Kunstler: Swingtime

…The “green economy” that so many people idly blather about — imagining that it will just mean running WalMart by other means than oil — is actually an economy of awesome stringency. It’s nothing like they imagine. It’s a world made by hand. We should be turning our efforts and our remaining resources toward the task of becoming that differently-organized, finer-scaled society.The money that went into propping up the automobile companies could have been used to rebuild the entire railroad system between Boston and the Great Lakes, and the capital squandered on AIG and its offshoot claimants could have rebuilt everything else the rest of the way to Seattle. Is it really so hard to imagine what history requires of you? Apparently so.

That’s why movements like Naziism start. If there ever was another nation beautifully primed for an explosion of deadly irrational politics, it’s us. And it looks to me as if that’s exactly what we’re going to get — especially now that the Supreme Court has made it possible for corporations to buy elections lock, stock, and barrel. I hope our constitutional law professor president turns his attention to proposing a legislative act that will sharply reign in the putative “personhood” prerogatives of corporations. They are relatively new entities in legal history, and their supposed “rights,” duties, obligations, and limits have been regularly subject to re-definition over the past hundred years. There’s no reason to believe that the court’s current ideas are definitive.

Kunstler.com