Kangaroo Court

"In times like these politics gets very crazy. The public forgets how misled and confused it is and develops vicious certainties that do not necessarily jibe with reality. The public becomes a mob and democracy turns into a kangaroo court, which is to say: a mockery of the rule of law. I suspect we'll see a correlation of turbulence in politics and markets as the weeks pound forward toward Halloween. By election day, democracy itself will be in disrepute and the streets will run with mad dogs. When this sucker goes down (to paraphrase a past president) it's going to be like a fire in a circus tent. Don't expect much from the clowns' bucket brigade. We'll be lucky if they don't toss gasoline into the grandstands."
James Kunstler, Author, "The Long Emergency"

Entire Article:
http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/08/the-queasy-season.html

National Character

"And in a way, I have my own thoughts about that because I’m basically a cheerful person, and in my own way I’m also an optimistic person. I’m not really a doomy-gloomy guy. And I would leave you with this thought: that the American people have historically been a generous, brave, forward looking, resourceful group, and we’ve shown great courage in the face of adversity before. I think we’ve become kind of a somewhat sloppy and complacent people in the last 25 years or so, but it doesn’t mean we can’t recover a lot of those virtues that are really part of the fiber of our national character. It’s still there and can still be recovered, and I think we’re going to be able to do that. It’s not going to be true for every place and everyone, but I think that’s going to help us a lot. So I have a lot of faith just in our national character, and the better angels of our nature, as Abraham Lincoln said.“
James Kunstler, "The Long Emergency"

Running On Fumes

"Here are some truths which I believe to be self-evident: that the USA has been running on fumes since the beginning of the 21st century. That you can't get something for nothing, and attempts to do so always end in tears. That massive expenditures of energy produce equivalent globs of entropy - which you can translate to "bad ju-ju" or the tendency of whatever can go wrong to go wrong. That because we're unwilling to re-scale and reform the things we do, nature is about to do it for us. That America has transformed itself from a nation of earnest, muscular, upright citizens to a land of overfed barbarous morons ruled by grifters. That what has been economics is about to turn dangerously political.  The greatest loss of the last decade was not in 401-Ks or manufacturing jobs or foreclosed houses, but the rule of law. Without genuine rule of law, anything goes and nothing matters. As a consequence of that, finally, everything goes. The rule of law is what kept foreigners buying our debt all these years (the fumes we've been running on). They kept buying because they believed, when all was said and done, that Americans would enforce contracts and regulate behavior in the direction of fair dealing - not for its own sake but because it made things work better. But when the rule of law goes here, the rest of the world will notice its absence. They'll stop believing in our money and our future. They'll cash out and we'll wash out. Then, as human tribes are wont, they may just turn around and kick our ass because we're down."
James Kunstler, Author, "The Long Emergency"

Entire Article:
http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/08/the-queasy-season.html

Kuntsler's What Is It

"A number of things are going on in our society that can be described with precision. We've generated too many future claims on wealth that does not exist and has poor prospects of ever being generated. That's what unpayable debt is. We have such a mighty mountain of it that the Federal Reserve can "create" new digital dollars until the cows come home (and learn how to play chamber music), but they will never create enough new money to outpace the disappearance of existing notional money in the form of welshed-on loans. Hence, money will continue to disappear out of the economic system indefinitely, citizens will grow poorer steadily, companies will go out of business, and governments at all levels will not have money to do what they have been organized to do. This compressive deflationary collapse is not the kind of cyclical "downturn" that we are familiar with during the two-hundred-year-long adventure with industrial expansion - that is, the kind of cyclical downturn caused by the usual exhalations of markets attempting to adjust the flows of supply and demand. This is a structural implosion of markets that have been functionally destroyed by pervasive fraud and swindling in the absence of real productive activity."
James Kunster, "What Is it"

The Recovery of Virtues

"And in a way, I have my own thoughts about that because I’m basically a cheerful person, and in my own way I’m also an optimistic person. I’m not really a doomy-gloomy guy. And I would leave you with this thought: that the American people have historically been a generous, brave, forward looking, resourceful group, and we’ve shown great courage in the face of adversity before. I think we’ve become kind of a somewhat sloppy and complacent people in the last 25 years or so, but it doesn’t mean we can’t recover a lot of those virtues that are really part of the fiber of our national character. It’s still there and can still be recovered, and I think we’re going to be able to do that. It’s not going to be true for every place and everyone, but I think that’s going to help us a lot. So I have a lot of faith just in our national character, and the better angels of our nature, as Abraham Lincoln said.“
"The Long Emergency", James Howard Kunstler