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A side-trip to the local mall -
where else to buy ammo around here? - evinced an epic struggle for supremacy
of the chain stores between the Great Pumpkin and Santa Claus, with both
fat-assed icons trying to shove the other out of the primary display sites as
if the store aisle were a WWF ring in some grubby forsaken Palookaville far far from the
salons of Washington decision-making, which, I guess, this is. This is the
kind of place that a Jimmy Stewart character would have called home in 1946;
only today it looks like a place taken over by a certain species of space
aliens, slovenly in mind as well as body.
Our gods are not happy. Anyway,
that third fat-assed icon, the Thanksgiving Turkey, was nowhere in sight,
perhaps due to the recognition that there is far more
grievance than gratitude 'out here' in the fly-over zone.
America still does everything
possible except prepare to become a different America, perhaps even a better
America than the current release, and this is unfortunate because history is
merciless. History doesn't care if the dog peed on your homework... or
you had car trouble this morning... or the tattoo on your neck got
infected... or (to take this in another direction), you justified robbing scores
of billions of dollars out of the mortgage sector because your
too-big-to-fail company came down with the financial equivalent of swine flu
and the top executives were hallucinating that they lived in a world with no
boundaries of law or common decency.
We're at another one of those
weird inflection points of "current events" -- a momentous eddy in
the larger stream of history. A good deal of the already-proclaimed
return to normality ("normalcy" in WGHarding-speak)
depends on something close to a normal holiday shopping season, when so much
of the nation's merchandise inventory moves from WalMart
to under the Christmas tree. Of course, even if it were to turn out like a
year-2005-type credit card binge, the result would surely be a sort of
hemorrhagic fever of buyer's remorse afterward. An aerial view of the
Heartland long about February 1st would show households blowing up like
individual kernels of popcorn at an accelerating rate until the terrain
itself was obscured by an evil fluff of financial woe suffocating the poor
folks trapped under it.
Over the weekend, the The Huffington Post ran a McClatchy news service
story about Godman Sachs's misdeeds around the issuance of
mortgage backed securities. The basic idea in it was that GS was
aggressively gathering trash mortgages from fly-by-night
"originators" all over America to bundle into tradable security
paper, which they then pawned off on feckless, inattentive investors (pension
funds, foreign banks, etc) seeking miracle returns -- at the same time that
GS was buying credit default swap "insurance" by the bale, knowing
full well that the collateral backing their own issuance of MBS was of a
quality somewhere between dead carp and dog poop. In other words, they
were shoveling shit investments out of one window, and betting against the
value of them from another window. Thus a picture resolves of GS's
"true opinion" of the securities it paddled, and the question arises
whether failure to inform the peddled of this opinion constitutes fraud. I
certainly think it does.
I've been making substantially
the same case in this column for two years now, so it is interesting to see
the mainstream media awaken to a story-line that an ambitious nine-year-old
could have pulled off the Web over recent months. I also continue to
assert that a flurry of bonuses paid out this holiday season by Goldman Sachs
and its other amigos at the top of the banking food chain will be greeted by
violence - which will be the natural outcome of a society whose government
fails to even give the appearance of protecting its citizens from organized
crime. How did a sock puppet get appointed head of
the US Department of Justice, folks will wonder.
How bad is the situation 'out
there' really? In my view, things are veering toward such extreme
desperation that the US government might fall under the sway, by
extra-electoral means, of an ambitious military officer, or a group of such,
sometime in the near future. I'm not promoting a coup d'etat, you understand, but I am raising it as a
realistic possibility as elected officials prove utterly unwilling to cope
with a mounting crisis of capital and resources. The 'corn-pone Hitler'
scenario is still another possibility - Glen Beck and Sarah Palin vying for
the hearts and minds of the morons who want 'to keep gubmint
out of Medicare!' - but I suspect that there is a growing cadre of concerned
officers around the Pentagon who will not brook that fucking nonsense for a
Crystal City minute and, what's more, would be very impatient to begin
correcting the many fiascos currently blowing the nation apart from within.
Remember, today's US military elite is battle-hardened after eight
years of war in Asia. No doubt they love their country, as Julius Caesar and
Napoleon Bonaparte loved theirs. It may pain them to stand by and watch it
dissolve like a castle made of sugar in a winter gale.
I raise this possibility
because no one else has, and I think we ought to be aware that all kinds of
strange outcomes are possible in a society under severe stress. History is a
harsh mistress. For all his 'star quality' and likable personality, President
Obama is increasingly perceived as impotent where the real ongoing disasters
of public life are concerned, and he has made the tragic choice to appear to
be hostage to the bankers who are systematically draining the life-blood from
the middle class. Whatever we are seeing on the S & P ticker these days
does not register the agony of ordinary people losing everything they worked
for and even believed in. In a leadership vacuum, centers don't hold,
things come apart, and rough beasts slouch toward Wall Street.
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
Also
by James Howard Kunstler
My 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/
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