After doing untold damage to the United States water table with fracking, Chesapeake Energy has at last filed for bankruptcy. Its former CEO Aubrey McClendon was forced to resign in disgrace in 2012 and died by driving his SUV straight into a wall in March 2016 in bright daylight in what looks a lot like a suicide.

The damage Chesapeake has done to the North American water table will take nature millions of years to undo. All of that environmental damage was done while running in the red. Accessible energy resources were easily available from Venezuela, Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia but instead as a matter of policy, Americans chose to poison their land. Chesapeake Energy is a symbol of the cupidity, corruption and short-sightedness of US leadership.

The conversation at ZeroHedge was fascinating. Hardcharger82 strangely feels that he’s happy to be old, or in his words:

“I am glad I’m not young anymore.”

Something I have been saying a lot in the last few years.

Continue reading Generational challenges: End Winner Takes All at uncoy.

The corruption at the top hollows out the bottom of the economy. Younger people don't have much interest in an honest day's work as they see that those gaming the system and not working are doing so much better. There will be no one to do the work, little to eat. If the super wealthy think they will be safe in their guarded havens, they haven't been reading history. The aristocrats of Ancien Régime France were the most coddled and protected and privileged class since the heyday of Ancient Egypt.

Most of them lost their heads. King Charles I of England was reputedly a very jolly fellow until Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads had enough of subsidising his shallow lascivity.

I'm not sure what we — the intelligentsia or upper middle class — can do to stop these shenanigans. If they don't stop it will end badly for all of us. The upper middle class will be the first to suffer - as we're easier to get to — eventually the really rich will pay an even higher price. Not to put too blunt a point on it, the redistribution of wealth does not start again soon, the fate of Ghadaffi awaits their heirs. I originally wrote elite instead of rich. But these people are not elite. They are scum, lacking either ethics or humanity, only interested in pecuniary gain and willing to break any rules to obtain these riches.

No one can take wealth to the grave. Wealth should be a tool to improve the world, not a method to hold it senselessly ransom.

Continue reading Money Laundering 2.0 or Changing Laws to Rob the People at uncoy.