The Abyss Stares Back

[Crewleader]

by Jim Kunstler

The public perception of the ongoing fiasco in governance has moved from sheer, mute incomprehension to goggle-eyed panic as the scrims of unreality peel away revealing something like a national death-watch scene in history's intensive care unit. Is the USA in recession, depression, or collapse? People are at least beginning to ask. Nature's way of hinting that something truly creepy may be up is when both Paul Volcker and George Soros both declare on the same day that the economic landscape is looking darker than the Great Depression.

Those tuned into the media-waves were enchanted, in a related instance, by Rick Santelli's grand moment of theater in the Chicago trader's pit last week when he seemed to ignite the first spark of revolution by demonstrating that bail-out fatigue had morphed into high emotion -- and that the emotion could be marshaled against public policy. The traders in the pit on-screen seemed to color up and buzz loudly, like ordinary grasshoppers turning into angry locusts preparing to ravage a waiting valley. "Are you listening, President Obama?" Mr. Santelli asked portentously.

In the broad blogging margins of the web that orbit the mainstream media like the rings of Saturn, an awful lot of reasonable people have begun to ask whether President Obama is a stooge of whatever remains of Wall Street, with Citigroup and Goldman Sachs's puppeteer, Robert Rubin, pulling strings behind an arras in the Oval Office. Personally, I doubt it, but it is still a little hard to understand what the President is up to. For one thing, the stimulus package, so-called, looks more and more like national sub-prime mortgage itself, a bad bargain made under less-than-realistic terms, with future obligations fobbed onto whoever inhabits this corner of the world for the next seven hundred years -- and all to pay for a bunch of granite counter-tops and flat-screen TVs.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2009/02/the-abyss-stares-back.html

[Truth2Tell]

1. Recommended.

Kunstler always nails it. Worth reading the whole thing.

[cliffordu]

2. Jimmy the K is a hard read, but he is closer to the truth than most.

And I think he's right about our lifestyle...

Free range credit is dead.

[cliffordu]

3. I'll kick this again/

[wuvuj]

4. Takes some finesse...

...to downsize and repair the house of cards while people are still living in it?

[ixion]

5. Painful though it may be, Kunstler nails it

we're staring down a dark path, and all the wishful thinking in the world will not make it go away. We could take real action, and make some real changes that would alter the landscape and even our day-to-day lives, but at this point we're treating the problem with solutions that led to the problem.

Time to think outside those small parameters pushed by the status quo pundits who continually see the 'bottom'.

This is going to be a bumpy ride anyway you cut it, but there are things we can do to make it less bumpy. The question is, will we?

[Pharaoh]

6. The problem is unregulated Capitalism

and a consumer society that is literally consuming and killing the planet.....K&R

[cliffordu]

7. Yep. Precisely.

[Danascot]

8. Thanks for posting

I'm always happy to have a new communique from Jim Kunstler to read. Plus he's a resident of my town, Saratoga Springs, NY.

A couple of meaty passages:

Dear Mr. President, you are presiding over an epochal contraction, not a pause in the growth epic. Your assignment is to manage that contraction in a way that does not lead to world war, civil disorder or both. Among other things, contraction means that all the activities of everyday life need to be downscaled including standards of living, ranges of commerce, and levels of governance. "Consumerism" is dead. Revolving credit is dead -- at least at the scale that became normal the last thirty years. The wealth of several future generations has already been spent and there is no equity left there to re-finance.

<snip>

No good, in fact, will come of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which is exactly what the Obama program is starting to look like. In the folder marked "unsustainable" you can file most of the artifacts, usufructs, habits, and expectations of recent American life: suburban living, credit-card spending, Happy Motoring, vacations in Las Vegas, college education for the masses, and cheap food among them. All these things are over. The public may suspect as much, but they can't admit it to themselves, and political leadership has so far declined to speak the truth about it for them -- in short, to form a useful consensus that will allow us to move forward effectively. One of the sad paradoxes of politics is that democracies do not seem very good at disciplining their citizens' behavior. The wish to please voters and the influence of campaign money overwhelm even leaders with mature instincts.

Vocabulary word of the day: usufructs