Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler

[medicvet]

This is a blog by the author of "The Long Emergency", and I think it makes some very salient points:

As the West's industrial regime sputters toward a cheap-energy-crackup conclusion, there have been attempts to recast what our economy is actually about, how to account for whatever wealth we manage to produce, and project what our society will actually be organized to do in the years ahead.

For a while in the 1990s, the idea was a "service economy," kind of like the old fable of the town whose inhabitants made a living by taking in each other's laundry -- only in our case it was selling hamburgers to tourists on vacation from their jobs making hamburgers elsewhere, or something like that.

Then came the idea of the "information economy" in which making things of value would no longer matter, only the processing and deployment of information (sometimes misidentified as "knowledge"). This model seemed to suggest a yin-yang of software engineers who made up games like "Grand Theft Auto" serving the opposite cohort of people who bought and played the game. If nothing else, it certainly explained how lifetimes could be frittered away on stupid activities.

That illusion yielded to the housing bubble economy, which actually did produce a lot of things, but not necessarily of value -- for instance, houses made of particle board and vinyl 38 miles outside of Sacramento. It was a tragic and manifold waste of resources, as well as an insult to the landscape. But the darker side of the housing bubble lay in the world of finance, where a vast empire of swindles was constructed to support the Potemkin facade of production homebuilding.

Now we are in a strange period when those swindles are unwinding. The people who run the finance sector -- the Wall Street investment banks, hedge funds and ratings agencies, the Federal Reserve, and the US Dept of the Treasury -- in desperately trying to prevent the unwind, have rapidly ramped up another new economy based entirely on the buying and selling of risk. Risk, as a pure abstraction unconnected to any real capital activity, is all that's left to buy and sell after all other plausibly practical vehicles for finance have failed.

While a lack of transparency in the individual risk vehicles has been an object of complaint over the past year, the system as whole is transparently absurd. The system is also abstruse enough to prevent most mortals (including many employed in the system) from understanding its operations. But the general public and the news media are virtually helpless to intervene in this last gasp racket, so the probability increases that it will do tremendous damage to whatever remains of the US economy.
One feature of the risk economy is the Federal Reserve's new willingness to absorb any sort of crap collateral in exchange for massive cheap loans to insolvent companies and institutions. The Fed has, in effect, made itself the world's largest financial shit-magnet. It has already taken in a few hundred billion in securities based on non-performing real estate loans, and has now opened the window to securities based on non-performing credit card debt, car loans, and other miscellaneous IOUs still drifting un-hedged in the banking ether.

It's a mark of our collective desperation to avoid the consequences of so much reckless behavior that no credible authorities have stepped up to denounce this racket -- no Fed governor, no politician of standing (including the candidates for president), no newspaper-of-record. The Attorney-general of New York, Andrew Cuomo, may be quietly cooking up some cases in the deep background, but the SEC and the federal banking regulators hung up their "out-to-lunch" signs on this long ago.

Meanwhile, the basic situation is this: the world is awash with bad investment paper. The standard of living in the US can't be supported on debt anymore. The people of the US don't produce enough real value to service their debts. Institutions can no longer be supported on debt gone bad. Something's got to give -- meaning something has to bring the US standard of living down to a level consistent with our declining actual wealth.

Everything else going on right now is a dodge. The Fed maneuvers, the "coordinated actions" of the western central banks, the postponements of default, the non-disclosure of contents in bank portfolios, the pretense that risk alone is a kind of fungible resource that can be endlessly traded to generate fees -- all this fucking nonsense will only make the eventual unwinding much worse.

Personally, I doubt that it can go on more than a few more months. The velocity of everything is going up past the "red line" where things really fly apart. The increased velocity of non-performing mortgages and deadbeat credit card accounts is one thing that can't be hidden or escaped. America will feel and see very vividly when the repossession teams rush families from their homes, when the pickup truck is taken away, and when the pink slip appears in the pay envelope. Meanwhile all the higher-end banking shenanigans will only debase the dollar and make it more difficult for people already in distress to buy gasoline and food.

If the bankers and treasury officials collude to prop up one more failing big bank a la Bear Stearns, the political fallout for Wall Street could be lethal. In any case, I think we will have a way different sense of ourselves as a society by the time the election comes.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.c...sk-econom.html

[Jake99]

I agree with this article but it is not a politician that the world needs to follow out of this mess its that strange and unusual man who the bible recommends. Forget about the ways of the politicians they have only created problems with thier greed, possession and gambling based systems. I am warming up the Lake of Fire for the evil ones of Washington DC, they will dissapear just like the armies and private banks and stock market that supports them.

I did stand up and stand against, I even went so far as to challenge the judicial system to an extensive war of laws in court. I won on every point of view after taking a stand in front of a courthouse with a compound bow and razor tipped arrows. I am not here to negotiate with terrorists I am here to eliminate them from the earth and that starts with the unconditional surrender of the United States of America which I asked for in many courts, many times. They rejected me as they rejected Jesus because my ways are not mans ways.

[medicvet]

Jake, once I see evil politicians dancing in the lake of fire...then I shall beg God to be a God of love and either forgive them, or at least put them out of their misery. I hate to see anyone suffer, even if somoene deserves it.

[Jake99]

medicvet,

Relax the Lake of Fire is just a figment of speach its just chlorinated water with a red light bulb, no soap or flames required. No misery, no suffering just a pink slip, soul washing and a new mission. What mankind deserves is much better than this world provides, all makind are sinners that are to be turned into saints. The Lake of Fire consumes jobs that will no longer be performed and posts new jobs that have never been done before. Its just part of the New World start up process that everyone must go through. The Lake of Fire is a blessing even for those who deserve it most.

The day of the Clusterfunk Nation will be over and the days of everlasting peace and prosperity will begin. Judgement day will be the best day in all of time and nobody gets hurt everyone who believes in the Messiah gets saved. The evil politicians will dance in the Lake of Fire I promise you that.

[Traveler]

And it took everyone how long to work this out?

When we exported our manufacturing industries to the far east for the cheap labor we also exported our wealth and gave it to them.

Now we sit in the shit but only grasp the significance of it now!

I guess that it will be back to basics and we will have to start from scratch with the old cottage industries serving our local communities all over again.

The end of the rat race, whooopeee!

[Nu Kua]

Originally Posted by Traveler

I guess that it will be back to basics and we will have to start from scratch with the old cottage industries serving our local communities all over again.

The end of the rat race, whooopeee!

:-) I'm kinda looking forward to that, too.

[medicvet]

Relax the Lake of Fire is just a figment of speach its just chlorinated water with a red light bulb, no soap or flames required. No misery, no suffering just a pink slip, soul washing and a new mission. What mankind deserves is much better than this world provides, all makind are sinners that are to be turned into saints. The Lake of Fire consumes jobs that will no longer be performed and posts new jobs that have never been done before. Its just part of the New World start up process that everyone must go through. The Lake of Fire is a blessing even for those who deserve it most.

Jake, I think that is the nicest thing you have ever said. thank you.

[iulian28ti]

I hate to see anyone suffer, even if somoene deserves it.

This is why criminals still exist.

[Doomer]

Originally Posted by iulian28ti

This is why criminals still exist.

True

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[medicvet]

I just happen to believe that if a pure and perfect God/Goddess of love does exist, then no punishment is eternal, and is merely to learn whatever lesson needs to be learned to not repeat it.

That does not mean that I think the prisons should be emptied, far from it. We need prisons to protect us from the evil ones who still haven't learned the lesson of the utter futility of evil, and want to unleash the pain they feel inside on others who do not deserve it. Such people need to be in prison, period. And the death penalty? Well, I am mixed on that..after having so many people released from death row after dna came about and showed how many on death row were innocent, I am more prone to want to err on the side of caution with that one. BUT. In certain cases, like serial killers like John Wayn Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and the Green River Killer, as well as mr. swastika face helter skelter man, the death penalty is definitly deserving. When you are talking of serial killers, there is just too much evil that has been done, and it is time to set the evil doer free of the tormented body he inhabits, and give the loved ones of the dead some sense of justice.

And don't even ask me how this ended up seguing into a crime and punishment discourse, but what the hey, let this debate/discussion take whatever turns it wants to as long as it stays interesting, and I think this is very interesting indeed.

As far as 'eternal torment', I think a true God of love would realize that we are but mortal beings with only a vague concept of immortality, and would not punish us past what we can comprehend of being. I at least want to believe that eventually, even the Hitlers and Stalins and Idi Amins and Pol Pots after a few thousand centuries or so will have done their time, and their souls to will be redeemed.

And you have to realize something about me. I don't take this lightly at all. I have seen the results of what evil men can do, and have a few times been a victim/recipient of it. That still doesn't mean that I think that ANY SOUL PERIOD deserves an eternity of torment.

[Jake99]

Evil men are born in an evil system that promotes evil as a way of life. All mankind are sinners because they use the wrong system for managing the planet. If we use the right system there will be no evil and the jails will be almost empty.

[olddragon]

Yes but, the mental hospitals will be running over.

[medicvet]

This is heaven and after the world has come to an end, when everybody lives happily ever after hon, not reality. yeesh.

There will be no mental hospitals, because they will be the ones IN HEAVEN..all others will be in weird places with no idea how they got there or how to get out.