In the Reality Lounge (James Kunstler)

[Tace]

James Kunstler -- World News Trust

Nov. 17, 2008 -- The G-20 came to Washington for the weekend and sucked all the air out of the city before announcing that they were really serious about patching all the leaks in the foundering ship of globalism. Well, they have to at least pretend that they are doing something. Meanwhile, the former bit player known as reality has taken center stage in the ship's main lounge. It is putting on an act even gnarlier than the Kit Kat Klub show in Cabaret.

This reality show is sending some clear signals to the denizens of the real and really crowded world. The main signal is that the trade and financing rackets of recent decades are over. The extravaganza of economic hypergrowth based on cheap resources is over. The promiscuous swapping around of risk and rewards is over. There is no global institutional framework for managing the impairment left in the wake of this binge. It will be up to the individual nations now to figure out their national lives and livings.

Alas, the financial impairment is still on-going world-wide and has quite a ways to run before it's finished working its hoodoo on the so-called advanced economies. The lame duck U.S. economic posse so far has done everything possible except the two things that really matter: allow the fraudulent securities at the heart of the problem to be exposed to the light of day to determine their actual value; and allow those companies who trafficked in them to suffer the full consequences by going out-of-business. For the moment, they're content to shovel cash into the truck-bed of every enterprise in America that shows up at the Treasury loading dock. This can only have the effect of eventually destroying the value of that cash.

President-elect Obama's cagey appearance on 60-Minutes showed that he's hardly in a position to say anything of substance about this country's predicament as long as the old posse holds the levers of the economic machinery -- and retains the ability to run it into the ground before Jan. 20, 2009. So many tribulations are now underway in our Republic that it is hard to fathom what the head of the federal government might do besides act as a kind of psychological counselor-in-chief to a land full of people in distress.

more

http://www.worldnewstrust.com/wnt-reports/commentary/in-the-reality-lounge-james-kunstler.html

[Kashka-Kat]

1. can you copy out more of this article? can't get in t o read the rest - thnx

[The Blue Flower]

2. Kunstler's URL

www.jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com