Obama Hostage to Wall Street, Americans Hostage to Consumerism
Dec 16th, 2009 | By James Howard Kunstler | Category: Featured, Macro Economics
Okay, so President Obama didn’t run for office to help out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street – or so he said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” show Sunday night. But maybe it didn’t seem like such a bad idea once the election was over. Anyway, the net effect of his administration’s actions since then – all nicely documented in the latest Rolling Stone dispatch from the choleric Matt Taibbi – was an immense helping out of fat cat bankers on Wall Street at the expense of a lot of American citizens who work elsewhere, if they are lucky enough to have income-producing work.
Mr. Obama has really offered no satisfactory explanation for why he larded his department of the US government from the get-go with so many agents and recent graduates of Wall Street’s biggest firms. Nor has any clear reason emerged for the absence of criminal prosecution – or even investigation – by the Attorney General in such obvious cases of criminal fraud and insider trading as Goldman Sachs’s double-window technique for hedging its own issues of mortgage-backed securities. By comparison, the Savings-and-Loan scandal of a decade ago led to thousands of criminal convictions.
Last week, the Right Reverend Lloyd Blankfein, still “doing God’s work,” announced in a “cash-for-pitchforks” deal that the top thirty executives of his company, Goldman Sachs, would not receive dollar bonuses this Christmas but instead will get stock that ostensibly can’t be sold for five years. Those of us in the USA who enjoy a good mystery are wondering exactly what fine language in this memorandum drawn up by a team of thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyers contains the magic catch that frees up the GS execs to convert this stock into money, say, on February 2, 2010 – because you know it’s got to be in there somewhere.
Anyway, insofar as the top 30 GS employees is made up strictly of people who are already multi-deca-millionaires, notice that the other 31,670 employees of GS, including not a few hundred in the upper income tranches, will be receiving cash bonuses as usual this year from a bonus pool that amounts to about $16 billion (sixteen thousand million dollars). Of course, being a publicly-held company, GS will have to announce soon what those cash bonuses are. Perhaps this is why the news also got out about GS employees seeking handgun permits in bunches. Exactly how they get around New York City’s special “Sullivan Law,” which supercedes the New York State permitting rules, has not been explained.
Meanwhile, all the stops are being pulled out to produce a mighty wall-of-sound in dubiously-reported statistics pertaining to national unemployment and retail sales – the first way down and the latter up, supposedly – in an attempt to squeeze one last giant potlatch Christmas out of the dying “consumer” economy. Jew though I may be, I confess that Christmas is for me. I’m sorry, fellow Chosen People, but Hanukkah is just plain boring – the equivalent of Danish Modern furniture for the spirit. Give me Christmas, with its pagan yule logs, feasts, and revels! One can enjoy the holiday doings and trappings without subscribing to either the divinity of Santa Claus or the Babe of Nazareth. But Christmas does invite us to indulge in all kinds of “hopes” and delusions, and the main one crackling through the American zeitgeist this year is the wish that our national life will resume the yeasty expansion of goodies that most living citizens regard as baseline normality – namely, a never-ending orgy of credit card spending and real estate flipping.
This wish is doomed to disappointment. The cold boney finger of reality, like Dickens’s spectral Ghost of Christmas yet-to-come, points to many a tableau of desolation in the decade ahead… of a lost “normality,” of evictions, foreclosures, tragedies, ruinations and most of all dashed expectations – assuming that the vast public clings to habits and behaviors no longer suited to the mandates of new circumstances in our world. And it is the greatest disservice of all at this holiday time for respected authorities to pimp that wish. What a shabby thing it has become anyway – a sordid spectacle of multitudes moiling in chain store checkout lines en route to the certain anguish of buyer’s remorse in the parking lot.
Can’t we come up with a better American Dream, even one that includes Christmas? I think we can. It would require the liberation of American citizen’s minds from their thralldom to bigness in every realm from work to worship to recreation. If you think Barack Obama is a hostage to Wall Street, reflect for a while on the people’s self-surrender to the tyranny of everything that diminishes us to mere “consumers.” We’re on a journey – and we don’t know it – back to a nation of communities where your character really matters, and where character rests on whether your deeds comport with truthfulness. Many will be dragged kicking and screaming upon that journey, and many a dark night will be passed in the cold and damp on the way. But it will take us to a place where the hearths are burning brightly and the estranged spirits of our national character await a reunion with us: fortitude, patience, generosity, humor. That will be a Christmas to live for and remember!
Regards,
James Howard Kunstler
December 16, 2009
James Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler is perhaps best known for The Long Emergency, which predicted the financial meltdown and the implications of the peak oil problem. The Geography of Nowhere , about the fiasco of suburbia, is a campus cult classic among the architecture and urban planning students. It was followed by a sequel, Home From Nowhere and The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition . Mr. Kunstler has also authored 10 novels including World Made By Hand, a story set in America's post-oil future. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and The Atlantic Monthly.
ShareThis
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ron Simon, Whiskey Gunpowder. Whiskey Gunpowder said: Obama Hostage to Wall Street, Americans Hostage to Consumerism: Okay, so President Obama didn’t run for office to… http://bit.ly/7gPG74 [...]
Consumerism: the preoccupation with the acquisition of consumer goods.
Isn’t there an interesting tension in that JHK criticizes Americans for buying too much stuff he thinks they don’t need and LBT exhorts survivalists to hoard stuff now to prepare for the extended emergency they both believe is coming? So, I guess it’s okay to load up the SUV, just make sure what you buy or scrounge will come in handy during a collapse of society. Wow, what if all consumers become survivalsumers. Think of the hoarding. Besides gold, should we invest in hardware stores [HD, LOW], farm stores [TSCO], new homestead suppliers [RSOL], yard sale economy [EBAY] ? Any other suggestions [ ] ? On the other hand, If things continue to muddle along into the progressively improving future as they always have in the grand scheme of things, may I suggest not only using eBay to clean house but investing in eBay to profit from the biggest national spring cleaning in recorded history.
[...] [...]
Bill…it is a great compliment to speak of LBT in the same sentence as JHK, but the answer is YES. Yes to everything you suggested . Pare down to the essentials mentally, but throw out nothing until you run out of room because you don’t KNOW what you will need when. One of the glories of country living is you don’t run out of space and the neighbors don’t complain. We mostly ALL collect junk. “Junk!”
You are learning my methods, Watson! As Nero Wolfe always said, “Use intelligence guided by experience.” It took me three years day in and day out working and thinking to invent my own, personal version of the wheel, based on what I had learned over a very long life, and I am quite proud of it. However, it is MY wheel; most of you would never spend money and space on a glossy doctor’s buggy! You wouldn’t think of 6 jars of wasabi mayonnaise.Mr. K and I differ primarily in FOCUS: in an old phrase, he “thinks globally” while I “act locally.” VERY locally! I care about myself and mine. He is a visionary; I am a robber baron at heart. I am FEUDAL, in the sense that I TAKE CARE OF MINE; or do my best…my lands, my stock, my dependents…which means, basically, that I am a Mama by trade, not a city planner.
Some loving person send me a place to down load WORLD MADE BY HAND or whatever it is and I’ll read it, but I’ve been too busy to go look at HIS wheel because mine can always use another spoke for strength or picking out in glittering silver just for pretty.
Uh…if I don’t take my bronchial self off to town to fill a prescription and stop being emotional, Southern, and very ill, you’ll all think I’m crazy instead of just passionate, Irish, and Southern. Hugs, Walt. Hail, JFK. May we both succeed. LBT
[...] Whiskey & Gunpowder – Obama Hostage to Wall Street, Americans Hostage to Consumerism [...]
Merry Christmas.
Peace on earth, good will towards men, women and children,
Take a snack, have a nap and give thanks for what we have.
[...] Also: It’s Jingle Hell out there, Christmas Consumerism, The handbag-full-of-manure theory, Obama Hostage to Wall Street, Americans Hostage to Consumerism, ’tis the season of secular consumerism, Can You Buy Religion To Transcend Materialism?, and [...]
Bill, I would NOT invest in Home Depot and Lowes–bearing in mind that what I do and do not do is not the professional advise of a Gary North or Justice Litle. DYI is in a slump because of the economy; expansions and upgrades have to be taken off the for non-essentials such as new decks. It would not surprise me to see one or the other of them go under, and Ace Hardware must be far worse of because it is smaller with more expensive merchandise. Tractor Supply is seeing an upswing in business AND taking precautions; remember my friend who reported that ALL credit cards were being checked actively via telephone and debit cards were not taken during a recent sale. I don’t know RSOL, so thanks for bringing it to my attention. As for e-Bay…yes, if I were going to put anything into stocks, that could tempt me. The dynamite lady CEO for the last 15 years plans on taking on Schwartzenegger in the next gubernatorial race.
[...] Obama Hostage to Wall Street, Americans Hostage to Consumerism [...]
Bill, you wrote: “On the other hand, If things continue to muddle along into the progressively improving future as they always have in the grand scheme of things…” and I suggest that for the first time in our enjoyable growing acquaintance that you had better check your premise, Buddy. Start with a period known as “The Dark Ages!” Or work your way backwards using Japan as a good example of how things do NOT improve progressively. Zimbabwe, Iceland, the USA.. In between you will find innumerable periods where nothing much happened and others were there was alternating forwards and backwards movement with occasional side drifts. I laughed delightedly over the comment here somewhere of “You had me from the moment of Low Tech Linda,” which we could immortalize as LTLT, but I find the ancient Egyptians very sensible much of the time. Above all else they prized STABILITY. I’ve said this before, but for new readers Pharoah’s idea of an excellent century was one in which he won any wars others insisted upon and built gaudy monuments to his prowess when he lost. A MAGNIFICENT century was one during which absolutely NOTHING changed. Don’t mess with success. Build your tombs and temples, keep the nobility and priesthood under control, make good dynastic marriages, summer time an’ th’ livin’ is easy. “Improve” the lot of the peasants? Whatever for?! They’re happy and employed, and if you go and develop a bigger middle class they’ll rock the boat wanting what the upper class has and leave a shortage of labor. The Egyptians went to great pains to make it difficult to learn to read! THAT was reserved for the elites–the court, the priests, those with a genuine need to know, and the scribes who did it professionally. They knew instinctively that no good could come of educating the working classes. You will find the writings of the English landed gentry and above on the social scale quite instructive, and their arguments were ineluctable, not that such good sense halted the Industrial Revolution. I have spoken of the “anti-industrial” revolution many times since I began writing here; it is coming, and it will be very beneficial. I am NOT, of course, speaking of destroying our industrial base through Cap and Tax and even more strangling regulations. I am speaking of a sea change more and more are calling for: sustainable levels of comfort for those who work, and backing off the unattainable dream of every new generation having “more” than their parents did, far less attempting to “give” 3rd world nations the lifestyle that makes many in first world areas miserable at unsustainable costs in numerous areas. “The enemy of good is ‘better.’” A theme that runs through correspondence here is how greatly those of us who pull away from “civilization” improve our lives. By giving up externals which cost far more than they were ever worth we have consistent large amounts of precious leisure and raise our standards of living sharply. No…a “progressively improving future” is a false idol that has failed to bring happiness for rising two hundred years. We should have quit with indoor plumbing and gas lighting! Hug, Linda
Linda,
Sorry I’m talking about survival in a comment section about consumerism, but you and JHK have got me thinking about the relationship between the two ideas. The way I see it, in defense of consumerism, it is itself a survival strategy of the masses coping with the environment in which they find themselves- not exactly a awful environment by any stretch of the imagination despite JHK’s derision of modern American life, but nevertheless a world in which everyone must consume intelligently to prosper and survive the benign challenges of 21st century living. How to spend your disposable income and how to invest your savings in light of the trouble brewing?
I can think of a few interesting TEOTWAWKIT-or-not outcomes that might occur:
1. Planning for disaster and being ready for it when it does arrive.
2. Planning for disaster and wasting resources in needless preparation.
3. Planning for status-quo and being blind-sided by disaster.
4. Planning for status-quo and actually reaping the benefits.
5. Planning for status-quo and hedging for disaster.
6. Planning for disaster and hedging for status-quo.
Other possibilities?
Bill
Great response, Bill–and lots! Let me answer you under some other thing I’ve got up–new one for you all tomorrow, with luck–because this is about to drop off. Linda