The Chronicler's Interview with James Kunstler

And now, for a little Monday 'gloom and doom' with James Howard Kunstler.

He asks the question: Economic Recovery? Recovery to what?

To Wall Street booking stupendous profits by laundering
"risk" out of bad loans with new issues of tranche-o-matic securitized paper?
This I doubt, since there isn't a pension fund left from San Jose to Bratislava
that would touch this stuff with a stick, even if it could be turned out in
collector's editions of boxed sets. Does it mean that American "consumers"
(so-called) are awaited momentarily in the flat-screen TV sales parlors with
their credit cards fanned-out like poker hands, ready for "action?" Not too
likely with massive non-performance out in cardholder-land, and half the
nation's electronics inventory wending its way onto Craig's List. Are we
expecting more asteroid belts of new suburbs carved in the loamy outlands of
Dallas and Minneapolis, complete with new highway strips of Big Box shopping and
Chuck E. Cheeses? Go to banking's intensive care unit and inquire (if you can)
among the flat-lining production home-builders and the real estate investment
trusts on life support when they expect to rev up the heavy equipment.
The
idea that we're about to resume the insane behavior that induced the current
epochal malaise of economy is so absurd it will only be heard in the faculty
dining halls of the Ivy League.

Okay, James, what then can we expect?

So many forces are arrayed against a return to the previous
"normal" that we will be lucky, in another eighteen months, to still find
ourselves speaking English and celebrating Christmas.

Come on, please get serious.

My guess is that the current mood of public paralysis will
dissolve in a blur of blood and spittle sometime between Memorial Day and July
Fourth, even with Nascar in full swing, and the mushrooming ranks of the
unemployed lost in raptures of engine noise and fried cornmeal.

James, I said get serious!

On the agenda in the second quarter of '09 are ominous
rumblings in the oil and food sectors. Half a year of cratered oil prices have
decimated the oil industry and we're driving at 100-miles-an-hour straight off a
cliff into a new kind of supply crisis -- even if industrial production and
global exports remain moribund. So many drilling rigs are being decommissioned
that the oil industry itself looks like it's preparing for its own death,
investment in exploration and discovery has withered with the credit markets,
and the world may never recover from the year long hiccup in oil industry
activity -- translation: peak oil is biting back now with a vengeance.

That's better. And?

So many dire elements are ranging around our food production
system (i.e. farming), from widespread drought and water table depletion to
"input" shortages (especially fertilizers) to sickness in credit availability,
that we're all one bad harvest away from something that will make Pieter
Bruegel-the-elder's "Triumph of Death" look like Vanity Fair's annual Oscar
Party in comparison.

Okay, then what do you recommend?

Barack Obama, charming as he is, had better drop his
pretensions about kick-starting the old consumer economy, fire the Wall Street
clowns and parasites who are running that futile exercise, and start preparing a
US Lifeboat Economy aimed at reducing the scale and scope of our outlays so we
can survive the coming siege of austerity.

Yeah, really. That ain't gonna happen, James. You know what happened when Jimmy Carter put on his sweater and told the American People that they were in a malaise.
So, any little brightspot or glimmer that you can share before you go?

Meanwhile, I'm glad that he finally got a dog for the White
House, because the President knows full-well where to turn in Washington if you
want some genuine love and affection.

Sweet. Gotta get me one.