KUNSTLER BRUTALLY DISAVOWS OBAMA

Jive Talkin
By James Howard Kunstler

Well, he had to get up there and say something. In this particular winter of our discontent, the wispiest nostrums and baldest lies will do. America is not interested in reality. America is a nine-hundred pound man imprisoned in a fetid trailer bedroom begging for one more case of Little Debbie Cocoa Cremes before the front-end-loader bashes through the wall to haul him to intensive care. America just wants to hear another story about its own wonderfulness before that happens. America’s soul is so lost that it has disappeared into the same cosmic wilderness that MF Global’s client accounts were last seen entering.

Mr. Obama keeps telling nationwide audiences that “we have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years.” That is just not true. If he believes it then he is either 1) getting treasonously bad advice from dishonest advisors or 2) not reading reports issued by his own agencies or 3) just making shit up. This was the same week, by the way, when the US Department of Energy dropped its estimate for the Marcellus shale gas play by 66 percent, while the estimate for all US shale basins went down 42 percent. The shale gas industry is another Ponzi bubble that is about to founder on a scarcity of investment capital. Just watch.

The “energy independence” trope is a lie, too. At least in the sense that Mr. Obama means – that we can run the suburban clusterfuck and all its accessories by other means than fossil fuels. He just says it because it makes voters feel better. By the time they find out it was just a story, he won’t need their votes anymore. Meanwhile, we’ll do nothing to prepare for a different way of life, and so, necessarily, the result will be an obscene scramble for power and resources that will leave a lot of people dead.

The topper for me, though, was the President’s cheeky announcement that he’d ordered the Department of Justice to form a “special unit” to investigate mortgage fraud and other lethal irregularities in the banking sector. The fact that his congressional audience did not bust out laughing shows what a convocation of craven and perfidious cat’s paws they are. Note to readers: the DOJ has a long-established criminal division fully empowered to prosecute all the familiar scams of our time from NINJA lending to the robo-signing of titles to MERS mortgage mischief, to the bundling and sales of booby-trapped CDOs – up to and including whatever Jon Corzine thought he was doing at MF Global.

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