The Tombstone Blues (James Howard Kunstler)

[Tace]

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

Oct. 25, 2010 -- The latest version of Pretend -- going on a couple of weeks now -- is the nation whistling past the graveyard of mortgage documentation fraud while skeletons dance around everything connected with the money system.

Halloween came early this year. The USA is getting to look like one big Masque of the Red Death, so I suppose it's convenient that our pop culture has been saturated with vampires, zombies, and werewolves for a decade, coincident with the self-cannibalizing of our economy. Something in the zeitgeist told us to get with the program of a twilight existence. We're well-schooled now in the ways of the undead, operating under cover of darkness, going for the neck at every opportunity, even eating our young -- if you consider the debt orgy, both private and public, as a way to party like it's 1999 by consuming your children's' future.

The big banks leading the charge of the anthropophagi are making like it's no big deal that notes representing money lent have become mysteriously dissociated from the mortgages that secure them. In the good old days, these things traveled in pairs, like boy-and-girl, Laurel and Hardy, a horse and carriage. It made for straight-forward property transfers, where Person A could be confident he was buying something free and clear from Person B. What a quaint concept, free and clear!

Nowadays, these documents can hardly be located at all -- not such a surprise, really, since they were ground out like e-coli infested bratwursts in strip-mall boiler rooms run by former used car salesmen, and pawned off wholesale (literally) on banks who served them up sliced-and-diced, sloppy Joe style, on CDO buns to credulous pension funds, cretinous insurance company yobs, double-digit IQ college endowment managers, and other such nitwits bethinking themselves the reincarnation of Bernard Baruch, not to mention foreign sovereign nations who bought this smallpox-blanket-grade investment paper by the container-ship-load and, finally, the innovative geniuses at the very banks who engineered the stuff and got stuck with tons of it themselves when, as they say, the music stopped.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/the-tombstone-blues-james-howard-kunstler.html

[Speck Tater]

1. I tend to agree with Kunstelr on most things, but he's getting tiresome.

He says the same things over and over and the only thing that keeps him going is that he keeping thinking up "clever" new ways to say the same things over and over.

[rfranklin]

2. some things bear repeating...again and again...

but prosecution would be preferable.

[Dr.Phool]

3. If we just keep talking about it, maybe it will go away.

[Moostache]

4. Why stop after a decade or more of bleating the same things?

His main issues are certainly real, but his tone and defeatist writings are tiresome and utterly predictable.