Jim Kunstler on our future right now

Two good articles by James Howard Kunstler this week:

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/black-swans-dead-cats-live-bats-...

Black Swans, Dead Cats, Live Bats, and Goodbye to All That
JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER - March 13, 2020

… Where I depart from MAGA is my sense that the industrial age itself has probably shot its wad, and that whatever America makes of itself going forward is likely to be a much more modest and simpler way of life, without a lot of the dazzling bells and whistles we’ve become accustomed to, and perhaps some genuine hardship.

I say that, readers will recall, because it really all comes down to the energy inputs available and that part of the picture has gone pretty grim in just the past week. The convergence of world events has driven a wooden stake through the heart of the shale oil business. From the get-go, shale oil was a loser because it just cost too much to get that oil out of the rock it was trapped in. It only worked as a financial stunt during the low interest lending orgy of the past decade. It was a magnificent stunt, you understand, goosing US production to 13 million barrels a day — energy independence, with all those short-term feel-good vibes — but it was just a stunt and now it’s over. The reality of this has yet to penetrate the American hive-mind.

… As I’ve averred before, the shale companies spent ten years proving to investors that they can’t make a red cent. Their bonds and notes are sinking into sub-investment-grade oblivion.

… US politics were already crazy enough before all this suddenly happened. The crisis of the past few weeks also saw the supernatural elevation of Joe Biden to the utterly implausible role of last-vehicle-standing in the Democratic Party demolition derby. Who do they think they are kidding? Not only is Joe Biden observably gone-in-the-head — that is, clearly unfit to be president — but he’s loaded down with a steaming, fetid cargo of easily proven grifting offenses so clunky and obvious they would embarrass a South Philly mobster. I’m sure Mr. Biden stayed in the race solely to avoid investigation for his operations in Ukraine and China with son, Hunter...

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/things-have-changed/

Things Have Changed
JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER - March 16, 2020

… Did you get the feeling, as I did, watching the Sanders-Biden debate last night — the inadequate versus the irrelevant — that the world they were blathering about possibly doesn’t exist anymore? The world of institutions that actually function? Like, the ones that conjure up whatever sum of money you demand to keep all the wheels spinning? … Medicare for all now? Really? More like, a year from now every physician in America may be the equivalent of the old country doc toting a black bag around to home visits. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough horses left in America, and the few buggies we’ve got are all in the museum.

The mega financial bubble-of-bubbles is deflating with frightful velocity precisely because of the efforts since 2008 to artificially inflate it. The Federal Reserve gave it one final blast Sunday night — while everybody else was counting their rolls of toilet paper — and the effect was like blowing hot air into a shredded Zeppelin. Stock futures are “limit down” as I write, before the Wall Street open. Gold is getting pounded into the ground like a grape stake and silver is so low it looks like the hedge fund managers are down to pawning grandma’s table service.

… Nobody really knows how deep and how harsh this gets (and perhaps the ones who have a clue ain’t sayin’). But the situation presents two salient questions: how much disorder is entailed in this ordeal? And what does the world look like when the convulsion phase of this thing is over?

… The stresses mounting on the national scene today reflect the extreme fragilities of the way-of-life we constructed... and an awful lot of bad choices we made in the process, like suburbanizing the nation and making everybody a hostage to happy motoring. I won’t belabor that point, except to ask how are those vast regions of the country going to manage daily life as the supply chains wobble? I’d say a shortage of toilet paper may only be the beginning of their problems.

The cities — at least, the few that didn’t already implode from the inside out — made assumptions about how big and tall they could grow which don’t jibe with the new circumstances chugging ferociously down the line. Just think what a lockdown of the global economy will do to all those residential skyscraper projects lately hoisted up in New York, San Francisco and Boston? I’ll tell you: They are assets instantly converted into liabilities. And how will these cities even begin to pay for maintaining their complex infrastructures and services when the money for all that no longer exists and there’s no way to pretend that it will ever come back? Answer: They won’t be able to keep borrowing and they won’t manage. These cities will depopulate and there will be battles over who gets to live in the parts that still may have some value, like riverfronts.

I guess just about everybody can now see the idiocy of concentrating the nation’s commercial life in super-gigantic organisms like Big Box stores. It seemed like a good idea at the time, like so many blunders in history, and now that time is over.

… Where does this all lead? Eventually, to a land and a people who operate their society in a very different way at a much more modest scale. The task of reorganizing our national life is immense. (There will be plenty to do, so don’t worry about that.) You can forget about the grandiose techno-narcissistic visions of electrified motoring and a robotic nirvana of perpetual sex-crazed leisure. Everything we do has to be downscaled, from whatever manufacturing we can cobble back together to rebuilding commercial ecosystems at a finer grain from region to region — in other words, what we now call small business, geared locally.

… There will be economic roles and social roles for all those willing to step up to some responsibility. Young people may see tremendous opportunity replacing the wounded economic dinosaurs wobbling across the landscape. It’ll be all about going local and regional and making yourself useful in exchange for a livelihood and the esteem of others around you — aka, your community...

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Kunstler nails it.

In a similar vein - we, it seems are the cavalry, if there is going to be any.

From Mike Krieger at his Liberty Blitzkrieg blog:

It’s likely the past few weeks have been some of the most surreal you’ve ever experienced; I know it’s been the case for me. The largest cities in the U.S. are essentially on lockdown, the stock market is in free fall and grocery stores are being stripped bare. It feels like a very dark moment, but in such darkness I see the light of a new beginning. A new beginning that starts with each and every one of us.

One of the things that helped me navigate the last couple of months in a state of relative calm is a longstanding understanding that something of this sort was inevitable. Not a pandemic necessarily, but something was bound to come along and slam us unexpectedly, and that when it did, the impact would be shockingly disruptive given how completely brittle and phony our economies and societies have become.

It’s impossible to overstate the impact you can have as an individual in times like these. We’ve all seen the federal government response. From statements like “it’s just the flu,” to Trump signing charts of a short-covering rally in the stock market and the CDC’s inability or unwillingness to test Americans in the early days, this entire episode should prove to you once and for all that the centralized cavalry isn’t coming. You are the cavalry.

Guess it's on who and however many of us are still around to pick up the pieces and build something more real, just, sustainable, fulfilling and so on from what's left after the current monstrosity collapses.

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@Blue Republic

Mike Krieger, points out, and as so many here at C99 have said so many times, the system we prop up with our tax dollars has appeared to be in a slow-motion collapse for a long time. Kunstler calls it here:

The Federal Reserve gave it one final blast Sunday night — while everybody else was counting their rolls of toilet paper — and the effect was like blowing hot air into a shredded Zeppelin.

That's the truth. The biggest industry in the United States right now is "finance," and that just means that by propping up the banks, we're blowing hot air into an empty vessel, an industry that services itself before producing goods and services that sustain life.

The American people have to do the work of sustaining life. I agree with Abraham Lincoln that,

http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/fair.htm

… labor is prior to, and independent of, capital; ... in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed -- ... labor can exist without capital, but ... capital could never have existed without labor. Hence ... labor is the superior -- greatly the superior -- of capital.

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