Off The Cuff: The End Of Privilege?

In this week's Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:

• Manipulating The Market To A New All-Time High
  • The case why we may see that soon
• Falling Corporate Profits
  • Why a new high, if it happens, won't last for long
• The Pension Time Bomb
  • Why all pension funds are dead men walking
• The End Of Privilege?
  • Soon, we will all be in the same boat

If you’re a public employee, a government employee, you are in a protected class. You know, you have gold-plated healthcare insurance that’s guaranteed by your union contract and you have, as you say, a pension that can’t be broken really, even in bankruptcy court as far as I can tell. And it’s very difficult where the private world is, as you say, Darwinian, and can be looted at will.

So that’s just the first level of privilege. And what I find interesting is if we examine a variety of cultures and a variety of economies from China to the Philippines to Venezuela to Greece, which you just wrote about recently, and here in the US, we find that privilege is a universal and it’s simply a matter of the details and the scope of the privilege.