Professional Managerial Class Struggle

Productive Citizens,

  When I was in med school and residency, and beyond that, doctors always had the last word over administrators. That changed by the later 1990s, and it is now reversed. 

All Professional-Talent (including IT geeks) is now subordinated to middle managers, which impairs the ability of the professionals to perform their essential tasks. This Professional Managerial Class (PMC) is non-productive, so it can only be maintained by societal excess of production. It grows in the monopoly phase of capitalism, and its solutions usually prescribe more-middle-management. 

  As the non-productive managerial jobs proliferate, they must always justify their proliferation by presenting to the owner-class a picture of improved output of goods, lower cost, and improved profits, as a result of better control over workers and talent. 

  This presentation necessarily becomes a falsehood at some point. "I passed that point long ago.", Jackson Browne

​  Identity and the Professional Managerial Class​ ,  This post by albrt reviews and analyzes Barbara Ehrenreich’s seminal work on the Professional Managerial Class. ​ 

​  The origins of the Professional Managerial Class lie in Napoleon creating a professional bureaucracy and standardizing education across France so as to allow for the identification of bright young men from poor families could be tracked into the grandes écoles.​.. ..Widespread identity issues tend to go hand-in-hand with social and political instability, when too many young people are not finding satisfactory options to build an identity they can live with.
​  Erikson said that identity takes shape in late adolescence (maybe into early adulthood if the process is difficult) based on multiple factors. Some of the most important are childhood experience, individual capacities, available ideologies, and available roles. Of these variables, ideology is a wild card because a new (or old) ideology can unexpectedly become available to the individual much more easily than any of the other variables can be changed...

..What matters is that you become comfortable and confident enough with your identity that you can stop behaving like an insecure adolescent and focus on adult things like personal relationships, community, or work.​ But . . . this process sometimes goes wrong, especially at difficult periods in history. If a young person was having trouble building an identity and the issues became acute, Erikson called it an “identity crisis.” ...

..This brings us to the subject of today’s post—the social group widely known as the Professional Managerial Class (“PMC”), a group which has suffered a few different identity crises on a widespread basis.  The PMC was christened by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in a 1977 article called The Professional Managerial Class in a small journal called Radical America ... ..Radical America assumes some degree of familiarity with Marxist ideas, so here is a superficial review for those who came in late.  Marxists generally believe that society is divided into two classes:  the owners of the means of production are the bourgeoisie, and everybody else who must sell their labor to survive are the proletariat.  Marxists have always debated how to categorize people who seem to be in between.  The most established category of tweeners is the petty (or petite) bourgeoisie, who in the 19th century were basically mini-capitalists such as shopkeepers, tradesmen, and small property holders...

..The Ehrenreichs started out:
​  "The Professional-Managerial Class (“PMC”), as we will define it, cannot be considered a stratum of a broader “class” of “workers” because it exists in an objectively antagonistic relationship to another class of wage earners (whom we shall simply call the “working class”).  Nor can it be considered to be a “residual” class like the petty bourgeoisie; it is a formation specific to the monopoly stage of capitalism."  ​... ..We define the Professional-Managerial Class as consisting of salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.
​  Their role in the process of reproduction may be more or less explicit, as with workers who are directly concerned with social control or with the production and propagation of ideology (e.g., teachers, social workers, psychologists, entertainers, writers of advertising copy and TV scripts, etc.). Or it may be hidden within the process of production, as is the case with the middle-level administrators and managers, engineers, and other technical workers whose functions, as [Andre] Gorz, Steve Marglin, Harry Braverman and others have argued, are essentially determined by the need to preserve capitalist relations of production.​..

..The Ehrenreichs highlighted the inherent antagonism between the proletariat and the PMC:
​  "We should add, at this point, that the antagonism between the PMC and the working class does not exist only in the abstract realm of “objective” relations, of course.  Real-life contacts between the two classes express directly, if sometimes benignly, the relation of control which is at the heart of the PMC–working-class relation: teacher and student (or parent), manager and worker, social worker and client, etc.  The subjective dimension of these contacts is a complex mixture of hostility and deference on the part of working-class people, contempt and paternalism on the part of the PMC.
​  The interdependent yet antagonistic relationship between the working class and the PMC also leads us to insist that the PMC is a class totally distinct from the petty bourgeoisie (the “old middle class” of artisans, shopkeepers, self-employed professionals and independent farmers)​"... ..Because the boundaries are not always obvious, the definition is important – the PMC is defined by its role in “the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations” rather than production of necessary goods...

..The analytical leap that the Ehrenreichs made was not the recognition that a buffer class existed, or that it was often antagonistic to the working class.  The big leap was to point out that the composition of the buffer class had changed in an important way since the 19th century, and as a result the PMC was experiencing spectacular growth rather than dying out as Marx had expected the petty bourgeoisie to do...

​..The introduction of modern methods of management was a reform which was understood by contemporary observers to be part of the overall Progressive cause.  In fact, scientific management first became known to the public as a tool for the Progressive attack on corporate greed: In the “Eastern Rates” case of 1911, the Interstate Commerce Commission turned down an increase in railroad rates after scientific-management expert H. Emerson testified that proper management would cut a million dollars a day off the cost of rail shipments.
​  In short, the PMC is defined by its expertise, and the Ehrenreichs described how belief in expertise was raised to the level of an ideology.​​  Erik Erikson summarized his working definition of ideology as “a highly charged attitude rooted essentially in a general need for a world view coherent enough to attract one’s total commitment and to render forever unnecessary the upsetting swings in mood and opinion which once [in adolescence] accompanied identity confusion.”  ​... ..Paul Sweezy has argued that the basic test of whether two families belong to the same class or not is the freedom with which they intermarry.  The children of PMC members do overwhelmingly tend to marry within the class; marriage “‘down” to the working class or “‘up” to the ruling class is comparatively infrequent. In line with the frequency of intermarriage, the class exhibits a substantial degree of intergenerational stability: children of PMC families are more than twice as likely as children of working class families to themselves enter PMC occupations.   Moreover, the class is characterized by a common “culture” or lifestyle​ [COMPLIANCE].  The interior life of the class is shaped by the problem of class reproduction.  Unlike ruling-class occupations, PMC occupations are never directly hereditary...
..As a result of the anxiety about class reproduction, all of the ordinary experiences of life – growing up, giving birth, childraising-are freighted with an external significance unknown in other classes.  Private life thus becomes too arduous to be lived in private; the inner life of the PMC must be continuously shaped, updated and revised by – of course – ever mounting numbers of experts: experts in childraising, family living, sexual fulfillment, self-realization, etc., etc.  The very insecurity of the class, then, provides new ground for class expansion.
​  The PMC is capable of expanding at the expense of the other two classes by constantly identifying social and technical problems, and creating new experts to solve them.  That gives the PMC a class interest distinct from the interests of either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.  The cultural component of capitalism is precisely the product that the PMC is in charge of producing under the Ehrenreich definition, so to some extent they should control their own destiny.  But it isn’t a durable product so it needs constant care and maintenance.​ The “anxiety about class reproduction” has only grown since 1977, and the “insecurity” has blossomed among PMC offspring... ..But the PMC was not only a victim of more powerful groups.  It had also fallen into a trap of its own making.  The prolonged, expensive, and specialized education required for professional employment had always been a challenge to PMC families—as well, of course, as an often insuperable barrier to the working class.  If the children of the PMC were to achieve the same class status as their parents, they had to be accustomed to obedience in the classroom and long hours of study... ..KLG ... expressed this feeling a little more bluntly in a review of Catherine Liu’s The Virtue Hoarders:  the Case Against the Professional Managerial Class:
​  The “good enough” mother and father are likely to produce a human being who will grow into a mature adult who is at one with the world.  The perfect helicopter parent often produces fear and misery, which with lucky outcomes will not lead to catastrophe.  But few of those bathed in the backwash of that rotor, however outwardly successful, are likely to ever be fully independent.​..

..The PMC gradually moved more and more toward the neoliberal version of rationality—something along the lines of “him who grabs the fastest gets the mostest.”  In her book Fear of Falling, the Inner Life of the Middle Class (Harper Perennial ed. 1989), Barbara Ehrenreich wrote that her theme was “the retreat from liberalism and the rise, in the professional middle class, of a meaner, more selfish outlook, hostile to the aspirations of those less fortunate.”... ..By 1989, Ehrenreich maintained that the PMC had achieved class consciousness, aware “of being a class among others, and, ultimately, of being an elite above others. . . .  [T]his emerging self-image has led to . . . the adoption of the kind of political outlook appropriate to an elite, which is a conservative outlook, and ultimately indifferent to the nonelite majority.”  Fear of Falling at 11.  Yet “[i]f this is an elite, it is an insecure and deeply anxious one.  It is afraid, like any class below the most securely wealthy, of misfortunes that might lead to a downward slide.  But in the middle class there is another anxiety:  a fear of inner weakness, of growing soft, of failing to strive, of losing discipline and will.”​... .​.In their 2013 article, the Ehrenreichs argued that substantial portions of the PMC were being squashed and proletarianized after all.
​  By the time of the financial meltdown and deep recession of the post-2008 period, the pain inflicted by neoliberal policies, both public and corporate, extended well beyond the old industrial working class and into core segments of the PMC.  Unemployed and underemployed professional workers—from IT to journalism, academia, and eventually law—became a regular feature of the social landscape.​.. The old PMC dream of a society rule by impartial “experts” gave way to the reality of inescapable corporate domination.​.. ..The Ehrenreichs seemed to have lost track of their original PMC definition—if you want to know whether college educated workers are part of the PMC, the question to ask is whether they are engaged in reproducing capitalist culture and capitalist class relations rather than producing necessary goods?​ ...
..The fact is, the PMC is continuing to grow in numbers, but it is not achieving socialism, and it is also not achieving the liberal/neoliberal dream of enlarging the PMC’s share of the economic pie or delivering good economic outcomes to all the little PMCs who work hard and hew to the PMC line.  The PMC ideology was difficult for many people to incorporate into a firm identity to begin with, and now it is failing outright because the credentialing process does not reliably produce acceptable role opportunities for individuals... ..The bourgeoisie figured out that they could kneecap the smart alec PMC experts politically with a caricature that is really not all that much of a caricature.  The PMC are the bossy gatekeepers that everybody hates, and they have lost most vestiges of their (real or feigned) mid-twentieth century concern for the welfare of the proletariat.  The current PMC pretty uniformly regards the working class as deplorable.​.. ..The essence of the PMC ideology is a giant jobs program for bureaucrats and experts, not socialism that would benefit the poor or subsistence workers. If you substitute “PMC managerialism” for the word socialism in right-wing rhetoric, then the proletarian/deplorable reaction to a lot of things starts to be a little bit more understandable.  Every issue that is dear to the PMC, from climate change to forced diversity, can be interpreted by the working class as just another excuse for the PMC to boss the working class around...
..The PMC is minimally organized as a class and acts in its own class interest only in the very broadest terms.  It is second nature for the PMC to view creating more rules and more PMC jobs enforcing those rules as the solution to every problem, but the PMC appear to have no competent class leadership or strategy to keep the proliferating PMC jobs from being devalued and proletarianized.  They are being squeezed economically, and we are going through a phase where neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat is listening to the PMC’s expert pronouncements.  In fact, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat seem to be uniting behind, of all people, the anti-expert, Donald Trump! https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/02/identity-and-the-professional-managerial-class.html

​  War Guilt in the Middle East​ , By Murray N. Rothbard,  Source: Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, Spring-Autumn 1967.

​  After World War I, Great Britain seized control of Palestine and used its sovereign power to promote, encourage, and abet the expropriation of Arab lands for Zionist use and for Zionist immigration. Often old Turkish land titles would be dredged up and purchased cheaply, thus expropriating the Arab peasantry on behalf of European Zionist immigration. Into the heart of the peasant and nomadic Arab world of the Middle East there thus came as colonists, and on the backs and on the bayonets of British imperialism, a largely European colonizing people.
​  While Zionism was now committed to Palestine as a Jewish National Home, it was not yet committed to the aggrandizement of an independent Jewish state in Palestine. Indeed, only a minority of Zionists favored a Jewish state, and many of these had broken off from official Zionism, under the influence of Vladimir Jabotinsky, to form the Zionist-Revisionist movement to agitate for a Jewish state to rule historic ancient Palestine on both sides of the Jordan River. It is not surprising that Jabotinsky expressed great admiration for the militarism and the social philosophy of Mussolini’s fascism.
​  At the other wing of Zionism were the cultural Zionists, who opposed the idea of a political Jewish state. In particular, the Ihud (Unity) movement, centered around Martin Buber and a group of distinguished Jewish intellectuals from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, advocated, when the British should leave, a binational Jewish-Arab state in Palestine, with neither religious group to dominate the other, but both to work in peace and harmony to build the land of Palestine.
​  But the inner logic of Zionism was not to be brooked. In the tumultuous World Zionist convention at New York’s Hotel Biltmore in 1942, Zionism, for the first time, adopted the goal of a Jewish state in Palestine, and nothing less. The extremists had won out. From then on, there was to be permanent crisis in the Middle East. https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/02/murray-n-rothbard/war-guilt-in-the-middle-east-2/

​  Jeffrey Sachs, Will Netanyahu Bring Down Biden?   (I would always put "Biden" in quotation marks, myself)

The U.S. president needs to take back U.S. policy from the Israel lobby and should stop backing Israel’s extremist and utterly illegal policies. ​  The cabinet of Israel’s Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is filled with religious extremists who believe that Israel’s brutality in Gaza is at God’s command. According to the Book of Joshua in the Hebrew Bible, dated by scholars to the 7th century BC, God promised the land to the Jewish people and instructed them to destroy the other nations living in the promised land... Netanyahu pursues the religious ideology of 7th century BC in the 21st century.​.. ..The vast majority of the world today, including the vast majority of Americans, are certainly not in line with Israel’s religious zealots. The world is far more interested in the 1948 Genocide Convention than in the genocides supposedly ordained by God in the Book of Joshua. They don’t accept the Biblical idea that Israel should kill or expel the people of Palestine from their own land. The two-state solution is the declared policy of the world community, as enshrined by the UN Security Council, and of the U.S. government.​  President Joe Biden is therefore caught between the powerful Israel Lobby and the opinion of American voters and of the world community.​.. ..So far, Biden is going along with AIPAC, even as he loses younger voters. In an Economist/YouGov poll of January 21-23, 49% of those aged 19-29 held that Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian civilians. Only 22% said that in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, their sympathies are with Israel, versus 30% with Palestine, and the remaining 48% “about equal” or unsure. Only 21% agreed with increasing military aid to Israel. Israel has utterly alienated younger Americans.
​  While Biden has called for peace based on the two-state solution and a reduction of violence in Gaza, Netanyahu has brazenly brushed Biden aside, provoking Biden to call Netanyahu an asshole on several occasions. Yet it is Netanyahu, not Biden, who still calls the shots in Washington.​.. ..Biden needs to take back U.S. policy from the Israel lobby. The U.S. should stop backing Israel’s extremist and utterly illegal policies. Nor should the U.S. spend any more funds on Israel unless and until Israel lives within international law, including the Genocide Convention, and 21st century ethics. Biden should side with the UN Security Council in calling for an immediate ceasefire and indeed in calling for an immediate move to the two-state solution, including recognition of Palestine as the 194th UN member state, a move that is more than a decade overdue since Palestine requested UN membership in 2011.
​  Israeli leaders have shown not the slightest compunction in killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, displacing 2 million Gazans, and calling for ethnic cleansing.​   https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/will-netanyahu-bring-down-biden

​  Same stuff, "no Palestinian State", now written down.  Netanyahu Finally Presents Gaza Post-War Plan To Cabinet & It's Sure To Anger Biden Admin The operation will continue until Israeli forces achieve the "complete demilitarization" of the Strip "beyond what is required for the needs of maintaining public order." https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/netanyahu-finally-presents-gaza-post-war-plan-cabinet-its-sure-anger-biden-admin

​It is the standing international law...  China's 'Shock' Statement: Palestinians Have Right To Use 'Armed Force' Against Israel https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/chinas-shock-statement-palestinians-have-right-use-armed-force-against-israel

​  Gilbert Doctorow, Russian expert:  UN agency for Palestinian refugees at ‘breaking point’:  Press TV, Iran
  I recommend this 10 minute video both for what the presenter and my fellow panelist said as they described Israel’s unconscionable efforts to destroy UNRWA, the main provider of humanitarian assistance to Palestinians inside and outside of Gaza, and also to what I was allowed to say regarding how this tragedy may yet be brought to a halt if the war widens, rather than contracts.
  Most of humanity is outraged by what Israel is doing in Gaza. But governments in the region have not taken military action against Israel to save the Palestinians.  The only forces that have acted are non state forces of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Everyone else is reasonably fearful of getting involved in a hot war with Israel given the vast destructive force that Tel Aviv commands, not to mention its nuclear arsenal... ..As I say in this interview, Israel may yet be brought to heel because of the now irrational, hubristic mentality of Netanyahu and his cabinet. Netanyahu seems to want a wider war to hold onto power, and perhaps he should get one because only a real war can stop the genocide.
  The wider war may yet come from the side of the Hout​his.  From what looked like pitiful volleys of drones and missiles that were easily shot down by U.S. air defense several weeks ago, we saw how the Houthis have in the past week seriously damaged a Qatari oil tanker, forcing its crew to abandon ship, and how they sank a British freighter in the Red Sea. Now, I understand that the Houthis have successfully attacked Eilat.  We may suppose that their weaponry has been greatly improved, and how can that be?  It is improbable that Iran would step in, due to the risks posed by the U.S. naval force in the Med.  But it is well possible that the Russians are assisting the Houthis in the spirit of tit for tat, paying Britain and the U.S. back for their proxy war on Russia in Ukraine.   If this conflict expands, if the fight between Hezbollah and the IDF becomes a war, then we may witness the showdown that will distract Israel from genocide and focus its attention on its own survival as a state. https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/02/23/un-agency-for-palestinian-refugees-at-breaking-point-press-tv-iran/

​  The Yemeni rebel movement Ansar Allah (the Houthis) has put a number of shipping and insurance companies on notice that US and UK vessels will not be allowed to sail across the Red and Arabian Seas, Reuters reported.
​  According to the news agency, the Houthi-formed Humanitarian Operations Center has issued notifications to shipping and insurance companies warning them that US-and UK-flagged ships or ships owned by US and UK individuals or legal entities are banned from entering the Red and Arabian Seas, as well as the Gulf of Aden. The ban also applies to ships registered in or linked with Israel. https://tass.com/world/1750457

​  US has no real leverage on Israel, says Russia's UN ambassador ​  "Washington's so-called diplomatic efforts on the ground that our American colleagues keep repeating like some mantra, have led nowhere so far. It is obvious that Washington simply has no levers of real influence on the government of Israel," the UN ambassador said.
​  "The authorities in West Jerusalem are declaring in no uncertain terms that that mopping up of the enclave will take several more months, making calls for continuing the military operation, the withdrawal of the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East - TASS) from the enclave and the forced displacement of Palestinians from the places of their permanent residence," https://tass.com/politics/1750575

​  Red lines: Will Iran enter the regional war?
Despite Tehran's central role in the Axis of Resistance, which has launched regionwide operations against Israel and its US ally, the Islamic Republic refuses to rise to the enemy's bait and make itself a central target. ​  Tehran’s envoy to the UN later clarified that the Islamic Republic would only intervene in the Gaza war if the occupation state were to jeopardize Iranian interests or citizens.
Given the events of the past four months, this raises the question: What are Iran's red lines, and at what point would Tehran opt for direct confrontation?​ ... ..Many in Tehran believe the Gaza war is orchestrated in Washington, with the US serving as Israel's primary advocate in global arenas like the UN Security Council. As such, Iran aims to undermine US influence by exacerbating divisions between Washington and Tel Aviv.​.. ..Last week, a major attack was carried out on Iran's national gas transmission pipelines. Iranian Oil Minister Javad Oji called the pipeline explosions in three regions "sabotage and terrorist attacks" and said the enemy's plan was to disrupt gas supply to several cities and main provinces during the winter to ignite social and political unrest across the country.
​  While no country has claimed responsibility, a New York Times report names Israel as the culprit, citing several western official sources. Despite the severity of the attacks, Iran's critical gas transmission capacity was safeguarded, preventing widespread energy crises.
​  Yet even these attacks didn’t cross Iran's red lines because this act of vandalism – intent on destroying about 40 percent of the country's gas transmission capacity and creating an energy crisis – was immediately thwarted... ​..If Israel pushes Iran's Palestinian allies to the limit, it appears that Tehran would pursue a relative, restrictive, short-term, and mid-term response.
​  In the interim, the assertive military reactions from Iranian allies – including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, factions operating in Iraq and Syria, and the Ansarallah-aligned armed forces in Yemen – serve as a stick to confront Israel's aggressive stance autonomously, even in the absence of direct instructions from Iran.
​  While Washington and Tel Aviv claim they wish to avoid opening new fronts, on the ground, they are gearing up for military confrontation and have already escalated on various fronts.​..
..Today, Iran's adversarial stance seems to be more focused on the US rather than Israel. Via regional intermediaries, Tehran hopes to broker agreements with Washington to secure a ceasefire and alleviate Israel's pressure on Gaza. A common view among Iranians is that the pursuit of "legitimate defense" is preferable to engaging in a wider regional conflict, as prolonged internal crises within Israel could ultimately work in Iran's favor. ​  Drawing from past conflicts, particularly the Hezbollah–Israeli battles in south Lebanon, Iran sees potential in eroding both Israel's internal power and external support. This strategy intends to gradually force the occupation state to retreat from its aggressive posture in the region​... ..Although a “preemptive attack” has already been proposed if Israel continues its assault on Gaza, Iran's strategic partners in Moscow and Beijing have not declared their full support for direct war. Therefore, Tehran is likely to avoid divergence with Russia and China in the event of major international crises... ..As the Commander-in-Chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said in January, although Iran is not seeking war, it will not leave any threat unanswered. ​  It must be noted that Iran sees the war in Gaza through a realist, long-term lens and not an ideological point of view. This highlights a critical reality: while Iran makes efforts to maintain a delicate balance of threats without plunging into direct warfare, the potential for direct actions and reactions to spiral out of control remains ever-present.
​  Iran has thus far calculated that neither Washington nor Israel would risk direct attacks on its territory. However, the mutual risk of miscalculation on both sides could lead to a gradual escalation into direct warfare. https://thecradle.co/articles/red-lines-will-iran-enter-the-regional-war

Bundestag backs resolution calling for supplies of ‘long-range weapons’ to Kiev​  (but removed ​specific reference to the Taurus long range cruise missile.) https://tass.com/world/1750475

Czech farmers join protest against EU’s agricultural policy
National protests are organized by major farmers associations led by the Czech Agrarian Chamber, with more than 2,000 agricultural vehicles being involved in the protests.​https://tass.com/world/1750355

CBP Seizes 6.5 Tons Of Meth In Eagle Pass, Largest Haul Ever At A Port Of Entry https://www.zerohedge.com/political/cbp-siezes-65-tons-meth-eagle-pass-largest-seizure-made-port-entry

​  "Unprecedented": Now-Fired CBS Reporter Who Investigated Biden Laptop Story Has Personal Files Seized By Network ​  Reporter Catherine Herridge of CBS had "her personal files seized by the network" in what is being called an "unprecedented" move. Herridge was investigating the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to her firing.​ Last week she was one of about 20 staffers fired from CBS as part of cuts at parent company Paramount. https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/unprecedented-now-fired-cbs-reporter-who-investigated-biden-laptop-story-has-personal-files

​  Joe Biden's EV Mandate "Vision" For America Is In Full Collapse   In the year and a half since passing the Inflation Reduction Act, automakers are finding out the hard way that the rigorous criteria for manufacturing batteries using materials from the United States and its free-trade allies could render them cost-inefficient compared to global competitors. https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/joe-bidens-ev-vision-america-falling-apart

​  Charles Hugh Smith,  How the Economy Changed: There's No Bargains Left Anywhere  (Additional thanks to the PMC for helping so "expertly".) What changed in the economy is now nobody can afford to get by on working-class wages because there's no longer any bargains. ​  Many people are spending half or 2/3 of after-tax earnings on rent. Personally, I was only able to work my way through college because there were still nooks and crannies of low-rent dives and rooming houses, and low-cost hole-in-the-wall restaurants and cafes, day-old baked goods outlets, etc.
​  Lowering the cost of credit for corporations, financiers and the wealthy created unprecedented competition for places to invest all this nearly free money, and real estate has long been a favored market for those seeking to increase income and appreciation by gentrifying low-cost properties.
​  The net result is nobody can afford to start a business because rents, insurance, fees, utilities and regulatory compliance are all unaffordable​.

How the Economy Changed: There's No Bargains Left Anywhere

​  Pfizer Secretly Studied a Heart Damage Marker, Troponin I, in Five- to 15-Year-Olds, Following mRNA COVID Vaccination in 2021. (I recall this from April 2021) ​  It became clear by February 2021 that a myocarditis safety signal was in the data and in scientific research ‘in press’ – meaning, scientific research which had passed peer review and been accepted for publication but that was not in print. In fact, the Israeli Ministry of Health alerted the CDC to a myocarditis safety signal on February 28, 2021.

Report 94: Pfizer Secretly Studied a Heart Damage Marker, Troponin I, in Five- to 15-Year-Olds, Following mRNA COVID Vaccination in 2021.

​  I know of only one pregnant patient who got this vaccine. 12 hours later her amniotic membranes ruptured, labor was induced and she developed preeclampsia. A fluke?

FDA Approved First Vaccine for Pregnant Women to Prevent RSV in Infants Six Months Old and Younger
​  Though this is not a Pfizer or Moderna COVID vaccine report, it offers vital information on a Pfizer vaccine targeting a once protected group -- pregnant women and their unborn babies. ​  "Among maternal participants, the incidences of serious adverse events through 6 months after injection were similar in the two groups; the most frequent were preeclampsia (in 1.8% of participants in the vaccine group and 1.4% of those in the placebo group) and fetal distress syndrome (in 1.8% and 1.6%, respectively)."
"The incidences of premature delivery were similar in the two groups (28 cases [0.8%] in the vaccine group and 23 cases [0.6%] in the placebo group)."

FDA Approved First Vaccine for Pregnant Women to Prevent RSV in Infants Six Months Old and Younger

​(There was an X 6.3​ solar flare last night) 3 X Class Solar Flares, Satellite/Network Issues, Biggest Flare of the Cycle | S0 News Feb.23.2024

Unvaccinated Deplorable (pictured today with tomato starts)