Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler

The bizarre spectacle being played out right now by President Obama and his team only adds layers of mystery and mystification to this big question. On the one hand, you have Mr. Obama giving a graceful, thoughtful speech on a very difficult issue (abortion) at a very tough venue (the country's leading Catholic university), and presenting an excellent case for common ground. It was a bold deed, unshirking, even brave considering what have come to be the standard modes of pander or evasion in presidential politics. I suspect that Mr. Obama did it as much to demonstrate his willingness to face tough questions in general as to address abortion per se.
       All this is to say why it is so dispiriting to see Mr. Obama's White House mount a campaign to sustain the unsustainable in the economic realm. Everything they've done for four months involving money management and enterprise policy -- from backstopping hopeless banks, to gaming the bankruptcies of the big car companies, to the bungled efforts to prop up artificially-high house prices -- amounts to a gigantic exercise in futility. Worse, it gives off odors of dishonesty or stupidity, since the ominous tendings of our system are so starkly self-evident.
     Not least of the problems entailed in all this are the scary political consequences. It's one thing for a business such as a bank to fail; its another thing for the public to lose confidence in banking, or their own currency, or the credibility of all the people who work in banking, or the authority of those charged to regulate these activities, or the courts and their officers who are supposed to adjudicate misconduct in them. When faith in all these things starts to go, all bets are off for even larger social constructs like democracy, justice, and the destiny of a federal republic.
      The Obama White House has very quickly painted itself into a corner on these things. The so-called bank "stress test" couldn't have backfired more completely. Rather than bolster confidence in our money system and the people who run it, it only made the system appear more obviously corrupt. It made the Treasury Department (and the White House by extension) look idiotic for concocting it. Worse, the game of allowing the banks to audit themselves, and cook their books under newly jiggered accounting rules, only made them look less sound and trustworthy, and their executives more venal and mendacious. The stress test scam also virtually guaranteed that the banks will not get another dime out of congress -- even while it is common knowledge that they will desperately need quadrillions more dimes in the months ahead.
      Who knows what the point of this ludicrous exercise was?