The U.S. had taken advantage of temporary confusion in Russia, during the ten-year-long post-Soviet-collapse interval, and set up a client government in Georgia…
August 20th, 2008 | James Howard Kunstler | 5 comments | ContinuedArchive for James Howard Kunstler
(born 1948) is an American author, social critic, and blogger who is perhaps best known for his book The Geography of Nowhere, a history of suburbia and urban development in the United States. He is prominently featured in the peak oil documentary, The End of Suburbia, widely circulated on the internet. In his most recent book, The Long Emergency (2005), he argues that declining oil production is likely to result in the end of industrialized society and force Americans to live in localized, agrarian communities.
Banks Could Put an End to the American Dream
There’s a particular moment known to all Baby Boomers when Wile E. Coyote, in a rapture of over-reaching, has run past the edge of the mesa and, still licking his chops and rubbing his front paws in anticipation of fricasseed roadrunner, discovers that he is suspended in thin air by nothing more than momentum. Grin becomes chagrin. He turns a nauseating shade of green, and drops, whistling…
July 16th, 2008 | James Howard Kunstler | 9 comments | Continued
The Iowa Floods Send America Into a Season of Hoarding
The recent Iowa floods show evidence of how the problems of weird weather (climate change) combine and ramify the problems associated with Peak Oil. In this particular case they lead to an inflection point sometime around the 2008 harvest season, which will also be our time of political harvest.
June 25th, 2008 | James Howard Kunstler | 7 comments | Continued
American Public are Becoming a Much Poorer Society
Those were the words that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke used to describe the financial markets (and by extension the economy) these heady spring days when everybody else with a rostrum, it seems, has pronounced the so-called liquidity crisis contained. There’s a great wish for American finance to return to business-as-usual - raking in fantastic fees for innovating new modes of tradable paper…
May 29th, 2008 | James Howard Kunstler | 3 comments | Continued
Angry Mortgagees Protesting Bear Stearns Favouritism
Last Wednesday, a bunch of peeved mortgagees protesting government favoritism in the Bear Stearns case entered the lobby of the company’s (soon-to-be-former) headquarters building in midtown Manhattan. While it might not seem like much, I view the symbolic “penetration” of this corporate stronghold as the very first sign of a much broader citizen revolt against the extraordinary protections being shown to crapped-out investment banker boyz…
April 10th, 2008 | James Howard Kunstler | 7 comments | Continued
The Price of Oil Remains Stubbornly Above $100 a Barrel
In the deeper background of all this is the all-important oil story that nobody in politics or the media wants to pay attention to. Notice that in the fervid unloading of assets this past week, as investors dumped their positions in the commodities markets, the price of oil remained stubbornly above $100-a-barrel when it was all over on Thursday afternoon. Well, maybe they’ll ratchet down a little further this week, but the trend line will prove to continue remorselessly upward in the months ahead…
March 26th, 2008 | James Howard Kunstler | 0 comments | Continued
Eric Janszen’s Bubble
Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published on James Howard Kunstler’s blog, here.
Eric Janszen of iTulip.com has made a splash in the mainstream media with his Harper’s Magazine cover story on the “The Next Bubble.” His thesis is that a new tidal wave of investment will shortly roll toward “infrastructure and alternative energy.” By this [...]
How to Escape the Black Hole Called the U.S. Economy
The dark tunnel that the U.S. economy has entered began to look more and more like a black hole recently, sucking in lives, fortunes, and prospects behind a Potemkin facade of orderly retreat put up by anyone in authority with a story to tell or an interest to protect – Fed chairman Bernanke, CNBC, The [...]
January 23rd, 2008 | James Howard Kunstler | 8 comments | Continued
U.S. Election Campaign Could Expose Frightening Realities for America
At the beginning of the month, CNN was frantically advertising a set of “live” debates between the presidential candidates - Democrats Sunday and Republicans Tuesday, with loads of “color commentary” before and after.
This big media show was staged in New Hampshire, whose once-significant early primary election has been reduced - like so much else in [...]
Post Peak Oil: Effects on the Stock Market and World Economy
Whenever somebody complains about “the lies that George Bush & Co. told to get us into the Iraq war” (as Frank Rich did in The New York Times recently), I wonder how those lies compare to the lies that the American public tells itself every day - for example, that America could get along without oil from [...]
May 10th, 2007 | James Howard Kunstler | 4 comments | Continued