Crisis of US Leadership Continues Unabated

With the stock market down about 88 points on the Dow as I write after opening sharply higher it appears that a dose of reality may be setting in. All of those President Obama supporters, including me, have to be getting concerned that a crisis of US leadership continues unabated and that the great Whitehouse spin machine so loved by Bush and Cheney is still going strong.

Adults should know better than children that wishing for things doesn’t make them come true. Yet all of the talk from the Obama team about “the economy getting better” is taking on the ring of a group of children pretending that all will be soon well.

A few paragraphs from today’s posting at James Howard Kunstler’s blog pretty much says it all. James does have a rare way with words.

============================

If you think we have been in a crisis of finance and economy for the past year or so, consider that we have also been sunk in a comprehensive crisis of leadership. Nobody in authority is willing to face the truth, state the truth, and offer a reality-based idea about how to meet the truth, This is a leadership failure not just in politics and government, but also in business, in the university faculties, in the editorial and production offices of the news media, and even among a barely-breathing clergy.

Americans look around and see nobody standing up for their interests. Their greatest interest is a vision of a fruitful society that they can help build and be a part of beyond the current wreckage of revolving-debt consumerism. It will have to be a vision based on fewer resources and on new arrangements for daily living. It will have to recognize losses frankly, and enable us to let go of things whose time is over, whether that is Happy Motoring, college-for-everybody, vast industries devoted to vanished leisure, or procedures geared to getting something-for-nothing.

For now, I still see the inflection point as coming by the holiday season, when the masters-of-the-universe on Wall Street will have to publicly post their Christmas bonuses (and as publicly held corporations, they will have to). It is also well within the realm of possibility that a Black Swan the size of Rodan the Flying Reptile will swoop through the stock markets to breath fire on the computer terminals and melt the glorious rally of 09 away. In the meantime, I wonder about that man in the White House, and those ever more comical meetings he attends every day. He must emerge from them spinning like a nine dollar gyroscope. Nobody wants to imagine what happens to him when the spinning stops.
==============================
The Obama team is running out of time. Jiving on about improvement in the broad economy in the face of obviously increasing distress on main street that is getting only worse will not endear team Obama to the American public. Due in large measure to American leadership avoiding reality and not dealing with harsh facts rather than dreaming about a “return to normal”, an impossible dream in a vastly changed world, it is likely that America will have a blue, blue, Christmas and a hellish New Year in 2010.