Russia Attacked Us

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

This idiotic fantasy congealed in the political matrix last week as everyone across the spectrum of parties and factions scrambled for patriotism brownie points in what is shaping up as an epic game of Capture-the-Flag for the mid-term elections. Listen to me for a moment, as our arch-nemesis Vlad the Putin said to Fox News knucklehead Chris Wallace in an interview aired Sunday Night — when Wallace interrupted Mr. Putin for perhaps the fourth time, saying, “I don’t want to interrupt you, sir, but….”

“Listen to me. Be patient,” Mr. Putin repeated dolefully, like a second-grade teacher struggling with an ADD kid.

The interview was trying my Christian patience, too. And my own personal fantasy was that Mr. Putin would whip out 30 inches of rebar and whap Chris Wallace upside the head with it. But he only repeated, “Be patient….”

So, listen to me: Russia did not “attack” us. Trolling on Facebook is not an attack on the nation. The allegation that Russia “hacked” Hillary’s email and the DNC server is so far without evidence, and computer forensics strongly suggests that the information was transferred onto a flash-drive on its journey to Wikileaks. And, of course, the information itself, concerning embarrassing unethical hijinks among Democratic Party officials, was genuine and truthful — they “meddled” in their own primary elections.

This lingering Russia hysteria got a big re-boot last week following Mr. Trump’s impressively awkward performance onstage with the nimble Mr. Putin, whose self-possession only reinforced Mr. Trump’s lumbering oafishness and amazing verbal incoherence. It’s hard enough for Americans to understand what the Golden Golem of Greatness is trying to say; imagine the torment of the translators untangling his tortured utterances!

I daresay that some of the American observers secretly wished that we could swap over Mr. Trump for Mr. Putin so as to have a national leader with some decorum and poise, but alas…. And one can’t help but wonder how Mr. Putin sizes up POTUS among his intimates inside the Kremlin. I’d love to be a fly on that wall.

The Helsinki summit meeting has the look of a turning point in Mr. Trump’s political fortunes. One irony is that he may escape his enemies’ efforts to nail him on any Russia “collusion” rap only to be sandbagged by financial turmoil as the dog days of summer turn nervously toward autumn. Events will cancel the myth that his actions as president have produced a booming economy. If anything, the activities that make up our economy have only become more vicious rackets, especially the war industries, with all their inducements to counter the imagined Russia threat.

The financial markets are the pillars of the fantasy that the US economy is roaring triumphantly. The markets are so fundamentally disabled by ten years of central bank interventions that they don’t express the actual value of any asset, whether stocks, or bonds, or gold, oil, labor, currencies, or the folly known as crypto-currency. We await the fabled “moment of truth” when the avenging angel of price discovery returns and shatters the illusion that accounting fraud equals prosperity.

The revelation that Mr. Trump is not an economic genius will spur a deeper dive by chimerical Democrats into nanny state quicksand. They will make the new fad of a Guaranteed Basic Income the centerpiece of the midterm election — even though many Democrats will not really believe in it. They are pretending not to notice how broke the USA actually is, and how spavined by unpayable debt. The lurking suspicion of all this is surely behind fantasies such as Russia attacked us, the displacement of abstruse and impalpable fear onto something simple and cartoonish, like the President of the United States.