Desperation Creeps In
The comments below are an edited and abridged synopsis of an article by James Kunstler
That silence you hear during these dog days of a wilting empire is the calm before the storm.
The recent Trump indictment is on par with the Ukraine spring offensive, hardly even worth a “hey, nice try.” Special Counsel Jack Smith may find it difficult to prove that expressing an opinion is some kind of crime. Meanwhile, Trump is the poster boy for the aggrieved victims of a government weaponized against its own people. More than half the US sees exactly what’s going on. America is on the threshold of a national crisis.
There is a 27.4% drop in goods sent on semi-trucks to the northeast US this summer. This forced 100-year-old Yellow Corp trucking company into bankruptcy. Yellow owes $750,000,000 in loans to the government (taxpayers) and untold pension obligations. Twenty-two thousand workers will hit the unemployment rolls. Yellow held the less-than-truckload niche, often the final journey of a product to the customer. It was also the cheapest. Whoever picks up the work will cost more, and so will everything Americans have to buy.
Behind this crumbling economy is the fragile financial system of banks, securities markets, derivatives trades and currencies. It will be in four to eight weeks, after Labor Day, that debt obligations and ownerships in failing enterprises start to break down. Banks will resume failing, too, followed by bail-out efforts that will open a trapdoor under the US dollar.
There is a clamor about a new pandemic virus. It doesn’t even have to be a lab-grown disease this time. All it will take to remove millions from the voter rolls is an ordinary seasonal flu, considering how many Americans have wrecked immune systems from the mRNA vaccines they lined up for so readily.
There will be so much going on that the US might not even notice the impeachment hearings against Biden, Garland and Mayorkas. The media won’t cover the proceedings. The only question around the presidential scandal, the Ukraine war, an economic train wreck and political show trials is how much civic upheaval there might be across the US while it all plays out, especially if the government tries to lay on a climate emergency trip as a final, desperate diversion.