Economy: The U.S. Retail Collapse Accelerates

The relentless campaign by the U.S. government to transform its own Middle Class into the Working Poor has been an unmitigated success. Using the numbers of the Corporate Media itself, only about 10% of the U.S. population presently qualify as “middle class”, now actually a smaller segment of the total population than the wealthy Americans who tower oppressively above them.

The purpose of destroying wage-levels for U.S. workers has been to drive those wages so low that American serfs will be able to “compete” with the wages of Asian serfs…while they manufacture toys and consumables for the wealthy. This is the “prosperity” which the Corporate Oligarchs promised us when they rammed “globalization” down our throats. They had the gall to call it “free trade”, when the only thing “free” about it was their ride – on our backs.

However, this transformation comes at a terrible cost. Deprived of income, the Working Poor have been forced to use ever-increasing amounts of debt in a foolish quest to sustain an unsustainable level of consumption: mimicking the policies and attitude of the U.S. government itself. The result is the ultimate retail “perfect storm”: consumers with small-and-falling incomes; loaded up with so much debt that they are incapable of borrowing any more; and with much/most of those incomes permanently going to pay interest to the Debt Parasites (i.e. banks). Perpetual debt-slavery.

Of course the “collapse” to which I’m referring didn’t just start last month, or even last year. It began in earnest with the Crash of ’08, and has continued unabated since then. The propaganda-concocted “recovery” of government and media has been nothing but a cruel hoax, designed to placate the growing suffering of the Working Poor, and goad them into more overspending with the malicious lies that “things are getting better”.
[link to etfdailynews.com]