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

[KingOrfeo]

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

No, I suppose not, given the dates of his Admin, but . . .

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.

You're not even trying to maintain contact with reality any more, are you?

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

You don't seem to know the history behind the decline of so many American Cities.

There's a reason everyone with two nickels to rub together fled.




The high cost of political correctness and reparations.

 

[KingOrfeo]

You don't seem to know the history behind the decline of so many American Cities.

There's a reason everyone with two nickels to rub together fled.




The high cost of political correctness and reparations.

Thank you, I know a lot more than you do about the history of the decline of American cities beginning in the 1950s, it is a subject I have studied in depth, and I know very well that it had nothing whatsoever to do with "the Democrats and their group politics," "the holy name of the black child," or "political correctness and reparations."

 

[richard_daily]

Thank you, I know a lot more than you do about the history of the decline of American cities beginning in the 1950s, it is a subject I have studied in depth, and I know very well that it had nothing whatsoever to do with "the Democrats and their group politics," "the holy name of the black child," or "political correctness and reparations."

I wonder why New York, LA, Houston, and Chicago have all seen resurgences since the 70s?

Must be part of the lib'rul agenda.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Jared Got a Gun, 01/10/2011:

Did anyone else notice that Speaker of the House John Boehner did not shed a tear when issuing his statement about the massacre in Arizona that killed, among others, a nine-year-old girl and left Congresswomen Gabrielle Giffords maimed? The new Speaker notoriously weeps when recounting his own youthful travails rising to fortune in business and power in government. He handled this incident like a news-caster at a Midwestern TV station reporting rush hour traffic.

I doubt that the young shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, will turn out to be affiliated with the Tea Party or any other established political faction. The evidence he left in a few YouTube videos evinces the thought disorder typical of post-adolescent onset schizophrenia, but with a remarkable twist. He was preoccupied with thoughts about currency, money, in particular how money is created. In the text-and-music video available here at YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGRCEIxU96A&feature=related), Loughner writes:

Every human who's mentally capable is always able to be treasurer of their new currency....
If you create one new currency then you're able to create a second new currency.
If you're able to create a second new currency then you're able to create a third new currency.
You create one new currency.
Thus you're able to create a third currency.

Does this begin to sound sickeningly like the policy of the Federal Reserve and the thinking of its chairman, Ben Bernanke? Is the monetary behavior of top US officials now so disordered that it is showing up as mental illness in young people?

You are wrong if you think I'm being facetious.

Loughner had a few other obsessions: control, sleepwalking, the "scam" of higher education, and terrorism.

For more than one generation it has been difficult for young American males to develop successfully into men. They even dress like babies at 25. Their vocational options these days tend toward corporate slavery of one kind or another. Flipping burgers for a despotic fast food chain. A job in a cubicle. At best, a job in a cubicle making a lot of money by swindling fellow Americans. If they manage to get through college, many face a lifetime of tuition loan debt slavery.

The rewards of entering the realm beyond college are paltry-to-miserable. Solitary cab rides to the mall. A burrito and a Big Gulp. Later, back home, an hour in the virtual company of the Kardashian sisters via the E-Network on your parents' cable TV. Where are the initiations into manhood? (Try the channelized dry-wash, courtesy of the Barrio Blue Moon boyz.) I'm convinced that the reason video games and movies aimed at young males in America are devoted almost solely to fantasies about super-heroes and supernatural power (especially the power to kill) is because adolescent boys feel so impotent, so powerless, so unlike real men. The adults in this culture do not furnish any meaningful alternative scripts. That's the market's job, I guess.

When confused and disturbed young men do act, they sometimes act out the scripts of violent retribution that the video game and movie business so lavishly supply to them. This is a culture, lately, with no room whatsoever for tenderness. Look for a moment of tenderness in the popular video game, Carmageddon. The Speaker of the House's moments of tender reminiscence are reserved for himself. This used to be known as a condition called feeling sorry for yourself. It was considered, if anything, un-manly.

I don't know if the ambient political mood of the USA is any more poisonous now than it was for about a decade starting in the 1960s, when all those assassinations changed history: John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, George Wallace, plus Lennon and the attempts on Ford and Reagan. The Baby Boomers produced more than their share of lost souls. Myth still shrouds the doings of Lee Harvey Oswald, since he was bumped off so quickly, but other shooters have been around for decades. Surely plenty of people from FBI agents to forensic psychiatrists have plumbed the depths of Sirhan Sirhan and Arthur Bremer over their many years of incarceration, and all they find are a couple of human black holes yielding nothing that illuminates their acts.

I doubt that the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and the many others who attended her meet-and-greet will lead to anything like more civility in politics. The country faces grave problems and most of the political noise rises not from the agony of facing them, but from the desperate efforts to avoid or deflect them. The deliberations at the highest level in Washington sound these days like the tortured reasoning of Jared Lee Loughner - for instance the hiring of William Daley from JP Morgan to run a White House that is hostage to JP Morgan.

One thing the shooter surely accomplished: it will now cost elected officials hundreds of millions of dollars more every year to imagine they can protect themselves with new layers of security. Not just the assignment of federal marshals, but the deployment of all sorts of "high-tech" equipment and procedures, since we are now in the techno-rapture phase of the long emergency, which features massive amounts of magical thinking.

Will history notice that Jared Lee Loughner was struggling to puzzle through the mysteries of currency and of who controlled what in this world, even while he was being tossed out of a community college that he was extremely conscious of being scammed to pay for - a government-supported school that affected to prepare young people for a career spent in a corporate cubicle in order to fork over the weekly paycheck to pay back college loans.


From their website:

At Pima Community College you have access to an affordable, high-quality education. Our Costs and Payments section will familiarize you with tuition for credit and non-credit classes, as well as with payment methods.

Don't let a lack of funds keep you from reaching your goals! There are options available to help you cover tuition, including:

Federal Financial Aid - you should apply, don't assume you're not eligible!
Veteran's Benefits
Scholarships and Grants
Work Study Programs

The shootings of Congresswoman Giffords and all the others took place in front of a Safeway Supermarket in a strip mall in a city of strip malls and housing subdivisions - many of them failing financially. It must be unbelievably difficult for a young person to make sense of such an incoherent environment and such cruel swindling culture. A society that habitually and incessantly lies to itself is apt to choke to death on its internal contradictions. Jared Lee showed an unusual concern for language and literacy. His videos were all words, no pictures. I wonder if the word SAFEWAY flashed through his brain when he pulled the trigger.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Quite a gem of doomcrying this week!

The John Brown Moment

By James Howard Kunstler
on February 13, 2012 9:30 AM

When Gaia gets pissed off enough at the antics of humanity, she sends in her hit-man, Reality, to settle accounts. Reality is blessed with a cloak of invisibility. The human race is so busy concocting stories about what it is doing, that Reality steals onto the scene unnoticed - until bodies start to fall over, and the sort of bad political weather known as a shit-storm fills the skies, the streets, and the assembly halls.

One of the cockamamie stories circulating this week is that the Euro bailout of broke member nations is fait accompli, baked in the cake, a done deal, no problemo, because the December 2011 Long Term Refinancing Operation makes it so. The European Central Bank can supposedly eat bad bond paper until the cows come home without choking to death at the same time that it can run a back-door money-printing racket without the results showing up in currency degradation. And the Greeks will bend over and receive what they've got coming good and hard because, well, they are Greeks, and it is their way!

Excuse me, but something's got to give. History is a lot of things, but it is not silly putty. Its cousin, Reality, slips through it performing its deeds one way or another. The Greeks have lately remembered some of their own history. The Germans have beset them before, they now recall, and some of the money currently labeled "debt" may have been filed incorrectly, the Greeks say. It actually belongs in the folder labeled "war reparations." (Granted, it is hard to read folders when you are bending over so far that things look upside-down.) Germany, it happens, remembers too the last time that this folder was flopped out on the table. Things didn't work out so well for the Weimar finance ministry in those dark days ninety years ago.

Meanwhile, Athens and several other Greek cities ignite in an overture to what might come to be called the European Spring.

Reality steals onto the scene bearing a message from Mother Gaia: "None of your shenanigans make the numbers add up. The European financial arrangement will blow up because it must." Therefore, expect it to blow up. Germany will not keep pounding sand down the rat-hole of PIIGS insolvency for another year. Anyway, the proverbial can that everyone was kicking down the road - it fell down the rat-hole, too, so there is nothing left to kick except Greek civil servants, both current and retired and, alas, they represent that part of the Greek economy not occupied by olive cultivation, which is to say most of it. It turns out, when you kick Greeks down the road (probably Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, and Irish, too) sparks fly off them and things catch fire.

The bottom line seems to be that Europe can either go broke or burn down, or do both. But it can't go back to what it was doing before: pretending to be rich and care-free.

Over on this side of the Atlantic, America's experiment in pervasive control fraud took a new turn with the pretended "settlement" of massive, widespread, robo-signing allegations that will allow a bunch of "the usual suspect" TBTF banks off the hook from future liability and criminal prosecution resulting from hundreds of billions of dollars worth of swindles. The TBTF banks will have to pay, when all the "principal reduction credits" and other dodgy subtractions are made, a couple of billion altogether, which is obviously little more than a cost of doing business for such supernaturally fabulous returns. And then that is supposed to be the end of the whole disgusting episode.

Last to cave in on this legally squooshy agreement between fifty states was New York's own Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, newly enlisted in the elite national corps of cads, bounders, and sell-outs. This was the week that the same Schneiderman agreed to lead President Obama's so called Mortgage Fraud Task Force, which, any child of eight can see, is a smokescreen to conceal the fact that the US Department of Justice has failed to initiate any action whatsoever in the vast and gruesome pageant of fraud that has transformed the rule of law into a rule of larceny.

Do you think the late Whitney Houston was a lost soul? Then look for the soul of your country - if you can find it in the wilderness of self-denial, self-double-dealing, and suicidal self-perfidy that it has blundered into with eyes wide shut. No lie is now too big for the United States to swallow. If Europeans ignite and blow up when kicked down the road, here is what will happen to America: it will blunder down its own road until it reaches the next John Brown moment. John Brown put his proverbially famous body in the middle of that road some ways back. He mounted an insurrection at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in an attempt to fast-track the abolition of slavery. Brown was hanged in 1859, but less than two years later the Civil War commenced, the greatest convulsion in our history. So far.

Slavery was yesteryear's abomination in America as pervasive control fraud is today's. Somewhere out in America right now is the new American John Brown, a righteous fanatic whose act is waiting to alter the course of history. The next John Brown will also precipitate what was a long time coming. Reality is busy in the background, even while we blog and dither, setting things up.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Sean Renaud]

I'm sorry,but the memory of the wacko William Moses has forever tainted the credibility of anyone named "Kuntsler" for the foreseeable future. His is one of those rare cases where communism has worked a corruption of blood. rolleyes:

C'mon. With a name that could even accidently be turned into that you didn't have credibility from the get go. If he was smart he'd change is name.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Kunstler on the euro crisis, French election, etc:

1, 2, 3, Puke

By James Howard Kunstler
on May 7, 2012 8:38 AM

Europe may soon be choking on that plat du jour of government a la Hollandaise with the side of chopped Greek salad. The whole world, in fact, has got something like a giant hairball stuck in its craw. The hairball is composed of filaments of lies wound over a core of supernatural indebtedness. The lies are promises that the debt will be paid back.

For two months the financial markets have gone sideways on a cushion of the European Central Bank's Long term Financing Operations and the hot air of austerity chatter. The illusion of remaining airborne may dissolve now with the Hollandaise denunciation of Franco-German team spirit while a centripetal vortex of unpaid obligations sucks notional wealth through the event horizon of massive deflation.

Things are heating up, in other words. Wake up, sleepyheads! Welcome to the rest of the year 2012.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and op-ed columnist for The New York Times, is so amusing this morning. I, too, almost upchucked my "Paleo" diet breakfast of salmon hash with four eggs (pas de Hollandaise). Krugman writes in his column:

What's wrong with the prescription of spending cuts as the remedy for Europe's ills? One answer is that the confidence fairy doesn't exist -- that is, claims that slashing government spending would somehow encourage consumers and businesses to spend more have been overwhelmingly refuted by the experience of the past two years. So spending cuts in a depressed economy just make the depression deeper.

What an excellent misrepresentation of reality by one of the official molders of public opinion and policy in this exceptional land. I would attempt to debate his statement above that spending less government money is proposed to encourage consumers, blah blah. It is proposed because government doesn't have the money to spend and has run out of the ability to borrow more money due to the bad odor now wafting off the world's compost heap of sovereign bond paper. Everyone is going broke simultaneously, including putative lenders, i.e. buyers of bonds, who are the same ones selling them.

I like the way Krugman avers offhandedly to the concept of "depression." I believe this is a new thing for him to admit a certain absence of "green shoots" on the spring economic scene. Heretofore his halftime act between two presidential terms has been sheer cheerleading, but I guess he forgot to bring his pompoms to the office yesterday. I would refer to the situation as something more severe than a "depression," which merely suggests a valley between peaks. I would say that we are instead out on the arid buzzard flats beside the deep blue sea where modernity is shortly to drown itself in a fugue of suicidal bad faith.

All of which is to say the pretense that has reigned since 2008 (viz: "recovery") may not float through the rest of 2012. Surely in the USA, we are approaching a dark inflection point where the fall elections collide with the broken promises now gathering into the shitstorm vulgarly called "Taxmageddon." The event horizon for that extravaganza of financial lightning strikes is officially January 1, but the effects will be felt long before that as households, businesses, pension funds, municipal governments, and various branches of the US military prepare to roll over and die.

Enjoy the European sideshow for now because the roustabouts are still setting the props for act in the center ring. When the clown cars pull into the political conventions this summer, I would like to see these circus troupes greeted by large and lively mobs of furious citizens hurling objurgations at the likes of Barack Obama and Willard "Mitt" Romney. This is probably the least we can do to register some objection to the two useless parties' way of running things. Also, by the way, I would wonder what the generals over in the Pentagon will think (or might do!) as they see their country fall to tatters.

 

[KingOrfeo]

This week:

Still Standing Amid the Wreckage


By James Howard Kunstler
on May 14, 2012 9:17 AM

The New Urbanists held their big annual meet-up for four days last week and I stomped a big carbon footprint flying down to West Palm Beach for the doings. I don't know who exactly picked West Palm, but it was at once peculiar, disheartening, instructive, and exhausting.

The Congress for the New Urbanism has been throwing this yearly fandango since its founding in 1993 as a fire-eating reform movement dedicated to transforming the horrifying and toxic human habitat of America. Hopes were lofty in the early days that the US public would recognize the self-evident benefits of ditching suburban sprawl for walkable towns, but it didn't quite work out that way. The last frantic phase of sprawl-building commenced exactly the same time, jacked on easy lending steroids, and upping the stakes of the battle. That story ended in the baleful collapse of the housing bubble and the sad particulars need not be rehearsed here.

During the boom of the 90s and aughties, about 99.5 percent of the new real estate development was done by the conventional schlock sprawl-builders and the New Urbanists did much of the remaining .5 - which was enough to get their point across. Some of their projects (e.g. Seaside, Fla.) are now iconic examples of excellence in urban design artistry. Many others were botched by compromises made in the planning board battles, and another bunch were either half-assed from the get-go or plain fakes. These traditional neighborhood developments were almost always built on greenfield sites, provoking controversy that could not be briskly dismissed.

At the same time, quite a bit of New Urbanist work was done in re-making existing town centers and in retrofits of sclerotic older suburban parcels, and their influence was later seen in the many big city streetscape redesigns from Times Square to Santa Monica. Their laborious work in reforming the intricate idiocies of zoning law made possible better development outcomes in towns all over the land which adopted so-called Smart Codes.

The housing bubble bust massacred the New Urbanists. Many of the firms had tied their fortunes to the production house builders and the commercial real estate developers doing large projects, often hundreds of acres, and when the market imploded around 2007 their work dried up. Now there is very little new real estate development of any kind going on around the country. Many talents languish while the nation broods over the fate of its obsolete suburban dream and fails to recognize that we have to make drastically new arrangements for inhabiting the landscape.

But the mood at the 2012 CNU was still buoyant, considering. For all their vocational anguish, the New Urbanists are still about the only intellectual cohort in the USA with a coherent vision of what has gone wrong in our society -- our ruinous investments in futureless infrastructure -- and what can be done about it -- the reconstruction of traditional human habitat as the armature for enduring economies. Compared with the brainless religious zealotry and sexual hysteria of the right wing and the ruinous social services pandering of the left, the New Urbanists look like the only organized group of adults in the nation who have not completely lost their minds. So it was a pleasure to spend four days among them. They are a valiant band of cultural warriors.

Events are now in the driver's seat. The long battle against the continuation of suburban sprawl is over, despite the happy-talk noises made by what's left of the real estate industry. Half a decade of absolutely flat oil production -- propaganda to the contrary -- guarantees that the suburban project is finished. We're done building things that way (even if we don't quite realize it yet) so the New Urbanists have won the argument by default.

Quite a few non-New Urbanist "pundits" such as Ed Glaeser, the asinine Joel Kotkin, and dashing Richard Florida predict that the action has shifted to the big cities, and that may appear to be the case for this deceptive moment. But the mega-cities are in for a tsunami of troubles all their own in the form of vanishing wealth, fiscal disorder, sclerotic infrastructure failures, service interruptions, and ethnic turf battles as the effects of the epochal economic contraction bite deeper and harder. The inescapable downscaling of America means that we are heading toward a new disposition of things on the landscape in just the way the New Urbanists have prescribed: a declension of ecologies ranging from dense, walkable human-dominated urban habitats in the form of traditional towns and cities through a range of rural conditions running from farmland to wilderness necessary to support the health of the planet.

Time and nature will help take care of the accumulated suburban dreck on the ground. Humans are very skillful sorters of things and the disassembly of salvaged materials will be a big industry in a world taking a "time out" from industrial progress. The timeless principles that the New Urbanists revived will be the common sense of whatever we build in the future, even when the planning board battles of recent years are long forgotten. We will almost certainly return to social conditions in which nobody will dare put up a building devoid of conscious artistry. There's a lot to like in this quadrant of the long emergency.

The 20th reunion of old CNU friends was a little disenchanted by the conference site. West Palm Beach contains one of their showpiece projects, the nightlife and shopping district called City Place that was created out of a bombed out neighborhood. Casual observers crack on City Place as an "urban mall," but it's really just Rosemary Street rebuilt of new traditionally-scaled buildings with shops and bistros programmed in. A lot of it is generic chain business. Another sad element is the cartoonish, low quality finish of the buildings - sprayed on stucco and ornaments with no conviction. Both of these failures of quality represent the fast buck mentality of the big commercial developers and the larger vulgar so-called consumer culture they served. But City Place does include some pretty well composed public space in the form of a central plaza and a palm court running off it, and it was full of people enjoying themselves in the cafes those nights, and the ensemble managed to incorporate a very nice Beaux Arts church-turned-theater (the Harriet Himmel) in the Spanish neo-classical manner.

The trouble was when you strayed a block off Rosemary Street the fabric of the city fell apart. Some of it was just vacant land. Further east between Olive Street and the intercostal waterway stood a swath of oversized giant condo towers that represented the worst of the lamented housing bubble. Many were "see-through" buildings of empty, unsold units. The streets along these behemoths were as dead as any neighborhood on a Zombie planet, and traversing them to get anywhere was hugely depressing. The convention center, where the CNU meeting actually took place, stood off in its own twilight zone of separation, cut off from the beginning of City Place by the ghastly ten-lane Okeechobee Boulevard. The five-block walk (of very large super-blocks) to and fro from my hotel was like unto reenacting the Bataan Death March under that brutal Floridian sun.

Things are changing fast now though. The New Urbanists still standing are the strongest and most nimble. They are also the ones most deeply engaged in the trenches of architectural education, and they are as certain to win the ideology battles still raging in that realm as they won the battle over suburban sprawl.

Most of all, though, I'm glad to be home in my quiet backwater of this poor floundering nation.

 

[NeverEndingMe]

kingoftards, you are the prefect example of a clusterfuck

 

[KingOrfeo]

This week:

Rocky Mountain High

By James Howard Kunstler
on June 24, 2012 11:15 PM

The techno-narcissism flowed like a melted Slurpee this torrid weekend at the annual Aspen Environment Forum where scores of scientists, media figures, authors, professors, and policy wonks convened to settle the world's hash - at least in theory. The trouble started Friday night when Stewart Brand, 74, impresario of The Whole Earth Catalog, and an economic cornucopian these days, exhorted the skittish audience to show a little goshdarn optimistic spirit about the future instead of just griping about climate change, peak oil, imploding global finance, and a few other vexing trifles. The audience's response was to not line up and buy a signed copy of his latest book.

The Aspen Institute is supported by a bizarre array of corporate donors and individuals ranging from the secretive, devious, extreme right-wing Koch brothers to Goldman Sachs, to Michael Eisner to Duke Energy. The mission of the Environment Forum is divided about equally between publicizing the gathering horrors of climate change and promoting an ethos of wishful thinking that all the problems of mankind will yield to technological rescue remedies.

It's a very odd mix of hard-headed science and the most dismaying sort of crypto-religious faith in happy endings, tinged with overtones of corporate log-rolling and government propaganda. The basic message is: the world is hopelessly fucked up but thank God for technology. There is not even a dim apprehension that many of the aforementioned vexations originate in technology itself, and its blowbacks. Alas, this is about the best that the American intelligentsia can do right now, collectively, and it explains why we have such uniformly impotent and clueless leadership across the board in America, from the White House to the CEO offices to the diploma mills to the news media and every other realm of endeavor where thinking realistically about the future might be considered valuable.

Another strange notion permeating this forum - and probably the entire Progressive intellectual class in America - is the belief that if you can measure things, you can control them. Thus, an endless regurgitation of statistics, which, after a while, resembles liturgical incantation and, pretty much, serves the same purpose, namely an obsessive-compulsive ritual aimed at calming the nerves. If it was, after all, techno-magic that led us to poison the oceans and upset the calibration of the earth's atmosphere, then maybe fresh applications of magic can make all those bad things go away, fighting fire with fire, shall we say.

Speaking of fire, there was one burning up the valley from Aspen, which made the whole town smell like barbeque Sunday morning while six other wildfires blazed all around Colorado. One of them, the High Park fire, has been going for two weeks and burned over 82,000 acres so far with no sign of petering out. Temperatures in the high Rockies soared over 90 degrees all weekend and there was practically no snowpack left up in the elevations - a spooky development this early in the summer.

The odor of empire's end also hangs over Aspen these days, despite the sheen of spectacular wealth visible around the little town and the emanations of glowing health in the buff and tanned population of exercise freaks. Everything that makes the town tick is in danger of unraveling. The ski industry can't possibly survive the eventual effects of peak oil, and the collapse of commercial aviation will put an end to the conveyer belt of tourists. The villas of the Wall Street and Hollywood kingpins that decorate the ridge lines above town give off a desolate vibe of futility, as if the foregone disaster of a global banking meltdown had already sent their once-proud owners to bankruptcy Palookaville. The place gave off eerie intimations of a ghost town in-the-making.

Anyway you looked at America from the vantage of Aspen, Colorado, everything we do and stand for looks out of kilter. Our intellectual resources look spent, our prospects seem grim, and our assets are going up in flames. Maybe there's some consolation that we're not Europe. That said, I have never been to a conference in all my vagabond years where so many magnificent buffet spreads and overflowing gorgeous snack tables were laid in never-ending succession. It almost persuaded me that the old Right Reverend Malthus was too Malthusian.

 

[unregistered]

 

[koalabear]

wiki

Kunstler, who has no formal training in the fields in which he prognosticates,[18] made similar dire predictions for Y2K as he makes for peak oil.[19][20][21] Kunstler responds to this criticism by saying that a Y2K-related catastrophe was averted precisely because of the billions of dollars that were spent fixing the problem. As with programs to deal with acid rain and ozone depletion in the 1990s, a resoundingly successful, well-coordinated international response had the side effect of discrediting the very worst-case scenarios that inspired the efforts in the first place.[22]

Kunstler has made several unsuccessful predictions regarding U.S. stock markets. In June 2005 and again in early 2006, Kunstler predicted that the Dow would crash to 4,000 by the end of the year.[23][24] The Dow in fact reached a new peak of approximately 12,500 by the end of 2006. In his predictions for 2007, Kunstler admitted his mistake, ascribing the Dow's climb to "inertia combined with sheer luck".[25] In January 2009, Kunstler again repeated with Dow 4000 prediction. The Dow, in fact, ended 2009 at more than twice that value.[2

 

[unregistered]

 

[koalabear]

Like I said, after William Moses Kunstler, it's hard to trust anyone with that name. He tainted them all.

Oreo/U-D need to find new sources.

 

[unregistered]

 

[miles]

Oreo has crowned himself the Grand Poobah Gasbag C&P Wizard of Lit.

I mean seriously...did anyone actually read all his bullshit in this thread?

 

[unregistered]

 

[fair_warning]

The 3 stooges are at it again....

 

[unregistered]

 

[fair_warning]

My my, that was a crass insult for such a fair lass. Have you come all the way around the world for a roll in the dirt my dear?

I haven't left home....*looks out the window to check* I'm still here in Oz.
But seriously, some of the points you make are intellectually diminished when the bozo chorus of miles and koalabear back you up (and let's not forget dunce_man690.

 

[unregistered]

 

[fair_warning]

My arguments stand on their own my dear. I take full responsibility. You must know how amusing it is to hear you say you're from "Oz."

Oz
Oz
Oz
I understand that you stand behind your posts - the problem is one of....I guess, guilt by association. When you get the likes of the idiot brigade backing you in the chorus line....

 

[unregistered]