Weimar Meets Waterloo By James Howard Kunstler

Weimar Meets Waterloo

By James Howard Kunstler
on August 1, 2011 9:15 AM

The Sunday night news, scant as it is these days despite the grotesque exertions of over a thousand cable TV stations, showed the old familiar faces lit up with crocodile smiles. The Republic was saved, surprise, surprise, by a last-minute fugue of reasonableness, when all concerned decided that putting the business-end of a double-barreled 20-guage shotgun in America's pie-hole might not summon the spirits of Ronald Reagan, Santa Claus, Adam Smith, Chuck Norris, and the Holy Ghost after all.

Let's give thanks that it's over because now the USA can get on with its systemic collapse honestly and fairly. Even though the debt ceiling extravaganza ended in something like political failure, one point did seem to shine through: there's no more money. Anyway, no money for non-bankers, and pretty soon even the bankers will be out of money too, because their money is fantasy banking money (sssshhhh, don't tell them) consisting of hard-drives packed with digital slime trails of swindles and frauds. The public can live in straight-up unvarnished fear now that they are liable to lose everything they thought they had.


.........................


So now we enter an economic terra incognita of the real post-industrial economy - not the Cinderella hoo-hah of digi-magic advertised in places like Wired Magazine, but more like a Foxfire world made by hand. We're out of cheap oil, cheap and good ores, ocean fish, good timber, and lots of other things. All the stuff we erected to live our lives in - the stupendous armature of highways, strip malls, suburban houses, skyscraper condos, sewer systems, electric grids - is beyond our power to repair now. We can only patch it, and that can only work for so long before things go dark. (Can you sharpen a saw blade?)

.............

We will never solve this American debt crisis. We're going broke fast and it will be like falling down a long staircase. The federal government will never recover. It will pretend to be in charge of things that continue to fall apart, and eventually its pretenses will be seen for what they are - and then it will be every community for itself. (The same can be said of the states, and even the counties.)


___________________

http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/08/weimar-meets-waterloo.html

This Monday's Kunstler got it right on.

William Irwin Thompson.
Written in the 70's it focused on locally based economies.
He started The Lindisfarne Association
http://www.williamirwinthompson.org/lindisfarne.html