So many forces are arrayed against a return to the previous
"normal" that we will be lucky, in another eighteen months, to still
find ourselves speaking English and celebrating Christmas
James Kunstler -- World News Trust
April 13, 2009 -- It's a curious symptom of the consensus trance zombifying the American
public and its auditors in the media that something like a "recovery"
is now deemed to be underway.
And, as events compel me to repeat in
this space, it begs the question: recovery to what? To Wall Street
booking stupendous profits by laundering "risk" out of bad loans with
new issues of tranche-o-matic securitized paper? This I doubt, since
there isn't a pension fund left from San Jose to Bratislava that would
touch this stuff with a stick, even if it could be turned out in
collector's editions of boxed sets.
Does it mean that American
"consumers" (so-called) are awaited momentarily in the flat-screen TV
sales parlors with their credit cards fanned-out like poker hands,
ready for "action?" Not too likely with massive non-performance out in
cardholder-land, and half the nation's electronics inventory wending
its way onto Craig's List. Are we expecting more asteroid belts of new
suburbs carved in the loamy outlands of Dallas and Minneapolis,
complete with new highway strips of Big Box shopping and Chuck E.
Cheeses? Go to banking's intensive care unit and inquire (if you can)
among the flat-lining production home-builders and the real estate
investment trusts on life support when they expect to rev up the heavy
equipment.
The idea that we're about to resume the insane
behavior that induced the current epochal malaise of economy is so
absurd it will only be heard in the faculty dining halls of the Ivy
League. And if America is not picking up where it left off eighteen
months ago -- the orgy of spending future claims on wealth unlikely to
accrue -- then what is our destiny? Based on what's out there in the
organs of public thinking, it seems that we don't want to think about
it.
So many forces are arrayed against a return to the previous
"normal" that we will be lucky, in another eighteen months, to still
find ourselves speaking English and celebrating Christmas.
What's "out
there" is a panorama of mutually reinforcing critical problems
pertaining to how we live on this continent. Like the obesity, heart
disease, and diabetes that plague the public, these problems are
disorders of lifestyle habits and the only possible "cure" is a
comprehensive revision of lifestyle. With the onset of spring weather
and the cheez doodles and monster truck rallies and Nascar tailgate
barbeques and the drive-in beer emporiums all beckoning, can the public
public shift its attention from these infantile preoccupations to
saving its own ass?
So far, the most striking piece of the
economic fiasco is the absence of any galvanizing spirit among the
millions getting crushed in the tragic unwind of our relations with
money. It will be interesting to see, for instance, if there is any
uproar over the evolving story of Goldman Sachs's latest raid on the U.S.
Treasury, after booking billions in taxpayer-funded payouts funneled
through AIG, based on double-hedged credit default swaps. Such magic
tricks are understandably hard to follow, but a dozen-or-so federal
attorneys with a middling background in differential calculus might
suss out the trail that leads from Ben Bernanke's work station to Lloyd
Blankfein's cappuccino machine.
Something similar may be
said in regard to revelations last week of White House economic advisor
Larry Summers' connection with a number of hedge funds shoveling
millions into his deep pockets for showing up once a week to cheerlead
their "innovations" -- not to mention his shadowy visits to the Goldman
Sachs gravy train even after he signed onto the Obama campaign. As long
as the stock markets seem to rally -- no matter what else is really
going on in America -- nobody will pay much attention to these
disgusting irregularities.
Since it is that time of year, and
I am haunting the gardening shop, one can't fail to notice the many
styles of pitchforks for sale. My guess is that the current mood of
public paralysis will dissolve in a blur of blood and spittle sometime
between Memorial Day and July Fourth, even with Nascar in full swing,
and the mushrooming ranks of the unemployed lost in raptures of engine
noise and fried cornmeal. It doesn't take too many determined,
pissed-off people to create a lot of mischief in a complex society.
On
the agenda in the second quarter of '09 are ominous rumblings in the
oil and food sectors. Half a year of cratered oil prices have decimated
the oil industry and we're driving at 100-miles-an-hour straight off a
cliff into a new kind of supply crisis -- even if industrial production
and global exports remain moribund. So many drilling rigs are being
decommissioned that the oil industry itself looks like it's preparing
for its own death, investment in exploration and discovery has withered
with the credit markets, and the world may never recover from the year
long hiccup in oil industry activity -- translation: peak oil is biting
back now with a vengeance. Its peakness will look peakier and the
yawning arc of depletion beyond will look steeper and pose a threat to
every globalized and continental-scale enterprise in the known world.
So
many dire elements are ranging around our food production system (i.e.
farming), from widespread drought and water table depletion to "input"
shortages (especially fertilizers) to sickness in credit availability,
that we're all one bad harvest away from something that will make
Pieter Bruegel-the-elder's "Triumph of Death" look like Vanity Fair's
annual Oscar Party in comparison.
Barack Obama, charming as he
is, had better drop his pretensions about kick-starting the old
consumer economy, fire the Wall Street clowns and parasites who are
running that futile exercise, and start preparing a U.S. Lifeboat Economy
aimed at reducing the scale and scope of our outlays so we can survive
the coming siege of austerity. Meanwhile, I'm glad that he finally got
a dog for the White House, because the President knows full-well where
to turn in Washington if you want some genuine love and affection.
{mosimage} My 2008 novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available in paperback at all booksellers.