2020: Annus Horribilis, The Worst Is Yet to Come? Poverty, Unemployment, Despair

For most Americans, 2020 was disastrous for their safety, well-being and future.

Unprecedented numbers of people lost jobs — a greater percent of working-age Americans than in the 1930s Great Depression. 

Millions more became way underemployed earning poverty wages with few or no benefits — struggling daily to survive.

Well over 100,000 small businesses went bankrupt or otherwise shut down permanently because of draconian lockdowns, quarantines and related policies.

According to Gallup survey data, “Americans’ mental health ratings s(ank) to a new low” in 2020 — with no end to mass-misery in prospect.

Chicago’s Water Tower Place is the city’s preeminent downtown shopping mall along its Magnificent Mile.

Its survival is threatened by lack of enough retail traffic.

A city news report said there’s “real anxiety that Chicago’s main shopping districts — the Magnificent Mile and Gold Coast — are (at risk) of falling apart” for lack of enough revenue to keep operating.

The Illinois Retail Merchants Association said “economic fallout” from what’s going on “made it difficult for businesses to keep up with high downtown rents.”

What’s true about Chicago’s retail environment applies to the US nationwide — with no end of it in prospect looking ahead.

According to the National Restaurant Association, up to half of the nation’s restaurants may close permanently if the current environment continues or worsens — millions of jobs to be lost with them.

Looking ahead in the new year, is unprecedented food insecurity, hunger, malnutrition, untreated illnesses, and homelessness coming in the weeks and months ahead?

While Congress and the Wall Street owned and controlled Fed throw trillions of dollars of free money at the nation’s privileged class, most US households never endured harder than ever hard times than now.

They’re worsening, not improving, because of indifference in high places toward the nation’s most disadvantaged that are exploding in numbers of affected millions of people — the US middle class disappearing in plain sight.

Everything going on — the Greatest Main Street Depression in US history — was planned by US dark forces in cahoots with monied interests.

It’s all about benefitting them exclusively by exploiting most others.

It includes creating an unprecedented in size permanent underclass.

Longer-term, the diabolical scheme aims to create a ruler-serf society, harming the vast majority of Americans.

Seasonal flu/influenza — disguised as covid — has been and continues to be the phony pretext for getting Americans to go along with what no one should tolerate.

Their fundamental freedoms may be permanently lost so privileged interests can more greatly benefit from their misery.

Providing $600 stimulus checks to qualified households pales in comparison to open-checkbook handouts to Wall Street, other corporate favorites, and the already super-rich.

The paltry amount mocks growing poverty and deprivation that’s highly likely to worsen in the new year.

The US is not only unsafe and unfit to live in, it’s permanently thirdworldized.

It’s a totalitarian/plutocratic banana republic in the Northern Hemisphere — the world’s largest and most threatening to everyone everywhere.

On New Year’s Day, establishment media maintained their mass deception drumbeat.

According to NYT fake news, “in 2021 things will start getting better (sic).”

“And there’s good reason to believe that once the good news starts, the improvement in our condition will be much faster and continue much longer than many people expect (sic).”

The Washington Post pretended that “the big story of 2021 could be a very hopeful one (sic).”

Like other establishment media, it’s pushing the myth of mass-vaxxing to the rescue — ignoring how experimental covid vaccines may cause irreparable harm to human health overall, along with risking the illness they’re supposed to protect against but won’t.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “(t)he great comeback of 2021 is surely coming (sic).”

“(I)t will begin to explode in late spring, with vaccines more available and a spreading sense that things are easing off, and be fully anarchic by summer (sic).”

The above disinformation ignores the reality of unprecedented/made-in-the USA misery that’s highly likely to worsen ahead and become permanent for most Americans.

I see nothing to be optimistic about in the new year and what follows.

The only solution is popular revolution. Nothing else can prevent state-sponsored dystopia that’s well underway.

It’ll worsen without mass outrage and rebellion against the diabolical system.

It’s our lives, our well-being, our future, and our choice to accept the unacceptable or rise up against it.

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/


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Articles by: Stephen Lendman

About the author:

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III." http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

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