Something Happened (James Howard Kunstler)

[Tace]

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

May 17, 2010 -- Everybody in the world is broke, except for maybe Lloyd Blankfein, and he may not end up broke so much as broken by a political meat-grinder that is revving up to turn the world's woes and swindles into a new kind of Long Emergency sausage, to be distributed among the roiling, angry masses as a synthetic substitute for nutriment. Call it a synthetic non-collateralized political obligation.

Something snapped in the world last week and a lot of people around the world sensed it -- especially in the organs of news and opinion -- but this ominous twang was not very clearly identified. It was, in fact, the sound of the financial becoming political. The macro-swindle of a worldwide Ponzi orgy now stands revealed and the vacuum left in its place is about to suck everything familiar into it -- standards-of-living, hopes, dreams, not to mention lives. The political action will be a desperate scramble to determine who and what is able to escape getting sucked into this black hole of annihilation. It's very suddenly shaping up to become an epic in human history.

Meanwhile, a giant oil blob lies quivering in deep waters off the Gulf coast, like some awful amorphous Moby Dick full of malice waiting to sink Pequod America -- or at least the economies of five states. A few months from now, the BP corporation will wonder why it didn't go into something safe and predictable like the pants business instead of oil exploration. They will surely question the viability of conducting future business anywhere near the USA, and the USA will enter a wilderness of soul-searching about the drill-baby-drill strategy that only a few scant weeks ago seemed to be a settled matter. Tough to have your future hoped-for energy supplies evaporate at the same time that your hopes for future prosperity get sucked into a black hole.

I've maintained for a long time that the folks down Dixie way are the the most dangerously crazy people in America and the Deepwater Horizon oil blob is not going to improve their outlook when it slops over their beaches and bayous. They'll blame Obama for it by syllogism. Anyway, they are only marginally more crazy than the rest of the folks in the USA. Those folks are warming up for an election season that is going to send a horde of exterminating angels into the halls of congress and the governor's mansions, and before too long those merchants of retribution are going to appoint their inquisitors. It's going to be a heckuva spectacle. In retrospect, Mary Shapiro's SEC will look like the Council of Trent. You can be sure that if ten gallons of gasoline remain to be found in America a few years from now, they will power the last GMC Sierra to drag the captains of Wall Street through the sawgrass prairies of Collier County, Florida.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/index.php?option=com_flexicontent&view=items&cid=134:commentary-wnt-reports&id=7697:something-happened-james-howard-kunstler

[phantom power]

1. the pants business

:rofl:

[Demeter]

2. You Ain't Seen Nothing, Yet

This is just the beginning.

[Go2Peace]

3. It seems it will have to get worse before people will make the powers truly change

[tavalon]

4. kick

[grasswire]

5. here it is

"God knows what the Europeans will make of the helter-skelter scene playing out here in the States. Perhaps some species of schadenfreude tinged with regret for the missing stream of tourists. My own guess is that there may not even be a president of the United States after Mr. Obama. Rather, events will get so gnarly and disordered so fast that somebody like General Patraeus will have to step in for a while and keep the reincarnation of the Ku Klux Klan from trying to murder every non-Cracker from sea to shining sea. Of course, once that happens, we probably don't go back. It's not Imperial Rome (release 2.0) after that, either, because even the mighty U.S. military will be too strapped for a means of support to continue operating. Instead, it's the devolution of the United States into functionally autonomous regions and states -- and even that scale of governance may be too great for the stringent economic realities of the years ahead."

[Tutankhamun]

6. Our "leaders" and or media have cleverly set it up so that as things devolve

we blame those who would save us and support those who will continue ruining us. This is at the core of our self-defeating spiral. The collapse this piece describes can still be averted, but we need a major shift in our consciousness.

The question, then, is how and where can this change happen? If we look to history, such shifts aren't common, but they have occurred. The ice age and subsequent thawing brought a shift in consciousness that led to the creation of civilization itself. Millenia later, the plague was arguably the most important factor in ending the dark ages.

Not to say we should root for another ice age or a plague. Nonetheless, huge shifts in human consciousness are possible and historically precedented. Humankind HAS, after all, made these giant evolutionary leaps at precisely the moment it became necessary. Never sooner.

At the very least, this will be interesting.

[depakid]

7. One of the best Kunstler rants in a while...