Kick Back, Watch It Crumble
Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
The title to this post comes from one of my favorite NOFX songs, Dinosaurs Will Die.
While I’m sure the band in absolutely no way agrees with most, if not all, of my political leanings, the critiques they raise about the music industry in the song could serve just as well as many of the questions I want to ask of legacy mainstream media and politicians from both sides of the aisle in our government.
Leading those questions, for me, is this one: Doesn’t it elicit a hopeless feeling sometimes that we always have to learn the hard way in this country?
Few things are surer than taxes and death, but one of them is that our powers that be will make up any excuses necessary, scapegoat anything possible, and generally exercise every single possible wrong decision before reluctantly realizing that a consequential, uncomfortable yet important, proactive adult decision needs to be made and/or communicated to the American public.
Nobody ever wants to fess up to doing something wrong and nobody has a tolerance for even an ounce of discomfort, even when it accompanies an obvious decision that is in the best interest of our nation.
There have been too many examples in recent memory to name, but one of the latest bouts of us acting like a scared 6 year old with an aversion to reality was the farce of the Fed and Biden administration constantly telling the nation that inflation was transitory, when that has turned out to be the polar opposite of the truth.
Janet Yellen, unable to ascertain a clue in the real world, looking for one in the virtual world.
Zooming out from the inflation farce, monetary policy in general is another example of our inability to digest even subatomic amounts of bad news. We would rather pile on larger and larger tranches of quantitative easing, flying blind and ignorant of the potential consequences of our novel virus of a monetary policy experiment, than deal with the reality—or even the thought—of a recession.
Captain O’Connell said it best in Armed and Dangerous:
“The world is a shithole, full of shitty little scumbags, who are scared shitless.”
Yes, we have chickenshit cowards, whose fragility won’t physically allow their bodies to utter the truth, on both sides of the political aisle. It is a toxic brew of being spineless and an incessant need to be reelected.
Donald Trump lied to us over and over about Covid, saying we had 15 cases that were going to zero. Ben Bernanke told us that subprime housing was contained in the very moments leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. Joe Biden is blaming today’s inflation, very obviously the result of the massive money printing that took place during Covid, on Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, corporate greed and pretty much any person or inanimate object his feeble brain can conceptualize. Elected leaders support violent protests until they show up on their front lawn. They have no problem telling us that we need to stay home and isolate while they go out to expensive dinners and make trips to the salon. One presidential candidate rails on the other for corruption while engaging in the very same practices they decry.
Out of the hundreds of representatives in Congress, I could probably count the people of integrity from both sides of the aisle using one hand — to say we have lost our way would be a vast understatement. While I thought Bob Moriarty did a great job outlining the end of the empire on my last podcast with him, this weekend provided us an even clearer example of just how profoundly lost we have become.
It’s already bad enough that the nation is in such a precarious debt-to-GDP situation that more than 90% of countries in history that have followed the same fiscal path have wound up defaulting. And it’s similarly disturbing that, despite these obvious realities...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE, FREE, HERE).
