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Page added on April 18, 2016
Kunstler: The Elephant Cometh
The elephant’s not even in the room, which is why the 2016 election campaign is such a soap opera. The elephant outside the room is named Discontinuity. That’s perhaps an intimidating word, but it is exactly what the USA is in for. It means that a lot of familiar things come to an end, stop, don’t work the way they are supposed to – beginning, manifestly, with the election process now underway in all its unprecedented bizarreness.
One reason it’s difficult to comprehend discontinuity is because so many operations and institutions of daily life in America have insidiously become rackets, meaning that they are kept going only by dishonest means. If we didn’t lie to ourselves about them, they couldn’t continue.
For instance the automobile racket. Without a solid, solvent middle-class, you can’t sell cars. Americans are used to paying for cars on installment loans. If the middle class is so crippled by prior debt and the disappearance of good-paying jobs that they can’t qualify for car loans, well, the answer is to give them loans anyway, on terms that don’t really pencil out — such as 7-year loans at 0 percent interest for used cars (that will be worth next to nothing long before the loan expires).
This will go on until it can’t, which is what discontinuity is all about. The car companies and the banks (with help from government regulators and political cheerleaders) have created this work-around by treating “sub-prime” car loans the same way they treated sub-prime mortgages: they bundle them into larger packages of bonds called collateralized loan obligations. These, in turn, are sold mainly to big pension fund and insurance companies desperate for “yield” (higher interest) on “safe” investments that ostensibly preserve their principal. The “collateral” amounts to the revenue streams of payments that are sure to stop because the payers are by definition not credit-worthy, meaning it was baked in the cake that they would quit making payments — especially when they go “under water” owing ever more money for junkers that have lost all value.
It’s easy to see how that ends in tears for all concerned parties, but we “buy into it” because there seems to be no other way to a) boost the so-called “consumer” economy and b) keep the matrix of car-dependant suburban sprawl in operation. We took what used to be a fairly sound idea during a now-bygone phase of history, and perverted it to avoid making any difficult but necessary changes in a new phase of history.
Health care is now such a blatant, odious, and ruinous racket that it is a little hard to believe that it hasn’t ignited an outright revolution or, at least, a workplace massacre in some insurance company C-suite. It is a well-known fact that most Americans don’t even have $500 to pay for a car repair. How are they supposed to cope with a $5,000 deductible health insurance incident? Answer: they can’t. Their mental health is destroyed in the process of attempting to fix their physical health. Not uncommonly, they have to declare bankruptcy after a routine appendectomy or a visit to the emergency room to set a broken arm. Sometimes, they don’t even bother to go to the doctor, seeing clearly how this plays out. The pharmaceutical industry has, of course, been allowed to convert itself into a simple extortion racket. Got an unusual kind of cancer? We have something that might help. Oh, it costs $43,000 a month….
What kind of a polity allows this cruel and indecent grift to go on? Why, the Obama administration, which allowed the health insurance company lobbyists and their colleagues in Big Pharma to “craft” the Affordable Care Act — the name of which must be the biggest public lie ever floated.
It’s interesting to see how a parallel fraud is playing out in higher ed. I submit the reason that college presidents are not pushing back against the Maoist coercions of the undergraduate social justice warriors is because the marvelous theater of the gender, race, and “privilege” melodrama is a potent distraction from the sad fact that college has turned into a grotesquely top-heavy and high-paying administrative racket offering boutique courses in fake fields (Dartmouth College: WGSS 65.06 Radical Sexuality: Of Color, Wildness, and Fabulosity… Harvard University: WOMGEN 1424: American Fetish) in order to pander to their young customers (students) conditioned to tragic “oppression” sob stories. All in the service of paying huge salaries + perqs to the dynamic executives running these places.
Then there is banking, a.k.a. the financial system, certainly the greatest racket of rackets, since the fumes it’s running on — combinations of ZIRP, QE, and “forward guidance” (happy talk) — is all that there is to maintain the illusion that “money” remains a reliable gauge of value. Finance is the racket that will go down first and hardest, and when it does, all the other rackets currently running will go up in a vapor. That elephant will storm into the room before the political conventions, and when it does, it will usher in the recognition that nothing can go on as before.
11 Comments on "Kunstler: The Elephant Cometh"
onlooker on Mon, 18th Apr 2016 1:25 pm
Wonderful essay by Kunstler capturing the essence of what the US has become. One giant swindle corrupt culture bent on swindling each other and especially the disenfranchised till nothing is left.
Anonymous on Mon, 18th Apr 2016 2:30 pm
Well said, if my country had any sense at all, it would sever all ties to the americant empire and stop following its every diktat. But our local installed elites, whose real loyalty is to washingdum, Tel Aviv, and uS oil corporations, would much rather go down with the sinking american ship than declare independence. Id like to know where my nations Vladimir Putin is..
Apneaman on Mon, 18th Apr 2016 2:37 pm
Big Pharma Trips Over the Maxed-out American Consumer
Even as Prescription Drug Volume Stagnates, Prices Soar.
“Total US spending on prescription drugs in 2015, at the manufacturers’ level and as measured by “invoice pricing,” jumped by 12.2% to $424.8 billion, after having already soared 14.2% in 2014! A two-year increase of 28%!
So you’d think we’d get some results for all this moolah. But no.
Life expectancy in the US, at 78.7 years at birth, ranks between 34th and 52nd place globally, depending on who does the counting, wedged somewhere between Bahrain and Cuba, and about 5 years below the top. Among US states, life expectancy ranges from 81.3 years in Hawaii or 80.8 years in California to 74.9 years in Mississippi. It’s bad. But we handed Big Pharma a ballooning amount of money to get there.”
http://wolfstreet.com/2016/04/14/big-pharma-drug-prices-soar-volume-stagnates-best-way-to-wreck-consumers/
PracticalMaina on Mon, 18th Apr 2016 2:40 pm
Drugs to fix the side effects of drugs to fix the side effects of drugs to fix the side effect of breathing in polluted air, drinking polluted water and eating drugged filled polluted food.
penury on Mon, 18th Apr 2016 5:11 pm
In my limited exposure to the medical profession I have noticed a tendency for medical providers to treat the symptoms and not attempt to determine the cause, Doctor I have frequent headaches,”well mrs jones, take two aspirin a day, next patient?
makati1 on Mon, 18th Apr 2016 7:34 pm
penury, I have decided that the goal of professional medicine is to prolong the (profitable) treatment, not provide a cure. For instance, take cancer. Medical ‘researchers’ have spent trillions over decades to ‘find a cure’ but all we have are a few ‘treatments’ that cost a fortune and only prolong the agony.
“In 2016, an estimated 1,685,210 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the United States and 595,690 people will die from the disease.”
“National expenditures for cancer care in the United States totaled nearly $125 billion in 2010 and could reach $156 billion in 2020.”
http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/what-is-cancer/statistics
And this is just the 5% of the population represented by the US.
If they charged $100,000 each to cure a cancer, the medical industry would still lose almost $100+ Billion dollars per year in income. Money talks and EVERYTHING is about money in the Western world. EVERYTHING.
onlooker on Mon, 18th Apr 2016 7:47 pm
Yes chemo drugs costs in the thousands of dollars. When Cannabis could be such a potent treatment. But no, because then they would lose exclusive patented rights to their medicine and their profits. Conventional cancer treatment is a joke just prolonging what will be the inevitable. Like everything else now in the Western world just a racket.
Kevin Cobley on Mon, 18th Apr 2016 8:35 pm
We don’t have the American problem in Australia. Political parties no longer have the clout to abolish our nationalised health care, it’s just too popular to campaign against.Some politicians have attempted to promote “Private Health care insurance”, the measures adopted only run until the costs are too high and people abandon insurance, Private Health insurance is collapsing again as it always does when the subsides provided by Government can’t stop prices rising to an excessive amount. When people have private insurance they abuse it with excessive claims, Dr’s abuse it by excessive procedures. With the public nationalised system care is rationed by need. The public system wastes money too employing too many “nutritionists”, “Psychologists” “Physiotherapists”.
University educated X-ray techs, Nurses which are a very costly impost for minuscule benefit, attracting inappropriate staff that aren’t in it for the love of nursing. Have huge numbers of unneeded ancillary staff created by empire building managements. Get rid of the unnecessary “degrees” and return the Health care system to the way it was 30 years ago.
The phoney degree/diploma system is everywhere in society in Australia, with fake training courses costing huge amounts of money training people for jobs that either don’t exist or require zip training. It’s a problem with the electorates “parents demands” for everybody’s kids wanting a “university educated” child. Society actually requires very few University graduates. The traditional University areas of science and medicine, not many people can cope with integral calculus or trigonometry, so University courses are now designed to be free of any functional mathematics. The Idea of a mathematics’ free economics’ course is ludicrous, with graduates unable to understand what an “exponential” is, the very basis of our banking system.
Survivalist on Mon, 18th Apr 2016 8:46 pm
The number one consumer of global energy flows will no doubt be the number one sufferer when said energy flow diminishes. America will implode upon itself like the mother of all Black Friday TV sales. I’m going camping.
theedrich on Tue, 19th Apr 2016 4:20 am
The religions of the West are based on demands for escape from evolution. Christianity promises “life everlasting.” Paranoia-based Judaism promises superiority over all other races. Mohammedanism promises to give males eternal orgasms with beautiful women. (Women themselves are unimportant except for sex, cooking and breeding.)
Today in the West, such demands have come down to earth in the form of unlimited physical and psychic benefits for everyone. Hotflash Clitory claims that only White males are blocking women and the lower races from getting their (and her) “share.”
At the same time, Western “democracy” allows foreign governments surreptitiously (see Hotflash’s “Clinton Foundation”) to bribe, and hence control, the regimes of America and other erstwhile White countries. Christianity, the West’s dominant religion, wants life everlasting to descend from heaven to rescue the troglodytic sludge now overwhelming the planet — all this at Whitey’s expense. Globalizing corporations agree, since that enables them to “help” in the transfer. Jews, who have hated the West since Roman times, through their modern control of the hypnosis-box, persuade Whitey to commit genosuicide.
All of this includes a corporate feeding frenzy destroying Whiteland, and thereby all higher intelligence on the planet. There are no longer any fixed boundaries between international crime and governments, especially the American government.
The stringpullers, of course, hate free speech, because it impedes their dominance. In countries such as Canada and the European disneylands, those marionetteers have achieved suppression of such freedom through the laws by bribing the lawmakers themselves. Only the American First Amendment keeps these vampires from total control in the U.S. One wonders how much longer that Amendment will hold up, given the Marxist anti-Whitism now proliferating on many campuses. With Georg Sörös’ MoveOn.org rent-a-mobs and similar agitprop groups, it seems only a matter of time before Stalin returns. Will “re-education camps” for pro-Whites be next? The anti-Whites who cluster on sites like this would love it. And so would the plutocrats who are sucking our blood.
penury on Tue, 19th Apr 2016 5:10 pm
I fear that the banking industry will be the next step in the total control of the economy. NIR on loans? Happening in Europe. Bail-in for the banks, has happened, Cyprus, Austria, could happen here.; Eliminate cash to control criminals? When cash is eliminated the control over the Sheeple will be complete. Coming soon to a country near you.