[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] President's Day

[Bill Totten]

Clusterfuck Nation

by Jim Kunstler

Comment on current events by the author of
The Long Emergency (2005)

www.kunstler.com (February 16 2009)


A creepy feeling ushers in President's Day this year as the suspicion
grows that nobody in charge of anything knows what what to do next. The
usual yin-yang consensus has solidified in congress along party lines,
both equally idiotic. In the White House, Mr Obama is under excruciating
pressure to "do something" as systems unravel and economies augur into
darkness. Amid all the anxiety and raging cluelessness, one thing is
clear: we're doing everything possible to evade reality.

The reality we can't face is that one way of life is over and a new one
is waiting to be born. It's been waiting, really, since the early 1970s,
when God whacked the USA upside its head to announce that we'd outgrown
our once-stupendous domestic supply of oil. I remember those fervid
months following the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 (I covered the story as a
young newspaper reporter). The basic message was this: from now on we'll
be running this show on other people's oil so we better start doing
things differently. Back then, the not-yet-lost-in-a-fog-of-greed Baby
Boom generation rolled up its tie-dyed sleeves and got to work doing a
lot of forward-looking things: micro hydro-electric, passive solar
houses, rural homesteading, the next generation of public transit (BART,
the DC Metro), the first wave of urban gentrification ...

Then, in 1979, the Ayatollah tossed out the Shah of Iran, we got another
dose of oil problems, and a year later, President Jimmy Carter's
clear-eyed view of the oil situation as "the moral equivalent of war"
got overturned in favor of Ronald Reagan's dreadful Hollywood nostalgia
projector. As usual in times of severe social stress, the public got
delusional. Mr Reagan was very lucky. During his tenure, two of the last
great non-OPEC oil discoveries came into full production - Prudhoe Bay,
Alaska and the North Sea - and took the leverage away from the Islamic
oil nations who had been making us miserable with their threats,
embargos, price-jackings, and hostage-takings.

Americans drew the false conclusion that Ronald Reagan was an economic
genius (a similar thing happened in Great Britain with Margaret
Thatcherism). The price of oil went down steeply while they were in
office. Britain could kick back and enjoy it's last remaining industry,
banking, on a majestic cushion of energy resources. The USA resumed its
major post-war industry: suburban sprawl building. Reaganism got
elevated to the status of a religion, though it was little more than a
twisted version of Eisenhower-on-steroids. Under Reagan, WalMart
embarked on its campaign to destroy every main street economy in the
nation. The Baby Boomers came back from the land, clipped their pony
tails, discovered venture capital, real estate investment trusts,
securitization of "consumer" debt, and the Hamptons. Greed was good.
(No, really ...)

The first President Bush's Gulf War jolted the oil markets briefly, but
Saudi Arabia was demonstrably on our side in that conflict, while the
non-OPEC oil supply was goosed up by production from Mexico's giant
Cantarell field. The slight economic shudder caused by the Gulf War was
enough, though, to unseat Bush Number One in favor of the Boomer Bill
Clinton. A puzzling figure in many ways, articulate and magnetic, Bill
Clinton was hardly a reformer, surely not in terms of the national
lifestyle. He was in so many ways an exemplar of it. He'd been governor
of WalMart's home state (and his wife sat on its board of directors). He
was a pure product of the New South, the sunbelt, with its economy
literally driven by everything connected to cars - new suburbs, malls,
fast food huts, Nascar. He wasn't about to pull a Jimmy Carter and try
to prepare the people for some harsh realities.

Really nobody saw what was going on during the Clinton years. The public
was sleepwalking in a Martha Stewart nesting fantasy. Clinton was as
lucky as Reagan. The only geopolitical conflict he faced was the Balkan
gang-war that attended the collapse of Yugoslavia. Baby Boomer greed
went into overdrive during the Clinton years as the former hippies hit
their mid-life career strides, epitomized in billionaire-worship and the
eventual money-grubbing book deals both Clintons made on departure. Does
anyone remember Mr Clinton saying, even once, that an economy based on
suburban sprawl building and car dependency might not be such a good
thing? Of course not. Under Clinton, the SUV became our new national
bird. The price of oil flat-out crashed while Clinton was in office,
sinking to the $10-a-barrel range by the time he handed over the White
House keys to Bush Number Two.

Poor dim "W" rode his generation's last wave of cultural inertia into
two terms as little more than custodian of things set into motion by
others years before. Reality was shifting starkly "out there" but "W",
raised in the protective globe of great wealth, coddled in made-to-order
business deals, surrounded by political triumphalists and Jesus Jokers,
couldn't see through the brush-piles in his mind. (Maybe it was all that
cocaine from the years before.) He paid lip service to a murky notion
called "energy independence", but to him that just meant finding a
home-grown way to maintain extreme car dependency and all its perilous
usufructs. The 9/11 tragedy allowed him to pretend to be a
man-of-action, but as the various wars and occupations ground on, "W"
more or less disappeared into the deep groove of his own limited
programming.

During those years, more than a few things happened to inform the
American people - not all of whom were dim, of course - what was up. For
one, a cohort of senior geologists retired out of service to the oil
industry and started publishing their own dark thoughts about the
world's energy future. The discussion of these matters spread to the
internet, where it grew in clarity and insight. We began to understand,
for instance, the connection between our energy predicament (peak oil,
so-called), and the growing parallel fiasco in hypertrophic debt
creation that was driving the banking system and threatening to wreck it.

Now we've arrived at the moment of wreckage. Meanwhile, Barack Obama
sailed into the White House on a tide of "hope" for "change". The change
was unspecified, by both Mr Obama and the general public (and the news
media that audits its thinking). What is dogging many of us who
supported Mr Obama is the delayed entrance of much-vaunted change. At
this moment of "stimulus" and TARP-II, it seems to have been about a
desperate attempt to preserve the hypertrophic debt economy of "miracle"
mortgages, blue-light-special shopping on credit cards, and endless
happy motoring at all costs. And by "all costs" I mean literally
bankrupting our society at every level to keep on living as if it were
still 1999. This naturally alarms those of us who perceive a need for
more drastic reprogramming in American life.

Mr Obama is not dim. The euphoria that attended his election was largely
about acquiring a leader of first-rate intelligence and sensibility,
compared to his lamentable predecessor. I like to think that Mr Obama
really does know what's up - that "change" means we have to live a lot
differently, not mount a campaign to sustain the unsustainable. I
suspect that President Obama has learned over the last several weeks
that the nation's banking system and economy - indeed, the whole world's
- are in way worse shape than anyone imagined before January 20. He is
faced with the immediate crushing problem of appearing to do something
while a tsunami of catastrophic debt deleveraging sweeps away the first
outlier nations and their economies and bears down on the G-7. I suspect
that in a few weeks, or possibly even a few days, Mr Obama will have to
start announcing all kinds of new and more drastic measures that will
shock the stunned American public - things like bank holidays,
nationalizations, possibly even dollar devaluation.

As I've said more than once, I believe this basically honest and
intelligent president will have to take on the role of the nation's
hand-holding camp counselor or school teacher. When the time comes that
he assumes this role, I think he'll do it pretty well, even though great
pain and misery will be abroad in this land.

_____

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/presidents-day.html


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