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Page added on June 16, 2017
Kunstler: Things To Come
As our politicos creep deeper into a legalistic wilderness hunting for phantoms of Russian collusion, nobody pays attention to the most dangerous force in American life: the unraveling financialization of the economy.
Financialization is what happens when the people-in-charge “create” colossal sums of “money” out of nothing — by issuing loans, a.k.a. debt — and then cream off stupendous profits from the asset bubbles, interest rate arbitrages, and other opportunities for swindling that the artificial wealth presents. It was a kind of magic trick that produced monuments of concentrated personal wealth for a few and left the rest of the population drowning in obligations from a stolen future. The future is now upon us.
Financialization expressed itself in other interesting ways, for instance the amazing renovation of New York City (Brooklyn especially). It didn’t happen just because Generation X was repulsed by the boring suburbs it grew up in and longed for a life of artisanal cocktails. It happened because financialization concentrated immense wealth geographically in the very few places where its activities took place — not just New York but San Francisco, Washington, and Boston — and could support luxuries like craft food and brews.
Quite a bit of that wealth was extracted from asset-stripping the rest of America where financialization was absent, kind of a national distress sale of the fly-over places and the people in them. That dynamic, of course, produced the phenomenon of President Donald Trump, the distilled essence of all the economic distress “out there” and the rage it entailed. The people of Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin were left holding a big bag of nothing and they certainly noticed what had been done to them, though they had no idea what to do about it, except maybe try to escape the moment-by-moment pain of their ruined lives with powerful drugs.
And then, a champion presented himself, and promised to bring back the dimly remembered wonder years of post-war well-being — even though the world had changed utterly — and the poor suckers fell for it. Not to mention the fact that his opponent — the avaricious Hillary, with her hundreds of millions in ill-gotten wealth — was a very avatar of the financialization that had turned their lives to shit. And then the woman called them “a basket of deplorables” for noticing what had happened to them.
And now the rather pathetic false promises of President Trump, the whole MAGA thing, is unraveling at exactly the same time that the financialized economy is entering its moment of final catastrophic phase-change. The monuments to wealth — especially the stock and bond portfolios and the presumed value of real estate investments — will surrender to a process you might call price-discovery-from-Hell, revealing their worth to be somewhere between little and nothing. The accumulated monstrous debts of persons, corporations, and sovereign societies, will be suddenly, shockingly, absolutely, and self-evidently unpayable, and the securities represented by them will be sucked into the kind of vortices of time/space depicted in movies about mummies and astronauts. And all of a sudden the avatars of that wealth will see their lives turn to shit just like the moiling, Budweiser-gulping, oxycontin-addled deplorables in the flat, boring, parking lot wastelands of our ruined drive-in Utopia saw their lives rendered into a brown-and-yellow slurry draining clockwise down the toilet of history.
Nobody in power in this country is paying attention to how close we are to that epic moment — at least, they’re not talking about it. If the possibility of all that even occupies some remote corner of their brains, they surely don’t know how to prepare the citizenry for it, or what to do about it. The truth is that societies respond emergently to major crises like the imminent unraveling of our financialized economy, often in disorderly and surprising ways. I suppose we’ll just have to watch the nauseating spectacle play out, and in the meantime enjoy the Russian collusion melodrama for whatever it’s worth — probably more than a ticket to Wonder Woman or the new Tom Cruise Mummy movie.
12 Comments on "Kunstler: Things To Come"
deadlykillerbeaz on Fri, 16th Jun 2017 6:39 am
Life is just a shit sandwich and every day you take another bite.
Kunstler hasn’t figured it out yet.
He might over time, but I won’t hold my breath.
onlooker on Fri, 16th Jun 2017 8:28 am
Yep, the catastrophic denouement of systems that simply were never sustainable. And please all you optimists, give or take a few years on all this unfolding is an inanely childish diversion
Apneaman on Fri, 16th Jun 2017 9:08 am
deadlykillerbeaz, Kunstler has made a living describing the flavor of each bite for the biters and chewers who are stuck in commuter traffic for 40 years. Which way of making a living sounds more preferable?
dooma on Fri, 16th Jun 2017 9:12 am
Life is just like a shit sandwich. The more dough you have, the less shit you have to eat.
Apneaman on Fri, 16th Jun 2017 9:40 am
Once again the media is a few years behind me with a prediction of things to come for merica’s Cancer capital.
Houston fears climate change will cause catastrophic flooding: ‘It’s not if, it’s when’
Human activity is worsening the problem in an already rainy area, and there could be damage worthy of a disaster movie if a storm hits the industrial section
“There is little hope the situation is going to get better any time soon. Earlier this month, days after Donald Donald Trump announced the US will withdraw from the Paris accord on climate change, a new report warned that rare US floods will become the norm if emissions are not cut.
Brody, a professor in the department of marine sciences at Texas A&M University’s Galveston campus said the requests for help in Houston from people moving homes inspired him to create a forthcoming web tool so that people can type in an address and get a risk score.
“If you can see your crime statistics, shouldn’t you be able to see your flood risk also? And other risks as well, human-induced risks?” he said. The site will be named Buyers Be-Where.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/16/texas-flooding-houston-climate-change-disaster
Cloggie on Fri, 16th Jun 2017 10:09 am
Once again the media is a few years behind me with a prediction of things to come for merica’s Cancer capital.
Tax office, same story.
Apneaman on Fri, 16th Jun 2017 11:27 am
clog, it’s the same story alright. As you can see the Cancer is infecting and consuming your beloved homeland as well. That’s because y’all two legged Cancer apes like the rest of the humans. Same story indeed.
Gas grab and global warming could wipe out Wadden Sea heritage site
The world’s largest unbroken intertidal system and a haven for migratory birds on the Dutch coastline is at risk of sinking out of existence
“But the storm-weathered Frisian coastline may be living on borrowed time. One report this month predicted that it would be submerged by 2100 if current global warming trends and planned gas extractions continue.
“It is more likely that the area will drown than that it will survive,” said Rolf Schuttenhelm, the paper’s author. “The equation is quite simple. If sea level rise and subsidence combined are larger than the maximum speed of sedimentation – and they are – then with time, the drowning of the tidal system becomes inevitable.””
“NAM, a Shell-Exxon partnership, plans to start a gas drilling operation next year and three other wells could soon follow. Local people from 14 villages have formed a movement to resist them.
“It’s all about money,” said Willem Schoorstra, an award-winning Frisian novelist from the group. “We had one talk with NAM and they constantly repeated that they would help us make the clean energy transition. But it’s crap. We don’t buy it. They only want to invest in it when they are drilling. They hold on to their old ways and destroy everything for the sake of money.”
Beneath such talk is an attachment to the low-lying, ancient ground on which Romans, Vikings and Franks have trodden.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/16/gas-grab-and-global-warming-could-wipe-out-wadden-sea-heritage-site
IF YOU’RE A CANCER AND YOU KNOW IT CLAP YOUR HANDS…………….CLAP! CLAP!
onlooker on Fri, 16th Jun 2017 11:29 am
Cancer monkeys rule until they don’t!
Apneaman on Fri, 16th Jun 2017 12:03 pm
Onlooker, the Doctor has give his diagnosis.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/33/70/e5/3370e551cd7e55ebe1f71c20c9512648.jpg
JJHMAN on Fri, 16th Jun 2017 8:04 pm
I think Kunstler is caught in a really slow moving relativistic time trap. He’s been predicting that the end of the world is coming next Tuesday for at least five years.
It’s really not healthy to read his stuff too often unless you get unnaturally optimistic.
Davy on Fri, 16th Jun 2017 8:49 pm
Kunstler is struggling to be relevant. He was one of the founding fathers of doom. Now kunstler’s message is losing relevance. Why, becuase both peak oil and financial collapse were extended. These conditions are still present but without the dire force they once had. He made a big impact on me in 05 but today I don’t read him much. I still enjoy reading him when I do becuase he is entertaining but he is no longer the resource he once was.
Personally I feel the cards are now dealt. We know what to look for but we do not know very well what cards are dealt. In 05 we were still unsure of the nature of the game. Today it is pretty obvious but the details are the issue now. Now it is a wait and see and back then it was what are we looking for. As a doomer I am very impressed at the tenacity of the status quo but I also know as time passes we are more and more exposed to the dangers Kunstler has spoken about. Kunstler knows this too but his problem is keeping his following.
makati1 on Fri, 16th Jun 2017 9:24 pm
A good summary of where the U$ is at and where it is headed. Where? Why, that big step down to the 3rd world, where else? And, I think TPTB know exactly where it is going because that is their planned destination for America.
Official Summer begins on Wednesday. What will it bring? We shall see.