Adam Taggart @ Zero Hedge:
It’s characteristic of the time that we’re living in that there simply is no sense of consequence. And that’s exactly what you get when you have a Federal Reserve that’s out of control and a public that is filled with technological narcissistic visions of Santa Claus delivering rescue remedies on demand. And so there’s no general sense that when you do things, bad things can happen.
James Howard Kunstler is concerned. Sure, he still has the same issues with the West’s highly energy-consuming suburban lifestyle that he famously brought to light in his books, The Long Emergency, the World Made by Hand series, and Too Much Magic. But beyond our decaying fundamentals, he’s distressed by society’s unwillingness to be honest with itself about the issue’s it’s facing.
Instead, we are embracing a narrative based in “magical thinking” (e.g., prosperity through the printing press, energy independence through domestic shale) that assures us everything is fine. That we’ll be able to enter the future without having to make any changes to our manner or standards of living, despite our massive debts and depleting resources:
History is very peculiar in the sense that sometimes cultures and societies go through very strange periods of their history, and we’re in one of those now. And I characterize this as the “great period of America lying to itself.” And the way that it’s really carried out as a practical matter is that accounting fraud is now the basic mechanism for running most of the important things in American life. Accounting fraud is now the basis for banking and finance, and it’s certainly the basis for government, and certainly for its fiscal role.
So I think what you’re seeing is a kind of deformity of the consensus. And of course, the most striking feature of our current times isthis inability of the country to construct a coherent story about what’s happening to us, and therefore the inability to construct a story about what we might do about it.
And the sad thing is there is much we can get busy on to address our situation. But to get started, we need to engage in an eyes-wide open assessment of our true state:
What’s really happening in reality, in this moment in history, is a comprehensive contraction in economic activity, because there’s a connection between the energy inputs into an economy and a culture and your ability to accumulate wealth of the kind that we’re used to, produced by industrial activity. And that’s coming to an end, and there’s no way around it.
Kunstler says:
“It comes back to the unfortunate condition of a nation that is so frightened of the consequences of what it has been doing that it cannot really face reality, and so it just spins one story after another.
I think Jim Rickards put it pretty well the other day when he said that this kind of monetary policy exists in what he referred to as a critical state dynamic. In other words, you can’t just dial up free money and then dial down free money when you seem to be getting into an inflationary problem. The control, the toggle, just doesn’t work that way. And what happens, in fact, is that things go critical because it is a critical state dynamic.
And what’s been going on is that we’ve been trying to compensate for the lack of capital formation with this imaginary money. And by capital formation, I mean the ability to accumulate real wealth from real wealth-producing activities. And creating credit card money on a national level is not real wealth-producing activity.”
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“And by capital formation, I mean the ability to accumulate real wealth from real wealth-producing activities.”
Our Government is now the magician….and the illusionist… more so delusional ..
Remember Pelosi’s incredibly stupid remark that unemployment compensation will “Stimulate” the economy? Explain to me then why this incredible plan has not worked?
With the US Government still believing after 4 going on 5 years of a more than a Pitiful Mantra that it can “Create JOBS ” is way MORE than this Country can handle…
How ‘fair’ is it that working people should foot the Bill not only for Government incompetence, but for the rampant fraud going on in this country BECAUSE of Government?
REAL WEALTH WASHINGTON DC STYLE PERHAPS [sarc]
Borrowed:
Ts Mon
Today 10:05 AM
President Obama’s Taxpayer-Backed Green Energy Failures;
Evergreen Solar ($25 million)*
SpectraWatt ($500,000)*
Solyndra ($535 million)*
Beacon Power ($43 million)*
Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)
SunPower ($1.2 billion)
First Solar ($1.46 billion)
Babcock and Brown ($178 million)
EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*
Amonix ($5.9 million)
Fisker Automotive ($529 million)
Abound Solar ($400 million)*
A123 Systems ($279 million)*
Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($700,981)*
Johnson Controls ($299 million)
Brightsource ($1.6 billion)
ECOtality ($126.2 million)
Raser Technologies ($33 million)*
Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*
Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*
Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*
Range Fuels ($80 million)*
Thompson River Power ($6.5 million)*
Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*
Azure Dynamics ($5.4 million)*
GreenVolts ($500,000)
Vestas ($50 million)
LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($151 million)
Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*
Navistar ($39 million)
Satcon ($3 million)*
Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20 million)*
Mascoma Corp. ($100 million)*Denotes companies that have filed for bankruptcy.
Here is the REALITY – WHEN are Americans [middle class and up] going to get tired of FOOTING THE BILL for these MISERABLE failures?? The Middle Class on up are the ones who bear the brunt of these failures….and these “companies” – – where are their consequences for their failures??????