Website review: Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler ...
laodan discovered this in Economics
•2 reviews since Jan 21, 2008
economics
•jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_n...
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laodan discovered 4 months ago- Fullblown Panic in Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler
Knees knocked last week from sea to shining sea as the shape-shifting monster of economic reality cut a swathe of destruction through the markets and financial ranks. The exact nature of this giant beast still remained largely concealed in a fog of accounting gambits, policy blusters, and reporting dodges, but a few intrepid scouts who glimpsed the behemoth up close said it looked like Godzilla with Herbert Hoover's face. ... My favorite moment was seeing Treasury Secretary Paulson and one of his fellow shaved-head deputies at a press conference rostrum frantically trying to calm the news media rabble like a couple of extraplanetary high priests from a Star Trek episode -- the batteries having run down in their laser wands, and their incantations ("liquidity! liquidity!) veering into mystifying glossolalia. I resort to such admitted extreme hyperbole because it may be the only language that an infotainment-drunk society can still process in the face of an epochal calamity that will transform the lush terms of everyday life as we've known it into something like a bleak surrealist landscape in the manner of Tanguy. That crashing sound out there is the armature of confidence needed to support an economy based on faith that borrowed money will be paid back. It's as simple as that. (Doesn't seem so exciting now, does it?) Fullblown Panic I'm rejoicing Kunstler's language. Ah ah. But to what extend does he reflect the reality we all share? Kunstler writes that "I resort to such admitted extreme hyperbole because it may be the only language that an infotainment-drunk society can still process in the face of an epochal calamity that will transform the lush terms of everyday life as we've known it into something like a bleak surrealist landscape in the manner of Tanguy. " But is our reality really in so dire a circumstance? I have the feel that the doomsayers are as much in a bubble than their opposites the naysayers. All, it seems to me, are losing their minds in "group-think". There is no doubt that we are at a turning point in the history of modernity. A set of crises are converging that will multiply the intensity of their individual outcomes: - financial crisis of solvency (unpayable debts at the center of Western capitalism) - resurgent nationalism, as a consequence of financial globalization, that could end up in conflicts and wars. - Necrotic side-effects of modernity (climate change, loss of diversity, drinking water rarefaction, ...) - Peak resource crisis (energy, minerals, helium, ...) So what does it all mean in term of our daily lives? The extreme systemic complexity, resulting from the exceptional convergence of all those crisises, results in each of us being lost in what appears to be a maze without boundaries or what is also called a "singularity"... The only certainty is that changes will come fast and sweep away all that we now know. But we just can't know what will emerge out of such a maelstrom. Some other views: The Fallacy of Reversibility by Stuart Staniford Does Less Energy Mean More Farmers ? by Jason Bradford
- Fullblown Panic in Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler
- Dashiell rated 4 months ago
- "George W. Bush, tried to appease the beast by offering each American adult the dollar equivalent of half a month's mortgage payment -- with the exhortation to drive forthwith to the nearest WalMart and blow it on salad shooters and plasma TV's -- but Hooverzilla just laughed at the offering and pounded the equity markets further into the dust of loss, while the "bank-like" guardians of wealth lay in the drainage ditches bleeding from their ears and eyes."
