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The Fed has created trillions out of thin air to boost the speculative wealth of Wall Street, but it can’t print experienced workers willing to work for low wages. The Federal Reserve is reassuring us daily that inflation is temporary, but allow me to assure you that wage inflation is just getting started and will accelerate rapidly.

So hey there Corporate America, the Fed and your neofeudal cronies: take this job and shove it. This time it really is different, but not in the way the Wall Street shucksters are claiming. Conventional economists, politicos and pundits are completely clueless about the unraveling that’s gathering momentum beneath the superficial surface of “reflation” because they don’t yet grasp we’re entering an unprecedented new type of recession: a ‘Take This Job and Shove It’ recession which is unlike any previous downturn.

But weirdly, and irrationally, bubbles pop anyway. At long last, the moment you’ve been hoping for has arrived: you’re pitching your screenplay to a producer. Your agent is cautious but you’re confident nobody else has concocted a story as outlandish as yours.

Despite their hollow bleatings about ‘doing all we can to achieve full employment’, the Fed’s policies has been Kryptonite to employment, labor and the bottom 90%–and most especially to the bottom 50%, the working poor that one might imagine most deserve a leg up.

What’s left are the ‘fatal synergies’ of soaring debt and leverage, diminishing returns on stimulus, the substitution of credit for savings and the coming deflationary tsunami that pops all the speculative bubbles. Imagine a once modest but sturdy home built near a cliff to maximize the vistas.

Events that devastate the majority financially greatly enrich the few who bet on non-linear dynamics. I see the same question in forums, threads, articles and emails: what can I do to protect myself and my family from whatever lies ahead?

I’m sure it’s no surprise that the next five years will be risky and challenging; to the degree that we will be reliant on those closest to us, we are sharing a virtual lifeboat. Consider a scenario in which we’re on a ship that’s sinking, and the lifeboats have been launched. Being some of the last still on board the doomed vessel, we can scan who’s in each lifeboat and choose which one we’ll clamber into.

The sheer weight of this outlandish asymmetry of wealth and power is pulling the nation into disorder. The U.S. Constitution doesn’t address a small elite owning most of the nation’s private wealth and using a sliver of that wealth to influence the federal government so their wealth and political power increase in a self-reinforcing feedback: as a result of their campaign contributions and lobbying, the elites’ wealth continues expanding, enhancing their political power to further expand their wealth, and so on.

When the warning light is flashing red, it’s prudent to have a capital preservation strategy in place. Not everyone has an IRA or 401K invested in the stock market, for those who do, the red warning light is flashing red:markets have reached historic extremes on numerous fronts.

The takeaway here is obvious: earn as little money as possible and invest your surplus labor in assets that can’t be expropriated. Expropriation: dispossessing the populace of property and property rights, via the legal and financial over-reach of monetary and political authorities.

This is how states and empires decay and slide into the dustbin of history. 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.

It’s all so pathetic, isn’t it? The only way left to get ahead in America is to leverage up the riskiest gambles. It’s painfully obvious that the only way left to get ahead in America is crazy-risky speculation, but nobody seems to even notice this stark and stunning reality.