The End of the American Way of Life

James Kunstler gives us our regular Monday dose of hyper-pessimism:

Nature's way of hinting that something truly creepy may be up is when both Paul Volcker and George Soros both declare on the same day that the economic landscape is looking darker than the Great Depression.

....an awful lot of reasonable people have begun to ask whether President Obama is a stooge of whatever remains of Wall Street, with Citigroup and Goldman Sachs's puppeteer, Robert Rubin, pulling strings behind an arras in the Oval Office. Personally, I doubt it, but it is still a little hard to understand what the President is up to.

The sad truth is that banking has become a Chinese fire drill -- a frantic act of futility -- as insolvent companies persist in covering up their losses in order to avoid the counter-party hell of credit default swaps that would ring the world's "game over" bell. This can only go on so long. All the chatter about "nationalizing" the banks really boils down to what kind of bankruptcy work-out will they be put through, how destructive will the process be, and how much of the pain can be shoved forward in time to people now in diapers and their descendants.

No good, in fact, will come of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which is exactly what the Obama program is starting to look like. In the folder marked "unsustainable" you can file most of the artifacts, usufructs, habits, and expectations of recent American life: suburban living, credit-card spending, Happy Motoring, vacations in Las Vegas, college education for the masses, and cheap food among them. All these things are over.

It's quite likely that Obama has simply not accepted all of Kunstler's assumptions about the future, and therefore won't act like he would like. After all, he's trying to act like Lincoln and Roosevelt, not a 'small-is-beautiful' prophet.

No one who believes like Kunstler does could ever get elected to the local school board, let alone the Presidency. That doesn't mean James is wrong necessarily, but if he is a true prophet, well, then let him do his thing, and let Obama do his, and reality will use both of them to move into the future.