[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Campaign Blues

[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 (March 03 2008)


While it's gratifying to watch Hillary Clinton melt back into her senate
seat - in the process foiling the ascent of Emperor Bill the 1st - one
can't help but feel that that the contest for president is taking place
in a different "world-line" (shall we say) than the melt-down of the US
financial sector, and with it, the US economy.

Whoever wins on November 5 will wake up to preside over a different
America than the schematic one he was debating about during the
primaries and the election. The long campaign will beat a path straight
into the long emergency. The new president will inherit a wrecked
banking system, an economy in freefall, a wobbling world oil market, and
an American public extremely ticked off by its startling, sudden
impoverishment. (This is apart from whatever melodramas spool out on the
geopolitical scene.)

The president-elect will quickly realize that the number one problem is
not that Americans can't afford health care - it's that they can't
afford anything, because their income is evaporating in terms of both
lost jobs and a dollar that is racing toward worthlessness. They'll be
hard put to pay for food and gasoline, nevermind Grandma's emphysema
treatments. They will be walking away from home ownership - or yanked
kicking and screaming by default and repo - and any government scheme
devised to abridge their mortgage contracts will only undermine basic
contract law that has made mortgage lending a credible thing in the
first place. And that too, of course, would redound straight to a real
estate sector already in price free-fall, with no one willing or able to
think about buying a house.

As Obama and McCain go at it through the next eight months, they will
likely focus on our situation in Iraq. (Calling it a "war" now is
imprecise.) As merely one commentator among thousands, I'm not satisfied
that either one of the contenders has defined his position on this
coherently. Obama is disposed to get the US military out of there as
quickly as possible. He's right that the sheer awful cost of the
adventure is one big factor in wrecking US finances while it erodes our
standing in the world. But with our Iraq garrison shut down, he'd better
be prepared for a further breakdown in Middle East stability and the oil
markets that depend on it - meaning, the basis of American life for four
generations, dependable oil imports, will sharply end. That would
accelerate the disorderly abandonment of our massive misinvestment in
suburban living, and also ramp up the anger and resentment of the public
grieving over its lost entitlements.

McCain's contrasting hundred-year plan does not take into account the
severe impoverishment and exhaustion of the military itself, not to
mention the overall purpose of the adventure - to keep suburban life and
all its accessories running in the homeland - which is an exercise in
futility under any terms. McCain would have to confront the terrible
paradoxes of the war, namely that thousands of legs have been blown off
for the sake of WalMart, which company will be hemorrhaging customers
anyway, as incomes wilt, at the same time that WalMart's own operating
system - the "warehouse on wheels" - surrenders to the reality of five
or six dollar-a-gallon diesel fuel. In any case, the implosion of the US
economy during the next eight months will overshadow whatever we decide
to do in Iraq, and that cratering will be laid directly at the feet of
the Republican party. If the party survives that, which I doubt, it
would a long time before anybody trusted it again.

Whoever wakes up as the next president on November 5 will have to
preside over the comprehensive reorganization of American life. The big
question is whether he can persuade the public to let go of its sunk
costs, and all the sheer stuff that represents, and move ahead in a
unified way that doesn't end up tearing the nation apart. The danger is
that the public will want to mount a kind of last stand effort to defend
a way of life that has no future under any circumstances, and they will
ask the president to lead that last stand.

To avoid that deadly outcome, the new president will have to be equipped
with a realistic vision of what this society can actually do to survive
the discontinuities that circumstances present. This will require him to
confront the prevailing delusion that the US can become "energy
independent" in the sense that we can run WalMart on something other
than oil from foreign lands. The new president would have to carefully
restate American expectations and goals - for instance, not to keep all
the cars running at all costs, but to get us living in places where
driving is not mandatory. I'm concerned that the American people will
hate the new president if he tells them the truth: that an old way of
life is over and a new one has to begin now. We're about to find out how
much "change" the public can really stand.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/

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