Three Paragraphs from Jim Kunstler's Latest "Is Obama Gorbachev?"

Jim Kunstler's latest "Is Obama Gorbachev?" has the following three paragraphs. This is the type of thinking which is on the minds of many Americans, even many who voted for Obama in 2008.

Those members of the FIRE Economy Rackets who are not aware of the anger percolating inside the bowels of America's middle and lower classes would do well to read this whole piece. Pay attention to the middle paragraph of just the 3 paragraphs I present here.

Since September of 2008, when Hank Paulson began shoveling bail-outs to the very banks who screwed the world on fraudulent and unreal securities, and left American society comprehensively bankrupt, the consensus has only deepened on the perception of an historic swindle. And so far, President Obama has positioned himself as chief enabler to further swindling. One need look no further than the rulings this past spring of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) as authorized by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC, an official government agency, created 1934), which have allowed the biggest banks to pretend that the fraudulent paper in their vaults does not have to be recorded as a loss on their books.

The US economy is now dying a slow and painful death because it had become based on activities that had nothing to do with producing real wealth. Instead, it became dependent on rackets, that is, behavior geared to getting something for nothing. These rackets are often summarized under the acronym FIRE (for finance, insurance and real estate), a system set up to strip-mine profits from the wish commonly labeled "the American Dream" -- itself largely a product of televised advertising and propaganda. The end product of all that was the doomed economy of suburban sprawl, an infrastructure for daily life with no future in a world defined by fossil fuel scarcity. The unraveling of debt at every level now is directly related to the mis-investments made in that way of life.

By now, it's self-evident that the "change" voted for in November's election was too horrifying to articulate. It still is. The suburban sprawl economy was all we had left. Now it's gone and we're stuck with all its deleveraging after-effects -- the worst case of "buyer's remorse" since the fall of Nazi Germany. Thus, the only "change" that President Obama can really work for is the health care system, which is a life-and-death matter. The sordid rackets so ostentatiously infecting the system boil down vividly to lives ruined and bankrupted, and a system more frightful to deal with than disease itself. Probably the baseline truth is that health care will end up being rationed one way or another. It's another prime symptom of population overshoot, and a reminder that life is tragic.