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When the top 10%’s bubble pops in 2021, the loss of illusions/delusions of security and wealth will be shattering to all those who believed artifice and illusory “wealth” were real. A great many people are living in bubbles that are about to pop.

So party on, because “the worst year ever” is ending and the rebound of financial markets, already the greatest in recorded history, will only become more fabulous. Of the lavish banquet of absurdities laid out in 2020, one of the most delectable is Time magazine’s December 14 cover declaring that 2020 was the “worst year ever.”

Choose wisely, America, or the options for a positive outcome will vanish like mist in Death Valley on a clear July afternoon. From the point of view of evolution, the most hopeful scenario for 2021 is the sudden and complete collapse of everything that is obsolete, inefficient, ineffective and sclerotic.

We think we’re powerless because we don’t have wealth and power over others, but nothing could be further from the truth. To have agency is to have power over your own life and control of your assets, options and resources.

What happens when America finally admits its middle class is a phantom of feel-good fantasy? We may well find out in the next four years. Of the many things we cannot bring ourselves to admit, one of the most consequential is that our vaunted middle class is illusory, a phantom of our imagination rather than a reality.

The profit-maximizing Big Tech / Big Media Totalitarian regime hasn’t just strangled free speech and civil liberties; it’s also strangled democracy. The U.S. has entered an extremely dangerous time, and the danger has nothing to do with the Covid virus.

Extremes get more extreme until risk breaks out; then the reversal will be as extreme as the bubble expansion. What would happen if the Federal Reserve ceased to exist?

This devaluation of financial wealth–and its transformation to a dangerous liability– will reach extremes equal to the current extremes of wealth-income inequality. Financial capital–money–is the Ring that rules them all. But could this power fall from grace?

Extremes become more extreme right up until they reverse, a reversal no one believes possible here in the waning days of 2020. The absolutely last thing anyone expects is a collapse of all the asset bubbles, i.e. a deflation of assets that reverses the full 20 years of bubble-utopia since 2000.

Regardless of what happens with vaccines and Covid-19, debt and energy–inextricably bound as debt funds consumption– will destabilize the global economy in a self-reinforcing feedback. Back in the early days of the oil industry (1880s and 1890s), the product that the industry could sell at a profit was kerosene for lighting and heating.

There is no way a status quo that is completely dependent on the permanent expansion of these interlocking extremes, asymmetries and imbalances can unwind them all and retain its myriad parasitic elites. Thanks to my friend and colleague Mark Jeftovic, the audiobook of A Hacker’s Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet is now available.Hands-free grokking is now accessible.

Freeing ourselves of unwanted/unneeded gift-giving is not just heresy in a debt-funded consumerist economy–it is tantamount to treason. Did you see the new “gotta-have” coffee-pod flavors this Christmas? Crayfish, Spanish Moss, Pumpkin Spicy Radish and Jungle Rot. Yowza, it doesn’t get any better than this….

The idea that debt, leverage, speculation, greed, exploitation and parasitic elites can expand exponentially forever is magical thinking. Contrary to first impressions, I am not a doom-and-gloomer; I’m a systems-cycles-er meaning I’m interested in where systems and cycles are heading.

The incontestable incompetence of the USSA’s monopolies, institutions and agencies is about to take center stage in 2021. When I mention that the U.S.A. feels increasingly like the U.S.S.R., a surprising number of people tell me they feel the same way.

Sorry Fed, it’s too late. The dominoes are already toppling, and every point of failure is being exploited by the catalyzing effects of Covid. America’s many points of failure leverage points where a break brings down the entire system–are falling like dominoes, a process catalyzed by Covid.

If you still believe that America’s Sickcare is “the finest in the world” and is endlessly sustainable, please study these three charts and extend the trendlines. I’ve long been making the distinction between healthcare and sickcare: healthcare is the service provided by frontline operational caregivers (doctors, nurses, aides, technicians, etc.) and sickcare is the financialized system of Big Hospital Corporations, Big Insurers, Big Pharma, etc. and their lobbyists that keep the federal money spigots wide open.