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

[fair_warning]

And here I was thinking you were fair minded enough to rise above inelegant arguments such as "guilt by association."

I guess this is "fair warning" that fair mindedness is off the table.

I believe I am very fair minded and more than educated enough to evaluate any argument on it's merits.

 

[unregistered]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

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?

What is lacking here is an honest discussion of WHY so many city centers were abandoned.

I was raised during the white flight from KCMO.

Ask me.

They keep spending, spending spending to reinvent downtown and still they have to close schools...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I believe I am very fair minded and more than educated enough to evaluate any argument on it's merits.

its

 

[miles]

The 3 stooges are at it again....

What's your malfunction?

 

[miles]

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....

Of course that never applies to liberals who lie with dogs and wake up with fleas.

 

[miles]

I believe I am very fair minded and more than educated enough to evaluate any argument on it's merits.

How impressive.

 

[fair_warning]

its

You are so right...there is something oddly sexy about correct spelling and grammar....I think it brings the black stockings out in me....

Of course that never applies to liberals who lie with dogs and wake up with fleas.

My dog often sleeps on the bed and she DOES NOT have fleas and neither do I.

How impressive.

Well, what can say, two degrees and all those years at University have paid off.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

At the moment, it was just ironically funny...


The moment has passed.

 

[fair_warning]

What is lacking here is an honest discussion of WHY so many city centers were abandoned.

I was raised during the white flight from KCMO.

Ask me.

They keep spending, spending spending to reinvent downtown and still they have to close schools...

Start an honest discussion - I am genuinely interested about this. My Masters is in Urban/Environmental Planning.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Start an honest discussion - I am genuinely interested about this. My Masters is in Urban/Environmental Planning.

The city government became radicalized by the Affirmative Action movement.

The "African-American" citizens became militant in their demands.

Judge Clark ordered bussing to desegregate the schools.

ACLU lawsuits kicked the Catholics off the bus.

New-age Liberalism raged in the schools.

The result was white flight...

 

[fair_warning]

The city government became radicalized by the Affirmative Action movement.

The "African-American" citizens became militant in their demands.

Judge Clark ordered bussing to desegregate the schools.

ACLU lawsuits kicked the Catholics off the bus.

New-age Liberalism raged in the schools.

The result was white flight...

Noooo..
That's not the start of a discussion.
Bad 4est!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Noooo..
That's not the start of a discussion.
Bad 4est!

How should I begin?

When I was a lad, the black community began to blame the white community for all their ills, banded together with liberal urban Democrats, used the courts, the elective process in their segregated neighborhoods and in general began to make life miserable for the people they depended upon for jobs and a tax base, so those people simply moved across the state line to Johnson County, KS and built themselves a whole new life leaving the African American community and their white liberal buddies, who tended to government jobs, to stew in their own "multi-cultural" stew...

 

[KingOrfeo]

Everybody check out Kunstler's new book, Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation. (It's a companion volume to his 2006 book The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.) Very, very sobering. Also enraging, at least the sections about the financial sector, Wall Street, and the 2008 financial crisis.

 

[koalabear]

Twinkie boy with more soros facts.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Clusterfuck Nation 02/11/13:

State of the Union

By James Howard Kunstler
on February 11, 2013 9:09 AM

The fog of chatter about Federal Reserve money-printing shenanigans, currency wars, fiscal intransigence, exchange rates, and alphabetized rescue operations conceals the central reality of the historical moment: that all industrial economies now face epic contraction, even rip-roaring China in its absurd and spectacular bid to become the latest drive-in utopia. The so-called advanced nations of the world are all sliding toward something less than they wish to be, and the so-called developing nations will backslide further into poverty and anarchy where development will never happen.

The implacable contraction underway is the simple result of growing scarcity of cheap oil, the master resource. Thus, in a world where fantasy has replaced analysis, the propaganda channels brim with false news of America's coming "energy independence" and the rebirth of domestic manufacturing, the coming electric car fleet, and space tourism. There is also chatter among the paranoid that an imagined elite has deliberately engineered American collapse for fun and profit, with sideshows about the Department of Homeland Security promoting social upheaval in order to make a show of putting it down. This is all bullshit concealing the futile machinations of people so unfortunate as to hold political office in an unraveling they can't control. Where control is no longer possible, paranoid fantasies fill the vacuum of wishing for control.

One thing you can be sure of: the current sociopolitical weather will change. A front will blow through and sweep the fog away. So many circles of hazard are spinning around events that some fast-turning object will come off its axis and start smashing all the fantasies. When that happens, it will be every community for itself, and where there are no real communities -- for instance, the vast matrix of suburban noplaces that America emergently composed itself out of in a tragic quest to become its own televised fantasy -- we'll discover the dark side of the "liberty" that so-called conservatives endlessly invoke, in all its screaming eagle iconography.

Not since the Civil War (1861 - 65) has anything bad of this scale happened within the United States itself and the public is unprepared despite our total immersion in the on-screen ersatz heroics of avatars such as Dwayne Johnson. The terrible convulsion of the 1860s was preceded by a political time much like ours is now, with figures (calling them leaders is inaccurate) of no conviction backpedaling furiously toward strife.

Remember these things if you tune in to watch President Obama move his lips on Tuesday amid the incessant applause in the House chamber. He'll speak the words "climate change" and the hall will rock with thunderous handclapping -- but it won't mean anything because both the president and the people have no intention of changing the way we live. Mr. Obama will cheerlead for economic growth and he will be talking out of his ass. It's the nature of this contraction that economic growth is absent. You can have plenty of economic activity -- especially if you re-form (literally) the systems we depend on, such as farming, commerce, medicine, and transportation -- but it won't be expressed favorably in the GDP stats or the balance sheets of CitiGroup and Morgan Stanley.

At the core of this contraction is the disappearing act of real capital -- that is, accumulated wealth -- for the excellent reason that we are squandering what remains of it in the futile effort to keep living the way we do. But it will be vanishing fast, contrary to the view of such fantasists as David Leonhardt, Washington bureau chief of The New York Times -- catch him on the current Slate Political Gabfest -- who thinks that the Growth Fairy is about to land on the south lawn of the White House.

The State of the Union Address is happening in a peculiar quiet moment when all the financial brushfires of the time have been reduced temporarily to a smolder that conceals the full involvement of the roots under the surface. Our economic system is burning down. Nobody wants to talk about the system that will have to replace it, which I call a world made by hand.

The fortunate few will be those who have already established themselves in an authentic community of helping hands, who have some tools -- and I don't mean Adobe Photoshop or the latest iPhone app -- and laid in some bits of silver and gold.

 

[KingOrfeo]

And yet you pass judgement on mine based on association.

While you dismiss James Howard Kunstler just because he happens to share a last name with a better man than you.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Fortress of Lies

By James Howard Kunstler

on March 11, 2013 9:24 AM

History has a special purgatory where it sometimes stashes feckless nations punch drunk on their own tragic choices: the realm where anything goes, nothing matters, and nobody cares. We've surely crossed the frontier into that bad place in these days of dwindling winter, 2013.

Case in point: Mr. Obama's choice of Mary Jo White to run the Securities and Exchange Commission. A federal prosecutor back in the Clinton years, Ms. White eventually spun through the revolving door onto the payroll of Wall Street law firm Debevoise & Plimpton, whose clients included Too Big To Fail banks JP Morgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and UBS AG, defending them in matters stemming from the financial crisis that began in 2008, as well as other companies that needed defending from allegations of financial misconduct, such as the giant HCA hospital chain (insider trading), General Electric (now a virtual hedge fund with cases before the SEC), and the German-based Siemens Corporation (federal bribery charges).

A republic with a sense of common decency -- and common sense -- would have stopped the nomination right there and checked the "no" box on Mary Jo White just for violating the most basic premise of credibility: that trip through the revolving door that shuttles banking regulators from the government agencies to the companies they used to oversee and sometimes back again.

Has there not been enough national conversation about the scuzziness of that routine to establish that it's not okay? Does it not clearly represent the essence of dysfunction and corruption in our regulatory affairs? Didn't President Obama promise to seal up the revolving door? So how could Mary Jo White possibly be taken seriously as a candidate for the job? And how is it possible that everyone and their uncle, from The New York Times editorial page to the Sunday cable news political shows to the halls of congress, is not jumping up and down hollering about this? Well, because anything goes, nothing matters, and nobody cares.

The funny part is that, when challenged over her past connections to the banks and companies she would now have to regulate, Mary Jo White offered to recuse herself from future cases involving them. So, from the get-go as SEC head, Ms. White would not concern herself with the doings of JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley? How is it that gales of laughter did not blow Mary Jo White clean out of the hearing room? Is there not another qualified person from sea to shining sea who could come in and do the job without one hand tied behind his or her back?

Now it also turns out that upon leaving Debevoise & Plimpton, Ms. White is scheduled to collect monthly retirement checks from the company amounting to a half million dollars a year -- that's for life, by the way -- while she supposedly runs the SEC. How is that not a conflict of interest? The remedy proposed by Ms. White and her attorneys was for her to take the retirement loot as a lump sum during her tenure as SEC chair, after which she could revert to collecting her pension in the $42,500 monthly payouts. Pardon me, but, well ...what the fuck? What planet are we on?

As if that's not enough, Ms. White's husband, John W. White, is a partner at another giant Wall Street law firm, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, which frequently tangles with the SEC on behalf of its clients. Mr. White proposed to change his pay structure while his wife runs the SEC. More gales of laughter. He is also on the advisory committee of the Financial Standards Accounting Board, the group that oversees national accounting practices and which, in 2009, infamously changed its Rule157 so that TBTF banks could "mark to fantasy" the fraudulent CDOs and other bond-like "innovative" securities that they created -- many of which they had to eat after the housing bubble bust when the collateral for these swindles lost its value and the "innovators" could no longer pawn the stuff off on credulous pension funds and other client "muppets."

The silence over this disgraceful matter -- and many others like it, including the dead hand in the empty suit posing as US Attorney General -- indicates that not only is the rule of law extinct in this country, but so are public figures of principle and credible news organs. Nobody has made a noise about it. Anything goes, nothing matters, and nobody cares. So, the objection to it has to come from outside the authorized channels. And the consequences will mount outside the fortress of lies that the establishment has become.

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

That Dreadful Day

By James Howard Kunstler
on April 7, 2013 5:55 PM

For the moment, the trend seems pretty clear. Money from far and wide rushes into the US stock markets because every other conceivable place to stash money produces no return, no interest, no increase, at a time when the value of central bank currencies is slip-slidin' somewhere south of Palookaville. The rush into equities gooses equities increasing the rush, goosing the goose. Consider, however, that trends by their nature must last longer than the moment to be trends in the first place. One thing you can be sure of: the trend will end.

Another region of the trend concerns the recent peculiar behavior of gold and silver. Fear and greed may rule the trade in paper instruments, but something else rules the trade in hard metals: uncertainty. These days the uncertainty is very keen, not so much about the direction of the trade in paper - because the trend is up, up, and away - but whether the placeholders for the paper are for real, or whether you get to keep any of them when the dust settles at every dust-up. Markets can go wither they will, but it's another matter when the government slams on capital controls and you can't move your money or redeem it from your account.

With the precedent of Cyprus now established (never mind MF Global), you'd think people all over the planet would be buying gold and silver as stores of value without counterparty risk, but the price keeps slowly sinking. I don't think it's because of the much chattered-about threat of confiscation. The US government could not be dumb enough to try to pull an FDR-style gold grab. This is a different land than it was in 1933. The people who hold gold are exactly the same people who are very heavily armed, and just because the Department of Homeland Security supposedly has been buying up all the ammo on God's green earth, virtually all the people who are heavily armed are already heavily stocked up on ammo, too, and have quite enough to start an insurrection if the treasury agents come calling for their life savings.

Though I'm generally allergic to conspiracy theories, it smells like someone is engineering the downward behavior of the metals. The central banks of the US and Europe have a big incentive for driving the price down: it makes their currencies look stronger - despite the universal QE policies designed to make them actually weaker. That is, it gives the appearance that QE is not doing exactly what it is intended to do: wage currency war by driving down the value of money and incidentally inflating away the cost of debt denominated in these currencies.

I think the Federal Reserve and its TBTF cronies will succeed in driving the price of gold down, perhaps as far as the $1350 range, for a while (a moment, let's say). But by the time it gets there they will have completely wrecked the economies they pretend to represent, and driven many citizens into penury. Now, consider that hyperinflation is always a rather sudden phenomenon. When it comes on, it comes fast and hard, by the day and then the hour. The Fed and its handmaidens will not be able to control it when it happens, because it will spring from all their previous actions, including the concealment of the loss of value of the dollar via manipulation of the gold and silver markets - and Ben Bernanke can't pretend that his helicopter is a time machine. There will be no going back to undo what he's already done. That's the point where you will see the price of gold very quickly head toward $3,500 or even $10,000 and beyond, depending on the damage done and the oafishness of the political response. QE to infinity really translates into dollar wreckage to infinity.

History will record that this crisis of confidence in money was brought on by men who stupidly refused to acknowledge that the terms of daily human existence had changed in 2013. We could save the country and fashion a new economy appropriate to the new era of contraction, but it wouldn't look much like what you see out there now. It would be all about empty highways and empty WalMarts and people turning their energies elsewhere, to their communities, workshops, homesteads, and main streets. We'll get to that place, but the journey to it will be dark and lonely since it will be accomplished by individuals bravely venturing where no politician dares to speak of, and the lonely individuals will receive no support from their culture or any of the authorities who play at political leadership.

There could well come a time, though, when those authorities will be disgraced, dragged down, and trampled, and I would tremble to be there on that dreadful day. That will be the day that the ultimate TV reality show debuts. Call it: Waterboarding the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. When elites circulate, things get messy.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Oh, my, he's really on today!

Shake me, wake me!

The rot moves from the margins to the center, but the disease moves from the center to the margins. That is what has happened in the realm of money in recent weeks due to the sustained mispricing of the cost of credit by central banks, led by the US Federal Reserve. Along the way, that outfit has managed to misprice just about everything else — stocks, houses, exotic securities, food commodities, precious metals, fine art. Oil is mispriced as well, on the low side, since oil production only gets more expensive and complex these days while it depends more on mispriced borrowed money. That situation will be corrected by scarcity, as oil companies discover that real capital is unavailable. And then the oil will become scarce. The “capital” circulating around the globe now is a squishy, gelatinous substance called “liquidity.” All it does is gum up markets. But eventually things do get unstuck.

Meanwhile, the rot of epic mispricing expresses itself in collapsing currencies and the economies they are supposed to represent: India, Turkey, Argentina, Hungary so far. Italy, Spain, and Greece would be in that club if they had currencies of their own. For now, they just do without driving their cars and burn furniture to stay warm this winter. Automobile use in Italy is back to 1970s levels of annual miles-driven. That’s quite a drop.

Before too long, the people will be out in the streets engaging with the riot police, as in Ukraine. This is long overdue, of course, and probably cannot be explained rationally since extreme changes in public sentiment are subject to murmurations, the same unseen forces that direct flocks of birds and schools of fish that all at once suddenly turn in a new direction without any detectable communication.

Who can otherwise explain the amazing placidity of the sore beset American public, beyond the standard trope about bread, circuses, and superbowls? Last night they were insulted with TV commercials hawking Maserati cars. Behold, you miserable nation of overfed SNAP card swipers, the fruits of wealth and celebrity! Savor your unworthiness while you await the imminent spectacles of the Sochi Olympics and Oscar Night! Things at the margins may yet interrupt the trance at the center. My guess is that true wickedness brews unseen in the hidden, unregulated markets of currency and interest rate swaps.

The big banks are so deep in this derivative ca-ca that eyeballs are turning brown in the upper level executive suites. Notable bankers are even jumping out of windows, hanging themselves in back rooms, and blowing their brains out in roadside ditches. Is it not strange that there are no reports on the contents of their suicide notes, if they troubled to leave one? (And is it not unlikely that they would all exit the scene without a word of explanation?) One of these, William Broeksmit, a risk manager for Deutsche Bank, was reportedly engaged in “unwinding positions” for that that outfit, which holds over $70 trillion in swap paper. For scale, compare that number with Germany’s gross domestic product of about $3.4 trillion and you could get a glimmer of the mischief in motion out there. Did poor Mr. Broeksmit despair of his task?

Physicist Stephen Hawking declared last week that black holes are not exactly what people thought they were. Stuff does leak back out of them. This will soon be proven in the unwinding derivatives trades when most of the putative wealth associated with swaps and such disappears across the event horizon of bad faith, and little dribbles of their prior existence leak back out in bankruptcy proceedings and political upheaval.

The event horizon of bad faith is the exact point where the credulous folk of this modern age, from high to low, discover that their central banks only pretend to be regulating agencies, that they ride a juggernaut of which nobody is really in control. The illusion of control has been the governing myth since the Lehman moment in 2008. We needed desperately to believe that the authorities had our backs. They don’t even have their own fronts.

Is the money world at that threshold right now? One thing seems clear: nobody is able to turn back the plummeting currencies. They go where they will and their failures must be infectious as the greater engine of world trade seizes up. Who will write the letters of credit that make international commerce possible? Who will trust whom? When do people seriously start to starve and reach for the pitchforks? When does the action move from Kiev to London, New York, Frankfurt, and Paris?

 

[KingOrfeo]

After the Communist William Kunstler invaded American society, the name Kuntsler has been mud...sorry bub.

Invade what? He's just as American as you.

 

[Sean Renaud]

We'll see, I'm not predicting the end of the world just yet.

 

[KingOrfeo]

And, on a surprisingly optimistic (YMMV) note, February's Eyesore of the Month and Kunstler's commentary:

http://kunstler.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Eyesore_Feb_2014.jpg

Woe and alack a day! A sign of the times in a hyper-turbo-techno-industrial economy rocking in the throes of meltdown, a.k.a. compressive deflationary contraction. Lo, what was once a dollar is now seventy-five cents. In another month, it’ll be fifty cents and perhaps they can sign up the celebrity “Fitty Cent” to shill for them. I went into this establishment once out of morbid curiosity about a year ago. The shelves were sparsely stocked with merchandise that looked like it fell off a truck in Guangzhao. Box wrenches made out of metallic margarine. Suspicious-looking snack foods in supernatural colors. Toxic this’n'that. This was, of course, marginal retail and we are seeing the commercial rot proceed from the margins to the center. Pretty soon you’ll see the Target stores closing and maybe, here and there, a WalMart. Don’t wring your hands. This sets America on the pathway to rebuilding Main Street economies, along with the multi-layered, fine-grained local and regional networks required to support them — which will eventually translate into local business opportunities for those who can understand the trend. The dollar store pictured above is in my little town of Greenwich, New York, population around 2,500, a former factory village now with no factories — but plenty of water power!

 

[Sean Renaud]

This guy is insane?