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Everybody in the
world is broke, except for maybe Lloyd Blankfein, and he may not end up broke
so much as broken -- by a political meat-grinder that is revving up to turn
the world's woes and swindles into a new kind of Long Emergency sausage, to
be distributed among the roiling, angry masses as a synthetic substitute for
nutriment. Call it a synthetic non-collateralized political obligation.
Something snapped in the world last week and a lot of people around the world
sensed it -- especially in the organs of news and opinion -- but this ominous
twang was not very clearly identified. It was, in fact, the
sound of the financial becoming political. The macro-swindle of a worldwide
Ponzi orgy now stands revealed and the vacuum left in its place is about to
suck everything familiar into it -- standards-of-living, hopes, dreams, not
to mention lives. The political action will be a desperate scramble to
determine who and what is able to escape getting sucked into this black hole
of annihilation. It's very suddenly shaping up to become an epic in human
history.
Meanwhile,
a giant oil blob lies quivering in deep waters off the Gulf coast, like some
awful amorphous Moby Dick full of malice waiting to sink Pequod
America -- or at least the economies of five states. A few months from now,
the BP corporation will wonder why it didn't go into something safe and
predictable like the pants business instead of oil exploration. They will
surely question the viability of conducting future business anywhere near the
USA, and the USA will enter a wilderness of soul-searching about the
drill-baby-drill strategy that only a few scant weeks ago seemed to be a
settled matter. Tough to have your future hoped-for energy supplies evaporate
at the same time that your hopes for future prosperity get sucked into a
black hole.
I've maintained for a long time that the folks down Dixie way are the the
most dangerously crazy people in America and the Deepwater Horizon oil blob
is not going to improve their outlook when it slops over their beaches and
bayous. They'll blame Obama for it by syllogism. Anyway, they are only
marginally more crazy than the rest of the folks in the USA. Those folks are
warming up for an election season that is going to send a horde of
exterminating angels into the halls of congress and the governor's mansions, and
before too long those merchants of retribution are going to appoint their
inquisitors. It's going to be a heckuva spectacle. In retrospect, Mary
Shapiro's SEC will look like the Council of Trent. You can be sure that if
ten gallons of gasoline remain to be found in America a few years from now,
they will power the last GMC Sierra to drag the captains of Wall Street
through the sawgrass prairies of Collier County, Florida.
What has gone on in Europe the past few weeks is nothing more complicated
than a waking-up to how broke they are. We're not quite there yet on this
side of the Atlantic. They fired one last bazooka of wishfulness at the
enveloping monster of debt and the monster laughed at them, and now they are
standing in the windows of palatial edifice of the Euro Union waiting to see
who will jump first. Here in the USA, we're still dazed and confused. What
for a long time had looked like a game of musical chairs is morphing into
something more like a national Chinese fire drill, a pointless running around
in circles in the hope that sheer motion will be an adequate substitute for
conscious action. In any case, both Europe and the USA are out of bazooka
ammo now. Nobody can bail out so much as another lemonade stand. From here on
governments really start to crumble.
As
in any time of severe turmoil, all political bets are off. There are
insinuations in the press, for instance, that the communists will rise up in
Greece and overthrow the elected government. That's rich, since communism was
flushed down the human race's credibility toilet twenty years ago. The Greek
opposition may even call themselves communists, but what on earth could they
mean by that? There are no "means of production" left in a
country whose economy consists solely of cab-drivers, bellboys, and waiters.
There's no "wealth" to redistribute, only the pain of collective
economic loss when the tourists stop landing.
Elsewhere in Europe, each national house is being outfitted with a
procrustean bed of austerity. The various publics are not going to like lying
in them. They ain't no Tempurpedics. History being the shape-shifting demon
that it is, I imagine that this time around the Brits will be the ones who
elect Nazis --or something like them -- while the still-chastened Germans
find themselves in the odd position of becoming Europe's moral guardian --
its sole-surviving "good parent" figure, striving to maintain some
residue of collective goodwill in Europe's once-ritzy gated community. Great
historical figures always arise from unexpected places -- Corsica, Kentucky.
Maybe some great unifying leader even now warms a seat in a Norwegian law
school.
God knows what the Europeans will make of the helter-skelter scene playing
out here in the States. Perhaps some species of schadenfreude tinged
with regret for the missing stream of tourists. My own guess is that there
may not even be a president of the US after Mr. Obama. Rather, events will
get so gnarly and disordered so fast that somebody like General Patraeus will
have to step in for a while and keep the reincarnation of the Ku Klux Klan
from trying to murder every non-Cracker from sea to shining sea. Of course,
once that happens, we probably don't go back. It's not Imperial Rome (release
2.0) after that, either, because even the mighty US military will be too
strapped for a means of support to continue operating. Instead, it's
the devolution of the US into functionally autonomous regions and states --
and even that scale of governance may be too great for the stringent economic
realities of the years ahead.
There remains, of course, the very great question of what the rest of people
of the world -- the non-Western world -- do as the West spins into insolvency
and tribulation. The Islamists will do everything possible to make things
worse, and there's a lot they can do, from restricting their oil exports
(maybe cutting them off altogether) to provoking the immigrant populations of
Europe into political violence to possibly setting a few nukes off in their
enemy's front yard.
The Chinese will affect to referee the collapse of the West, but soon they'll
be sucked into their own implosion of population overshoot and resource
scarcity. India you can forget about out -- zero oil. Russia gets to kick back
in glorious isolation and enjoy the methane fumes of the melting tundra.
South America will heed the wise words of a forgotten 18th Century Viceroy of
Mexico who explained his method of administration thusly: "Do little,
and do it slowly!"
The Long Emergency has now up-shifted to second gear. Wouldn't you know it, I
have to go to Europe at the end of the month. And I'm supposed to get paid in
Euros -- oh, snap! This week I'll be cavorting with my homeys, the Congress
for the New Urbanism, at their annual jamboree in Atlanta (ugh!) and will be
reporting on the doings there in this space next Monday.
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
James Howard Kunstler’s new novel of the
post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is
available at all booksellers.
James Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature
writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling
Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis.
His latest nonfiction book, "The Long
Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the
21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic
crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and
strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at
war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion
subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.
You can purchase your own copy here : The Long
Emergency .
You can get more from James Howard Kunstler - including his artwork,
information about his other novels, and his blog - at his Web site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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