Sign of the times

Here's an interesting wrinkle that finally somebody has written about: doctors in private practice are under financial stress and many of them are going broke.

So much for the blather about recovery in 2012. As Paul Craig Roberts has been saying for years: there can be no recovery because there is nothing to recover. America has lost a vast part of its industrial infrastructure (some 54,000 entire industrial plants closed in the first decade of the 21st century--that's equivalent to the whole industrial sector of many first world nations). It has also sent abroad by the millions the middle-class service jobs that once sustained the consumer economy. The borrow-and-splurge financial fiesta that masqueraded as prosperity during the Bush years is long over--it crashed in the fall of 2008 and revealed to the world the total fraud of the Bush-Cheney administration's economic polices of wealth through warfare.

Barack Obama has no clue and no policy. His fellow fraudster, Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve, has been printing money by the trillions for "stimulus"--as if you can stimulate a corpse. Every finagle of the Keynesian counter-cyclical program has been tried and has failed. There's nothing left to do. The tricksters of Washington, D.C., are fresh out of tricks.

Ordinary folk have been sinking to rise no more even before the "official" crash and subsequent pseudo "recovery." The relentless economic rot has now reached the top echelons of the professional class, the medical profession. About half of America's doctors are in private practice, which is to say that they are small businessmen who have to pay rent and make payrolls. Broke customers (a.k.a patients) can't pay their bills and reimbursements from government programs are shrinking and the doctors are getting screwed by big pharma just like the rest of us. The upshot is many doctors are going broke and bankrupt. When life is no longer good even for the upper crust, it's just plain crap for everybody.

The silly season of presidential primaries is now in progress and not a single person--not even the fabled straight-talker Ron Paul--is addressing what is really happening in America and what (if anything) can be done to save the country. The old-time religion of the free market and yet another mid-east war (this time with Iran) won't save us. Nobody's got a new idea or the guts to try it if they did.

Back home the river's still rising, the levees are buckling, and the sandbags won't hold. Which way to the high ground? Can you swim?

Read about it here