James Howard Kunstler: The banking system is just blowing smoke up the shredded ass of what's left of the economy

kunstler takes on the rantings of the unhinged repubs and compares them to the equally unhinged democratic denials of reality...

[I]t's especially gratifying to see the Republicans sail off the edge of their own flat earth on the winds of religious idiocy. For forty years it has not been enough for them to just be a conservative party. They had to enlist the worst elements of ignorance and reaction, and they found an endless supply of it in the boom regions of the Sunbelt with its brotherhood of TV evangelist con-artists and a population fretful with suburban angst.

[...]

Just as there is a place for conservatism in civilized life, there is also a place for the progressive impulse, let's call it - for making bold advance in step with the mandates of reality and an interest in justice for all those along on the journey.

The Democrats under Obama don't want to go to that place. They want to really go to the same place as the fretful Sunbelt fundamentalists, but by a different route - and that place is yesterday, by means of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable. Mr. Obama is pretending that an economic "recovery" is underway when he knows damn well that the banking system is just blowing smoke up the shredded ass of what's left of that economy. He pretends to an interest in the rule of law in money matters but he's done everything possible to prevent the Department of Justice, the SEC, and a dozen other regulatory authorities from functioning the way they were designed. He has never suggested resurrecting the Glass-Steagall act, which kept banking close to being honest for forty years. He never issued a peep of objection about the Citizens United case where the Supreme Court tossed the election process into a crocodile pit of corporate turpitude (he could have proposed a constitutional amendment redefining corporate "personhood."). He declared he'd never permit a super-PAC to be created in his name, and now he's got one. Mr. Obama represents a lot of things to a lot of people. He is mainly Progressivism's bowling trophy, its symbol of its own triumphant wonderfulness in overcoming the age old phantoms of race prejudice. Alas, that's not enough. Where exactly is the boundary between telling "folks" what they want to hear and just flat-out lying?

when people are afraid, they will listen to just about anything that they think can reduce their fear...

if the world as i had always known it was coming down around my ears and i had no idea what was going to happen next, i would be VERY receptive to anyone and everyone who presented themselves as having a solution at hand...

whether it's the repubs promising that they will vanquish all society's great "evils" - brown people, gay people, non-christian people, poor people, uppity women, uppity presidents, uppity countries, the list goes on - or the dems promising a return to the go-go economy, people who live in fear will be very responsive...

the one thing fearful people DON'T want to hear is anyone spouting reality...

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