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Senator Levin pretty much
had Goldman Sach's Lloyd Blankfein
dead in a casket with that now-notorious email from GS's head of sales and
trading, Tom Montag, describing one of their
billion-dollar investment "products" as "one shitty deal."
Levin seemed to delight in crossing the boundary into the realm of the
unspeakable, knowing that even the so-called "family" newspapers
and cable TV networks would have to report it. And just to make sure nobody
missed the point, the senator repeated that phrase at least twenty times
before the day was over. It was like the climactic scene in that old Hammer
Films classic, The Horror of Dracula, where Professor Van Helsing moves from coffin to coffin pounding stakes
through the hearts of Drac and all his fellow
bloodsuckers.
It's hardly the climax of our story, though. Ours has barely started.
It seems to me lately that the crack-up we've entered is liable to play out
more gruesomely for our privileged elites than the orgy of bloodletting that attended
the French Revolution. That historical moment was a sharp transition between
old, settled social relations and the new political realities of imminent
industrialization and a rising middle class. The elites in charge of things
to that moment, an ossified aristocracy, responded to rising discontent with
utter feckless stupidity. To make matters worse, a great many of them were
hunkered down in the fantasy-land Royal Palace of Versailles, enjoying what
was for practical purposes a non-stop mega house party. They must have
thought they were safe twelve miles outside Paris.
The French Revolution actually got off to a better start than it is
remembered for. A progressive opposition put together a new legislature, the
National Assembly. They undertook the writing of a constitution. But it all
fell apart rather quickly since the dim-witted King and his cohorts didn't
really get into that old changing times spirit and their lack of cooperation
-- not to mention their decadence -- provoked the more violent factions of
the common people to form that kraken of politics, the mob. What a
goddamned mess it turned into -- a revolving cast of mob masters, each worse
than the last, whipping up the crowds to ever more horrible enormities of
human vivisection -- a political process that had gone hopelessly out of
control. Despite the agile precedent of their friend, the new USA, quickly
resolving its own rebellion into a functioning government of law, France
opted for a bloody clusterfuck -- which went on for
eight more years.
The France of 1789 and the USA of today have a few important elements in
common: a striking inability to sort out any national problems, an arrogant, depraved ruling elite resistant to reform,
and an intellectual underclass motivated by blind fury. Some signal
differences: most of our even theoretically best-intentioned
"leaders" -- i.e. elected officials, business, education, and media
figures -- are unable to articulate the problems we face, which go way beyond
the mere distribution of political power or even wealth. (In fact much of the
so-called Left, especially the faculty intellectuals, are
preoccupied with esoteric sideshows around wealth, power, and the ridiculous
"politics" of gender.) Paul Krugman
and David Brooks have no more of a clue about the implications of Peak Oil
than Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin.
The resounding message of Senator Levin's hearings on Goldman Sachs last week
is that Wall Street is a shitty deal for America. Okay, now everybody
knows it. Nobody has an excuse for not knowing it. The machinations ongoing
over a financial reform bill seem to be leading to a rather feeble outcome.
The only people who are excited by it are -- surprise! -- a
bunch of economists, who will soon be relegated to the dumpster of discredited
professions along with necromancers, alchemists, and magnetic mesmerists. My
guess is that something lame will pass, it will be instantly denounced as yet
another fraud, and then the next move is probably the stock market's. A return of volume will signal a return of cratering equities as all the indexes give up their
hallucinated gains of the past year, and all the pension funds and college
endowments and banks who flocked there in the desperate search for yield will
find that they were hosed.
By
August, it's possible that the entire country except for the editorial board
of the New York Times will be members in good standing of the Tea party, and
it will have split into a dozen warring factions. By then, too many other
destabilizing events will be in motion. The hangover of the British election
will reveal the fatal insolvency of the UK, torpedoing the pound -- a huge
event that would certainly trigger a cascading fiasco of credit default swap
obligations. I don't see how the global financial system emerges from that in
any form recognizable to someone watching the scene in the first week of May,
2010. In the background of all this, something wicked this way comes in the
matter of oil prices and availability. The eco-disaster underway from the
Deepwater Horizon oil spill is looking every hour more like an event horizon
that will rock the whole industry and, with it, the developed world. At the
moment, oil is over $86 a barrel (and gasoline over $3 for regular at the
pumps).
I
continue to wonder how it will all go down this summer in the Hamptons where,
like Versailles in 1789, the elite mega-wealthy of today cavort shamelessly
in a semi-private fantasy-land of status vamping for the Vanity Fair
shutterbugs. The Hamptons are not defensible -- unless you count privet hedge
as an effective fortification. Any bloody-minded gang of unemployed,
grievance-maddened mudlarks can creepy-crawl down
the Sunrise Highway to Gin Lane with firearms bought at the WalMart (and modified to full-automatic in the garage).
What if hundreds -- thousands! -- of them get
the same idea? Louis XVI and his homeys probably never thought the mobs would
scale the ha-has of his fabulous estate, either.
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/
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