If you don't understand what's causing a particular problem, then it's pretty difficult to come up with an effective solution.
Author, commentator and longtime friend-of-the-site James Howard Kunstler returns to our podcast this week to discuss the importance of accurate diagnosis — in this case, of the scourge he sees as accelerating America's downslide into economic and social decline: Racketeering.
More associated with the organized crime bosses of a century ago, it's not a word used often these days. But that doesn't diminish in any way its relevance to and impact on our lives today:
The disorders in politics that we're seeing now are really expressions of the larger disorders in our economic life and our financial life. That just happens to be the avenue that the expression is coming out of. Another point I'd like to make is that the reason that people are against Hillary or dumping on Hillary or don't like her, is because she's a poster child for racketeering. I encourage people who are talking about our circumstances and people who are interested in the news and election, to use the word racketeering to describe what's going on in this country. You really need the right vocabulary to understand exactly what's going on.
Racketeering is just pervasive in all of our activities. Not just in politics but in things even like medicine and education. Obviously the college loan scheme is an example of racketeering. Anybody who has to go to an emergency room with a child whose broken their finger or something, is going to end up with a bill for $20,000. You know why? Because of medical racketeering. And so, these are really efforts to money-grub by any means necessary, often in ways that are unethical and probably illegal. Let's use that word racketeering to describe our national situation.
And let's remember by the way, the activities of the central banks is just another form of racketeering. Using debt issuance and attempting to control interest rates in order to conceal our inability to generate the kind of real wealth that we need to continue as a techno-industrial society.
Societies have a really hard time understanding what they're doing, articulating the problems that they face and coming up with a coherent consensus about what's happening, and coming up with a coherent consensus about what to do about it. Combine that with another quandary, the relationships between energy and the dead racket for concealing real capital formation. I like to reduce it to one particular formula that is pretty easy for people to understand. It's a classic quandary: that oil priced at over $75 a barrel in today's dollars tends to crush economies, and oil priced under $75 a barrel in today's dollars tends to crush oil companies. There is no real sweet spot between those two places. We're ratcheting between them and each one of them entails a lot of destruction. That's a terrible quandary that we're in and it's being expressed in banking and finance…and the people in charge of those things don’t really know what else to do except continue the deformation of institutions and instruments.
Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with James Howard Kunstler (58m:21s).
by aggrivated 
