James Howard Kunstler's 2011 Forecast

[Speck Tater]

Forecast 2011 - Gird Your Loins for Lower Living Standards

The outstanding question from the get-go of 2011 is just this: can a political economy be kept floating along like a Winnie-the-Pooh balloon on gusts of sheer fakery? To me, the simple answer is no. The people running things in the USA have tried everything from pervasive accounting fraud to complete opacity in trading procedures to looting the republic's future. The consensus trance of "recovery" makes itself manifest through every conduit of public utterance - cable TV news, The New York Times, the pronouncements of every last elected official - even though the Consumer Price Index omits items such as food, gasoline, and heating oil in its calibrations, while heaping on fictional "hedonic" adjustments.
...
My guess is that we will eventually be dragged kicking and screaming to this re-set, which I have described in my book The Long Emergency and my novels World made By Hand and The Witch of Hebron. That outcome is rather severe, basically a "time-out" of unlimited duration from the orgy of techno-comforts that have defined existence in "developed" societies for many decades. It implies a massive loss of things that people will not let go of, and so the political games around money matters really all amount to one thing: a campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs.

more at: http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/01/forecast-2011---gird-your-loins-for-lower-living-standards.html

[leveymg]

1. Yup. And the slope gets ever-steeper from here on down.

[kgnu_fan]

2. So what do we do now????

[tama]

4. As allways

Do to others as you would like them to do to you.

[kgnu_fan]

6. Help!!!

[tama]

7. Help on the way :)

Hush my darling, don't fear my darling!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugeztWg-RCI

[Major Hogwash]

3. Is that the guy from CNBC?

I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with James Howard Kunstler.
Certainly he is more famous for something other than just having a blog.

I say that because there have been a lot of posts put up here recently touting comments made by bloggers, who don't have any qualifications whatsoever, so it makes it hard to discern who we should actually read and take seriously.

[DemReadingDU]

5. Kunstler is an American author

James Howard Kunstler (born in 1948, New York City, New York) is an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger. He is best known for his books The Geography of Nowhere (1994), a history of American suburbia and urban development, and the more recent The Long Emergency (2005), where he argues that declining oil production is likely to result in the end of industrialized society as we know it and force Americans to live in smaller-scale, localized, agrarian (or semi-agrarian) communities. He has written a science fiction novel conjecturing such a culture in the future, World Made by Hand in 2008. He also gives lectures on topics related to suburbia, urban development, and the challenges of what he calls "the global oil predicament" and a resultant change in the “American Way of Life.” He is also a leading proponent of the movement known as "New Urbanism."

more...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Howard_Kunstler