America Is One Big Clunker and No Amount of Cash Will Buy Us a New One

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



America Is One Big Clunker and No Amount of Cash Will Buy Us a New One

By James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler.com. Posted November 16, 2009.

We continue to be childishly delusional about our dark economic and environmental prospects. Unfortunately, reality isn't amenable to lies and spin.




In The Long Emergency (2005, Atlantic Monthly Press), I said that we ought to expect the federal government to become increasingly impotent and ineffectual -- that this would be a hallmark of the times. In fact, I said that any enterprise organized at the colossal scale would function poorly in years ahead, whether it was a government, a state university, a national chain retail company, or a giant midwestern farm. It is characteristic of the compressive contraction our society faces that giant hypercomplex systems will wobble and fail. We should expect this.

It's tragic that the avatar of hopefulness himself, Barack Obama, stepped into his role at exactly the moment when this set of conditions was getting traction. It is sure to get worse, and there are going to be a lot of disappointed people out there who will be suffering terrible losses and real pain in daily life. Societies don't do well when the public falls into the broad despair that is the opposite of hope. That's when the long knives and the tribal animosities come out and things get smashed.

Within the context of conventional party politics -- the kind that has been baseline "normal" in the USA for a long time -- we see this playing out in two factions that are increasingly out-of-touch with reality. The Obama government has made itself hostage to a toxic form of pretense and lying. In order to sustain the wish for "hope" -- if not hope itself -- the President and his White House advisors along with his cabinet appointments, are pretending that the historical forces of compressive contraction are not underway. They're flat-out lying about the employment figures issued in the government's name. They're willfully ignoring the comprehensive bankruptcy gripping government at all levels. They refuse to bring the law to bear against "the malefactors of great wealth." They appear to not understand the epochal energy scarcity problem the whole world faces, or its implications for industrial economies. Most of all, they persist in promoting the lie that this economy can return to the prior state of reckless debt accumulation (a.k.a "consumerism") that has made us so ridiculous and unhealthy. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/143969/america_is_one_big_clunker_and_no_amount_of_cash_will_buy_us_a_new_one

[ixion]

1. I think that during the decline and fall of every empire, there were those

that sounded the alarm well before the collapse. I don't always gibe with his predictions, but I think he's got the Big Picture down pat.


We're screwed, and we're trying to pretend like we're not.

As such, we seal our fate.

[tularetom]

2. If we're really screwed why does it make any difference

What Obama does? WTF is he supposed to say, "it's all over now folks,we're becoming the UK so you may as well just give up on the future"

[dgibby]

3. He's between a rock and and a hard place.

In order to fix a problem, it has to be acknowledged as a problem. If he does that, the crazies will even farther off the deep end (if that's even possible!), and we'll have REAL civil unrest.

If he doesn't acknowledge the problem and deal with it, we'll just sink deeper and deeper into an economic disaster, from which there will be no hope of recovery.

Either way, the opposition will blame him. It's a no win for him politically, and it's a no win for us, either.

[depakid]

4. They refuse to bring the law to bear against "the malefactors of great wealth."

Forget that- they're too impotent to even go after the poisoners at Peanut Corp- despite mountains of email print outs from executives and managers thumbing their noses at regulators, and saying- go ahead, ship contaminated products all across the country.

[Festivito]

5. The malefactors own the media-military-manufacturing congressional complex.

And the media part is running at full spin.

[Butch350]

8. THEY ARE THE LAW!!! Should know that by now.

[northernlights]

6. I expect they know what's coming

I was at the grain store a couple weeks ago and overhead a conversation between two locals. I live in a very rural area, where hunting is more to put food on the table than sport. 15% of the locals were on food stamps *before* the "great recession." No hunting for many families means no food.

A very unhappy hunter had just attempted to buy his normal ammunition for the season -- he used to buy in bulk lots of 200 rounds or something like that, to get the best price.

Somewhere along the way, some new regulations have been put into place. You may no longer have that much ammunition in your house. So not only is he now forced to buy in smaller, more expensive quantities, the impression I got is someone is tracking how much you buy.

The guy at the register said, "Wait a minute -- you mean you can't *buy* 200 rounds at once...or you can't *have* 200 rounds in your home."

"You can't *have* 200 rounds in your home."

[GreenPartyVoter]

7. We almost hit an 8 point buck yesterday with our car, and my first thought was

"Phew! Thank goodness he and we got away ok." My second thought was, "I bet he doesn't make it long before a hunter gets him." And my third thought was, "If we had hit him, I know exactly who to call and take nim for meat." (If the Game Warden said it was ok.)

[AtheistCrusader]

9. This is completely wrong.

Someone misunderstood something, somewhere. Some local ordinances around the country are set in an attempt to prevent huge amounts of ammo stored in residential houses, under fire code, but I am not aware of any that set the limit so laughably low. Hell, I've got 2000 rounds of just 9mm. The company I buy from doesn't sell it in lots of less than 1000.