[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Under a Flourescent Moon

[Bill Totten]

Clusterfuck Nation

by Jim Kunstler

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

www.kunstler.com (March 29 2009)


Mr Obama heads to Europe now where official hostility is rising against
the Anglo-American method of pounding monetary sand down the rat-holes
of "non-performing" debt, bankrupt enterprise, and bubble-levitated
bonds. Our poised and charming Prez may escape personal obloquy from the
quaint old-world street folk, but most of the other G-20 policy playerz
take a dim view of the shell-and-pea games being played by the
custodians of the world's reserve currency, including front-end-loader
bank bail-outs, the shuffling of worthless securities under TARPS and
TARFS, the desperate efforts to prevent the sane re-pricing of real
estate, the cannibalizing of treasuries by the Federal Reserve, the
now-notorious hijacking of public "liquidity" injections by third
parties like Goldman Sachs, and most generally the perceived sacrifice
of everybody else's greater good for the sake of maintaining Lloyd
Blankfein's cappuccino machine.

What's going on now is nature's way of telling you that America's
standard of living has to be reduced by something between twenty and
fifty percent.  You can have it in the form of a compressive
deflationary depression, including widespread bankruptcies … or you can
have by way of inflation, in which money loses its value.  But there's
one basic qualification to this: the way down is not symmetrical with
the way up.  That is, it's really not just a matter of ratcheting down
to a standard of living half of what it was, say, in 2006, because in
the event all the various complex systems that support everyday life
enter failure mode before our society re-sets at a theoretically lower
level of equilibrium.

By this I mean our methods for getting food, for moving about the
landscape, for deploying capital, for trading and manufacturing, for
schooling, doctoring, and running public services all destabilize and,
to some degree or other, fail to deliver their contribution to normal
daily life.  Banking (capital deployment) is already mortally wounded.
It remains to be seen how this will affect the food supply half a year
ahead in the harvest system.  Capital is as big an "input" for our
method of farming as diesel fuel or fertilizers made from methane gas.
The failure of banking will combine with city and state insolvency to
crush public transit, law enforcement, fire protection, and whatever
flimsy local safety nets exist to keep the ultra-poor and helpless from
die-off.  The lowering of living standards by twenty to fifty percent
essentially eliminates all but the must critical commerce, meaning that
most of the stores in the malls and strip malls lose their customers and
shed employees, while the mall and strip mall owners lose their rents,
and the bankers lose performing commercial real estate loans. As all
this occurs, tax revenues go way down, schools can't pay their employees
or buy diesel fuel for their yellow bus fleets. More people lose the
ability to carry health insurance.  Hospital emergency rooms are
overwhelmed. Health care descends to Third World levels.  Meanwhile,
pensions are destroyed, the elderly live on dog food and ketchup ...

This is where we're headed. It could easily be worse than the 1930s,
when we still had plenty of family farms, plenty of oil, plenty of
factories in good running order, and a highly regimented population of
workers unaccustomed to luxury, leisure, and entitlement.  We've hardly
begun to see the potential political repercussions of economic disorder
now underway.  I think it will start to show in a big way not long after
Memorial Day, when the current false euphoric Wall Street rally ends in
yet another pool of tears, and the despair trickles downward. A crucial
piece of the outcome depends on what happens over at Attorney General
Eric Holder's Justice Department - which lately seems to have seceded
from the federal government.  A peeved public is going to start
wondering why the bankers and insurers have not been called in by the
criminal division to do a little 'splainin'.  As the spring yields to
summer, the Obama team's current fix-it plans are also likely to have
run out of credibility.  Mr O better be prepared to get a new game.

I spent the weekend at the yearly Aspen Institute Environmental Forum -
a confab lately devoted about equally to the energy and climate fiascos.
 It's a peculiar exercise, since major sponsors include the oil and gas
companies and the auto industry. The Saturday center-ring panel on peak
oil, for instance, was shockingly weak, led by the flack from the Shell
corporation, a charming lady, highly-skilled at blowing green smoke up
the public's ass. Even more shocking is the consensus among the
presenters and attendees - including the hotshots of climate and energy
science and the elder statespersons of environmentalism - that the
energy problem merely amounts to finding other means for running all our
cars.  The assumption that we must remain car-dependent remains
absolutely entrenched among these people who ought to know better.  Of
course, the words "public transit" were barely uttered.  It's
disappointing to find such idiocy among this particular elite.

But Sunday's departure really plunged me into the epicenter of American
idiocy - namely, the airline industry.  They've been running airplanes
out of Pitkin County, Colorado for at least fifty years, but they seem
to discover a'fresh every morning that strange winds blow through the
valley.  After jerking around absolutely everybody in the terminal for a
couple of hours with unexplained delays, the United Airlines ground crew
announced that all flights for the day were cancelled, causing a rhino
rush back out through the security checkpoints to re-booking counters.
I ended up on a bus for the Denver Airport - a five hour trip, including
twenty-miles of parking-lot quality traffic along I-70 where the jackass
Colorado DOT had closed down one eastbound lane, despite the fact that
it was Sunday and there was no work going on there.

You'd also think that after all these years, the state of Colorado might
have organized choo-choo train service from Denver into the ski valleys
of the Rockies, given how important the ski industry is to the state's
economy - and how incredibly fragile the airline service is. But that
would be too sensible for a nation determined to become the Bulgaria of
the western hemisphere.  So, instead, they get up every single morning
in Aspen and try to figure out whether commercial aviation works out
there, and half the time it doesn't.  Anyway, the Aspen Institute was
very generous in organizing the bus trek out of there, and putting up us
travelers stranded overnight in airport hotels.  Mine was some rummy
operation called the Staybridge Inn where the vaunted in-room wireless
didn't work in my room, so I write to you in a dreary little chamber off
the lobby where children are screaming from their overdoses of fry-max
and melted cheese in the only dining venue (Ruby Tuesdays) along this
massively over-scaled boulevard of chain motels.  I can easily see the
whole miserable strip becoming a ruin inside of five years as the
airline industry dies. Final note: the hotel elevator proudly declares
itself to be the German-made product of the ThyssenKrupps corporation.
America's so lame, it can't even make its own elevators anymore.

I apologize for a somewhat sloppy blog this week.  My tendencies to
insomnia are aggravated by high altitude and I am cross-eyed with
sleeplessness ...
_____

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

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2009/03/under-a-flourescent-moon.html


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