Kunstler: Since September of 2008, when Hank Paulson began shoveling bail-outs to the very banks who screwed the world on fraudulent and unreal securities, and left American society comprehensively bankrupt, the consensus has only deepened on the perception of an historic swindle. And so far, President Obama has positioned himself as chief enabler to further swindling.
SHOOT: Nobody knows what reality is any more. There's just noise, and rackets. What are rackets, you ask?
Kunstler: Rackets are behavior geared to getting something for nothing. These rackets are often summarized under the acronym FIRE (for finance, insurance and real estate), a system set up to strip-mine profits from the wish commonly labeled "the American Dream" -- itself largely a product of televised advertising and propaganda. The end product of all that was the doomed economy of suburban sprawl, an infrastructure for daily life with no future in a world defined by fossil fuel scarcity.
SHOOT: Nobody knows what reality is any more. There's just noise, and rackets. What are rackets, you ask?
Kunstler: Rackets are behavior geared to getting something for nothing. These rackets are often summarized under the acronym FIRE (for finance, insurance and real estate), a system set up to strip-mine profits from the wish commonly labeled "the American Dream" -- itself largely a product of televised advertising and propaganda. The end product of all that was the doomed economy of suburban sprawl, an infrastructure for daily life with no future in a world defined by fossil fuel scarcity.
Watching the old clips of Cronkite delivering the evening news years ago, one couldn't help weighing the contrast with the current spectacle of snide, combative, overbearing idiocy acted out nightly by the likes of Kudlow, Olberman, Kneale, O'Reilly, Matthews, and Dobbs as they shout down their invited guest commentators, pander to their demographic, and diss their rivals for ratings. It was instructive to notice that the program following "Sixty Minutes" -- in the supreme weekly slot of 8p.m. Sunday -- was a childish and stupid "reality" show called "Big Brother." This said even more about the craven quality of the people currently running CBS. It should remind us more generally that when a society's operations become broadly fraudulent and unreal, authority and legitimacy wither. This is analogous to the position Barack Obama now finds himself in. He was elected as the politician most trusted in America to change the fraudulent and unreal operations of the US government.
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