Death to All Zombies!

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Wait a minute. They’re already dead. Brexit just reveals that not everybody’s brains have been eaten. A viral contagion now threatens the zombified institutions of daily life, especially the workings of politics and finance. Just as zombies exist only in the collective imagination, so do these two principal activities of society operate mainly on trust, an ephemeral product of the hive-mind.

When things fall apart in stressed complex systems, they tend to fall apart fast. It’s called phase change. Too many things in 21st century life have depended on sheer trust that the people-in-charge know what they are doing. That trust has subsisted on the doling out of money-from-nothing: debt, reckless bond issuance. TARP, QEs, bailouts, bail-ins, Operation Twists, Ponzi schemes… the whole sad-ass armamentarium of banking necromancy. The politicians let it get out of hand. Things that can’t go on don’t, and now they won’t.

The politics of Great Britain are now falling apart landslide-style. Since just about everybody in or near power can be blamed for the national predicament, there’s nobody to turn to, at least not yet. The Labour party just acted out The Caine Mutiny, starring Jeremy Corbyn as Captain Queeg. The Tory Cameron gave three months notice without any plausible replacement in view. Now Cameron’s people are hinting in the media that they can just drag their feet on Brexit, that is, not do anything to enable it from actually happening for a while. Of course, that’s what the monkeyshines of banking and finance have done: postponed the inevitable reckoning with the realities of our time: growing resource scarcity, population overshoot, climate change, ecological holocaust, and the diminishing returns of technology.

Britain illustrates the problem nicely: how to produce “wealth” without producing wealth. It’s called “the City,” their name for the little district of London that is their Wall Street. In the absence of producing real things, the City became the driver of the UK’s economy, a ghastly parasitical organism that functioned as the central transfer station for the world’s swindles and frauds, churning the West’s dwindling residual capital into a slurry of fees, commissions, arbitrages, rigged casino bets, and rip-offs. In the process, it enabled the European Central Bank (ECB) to run the con-job that the European Union (EU) became, with the fatal distortions of credit that have put its members into a ditch and sent the private European banks off a cliff, Thelma and Louise style.

The next stage of this protean global melodrama is what happens when currencies and interest rates become completely unglued from their assigned roles as patsies in financial racketeering. Sooner or later we’ll know what’s going on in the vast shadowy gloaming of “derivatives,” especially the “innovative” arrangements that affect to be “insurance” against losses in currency and interest rate “positions” — bets made on the movements of these things. When currencies rise or fall quickly, these so-called “swaps” are “triggered,” and then some hapless institution is left holding a big bag of dog-shit. A zombie is a terrible thing to behold, but a zombie holding a bag of dog-shit is like unto the end of the world.

Once this contagion starts burning, the people-in-charge won’t be able to quell it the way they did last time: by drowning it in torrents of money-from-nowhere. At least not without inducing real-deal inflation, the kind that leads to epochal ruin and more intense political upheaval: the nation-changing kind. We’re about five minutes away from that in the USA already, with the loathsome duo of Hillary and Trump putting on a Punch and Judy show for a disgusted public. If nothing else, Hillary and Trump represent the withering of political trust in America. The parties that spawned them are also whirling around the drain of credibility. They won’t survive in the form we knew them.

Who knows what comes out of this vacuum, what rough beast slouches towards Washington.

 

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TJF
TJF

“the whole sad-ass armamentarium of banking necromancy”…..lol. The man must get paid extra for obscure words or he has a deep seated need to continuously prove to himself just how smart he is.

Now to actually read the post instead of just the first few sentences shown on the home screen.

kokoda
kokoda

After reading the whole lot, I was ticked off t losing those precious minutes of my life for nothing.

hardscrabble farmer

“the whole sad-ass armamentarium of banking necromancy”

I c&p’ed that before I saw TJF’s comment. Serendipitous.

Worth the price of admission.

unit472
unit472

I find Kunstler’s writing to be brilliantly funny. Rather than load you up with figures and charts that are themselves mostly manipulated lies he uses prose to get to the essence. While his ‘solutions’ tend to be overwrought, we aren’t going to return to some sort of medieval existence, we are going to experience a crash more severe than the Great Depression when his ‘sucker goes down’.

Sonic

I enjoy the 2-3 words I learn/rediscover each time I read JHKs posts. Today is armamentarium and gloaming. I enjoy the additions to my own lexicon. All that said I don’t really think he uses the words to sound smart. I think he just likes words and picking the right word for the job. Not a close word, but the exact one he wants. I relate to that. I do the same thing. I hate speaking and writing inaccurately. If there is a word that fits, then that is the one I want. I’m just glad in this case I just have to right-click to find out what his words mean. Way easier than going to dictionary.com….lol.

methatbe
methatbe

As is often the case, people realize the consequences of statist ideas only when their own private individualities are touched.

Government is not reason, it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.-George Washington

JIMSKI
JIMSKI

This is the perfect example of why Obama needs to be Clinton’s V.P.
Their collective brain power will get us out of the mess that we as a society are in. Not just financial crisis, but the moral crisis as well!

Stucky

I like JK!

Today.

Although I’m not too thrilled with his characterization of The Donald (PBUH) as “loathsome”. Fucken’ Joo.

Iconoclast421
Iconoclast421

Where does this guy come up with these words? Armamentarium? I have never not once ever seen that word. But apparently it is a real word.

Bea Lever
Bea Lever

Stucky-

Trump campaign headquarters called, they could sure use you down there on the phone banks. Give ’em a call.

JIMSKI
JIMSKI

It is breathtaking the false narrative being pushed by the media and mouthpieces of the globalists.

Do they really think we will run out of rope and trees?

razzle
razzle

No. They think you will run out of bullets and their well fed drones won’t.

MuckAbout

@kokoda: It a satire, idiot! You’re smarter than that – and if it contains nothing much in the new category, it is certainly worth a laugh at!

Wait until Mucks’ Minute #30 shows up.. That is also a satire and you won’t get it either.

I just got Jim K’s newest book (Harrows of Spring) in the mail and will curl up with it tonight. I hope he hasn’t wimped out and built a false solution to end of TWAWKI….. TWAWKI is going to be a bitch except for people like HardScrabble and others of that strain. I’m too old to homestead again, so I will just go out with a bang and a WHOOPEE! We’ll see how JK handles it as this is his LAST book in the series..

Muck

ragman
ragman

One of his best! The whole can of Whup-ass is being opened. A trump presidency will unscrew the lid a little more. Not all the way, but a step in the right direction.

Unoccupied
Unoccupied

“At least not without inducing real-deal inflation, the kind that leads to epochal ruin and more intense political upheaval: the nation-changing kind. We’re about five minutes away from that in the USA already, with the loathsome duo of Hillary and Trump putting on a Punch and Judy show for a disgusted public.”

“Who knows what comes out of this vacuum, what rough beast slouches towards Washington.”
____________________________

Conspiracy
1. An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
2. A group of conspirators.
3. An agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action.
4. A joining or acting together, as if by sinister design.

Cabal
1. A conspiratorial group of plotters or intriguers.
2. A secret scheme or plot.
______________________________

If I were part of a cabal of elite globalists (or I guess the new term now is “multi-nationalists”) I would work to conspire together towards economically collapsing sovereign governments to bring about a New World Order. At the same time, I would also utilize the liberal left (or I guess the more recent term is “progressives”) – and their useful idiots – to bring about gun confiscation to minimize any blowback during the transition.

To do this, I would use the Hegelian Dialectic (Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis) as follows:

1.) Money is the Answer to All Things:

The Sheep Cry “Wolf” (Thesis / Crisis) = Unregulated Cash Transactions – Unreported. Untaxed. “Drugs! Guns! Bombs! Oh, my!”

And the Wolf says: “I’m from the Government and I’m here to help” (Antithesis / Solution) = Cashless System with all transactions tracked and taxed. Let us also “chip” credit cards.

Then the Beast says” “Now you’re my bitch!” – (Synthesis / Change) = Total social and economic control.

2.) Don’t Worry. We’ll protect you.

The Sheep Cry “Wolf” (Thesis / Crisis) = Home grown terrorists who own guns LEGALLY are killing fellow citizens. Internet activated terrorists and the hydra-headed ISIS! Oh my!

And the Wolf says: “I’m from the Government, I’m here to help”: (Antithesis / Solution) = More gun control laws.

Then the Beast says” “Now you’re my bitch!” – (Synthesis / Change) = The 2nd Amendment negation via legislation towards the ultimate subjugation of one populace under totalitarianism.
______________________________________

Paradoxically, the crisis for each scenario can happen on its own, naturally, or be a false flag. It doesn’t matter.

And, not so surprisingly, both lead to the same address on that predicted wrong turn from antiquity also known as that distant dead end road from the future: 666 Mark of the Beast Lane.

And the sheep go: “baaaaa… baaaaa… baaaaa”.

May Trump help us and in Trump we trust. May Trump give us hope. May Trump guide us and be our Shepard. And, may Trump cast the evil, wicked Hildabeast into the Political Lake of Fire to burn forevermore. Amen.

CT-Hilltopper
CT-Hilltopper

I mainly read Kunstler to get new words to dazzle my friends when we play scrabble

Of course Armamentarium is a word…I read it in Clusterfuck Nation!

Bow to me bitchez!!!!

Billah's wife
Billah's wife

I find Cunstler ter be exhileratin ter read, not just fer the extraordinary verbiage, but mor fer his gawd dammed persistence. Y2k was like 16 years ago and his jew anus has been turdin out these doom articles with uh death camp level uh efficiency ever since. Speakin uh which, I opened uh can uh Y2k apple slices last week and shitballs uh mercy they was still edible. Anybody know whether you kin use oxygen absorbers with weed?

EL Coyote
EL Coyote

…the loathsome duo of Hillary and Trump putting on a Punch and Judy show for a disgusted public.

Stuff it up your bunghole, JK.
Americans put up a good fight and came up with these two finalists. Like in any beauty pageant, there are many disappointed folks but in the end, somebody must be crowned and the celebrations begin. They may be loathsome to some snobs but they are America’s own.

This is going to be one heck of a shit-fest.
Enjoy the show folks.
A Hillary vs Trump tag team match including Pocahontas Warren and a mystery man on Trump’s corner; perhaps Mitch McConnell or Mitt Romney, what outrage is too incredible this year?

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