NOTE: Hope=Truth (Jim Kunstler)

[Pale Blue Dot]

People of good intentions and progressive predilection are scratching their heads wondering just how President Barack Obama managed to turn himself into George W. Bush Lite with sugar-on-top just twelve weeks after that fateful walk down the US Capitol's east stairway to the waiting helicopter. I'm hardly the first observer to note that Mr. Obama's actions in the face of an epochal finance fiasco and economic collapse are a mere extension of the pre-January-20 policies, carried out by much the same cast of characters.

The assumption up until now was something about the reassuring value of continuity -- if we could just prop up an ailing set of banks for a little while, the US public could resume a revolving credit way-of-life within an economy dedicated to building more suburban houses and selling all the needed accessories from supersized "family" cars to cappuccino machines. This would keep everyone employed at the jobs they were qualified for -- finish carpenters, realtors, pool installers, mortgage brokers, advertising account executives, Williams-Sonoma product demonstrators, showroom sales agents, doctors of liposuction, and so on.

This was a dumb strategy for such a supposedly bright group of people surrounding Mr. Obama. That old economy was dead on arrival January 20th. Even the kindest physicians don't put corpses on life support. This particular corpse has been placed in the world's cushiest intensive care unit, with transfusions running about a trillion dollars a month -- not to mention hefty bonuses for the attending nurses. Instead, a fast and furious wake might have been held, with the corpse of the old economy laid out on a granite countertop for all to toast and bid farewell. President Obama might have led this exercise with some aplomb -- even while directing his new justice department warriors to round up a host of suspects in the old economy's suspicious death.

What it comes down to, apparently, is a leadership elite across all sectors -- politics, business, academia, media -- that is incapable of processing the truth, and then conveying it to the broad American public. Alas, this also appears to be a common theme in history, with a commonly tragic outcome, which is that elites get ruthlessly dumped and replaced by new elites, often composed of zealots, maniacs, nincompoops, and others generally ill-disposed to the able management of complex affairs. It's called the "circulation of elites," and in times of crisis it tends to take on a kind of downward spiraling flavor, with each gang of discredited leaders tossed out for a progressively worse one until a kind of exhaustion is reached -- whereupon the archetypal man-on-a-white-horse arrives on the scene.

Mr. Obama looked to be the man-on-a-white-horse -- on the exhaustion of Reagan-Bush Jesus-Republicanism -- but he's coming off more like Philippe Égalité (Louis Philippe Joseph d'Orléans, duc d'Orléans) in 1793, with perhaps Newt Gingrich waiting offstage to become Robespierre in 2012 -- and some obscure US Army captain now toiling in Kirkuk slated to become the American Napoleon of 2015. As you've surely heard a thousand times now, history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes. The enormities of Wall Street today are a little like those of the French Ancien Régime at Versailles. If America encounters the sort of disruptions of food and energy supplies that are brewing on the horizon, and unemployment keeps arcing up its current trajectory, civil uproars could easily follow. Readers think I joke about the Hamptons going up in flames. But the antics of the bankers, hedge funders, the CEOs, the Madoffs, and even the P. Diddy's of our time, are liable to attract murderous attention as the public mood moves from sour to wrathful.

So, what people of good intention and progressive predilection want to know is how come Mr. Obama doesn't just lay out the truth, undertake the hard job of cutting the nation's losses, and get on with setting this society on a new course. The truth is that we're comprehensively bankrupt, and no amount of shuffling certificates around will avail to alter that. The bad debt has to be "worked out" -- i.e. written off, subjected to liquidation of remaining assets and collateral, reorganized under the bankruptcy statutes, and put behind us. We have to work very hard to reconfigure the physical arrangement of life in the USA, moving away from the losses of our suburbs, reactivating our towns, downscaling our biggest cities, re-scaling our farms and food production, switching out our Happy Motoring system for public transit and walkable neighborhoods, rebuilding local networks of commerce, and figuring out a way to make a few things of value again.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2009/04/note-hope-truth.html

[BeHereNow]

1. And yet another gem sinks like a stone...

K&R-
BHN

[Davis_X_Machina]

2. I have an answer...

to "how come Mr. Obama doesn't just lay out the truth, undertake the hard job of cutting the nation's losses, and get on with setting this society on a new course."

He has children. He'd like to live to see his grandchildren. And he reads history.

[RufusTFirefly]

5. Good answer.

I'm pissed off and discouraged, but I understand his motivations.

[BeFree]

7. That's crazy

Obama's reason for not doing the right thing is that he has children? Gawd!!

Because he has children he has to do the right thing, and that thing is to quit doing the same thing and expecting different results. Which is what he is doing.

He's fiddling around on the edges and going overseas, when what this country needs is to be reformed from the top down. Our government needs to change and change fast. But with the bank bailouts, increased defense spending, and more of the same virtually everywhere else, our government is just sinking deeper and deeper.

And the kids are gonna be the ones in real pain.

Frankly, I want a president who puts the country first, and I thought that is what Obama was gonna do. Looks like I was wrong, eh?

[Davis_X_Machina]

8. He doesn't want to get killed.

People in this country who want to change things too much often do.

Why do you think was he speaking today where he was speaking?

[BeFree]

9. So

Now you are one of them conspiracy nuts? Don't recall seeing you down in the dungeon getting whipped and chained by the floor dwellers there, but you'd fit right in.

You really think Obama does what he does with an eye on not getting killed? If what you say is true, he's a damned chicken. The lowest PFC in Iraq would be braver than him.

[Strelnikov_]

10. Agree. He is doing what he can

until there is a political will.

[BeHereNow]

3. Kick- n/t

bhn

[pscot]

4. We've been delusional for the last 30 years

It's hard to pull out of it.

[Pale Blue Dot]

6. Kick. nt

[Strelnikov_]

11. "Alas, this also appears to be a common theme in history"

As our fifth strand, we have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the human peasants to support all those activities. Like most leaders throughout human history, the Maya kings and nobles did not heed long-term problems, insofar as they perceived them.

. . .

Like Easter Island chiefs erecting ever larger statues, eventually crowned by pukao, and like Anasazi elites treating themselves to necklaces of 2000 turquoise beads, Maya kings sought to outdo each other with more and more impressive temples, covered with thicker and thicker plaster, reminiscent in turn of the extravagant conspicuous consumption by modern American CEO's. The passivity of Easter chiefs and Maya kings in the face of the real big threats to their societies completes our list of disquieting parallels.

From Chapt. 5, 'The Maya Collapses', from 'Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed’ by Jared Diamond

[cliffordu]

12. I like Jimmy. Crazy but right on a lot of the time.....K%R