Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler

      God knows what manner of deals went down this past weekend in the Hamptons wine cellars and below-decks among the Chesapeake Bay sailboat fleet. All these hidey-holes must have been dank and fetid with the sweat of mortal fear. Will the US Government declare itself a subsidiary of General Electric? Will Vlad Putin be roped in to save Goldman Sachs? Meanwhile, the whole noisome rat maze of international counter-party deals was taking on sewer water and rodents of every nationality were seen leaping for daylight all over the fusty old motherlands of Europe. A cascading collapse of international finance is underway. While many fixers may jump heroically into the tumbling wreckage hoping to rescue this-and-that, the outcome by Friday is liable to be an unrecognizable smoldering landscape of the G-7's hopes and dreams.
     Some big questions for the week: will the Euro survive as a currency? Will the rush into the US dollar continue even as the US financial system dematerializes in a Fibonacci fever of accelerating de-leveraged infinitude? Will the remaining Big Boyz, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan succumb to the counter-party hemorrhagic fever? Will great rows of lesser banking dominoes now start clacking onto their faces? Will all fifty states follow the leads of California and Massachusetts and line up at the US Treasury's hand-out window. Will the entity that calls itself the civilized world be left at week's end with anything resembling money?
     Your guess is as good as mine. We've entered the realm of phase change, where everything is slipping and nothing has settled. The final result, when the dust settles -- and that may not be for weeks to come -- will certainly be a poorer western world. Will it be so poor that it can no longer afford to import anything? Including oil from the land of the date palm? If so, we are really in for a rough ride, poised as we are at the edge of the heating season here in the temperate regions. Notice, by the way, that the $700 billion just approved by congress to bail out Wall Street is exactly the same sum of money that we send to the oil exporting nations this year.
     Will millions stop receiving paychecks due to the turmoil in banking? It's certainly possible, starting with the poor drones in Mr. Schwarzenegger's motor vehicle bureau and eventually ranging to every payroll office in the land. Will Sarah Palin's fellow Six-packers line up around the parking lagoons of the suburban banks trying desperately to withdraw the last seventy bucks in their checking accounts? (And will their thoughts in the event be: this economy is fundamentally sound....) Will the supermarket shelves of chipoltle-flavored crunchy snacks and power drinks go empty as truckers refuse to deliver their loads without up-front payment? And how long does it take a hungry public to turn mean?
     We could see a parallel problem in the motor fuel supply sector. So far, gasoline shortages have only appeared in parts of the Southeast USA, due to interruptions caused by two hurricanes. If the oil tankers quit offloading now for lack of credible payment, then the whole nation will get an interesting lesson in the shortcomings of the suburban development pattern.
      The candidates' debate Tuesday night should be interesting. I don't expect too much give-and-take on the subject of East Ossetia this time around.
     Even at this point, the current crack-up in world finance makes the 1929 crash and the events of the 1930s look in comparison like an orderly small town auction of somebody's grandmother's effects. Back in that sepia day, America had plenty of everything except ready cash. We had, especially, plenty of our own oil, and -- you're not going to believe this but it's true -- the stuff was selling for as little as ten cents a barrel, it was so abundant. And yet still, America in the 1930s plunged into a dark depression of inactivity, loss of confidence, and impoverishment.
     This time around, things could get more disorderly. Personally, I think we may be beyond the reach even of fascist authoritarianism, because unlike the programmed industrial masses of the 1930s, we are unused to regimentation, to lining up at the factory gates and the movie theaters. Back then, society was so regimented that everybody wore uniforms in-and-out of the military. Look at movies from the 1930s. Every man-jack wore either a necktie and hat or overalls. The industrial masses behaved like termites. Once unemployment hit, they were waiting to be told what to do, to line up for something. It worked fabulously for Hitler, who took every advantage of this mentality. Luckily, the US went for Roosevelt (both FDR and Hitler entered office the same winter of 1933, by the way). FDR was more like everybody's kindly Uncle Frank, and his reassuring persona enabled Americans to suck up their bad luck and altered circumstances. Many of them retreated to the family farm (which still existed then) and waited things out -- and, anyway, the melodrama of the Great Depression soon resolved in the Second World War when Hitler's love of regimentation led him into military misadventure. He shouldn't have picked a fight with someone who had so much petroleum -- end-of-story.
     Okay, what happens here and now? To this point (9:am Monday October 6, 2008) events have been proceeding under a veneer of still-just-barely-credible authority. We (as represented by congress) have allowed Mr. Paulson to advance and activate his remedies. As things unspool further, he will be out of credibility, perhaps in a few days, and it's unlikely that his successor will have any either. Mr. Bernanke has simply gone AWOL. Notice, he has vanished from the media landscape. We may soon be hearing the declaration of various "emergency" measures involving the allocation of food and the rationing of oil products. The Big Bailout of last week may be partially rescinded as it becomes obvious that it has had no effect -- I believe about half the $700 billion has already been allocated, which is to say: lost. I realize these things sound pretty extreme. But forces have been set in motion and momentum rules. One thing for sure: the American public is about to undergo a severe mood adjustment. There will be fewer American Idol fans and worshippers of Donald Trump by the close of business on Friday.

     To paraphrase the late and great old war-horse of the senate, Everett Dirkson of Illinois (1896 - 1969), a trillion here, a trillion there, sooner or later you're talking about real money. Except in the case of the Great Bail-out of 2008, maybe it's more like... sooner or later your money is no longer real.
     What we're seeing in this fiasco, among other things, is a lesson in the diminishing returns of technology. This is a train wreck of investment vehicles so complex that they could only be created with the aid of computers. The result is that hardly anyone -- perhaps even nobody in or out of Wall Street -- really understands what they represent. In fact, this alphabet soup of engineered securities -- CDOs, CDSs, MBSs, SIVs, etc -- was cooked up from a recipe of Ponzi algorithms. They were designed to be mathematically indecipherable, except by computers, in an alternative universe of model-making that bore only a superficial relation to the real world. That was their dirty secret. And the dirty secret of the Great Bail-out is that, in the real world, we will never be able to discover the actual trading value of these things at any number above zero. This is why they are called "toxic."
     The big effort of Mr. Paulson and his working group has been to ram through legislation that at all costs avoids any attempt to place a reality-based value on this bad debt. He managed it by holding a gun to Congress's collective head, telling them in plain English that a genuine "work-out" of these "toxic" investments would set in motion a fatal cascade of credit default swaps which would leave the entire banking landscape a smoldering wasteland -- with the result that virtually every retirement account and pension fund would go up in a vapor, the Federal Reserve and the FDIC would melt away to twin piles of goo, scores of millions of lives would be ruined, and the USA would be left a basket case among nations, making us envy even the fate of Haiti and Zimbabwe. Talk like that might prompt a congress-person to do any fool thing.
     The question, of course, is what happens now, after this morning's scheduled vote on the Great Bail-out package. Last night, I would have predicted a brief bounce in the stock markets of a week-or-so duration. This morning, at eight o'clock, I'm not so sure of that anymore, but I suppose we shall see. Beyond a week-or-so, I expect the Great Bail-out to fail rather quickly in its main mission: to stabilize the banking system and calm the markets. The process of negotiating the package has given off an odor something like medieval scholasticism -- a method much like the creation of Ponzi finance itself, in which layers of tortured interpolation rendered theological concepts so abstruse that all the prayer of all the monks and nuns ever conceived within the walls of the Vatican would not avail to reveal their mysteries. The object, of course, was to reinforce the essential mystery of religion, just as the object in Ponzi finance was to reinforce the mystery of engineered securities.
      What the mainstream is truly missing here en masse is that another tsunami is building right behind the finance fiasco, and that it will render moot the whole reeking cargo of schemes and wishes that comprises the Great Bail-out. I am speaking of the global oil problem. In fact, the problems in banking and money currently roaring in the center ring of the world circus, can be described categorically as a product of the oil problem -- since oil is the primary resource of industrial economies and therefore the motive force behind our ability to generate "wealth." Without reliable and ever-growing supplies of oil, there is no industrial growth, and without industrial growth things like capital investment instruments lose their legitimacy. That is why the Frankenstein family of Ponzi securities was invented in the first place -- to compensate for the demise of industrial growth by creating wealth out of... nothing!
     The looming oil problem entails a swirl of factors that will aggravate and accelerate our social, economic, and political struggles. These factors will mutually reinforce the instabilities that they set into motion. For instance, the new oil nationalism is undermining the traditional operation of oil markets as we've known them since the mid-20th century. In turn, oil nationalism will aggravate the oil export crisis, which will starve the oil importers -- the USA being the chief victim. Finally, there is the remorseless base-line condition of Peak Oil itself, meaning that we are at point where world oil demand permanently outstrips world oil supply no matter if the USA falls on its ass economically or not. What remains beyond this is a desperate contest among the oil importers -- America, Europe, China, Japan, India -- for control of the world's remaining oil resources.
      The fantasies about alternative energy currently wafting across the American media-scape will not "solve" this problem, much as we wish they might. We'll try everything in a quixotic effort to sustain the unsustainable (that is, the happy motoring consumer society), but we will be disappointed by the results. I try to remind readers that the very concept of "solutions" does not apply in this situation, since it implies that we can keep running things in America just the way we are running them now, only by means other than oil. The truth, in my view, is that we have to run things very differently now, at different scales than the ones we're used to -- but we are too invested in our behavior of the past to move forward. This is certainly unfortunate, because we have everything to gain by letting go of our old habits and obsolete wishes.
      It's odd to watch the talking heads on CNBC this morning, parsing endlessly over the latest minutiae of the latest deal for CitiGroup to land on Wachovia like a giant amoeba and begin the gruesome process of digesting its innards. The TV heads are just like the medieval monks trying to explicate the labanotation of x-number of angels dancing on the head of the pin. Religion really is the only metaphor left to discuss the epochal disaster underway right now, because God alone knows where this will take us.
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My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers.

      So many shoes are poised to drop this week that the American scene might be confused for the world's greatest-ever clog dancing festival, but a closer look will reveal a circle of cavorting skeletons.
     Last week's ripe moment turned out to be the Thursday night Washington photo op when Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chief Bernanke emerged from a huddle with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and just about every other legislative eminentissimo in an attempt to reassure the nation that its financial system had not turned into something like unto a truckload of stinking dead carp. I don't know about you, but I got two distinct vibes from the faces in that particular tableau: 1.) abject fear, and 2.) a total lack of conviction that they knew what they were doing.
      The product of that huddle was a cockamamie scheme for the US treasury to absorb all the losses from a twenty-year binge in which Wall Street created and retailed the most complex set of swindles ever seen on this planet Earth. The background music to the tableau was the whoosh of a several trillion dollars exiting the US financial system never to be seen again.
     The next day (Friday) many particulars of that scheme began to emerge -- such as the complete lack of oversight and review mechanisms for Treasury's new power to monetize private business failures and frauds -- and the stock market soared in response. Other new features of the reformed capital landscape also resolved later that day, like a new experiment aimed at eliminating the short sale as a way of guaranteeing that henceforth market bets could only be placed on the upside of the table. It will be interesting to see how that reform works out in the days ahead.
     Over the weekend, all these various playerz retreated into their gilded bunkers to negotiate the details, and by Sunday night, among other things, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley -- the two remaining investment giants left standing -- announced that they would metamorphose into regular banks in order to qualify for additional truckloads of government loans in exchange for any leftover fraudulant securities still lurking in their vaults. Another new provision had the Treasury rescuing swindled foreign companies, too -- in effect, saving the world, which seemed at least, how you say, pretty ambitious.
      By this morning, many new arguments had been raised by a suddenly de-zombified congress as to whether the proposed grand bail-out might reward recent Wall Street turpitudes and incentivize future mis-deeds and it looks like enough objections may be lodged to gum-up the process before it even goes into effect -- which, of course, would tend to revert the whole reeking cargo of trouble to its original train-wreck trajectory. I guess we'll see what happens now.
      Any way you paint this grotesque panorama, it looks like a very new chapter of history for life in the USA. Basically, we are a much poorer nation than we were even a couple of years ago, and we have a much-reduced ability to project our will around the world, or even among our own floundering sectors and regions. Most troubling to me is the question of legitimacy that now hangs over the proscenium like a guillotine blade. Factoring in the old saw that history doesn't repeat but it rhymes
      At issue then was the great festering unresolved polity of slavery. The Whig party, in its oafish, craven fecklessness, disappeared so quickly from the scene that an embarrassed God Almighty seemed to have hooked it off-stage in a nanosecond. Into the vacuum stepped an awkward lawyer from Illinois -- widely mocked by the coarser elements of what was then called the press as a figure resembling an ape in a stovepipe hat. He accomplished one crucial thing in the process of his emergence: he deployed a potent rhetoric that captured the essence of the crisis and clarified it for all to understand what was at stake -- and then the convulsion commenced in earnest.
     The Republican Party amounts to today's Whigs. Their candidate for president, John McCain, is trying to run away from his own party -- as one might shrink away from a colony of importuning lepers. I am actually not kidding when I label the Republicans "the party that wrecked America," because I believe that is truly how the popular strain of history will regard them when (maybe if) the wreckage of their ministrations ever clears. But history doesn't repeat exactly. The current figure from Illinois, Barrack Obama, has yet to offer a truly crisis-clarfying rhetoric, though he labors under the expectation of being able to do so. Like his long-ago predecessor, he is mocked by the coarser elements of what we call "the media" these days -- Fox News and the moron-rousers of talk radio.

     Mr. Obama isn't kidding either when he alludes to the change America faces, though history has not yet rhymed enough for his rhetoric to really set forth the terms of this change in its stark particulars. And even if he is able to articulate these things, he won't forestall the convulsion anymore than Lincoln held back a war between the states. That prior crisis was when America learned good and hard how tragic life could be, and it colored our national character for a century -- until we chucked it all to become a society of overfed clowns, with God Almighty replaced by Ronald McDonald. That pageant of happy idiocy is now ending. Like everyone else in this fraught and nervous land, I'm standing by to see what transpires in the days just ahead.
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My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers.      Some of the issues yet-to-be-clarified concern the behavior of the American public in the broad sense. We have obdurately resisted the reality of the energy crisis that hangs over everything we do (as slavery hung over the 1850s), from the way we inhabit the landscape to the way we do daily business in our 240-million-plus fleet of cars and trucks that ply the ribbons of asphalt and the lagoons of parking that now run from sea to shining sea where the fruited plain was replaced by the Wal Marts., I think the situation emerging is rather like the crisis of legitimacy that preceded the Civil War. Then, in the 1850s, the nation's two symbiotic political parties, Whig and Democrat, entered a zone of fatal discredit. The White House had been occupied by a sequence of empty cravats named Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan, and so much pent-up mistrust roiled the centers of power that the nation entered a convulsion.

      It turns out the real hurricane blew through Wall Street last week, not Galveston. This morning, Manhattan is strewn chest-deep with the debris of banking and at this hour (seven a.m.) nobody knows how far, deep, and wide the damage will spread. The fear, of course, is that we are witnessing a classic "house-of-cards" or "dominos-in-a-row," situation, and that the death of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch will cascade into a generalized collapse of the entire consensus of value that supports mediums of exchange.
     At least one thing ought to be clear: this has happened due to the negligence and misfeasance of the regulating authorities, namely the Republican Party, and that now all the hoopla surrounding Sarah Palin can be swept away revealing that group to be what they actually are: the party that wrecked America. I hope one or two Barack Obama campaign officials are reading this blog. You must commence the re-branding of the opposition right now. The Republicans must be clearly identified as, the party that wrecked America.
     Many things happening this week will be interesting to see and hear, but just now an outstanding question is how on earth can the Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch for $50 billion after assuming the liabilities of the tarbaby known as Countrywide? But that little detail may be lost in the din as other banks and bank-like organizations start crashing like sequoia trees in a national forest.
     I wish I knew whether this extravaganza of ruin might settle the question as to whether America goes into hyperinflation or implacable deflation, but the net effect is that money is leaving the system in big gobs. And if not money per se, then the idea of money as represented in certificates, contracts, counter-party positions, and gentlemen's agreements. This is the day that America finds itself a much poorer nation. The capital we thought was there, is gone.
      A lot of it was actually translated over the years into Hamptons villas, Gulfstream jets, and other playthings that will now go up on Ebay or some equivalent as we turn into Yard Sale Nation in a general liquidation of remaining assets. Of course, the trouble in a situation like this, where absolutely everybody is trying to pawn off assets, is that there are very few buyers on the scene, so the prices of all these things go down down down. Everything is for sale and nobody has any money.
      This was essentially the state of things in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the only escape from that turned out to be the mobilization for war. And in the aftermath of that terrible war, we were the only industrial nation that hadn't been bombed to rubble. What's more, we had a very handsome supply of industrial world's primary resource, oil, at our disposal. So we spent the next thirty years making oodles of things and selling them to people in other lands (lending them the money to buy), until these nations were back on their own feet and solvent. And after 1975, the industrial club picked up a bunch of new members and they all began to clean our clock.
      So, as our industrial base waned, and our factories got old and brittle, and our labor force was steeply under-bid by cheaper labor forces, we embarked on a quest for "the new economy." This was represented in successive turns as the information economy, the consumer economy, the high-tech economy, et cetera. They were all ruses, aimed at concealing the truth -- which was that we had become a society no longer producing things of value, no longer generating real wealth. The final act of this farce has been the so-called "financial industry."
      That "industry" turned out to be most earnestly devoted to the production of complex swindles. They were so finely engineered that it took twenty years for the swindles to stand revealed, and they were cleverly hitched to the primary thing that the American public vested its identity in: house-and-home. Thus, much of the public finds itself in very real danger of becoming homeless and broke.
      We generally recognize that some wicked-massive transfer of wealth occurred in the process of the mortgage fiasco, but it remains to be seen whether any residue of this wealth can actually be retained, as represented by currencies, contracts, and supposed securities. The wholesale settling of debt now underway may leave an awful lot of this stuff with no value.
      We should be frightened by the political implications of this Great Implosion of presumed wealth. Some group of somebodies will have to clean up this mess. Moving toward a major election, it is hard to imagine the American people giving the clean-up task to the very group that created the mess -- no matter how many cute little faces Sarah Palin can make on TV. Both parties have so far managed to ignore the gathering crisis of banking and money, but they can't ignore the sequoia trees crashing down around their ankles and shaking the earth they stand on.
    At issue now will be the question of legitimacy in all its human social dimensions. Is our money legitimate? Is the authority of our elected officials legitimate? Are our values and ideas legitimate? These are the things that will determine what kind of future we find ourselves in.
      So, to begin this process, and to clarify the situation, I urge readers of this blog to identify the Republican Party by its new brand-name: the party that wrecked America. At least, then, we can reinstate one cardinal value into the juddering structure of what we claim to believe: that actions have consequences, that you can't just swindle and loot a society and walk away with the swag.
     Spread the word, change the tone of this campaign, and keep posted. This will be a momentous week.
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My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers.

     Why do the big deals always happen over the weekends? So the big boyz in government and finance can take off their neckties when they bargain with each other? So the markets will be closed and unable to register a response one way or another? So the shrinking fraction of the US public that pays attention to anything besides Nascar and pornography won't catch the news Saturday evening?
     This weekend's big deal was the US government taking over the "government sponsored enterprises" (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that guarantee trillions of dollars in mortgages. The "guarantee" is supposedly accomplished by converting bundles of mortgages from the banks and loan companies that originate them (that make the contracts with the buyers of houses) into bonds that can be sold downstream. Risk was theoretically dispersed among the holders of these bonds. This all seemed to work during the long stable period when our cheap oil economy was chugging along, and house prices maintained a consistent relationship with incomes, and people paid their mortgages dependably. The whole system ran like a reliable machine -- like a Chrysler slant-six engine!
     Until the cheap oil age came to an end. Then, all parts of the system shook apart. It was the end of cheap oil that catalyzed the housing collapse and, by extension, the current huge financial crisis. But the run up to it was like a bounce off a high diving board into an empty pool. The bounce came around 2001 when it became apparent that the US standard-of-living could not be maintained on incomes in a post-cheap-oil economy. The trauma of 9/11 prompted a new and utterly insane consensus to form that the US standard of living could be switched over from income to massive debt. All the normal brakes against irresponsible lending and borrowing came off -- embodied in Alan Greenspan's absurd statement that it was a good time to assume an adjustable rate mortgage when interest rates were at a historic low -- meaning they could only be adjusted upwards. Why hold Greenspan responsible? Because he was at the apex of the authority vested with establishing norms, and he shoved our behavior into the realm of the recklessly abnormal, and he should have known better.
      The public went along with it because "free money" and high living are fun. Their behavior was reinforced by other authorities -- for instance, President Bush, who told Americans to go shopping after the 9/11 attacks. (They went shopping with credit cards.) Things really wobbled in 2005 -- which was, coincidentally, the year of all-time world-wide peak conventional oil production -- with hurricanes Katrina and Rita ripping through the Gulf of Mexico oil rigs as a dramatic highlight. (It was also the year that The Long Emergency was published.)
      Since then, the US economy and the financial part of it that became a nine hundred pound tail wagging a thirty-pound dog, has been held together with baling wire, duct tape, and band-aids. All the debt run up by all parties -- home-owners, credit-card holders, business, banks, hedge funds, government -- is not being paid back reliably, and all the leveraged arrangements that depend on it being paid back are coming apart. Thus, capital disappears. The wealth of a nation disappears. All that remains is the pretense that we are still a wealthy society
    Fannie and Freddie are near the center of this black hole of debt. So far, the black hole has been "papered over" by the old stage magician's trick of diverting the audience's attention. The systemic wound that Bear Stearns represented, was covered up with a band-aid applied by the Federal Reserve's exchange of loans for worthless securities. In fact, the capital of Bear Stearns actually did disappear -- a mere residue of it, a few cents on the dollar, was shifted to JP Morgan as payment for taking the wrapper off the band-aid. But, basically, the money is gone.
     Now, the same thing has happened with Fannie and Freddie, except that the scale is an order of magnitude greater. This time, the US Treasury Department is assuming worthless paper and paying out much larger loans to enterprises that are functionally bankrupt. The exact nature of the government's chartered "sponsorship" has always been ambiguous. Professional opinion has generally held that government backing was implied rather than explicit -- but that's a ridiculous internal contradiction that went unchallenged for decades as Fannie and Freddie's Ponzi-style operation lumbered on (and their executives made off with obscene payouts). Now the government's role has suddenly been made explicit. It will probably only make things worse, since the enterprises are too big and over-scaled to work under any circumstances, let alone insolvency.
     One thing this points to is a truth that is uniformly overlooked by kibitzers: that what we developed over the past decade in America was not an "information economy" or a "consumer economy" but a suburban sprawl building economy, meaning an economy dedicated to building a living arrangement with no future. The climax of the sprawl building economy occurred in absolute lockstep with the climax of peak oil. You can date it virtually to the month -- May, 2005. After that, the future asserted itself and all the financial expectations bound up with sprawl-building went up in a vapor -- including the value of mortgages on suburban houses. Everything that followed has been an attempt to cover up this basic reality: that the way we live in America can't continue.
     The reason our energy debate is so hollow and idiotic is because we can't face this basic reality. The fantasy-du-jour among both political parties is that we can become "energy independent." By this they mean we can keep on living the way we do by means other than oil. This is just not true. We have to make profound changes in everything we do from the way we inhabit the landscape to the way we produce our food. Lately, the only change we've shown any interest in is changing what our cars run on. But that is not going to rescue us, not even a little. Our inability to talk about anything else except the cars will drag us down into poverty and turmoil.
     The housing market is not coming back. Ever. In the form that we knew it. The suburban project is over. That version of the American Dream is over. We'll be a lot better off if we put aside dreaming altogether for a while and start focusing on reality instead -- that part of the day when we're awake and capable of actually doing things. We've got a lot to face and a lot to do.
     The government takeover of Fannie and Freddie is just another papering-over of our fundamental problem -- that until we embark on new ways of being a nation, of living differently and working differently on different things, the other nations of the world will not have confidence in us, or the paper we issue, and we will not really have confidence in ourselves.
     I have believed all along -- and said as much in The Long Emergency -- that we would not get through this crisis without passing through a period of hardship. We're entering it now. Even if the stock markets shoot up five hundred points today on the basis of the Fannie-Freddie deal (and the mistaken belief that our troubles are over), we are only at the beginning of a very painful workout. Personally, I think we're in for financial carnage before the election. The Fannie-Freddie deal may be the place where the wheels really come off.
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My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers.

 Update on Gustave Damage
 Thurs, Sept 4

DARKNESS AND FRUSTRATION REPLACE FEAR

OIL AND GAS CAPACITY IDLED BY STORM

For additional info, go to THEOILDRUM.COM

    

       As I write at 6:30 Eastern Daylight Time, Hurricane Gustave grinds out of the Gulf of Mexico to make landfall on the Louisiana Coast at Port Fourchon, the marshalling yard for the oil and gas industry -- where the oil companies move people and equipment to the rig zone offshore. The storm spent the wee hours of the morning chewing through a wad of offshore drilling platforms and, perhaps more importantly, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (or LOOP), where all the oil supertanker ships from Middle East come to offload their cargos. It will probably be days before we know what was chewed up out there -- not to mention the spaghetti-like network of pipelines that run all over the shallow bottom to carry the oil and gas from the platforms to the refineries just up the Mississippi corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
     So, at this hour nobody knows yet what the outcome will be, either for the city of New Orleans and its suburbs, or for the oil and gas industry. My guess is that enough oil and gas will come off-line, be shut-in, or get disrupted to severely affect the normal operations of America for a couple of weeks. At the least, our just-in-time gasoline and diesel supply system will take a forced time-out. Those refineries on-shore are in the path to get hit. If they are damaged then we'll probably see shortages of motor fuels all over the eastern US.
     If we see a shortage of motor fuels, we may also get a disruption of trucking for the just-in-time food delivery system that keeps the supermarkets stocked. So, there is a possibility that Americans will experience both fuel and food shortages this back-to-school week -- and in some places it may be the not-back-to-school week if there is any trouble getting fuel for the yellow bus fleets. There has also been chatter about possible far-reaching damage to the old-and-fragile electric grid if this storm trips just the right switches, but that's in the category of idle talk for now.
     All the above is unknown so far, and I won't even venture to guess what may happen in the city of New Orleans itself -- except that the morale of its citizens must be badly strained as three years of re-building gets undone and the long-term future becomes an even more dubious proposition.
     Projected damage estimates on CNN early this morning ran into about the $30-billion range. This hit, and the potential disruptions to the everyday economy, could be the shot that finally pushes the long-teetering banking system over the edge. Surely the insurance industry, which is tied to banking and its worthless alphabet securities, will not be in position to cover all its billions of dollars in payouts. This may be what finally stops the game of musical chairs in which insolvent banks pretend to be capitalized by showing up for loans at the Federal Reserve's teller cages. For instance, when last seen before the Labor Day hiatus, Lehman Brothers was desperately scrambling for life-support from anybody and anything with a few billion spare bucks. As the hiatus ends and real-life reasserts itself, Lehman may finally find itself free-falling into the abyss, and the chain of mutual obligations, cross-collateralizations, and Ponzi plays connecting it to the other banks could break, bringing on a domino fall of insolvent banks and institutions.
     All the hurricane action has come at a bad time for the Republican Party. The roll-out of John McCain's ridiculous and cynical choice of a running mate, complete with pompom pumping cheerleaders, will remain front and center in the public's consciousness now while the party delegates go through a few procedural motions in Minneapolis -- taking it light on the funny hats, and the other usual festive hijinks, which would only seem indecent against the background of a profound natural disaster. Despite the poll numbers currently showing a fairly close race between Obama and McCain, the Republicans are well on-track to being regarded as "the party that wrecked America." So it's fitting that their quadrennial meeting should be solemn and restrained.
     This official last day of summer, Labor Day Monday, with roughly twenty percent of America's oil production getting chewed up, and the financial markets shut down, and the public in other places than the Gulf states kicking back with weenies and burgers, or watching the hurricane on TV, may be the last day of seeming normality in this country for quite a while to come.
     I will come back to this week's blog later this afternoon or evening when more is known about the outcome of Hurricane Gustave.

Update, 7:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Sept 1:

     Hurricane Gustave has now moved away from New Orleans and is stumbling northwest through the backwaters of louisiana toward Texas. Damage to the city of NOLA seems to be minimal at this time. But there is something very strange about coverage coming across on the cable news networks. While trumpeting the "dodged bullet" story-line, and the triumph of post-Katrina government bureaucracy, there have been absolutely no reports of what's happened to the oil-and-gas platforms offshore, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP), or the tangle of pipelines running along the sea floor from these things to the onshore terminals and refineries. I'm quite sure we will not get any comprehensive news about these things for days, because it will require a huge effort of up-close inspection. Gustave roared over that area as a category three storm. It is possible that a great deal of damage has been sustained and that we may still look forward to trouble with gasoline, diesel, and methane gas supplies in the weeks ahead. Playerz on the oil-and-gas futures markets must have been watching CNN and MSNBC all day -- and have no idea whether we actually have a problem out in the rig zone.

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My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers.
   

   As the political conventions descend like the soggy forces of nature they have become -- the tropical depressions of politics -- the Republican party will be seen, with growing clarity, as the party that wrecked America. So many shoes are about to drop, and so many dominoes lined up to fall 'out there' on the financial landscape that the thump and clatter of crashing institutions will sound like the percussion section of the renowned USC marching band as the nation tramps toward the general election.
     In a classic calm-before-the-storm moment, last week's momentous Jackson Hole monetary conference played out like Sherlock Holmes's "dog that didn't bark in the night." The poobahs of global banking turned out in the Grand Tetons to compare Gulfstream jets and show off their concho belts, and that was about it. For all the massive turmoil in the banking system, almost no real news leaked out of the conference, and one was inclined to come to the unsettling conclusion that nothing came out because absolutely nothing happened there -- because absolutely nothing can be done about the gathering calamity of capital.
     At the moment, two of the biggest elephants in the room, so to speak, are going tits-up with X's where their eyes used to be. These would be the "affordable housing" enablers Fannie and Freddie, who managed during the past decade to make housing virtually unaffordable for any normal, responsible person unwilling to game the system -- with the additional consequence that not only the housing market but the general credit-and-lending apparatus of the US has entered a state of morbid failure. These two corporations are now dead, incurring a legacy of obligation that will add five trillion dollars to the national debt at one stroke. Nobody knows what the exact results of this debacle may be -- and the current silence about it is deafening -- but odds are the effect will range somewhere between destroying the currency and bankrupting the United States altogether.
      Meanwhile, the list of giant banks on life support runs to at least ten, with an unknown number of less giant banks that will be squashed when the big ones go down. The sound you hear in the background -- even beyond the sound of John McCain's carping, snotty campaign commercials -- is the whoosh of capital leaving the system. By capital I mean assumed accumulated wealth ready to be put-to-work by this society. We won't have any. The president-elect will wake up November 5th as leader of a poor nation, and all the grand plans laid out during the campaign will have to take a back seat to a severe revision of hopes and expectations.
     Now the Democratic party has assembled in Denver to anoint its candidate. The big question for me is whether this will occur in a dignified manner, or whether Hillary Clinton's supporters will turn this into yet another fiasco-du-jour. Forgive me as I begin to wonder what's up. Mr. Obama has graciously yielded to the Florida and Michigan delegations that their morally-compromised primary votes be allowed to count. And Obama has yielded to the ceremony of placing Mrs. Clinton's name in nomination. And a flock of disgruntled harpies has landed in Denver to advance Mrs. Clinton's claims at all costs -- and, well, I fear that there may be some room for mischief here, like an arrant hijacking of the convention by the forces of Hillary.
     This would be an almost unbelievable debacle, and yet we are in a season of debacles so anything can happen, really. I am generally allergic to paranoia, but Hillary's recent going-through-the-motions lip service to the Obama campaign does not convince me that she is truly on-board. Rather, I think she is egotistical enough -- in the Greek tragedy sense -- to just kick back now in her Denver hotel suite and see whether her troops can seize the arithmetic of the convention and jam her down the party's throat. I know this sounds like a paranoid fantasy, and I offer it up as little more than that, but, there you have it, like so much brisket on the butcher block....
      Meanwhile, reports coming out of Denver that Hillary's Harpies say they would rather vote for John McCain than Barack Obama simply boggle the mind. How fucking crazy are these women? And what have they made of their movement to advance political equality -- a mere campaign of revenge? Is that what their country needs right now?
     Speaking of John McCain, my friends, we can return to the general theme of this essay, which is that his party will come to be regarded as the party that wrecked America, and therefore, despite the poll numbers zinging around the news-o-sphere lately, he really doesn't have snowball's chance in hell of winning this election -- assuming it will go ahead as a contest between himself and Obama. Returning also to the theme of impotence among the leaders in the finance sector -- Mr. Bernanke, Mr. Paulson, et al, as displayed in Jackson Hole -- I'm rather convinced that the carnage on the money scene will be so extreme this fall that the nation will seem to have been transformed from a superpower to a basketcase before November 4th, and that the blame for this state of affairs will be blindingly obvious: the people in charge for the past eight years looted the treasury, destroyed the currency, and left the machinery of capital a smoking wreckage.
     And so, with the fucking nonsense of the Beijing olympics being over, let the real games begin.
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My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers.

    The feeble American response to Russia's assertion of power in the Caucasus of Central Asia was appropriate, since our claims of influence in that part of the world are laughable. The US 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, complete with military advisors, sales of weapons, and even the promise of club membership in the western alliance known as NATO. These blandishments were all in the service of the Baku-to-Ceyhan oil pipeline, which was designed specifically to drain the oil region around the Caspian Basin with an outlet on the Mediterranean, avoiding unfriendly nations all along the way.
     At the time this gambit was first set up, in the early 1990s, there was some notion (or wish, really) among the so-called western powers that the Caspian would provide an end-run around OPEC and the Arabs, as well as the Persians, and deliver all the oil that the US and Europe would ever need -- a foolish wish and a dumb gambit, as things have turned out.
     For one thing, the latterly explorations of this very old oil region -- first opened to drilling in the 19th century -- proved somewhat disappointing. US officials had been touting it as like unto "another Saudi Arabia" but the oil actually produced from the new drilling areas of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and the other Stans turned out to be preponderantly heavy-and-sour crudes, in smaller quantities than previously dreamed-of, and harder to transport across the extremely challenging terrain to even get to the pipeline head in Baku.
     Meanwhile, Russia got its house in order under the non-senile, non-alcoholic Vladimir Putin, and woke up along about 2007 to find itself the leading oil and natural gas producer in the world. Among the various consequences of this was Russia's reemergence as a new kind of world power -- an energy resource power, with the energy destiny of Europe pretty much in its hands. Also, meanwhile, the USA had set up other client states in the ring of former Soviet republics along Russia's southern underbelly, complete with US military bases, while fighting active engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, if this wasn't the dumbest, vainest move in modern geopolitical history!
     It's one thing that US foreign policy wonks imagined that Russia would remain in a coma forever, but the idea that we could encircle Russia strategically with defensible bases in landlocked mountainous countries halfway around the world...? You have to ask what were they smoking over at the Pentagon and the CIA and the NSC?
      So, this asinine policy has now come to grief. Not only does Russia stand to gain control over the Baku-to-Ceyhan pipeline, but we now have every indication that they will bring the states on its southern flank back into an active sphere of influence, and there is really not a damn thing that the US can pretend to do about it.
     We could have spent the past ten years getting our own house in order -- waking up to the obsolescence of our suburban life-style, scaling back on the Happy Motoring, reconnecting our cities with world-class passenger rail, creating wealth by producing things of value (instead of resorting to financial racketeering), protecting our borders, and taking the necessary measures to defend and update our own industries. Instead, we pissed our time and resources away. Nations do make tragic errors of the collective will. The cluelessness of George Bush is nothing less than a perfect metaphor for the failure of a whole generation. The Boomers will be identified as the generation that wrecked America.
     So, as the vacation season winds down, this country greets a new reality. We miscalculated in Western and Central Asia. Russia still "owns" that part of the world. Are we going to extend our current land wars there into the even more distant and landlocked Stan-nations? At some point, as we face financial and military exhaustion, we have to ask ourselves if we can even successfully evacuate our personnel from the far-flung bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
      This must be an equally sobering moment for Europe, and an additional reason for the recent plunge in the relative value of the Euro, for Europe is now at the mercy of Russia in terms of staying warm in the winter, running their kitchen stoves, and keeping the lights on. Russia also exerts substantial financial leverage over the US in all the dollars and securitized US debt paper it holds. In effect, Russia can shake the US banking system at will now by threatening to dump its dollar holdings.
     The American banking system may not need a shove from Russia to fall on its face. It's effectively dead now, just lurching around zombie-like from one loan "window" to the next pretending to "borrow" capital -- while handing over shreds of its moldy clothing as "collateral" to the Federal Reserve. The entire US, beyond the banks, is becoming a land of the walking dead. Business is dying, home-ownership has become a death dance, whole regions are turning into wastelands of "for sale" signs, empty parking lots, vacant buildings, and dashed hopes. And all this beats a path directly to a failure of collective national imagination. We really don't know what's going on.
      The fantasy that we can sustain our influence nine thousand miles away, when we can't even get our act together in Ohio is just a dark joke. One might state categorically that it would be a salubrious thing for America to knock off all its vaunted "dreaming" and just wake the fuck up.

     America is on vacation from its financial, fiscal, and economic problems, having left the centers of power in Wall Street and Washington for a Nantucket-of-the-mind, where, in a haze of artisanal vodka and bong smoke, it's out in the cool dune grass watching imaginary whalefishes blow, leaving only the TV Bubbleheads behind back home. Larry Kudlow of CNBC was practically drooling into his cufflinks on screen last week when the dollar popped against the Euro, and crude oil slumped, and the equity markets climbed up a flagpole.
     This sort of euphoria is actually an alarming pre-crash symptom, in this case of a patient (the US) entering the terminal phase of sclerosis. Our society and all its playerz -- especially the appointed communicators -- just can't fathom the reality of the threats we face, which are 1.) the loss of primary energy resources, 2.) the loss of technological potency, and 3.) the loss of a comfortable standard of living.
      As the boys over at the Financial Sense News Hour podcast have been saying for months, we're caught in a paradigm shift and we're trying desperately to prove (to ourselves) that we can get back to the way things used to be. This is a broad cultural phenomenon and helps to explain why even the greenest captains of environmentalism strive to find groovy new ways to run all our cars, while their counterparts on Wall Street strive desperately to salvage a set of "innovative" financial rackets based on getting something for nothing. It also explains the foolishness of the "drill drill drill" crowd, which believes we could be back to 99-cent gasoline if only Exxon-Mobil were allowed to prospect offshore where the codfish used to swim. (By the way, I'm in in full favor of granting them permission to do so, if only to put an end to this foolish debate.)
     Reality, meanwhile, strives to take us in another direction. Our destination is a far less complex society in a larger, rounder, and less economically-integrated world. We will be leaving a lot of our technological comforts behind, staying closer to home, living in smaller cities and reactivated small towns, working the land more intensively to produce the food we need, and possibly organizing our governance at something less than the continental scale our dwindling riches used to afford. That is, if we're lucky enough to avoid the real possibility of social disorder and violence that would attend a fullblown economic collapse scenario.
     August is historically a quiet time for oil, the so-called "shoulder season" when vacationing climaxes, but before deliveries of heating oil get underway in earnest. We have no real prospects of overcoming any of the structural problems now built-in to our oil supply, starting with the grim central fact that we import at least 70 percent of the oil we use. Add to this the fact that world production of conventional crude has not exceeded the 2005 rates; that export rates from our Number 3 and 4 sources of oil, Mexico and Venezuela, are down a combined 30 percent this year; that discoveries of new oil are meager to the degree that they fail by a long shot to offset current world-wide depletion; that the oil available on global markets is proportionately more sour and heavy crude than the light and sweet our refineries are designed for. And so on....
      These geological matters form the base on which the geopolitical issues work their hoodoo. For instance, the war currently underway in former Soviet Georgia (I say this in case the folks in Atlanta wonder why Stone Mountain is not being bombed) will at least end up with Russia in control of the major oil pipeline that runs from the Caspian region across Georgia, through Turkey, to Europe -- even while parts of that pipeline get blown up. The net effect will be of Russia will taking control of even more of the oil now flowing to Europe. The whole point of building that pipeline was to bypass Russia, which was crippled by its own paradigm shift in the years when the pipeline was built.
     The US might talk tough about this threat to the status quo, but what is it going to do? Pull troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan to mount a land war against Russia in a landlocked region of its own neighborhood? Fuggeddabowdit. Notice, the Europeans are not making so much as a peep -- because when the time comes that Russia does control that pipeline, the Europeans will do anything to keep the contents flowing toward them. Europe may be organized as a trade-and-currency confederation, but not as a military power. NATO is strictly a US auxiliary, not a power unto itself. The result of all this will be that Russia, already the world's leading oil producer, even as it has entered depletion, will now possess a potent geopolitical-and-financial weapon with control of that pipeline. A collateral effect will be Europe's inclination to bid more desperately for Middle East oil -- the oil that comes via the Suez Canal -- which can't help but boost the price-per-barrel that the US is forced to pay.
     One part of the oil equation we haven't seen yet this year -- the prelude to the heating season which could be just as spectacular as the opening of the Beijing Olympics -- is the hurricane season. This will be an interesting week for that, as two tropical depressions have now formed off West Africa and begun their grinding progress into our part of the world. Stay tuned to that (National Hurricane Center).
     With Wall Street on vacation at its various beaches, the idea has taken hold that the so-called credit crisis is mostly over. In fact, we're still in the first quarter of that classic. The big move before the investment bankers packed their snorkels and baggies was Merrill Lynch selling off a batch of its fraudulent securitized debt bundles for roughly five cents on the dollar. That pretty much marked-to-market the similar garbage that every other big bank or pension fund or hedge fund has hidden in its closet. My guess is that some of them will just declare "game over" without even bothering to haul their garbage out and hang a "for sale" sign on it. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are essentially there now.
      The Federal Reserve will be in the awkward position of having to make more loans (that will never be paid back) to many of these companies and entities, and in the process will fork over their remaining treasuries in exchange for garbage collateral that they will never get rid of. I don't see how the Federal Reserve survives this process. It will not have any reserves left. The collapse of the Federal Reserve would take America into an outer space version of uncharted territory, really into a whole other dimension of distress.
      While Europe faces its problems on Russia and energy and its own economic performance, it has more probability of staying afloat than the US in this upcoming period. I would look for the dollar to make a new big "leg" down against the Euro.
      It was fascinating to watch a CNBC report Sunday night about the progress of General Motors and McDonalds Hamburgers in China. It sure makes one wonder about the current mood of Sino-triumphalism -- the favorite car of the Chinese elite is... the Buick, a product that even demented old ladies in Columbus, Ohio, will not touch with a stick. It appears that China has succeeded in turning Peking and Shanghai into simulacrums of Atlanta and Dallas, complete with glass office towers and all the on-and-off-ramps they'll ever need -- a pretty stupid project when you consider how little oil of its own China actually has. One can only say, with a shudder, that they got into the Happy Motoring game a bit late, and wish them "good luck."
      The Mickey-D phenomenon appears to be a mere fad, a toy that Chinese trade officials tossed to its people in the euphoria of ramping up the world's last manufacturing economy. For starters, China doesn't have enough groundwater or grain to feed the necessary steers (and hogs) that McDonald's uses for it's "meat products" there.
      The most amusing part of the CNBC segment was the deportment of the smarmy American executives representing those companies: Rick Waggoner of GM, who was depicted in the full flower of a campaign to hose his Chinese "partners," blowing smoke up their asses as if he were some kind of a human walking-talking bong, and the two necktied creeps from McDonalds' Asian office scheming on camera about opening tens of thousands of so-called "restaurants" across the ancient kingdom. These were all perfect representatives of people stuck in a paradigm already bygone. When the Olympic mania ends, China will find itself in a new reality, too. Its single advantage, as far as I can see, is that it holds a lot of US dollars in various formats, and I don't know that this is much of an advantage given the imminent tanking of American finance. Yes, China has become the world's factory. But if the world's leading shopper is shopped-out and busted, this might not be much of an advantage. Beyond that, as suggested above, they face huge problems with oil, water, and food, not to mention over-population and environmental degradation at a scale we can barely imagine here.
     The slide toward Labor Day will remain interesting, even with all the Boyz off at the beach. Notice we haven't even touched on the upcoming political theater of presidential politics, a show that I'm inclined to call "The Party That Wrecked America."

Note: Posting early this week on account of weekend road trip.

    The most striking thing about the new Batman movie, now smashing the all-time box office records, is its emphasis on sado-masochism as the animating element in American culture these days. It must appeal to the many angry people in our land who want to hurt others, even while they themselves feel deserving of the grossest punishments. In other words, the picture reflects the extreme depravity of the current American sensibility. Seeing it all laid out there must be very validating to the emotionally confused audience, and hence pleasurable, in all its painfulness.
      The rich symbolism in this spectacle represents the tenor of contemporary America as something a few notches worse than whatever the Nazis were heading toward around 1933. We like nothing better than to see people suffer and watch things get broken. The more slowly people are tortured (including the movie audience) the more exquisite the pleasure derived from the act. Civilization offers no consolation. In fact, its a mug's game. Thus, civilization is composed only of torturers and their mug victims.
     Gotham City, the setting for all these sadomasochistic vignettes, is a place devoid of comfort. (The suburbs are missing completely.) Even the personal haunts of "the Batman," a.k.a. zillionaire Bruce Wayne, are hard-edged non-spaces. His workplace (cleverly accessed via a dumpster) is an underground bunker the size of about three football fields with a claustrophobic drop ceiling and a single furnishing: the megalomaniacal computer console that is supposed to afford him "control" of the city, but which appears to be, in fact, a completely impotent sham piece of techno-junk, since it can't even outperform a $300 GPS unit in locating things. By the way, Hitler had a brighter sense of decor in the final days of the bunker. Bruce Wayne's personal apartment is one of those horrid glass-walled tower condos beloved of the starchitects, which, in its florid exposure to everything external practically screams "no shelter here!"
      At the center of all this is the character called "The Joker." Judging by the reams of reviews and reportage about this movie elsewhere in the media, the death of actor Heath Ledger, who played the role, adds another layer of juicy sadomasochistic deliciousness to the proceedings -- we get to reflect that the monster on screen may have gotten away, but the anxiety-ridden young actor who played him was carted off to the bone orchard before the film even officially wrapped, (and therefore deserves extra special consideration for America's greatest honor, the Oscar award, while the audience deserves its own award for recognizing the lovely ironies embroidered in this cultural phenomenon.)
      The Joker is not so much as person as a force of nature, a "black swan" in clown white. He has no fingerprints, no ID, no labels in his clothing. All he has is the memory of an evil father who performed a symbolic sadomasochistic oral rape on him, and so he is now programmed to go about similarly mutilating folks, blowing things up, and wrecking everyone's hopes and dreams because he has nothing better to do. He represents himself simply as an agent of "chaos." Taken at face value, he would seem to symbolize the deadly forces of entropy that now threatens to unravel real American life in the real world -- a combination of our foolish over- investments in complexity and the frightening capriciousness of both nature and history, which do not reveal their motivations to us.
      By the way, forget about God here or anything that even remotely smacks of an oppositional notion to evil. All that's back on the cutting room floor somewhere (if it even got that far). And I say this as a non-religious person. But the absence of any possible idea of redemption for the human spirit is impressive. In the world of "the Batman," humanity at its very best is capable only of being confused about itself. This is perhaps an interesting new form of dramaturgy -- instead of good-versus-evil you only get befuddlement-versus-evil. Goodness has lost its way in the dark night of the American psyche, as might be understandable considering the nation of louts, liars, grifters, bullies, meth freaks, harpies, and tattooed creeps we have become. The best we can bring to this predicament is the low-grade pop therapy that passes for thinking nowadays in educated circles. Any consideration of the heroic is off the menu here. We can't ask that much of ourselves. It's too difficult to imagine. Meanwhile, The People -- that is, the citizens of Gotham City -- literally banish even the possibility of heroism from town at the end of the movie -- they take an axe to it! -- perhaps indicating that they deserve whatever befalls them or, shall I say, "us."
      A few other striking elements of this spectacle deserve attention. One is the grandiosity that saturates the story elements, and the remarkable impotence of it all. The Batman possesses every high-tech weapon and survival implement ever dreamed up, yet they avail him nothing -- except a lot off sickening leaps off skyscrapers and futile hard landings on car roofs, shipping containers, sidewalks, and other human carcasses. I doubt the writers/director Chris and Jonathan Nolan consciously aimed to depict good old American ingenuity as utterly valueless in the face of chaos, but that's the effect. Otherwise, everything in the Batman's world is overscaled and out-of-whack from the size of Bruce Wayne's fortune (what an executive package his Daddy must have made off with, and from which investment bank?!), to the energy expended in so many car chases and explosions, to the super-sized doom-worthy towers of the gigantic, soulless city.
      Finally there is the derivation of all this sadomasochistic nihilism out of a comic book. How appropriate, since we have become a cartoon of a society living on a cartoon of a North American landscape, that the deepest source of our mythos comes from cartoons. We're so far gone that real human emotion is beyond us. We're too far gone -- and even without shame -- to care how this odious movie portrays us to the rest of the world. It is already making a fortune out there.