ALL RACKETS SOCIETY

Jimmy is in fine form this morning, obliterating Kudlow, oil company whore Yergin, Obama and Romney. The energy racket is in his wheelhouse and he never fails to knock it out of the park.

Unthinkable
By James Howard Kunstler

In the drunken, drug-crazed twilight of its run as Leader of the Free World, America’s collective imagination swerves from one breakdown lane to the other while the highway patrol throws a donuts-and-porn party down at headquarters and the news media searches the gutter on hands-and-knees looking for the spot where it dropped its brains.

The other day, Larry Kudlow, the king popinjay at CNBC, told viewers that the US has over a trillion barrels of oil waiting to be drill-drill-drilled on our way to “energy independence.” This is the kind of malarkey that America thrives on these days, the way yeasts thrive on sugary mash. It’s a complete falsehood, of course, but the working dead over at The New York Times said substantially the same thing in a front-page story the week before. The Timespersons have only one source for their stories: Daniel Yergin, chief public relations pimp for the oil industry, because he makes it so easy for them by providing all the information they will ever need. The oil and gas companies would like to direct the fire-hose of loose and easy money out there into their stock prices – building to the magic moment when, Mozillo-like, the executives can dump shares, cut, and run for the far hills where no SEC officer or DOJ attorney will ever think to look. This is just another racket in an all-rackets society.

The fantasy of energy independence therefore takes shape as a “settled matter” as we lurch toward elections. The arch-moron Mitt Romney will inveigh against Obama for holding the oil dogs back while Obama pretends to spank the oil companies for gouging the public on that alleged Niagara flow of new oil. None of them understands the true situation, which is that the USA is enjoying one last gulp of a very expensive oil cocktail with the last few dollars it can prestidigitate out of the central bank’s magic box, and then there is no more even notional surplus wealth to blow on more drinks.

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