As the election campaign ground on like a 3000-mile race between a greyhound and an armadillo, the media kept harping on Barack Obama's vague promises of "change." We now know what the main promise was: regime change, right here in the USA, not in some place where the natives wear strange headgear. Mr. Obama's victory was a moment of epochal exhilaration, not least because he appears to be a decent and intelligent person self-made from a humble background -- someone who has personally bought tube socks in the K-mart, worried about money, and made many trips in a subway car.
The current occupant of the White House, however, has sedulously prepared for his successor the biggest shit sandwich the world has ever seen, and there is naturally some concern that Mr. Obama might choke on it. The dilemma is essentially this: the consumer economy we all knew and loved has died. There will be pressure from nearly every quarter to keep it hooked up to the costly life support machines even though it is dead. A different economy is waiting to be born, but it is nothing like the one that has died. The economy-to-come is one of rigor and austerity. It is not the kind of thing that a nation of overfed clowns is used to. Do we even have a prayer of getting to it, or are we going to squander our dwindling resources on life support for something that is already dead?
Peacenik wonders how long before the public seriously wakes up to the enormity of the financial/industrial crisis sweeping the globe. China is shuttering factories at a breakneck pace. 130,000 people a day are departing the city of Guhanzhou in China. Many of them newly unemployed. In North America the question isn't how to try and save the automotive industry, the question is whether it is worth saving. AIG needs another huge bailout. Kunstler of course wraps it all up in today's post. And the Bush wrecking machine still has two months left to continue wrecking.
