Send Out the Clowns

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

In this decade of maximum peril, a prankish God delivers two maximally detested candidates to lead the faltering nation as events run ahead of all the convenient narratives. For instance: the idea that Republican “insiders” can block Trump’s path to the nomination. The insiders may be phantoms after all. For instance, the loathsome Koch brothers have already made their move onto Hillary’s side of the game-board. Trump won’t miss their campaign contributions for a New York minute (while Hillary might find a way to stuff the cash into some Cayman Islands lock-box of the Clinton Foundation).

Events played right into Trump’s smallish hands last week when protesters outside a Donald rally in Costa Mesa, CA, waved Mexican flags and placards calling for the reestablishment of Aztlán del Norte. Kind of proves his point about illegal immigration, don’t it? Trump also supposedly blundered in saying that Hillary had only “the women’s card” left to play in her donkey trot to the election. I’m not so sure he’s wrong about that — though the indignometer needle danced through the red-line after he said it.

Has it come to this? The women’s party against the men’s party? What kind of idiot psychodrama is this country acting out? Mom and dad mud-wrestling in an election year hog-wallow? A Reality TV show writ large from sea to shining sea? Are there no better ways of understanding the difficulties we face?

Lately Hillary has been boasting of her ability to bring Wall Street to heel, theoretically after Wall Street installs her in the White House. Voters (especially women) might want to pay attention to Hillary’s lavish praise for President Obama’s handling of the banking turpitudes still unresolved seven years after the crack-up of 2008. What did the Dodd-Frank Act (signed by “O” in 2010) accomplish except to provide more lucrative work-arounds, by Too-Complex-To-Comprehend legalese, for Too-Big-To-Fail banks. It was written by bank lobbyists and lawyers and was about 2,270 pages longer than the old Glass Steagall Act that Bill Clinton vaporized in 1999. Do you suppose that Bill and Hill might have talked about the repeal of Glass Steagall back then? Do you wonder what she thought about it at the time… being a lawyer and all?

This week attention is fixed on the Indiana primary where Devil Bat Ted Cruz desperately makes his last stand against the Trump juggernaut. It seems that former House Speaker John Boehner actually succeeded in driving a wooden stake through Cruz’s hypothetical heart by casually remarking that he was “the most miserable sonofabitch I ever worked with.” Kind of hard to explain that one away, though Ted tried by sending out his new attack dog Carly Fiorina and claiming that he never worked with the Speaker of the House — a risible claim for a national legislator in the same party.

All of this would be amusing if the USA wasn’t sliding into the twilight of what many people call “modernity” — which is code for the techno-industrial hyper-complexity we’ve been enjoying lately as a species. We have yet to comprehend the diminishing returns of heaping more complexity on what is already too complex. Exhibit A for most of the common folk must be the Affordable Care Act (also signed by “O” in 2010). Whereas the shrewd stylings of Dodd-Frank surely mystify the public, most full-functioning adults understand what it means when their health insurance premiums go up by 20 percent and the new deductible makes it unthinkable to even consider going to the emergency room.

The sad truth may be that rackets of this kind are unreformable, and that we can’t begin to do things differently until they collapse. It should be obvious, for instance, that American health care needs to move in the opposite direction from where it has been going — from giantism, as epitomized by colossal merged mega-hospital corporations, back to some kind of local clinic care in which doctors and their subalterns are not burdened by an oppressive matrix of Charge-Master grift. There may be less razzle-dazzle technology in that future model, but much more hands-on care, plus an end to the kind of financial pillage that bankrupts households for relatively routine illnesses (the $90,000 appendectomy).

Likewise in virtually all other areas of American life, the real trend as yet un-discussed in this election campaign, will be unwinding and downscaling of the onerous, toxic hyper-complexity of the age now passing and finding our way to a workable re-set of what used to be known as political-economy.

In the meantime: a clown show.

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Hollywood Rob

Yepper, I am on Jim’s side on this one. Well said.

hardscrabble farmer

I wonder sometimes if JHK has an Internet connection. Has he seen a Trump rally? The percentage of males to females is 1:1

The only kinds of women on the D side in this one are the ones Jimmy Stewart referred to as “Miss Lonely Hearts” in Rear Window.

Her rallies look like the annual Cat Fanciers Show.

rhs jr

A lot of fine words spelling out what we already know: the NWO Elite have screwed the 90% Royally. But he doesn’t suggest a remedy so I will: We’ve had all we’re gonna take from TPTB (including the Cruz Ruse) and we are going to fight back!

Dutchman
Dutchman

“It’s a racket” – Interesting – I’ve never heard this phrase applied to so many things: stock market, the FED, BLS, ACA, two party system, the Repubs and Dems, health care, retirement, middle class – you name it’s all been called a racket – over and over again.

I think people are starting to get the message.

Suzanna
Suzanna

JHK,

good one this time, and any women that are “for”
Hil are beyond repair. They may be a distinct
minority…I hope, I hope.

the tumbleweed
the tumbleweed

This guy has nothing to say, but feels the need to pump out an article anyway. Like the guy on the roof of his house in Hurricane Katrina, turning away raft after raft, waiting instead for a luxury ocean liner to pick him up. The whiny internet bloggers continue to wait for the bumbling Ron Paul to save them, and their audiences and donations continue to dwindle as they sneer at Trump. The whole “buy gold and whine about everything” narrative is growing very thin. Very thin indeed. Trump will destroy the faux-Libertarian bloggers just as he will the mainstream media and the standard Republican and Democrat narratives. The faux-Libertarians are soon going to abandon their websites and return to sweeping floors and selling insurance.

Cogdissnormbias
Cogdissnormbias

“We have yet to comprehend the diminishing returns of heaping more complexity on what is already too complex. Exhibit A for most of the common folk must be the Affordable Care Act (also signed by “O” in 2010).”

Didn’t this douchebag vote for Obamma along with his hope change and Obammycare??

Cuntsler is a fucking loser!

hardscrabble farmer

Last time I saw JHK he drove to the gig in a car. Using gasoline.

Peak JHK

Bea Lever
Bea Lever

I agree with JK that hyper-complexity is killing this country and turning everyday life into a living hell. I also agree that before this election is over it could be turned into the “men” against the “women” to further divide this nation and restart the Feminazi torture chamber. God help us.

DDearborn
DDearborn

Hmmm

“a prankish God delivers two maximally detested candidates” When you lead with such an inflammatory and misleading statement it calls the entire article into question. The point here is of course that Trump has a huge following who clearly keep voting for him in huge numbers. Witness the record breaking GOP voter turn out in primaries to date. Couple this with the fact that Trump has been getting 50% or more of the entire vote against 2 other candidates and suddenly it is clear that a whole bunch of people don’t detest him at all. The author litters his article with these carefully placed negatives casting disparaging shadows on Trump, and to a less degree Hillary. He isn’t bashful here, calling them clowns in the title. And yet despite his gracious largess, which seems to leave no candidate unscathed he manages to leave Bernie Sanders completely untouched. Now why is that? Of all the candidates, there are many that put devout socialists/communists and war mongering chicken hawk draft dodging wannabee turncoats like Sanders right at the top of the detested list. The omission of Sanders from this little tirade is far more telling than anything the author had to say.

EL Coyote
EL Coyote

Events played right into Trump’s smallish hands last week when protesters outside a Donald rally in Costa Mesa, CA, waved Mexican flags and placards calling for the reestablishment of Aztlán del Norte. Kind of proves his point about illegal immigration, don’t it?

Cali Hispanics are the coconuttiest of coconuts. And Costa Mesa is not East LA. These were probably paid protesters.

Foreign nationals have little interest in the Aztlan fable, that is a Brown Power myth of the 70’s. They don’t like Brown Power when it is made up of pochos, who they despise.

Pochos are Mexican in name only; loud, rude, ill-mannered, (El Doggy criticizes the pocho failing to invite a Mexican into his house, pocho style, he called it) conceited and sissified. We are about as Mexican as Billy is German.

Pinchis pochos, they call us, fucking gringo-fied trash. Maybe they want Cali to be part of Mexico again but they don’t want it to be ‘Aztlan’ the pocho paradise.

Tucci78

Jim Kunstler: “Exhibit A for most of the common folk must be the Affordable Care Act (also signed by ‘O’ in 2010). Whereas the shrewd stylings of Dodd-Frank surely mystify the public, most full-functioning adults understand what it means when their health insurance premiums go up by 20 percent and the new deductible makes it unthinkable to even consider going to the emergency room.”

——————
While at the same time Obozocare “health insurance” – if you can afford it, and if your insurance carrier isn’t abandoning the pertinent exchange frantically to keep from being bankrupted – won’t be accepted by more and more physicians, meaning that you’re welcome by primary care providers in private practice about as enthusiastically as if you were a Medicaid patient.

Which is to say “not at all.”

Ed
Ed

“Didn’t this douchebag vote for Obamma”

You don’t know the half of it. He’s gonna vote for Obama again this November.

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