|
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
James
Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
James Howard Kunstler’s new novel of
the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is
available at all booksellers.
James Kunstler has worked as a reporter and
feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling
Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis.
His latest nonfiction book, "The Long Emergency," describes
the changes that American society faces in the 21st century. Discerning an imminent
future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler
foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the
depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil,
military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans
will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.
You can purchase your own copy here : The Long
Emergency . You
can get more from James Howard Kunstler - including
his artwork, information about his other novels, and his blog - at his Web
site : http://www.kunstler.com/
|