sign me up, lets get some rope!

November 2, ’09

THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE             James Howard Kunstler

     Our gods are not happy.  With Thanksgiving just a few weeks away, there is more grievance than gratitude.

    History is merciless.  History doesn't care if you justified robbing scores of billions of dollars out of the mortgage sector because your too-big-to-fail company’s top executives hallucinated that they are exempt from law or common decency.

     We're at a momentous eddy in the larger stream of history.  A good deal of the already-proclaimed return to normality depends on a normal Christmas shopping season. Of course, even if there were a credit card binge, there would be buyer's remorse afterward.

     Goldman Sachs was aggressively gathering trash mortgages to bundle into tradable security paper, which they then pawned off on feckless investors seeking miracle returns -- at the same time that G.S. was buying credit default swap "insurance".  In other words, they were shoveling shit investments out of one window, and betting against the value of them from another window.  Why isn’t Goldman Sachs being prosecuted for this fraud?  Big bonuses paid out this holiday season by Goldman Sachs and its other amigos at the top of the banking food chain will be greeted by violence - which will be the natural outcome of a society whose government fails to protect its citizens from organized crime. How did a sock puppet get appointed head of the US Department of Justice?

     The US government might fall under a military coup d'etat - a realistic possibility as elected officials prove unwilling to cope with a mounting crisis of capital and resources. The 'corn-pone Hitler' scenario is still another possibility - Glen Beck and Sarah Palin vying for hearts and minds - but there is a growing cadre of concerned Pentagon officers impatient to correct the fiascos blowing the nation apart from within.  No doubt they love their country, as Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte loved theirs. It might pain them to stand by and watch it dissolve like a sugar castle in the rain.

      All kinds of outcomes are possible in a society under severe stress. History is a harsh mistress. For all his likable personality, President Obama increasingly looks like an impotent hostage to the bankers systematically draining the life-blood from the middle class.  The reviving stock market does not register the agony of ordinary people losing everything they worked for and even believed in.  In a leadership vacuum, centers don't hold, things come apart, and rough beasts slouch toward Wall Street.