Anxious Hiatus by Jim Kunstler

May 26, 2008

We're at a dead end with all this and a lot of Americans are paralyzed with fear about what's next. This may actually be a deeper fear than the anxiety about money and banking in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in and tried to reassure the nation. Back then, despite the grave problems of capital, we still had plenty of everything: plenty of good productive land, plenty of manpower earnestly eager for hard work, plenty of ore in the ground, shining cities equipped with excellent streetcar systems, a railroad network that was the envy of the world, sturdy small towns and small cities fully equipped with locally-owned business, and a vast number of small family farms that could re-absorb family members unable to get wages in the cities. Most of all, we had plenty of oil in the ground, and the world's biggest industry for getting it out and selling it. What we didn't have in 1933 was cash money.

The crisis at hand now goes way beyond a crisis of capital -- though that is certainly part of it. Notice how many of the things we had in 1933 are gone now. Our cities, with a few exceptions, are imploded husks. Our small towns and small cities (Schenectady, home of G.E.!) are gutted, especially in terms of locally-owned business. Our passenger rail system is worse than anything a Soviet ministry might produce (while the airline industry that replaced it is dying of a kind of financial hemorrhagic fever). Our local transit hardly exists anymore. Family farms have all but disappeared. We have plenty of manpower earnestly eager to become American Idols (but certainly not for heavy labor). Our oil industry now supplies only a fraction of the world's daily supply (and not even enough for half of our own needs)

What happens now? We face not just change but convulsive change. The public senses the rapid unraveling of our car-centric arrangements. In the week before the holiday, gasoline prices went up several cents each day -- in upstate New York, it crossed the $4 mark and kept going up. The trucking system faces collapse as diesel fuel price-rises exceed even the rise in gasoline, and the vast number of independent truckers who make up the system confront the individual calamity of a personal business failure. American Airlines last week announced severe measures to keep operating through the fall of 2008. but none of the airlines can feasibly carry on as usual with oil prices above $120-a-barrel -- and the ominous message is of a business model that has no conceivable way to adapt to the new reality. Most likely, in a very few years air travel will no longer be a "consumer" enterprise.

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continuously diminishing our liberties and those of others, supported by corporations outsourcing our jobs and using our infastructure while paying no taxes with their greed-based off-shore business entities and our contentment with the obscenity of polluting the entire world with our usage of 25% of the world's resources with a mere 5% of its population and our total immersement for a generation in MEism have brought this country to the point of collapse...right where it belongs. In the 19th century the British Empire was Queen of the World until two world wars and unhappy Commonwealth countries blotted them out, so we took over and with a culture of pride in knowing as little as possible about the rest of the world became a monolith of egregious and self-centered hegemony until the ultimate disaster brought us to our knees; the two terms of the unelected boy-idiot and his Darth Vader-look alike only served to expedite the already inevitable decline. Rome had centuries; we have had all we deserve in one half a century. So much for the neo-cons philosophically bankrupt American Century.

Shrub is just the symptom of the disorder politic