Full Moon Edition September 2026

The rubber band is stretching ever farther with each passing year. That fundamental aspect of our lives, the economy, is showing less familiarity with the principals on which it’s supposed to be based and more in common with hoodoo and flimflam. Employment is a daily walk on a rickety bridge above a pool of quicksand. Every so often and more frequently all the time a few of your colleagues slip from the walkway and sink into the muck. It’s called layoffs, downsizing, rightsizing. When is your time?

A recent study reports that only 28% of workers say now is a good time to find a job. Worker satisfaction with pay and the ability to get ahead is dismal (HERE). A term of art is the “soul-sucking job.” There was a time when the bargain you struck with the devil called capitalism bought you Life in the Crystal Palace, as a book on the subject was called, a lifetime career nestled comfortably in the corporation, advancement up the management ladder, and a sufficient retirement, all for just doing what you’re told.

The last two decades of the Twentieth Century changed all that. You still had to toe the line, but in the Age of Reagan and Welch and trickle down economics loyalty was frequently tested but rarely rewarded. Returning value to the shareholder replaced the customer is always right as the operating ethos. Whatever turned a profit without putting you in jail (even if maybe it should have) became the one and only focus. The stock market now was the measure of how well America fared. Hope you own some.

It’s surprising and sad to learn, as you will if you ask most anyone, why hang on to a job you hate? “For the health insurance.” Private sector healthcare is a point of pride in America absent any reason whatsoever for insisting it’s the only way to go. But we do. America is the only “developed” nation in the world where you must be able to afford to be healthy. If you can’t, well, that’s your problem. If medical care bankrupts you, as it does nowhere else, at least it isn’t socialized medicine you suffered. Right?

As we’ve cited in previous editions, we pay more than any other country per capita for healthcare that is inferior to most. Medical care that is ordered by highly trained professionals is approved or not by insurance company accountants. What they decide is what you get regardless of what the doctor orders. The premiums for that insurance rise as the care they pay for falls. All that for healthcare in urban areas. If you’re rural, call the vet. The care will be better than nothing. That’s what’s to be had.

There’s a terrible irony to hold onto a job you hate when you could probably make as much money working for yourself but you can’t afford the healthcare. You can’t be healthy and happy and productive doing something you enjoy, something meaningful, something that makes you proud of your work; instead you gotta work for the man doing a job that sucks the life out of you, because sooner or later you or someone you love is going to get sick. If it’s major and you’re not covered, you’re destitute (HERE).

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” Shakespeare advised about insanity in politics all those years ago. At least in the case of Macbeth and the other mad kings and queens of yore, they were born to it. What to say about the depraved elected leaders we gift ourselves today? Do they reflect the mental imbalance of the elected or the electors? Perhaps democracy is merely a performative exercise permitted by the powers that be to defuse the suspicion many of us harbor that we actually are powerless (HERE).

Distrust of our elected leadership is nothing new. Yet the sense of betrayal among the electorate has reached extreme proportions. We have a very strong sense that we are being lied to. Imagine that! What not too many years ago was termed “spin,” putting the best face on the story you were trying to sell, is now bold-faced fabrication with not a hint of shame nor any apology offered. We lie because we can and because it gets the results we’re seeking, so the maestros and maestras of manipulation tell us.

You can’t fool all the people all the time, we’re told, and there is evidence that even the some among us who are susceptible to always being conned show signs of taking note they’re being fleeced. What so glares in our collective vision even through the rosiest of glasses is the stark reality that elected leadership serves the people who pay for their election and unless you are among that elite power structure, they really don’t care about your problems. Empathy, it’s been said, is the weakness of the West.