Anybody with a personal history of protesting or a good resistance library knows that the police often are not friends of Americans’ right of dissent and assembly. And this is especially so when the dissenters are people of color and their allies. Although individual officers may be particularly brutal, this is not a matter of […]
As our politicos creep deeper into a legalistic wilderness hunting for phantoms of Russian collusion, nobody pays attention to the most dangerous force in American life: the unraveling financialization of the economy. By James Howard Kunstler Financialization is what happens when the people-in-charge “create” colossal sums of “money” out of nothing — by issuing loans, […]
By Meteor Blades Sometimes, an excerpt—even a long one —simply doesn’t do justice to an essay. Since that is the case with Bill Moyers’ piece “We, the Plutocrats vs. We, the People—Saving the Soul of Democracy,” first published by TomDispatch, I’m only providing the link along with his ending paragraph. I know some of you may click that link and upon […]
By Meteor Blades The prime minister of Iceland resigned Tuesday as the weekend exposé of off-shore tax haven shenanigans from the Panama Papers claimed its first major casualty. The year-long investigation carried out by 370 journalists of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (a project of the Center for Public Integrity) was sparked by a massive document leak from the files of the Mossack Fonseca law firm. Their work […]
By James Howard Kunstler It looks like 2016 will be the year that humanfolk learn that the stuff they value was not worth as much as they thought it was. It will be a harrowing process because a great many humans are abandoning ownership of things that are rapidly losing value — e.g. stocks on […]
By James Howard Kunstler The rot moves from the margins to the center, but the disease moves from the center to the margins. That is what has happened in the realm of money in recent weeks due to the sustained mispricing of the cost of credit by central banks, led by the US Federal […]
By James Howard Kunstler Kunstler.com The past two months I’ve taken in all but the final few episodes of Breaking Bad, America’s loathe letter to itself. What a metaphor for a nation’s transition from an ethos of earnest effort to a mood of criminal buffoonery. For you who haven’t tuned in to this cultural artifact, […]
By James Howard Kunstler The rock is reality. The squishy place is the illusion that pervasive racketeering is an okay replacement for an economy. The essence of racketeering is the use of dishonest schemes to get money, often (but not always) employing coercion to make it work. Some rackets can function on the sheer cluelessness […]
By David Brin R.J. Eskow – on Salon – offers “11 Questions to see if Libertarians are Hypocrites.” And yes, most of Eskow’s posers certainly do set up some stark and thought-provoking contradictions – even hypocrisies – in the oft-touted positions held by many who today use the “L-word” to describe themselves. The article is […]
By Meteor Blades Back on May 26, Edward Luce at the Financial Times offered the first inkling in the media that President Barack Obama would likely choose Larry Summers as chairperson of the Federal Reserve. He acknowledged that Summers had potential deficits, including a deep-seated abrasiveness. But, wrote Luce, “charm is overrated”: Worries about Mr Summers’ Senate hearings […]
By David Brin Here is a riff that I’ve stored too long. Something that needs saying. Can companies really gain investment capital via the stock market? Elsewhere I have commented on how easily capitalist/entrepreneurial markets can and do get warped by cheating and parasitism. Some of it is inherent, as Adam Smith described way back in […]
by James Howard Kunstler The political air lies thick and heavy upon us, like the subtropical wedge of atmospheric sludge that has bogged down the northeast USA for weeks of soupy gray days when there is nothing to do but wonder when things will become unstuck. If the world is an organism, something is wrong […]
by James Howard Kunstler Wondering why the money world got its knickers in a twist last week? The answer is simple: the global economy is breaking apart and its constituent major players are doing face-plants on the downhill slope of a no-longer-cheap-oil way of life. Let’s look at them case by case. The USA slogs […]
By James Howard Kunstler The basic operating system of global banking today is… accounting fraud. And it has become that way stealthily, insidiously, for about fifteen years now. Nothing is what it appears to be anymore. What remains are games of musical chairs, Ponzi schemes, frauds, swindles, stonewalls, ruses, ploys, scams, dodges, bluffs, subterfuges, QE […]
Zombie banks – too big to fail, can’t regulate ’em By James Howard Kunstler History has a special purgatory where it sometimes stashes feckless nations punch drunk on their own tragic choices: the realm where anything goes, nothing matters, and nobody cares. We’ve surely crossed the frontier into that bad place in these days of […]