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Zounds! Public sentiment toward the accelerating economic fiasco has
shifted, seemingly overnight, from a mood of nauseated amazement to one of
panicked grievance as the United
States moves closer to an apparent
comprehensive collapse -- and so ill-timed, wouldn't you know it, to coincide
with the annual rigors of Santa Claus. The tipping point seems to be the
Bernie Madoff $50 billion Ponzi
scandal, which represents the grossest failure of authority and hence
legitimacy in finance to date in as much as Mr. Madoff
was a former chairman of the NASDAQ, for godsake. It's
like discovering that Ben Bernanke is running a meth lab inside the Federal
Reserve. And out in the heartland, of course, there is the spectacle of Illinois governor Rod
Blagojevich trying to desperately dodge a racketeering rap behind an
implausible hairdo.
What seems to
spook people now is the possibility that everybody in charge of everything is
a fraud or a crook. Legitimacy has left the system. Not even the the legions of Obama are immune as his reliance on Wall
Street capos Robert Rubin, Tim Geithner, and Larry
Summers seem tainted by the same reckless thinking that brought on the
fiasco. His pick last week for chief of the SEC, Mary Shapiro, is already
being dissed as a shill for the Big Bank status
quo. In a few days we'll discover what kind of bonuses are being ladled out
by the remaining Wall Street banks with TARP money and a new chorus of howls
will ring out.
This is very dangerous territory. In
dollar terms, the numbers being applied to the various problems are so
colossal -- trillions! -- that the death of our
currency seems assured. And in defiance of congress's express intentions,
none of the TARP "money" has been applied to its targeted purpose
of buying up "toxic" (i.e. fraudulent) securities hidden in the
vaults of banks, pension funds, and municipal portfolios.
George W, Bush's personal bailout of
General Motors and Chrysler is designed solely to postpone their bankruptcy
and mass job layoffs until after the holidays. Otherwise, the $17.4 billion
will probably be used by the companies to underwrite the extensive legal work
required for the moment they must declare bankruptcy -- when Mr. Obama is in
the White House. Meanwhile, the President-elect has ramped up his
job-creation target overnight from two to three million, and some observers
are catching a whiff of Soviet-style economic engineering ("...we
pretend to work and they pretend to pay us....").
The years since Jimmy Carter have
produced an astoundingly flaccid public, sunk in various addictions and
distractions, but this is about to change. The darkling mood of political
protest and violent activism that saturated my own young adult years is
scudding up again on the horizon. Mr. Obama's pick for attorney general, the
mild-looking Eric Holder, may be the key figure in the early months of the
new government. If he doesn't commence some aggressive investigations and
prosecutions -- beginning with Henry Paulson for insider trading when he was
in charge of Goldman Sachs and shorting his own company's mortgage-backed
securities -- then the whole Obama enterprise could fall under suspicion of
illegitimacy. The bums who ran the US banking sector into a ditch
have to account for their turpitudes. They can't be allowed to hide under a
TARP.
Unfortunately, the legal system,
and probably the legislative system, will be so buried in procedural bullshit
from the unwind of countless enterprises and institutions, and the sorting
out of the remnants, that it remains to be seen whether this generation of
people-in-charge can even embark on a fresh start of anything connected to
real everyday life in America. All this is starting to alarm the tattered
residue of the middle classes, and from here it's a very short path to them
being really pissed off.
When legitimacy erodes, anything goes.
Nothing is respected including rules and personalities. The center doesn't hold and the new vacuum there is a
tumultuous place. The same crisis of authority and legitimacy is spreading
from nation to nation now. Soon, China will contend with a
discontented army of the unemployed. Greece has been in an uproar for
two weeks. Belgium's
government just collapsed. Trade barriers are going up. Exports are falling
away. The world's energy markets are not immune to these disorders. I would
expect problems with the currently seamless supply lines that bring America
two-thirds of the oil we use. Even a mild disruption of oil supplies could
attach an anvil to the ankle of an economy already falling off a cliff.
Right now, the overwhelming sentiment is
to get this country back to where we were, say, ten years ago, when
everything was humming nicely: Clinton nostalgia. We're
definitely not gong back there, though. It's an idle wish. And any set of
policies designed to lead in that direction will prove very disappointing. Our
destination is a land of much smaller-scaled local economies. We could retain
our federal ties if the federal government can scale back appropriately from
the bloated, feckless enterprise it has become. Otherwise, it might only get
in the way and make matters worse, and the public in one region or another of
North America might reach a decision that
they are better off without it. That would be
what's called a revolution.
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
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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