[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Wobble Time

[Bill Totten]

Clusterfuck Nation

by James Howard Kunstler

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

www.kunstler.com (July 13 2009)


The cat coming out of the bag this week - a frazzled, flaming, rabid,
death-dealing cat - is the news that Goldman Sachs will announce
impressive second-quarter profits, and set aside $18 billion or so for
employee bonuses averaging $600,000 per head (though, of course, not
evenly distributed among them). There probably are not fifty-three
people in the USA who can explain how this development figures in with
last fall's bailout gift from the US treasury, or the $13 billion GS
received on the backside of US gift payments to the failed AIG
insurance company, plus the reams of necrotic securitized debt paper
rotting in the back of the GS vaults. This is a company playing with
the fire of world history.

It brings back the question, which has loomed dimly at the margins of
America's collective consciousness, as to whether we can get through
the long emergency ahead without going through a wringer of domestic
political convulsion. At this rate, sooner or later, anything
identified with wealth could become a target for the wrath of the
unemployed and foreclosed. The first rock that flies through an East
Hampton window, or the first firebomb tossed into the lobby of Goldman
Sachs Manhattan headquarters could ignite a chain of events that shoves
all economic policy out of the political arena and quickly divides
everyone at the center of power into armies out for blood.

What the nation - including President Obama - can't seem to get through
its head is that the USA has entered a period of epochal economic
contraction. Instead of growth, as measured in conventional
econometrics, we can only expect (in the best case) transformation to a
different economy within the limits of real contraction. The president
has got to stop promising renewed growth. While this would affect the
perceived "standard-of-living" as measured in things like shopping mall
sales and vehicle miles driven, it would not necessarily mean
diminished "quality-of-life". It would mean different ways-of-life for
a lot of people - for instance, young adults who had expected lifetime
employment as corporate executives but who, instead, find themselves
ten years from now working at farming. We have an awful lot to get real
about.

A genuine reorganization of the US economy seems beyond the ken not
just of all US politicians but of the entire US news media and business
leadership. A wonderful example last week was the idiotic press
conference by General Motors marketing chief, Bob Lutz, who thinks he
can revive the American Dream with electric cars. (By the way, this is
pretty much the same thinking I encountered at the Aspen Environmental
Forum among the Green celebrities.)