It is true that the European financial fiasco is a story of such fantastic mystifying complexity that the public can’t possibly be expected to follow each twist of the plotline. But the fact is that nothing was fixed for Greece or after Greece and the hazard of evermore profound wreckage is assured. The only question is how many months before the appearance of normality in financial matters yields to fighting in the streets of supposedly civilized countries.

      Spain, it was revealed this week, has turned to a form of finance that could only have been designed by M.C. Escher.

      The plan for stabilizing Spain’s hemorrhaging insolvency position works as follows: Spain’s big banks borrow billions from the European Central Bank (ECB); the Spanish banks then turn around and lend the Spanish government the money to fund a bailout operation for the Spanish banks; the Spanish banks then use the bailout money to buy Spanish sovereign bonds, that is, lend money to the government. The world received news of this dangerous idiocy with a yawn. You’d at least expect a few Germans to choke on a bratwurst here and there.

      The idea that shenanigans like this can continue must amuse the historians looking on. But three weeks into April so far nothing has penetrated the stupendous wall of illusion that separates money matters from reality like the one-way mirror in the interrogation chamber of a police precinct where every last officer of the law is on the take.

     The lesson in the first quarter of 2012 is that when anything goes, nothing matters. Jon Corzine, chief of the fraudster operation MF Global is still at large how many months after his firm pulled an abracadabra disappearing act on $1.2 billion of segregated customer accounts, many belonging to farmers and ranchers engaged in the normal options trade in commodities prices necessary to their business?¬ Nobody has been fired at the Chicago Mercantile exchange or the Commodities Futures Trading Commission for this, either. No newsman has asked President Obama about any of these things, or how come Jon Corzine is still listed by the re-election campaign as a continuing major contributor. The New York Times, for one, is much more focused on major bullshit propaganda operations, such as its recent giant spread on how America will soon be an energy independent oil exporting nation.

     No one in the American media is paying attention to the unfolding tragedy of Japan – and by this I refer not only to the unfinished Fukushima saga, but the parallel story of Japan closing down virtually its entire nuclear power industry necessitating gigantic additional imports of oil and gas to generate electric power – all of which points to the likelihood that Japan will become the first advanced industrial nation to bid sayonara to modernity and return to a neo-medieval socio-economic model of daily life.

      The Middle West and North Africa still smolder away like giant root fires. Nothing has been settled politically and the prospects are excellent that Islamic maniacs will shortly be in charge of Egypt and Libya, not to mention Syria, or even America’s trillion-dollar battleground of Afghanistan where, after ten years of persistent struggle, we can’t control either the terrain or the behavior of the people who dwell on it. Meanwhile, half of Sudan’s oil production was blown up over the weekend. And King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is not getting any younger at 88. Saudi spare oil capacity won’t matter so much when the kingdom is up in flames.

     What I wonder is how long the American public will remain in its Kardashian trance. At this torpid moment no one believes that any theoretical political cohort in this land – tea-partiers, swindled youth, professional lefties (or what’s left of them), or the fugitive thinking centrists (wherever they are) – might bestir themselves to bust up a nominating convention or march on one of many debauched institutions in the nation’s capital, from the SEC to the wax museum formally known as the Department of Justice. I think differently, though. I think this grim interval of crisis consolidation is drawing to a close and, like the buds swelling on every tree in New England, events will soon burst into astounding efflorescence.

5 Comments on "Kunstler: As If Nothing Matters"

MrEnergyCzar on Mon, 23rd Apr 2012 4:20 am 



What Spain is doing isn’t much worse than a country just printing more money. It’s just that in Europe they can’t really print…

MrEnergyCzar

Arthur on Mon, 23rd Apr 2012 8:34 am 



“all of which points to the likelihood that Japan will become the first advanced industrial nation to bid sayonara to modernity and return to a neo-medieval socio-economic model of daily life.”

Kunstler basically acknowledges that globalism is over in the light of energy depletion. Ironic that it had been the US that in 1854 under commodore Perry had forced Japan to open up for world trade:

See: wikipedia Matthew_C._Perry

Japan always was a closed (read nationalistic) society, that did not need combustion engines to keep it’s society going. The only contact Japan had up until 1854 with the West was with the Dutch on the small island of Desima:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejima

The nationalist stance of Japan was the reason it became targeted by the Roosevelt communist mob (just like Germany and Italy) that was busy laying the foundations of the US global empire as early as 1933. Now it looks like the total desaster caused by this flawed Westinghouse-Toshiba reactor will reverse the US actions of 1854 and 1945. But before that happens, Japan will put an extra big strain on the already tight global oil-market by replacing it’s nuclear generated electricity with oil. In 1985 the US were afraid that Japan might overtake the US economy (book: The Fifth Generation Computer: The Japanese Challenge). Nothing of the sort happened. Now Japan might be the first country to leave the US lead globalist system. In the end all will follow. In 2100, after a likely massive die-off, the world will be quiet again and resemble the world of 1600, with a few gadgets as a left over and souvenir from industrial society.

BillT on Mon, 23rd Apr 2012 9:53 am 



Arthur, you are so correct. I wish I were 40 years younger so I could see the events unfold that take all of us back to pre-1900s living. That is, IF we can keep our fingers off of the nuclear triggers. Hopefully, the collapse will happen so fast and be so thorough that it will not be a possibility, but, just who will inherit them? After all, there must be some 20,000 nukes laying around waiting to be used. Wasn’t that why we built so many nuclear power plants? It certainly was not for cheap electric. That never happened. WE did build up deadly stockpiles of weapons and thousands of tons of deadly waste in the process.

Will some alien species visit our planet someday and wonder what the F… happened? How a culture that could build rockets and visit the moon could destroy themselves a few short decades later.

Newfie on Mon, 23rd Apr 2012 6:09 pm 



“Will some alien species visit our planet someday and wonder what the F… happened? How a culture that could build rockets and visit the moon could destroy themselves a few short decades later.”

Intelligent life forms on other planets would also be the end result of billions of years of evolution and they would have the same defects built into their genes as us and would make the same kinds of mistakes (over population, resource depletion, environmental destruction) and self destruct the same as we are going to do. So there won’t be any visits by aliens. This is one interpretation of the Fermi Paradox.

BillT on Tue, 24th Apr 2012 5:22 am 



Really Newfie? Out of the billions of possible planets with life forms and the probability of millions having intelligent life, none were smart enough to not have constant warfare? Or perhaps were more intelligent in their use of the resources they were given? Or, maybe even came here before man and started what a large portion of the world’s population attribute to ‘gods’ from the heavens? Since you will probably never know, I would not discount future visitors from the universe.