Bull Market

I guess there's no better time to post this piece than now... like right now... in the face of the market plunging over 1,800 points over the last two sessions (Friday and today), with the Dow seeing its steepest plunge since 2011, perhaps signaling what some economists have been suggesting for a while now: that the "bull market" is over, that stocks have been way overvalued for way too long, and that the dreaded correction has at last arrived. 

There's an intricate combination of factors which could have been avoided but the oligarchs and the politicians they own are so damn greedy that they can't see straight.  I won't go into all the gory details of what's triggered this (hopefully temporary) decline, but it mostly has to do with the Fed raising interest rates, the fact that so many businesses are loaded up to their eyeballs with debt and will have to pay even more interest on that debt, cutting into their profits, and also with the massive tax giveaway (to the richest elites and corporations in the country/world) that was recently passed in Congress and has forced the govt. to borrow tons of money which risks creating an oversupply of treasury bonds that will then devalue the bonds and the currency upon which they are based (USD) and risk inflation, etc.

Amidst all this uncertainty and potential turmoil, I can't help but recall an excellent documentary I watched years ago, called "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media", and a great quote about this borderline nightmarish fever dream of modern industrial civilization that most of us are living in... 

"The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits, in the classic formulation. Now, it has long been understood, very well, that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist, with whatever suffering and injustice that it entails, as long as it is possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage can."

Well, I think it's getting harder and harder for most of the people to pretend... and I fear that reality is going to assert itself sooner rather than later.

I really cannot stress enough just how scary these times are that we are living in -- when the 3 richest Americans have more money than the bottom 50% of the country*, when income inequality is the highest that it has been since right before the Great Depression**, and wages for the working & middle class remain virtually stagnant while the costs of everything else continues to rise.  I was in college when the sub-prime mortgage crisis sent the economy crashing back in 2008 - it had tremendously negative effects on my life and the lives of many of my friends and family members, effects that are felt to this very day. Thanks to the system of legalized bribery and corruption that defines our political structure, the government did very little to prevent future collapses.  The few gains that were made have since been mostly rolled back, repealed, or ignored, and the current administration has done everything in its power to undermine what little remains.  

The real estate bubble we're in right now very easily rivals the one that helped to create to the collapse in 2008, and the derivatives market is just as big as it was back then, too, while more wealth has been consolidated into the hands of fewer and fewer mega-banks, and working people are making less and less than they were before (in terms of purchasing power).  Lump on top of all that the fact that we have an administration of power-craving sociopaths more criminally corrupt than any other in U.S. history, with perhaps one of the most grotesque and disgusting living "human" beings at the helm. 

We're in a very bad place, friends.  Brace for impact.



Listening to:  "Beast" by Nico Vega


To elaborate on the illustration itself... really just a collage of various different politically-inclined projects I'm working on right now at different stages of completion, ranging from sketches to cleaner, more completed works.

IMPORTANT © COPYRIGHT NOTICE: This work may not be reproduced, copied,
edited, published, transmitted, uploaded, sold or re-sold in any way
without the express permission of the artist/creator.

FOLLOW ME ON:
INSTAGRAM
ARTSTATION


*www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsc…
**www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/…