The Long Crisis

Posts Tagged ‘Team Obama’

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.

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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.
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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.

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Here is a grim overlooked indicator that strips away the happy green shoots talk out of Washington and fractures the less bad is good crowd’s nonsense while being a sad indication as to just how bad living conditions are becoming for even formerly middle class families.

Across the nation counties are experiencing unprecedented increases in the number of unclaimed deceased. Not only because the dead person could not be unidentified, was indigent or was estranged from their family, but apparently because more people simply cannot afford to bury or cremate their deceased loved ones.

“People were picking the bodies up last year,” says Albert Samuels, chief investigator at the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office in Michigan, which includes Detroit. “Across the board, I’m finding the numbers are on the rise of either families who are not coming forward to claim bodies or they’re signing releases saying they can’t afford to bury someone, which taxes the county resources because then the county is responsible for burying these people.”

Note that this headline uses the word “depression”. While the word is completely avoided by a hard working President Obama, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, all of the MSNBC cheerleaders, and their like, it is important that you do not make the mistake of thinking that the current downturn is simply a recession that is a little deeper and longer lasting than most. Your financial survival may depend upon it.

We are in a super deflationary cycle that will in time , probably a lot of painful time, correct the high debt and high leverage excesses of the past 60 years. The unclaimed dead body indicator may be unpleasant to think about but it should be a reminder as to how grim this long crisis is apt to be.

At some point, probably very late in the cycle, even the cheerleader in chief, President Obama, will be forced to use the dirty depression word. Or maybe not. Obama will likely be out of office for quite a few years before the deflationary cycle has fully run its’ course and the risk and fear shifts to hyperinflation. A smart politician like President Obama, with the support of Team Obama, can probably manage to deny the existence of a depression until he is out of office and then will blame it on the other guys both past and present.

President Obama can take lessons from former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan as to how to deny any responsibility for the obvious.

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