[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Where We're At

[Bill Totten]

Clusterfuck Nation

by Jim Kunstler

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

www.kunstler.com (July 07 2008)


Every time I saw a car towing a motorboat this holiday weekend, I
wondered what was going through the head of the towee. Did they have a
sense that darkness was falling on their careers in motor sports? Did
they have an inkling that an oil-and-gas crisis is upon us and just not
give a shit? Or were they just going through the motions, following some
implacable rote programming induced by, say, forty-odd years of TV
addiction and a diet based on corn-syrup byproducts?

The holiday to me was a creepy hiatus from an ever more desperate
reality overtaking the nation like a miasma. Meanwhile, the mainstream
media's ongoing narrative has gotten stuck in the moronic groove of
"drill drill drill". The belief of people like Larry Kudlow of CNBC and
uber-mega-idiot John Stossel of ABC-News is that we could go back to
$1.50 gasoline if only congress would open the offshore exploration
areas and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This view is just plain
erroneous. Nothing we get out of these regions will come close to
offsetting the ongoing depletion of worldwide oil resources, or even
arresting our own losses.

Larry King had a particularly dreary debate Sunday night between Robert
F Kennedy, Jr, and a grab bag of "drill drill drill" advocates. Kennedy
took the position that the US could achieve a sort of energy
independence by massive deployments of wind and solar equipment. It's an
understandable wish, I suppose, but not something I view as consistent
with reality. The unfortunate part of the Larry King presentation is
that it gives the public an idea that these two fantasies are the only
possible responses to our predicament. No one is interested in changing
our current behavior.

In the background of these energy conundrums is the sickening spectacle
of the nation's fatal insolvency, which remains partially disguised by
the machinations of the Federal Reserve, using the various new loan
"windows" to maintain the illusion that the major banks have not
swindled themselves out of existence - and in doing so, caused at least
$3 trillion (so far) in capital to vanish in a black hole. This
three-card-monte game has gone on for a whole year now, and the
consequences are hitting home. No more money can be lent into existence now.

One consequence is that other nations sitting on our exported dollars
(from our massive trade deficit) have apparently decided to spend off
those dollars rather than wait for the fullblown financial collapse of
the nation issuing them. My guess is that they are spending those
dollars on oil, the primary resource of industrial economies, and that
they are prepared to outbid other contestants (including the USA) no
matter what - because they know the dollar is losing value, and that
those losses are apt to accelerate over time, and what else would they
spend them on? I suspect this is behind the rising price of oil more
than anything else - certainly more than the phantom "speculators" the
right wing is yelling about - and that behind the spending off of those
exported dollars are the geological facts of oil being a finite resource
inequitably distributed around the world.

But to get back to my prior point, things are hitting home anyway, and
with force. The US economy is crumbling because the way we conduct the
activities of daily life is insane relative to our circumstances. We've
spent sixty years ramping up a suburban living arrangement that has
suddenly entered a state of failure, and all its accessories and
furnishings are failing in concert. The far-flung McHouse tracts are
becoming both useless and worthless in the face of gasoline prices that
will never be cheap again. The strip malls and office "parks" are
following the residential real estate off a cliff. The retail tenants of
all those places are hemorrhaging customers who have maxed out every
last credit card. The lack of business is now leading to substantial
layoffs. The airline industry is dying and will probably cease to exist
in its familiar form in 24 months. The trucking industry is dying,
threatening the entire just-in-time distribution system of things that
even people with little money to spend still need, like food.

These conditions will now get a lot worse, no matter whether the banks
continue to conceal their problems. All of it leads to an inflection
point that coincides with the November election. By then, I expect that
quite a few banks will be toast, job layoffs will rise spectacularly,
foreclosures and bankruptcies will be raging across the land, and
homeowners north of the magnolia belt will be shattered by the cost of
staying warm this winter.

All this hardship and woe will be blamed on the Republican party. It may
actually kill off the party. Political parties do go out of business in
American history, and this one deserves to die - with its aggressive
no-nothingism, its avaricious, punitive religious extremism (the
religious part often being fake), its stunning inattention to financial
malfeasance in areas under its direct supervision, and its gross
incompetent mismanagement of the nation's strategic interests.

That said, I will feel a little sorry for Mr Obama if he gets to the
White House. He'll have to find a gentle way to tell the truth to the
people who elected him, people who will be suffering mightily, and who
will be very sore about their losses. He'll have to tell them that the
previous "release" of the American Dream software is obsolete, and the
new version will require a whole lot more of them in the way of earnest
effort, delayed gratification, and revised expectations.

There's a whole lot we can do to greet the new circumstances awaiting
us, but the one thing we can't afford to do is put all our efforts into
keeping the current system running as is. Reality simply won't permit
it. We would squander our dwindling remaining resources trying to keep
it all going.  The next president is going to have to lead us through
the awful process of cutting our losses. So far, the debate has been
about how to avoid that.
____________________________________

My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at
all booksellers.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/07/where-were-at.html


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