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

[Suzanne de Kuyper]

I was in the lordly, largest, most expensive mall north of Detroit in May
2008 on a Wednesday early evening when usually the vast spaces would be
full.  Gasoline prices were where US gas prices were not supposed to be, a
$3.48 a gallon, Americans not knowing that gas prices in Old Europe were the
equivalent of $8.00.  The mall was empty but for sales people, security
people.  Before going for the bus back to Detroit I hung out with the
information desk lady musing about the future of the kingly marble and glass
and polished brass clad spaces.  Loving escalators I silently mourned they
would be quiet and then dismantled, trashed or stolen in parts.  I asked the
young lady whether she could agree that given the facts of oil, this whole
mall and parking spaces might be made into a set of football fields?  She
laughed and agreed.

Suzanne                                             suzannedk at gmial.com

2009/3/31 Bill Totten <shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp>

>
> 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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>
>
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