Gross All Over (James Howard Kunstler)

[Tace]

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

Nov. 21, 2010 -- I was kind of relieved to be leaving the country again this week with Thursday's Feast of Football looming, followed by the "consumer" buffoonery of Black Friday. Distance affords reflection and this is a good week to ask ourselves what, exactly, lies on the other side of this massive wall of suspense we have constructed around the fate of our money system?

What a scary season! This is what it feels like to hit the wall of limits to everything the earth provides us. Our oil problems are for real and urgent, despite the arrant nonsense ("THERE WILL BE FUEL") published last week in The New York Times -- a news organization that runs a direct hose-line of smoke up its own ass from the oil industry's chief PR shop, IHS-CERA, The Times's sole source on the energy beat.

Meanwhile, Europe is back to imploding financially again (with Ireland as the rotting head of the dead fish in the current rotation). The U.S. housing sector has flat-lined, the banks are so lost in the "mortgage-gate" morass of lost and robo-forged documents that the ghost of Roy Cohen couldn't get them out of it alive -- though Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon must pray to tiny gilded statuettes of old Roy in their late night sweats. Ben Bernanke is set to shovel huge transaction fees to the "primary dealers" (i.e. Lloyd's and Jamie's banks, et al) in his scheme to buy treasuries through them monthly at a whopping premium instead of directly from the source -- with the side effect of making it an act of futility for ordinary Americans to save money the old-fashioned way, at interest.

The fetid remains of decomposing CDOs line the vaults and stain the books of financial institutions everywhere. Accounting fraud is still the order-of-the-day in everything from Fannie and Freddie to your neighborhood HMO. Government at all levels is dead broke. Did I leave out endless war at endless cost (of money we don't have)?

There's a lot to feel uncomfortable about. But the question remains: what will be there when we break on through to the other side (as The Doors used to say... remember them? Probably not).

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