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Page added on October 15, 2013
Kunstler: The “Aggregation Of Rackets” That American Life Has Become Is Rolling Over
Things that can’t go on, the prophet Herb Stein once observed, go on until they can’t. Criticality eventually bushwhacks credulity. The aggregation of rackets that American life has become is rolling over like a great groaning wounded leviathan and the rest of the world is starting to freak out at the spectacle. Instead of a revolution, we’re having a suicide party.
But don’t worry, a revolution would not be far behind. My guess is that it would kick off as generational rather than regional or factional, but it would eventually incorporate all three. A generation already swindled by the college loan racket must be chafing at the bureaucratic nightmare that ObamaCare instantly turned into at its roll-out, with a website that wouldn’t let anyone log in. Isn’t technology wonderful? I wonder when the “magic moment” will come when all those unemployed millennials join a Twitter injunction to just stop paying back their loans. If that particular message went out during this month’s government food fight, it would do more than just get the attention of a few politicians. It would crash the banks and snap the links in every chain of obligation holding the fiasco of globalism together.
So far, the millennials have shown about as much political inclination as so many sowbugs under a rotten log, but it is in the nature of criticality that things change real fast. In any case, the older generations have completely disgraced themselves and it is only a question of how cruelly history will treat them in their unseating. The last time things got this bad, the guys in charge divided into two teams with blue and gray uniforms, rode gallantly onto the first fields of battle thinking it was a kind of rousing military theatrical, only to find themselves in a grinding four-year industrial-scale slaughter in which it was not uncommon for 20,000 young men to get shot to pieces in a single day — one day after another.
Of course, things are a bit different now since we became a nation of overfed clowns dedicated to getting something for nothing, but despite the abject futility of American life in its current incarnation, there is room for plenty of violence and destruction. The sad and peculiar angle of the current struggle is that both sides in government wish heartily to keep all the rackets of daily life going — they just disagree on the distribution method of the vig.
What amuses me at the moment is the behavior of the various financial markets and the cockamamie stories circulating to explain what they are doing in this time of perilous uncertainty. One popular story is called “the energy renaissance.” This is a fairy-tale that pretends that we have enough oil at a cheap enough price to keep driving to WalMart forever. Of course, shale oil wells that cost $12million to drill and produce 80 barrels-a-day for three years before crapping out altogether do not bode well for that outcome, but the wish to believe over-rides the reality. Another laughable story du jour is “the manufacturing renaissance.” This story proposes that the “central corridor” of the USA, from North Dakota to Texas, is about to give China a run for its money in manufacturing. The catch is that any new factory opening up in this scenario will be run on robots — leaving who, exactly, to be the customers paying for what these factories produce? Think about it for five minutes and you will understand that it is just a story calculated to goose up a share price here and there, and only for moment until it is discovered to be just a story. What interests me most is what happens when the stories lose their power to levitate the legitimacy of the people who tell them.
Well, Christine LeGarde, chief of the IMF, tried to read the riot act to the American clownigarchs over the weekend, but they’re not paying attention to her. What has she done for her own country, France, lately anyhow. They’ve got their own set of rackets running over there. The Chinese are getting a little prickly, too, since they are sitting on a few trillion in US promises to pay cash money in the not so distant future. The Chinese are beginning to apprehend that future perhaps never arriving.
In case you haven’t heard: America is “in recovery.” We can play all the games we want with money, or what passes for money these days. And then the moment will come when we can’t. That moment begins to feel creepily close.
14 Comments on "Kunstler: The “Aggregation Of Rackets” That American Life Has Become Is Rolling Over"
dsula on Tue, 15th Oct 2013 11:42 am
Kunstler?? Hahaha.
BillT on Tue, 15th Oct 2013 1:02 pm
As the rest of the world gathers together to take down the Empire, we play games and pretend all is well.
dsula, you need to get out of the US and get a picture of the real world. There is nothing in the above article that isn’t true.
rollin on Tue, 15th Oct 2013 1:06 pm
Kunstler is a bit more on track than usual. There will be no revolution though, more of a walking away from society and government, which is already proceeding across the generations.
dsula on Tue, 15th Oct 2013 1:13 pm
BillT. Thanks. I lived the better part of my life outside the US. But did you notice that Kunstler is preaching imminent doom since, 1990 or so? That’s 20 years of waiting for imminent doom. What a clown.
george on Tue, 15th Oct 2013 1:37 pm
dont be angry because he kicked you off his website . lololol
rune on Tue, 15th Oct 2013 2:12 pm
That whole coterie of peak oil cassandera’s from the Noughties seems likeit just spins the same old yarn. You lose respect for The boy Who Cried Wolf after a while. Kunstler just seems eternally on-the-rag.
GregT on Tue, 15th Oct 2013 3:58 pm
“That’s 20 years of waiting for imminent doom. What a clown.”
Shooting the messenger is not the most intelligent use of ones time. 20 years is a drop in the bucket in the big scheme of things. Have patience, Kunstler will be vindicated, soon enough.
vulcanelli on Tue, 15th Oct 2013 4:33 pm
Dsula, Kunstler has never preached imminent doom. He is not saying when so much as what, reflecting what we are trending towards which is the inevitable decline of society from its unsustainable underpinnings. You laugh at what he suggests. What do you think we are trending towards? Tell us about your vision of our rosy future and how we are supposed to get there.
J-Gav on Tue, 15th Oct 2013 4:44 pm
A problem on this website: articles flash past and disappear, scarcely leaving the time for readers to comment, much less come back to other posters …
There ought to be some sort of, say, one-week archive available to consult and continue commenting on. I know the forums exist but who wants to get involved in that rigamarole?
Anyway, on to Kunstler. A good writer and an above-average thinker. Sure, he’s gonna play his themes to the hilt, other wise he’d find himself bouncing back and forth between “so-and-so says this and such-and-such says that.” He keeps his message pretty tight.
Which doesn’t mean I agree with him on everything. In this article, for example, I see no reason why the coming conflicts need to be generational.If he’s right there, that would be an extremely childish (ab)reaction to our predicament. Not impossible but, jeez! have we come to that?
More broadly, I don’t see the (correctly diagnosed as socially obscene) development of suburbia and exurbia as quite the monstrous pile of stranded assets that he frequently refers to. Eye-sores galore? Yes! Waste galore? Yes! But a total write-off? I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Check out David Holmgren’s writings on the subject. He’s one of the co-founders of the modern permaculture movement and has plenty of ideas on how these ‘wastelands’ could be transformed into real communities.
J-Gav on Tue, 15th Oct 2013 4:51 pm
Addendum: On the other hand, when Kunstler excoriates the depraved cretins who presently strut through the ‘hallowed’ corridors of our national institutions pretending to ‘represent’ somebody, I’m in total agreement.
Arthur on Tue, 15th Oct 2013 5:28 pm
“Which doesn’t mean I agree with him on everything. In this article, for example, I see no reason why the coming conflicts need to be generational.”
Indeed, any ‘generational conflict’ will pale in contrast what is really looming…
http://www.infowars.com/worse-than-healthcare-gov-ebt-food-stamp-system-crash-is-inevitable-heres-why/
Kunstler can’t understand that, or at least can’t admit, that the diverse America that was build in the image of his ethnic group, could possibly fail because of ethnic tensions, just like everywhere else, tensions that can no longer be kept under control after an inevitable default.
Bor on Tue, 15th Oct 2013 11:04 pm
Arthur,
You deserve lobotomy to fix something in your brain. Sorry, I have gotten too personal but you are so specially impossible.
GregT on Wed, 16th Oct 2013 1:04 am
“Kunstler can’t understand that, or at least can’t admit, that the diverse America that was build in the image of his ethnic group, could possibly fail because of ethnic tensions, just like everywhere else, tensions that can no longer be kept under control after an inevitable default.”
Arthur,
As I attempted to point out to you before, discrimination knows no boundaries. If every person on Earth was white, human beings would still find ways to make themselves feel better, by putting others down. Social status, political affiliation, religion, or even the colour of your eyes, there is no limit to human ignorance. If you believe that everything will be A-OK, in a white dominated society, after this all plays out, you are in for a very huge wake up call.
Arthur on Wed, 16th Oct 2013 9:50 am
“You deserve lobotomy to fix something in your brain. Sorry, I have gotten too personal but you are so specially impossible.”
Sure, like in your good old USSR, in some psychiatric institution, right Bor? Dream on.
So you think that Yugoslavia is merely Yugoslavia, Iraq is Iraq, Syria is just Syria and the US are… well.. ‘exceptional’. Give me a brake. Poor Bor, the time of your people is over, unless the Mossad launches a nuclear false flag, they are fanatical enough to contemplate such a move.
“If you believe that everything will be A-OK, in a white dominated society”
I a not making a moral issue of it, I am just saying what I think is going to happen. There is not going to be a ‘white dominated society’, there are going to be segregated societies.
And don’t think for a minute that I have Schadenfreude about it. Pure from a European interest I would not mind to have another 1-2 decades Pax Americana, just to maintain global financial order so we can make it to the other side of the energy Rubicon relatively easily. But it looks that that is not going to happen, unfortunately.