James Howard Kunstler: Obama, Dems, Pubs oblivious to the real problem

[The_Trouvere]

Reducing tax rates increases revenues. But that seldom happens in a vacuum. Congress can't curb its insatiable lust for spending, so any revenue increases keep getting dwarfed by spending increases. That's not the fault of the tax rate reductions.

If reducing prices didn't increase revenues, then retail stores would never have sales.

Congress spends more because those who vote for them want the government to help them get through life. There is nothing unusual, or wrong with that. Europeans expect far more from their governments, and get more.

 

[The_Trouvere]

Second, being in a large city typically means you're closer to the crime hotspots; plus there's the pollution, and the ease by which a suitcase nuke could wipe out everyone. That, and a city is the LAST place you want to be when the Zombie Apocalypse happens.

The way to deal with crime is to put more criminals in prison, keep them there longer, and treat them harsher. The Soviet Union demonstrated that a prison system can be run at a profit to the state. A lot of people in the United States are useless, worthless, and dangerous. There is plenty of labor intensive work for them to do that is too painful and dangerous for anyone to be willing to do it.

 

[The_Trouvere]

I'm cool with that as long as incoming residents receive FREE 9mm pistols to defend themselves against the urban thugs who've settled there for generations

Look at my comment #52.

 

[KingOrfeo]

The way to deal with crime is to put more criminals in prison, keep them there longer, and treat them harsher.

The U.S. already has the world's highest incarceration rate. It doesn't seem to be working.

 

[KingOrfeo]

This week's Clusterfuck:

One Lump Or Two?

By James Howard Kunstler
on August 30, 2010 9:38 AM

Here come the Corn Pone Nazis!

Fox News entertainer, former drug addict, and professional weeper Glenn Beck took center stage at the Lincoln Memorial exactly forty-seven years to the day after Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech for a rally dedicated to "restoring honor," which is tea party code for the otherwise unutterable idea: get that nigger out of the White House! (despite the attendance of a few African-American shills on the scene).

Eighty-seven thousand disoriented citizens lined the DC Mall reflecting pool and adjoining lawns to witness Beck overstep his role as a television clown and don the mantle of an evangelist-savior battling the dark forces working insidiously to put the America of WalMart, Walt Disney World, Nascar, and Burger King into the Collapsed Society Hall of Fame -- where it's heading anyway, due to the bad choices these self-same citizens made during an extraordinary bonanza era of cheap oil that is now drawing to a close whether anyone likes it or not. Naturally, Beck invoked prayer against this prospect, which is what people resort to when they don't understand what is happening to them.

Beck himself just seems to be following a career arc more than really answering "a call." The emptiness of his platitudes and the confusion of his ideas shows that he is just flexing his demagogic muscles in a moment when weepy bluster passes for heroism. Ten years ago he was a cringing drunk contemplating suicide. Then he went shopping in America's Mall of Utopias for something to believe in and found Mormonism, a "religion" dreamed up by an imaginative young man on the agricultural frontier of western New York during an earlier age of ferment which -- guess what -- coincided with a decade of economic turbulence. (Anyone interested in the bizarre subject is advised to read Fawn Brodie's excellent biography of Smith, No Man Knows My History [Knoph,1945].)

Of course, what has allowed Beck to occupy center stage is the failure of rational political figures to articulate the terms of the convulsion that American society faces, brought about not by communists and other John Bircher hobgoblins but by the forces of history. The failure at the political center is a conscious one of nerve and will, of elected officials in both major parties playing desperately for advantage in defiance of the truth -- this truth being that the USA went broke trying to swindle itself into prosperity. Add to this the failure of the law to go after the swindlers, which has undermined the fundamental belief in the rule of law that enabled this society to function as well as it did previously.

Barack Obama personifies this failure these days, a politician proclaiming "change" who not only managed to change nothing, but promoted a continuation of the national self-swindling with legislation so dazzlingly prolix and complicated that no one can claim to have read either the Health Care Reform Act or the Financial Regulation bill, the two hallmarks of his tenure so far, neither of which will change anything about how we do these things. Why Mr. Obama has turned out to be such a weenie remains a mystery. Even the former communists at Russia Today laugh at the idea that he is a "communist" or a "socialist" and so do I. He certainly appears to be hostage of the more malign forces in society these days -- the medical insurance racket, the too-big-to-fail banks, the multi-national corporations. But I don't believe it's because he wants to suck up to them, or join their country clubs when his current job ends.

My own guess is that he's been informed that the system is so fragile that if he dares to disturb even one teensy-weensy part of it -- for instance, by throwing some executives from Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, et cetera, into federal prison -- that said system will fly to pieces in a fortnight. So Obama's main task for a year and a half has been to desperately apply baling wire and duct tape to the banking system while telling fibs to the public about a wished-for recovery to a prior state. Unfortunately that prior state is the ecstasy of a self-swindle in the moments before it unravels... the sublime feeling of having gotten something wonderful for nothing. We're beyond that now and nothing on the age-old shelf of nostrums, spells, prayers, and miracle-cures will avail to bring that moment back, though the public does not know this.

This is what allows a faker like Glenn Beck to shine. The masses still truly believe that prayer will save them from bankruptcy, foreclosure, penury, the loss of status, and the cut-off of precious air-conditioning, so Glenn steps onto a national monument like an Aztec priest ascending the Pyramid of Huitzilopochtli to soothe the angry god with worshipful incantations, and incidentally maybe a few dozen sacrificial hearts cut out -- just as the tea-bagger right-wing glorifies the sacrifices of US soldiers blown up by roadside bombs for the sake of American military adventuring in lost causes like the war to turn Afghanistan into a functioning western-style democracy.

Glenn Beck's sidekick nowadays, Sarah Palin, is exactly the kind of corn pone Hitler that America deserves: a badly-educated, child-like, war-mongering opportunist easily manipulated by backstage extremist billionaires who think they don't have enough money yet. Sarah Palin is going to run for president in 2012. In the process she'll turn the sad remnants of the Republican party into a suicide cult, but she might just get elected and you can kiss the 230-year-long experiment in representative government goodbye for good.

In the meantime, the financial markets are getting ready to puke, the housing market has yet a million frauds left to unwind, the commercial real estate and retail sectors are crashing, the projects in Afghanistan, and Iraq, too (despite the current hype about the end of the combat mission there), are set to suck a few billion a day out of the system, indefinitely, and the season leading into the holidays is taking shape as a major amplification of all the converging clusterfucks that make these such interesting times. The tea-bagger faction will only get more desperately crazy as a result.

The bigger mystery in all this -- if I may perhaps engage in some nostalgia of my own -- is: what happened to reasonable, rational, educated people of purpose in this country to drive them into such burrow of cowardice that they can't speak the truth, or act decisively, or even defend themselves against such a host of vicious morons in a time of troubles?

 

[rosco rathbone]

I read his "World Made By Hand" not long ago. Good stuff.

 

[KingOrfeo]

I read his "World Made By Hand" not long ago. Good stuff.

There's a sequel out: The Witch of Hebron. (I haven't read it yet.)

 

[RightField]

Your fix has a proven success record for people who already have a lot of money and access to the kind of networks of people who support each other in sustaining their lot of money. That's great for the very few who benefit from it, for the rest of the country (ie, the majority, the vast majority), not so much. And that vast majority, sometimes referred to as a silent majority, is having a hard enough time making their upwardly-mobile lifestyle work these days that they are starting to finally catch a clue where the real problem lies.

Actually, small and less intrusive government does have a track record of success. The problem we have now is the speculative bubble of real estate burst and that speculative bubble was fueled by the liberal desire to make sure anyone who wanted a home could have one whether or not they could afford the associated payments or not. The Republicans weren't aggressive enough to reign it in and it eventually burst. GWB did try to reign it in, but shrank back from it when he was called a racist for his efforts.

As for your assertion that it was good for people who already have money...the census bureau would disagree with you. The census data shows that there's tremendous change in income quintiles in the USA. That means that there's a lot of turnover from year to year in the richest 20% and in all the other catagories. There's not a fixed caste system in the USA and anyone who really puts their minds to it can become wealthy. By the same logic, the "poor", represented by the lowest income 20% also changes a lot from year to year. In fact, the census found that a person typically only stays in the poorest quintile for an average of 17 months and then moves up. As Bill Cosby used to say, if you graduate from high school and wait until you are married to have children, you will not be poor.

Freedom is a good thing. Don't cede your freedom for a bunch of empty-promise liberal class-warfare bromides that will do nothing but make all of us poorer except for the few friends of the liberal politicians who always seem to do well when liberals are in power.

 

[RightField]

As far as Kunstler...like someone above said, it's difficult to predict the future. Hydrogen cars are far more expensive that what we have now (cost for creating enough hydrogen would require massive nuclear energy expansion), but if all the oil dissappeared tomorrow, we could probably make a go of it. Electric cars are still not practical because of the range restrictions, but I hope battery technology improves and we can use electric cars as a viable alternative.

The problem is that if we in the US all decide we don't want to use oil any more and use alternatives instead, the cost of energy utilization would almost double overnight which would put our manufacturing and many other business out of business almost immediately because of the cost/energy advantages that other countries who continue using oil would still have.

 

[HarlotMinx]

it's hard to run a locomotive pulling thousands of tons of stuff on solar. or a tank to fight a war running on a solar cell.
modern society screwed itself.

Hydrogen fuel cell sub There are also a few electric tanks, I couldn't find the link to the one I had in mind but the major benefit they have over traditional tanks is that they make no noise. Though, I think solar cells are a lost cause unless we can find a better way to manage they space they need to generate any real electricity... though I saw a promising idea of replacing nations highways with photoelectric road material. I'm still not thrilled with the efficiency. I think we should be looking at nuclear and geothermal power.

 

[Killswitch]

Hydrogen fuel cell sub There are also a few electric tanks, I couldn't find the link to the one I had in mind but the major benefit they have over traditional tanks is that they make no noise. Though, I think solar cells are a lost cause unless we can find a better way to manage they space they need to generate any real electricity... though I saw a promising idea of replacing nations highways with photoelectric road material. I'm still not thrilled with the efficiency. I think we should be looking at nuclear and geothermal power.

Have you ever caught that piece on 60 minutes on a power unit called a Bloom Box?

It was really neat and was fuel cell technology.

On the noise front....Toyota is making a fake engine noise for their electric cars so it;s safer for pedestrians.

 

[The_Trouvere]

The U.S. already has the world's highest incarceration rate. It doesn't seem to be working.

In 1980 the U.S. crime rate was 5,950.0 per 100,000. By 2008 that had declined to 3,667.0 per 100,000.
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

I am confident that if the U.S. prison population was much higher, and if conditions were much harsher, the crime rate would be lower. I am not worried about the large number of criminals in prison. I am worried about the large number of criminals out of prison. I want them to be put in prison, and I want them to experience an enormous amount of suffering.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Kunstler's pre-eday message:

Now What?

By James Howard Kunstler
on October 31, 2010 10:35 PM

On Tuesday, when the Republican Party and its Tea Party chump-proxies re-conquer the sin-drenched bizarro universe of the US congress, they'll have to re-assume ownership of the stickiest web of frauds and swindles ever run in human history - and chances are the victory will blow up in their supernaturally suntanned, Botox-smoothed faces.

But don't cry for John Boehner, Barack Obama.

The President and his Democrats may have inherited this clusterfuck from the feckless George Bush but they flubbed every chance to mitigate any part of it, ranging from their failure to restore the rule of law in banking (by prosecuting the executives of major banks who oversaw the systematic swindle), to mis-directing our dwindling resources toward ends (such as "shovel-ready" new super-highways) that won't promote a credible future for this society, to misleading the public in the fantasy that alt-energy will offset the disruptions of peak oil (and allow us to keep running suburbia, the US Military, and WalMart by other means).

It's really too late for both parties. They're unreformable. They've squandered their legitimacy just as the US enters the fat heart of the long emergency. Neither of them have a plan, or even a single idea that isn't a dodge or a grift. Both parties tout a "recovery" that is just a cover story for accounting chicanery and statistical lies aimed at concealing the criminally-engineered national bankruptcy that they presided over in split shifts. Both parties are overwhelmingly made up of bagmen for the companies that looted America.

Alas, the damage is now so pervasive in money matters that the federal government could be toast as a viable enterprise, even if a new party or two spontaneously rose up out of the ruins of a plundered democracy. Anyway, one of them will not be the Tea Party, with its incoherent agenda and moron cadres who seek to put Jesus back in the US constitution, where he never was in the first place - though they don't know that.

Nor is there any party on the left or even in the center with a clue or a moral compass. Its just one of those tragic moments in history - like 1850s America, when a strange vacuum of thought occupied the heart of political life, and the scene was cluttered up with mere place-holders like Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. (Can you state a single idea or position, these political ciphers advanced?)

Where we stand now is on the cusp of another giant step into the abyss, since the latest storm of Foreclosure-Gate suggests pretty strongly that mega-tons of mortgage-backed securities are assured of blowing up, as well as the sundry derivatives of these things (CDOs, CDOs-squared, plus the massive fetid matter infesting the alternative cosmos of credit default swaps). If you follow the media-of-record like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, you would have to conclude that there is no extant plausible notion among financial leaders as to how the fiasco of botched mortgage-and-title documentation can be resolved. After three weeks of emerging events around this debacle, the consensus among the power brokers is to pretend that there's no problem, that the issue of missing, forged, post-dated, trashed, or non-existent paper related to claims on property can just be put aside, brushed under the rug, glossed over, ignored.

Let me tell you something: this problem is not going away. At the very least it is going to paralyze the real estate industry for as far ahead as anyone can see. For another thing, it could force the disclosure of what the banks are holding in their vaults in the way of worthless paper and expose their insolvency. For still another thing, it could lead to rafts of lawsuits that would additionally shove the banks toward collapse, demolish the claims that underlie our currency, call into question the meaning of property ownership per se that is the basis of Anglo-American law, and tie up the court system until kingdom come. In any case, every pension fund, state government, and insurance operation would be crippled. I could go on but you get the picture.... This might all sound extreme, but I repeat: nobody with any authority in this land has proposed a plausible way out.

By the way, I haven't even touched on the totally insane but now accepted practices of the Federal Reserve attempting to stage manage the velocity of money by so-called quantitative easing - a.k.a. the US writing checks to itself - because even that nonsense assumes that everything else remains more or less stable.

This is what the two major parties can look forward to as we swing around into the Yuletide season and then into 2011. The proud winners of seats in congress and the senate might as well put on clown suits and little pointed hats on Wednesday morning and drive around the Washington monument in toy cars. There will be a desperate need for a new politics in this country, for people unafraid to tell the truth and act in the genuine public interest. If we can't generate it from the saner quarters of this country where people think thoughts that comport with reality, I'm afraid we could see some generals step into the picture.

I write literally over the middle of the Pacific Ocean, en route from Australia where I spent the past week - not on vacation. It's a reminder that there are a lot of other players in the wide world - not all of them nations on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

 

[pete]

holy hell, what a heaping pile of dogshit

47 paragraphs and yet no substance at all

 

[Powertone]

We can stop building new suburbs. We can revitalize downtown areas of our cities.

and you live downtown presumably

 

[LJ_Reloaded]

it's hard to run a locomotive pulling thousands of tons of stuff on solar. or a tank to fight a war running on a solar cell.
modern society screwed itself.
it forgot about local, and community. thus food, energy, and politics becomes a thing that is done elsewhere. and that requires a corporate mindset.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/oct/28/oil-us-military-biofuels

In 1980 the U.S. crime rate was 5,950.0 per 100,000. By 2008 that had declined to 3,667.0 per 100,000.
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

I am confident that if the U.S. prison population was much higher, and if conditions were much harsher, the crime rate would be lower. I am not worried about the large number of criminals in prison. I am worried about the large number of criminals out of prison. I want them to be put in prison, and I want them to experience an enormous amount of suffering.

Are there stats that show that harsh imprisonment leads to less crime? I am not so sure about that.

 

[Ham Murabi]

Are there stats that show that harsh imprisonment leads to less crime? I am not so sure about that.

There's plenty of evidence to show that someone in prison isn't committing crimes in your town.

 

[KingOrfeo]

12/13/10 Clusterfuck Nation:

The Revolutionary Moment

By James Howard Kunstler
on December 13, 2010 9:31 AM

I overheard a conversation between two employees over at the Price Chopper supermarket last week. (The Price Chopper logo is a picture of a Mercury dime with an ax cleaving into Mercury's head; in other words, an ax murder.) The supermarket employees were both middle-aged women.

First: "I'm going home to a cold house."

Second: "Why don't you turn up the heat?"

First: "I don't have no money for fuel."

Meanwhile, 175 miles south in Manhattan somewhere, Lloyd Blankfein's personal shopper is trying to figure out whether to buy Lloyd's favorite niece a Fabergé egg themed Memories of Azov or a Jaguar XK convertible.

Maybe the catch here is that the anonymous supermarket workers are only freezing this Christmas season. If they were freezing and hungry, it might be a different story. But, working in a supermarket, a person might find a way to cadge a few tidbits here and there (whoops, we broke a bag of Cheetos on the loading dock) - the catch there being you could get fired for stealing the merchandise. O sorry nation!

But don't fear! The president and congress are looking out for you, O nation of freezing supermarket employees (and flummoxed personal shoppers, and wily mega-bank CEOs)! They have fashioned a deal that we might call Stim-u-rama. Everybody gets a tax cut! Everybody! Not just Lloyd B but all you toiling and moiling shelf-stockers and check-out cashiers. Plus, you will get a reduction of several percentage points in your payroll deductions - a redoo in the dedoo! - which must be good for at least one Justin Bieber action figure (if there are any left!) in these waning days of the Yuletide consumer frenzy.

Meanwhile moreover, CBS 60-Minutes showed a segment Sunday night on the rip-roaring economic miracle of Brazil - "a little bit bigger than the USA geographically and loaded with natural resources" - as if to rub it in that we have become a sorry nation of losers to a bunch of no-account beach layabouts. As usual, the 60-Minutes reportage was full of lies and misrepresentations, for instance, that Brazil's offshore oil discoveries are so huge and so easy to extract that they will save industrial civilization.

The sights and smells of Christmas usually put me in a mellow frame of mind. But this year there's an acid edge in the mulled wine, an off-taste in the plum pudding, a disconcerting odor of rot in the piped-in holiday potpourri.

Obviously, the government tax deal along with the Federal Reserve's recent QE announcements represent a mighty effort to stuff some spendable lucre into this shuddering, doddering beast of the American economy. The people running things don't know what else to do. We find ourselves in a decelerating system, hopelessly over-complex (and scheming, even, to add additional layers of complexity!), with money-making activity shifted from producing things of value into a runaway Wall Street machine dedicated to something-for-nothing rentier exploitation of interest rate differentials, arbitrages, short-sales, outright swindles, and other activities based on no creation of value whatsoever. While capital piles up in the salons of Central Park West and the cigar cellars of the Hamptons, social capital hemorrhages every day as masses of formerly-working Americans forego the acquisition of any useful skills, or forget old ones, or opt to lose themselves in the transports of methadrine, "reality" TV, and tattoo art. To put it perhaps a bit indelicately, our shit is falling apart.

It's fascinating that in the background of all this the price of oil is fibrillating around $90-a-barrel - and nobody is paying any attention to that. We seem to have forgotten the lesson from back in 2008 that when oil gets above the $80 mark, things in this land of Happy Motoring and the Warehouse-on-wheels don't work so well. No wonder President Obama and congress are trying to stuff the country full of sugar plums just to get past the horror of a Christmas holiday when not a few working people will be freezing in their homes, if they have homes.

And in not too many days ahead we'll get a peek at those Christmas bonuses landing in the laps of Lloyd Blankfein's minions at Goldman Sachs and the rest of the geniuses in the engine room of prosperity.

When I was already a grown-up young newspaper reporter thirty-odd years ago, I never dreamed I'd see a revolutionary moment here in the USA - even with old Nixie pulling one fast one after another, before heading off to that helicopter for his last wave to the people who elected him. Now, I'm not so sure.

 

[off2bed]

Why do you hate rich Jews?

 

[KingOrfeo]

Why do you hate rich Jews?

What, you think a guy named "Kunstler" is Irish Catholic?

 

[off2bed]

Demonizing a rich guy named Blankfein sure sounds Goebbelsesque.

 

[RightField]

The President and his Democrats may have inherited this clusterfuck from the feckless George Bush but they flubbed every chance to mitigate any part of it, ranging from their failure to restore the rule of law in banking (by prosecuting the executives of major banks who oversaw the systematic swindle), to mis-directing our dwindling resources toward ends (such as "shovel-ready" new super-highways) that won't promote a credible future for this society, to misleading the public in the fantasy that alt-energy will offset the disruptions of peak oil (and allow us to keep running suburbia, the US Military, and WalMart by other means).

All of this is just crap and here's one small example why.

You blame bankers for this and are on a crusade against them (warning: liberal looking to assign blame again). The government (liberals) decide that they want to ensure that poor people can buy any home they want based on their liberal utopian ideal and their belief that they can change the law of economics by shear do-gooding willpower.

They cook up a scheme and change the laws to ensure that there are no standards in loan origination "to be fair". They go to the bankers/loan officers and say "make these loans and we'll ensure that you get your typical incentive", further, they say "we know that you wouldn't normally make these loans so to mitigate your risk, we'll insure them and cover them if they default". The bankers/loan officers dutifully go out and make the loans to people who can't afford it and sell the bad loans back to the government and as was always inevitable, when the Utopian dream sinks in a sea of debt and the econony crumbles, the liberals get angry and blame the bankers/loan officers for making the bad loans (when it was their idea in the first place). I can see Harry Reid standing in front of congress wearing a TShirt that says "Don't blame me, blame him - with an arrow pointing to the next person".

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

James Howard Kunstler is a writer, novelist, social commentator, who has written several books about America's post-WWII suburbanization and the unsustainability of a built environment built on the assumption that we'll always be able to get anywhere by car because we'll always have cheap oil (or else develop renewable alternatives that we can use without changing our lifestyle). His most ominous book is The Long Emergency, fortelling doom within our lifetimes for Western industrial civilization as we know it.

On his website he publishes a weekly "Clusterfuck Nation" commentary. This is the entry for 2/2/09:



Is he right? And what, if anything, can be done?

No. His tone tells you the problem, he is dripping in distain for "those people."

The problem is that first the Left made the cities untenable and unlivable and then they kept following the population they ran off until you end up with a Greece, a Spain, an Ireland, California, New York, Michigan...,

If the cities were not politically-correct havens of favors due to group politics, people would be HAPPY to live there, but you tax them and regulate the productive into the suburbs leaving only the hands-out crowd screaming for handouts.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Yeah RF, George W. Bush did not cause KC's "White Flight."





That was the Democrats and their group politics all the way baby...

Everything had to be done and legislated in the holy name of the black child.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Congress spends more because those who vote for them want the government to help them get through life. There is nothing unusual, or wrong with that. Europeans expect far more from their governments, and get more.

I say we yank out our defensive shield and see how much more they get.





__________________
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A_J, the Incredulous