[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Upscale

Tue Apr 1 02:59:03 MDT 2008

Clusterfuck Nation

by Jim Kunstler

Comment on current events by the author of
The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005)

www.kunstler.com (March 31 2008)

My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at
all booksellers.
http://www.worldmadebyhand.com/

Things continue to slip, slide, and shift strangely Out There.

Last Wednesday, a bunch of peeved mortgagees protesting government
favoritism in the Bear Stearns case entered the lobby of the company's
(soon-to-be-former) headquarters building in midtown Manhattan. While it
might not seem like much, I view the symbolic "penetration" of this
corporate stronghold as the very first sign of a much broader citizen
revolt against the extraordinary protections being shown to crapped-out
investment banker boyz - at the expense of millions of equally
crapped-out poor shlubs facing the default and re-po of their McDwelling
places.

Occupying an office building lobby peacefully in broad daylight is one
thing. Wait until summer gets underway and The New York Post gossip page
resumes its coverage of hijinks in the Hamptons. The executives of
Goldman Sachs, J P Morgan / Chase, and other dealers in fraudulent
securities, plus the art world and show biz glitteratti who party
together out there, might all find themselves the object of considerable
grievance and resentment as the beaching season ramps up, and the limos
roll around the charity lobster roasts, and the guests stray down the
lawns, chardonays in hand, to plot divorce from their over-leveraged
husbands ... God knows what seekers-of-vengence will be creepy-crawling
the privet plantings along Gin Lane in the crepuscular gloom, searching
for trophy wives to garrote.

Perhaps a bankrupt landscaping contractor from Lake Ronkonkoma, recently
stiffed by a hedge fund manager over the installation of a half acre of
pachysandra, will be arrested on the Wantagh Highway with blood on his
sleeves and a high-C piano wire in his pocket. The non-Hampton precincts
of Long Island, which make up more than ninety percent of the
fish-shaped appendage to New York State, will be full of angry re-po
victims, and the Hamptons lie at the very dead-end tail of the
geographical fish. Will the banker boyz attempt to flee by yacht? And
where might they escape to? Newport, Rhode Island? Labrador ... ?

I maintain, of course, that the media (and the public itself) has no
idea how quickly things might get weird in this country - or how weird
they might get.

Now bear with me while I shift gears. The past five days I went to a
pretty major environmental conference put on by the Aspen Institute in
their odd little mountain town - and nobody needs to tell me how
un-correct it was that I flew all the way out to Denver and then drove a
rent-a-car the size of a humpback whale deep into the heart of the Rocky
Mountains to attend this thing. (I assure you, I wasn't paid to go.) The
Institute grounds - which looked like the set of a 1950s Raymond Massey
movie about the future - were thick with many eminentissimos of Climate
Change (minus Al Gore) and activists in "green" politics, more
generally. The latest frightful measurements of retreating glaciers,
vanishing species, and creeping deserts were proffered and everybody was
suitably impressed by the acceleration of scary conditions facing the
human race.

Being such a formal conference, though, with the putative mission to
advance understanding and set agendas for action, a great effort was
made through the medium of panel discussions to set forth various
"initiatives" to deal with all the scariness, especially by enlisting
the agencies of the US Government - and most especially with the
prospect of a new administration sweeping out the detritus of Bush-dom
next January.

I confess I found most of these well-intentioned proposals utterly
implausible, along with their trains of hopes, wishes, and fantasies.
The main conceit is that we can keep all the normal operations of the
American Dream humming by some "non-carbon" related energy source - in
other words, run WalMart without oil, methane gas, or coal - and that
all the forces of government and capital can be marshaled to make that
happen. The secondary conceit is that they would accomplish these things
in an orderly process, harnessing "new technology", as though it were a
higher sort of school science fair.

My own opinion is that these birds have the scale issue wrong. The
exigencies of the Long Emergency imply that virtually everything
organized at the grand scale will tend to wobble and fail as the
problems of energy scarcity and climate change converge. Institutions
from the federal government to WalMart to the University of Arizona will
face increasing impotence, incompetence, and bankruptcy. Vesting our
hopes in propping up activities run at that scale is bound to be
disappointing, to say the least, and the precursor to social upheaval to
go a bit further. There's probably a lot we can do at the finer and more
modest scale, but that is not the scale that conferences like this focus
on - in particular because so many of the participants are current or
former high-up government wonks themselves. Anyway, the scale of global
distress tends, by plain inference, to invoke the wish for global
"solutions", however detached from reality they may be.

At the center of all this conferencing was the movement's lead eco-guru,
Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), located just up
Highway 82 from Aspen. Lovins's long-running emblematic project with
that outfit is something they call the "hyper-car", a car that gets such
supernaturally great mileage that it will save the human race's
threatened Happy Motoring program from extinction. The hyper-car
program, which RMI still trumpets to this day, has, of course, the
unintended consequence of promoting future car dependency - which is
about the last thing that America needs - but that hasn't prevented RMI
from pushing it. Beyond that, Lovins's RMI program for America resembles
an actuarial exercise in "carbon credits" and other statistics-based
fantasies aimed at inducing theoretically rational behavior among the
WalMart executives (and "greening" up WalMart has been another of RMI's
consulting projects - I'm not kidding).

Here lies my third dissent from what I heard at the conference: since
America is bankrupting itself so comprehensively at every level, the
wished-for "funding" for the green rescue program will not be there in
any case.  Capital itself, as represented by Wall Street, is flying to
pieces this year as its stock-in-trade of paper certificates loses
legitimacy in the face of the overwhelming fact that the society behind
that paper will be decreasingly capable of producing surplus wealth -
which is what capital is. The unwind of "positions" now underway among
the big bankz is the process of previously anticipated capital
accumulation vanishing down a black hole. It will be gone forever.

This is the year we find that out. Bear Stearns was not the only sick
puppy in the kennel. When another one wobbles and crashes, will the
Federal Reserve step in again and accept its worthless CDO paper as
collateral on another $30 billion loan, and another, and another, and so
on? And will the individual mortgage default homeowner shlubs just watch
all this go down on CNBC without any action beyond "penetrating" the
lobby of a Manhattan skyscraper? I don't think so. What goes down in the
Hamptons will go down in Aspen, too.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/03/upscale.html

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