[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Bottom

[Bill Totten]

Clusterfuck Nation

by Jim Kunstler

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

www.kunstler.com (May 04 2009)


Euphoria managed to out-run swine flu last week as the epidemic-du-jour,
with "consumer" confidence jumping and the big bank stocks nudging up.
The H1N1 virus fizzled for now, at least in terms of kill ratio, though
we're warned it might boomerang in the fall with a vengeance. No one was
surprised to see Chrysler roll over like a possum on a county highway,
but the memory of their muscle cars will linger on like a California
surfing song. Here in the northeast, where Sundays are not spent at the
Nascar oval, the spring foliage reached the tenderly explosive stage and
it was hard to feel bad about anything.

For now, the "bottom" is in - that is, the bottom of this society's
ability to process reality. It may continue for a month of so, even
after the "stress test" for banks is finally let out of the massage
parlor with a "happy ending". But events are underway that are beyond
the command of personalities. We're done "doing business" in all the
ways that we've been used to, but we just can't get with the new
program. Let's count the ways:

1. The revolving credit economy is over. It's over because we can't
increase energy inputs to the system, which is one way of saying "peak
oil". Of course hardly anybody believes this right now because the price
of oil crashed nine months ago, along with global manufacturing and
trade. But nothing has changed on the peak oil scene - except perhaps
that ever more new oil projects have been cancelled for lack of
financing, which will boomerang on us (even if swine flu doesn't) in the
form of much lower future oil production. In any case, the credit fiesta
is over, and the "consumer" economy with it, because industrial growth
as we have known it is over. It's over globally, too, though all regions
of the world will not experience its demise the same way at the same rate.

The Asian nations may swap things around a while longer but China is
basically screwed. They have less oil left than we have (which is
saying, not much at all) and they won't corner the rest of the global
oil market without starting World War Three. Meanwhile, they're running
out of water and food. Good luck becoming the next global hegemon. Oh,
and Japan imports ninety percent of its energy; India over eighty
percent. Fuggeddabowdit.

Credit will not vanish everywhere overnight - even in the USA - because
it is not distributed equally everywhere. But it will vanish in layers,
and here in the USA a very broad layer of the lower and middle classes
are now losing their access to it in one way or another - personally, in
small business - and they will never get it back. Anyone who intends to
thrive in the years just ahead had better plan on doing it on the basis
of accounts receivable - and what they receive might not even
necessarily come in the form of US dollars. It may come in the form of
gold or silver or in the promise of reciprocal services rendered.

This has enormous implications for two of the items in which our
credit-dispensing operations are most deeply vested: houses and cars.
Unfortunately, these are exactly the things that economic life has been
based on for decades in our nation, which leads to the next categories:


2. The suburban living arrangement is over, along with all its
accessories and furnishings. Taken as "all of a piece", the suburban
expansion was one sixty-year-long orgasm of hypertrophy. We did it
because we could. We won a world war and threw a party. We had lots of
cheap land and cheap oil. It made lots of people lots of money and all
its usufructs have become embedded in our national identity to the
dangerous degree that the loss of them will provoke a kind of national
psychotic breakdown. In fact, it already has. The completely unrealistic
expectation that we can resume this way of life is proof of it.

The immediate problem is that we can't build anymore of it. The next
problem will be the failure of the stuff that already exists. The first
stage of that is now palpable in the mortgage foreclosure fiasco and,
just beginning now, the tanking of malls, strip centers, office parks
and other commercial property investments. The latter will accelerate
and become visible very quickly as retail tenants bug out and weeds
start growing where the Chryslers and Pontiacs once parked. The next
stage, which involves large demographic shifts in how we inhabit the
landscape, has not quite gotten underway.


3. The Happy Motoring fiesta is over. You'd think that with Chrysler
crawling into the bankruptcy court, and GM just weeks away from the same
terminal ceremony, the news media would begin to suspect that the
foundation of everyday life in this country was cracking. Instead, all
we hear is blather about "market share" shifting to Toyota. News flash:
not only will we make fewer automobiles in the USA, but Americans will
buy far fewer cars made anywhere. We'll keep the current fleet moving a
while longer, but when it's too beat to repair, we won't be changing it
out for a new fleet - despite all the fantasies about hybrids,
plug-and-drive electrics, and so on. The masses will be too broke to buy
these things. What's more, they will be very resentful of the shrinking
economic "elite" who can afford them. And, anyway, our roads and
highways are destined to fall apart very quickly because there is no way
we can sustain the necessary rate of normal maintenance. Meanwhile, we
remain completely un-serious about public transit - even about fixing
the vestiges that still exist. The airline industry, of course, will be
toast inside of five years.


4. Our food production system is approaching crisis. There's no way we
can continue the petro-agriculture system of farming and the Cheez
Doodle and Pepsi Cola diet that it services. The public is absolutely
zombified in the face of this problem - perhaps a result of the diet
itself. President Obama and Agriculture Secretary Vilsack have not given
a hint that they understand the gravity of the situation. It is probably
one of those unfortunate events of history that can only impress a
society in the form of a crisis. It also happens to be one of the few
problems we face that public policy could affect sharply and broadly -
if we underwrote the reactivation of smaller, local farm operations
instead of shoveling money to giant "agribusiness" (or Citibank, or
Goldman Sachs, or AIG ... ). I maintain that this may be the year that
the crisis gets our attention, because capital is suddenly harder to get
than fossil-fuel-based fertilizer.


All these epochal discontinuities present themselves, for the moment, as
a season of muted "hope" and general apathy. The days are suddenly mild.
We've resumed old and happy habits of grilling meat outdoors and
motoring to those remaining places that were not blanketed with
franchised food huts and discount malls. We have a new, charming
president with an appealing family. Newly-minted dollars are flowing to
the "shovel-ready". The new bad news is less bad than the old bad news
(or seems to be). And the year just past has been such a bummer that our
hard-wired human nature tells us that good things must be just around
the corner.

Personally, I think a lot of good things await us, but not the ones
we're expecting - not a return to buying slurpees on credit cards. It
will be very salutary to leave behind the junk empire we've accumulated
and move into an epoch of quality and purpose. For the moment, though,
our hopes reside elsewhere.

_____

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

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2009/05/te-bottom.html


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