[AGL] Kunstler

[Charles Loving]

*I Hear That Train a’Comin’*

Clusterfuck Nation

Think of the American two-party political system as two ramshackle freight
trains running towards each other over old, neglected tracks, on a one-year
collision course. Will there even be two parties left for the 2020 election?

The Republican Party is a train of booby-trapped freight cars that can blow
at any time. The engine is running on the fumes of the financialized
economy. The engineer, Mr. Trump, only has his eye on the gauge that
represents the stock market, which produces the gaseous emanations running
his train. But the tank cars are leaking. The vapors are highly flammable.
Any little spark can set it off, and surely will.

The Democratic Party is carrying seventeen gondola cars of the worst
political scandal in US history: RussiaGate, the attempted coup d’état by
national gaslighting, which will expose dozens of party officers and
foot-soldiers in an actual criminal conspiracy, and subject them to
ignominious prosecution in the heart of the election year. The damage could
run as high as former President Obama when all is said and done, with Mrs.
Clinton dragged under the wheels in the ensuing train wreck. It will be
ugly and embarrassing to the max.

The Dem’s train also includes the circus cars of its identity politics
hustlers, Reps AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley plus the
sideshow of so-far-suppressed Joe Biden scandals concerning massive cash
payoffs from Ukraine and China to his entrepreneurial son, Hunter —
conveniently arranged during his Dad’s official trips to those places as
Vice-president.

There is reason to believe that a majority of voters are good and goddam
sick of identity hustling and the tiresome racket of political correctness
that spawned it. They see its bottomless appetite for grievance and
complaint — against a reality in which life is difficult for everybody, not
just self-proclaimed victims of oppression. They smell the odor of bad
faith in the party’s campaign for an open border with Mexico and its abject
refusal to legislate immigration law reform — while grandstanding about the
alleged mistreatment of people who cross the border illegally. Most of all,
they are sick of the endless moral instruction and coercion, especially
over “gender” issues and sexual boundary-stretching, the parades of freaks
in dog masks, ball gags, and S & M get-ups, not to mention the utter
insanity of the drag queen story hour, in which men perform as monstrous
caricatures of women for impressionable six-year-olds. That is what it’s
come to for the party of Franklin Roosevelt and Jack Kennedy.

Yet, Mr. Trump’s chances for reelection hang on the slender thread of his
fictitious miracle economy, which is something like one of those fabulous
parties at Jay Gatsby’s place depicted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel about
life before the 1929 crash — a splashy but localized event strictly for the
denizen elite of the Gold Coasts. It’s the product of world-wide
money-printing, computer algo fakery in the exchanges, statistical
spirit-cooking, and the perversions provoked by artificial ultra-low
interest rates that destroy the basic functions of capital formation.

The cover-story for all that is the completely insane doctrine called
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) which states that a nation with the world’s
reserve currency can never go bankrupt as long as it can keep “printing”
more money — or punching computer keystrokes into the “systemically
important” (Too Big to Fail) bank accounts. When that train goes off the
rails — as it must, because it’s at-odds with reality — it will be the
biggest wreck in history, and it will bring all the operations of advanced
societies to a stop, including raw materials supply lines, manufacturing,
global trade, and industrial-scale Agri-Biz. The last of these will be
especially punishing in a world where bad weather is hammering this year’s
grain production.

The Democratic Party already has a big wagon of snake oil to “cure” all
that: socialism. They’re completely up-front about it. Anyway, it’s just
another name for the periodic forced redistribution of wealth from the fat
and greedy over-class to the suffering underclass — an understandable
impulse in societal extremis, but one with universally unappetizing
side-effects, namely the destruction of consensual economic relations. The
catch in this instance is that the “wealth” they seek to redistribute will
be exactly what goes up in a vapor when the stock and bond markets implode,
along with the world’s fiat currencies.

As the old axiom goes, debt is always repaid by somebody, even in a
default. In the present case, it will be paid by the young and by other
citizens of the future, since the mountain of debt racked up world-wide the
past several decades was literally a massive borrowing from the future to
keep running all the systems of today (and yesterday). The future itself
was the collateral. That’s the sad and tricky part.

These are the dynamics going into the election of 2020. It’s actually not
just a matter of whether these two old political parties survive, but
whether the USA can even remain intact when these tensions give way.


-- 
Charlie Loving
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