Mediacology

These days I go to author Jim Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation to get a grip on the economy. Not surprisingly today he scribes a grim report (snippet below). The thrust of his program is that we have to end the suburban mentality, which leads him to criticize environmentalists for trying to play the cars-can-be-saved-as-a-way-of-life card (as in perpetuating the car fantasy through the promotion of alternative fuels and hybrids). Want a picture of future car travel when gas is ten dollars a gallon? Go to Latin America and see how people get around. (I know, I know. This picture exaggerates to make a point, it’s not meant to depict them as “primitive,” but instead ingenious.)

Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler:

Ultimately, in my view, the issue of what happens next will be settled not by the fantasies of the algae-biodiesel geeks or the wishful thinking of the sustainable futures organizers, but by the natural, self-organizing properties of a society responding ‘emergently’ to new circumstances. One of the implications of destiny-as-emergence is the probability that we will try any damn fool thing besides the right things to keep the old game going for a while — even in the face of obvious failure.

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Over the weekend, the Federal Reserve engineered a $30-billion dollar Saint Paddy’s day present for the JP Morgan bank by handing them the corpse of Bear Stearns. The object of the game is to prevent the “assets” of Bear Stearns from going to the auction block, on which they would be discovered to be nearly worthless, which would instantly render all similar assets held by the other big banks to be similarly worthless, and would result in a universal margin call that would pretty much unwind the hallucinated “wealth” acquired the past ten years.