Unfortunately, Kunstler lays out a very plausible future. Can the tensions in the Middle East just keep festering without something different happening? Peacenik doesn't think so.
And something different won't be peace and friendship and brotherhood. The outcome of an attack on Iran is probably just as Kunstler imagines it or worse. Yet U.S. senators and media types and some generals openly cheer and campaign for an attack. Does U.S. society have a deathwish? Or is the future already so distopian that this future, World War, is a preferable outcome? Maybe swine flu should mutate and depopulate huge chunks of the earth. Maybe that is a preferable outcome.
By James Howard Kunstler
When Alan Greenspan predicted three percent economic growth showing up in the reported figures for the third quarter of 2009, did he mean executive compensation packages? Maybe the lesson here is: don't ask a crackhead to predict the future supply of crack. Greenspan's greatest success may be to drive economics into such disrepute that it will be cut loose from the universities and only be taught by mail order or internet subscription from the same outfits that offer PhD's in astrology. That is, before the universities themselves go broke.
The predicament that the USA finds itself will not be "solved" at the scale of operation that we're accustomed to, and we should just stop wasting precious time and dwindling resources in the idle hope that it will be. The failure to recognize this dynamic is the most impressive part of the meltdown. The only thing that the federal government is likely to prove in the process is the ineffectiveness of its actions as applied to any of the raging current problems from the killing burden of hyper-debt to the brushfires of geopolitics. Congress will only make the health care system more complex. Both congress and President Obama will do everything possible to keep housing prices unaffordable -- in a quixotic effort to protect the collateral of the big banks. Capital will continue to vanish in the black hole of default.
Read on...
And something different won't be peace and friendship and brotherhood. The outcome of an attack on Iran is probably just as Kunstler imagines it or worse. Yet U.S. senators and media types and some generals openly cheer and campaign for an attack. Does U.S. society have a deathwish? Or is the future already so distopian that this future, World War, is a preferable outcome? Maybe swine flu should mutate and depopulate huge chunks of the earth. Maybe that is a preferable outcome.
By James Howard Kunstler
When Alan Greenspan predicted three percent economic growth showing up in the reported figures for the third quarter of 2009, did he mean executive compensation packages? Maybe the lesson here is: don't ask a crackhead to predict the future supply of crack. Greenspan's greatest success may be to drive economics into such disrepute that it will be cut loose from the universities and only be taught by mail order or internet subscription from the same outfits that offer PhD's in astrology. That is, before the universities themselves go broke.
The predicament that the USA finds itself will not be "solved" at the scale of operation that we're accustomed to, and we should just stop wasting precious time and dwindling resources in the idle hope that it will be. The failure to recognize this dynamic is the most impressive part of the meltdown. The only thing that the federal government is likely to prove in the process is the ineffectiveness of its actions as applied to any of the raging current problems from the killing burden of hyper-debt to the brushfires of geopolitics. Congress will only make the health care system more complex. Both congress and President Obama will do everything possible to keep housing prices unaffordable -- in a quixotic effort to protect the collateral of the big banks. Capital will continue to vanish in the black hole of default.
Read on...
