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The elephant’s not even in the room, which is why the 2016 election
campaign is such a soap opera. The elephant outside the room is named Discontinuity.
That’s perhaps an intimidating word, but it is exactly what the USA is in
for. It means that a lot of familiar things come to an end, stop, don’t work
the way they are supposed to — beginning, manifestly, with the election
process now underway in all its unprecedented bizarreness.
One reason it’s difficult to comprehend discontinuity is because so many
operations and institutions of daily life in America have insidiously become
rackets, meaning that they are kept going only by dishonest means. If we
didn’t lie to ourselves about them, they couldn’t continue.
For instance the automobile racket. Without a solid, solvent middle-class,
you can’t sell cars. Americans are used to paying for cars on installment
loans. If the middle class is so crippled by prior debt and the disappearance
of good-paying jobs that they can’t qualify for car loans, well, the answer
is to give them loans anyway, on terms that don’t really pencil out — such as
7-year loans at 0 percent interest for used cars (that will be worth next to
nothing long before the loan expires).
This will go on until it can’t, which is what discontinuity is all about.
The car companies and the banks (with help from government regulators and
political cheerleaders) have created this work-around by treating “sub-prime”
car loans the same way they treated sub-prime mortgages: they bundle them
into larger packages of bonds called collateralized loan obligations. These,
in turn, are sold mainly to big pension fund and insurance companies
desperate for “yield” (higher interest) on “safe” investments that ostensibly
preserve their principal. The “collateral” amounts to the revenue streams of
payments that are sure to stop because the payers are by definition not
credit-worthy, meaning it was baked in the cake that they would quit making
payments — especially when they go “under water” owing ever more money for
junkers that have lost all value.
It’s easy to see how that ends in tears for all concerned parties, but we
“buy into it” because there seems to be no other way to a) boost the
so-called “consumer” economy and b) keep the matrix of car-dependant suburban
sprawl in operation. We took what used to be a fairly sound idea during a
now-bygone phase of history, and perverted it to avoid making any difficult
but necessary changes in a new phase of history.
Health care is now such a blatant, odious, and ruinous racket that it is a
little hard to believe that it hasn’t ignited an outright revolution or, at
least, a workplace massacre in some insurance company C-suite. It is a
well-known fact that most Americans don’t even have $500 to pay for a car
repair. How are they supposed to cope with a $5,000 deductible health
insurance incident? Answer: they can’t. Their mental health is destroyed in
the process of attempting to fix their physical health. Not uncommonly, they
have to declare bankruptcy after a routine appendectomy or a visit to the
emergency room to set a broken arm. Sometimes, they don’t even bother to go
to the doctor, seeing clearly how this plays out. The pharmaceutical industry
has, of course, been allowed to convert itself into a simple extortion
racket. Got an unusual kind of cancer? We have something that might
help. Oh, it costs $43,000 a month….
What kind of a polity allows this cruel and indecent grift to go on? Why,
the Obama administration, which allowed the health insurance company
lobbyists and their colleagues in Big Pharma to “craft” the Affordable Care
Act — the name of which is must be the biggest public lie ever floated.
It’s interesting to see how a parallel fraud is playing out in higher ed.
I submit the reason that college presidents are not pushing back against the
Maoist coercions of the undergraduate social justice warriors is because the
marvelous theater of the gender, race, and “privilege” melodrama is a potent
distraction from the sad fact that college has turned into a grotesquely
top-heavy and high-paying administrative racket offering boutique courses in
fake fields (Dartmouth College: WGSS 65.06 Radical Sexuality:
Of Color, Wildness, and Fabulosity… Harvard University: WOMGEN
1424: American Fetish) in order to pander to their young
customers (students) conditioned to tragic “oppression” sob stories. All in
the service of paying huge salaries + perqs to the dynamic executives running
these places.
Then there is banking, a.k.a. the financial system, certainly the greatest
racket of rackets, since the fumes it’s running on — combinations of ZIRP,
QE, and “forward guidance” (happy talk) — is all that there is to maintain
the illusion that “money” remains a reliable gauge of value. Finance is the
racket that will go down first and hardest, and when it does, all the other
rackets currently running will go up in a vapor. That elephant will storm
into the room before the political conventions, and when it does, it will
usher in the recognition that nothing can go on as before.
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Coming in June
World Made By Hand 4 (and final)
Praise for A History of the Future:
“Kunstler skewers everything from kitsch to greed, prejudice, bloodshed,
and brainwashing in this wily, funny, rip-roaring, and profoundly provocative
page- turner, leaving no doubt that the prescriptive yet devilishly satiric A
World Made by Hand series will continue.” — Booklist
My local indie booksellers… Battenkill Books (Autographed by the Author) … or Northshire
Books…
or Amazon…
Also: Published as an E-book for the first time!
The 20th Anniversary edition
With an entertaining new introduction by the author
Bargain Price $3.99
Amazon Kindle …or … Barnes & Noble Nook …or… Kobo
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s
Patreon Page!
