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Taking
in Charles Ferguson's excellent documentary, Inside Job, about the
dark doings of Wall Street in our time, I confess I was awestruck all over
again at the complete surrender of Obama to the very characters who embodied the corruption that rotted our system from
the heart outward. Summers, Rubin, Geithner, and a host of other revolving
door grifters who did everything possible to set up
the implosion of banking, defeat the rule of law in money matters, and ruin
millions who wanted nothing more than something useful to do in this society
for a living wage.
Most
impressive of all in this brave film were the shameless academic mandarins
caught on camera trying to weasel out of their greed-driven misdeeds - Glenn
Hubbard, chair of the Columbia University Econ department, a perfectly
programmed polished WASP (like out of a "Ken" doll box) on the
outside, slithering corruption inside, who played a major role in removing
all restraints on Wall Street, then served as a director on the boards of
several predatory financial giants, including the biggest, Black Rock, and
pretended not to remember if he got paid for it; Martin Feldstein of the
Harvard Econ department, in-and-out of government like a rat in a cheese-box,
who sat on the board of AIG in the months before it blew itself up on credit
default swaps, and who saw nothing about the company's operations that gave
off a bad odor after it entered the most massive government receivership the
world has ever seen; and most memorably Fred Mishkin,
former Federal Reserve governor, now an academic rover, who wrote a
cheerleading report for the Icelandic banking system about five minutes
before it collapsed, then changed the report's title from Financial
Stability in Iceland to Financial Instability in Iceland, then
denied it on camera in the face of obvious evidence, then forgot whether he
got paid six-figures to write the glowing report, then dissolved on camera
into a maundering puddle of indignity and humiliation.
How
do these rogues survive the disclosure of their turpitudes? Is there no one
at places like Harvard and Columbia who has any sense of shame or even an
inkling of disappointment that they employ such odious hustlers? Apparently
not. This is a system with no mechanism of self-regulation left. And there's
Obama at the tippy-top of it serving like a department store mannequin with a
Department of Justice that someone has hung a "gone fishin'"
sign on. I voted for him in 2008, and I want to start a movement in
whatever's left of the Progressive core to get rid of him. Being a decent,
presentable fellow with a nice family is just not enough. Even his vaunted
speech-making abilities have gotten on my nerves. If I hear him say
"make no mistake" one more time, someone will have to restrain me
from kicking in the flat screen TV. Obama, it turns out, is the mistake.
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.
In
the meantime, we can look forward to a year of spectacular unraveling. Our
money system probably can't survive the crack-up of revolving obligations
that were ginned up so that bankers could cream off fortunes from every
exchange of any sort of paper on the face of the earth. The European banks have
nowhere to go anymore with Ireland and Portugal crapping out. Bond-holders
are finally going to have to eat a lot of losses.
Governments
have fallen and more will go down - but, of course, more to the point is what
governments will follow them in power? Probably more audacious ones, run by
people who intend to act, perhaps even badly.
The
Middle East and North Africa have the look of spinning into World War Three.
The action just doesn't seem like it's going to simmer down anytime soon in a
half-dozen nations that have started gunning down their own people - and
there's Iran sitting rather quietly on the sidelines, or so it appears for
the moment, as the whole region rearranges itself to suit them better. Wait
until Hezbollah starts lobbing missiles into Israel. You'll see the big
"tilt" sign light up the sky. Anyway you
slice it there, America better get ready for a lot less imported oil. There's
really nothing we can do that will change that now, and drill-drill-drill
will not come close to mitigating our losses, no matter how much Larry Kudlow wrings his hands.
Poor
Obama. On The global chessboard of fate, he's the powerless king facing down
ranks of dark knights and implacable bishops. All he can do is sidestep their onslaughts. Even the pawns are beginning to
moil and roister in the background. He'll be on TV tonight. Make no mistake.
I
was just informed this morning about the death of Joe Bageant,
author of Deer Hunting With Jesus and the soon-to-be published Rainbow
Pie. Joe was a brave and funny soul and we will miss him very much.
James
Howard Kunstler
James
Howard Kunstler’s new novel of the post-oil future, World
Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers.
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