Change They Don’t Believe In

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

The unfortunate consequence of not allowing the process of “creative destruction” to occur in banking and Big Business is that the historic forces behind it will seek expression elsewhere in the realm of politics and governance. The desperate antics of central banks to cover up financial failure can’t help but provoke political upheaval, including war.

It’s a worldwide phenomenon and one result will be the crackup of economic relations — thought by many to be permanent — that we call “globalism.” The USA has suffered mightily from globalism, by which a bonanza of cheap “consumer” products made by Asian factory slaves has masked the degeneration of local economic vitality, family life, behavioral norms, and social cohesion. That crackup is already underway in the currency wars aptly named by Jim Rickards, and you can bet that soon enough it will lead to the death of the 12,000-mile supply lines from China to WalMart — eventually to the death of WalMart itself (and everything like it). Another result will be the interruption of oil export supply lines.

The USA as currently engineered (no local economies, universal suburban sprawl, big box commerce, despotic agribiz) won’t survive these disruptions and one might also wonder whether our political institutions will survive. The crop of 2016 White House aspirants shows no comprehension for the play of these forces and the field is ripe for epic disruption. The prospect of another Clinton – Bush election contest is a perfect setup for the collapse of the two parties sponsoring them, ushering in a period of wild political turmoil. Just because you don’t see it this very moment, doesn’t mean it isn’t lurking on the margins.

This same moment (in history) the American thinking classes are lost in raptures of techno-wishfulness. They can imagine the glory of watching Fast and Furious 7 on a phone in a self-driving electric car, but they can’t imagine rebuilt local economies where citizens get to play both an economic and social role in their communities. They can trumpet the bionic engineering of artificial hamburger meat, but not careful, small-scale farming in which many hands can find work and meaning.

The true genius of Hillary is that she manages to epitomize every failure of our current political life: the obsessive micro-manipulation of image, the obscene moneygrubbing, the tired cronyism, the entitlement masquerading as sexual equality. Mostly, though, she has no idea where history is taking us, in case you’re wondering at the stupefying platitudes offered up as representative of her thinking. I’m not advocating for this gentleman, but it will at least be interesting to see Martin O’Malley jump into the race and call bullshit on her, which he will do, literally, because he has nothing to lose by doing it. The eunuchs on The New York Times Op Ed page certainly won’t do it.

What happens on the world financial scene will determine the flow of events up into the 2016 election. The built-up tensions and fragilities are begging for release. The defining instant might be Greece’s unwillingness to fork over another debt payment, or the death of the shale oil “miracle,” or some act by Saudi Arabia’s enemies, or some chain of exploding booby-traps in the shadow banking netherworld. The great surprise for America especially will be the recognition that our current living arrangements have no future. That’s the only thing that will prompt a new consensus to form around some alternate, more plausible future, and the emergence of a generation willing to fight for it, even if it requires some real creative destruction of the things that are killing us anyway.

Note: JHK’s 2014 Garden Report is finally up

The new World Made By Hand novel

!! Is now available !!

Kunstler skewers everything from kitsch to greed, prejudice, bloodshed, and brainwashing in this wily, funny, rip-roaring, and profoundly provocative page- turner, leaving no doubt that the prescriptive yet devilishly satiric A World Made by Hand series will continue.” — Booklist

HistoryoftheFuture_Thumb

My local indie booksellers… Battenkill Books (Autographed by the Author) … or Northshire Books
or Amazon

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‘Muricans be like tapped out….you see what I’m sayin’

What’s going on is the customers don’t have the fucking money. That’s it. This isn’t rocket science.

—Retail consultant Howard Davidowitz quoted in the Al Jazeera article, “Mourn the Fall of the Mall.”

Mourn the fall of the mall
The symbol of US consumerism, the shopping mall, is crumbling.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/07/mourn-fall-mall-201471105835906735.html

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Optimism is cowardice. —Oswald Spengler

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more Spengler.

We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.

—Oswald Spengler

TE
TE

Agree with everyone of his assertions, bar one.

“… eventually to the death of WalMart itself …”

I call bullshit.

See store closures and operation Jade Helm.

I’m betting the evil collusion between Wallys and our Federal Government is going to mean continued business as the ONLY game in town for our irradiated, shoddily made, poorly grown and deadly, foods and clothing and medicines.

Imagine the Walmart heirs whom already are worth more than a humongous segment of our POPULATION is the ONLY game in town. They are probably fucking wet with giddiness over their upcoming Kingdom.

Wally’s won’t close. It will be a tool of our jailers, if I gifted a corporation the ability to become exactly what they have, I would know I would use them in the “after” of unchecked consumerism which anyone with a brain, and knowledge of actual earth resources, would see coming.

Yep, which is why I refuse to shop there now. I’m not helping them with my future lack of choice and mandates of toxic food and poisons. I simply could not live with myself if I did.

flash
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the only thing you need to survive the coming TEOTWAWKI is to remember to always maintain a good credit score unless you want your plastic revenue stream to be cut off.

Scrawled on a wallboard inside the operation center is the motto ‘7x24xforever.’ Even in the event of the Apocalypse, ‘we could run for at least a week,’ Knight says. Though he acknowledges that after the Apocalypse, credit-card usage might drop.

—Fast Company, Visa’s plan to survive blackouts, electrical surges, natural disasters, biological attacks and the apocalypse.

https://www.fastcompany.com/1784751/how-visa-protects-your-data

Stucky

Less than three years ago we bought a new fridge, dishwasher, and a large over-the-stove microwave.

The dishwasher (Maytag) has already broke down once … about a $200 repair job.

Yesterday, Ms Freud’s son-in-law and I are talking in the kitchen when the microwave simply … STARTED running on its own! Only opening the door made it stop. None of the controls worked. Then, after about 5 minutes a little error flashes across the screen —- “Circuit Board Error”. It’s a GE, but I have no doubt it’s Cheap Chink Shit.

Fuck China.
Fuck GE

Meanwhile, the 40+ year old Admiral fridge in my parent’s basement STILL WORKS. The Old America, where we made stuff, and stuff lasted a long time. #fuckmedead

TE
TE

Stucky, can you say, “planned obsolescence?”

I knew you could.

Lifespans have been reduced by more than 50% over the past 15 years, and 15 years ago was way down from long ago.

So many of my favorite tools and kitchen gadgets are around 50 years old and made in either the US or Europe. If I continue to care for them they will last a lifetime.

Most of my current appliances are around 10-15 years old, I’m praying the next ones will last that long. And that sucks, my previous washer I bought used for $40 in 1992 and used it for nearly 18 years, that thing lived for over 30 years. You will never see that kind of product lifespan again.

As money becomes harder to come by, our stuff becomes shorter lived. And everyone believes it is accidental that the Elite are getting richer by the minute. Long live next quarters savings and profit margins.

Stucky

“The true genius of Hillary is that she manages to epitomize every failure of our current political life: the obsessive micro-manipulation of image, the obscene moneygrubbing, the tired cronyism, the entitlement masquerading as sexual equality.” ———— from the article

The true genius of Hillary is that she’s a psychotic bitch, with an insatiable ambition to rule over others, but without any hint of humanity … a soul-less cunt from hell.

=====================================

Watching Hillary Clinton reach out and touch ordinary Americans is excruciating. In working a crowd of regular folks, Hillary is fingernails on the blackboard in a pantsuit. It is difficult to imagine anyone more out of touch with her own affect, movement, and connection to the people around her. She is unable to talk, touch, listen or smile in a natural manner. She doesn’t seem to know what to do with her hands, where to direct her eyes, her scope of awareness is restricted. A blind person with a stick would be better than Hillary Clinton at reading people around her.

In the staged and rigidly controlled glimpses of her, we see people positioned a handshake away wishing to be noticed by this woman who may be the next president, growing discouraged and becoming commensurately uncomfortable because Hillary can’t see them. Everyone is down on Hillary. The right hates her for moral, patriotic, and ideological reasons, the left wing has a worsening case of Hillaphobia. Those on the left who are not too drug-addled to be aware of politics don’t like her because they are driven by narcissistic emotional needs which she does not meet. She cannot reach the anti-traditionalist places where the left likes to be massaged, nor can she humor them with hipness.

It’s too late for Hillary to blow the smoke of radical transformation, on someone else’s dime, up the left-wing’s collective keister. Hillary can trot out plausible transgenders when necessary, but fundamentally she chose to stand by her man and political expedience at every point in her career. Just being around her makes people feel uncomfortable and she clearly returns the unhappy condition.

It is understandable that Hillary is postponing contact with the press. Special factors in the way Hillary Clinton has lived her life, beyond the typical cautiousness of the front runner, make it difficult for her to be present with herself or open to anybody else in a room full of strangers.

When one observes married couples who have been together for a long time it is often possible to recognize a complementary-compensatory dynamic wherein the partners automatically cover for the limitations of the other. As a benign example, if the wife is naturally shy, the husband may become increasingly outgoing and voluble over time to compensate for his wife and prevent the isolation which shyness might cause. There is a degree of filling in for each other that redistributes responsibilities in a practical way and is healthy. But this compensatory dynamic can become destructive by enabling weaknesses as the couple patches each other’s problems rather than confront themselves and grow as individuals.

The Clintons are the most married couple in the world. They are stuck with each other. The demands of their joint political careers have made the complementary-compensatory dynamic especially powerful in their marriage and destructive to their individual integrity. Their marriage was called upon to support fantastic ambitions and hide weaknesses in both of them.

Bill Clinton is a famously gifted retail campaigner. A friend of mine who met President Clinton and spoke with him for a few minutes says he made her feel like the only person in the room. His brash presentfulness is a skill especially valued in a leader. But President Clinton’s ability to connect to and take in the people around him is a double-edged rapier, with a predatory blade. His natural ability to connect allows him to select those who will benefit him but also cull the vulnerable from the herd for his nefarious purposes. We know he consumes and abuses women around him, offenses of impulsive domination and aggression. Hillary has her own history of ethical, legal and financial scandal. But the scandals that have stuck to her are the stuff of malfeasant calculation, monies and memos appearing and disappearing in wrongful ways. Hillary’s scandals are the machinations that leave a paper trail (or a no e-mail trail), not the wreckages of foolhardy moments.

In driving the Clinton franchise to the highest levels of power on earth, Hillary has wretchedly compensated for her husband’s porous boundaries by constructing impenetrable walls around herself. As he became more reckless, she must have become more wary. Many years ago Hillary accepted the job of being Bills’ after-party cleanup crew. In the service of their upward march, she had no choice. Many people think Hillary Clinton is a psychopath without a conscience who cares nothing about her husband’s betrayals on a personal level. That formulation does not seem supported by what has leaked out about the Clinton’s relationship. It is more likely that she is a wellspring of anger hiding behind a smile you can hang laundry on.

What is certain is she spent years mopping up and deodorizing Bill’s messes. Bill’s affairs with and attacks on women have been more destructive to Hillary’s psychological integrity and self-worth than some miraculous hundred grand showing up in the Clinton cookie jar have been to him. His sexist violence strikes at the heart of who she claims to be, and continues to damage her basic sense of security and candidacy. For forty years, a room full of strangers is where the party starts for Bill, and where the messes are made for Hillary. For forty years every time Hillary entered a room full of strangers she had her bucket and mop. A bimbo splatter might be found anywhere. For forty years a room full of strangers, interacting in an unscripted moment, has been Hillary’s worst nightmare.

Hillary was also Obama’s international cleaning lady as his policies weakened the American position around the world. The Benghazi outpost was under Madame Secretary’s authority and she is to blame for the outrages which were committed there against Americans. But it is hard to imagine such Muslim-pandering, puerile trash as the video cover story originating with the Clintons. Maybe the scheme was Hillary’s idea, we may never know. In this case the video cover story was so ridiculous when it fell apart, it made the righteous outrage of the American people far worse. But there is no doubt Hillary had the most to lose of the cleanup crew, and has been the most sullied by Benghazi. She has the most filth still clinging to her bright green jacket.

That a president gets to pass the office to his brother, wife or kid runs counter to the Constitution and American ideals. That Hillary — who has done so much dirty work for an impeached president, and one who should have been — should claim that inheritance is particularly repulsive. She has become the Dorian Gray of politics, a terrible visage nobody can bear to behold. Nor does she, hiding at the bottom of her own slop bucket, wish to be seen.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/04/why_hillary_cant_be_in_the_moment.html

Billy
Billy

Meanwhile, the 40+ year old Admiral fridge in my parent’s basement STILL WORKS. The Old America, where we made stuff, and stuff lasted a long time. #fuckmedead – Stucky

Same here, bro… +1

The Whirlpool fridge in my parent’s basement – their first appliance they bought as a married couple – ran every single day for 40+ years. Of course, they maintained it – cleaned it, kept it serviced regularly, took care of it – but it never had a major malfunction or breakdown. For 40 years.

Contrast that with… well, damn near everything. Cheap, made in Chinkland plastic bullshit. The good stuff still exists, but you have to look to find it, then save to afford it.

We can make lightbulbs that last 100 years. We’ve already DONE it. They just don’t because they figure they can milk us for more cash if they make them burn out after X hours or whatever… same with cars. Used to be, 200K miles wasn’t anything so long as you kept your car maintained… now? Now you’re pushing the envelope at 100K and anything that happens to survive to 200K miles is completely clapped out…

Motherfuckers… I can even peg the year that this designed obsolescence bullshit started – 1964. When everyone went from a quality based product to a quantity based one… crank them out like fuckin paperclips, boys… there’s more for everyone!

TE
TE

Stuck, thanks for sharing the AmericanThinker Clinton article. Not a piece I can’t disagree with.

Pretty obvious Hillary was the power-hungry one, she molded Bill and her drive took them to the highest office in the land.

Her ultimate goal, I am sure, has always been to be at the top herself. The woman embodies everything that is wrong with our society, hell, everything that is wrong in the hearts of men.

Thanks again.

DC Sunsets

TINOC. There Is No Other Choice.

We live in the world as it is.

The world as it is, is a spontaneous construct produced by the interaction of the Narrative animating our Mass Man fellow citizens, of their hopes and dreams and (above all) delusions. It is a product of the past and what people think will be the future (even though they are often wrong.)

This is the world today, and it will be the world tomorrow, even if the result (tomorrow) is quite different.

None of us gets to be an outside observer, watching dispassionately while events unfold.

IndenturedServant

TE, go buy a Speed Queen washer and dryer. They are still made in ‘murica by ‘muricans and are the same machines your grandparents owned……….for now.

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