[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Poverty of Imagination

[Macdonald Stainsby]

Kunstler is a rank, dyed in the wool Zionist. Anyone who has shown such 
a paucity of being able to read or comprehend basic facts-- never mind 
humanity-- deserves to never be read again.

This creepy racist shitbag is not worth our time.


Bill Totten wrote:
> Clusterfuck Nation
> 
> by Jim Kunstler
> 
> Comment on current events by the author of
> The Long Emergency (2005)
> 
> www.kunstler.com (February 09 2009)
> 
> 
> Venturing out each day into this land of strip malls, freeways, office
> parks, and McHousing pods, one can't help but be impressed at how
> America looks the same as it did a few years ago, while seemingly
> overnight we have become another country. All the old mechanisms that
> enabled our way of life are broken, especially endless revolving credit,
> at every level, from household to business to the banks to the US Treasury.
> 
> Peak energy has combined with the diminishing returns of
> over-investments in complexity to pull the "kill switch" on our vaunted
> "way of life" - the set of arrangements that we won't apologize for or
> negotiate. So, the big question before the nation is: do we try to
> re-start the whole smoking, creaking hopeless, futureless machine? Or do
> we start behaving differently?
> 
> The attempted re-start of revolving debt consumerism is an exercise in
> futility. We've reached the limit of being able to create additional
> debt at any level without causing further damage, additional
> distortions, and new perversities of economy (and of society, too). We
> can't raise credit card ceilings for people with no ability make monthly
> payments. We can't promote more mortgages for people with no income. We
> can't crank up a home-building industry with our massive inventory of
> unsold, and over-priced houses built in the wrong places. We can't ramp
> back up the blue light special shopping fiesta. We can't return to the
> heyday of Happy Motoring, no matter how many bridges we fix or how many
> additional ring highways we build around our already-overblown and
> over-sprawled metroplexes. Mostly, we can't return to the now-complete
> "growth" cycle of "economic expansion". We're done with all that.
> History is done with our doing that, for now.
> 
> So far - after two weeks in office - the Obama team seems bent on a
> campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs, to attempt to do all
> the impossible things listed above. Mr Obama is not the only one, of
> course, who is invoking the quest for renewed "growth". This is a tragic
> error in collective thinking. What we really face is a comprehensive
> contraction in our activities, especially the scale of our activities,
> and the pressing need to readjust the systems of everyday life to a
> level of decreased complexity.
> 
> For instance, the myth that we can become "energy independent" and yet
> remain car-dependent is absurd. In terms of liquid fuels, we're simply
> trapped. We import two-thirds of the oil we use and there is absolutely
> no chance that drill-drill-drilling (or any other scheme) will change
> that. The public and our leaders can not face the reality of this. The
> great wish for "alternative" liquid fuels (bio fuels, algae excreta)
> will never be anything more than a wish at the scales required, and the
> parallel wish to keep all our cars running by other means - hydrogen
> fuel cells, electric motors - is equally idle and foolish. We cannot
> face the mandate of reality, which is to do everything possible to make
> our living places walkable, and connect them with public transit. The
> stimulus bills in congress clearly illustrate our failure to understand
> the situation.
> 
> The attempt to restart "consumerism" will be equally disappointing. It
> was a manifestation of the short peak energy decades of history, and now
> that we're past peak energy, it's over. That seventy percent of the
> economy is over, especially the part that allowed people to buy stuff
> with no money. From now on people will have to buy stuff with money they
> earn and save, and they will be buying a lot less stuff. For a while, a
> lot of stuff will circulate through the yard sales and Craigslist, and
> some resourceful people will get busy fixing broken stuff that still has
> value. But the other infrastructure of shopping is toast, especially the
> malls, the strip malls, the real estate investment trusts that own it
> all, many of the banks that lent money to the REITs, the chain-stores
> and chain eateries, of course, and, alas, the non-chain mom-and-pop
> boutiques in these highway-oriented venues.
> 
> Washington is evidently seized by panic right now. I don't know anyone
> who works in the White House, but I must suppose that they have learned
> in two weeks that these systems are absolutely tanking, that the
> previous way of life that everybody was so set on not apologizing for
> has reached the end of the line. We seem to be learning a new and
> interesting lesson: that even a team that promises change is actually
> petrified of too much change, especially change that they can't really
> control.
> 
> The argument about "change" during the election was sufficiently vague
> that no one was really challenged to articulate a future that wasn't,
> materially, more-of-the-same. I suppose the Obama team may have thought
> they would only administer it differently than the Bush team - but
> basically life in the USA would continue being about all those trips to
> the mall, and the cubicle jobs to support that, and the family safaris
> to visit Grandma in Lansing, and the vacations at Sea World, and
> Skipper's $20,000 college loan, and Dad's yearly junket to Las Vegas,
> and refinancing the house, and rolling over this loan and that loan ...
> and that has all led to a very dead end in a dark place.
> 
> If this nation wants to survive without an intense political convulsion,
> there's a lot we can do, but none of it is being voiced in any corner of
> Washington at this time. We have to get off of petro-agriculture and
> grow our food locally, at a smaller scale, with more people working on
> it and fewer machines. This is an enormous project, which implies change
> in everything from property allocation to farming methods to new social
> relations. But if we don't focus on it right away, a lot of Americans
> will end up starving, and rather soon. We have to rebuild the railroad
> system in the US, and electrify it, and make it every bit as good as the
> system we once had that was the envy of the world. If we don't get
> started on this right away, we're screwed. We will have tremendous
> trouble moving people and goods around this continent-sized nation. We
> have to reactivate our small towns and cities because the metroplexes
> are going to fail at their current scale of operation. We have to
> prepare for manufacturing at a much smaller (and local) scale than the
> scale represented by General Motors.
> 
> The political theater of the moment in Washington is not focused on any
> of this, but on the illusion that we can find new ways of keeping the
> old ways going. Many observers have noted lately how passive the
> American public is in the face of their dreadful accelerating losses.
> It's a tragic mistake to tell them that they can have it all back again.
> We'll see a striking illustration of "phase change" as the public mood
> goes from cow-like incomprehension to grizzly bear-like rage. Not only
> will they discover the impossibility of getting back to where they were,
> but they will see the panicked actions of Washington drive what remains
> of our capital resources down a rat hole.
> 
> A consensus is firming up on each side of the "stimulus" question,
> largely along party lines - simply those who are for it and those who
> are against it, mostly by degrees. Nobody in either party - including
> supposed independents such as Bernie Sanders or John McCain, not to
> mention President Obama - has a position for directing public resources
> and effort at any of the things I mentioned above: future food security,
> future travel-and-transport security, or the future security of livable,
> walkable dwelling places based on local networks of economic
> interdependency. This striking poverty of imagination may lead to change
> that will tear the nation to pieces.
> 
> _____
> 
> My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at
> all booksellers.
> 
> http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2009/02/poverty-of-imagination.html
> 
> 
> TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
> on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
> essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/
> 
> 
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