AZspot

Can’t any of us begin the reform of the Democratic Party, starting with resigning from being Wall Street’s bitch? Granted, the age of labor unions may be over for a while, maybe forever (who knows?), and the age of government money hand-outs on the grand scale to everybody-and-his-uncle, too. But how about just a party of intelligence and courage? Wouldn’t that be enough to start with? A party capable of setting some limits and enforcing them. A party able to understand the signals that the future is sending us about resource scarcity. A party willing to engage and defeat stupidity, such as climate change denial, and drill-drill-drill cretinism, and “creation science,” and all the pietistic hypocrisies of the Sunbelt know-nothings. A party willing to drag characters like Lloyd Blankfein into a court of law to answer straight-up fraud charges. A party willing to admit that if you can’t control both the terrain and the people’s behavior in Afghanistan, then there’s no excuse for prosecuting a war there. I have a lot of hope for the millennials, the young people just coming up. They’re going to get sick of living in an ethical vacuum and sick of political paralysis.Their brains are going through the final stage of development where it arrives at the ability to make judgments. They are going to judge the Boomers and their X’er successors harshly and they’re going to remind us that Americans are capable of valiant action even without the trappings of jingoism and sports metaphors. James Howard Kunstler ☀

The big box chain stores rely on economic formulas that have no chance of surviving under the new stresses loose in the world — procedures like Wal Mart’s vaunted “warehouse on wheels,” which relies on the incessant circulation of tractor-trailer trucks traveling vast distances on the interstate highway system (itself subject to failure in a capital-scarce economy). Most truckers in America are independent contractors who have to cover their own costs, and as the price of diesel fuel rises, they will be battered. Likewise the conveyor belt of cheap plastic merchandise from Asia is also not a permanent arrangement, but rather a transient phenomenon of cheap oil and labor cost arbitrage. Consider, too, that the traumatic loss of jobs and incomes is impoverishing the very customers that the chain stores depend on. So the whole picture for these operations is rather grim. James Howard Kunstler ☀

The failure of the news media, trapped by the diminishing returns of technology, grows more epic every week. We’ve never had more media outlets in the history of this land, or been more poorly informed. Mental fossil George Will fired off a salvo last week against fixing the US railroads. He thinks it’s just a sinister ploy to snatch the people’s “individualism.” Perhaps George hasn’t noticed that other things are operating out there in the polity-space to turn the folks of this land into zombies. After all, they were long ago transformed from “citizens” into “consumers” - without a peep of complaint from anybody - so, having already surrendered their duties, obligations, and responsibilities to anything beyond their hunger for Cheez Doodles, they might now find themselves suddenly devoid of “individualism,” staggering down the highways in mobs wherever a whiff of blood emanates from a strip mall? James Howard Kunstler ☀

Americans lost in the Techno-rapture and the inane transports of Fashion Week have no idea how fragile our vital supply chain system is. If the lands around the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea continue to fall apart politically, you can be sure that something required by the oil markets will get broken over there - whether it is an oil terminal, or a shipping channel, or a royal skull - and before you can say Mike Huckabee the shipments of food to America’s supermarkets will be interrupted, with predictable results. James Howard Kunstler ☀

The Tucson shooting displaced two important political stories last week. 1.) the sentencing of former House Majority Leader Tom Delay to three years in prison for money mischief, and 2.) the appointment of JP Morgan executive William Daley as White House Chief of Staff. Both of these stories tell us as much about ourselves as the lethal antics of Jared Lee Loughner, but nobody paid attention. James Howard Kunstler ☀

One thing the shooter surely accomplished: it will now cost elected officials hundreds of millions of dollars more every year to imagine they can protect themselves with new layers of security. Not just the assignment of federal marshals, but the deployment of all sorts of “high-tech” equipment and procedures, since we are now in the techno-rapture phase of the long emergency, which features massive amounts of magical thinking. Will history notice that Jared Lee Loughner was struggling to puzzle through the mysteries of currency and of who controlled what in this world, even while he was being tossed out of a community college that he was extremely conscious of being scammed to pay for - a government-supported school that affected to prepare young people for a career spent in a corporate cubicle in order to fork over the weekly paycheck to pay back college loans. James Howard Kunstler ☀

One thing the shooter surely accomplished: it will now cost elected officials hundreds of millions of dollars more every year to imagine they can protect themselves with new layers of security. Not just the assignment of federal marshals, but the deployment of all sorts of “high-tech” equipment and procedures, since we are now in the techno-rapture phase of the long emergency, which features massive amounts of magical thinking. Will history notice that Jared Lee Loughner was struggling to puzzle through the mysteries of currency and of who controlled what in this world, even while he was being tossed out of a community college that he was extremely conscious of being scammed to pay for - a government-supported school that affected to prepare young people for a career spent in a corporate cubicle in order to fork over the weekly paycheck to pay back college loans. James Howard Kunstler ☀

The Jacobins of 1793 France were basically the Left. It took only five hundred or so of them to bully a nation of 30 million. The Jacobins of the USA in 2011 are basically the Right Wing, followers of Senator Jim DeMint, the mind-slaves of Rush Limbaugh and “students” of Prof Glenn Beck, and, of course, the worshippers of Sarah Palin. Their brand of politics might be labeled Nostalgic Sentimental Paranoid Know-Nothingism. They’re proud and loud, pious and ignorant, so deeply insecure that they depend on flag lapel pins to remind them to care about their country, full of righteous anger about their own sexual impulses, the religious notions (or not) of other people, and the possible introduction of the rule of law in banking matters. They pretend to represent the folks freezing in their mobile homes who subsist on Froot Loops, but they’re really protecting the country clubbers, the corporate poobahs, the fraudsters on Wall Street, and every other racketeer in the land - including their own class of political grifters. James Howard Kunstler ☀

The Jacobins of 1793 France were basically the Left. It took only five hundred or so of them to bully a nation of 30 million. The Jacobins of the USA in 2011 are basically the Right Wing, followers of Senator Jim DeMint, the mind-slaves of Rush Limbaugh and “students” of Prof Glenn Beck, and, of course, the worshippers of Sarah Palin. Their brand of politics might be labeled Nostalgic Sentimental Paranoid Know-Nothingism. They’re proud and loud, pious and ignorant, so deeply insecure that they depend on flag lapel pins to remind them to care about their country, full of righteous anger about their own sexual impulses, the religious notions (or not) of other people, and the possible introduction of the rule of law in banking matters. They pretend to represent the folks freezing in their mobile homes who subsist on Froot Loops, but they’re really protecting the country clubbers, the corporate poobahs, the fraudsters on Wall Street, and every other racketeer in the land - including their own class of political grifters. James Howard Kunstler ☀

It’s fascinating that in the background of all this the price of oil is fibrillating around $90-a-barrel - and nobody is paying any attention to that. We seem to have forgotten the lesson from back in 2008 that when oil gets above the $80 mark, things in this land of Happy Motoring and the Warehouse-on-wheels don’t work so well. No wonder President Obama and congress are trying to stuff the country full of sugar plums just to get past the horror of a Christmas holiday when not a few working people will be freezing in their homes, if they have homes. James Howard Kunstler ☀

There’s no guarantee that the USA will hold together as a continent-sized federal republic, and if history is any guide the fact is that political boundaries constantly shift over time. Manifest destiny is looking less manifest these days. If anything, the federal government can only become more broke, more ineffective, and finally irrelevant. If there is any Big Brother, he will show up in your county courthouse in a cheap suit. Or perhaps we’re in for more interesting costumes. Personally I could go for something other than Land’s End casuals. But please, check the “no” box on ruffed collars and Star Trek outfits. I stray from my theme…. Anyway, I’m convinced that a sore beset public, broke, hungry, idle, and hopeless, will beg somebody to push them around, or at least tell them what to do. Our new “leaders” will range in style and disposition just like the honchos of yore, from Otto the Illustrious, to Charlemagne to Ethelred the Unready. Who knows what residue of Anglo-American law will persist. My guess is that some of these characters will act more in dispatch than in the interests of what used to be known as justice. James Howard Kunstler ☀

Today, no one present in the political arena appears to have a clue and, lacking clues, any ability to articulate the terms of what we face. Both major parties are hostage to a peculiar nostalgia, a wish to return to the time when America could dream up any kind of machine or breakfast cereal or techtronic brassiere, and sell the manufactured surplus from our own happily oversold markets to the rest of the clamoring world - even lending them the cash (at interest) to buy the stuff. America makes and the world takes, was the theme song then. That earnest, upward-striving society of Eisenhower simplicity, of well-paid factory workers dreaming of a little summer place at the lake, and the Main Streets bustling in the cheerful early twilight of Christmas Eve, and the Beach Boys crooning about “fun, fun, fun,” and purloined German physicists stashed in comfortably aire-kooled rooms, turning a few tossed-off equations into moon-shots, and Bob Hope cracking wise before a nationwide audience of car-dealers and self-satisfied Rotarians - well that America has imploded like a weevil-infested hubbard squash in a back pantry. And all the prayers to Moloch by the Jesus boomers in and out of congress won’t make it whole again. James Howard Kunstler ☀

Glenn Beck’s sidekick nowadays, Sarah Palin, is exactly the kind of corn pone Hitler that America deserves: a badly-educated, child-like, war-mongering opportunist easily manipulated by backstage extremist billionaires who think they don’t have enough money yet. Sarah Palin is going to run for president in 2012. In the process she’ll turn the sad remnants of the Republican party into a suicide cult, but she might just get elected and you can kiss the 230-year-long experiment in representative government goodbye for good. James Howard Kunstler ☀

Here come the Corn Pone Nazis! Fox News entertainer, former drug addict, and professional weeper Glenn Beck took center stage at the Lincoln Memorial exactly forty-seven years to the day after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech for a rally dedicated to “restoring honor,” which is tea party code for the otherwise unutterable idea: get that nigger out of the White House! (despite the attendance of a few African-American shills on the scene). Eighty-seven thousand disoriented citizens lined the DC Mall reflecting pool and adjoining lawns to witness Beck overstep his role as a television clown and don the mantle of an evangelist-savior battling the dark forces working insidiously to put the America of WalMart, Walt Disney World, Nascar, and Burger King into the Collapsed Society Hall of Fame — where it’s heading anyway, due to the bad choices these self-same citizens made during an extraordinary bonanza era of cheap oil that is now drawing to a close whether anyone likes it or not. Naturally, Beck invoked prayer against this prospect, which is what people resort to when they don’t understand what is happening to them. James Howard Kunstler ☀

…these are just ominous days of drift in a place of stillness where the uncomplaining robot traders tirelessly work their magic in the server farms of Wall Street, while their putative “handlers” enjoy the dainty pleasures of the Hamptons — which seem to center these days on pounding back vast draughts of premium vodka in conjunction with Red Bull, cocaine, hydroponic ganja, Viagra, and Klonopin to round off all those edges. And let’s not forget the catered delicacies circulating on trays passed by super-models — the yellowtail tartare tidbits, the green olive pesto crescents, the firecracker shrimp canapés. I wonder if the nibblers ever stop to reflect on how many of the un-privileged “out there” get by lately on dog food and ketchup. James Howard Kunstler ☀