James Kunstler -- World News Trust
March 30, 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 20 and 50 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 20 to 50 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 2008 novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available in paperback at all booksellers.
LINK: Clusterfuck Nation