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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsKuntsler: 'Wall Street is 1 of several Financial Roach Motels in giant slum of the global economy'
Buy the All Time High
24th November 2014
Guest Post by Jim Kunstler
Wall Street is only one of several financial roach motels in what has become a giant slum of a global economy. Notional money scuttles in for safety and nourishment, but may never get out alive. Tom Friedman of The New York Times really put one over on the soft-headed American public when he declared in a string of books that the global economy was a permanent installation in the human condition. What were seeing out there these days is the basic operating system of that economy trying to shake itself to pieces.
The reason it has to try so hard is that the various players in the global economy game have constructed an armature of falsehood to hold it in place for instance the pipeline of central bank liquidity creation that pretends to be capital propping up markets. It would be most accurate to call it fake wealth. It is not liquid at all but rather gaseous, and that is why it tends to blow bubbles in the places to which it flows. When the bubbles pop, the gas will tend to escape quickly and dramatically, and the ground will be littered with the pathetic broken balloons of so many hopes and dreams.
All of this mighty, tragic effort to prop up a matrix of lies might have gone into a set of activities aimed at preserving the project of remaining civilized. But that would have required the dismantling of rackets such as agri-business, big-box commerce, the medical-hostage game, the Happy Motoring channel-stuffing scam, the suburban sprawl industry, and the higher ed loan swindle. All of these evil systems have to go and must be replaced by more straightforward and honest endeavors aimed at growing food, doing trade, healing people, traveling, building places worth living in, and learning useful things.
All of those endeavors have to become smaller, less complex, more local, and reality-based rather than based, as now, on overgrown and sinister intermediaries creaming off layers of value, leaving nothing behind but a thin entropic gruel of waste. All of this inescapable reform is being held up by the intransigence of a banking system that cant admit that it has entered the stage of criticality. It sustains itself on its sheer faith in perpetual levitation. It is reasonable to believe that upsetting that faith might lead to war. After all, a number of places organized as nation-states will be full of angry, distressed citizens clamoring for sustenance and easy answers and quite a bit of their remaining real capital is stored in the form of things that blow up.
MORE:
http://www.theburningplatform.com/2014/11/24/buy-the-all-time-high/
Populist_Prole
(5,364 posts)It's increasingly bothered at the increasing financialization of the economy, and how many just seem to accept that Wall Street = "the economy".
kpete
(71,961 posts)I thought it was an xlnt read as well
If only, what a wonderful world it could be:
All of these evil systems have to go and must be replaced by more straightforward and honest endeavors aimed at growing food, doing trade, healing people, traveling, building places worth living in, and learning useful things.
PatrickforO
(14,558 posts)Lots of good stuff is being done locally.