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Europe may soon be choking on that plat du jour of government a la
Hollandaise with the side of chopped Greek salad. The whole world, in fact, has got something like a giant hairball stuck in its craw. The hairball is composed of filaments of lies wound over a core of supernatural indebtedness. The lies are promises that the debt will be paid back. Words: 710
So says James Howard Kunstler (www.kunstler.com) in edited excerpts from his original article*.
Lorimer Wilson, editor of www.munKNEE.com (Your Key to Making Money!), has edited the article below for length and clarity – see Editor’s Note at the bottom of the page. This paragraph must be included in any article re-posting to avoid copyright infringement.
Kunstler goes on to say, in part:
The European Sideshow Continues
For two months the financial markets have…[remained aloft] on a cushion of the European Central Bank’s Long term Financing Operations and the hot air of austerity chatter. The illusion of remaining airborne may dissolve now with the Hollandaise denunciation of Franco-German team spirit while a centripetal vortex of unpaid obligations sucks notional wealth through the event horizon of massive deflation.
Things are heating up, in other words. Wake up, sleepyheads! Welcome to the rest of the year 2012.
Krugman’s Comments are a Joke!
Paul Krugman…has written something in his The New York Times column that is so amusing…I almost upchucked my “Paleo” diet breakfast of salmon hash with four eggs (pas de Hollandaise). Krugman writes in his column:
“What’s wrong with the prescription of spending cuts as the remedy for Europe’s ills? One answer is that the confidence fairy doesn’t exist — that is, claims that slashing government spending would somehow encourage consumers and businesses to spend more have been overwhelmingly refuted by the experience of the past two years. So spending cuts in a depressed economy just make the depression deeper.”
What an excellent misrepresentation of reality by one of the official molders of public opinion and policy in this exceptional land. I would attempt to debate his statement above that spending less government money is proposed to encourage consumers, blah blah. It is proposed because government doesn’t have the money to spend and has run out of the ability to borrow more money due to the bad odor now wafting off the world’s compost heap of sovereign bond paper. Everyone is going broke simultaneously, including putative lenders, i.e. buyers of bonds, who are the same ones selling them.
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I like the way Krugman avers offhandedly to the concept of “depression.” I believe this is a new thing for him to admit a certain absence of “green shoots” on the spring economic scene. Heretofore his halftime act between two presidential terms has been sheer cheerleading, but I guess he forgot to bring his pompoms to the office yesterday. I would refer to the situation as something more severe than a “depression,” which merely suggests a valley between peaks. I would say that we are instead out on the arid buzzard flats beside the deep blue sea where modernity is shortly to drown itself in a fugue of suicidal bad faith.
USA Approaching a Dark Inflection Point
All of which is to say the pretense that has reigned since 2008 (viz: “recovery”) may not float through the rest of 2012. Surely in the USA, we are approaching a dark inflection point where the fall elections collide with the broken promises now gathering into the shitstorm vulgarly called “Taxmageddon.” The event horizon for that extravaganza of financial lightning strikes is officially January 1, but the effects will be felt long before that as households, businesses, pension funds, municipal governments, and various branches of the U.S. military prepare to roll over and die.
America to Bring Its Act to the Circus’ Center Ring
Enjoy the European sideshow for now because the roustabouts are still setting the props for an act in the center ring.
When the clown cars pull into both the [Democrat and Republican] political conventions [in the U.S.] this summer, I would like to see these circus troupes greeted by large and lively mobs of furious citizens hurling objurgations at the likes of Barack Obama and Willard “Mitt” Romney. This is probably the least we can do to register some objection to the two useless parties’ way of running things….
*http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/05/1-2-3-puke.html (To access the article please copy the URL and paste it into your browser.)
Editor’s Note: The above article may have been edited ([ ]), abridged (…), and reformatted (including the title, some sub-titles and bold/italics emphases) for the sake of clarity and brevity to ensure a fast and easy read. The article’s views and conclusions are unaltered and no personal comments have been included to maintain the integrity of the original article.
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