America’s Great Unraveling: Hunger, Hollowed-Out Storefronts, and the Centralized Economy on Life Support

The New Hunger: Middle-Class America Joins the Breadline Let’s not sugarcoat this with bureaucratic euphemisms: the United States is lurching into an economic dark age. While political operatives and their media stenographers assure you the “fundamentals are strong,” tens of millions of Americans are ransacking their last dollars to put moldy bread on the table. Food insecurity—once an affliction confined to the destitute—has metastasized into the marrow of the middle class. As of May 2025, over 15.6% of U.S. adults are officially food insecure, nearly double the number from 2021. These are not anecdotal sob stories cooked up by activists. They are Census-level facts. Yet Washington, D.C.’s answer is to weaponize statistics and blame “temporary pandemic distortions,” as though a virus engineered the collapse of your grocery budget. Recall that in 2021, the only thing holding this dam together was a tsunami of borrowed stimulus cash—expanded SNAP benefits, the Child Tax Credit, and direct checks. For one brief moment, even the working poor could buy eggs without a loan. Predictably, as soon as the Treasury shut off the spigot in 2022, the façade cracked and the breadlines swelled. Look to Philadelphia, where the Share Food Program’s demand exploded by 120% in three years. Atlanta? Up 60%.These aren’t isolated outposts of misery; they’re warning flares along the economic front. In Georgia, one in five childrenis going hungry, yet more than 57% of families don’t even qualify for SNAP assistance. Why? Because the federal poverty metrics are rigged relics that haven’t been updated to reflect the real cost of living in a rigged economy. Storefronts Shuttered: The Myth of a Healthy Retail Economy While hunger stalks the kitchen table, the retail sector is evaporating in broad daylight. According to Coresight Research, **5,822 stores have already shuttered as of June 27th—**on track to obliterate all previous records. Remember 2008, when the housing collapse triggered a domino effect of closures? We’re hurtling toward that territory again—only this time, household debt is worse, and corporate consolidation is deeper. Storefront after storefront is now boarded up, casualties of an economic model that rewards Wall Street while hollowing out Main Street. And if you think these closures are a byproduct of “consumer preferences shifting to online,” you’ve been drinking the same stale Kool-Aid as the Commerce Department. No healthy economy hemorrhages retail jobs by the tens of thousands while food banks run out of supplies. Consider the layoffs: Intel: Over 500 workers in Oregon shown the door, with thousands more to follow. Levi Strauss: 346 Kentuckians losing their jobs so management can goose a quarterly profit report. If these companies were simply “reallocating resources,” why are their layoffs clustered with declining sales, rising defaults, and plummeting commercial real estate? Because these are not isolated contractions—they are the system sputtering. The 2008 Re-Run: Real Estate’s Collapse Returns Remember the 2008 meltdown? Back then, they called it a “once-in-a-century” event. Yet here we are, less than two decades later, replaying the same scenario—only this time, Americans are far more brittle. Median real wages have stagnated for 50 years, while the Federal Reserve and Treasury have propped up an everything bubble. Condo sales? Imploding. In Florida’s Deltona market alone, prices cratered 32% year over year. Across Texas and California, condos are suddenly worth less than your kid’s college debt. Anyone with the courage to look at the data can see the outlines of a collapse that no one in power is prepared to confront. Historical Context: The Roots of Systemic Decay The seeds of this unraveling were planted decades ago: In the 1970s, the dollar was severed from gold, unshackling the Federal Reserve to print with impunity. In the 1990s, NAFTA gutted the industrial base, displacing millions of blue-collar workers. In 2008, the Bush-Obama bailouts rewarded banks for criminal negligence while homeowners were evicted en masse. In 2020-2021, pandemic-era stimulus created a sugar high of consumer spending but did nothing to address the rot in supply chains and wages. This isn’t the failure of a single administration. It’s the cumulative result of globalist policy, bipartisan cowardice, and the blind worship of centralized finance. Counterarguments—And Why They Fail “But unemployment is still low!” A hollow argument. The labor force participation rate remains below pre-pandemic levels. Millions have left the workforce entirely. The official unemployment rate excludes discouraged workers and underemployment. Look at the surge in gig work and multiple job holders—this is desperation masquerading as prosperity. “Inflation is moderating!” Not in any meaningful sense. Even if headline CPI decelerates, core necessities—housing, food, energy—are still up double digits over 2019. When 70% of Americans say they are more financially stressed than ever, you can’t gaslight them into believing their bank accounts are fine. “Retail closures are just an evolution to e-commerce!” This is the myth of “creative destruction,” ignoring that e-commerce is dominated by a few monopolies. Small businesses—the backbone of local economies—are dying off. Once they’re gone, pricing power consolidates into fewer hands, and communities lose tax revenue, jobs, and cultural cohesion. The Road Ahead: Catastrophe or Course Correction America is now standing at the edge of the same abyss it stumbled into in 2008—only this time, the debt is bigger, the inequality wider, and the trust in institutions almost nonexistent. It didn’t have to be this way. But decades of globalist trade deals, corporate tax shelters, speculative finance, and policy cowardice have brought us here. Don’t let anyone—Democrat or Republican—pretend this is a random misfortune. It is engineered fragility, the inevitable byproduct of a system designed to enrich the few while leaving the rest one lost paycheck away from hunger. The only path forward is to decentralize economic power, rebuild local production, and dismantle the monopolies cannibalizing the middle class. Otherwise, the boarded-up stores and soup kitchens are merely the prologue.

America’s Great Unraveling: Hunger, Hollowed-Out Storefronts, and the Centralized Economy on Life Support

Bill Brocius Jul 10

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