The Darkest Hours

The comments above & below is an edited and abridged synopsis of an article by James Howard Kunstler

Kunstler thinks that the tax reform bill currently working its way through Congress should be called the Asset-Stripping Assistance Act.

The US economy is collapsing, and the stock market expansion is just what you might expect in a system getting ready to blow. Meanwhile, the rise of the crypto-currency scam is like smoke from Vesuvius around 79 AD-an amusing curiosity to the citizens of Pompeii, going about their normal activities before hellfire rained down on them.

Whatever the corporate tax rate might be, it won't be enough to rescue the Ponzi scheme that governing has become. The real aim is to keep up appearances for a while longer, while the table scraps of a 400-year-long New World banquet are tossed to the hogs of Wall Street and their accomplices. Even they don't have a clue about their imminent slaughter.

The centerpiece is control fraud. This is the misuse of authority in applying three-card-Monte principles to financial accounting practice, so that the public will be too bamboozled to see the money drain from their bank accounts and the ground shift under their feet until the moment of freefall.

The US has become used to thinking that the game of pretend is the same as what is actually going on in the world. The phrase coined by Karl Rove, "we make our own reality," is as comforting these days to Republicans as it is to professors in the Ivy League.

But reality will do its thing regardless of our wishes, hopes and pretenses, and we can see how these moves taken in the last hours of 2017 will play out in 2018. In March or April, something's got to give. Other players around the world will assist in shoving the US towards the critical state it deserves to enter.