JAMES KUNSTLER: We're Entering A Dangerous New Period In History

[lee n. field]

Who he is, I don't know.

Claire Wolfe pointed to this article today.  Reads well:

All this points to a dangerous new period of political history, a deadly Hobbesian scramble to evade the falling timber in a burning house as the rudiments of a worldwide social contract go up in flames. Such is the importance of legitimacy: the basic condition for governance, especially among supposedly free people.

Reality dislikes fraud and accounting tricks. Reality is serious about settling scores. Reality eventually intervenes and puts an end to monkey business. What will it be this time?  

Europe and America have been buying a month here, a month there (of a fragile, continuing status quo) on the installment plan. That's what QE, TARPs, LTRO, EFSF, Operation Twist, et cetera, are all about. Think of them as multi-billion dollar (euro) fire extinguishers bought on credit cards. Europe is now completely out of credit to buy more fire fighting equipment.

For months now it has been down to whether Germany intends to keep supporting Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, the French banks (and a few stray forgotten places between the backwaters of the Danube and the Gulf of Finland) without any say in how they manage their allowance. Much as Germany enjoyed the Ponzi heyday of the Euro zone, a big "tilt" sign now flashes ominously over the continent, signaling game over. All fall down.

Everybody gets real poor real fast. M. Hollandaise over in Paris has already sealed his fate with his stupid plan to return to "go" on the Ponzi game-board. Merkel's tattered scarecrow of a coalition will blow away in the next national election. The Club Med countries will soon boil up in street-fighting, Holland and Finland will drink themselves to death, and across the channel outsider Britain will fizzle away to a burnt bowl of mulligatawny. That's what the end of the summer looks like to me.    

Over here, in this sorry-ass edition of America, the election will look more and more like a World Wrestling Federation staged dumb-show between two catamite hostages of a foul corporate oligarchy. Imagine that horse's ass Mitt Romney spending the next four months denouncing Obama-care, modeled on his own health care reform in Massachusetts, while Obama pretends he has a grip on an economy where the rule of law is absent due to Obama's own omissions and negligence.  

(fixed the linkage.)

[brimic]

I 'm pretty jazzed at being alive during such interesting times plus we'll get front row seats to Europe's tikiwiki right before it happens to us.

[Scout26]

“The lamps are going out all over Europe, and we should not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

[agricola]

Perhaps, though it should be pointed out that watching the EU / Euro project collapse - with of course the identification and rejection of the political elites responsible - will probably be the best thing that happens to many Europeans (on a political level at least) in their lifetimes.