2020 and a revolt against corporate domination are waking up from their stupor.  I’ve been writing this day is coming for more than a dozen years.  And, even noted countless times in the last decade that it would all end by 2022.  Whether that is correct, we shall see.  But the ego is the great deceiver. And, people deceive themselves endlessly.  Truth has been in plain view for decades.  But as long as the ego’s endless belief systems were satiated in some way, it deluded itself of what was really happening because of the endless lies people tell themselves.

The U.S. economy is a fukcing disaster.  Can it recover?  Yes, but this system is finished and it would take an unprecedented common good that has never existed in the ego-centric, selfish United States.  I’ve noted countless times in the last fifteen years, U.S. wealth creation peaked around 1980. Without all of the fraud and debt above, what would the economy have done since 2008?  It would have collapsed.  Frankly, without meaningless and completely useless employment that has come to dominate our economy, what would our economy have been for the last four decades?  It would have collapsed. 

Our economy relies on corporate fraud to stay afloat.  This is due to greater and greater control over the economy by corporate capitalism.  Hierarchical institutions such as corporations create a dumbed-down society.  Any hierarchical organization, social structure or economic system eventually becomes ruled by pathology and idiots that subverts individual creativity and productivity. Mind you, for any newer readers, I’ve noted endlessly on here that socialism, capitalism, mercantilism, communism and every other ism the state can dream up are all control systems that subvert freedom and democracy. 

As noted many times since 2008, we are likely living through the final days of corporate capitalism. Not just in the U.S.  Globally.  And, the volatility we are experiencing today is a reflection of the latest in many phases of its collapse.