Which superannuated white male "guest" columnist is featured in the News and Tribune today?

Does it even matter which one? They all look and write the same.

Now that I have your attention, perhaps the ugliest of the 1960s-era bank buildings downtown, most of which were erected atop lots made vacant by the bulldozing of 19th-century architectural gems -- this being what the Warren Nash generation regarded as "progress," and why they shouldn't be trusted -- soon will be emptied.

Just look at all that space wasted for storing cars, as opposed to productive economic-enhancement possibilities. Daniel Suddeath explains and interviews a local rock star for good measure.

(But they're not really rock stars, are they?)

"Don’t blame it all on racism. During the financial crash Obama sided with the bankers, not people losing their homes – making Trump’s victory possible."

On this most auspicious of days, it bears repeating that I admire Barack Obama immensely as a human being performing a thankless job. We may not see the likes of him again, and that's to be regretted.

However, it's simply inescapable that one must separate the man from the performance, and the legacy of Obama's record is mixed. Posterity will probably enhance this legacy owing to the shambles of what came before it, and what's about to happen next -- that is, if we have anything approximating real news in the future.

The overarching point remains: Without properly understanding what has happened these past eight years, we cannot understand neither why Donald Trump is taking office as president, nor what a proper opposition political organization looks like.

Buckle up. America's about to indulge its inner white trash, and the results are not likely to be therapeutic.

How Barack Obama paved the way for Donald Trump, by Gary Younge (The Guardian)

Don’t blame it all on racism. During the financial crash Obama sided with the bankers, not people losing their homes – making Trump’s victory possible

 ... One cannot blame Obama for Trump. It was the Republicans – craven to the mob within their base, which they have always courted but ultimately could not control – that nominated and, for now, indulges him. And yet it would be disingenuous to claim Trump rose from a vacuum that bore no relationship to the previous eight years ...

 ... There is a deeper connection, however, between Trump’s rise and what Obama did – or rather didn’t do – economically. He entered the White House at a moment of economic crisis, with Democratic majorities in both Houses and bankers on the back foot. Faced with the choice of preserving the financial industry as it was or embracing far-reaching reforms that would have served the interests of those who voted for him, he chose the former.

Kunstler: "The condition of the country is pretty awful as we turn the corner onto 2017."

It's been a while since we checked in with Clusterfuck Nation, where James Howard Kunstler chronicles precisely that.

Here are a few of Kunstler's observations in vastly truncated form. Set aside 25 minutes, pour a nice coffee or stiff drink, and enjoy the ride.

Spoiler alert: We're doomed, folks.

---

Forecast 2017: The Wheels Finally Come Off

American Notes

If by some magic any new industrial capacity were built, much of the work in it would be performed by robotics, not brawny men in blue shirts, and certainly not at the equivalent of the old United Auto Workers $35-an-hour assembly line wage. We have not faced the fact that the manufacturing fiesta based on fossil fuels was a one-time thing due to special historical circumstances and will not be repeated. The future of manufacturing in America is frighteningly modest. We’ll actually be lucky if we can make a few vital necessities by means of hydro-electric or direct water power, and that will be about the extent of it. Some of you may recognize this as the World Made By Hand scenario. I’ll stick by that.

Similarly for “infrastructure” spending touted by the forces of Trump as the coming panacea for economic malaise. I suspect most people assume this means a trillion-dollar stimulus spend on highways and their accessories. Well, that also assumes that we expect another fifty years of Happy Motoring and suburban living. Fuggeddabowdit. We’re in the twilight of motoring anyway you cut it, despite all the chatter about electric cars and “driverless” cars. We won’t have the electric capacity to switch over the Happy Motoring fleet from gasoline. The oil industry itself is already headed for collapse on its sinking energy-return-on-investment. And our problems with money and debt are so severe that the motoring paradigm is more prone to fail on the basis of car loan scarcity and unworthy borrowers before the fueling issues even kick in. Every year, fewer Americans can afford to buy any kind of car — the way they’re used to buying them, on installment loans. The industry has gone the limit to help them — seven-year loans for used cars! — but they have no more room to maneuver. The car financing system is broken. Bear in mind the original suburbanization of America back in the 20th century — along with its accessory automobiles — must be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. So, a rebuild of all this stuff would represent more and possibly even greater malinvestment. We could have applied our post-WW2 treasure to building beautiful walkable towns and cities with some capacity for adaptive re-use, but we blew it in order to enjoy life in a one-time demolition derby. Life is tragic. Societies make poor choices sometimes, and then there are consequences.

Designated Bag-Holder

The American people have been punked by their own government and their central bank, the Federal Reserve, for years and the jig is now up. In 2017 both will lose their authority and legitimacy, a very grave matter for the survival of this republic ... had Hillary Clinton won the election, at least the right gang would have had to take the blame — the people in charge for the past twenty years. Instead, Donald Trump has been elected Designated Bag-Holder.

About That “Big Fat Ugly Bubble” and its Consequences, Part 1: History Lesson

The USA ran out of growth capacity around the turn of the millennium because we ran out of affordable energy to run our techno-industrial economy. It was hard to see this with seemingly plenty of oil available. And, of course, the computer tech fiesta was blossoming, but for all that glitzy stuff to attract dwindling real capital, other old stuff had to go, and did go, and when all was said and done the computers did not generate much wealth or social value. In fact, the diminishing returns and blowback of computer tech were arguably more damaging than beneficial to society and its economy. Look at where the middle class is today. Computer tech gave the magical appearance of growth while actually undermining it. By affordable energy I mean energy with a greater-than 30-to-one energy-return-on-investment, which is the ratio you need for the kind of life we lead.

Debt was the meat-and-potatoes of the Fed’s wizardry, but the “secret sauce” of Fed magic was fraud, in the form of market interventions, manipulations, regulatory negligence, and just plain systematic lying about the numbers that defined the economy. It amounted to nationalized financial racketeering. Under the consecutive Grand Vizierships of Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, control fraud (using official authority to cover up misconduct) was perfected by banking executives, eventuating in the mortgage securities fiasco of 2008, which took down the housing market and the economy. (That housing market, by the way, was made up mainly of suburban houses, the sine qua non of the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.)

About That “Big Fat Ugly Bubble” and its Consequences, Part 2: 2017, the Year of Living Anxiously

Get this: the Fed is completely full of shit. It is terrified of the conditions it has set up and it has no idea what to do next. The “data” that it claims to be so dependent on is arrantly fake. The government’s official unemployment number at Christmas 2016 was 4.6 percent. It’s a compound lie. The 4.6 percent does not include the 95 million people out of the workforce, most of them able-bodied, who have simply run through their unemployment benefits and given up looking for work. Nor does it figure in the fact that roughly 90 percent of the new jobs created are part time jobs, many of them held by people working several jobs (because they have to, to pay the bills). Nor does it detail the quality of the jobs created (minimum wage shit jobs.)

Why Trump Can’t Pull a Reagan

Today, the US is in a box and Trump comes on the scene with nowhere to move. Too much debt can only be managed if interest rates are kept low. Everybody and his mother around the world is dumping US Treasuries. With a bear market in bonds on, the Fed as buyer of last resort will have to sop up whatever comes on the market to keep the interest rate from rising above three percent on the ten-year, and even that may not prevent it. Trump’s vaunted infrastructure stimulus plan will be impossible to carry out without the Fed monetizing the necessary debt. So stimulus implies bigger deficits, which means more bonded debt that nobody wants to buy. The result will be inflation and accordingly further upward pressure on interest rates. Higher interest rates, in turn, will negatively impact economic activity, lowering tax revenue, inducing larger fiscal imbalances and greater instability.

Trump may never even get the stimulus he seeks. The Republican controlled-congress has vowed not to increase the national debt. How can Trump fulfill his pledge to cut taxes and bring on stimulus without hugely increasing the debt? If there is war over spending between Trump and Congress, Congress is likely to win, since they control the fiscal purse strings. Of course, Donald Trump cannot abide not winning. Hostilities between them may become permanent early in Trump’s term and bring on even more dangerous paralysis of governance.

Desperate Measures

One of the other big and dark trends of the past year has been the move of governments around the world — and among the economist / necromancers who advise them — to ban cash from the scene in order to herd all citizens into a digital banking system that will allow the authorities to track all financial transactions and suck every possible cent of taxes into national coffers. It would also be an opportunity for the bank-and government cabal to impose negative interest rates (NIRP) on bank accounts so that money herded into the digital system could be surreptitiously “taxed” by charging account holders just for being there (against their will). It’s a little hard to see how that might happen just now in a broad rising rate environment, but it would be the natural accompaniment to banning cash — and renewed aggressive QE (QE forever!) might do the trick.

It’s hard to see the US government banning cash as clumsily as India did, but they have other ways to herd the multitudes into the black box of all-digital banking.

Wild in the Streets

The public is just plain pissed off, and remains pissed off after the Trump Victory. Their anger has been fermenting for decades as their economic prospects dwindled and they began to understand how it all worked against them. The battered middle class might have gotten a temporary thrill from the election, but an awful lot of them are still out of work, or working at the humiliating shit-jobs that replaced their old lost jobs in the old real stuff economy. Worse is coming their way in 2017. Theirs is a true existential crisis.

That may be the moment when President Trump and his militarily-weighted cabinet appointees opt for martial law. What a goddamned mess that will be. There is no civilized country on earth with as many small arms per capita than the USA, and despite the fearsome appearance of militarized police forces, you cannot overstate how much deadly mischief a small number of pissed-off people can make with automatic rifles, rocket-propelled-grenades, Semtex plastic explosive, and other fun stuff. It could morph easily to a literal war on bankers and Wall Street in particular, especially if Ice-Nine goes into effect. Bear in mind that a lot of veterans of the endless Middle East wars belong to this suffering economic class, and they actually have some training in the warrior arts.

Their political counterparts in the Democrat / Prog coastal elite, hardcore Hillary, PC-and-unicorn crowd are moving through their post-election Kubler-Ross Transect-of-Grief from denial to anger too. So both sides are quite pissed off and primed for conflict. The Left will certainly do everything possible to oppose Trump and try to make him look bad, whether it’s in the public interest to do so or not. They will throw every monkey-wrench possible into the machinery of governance, up to and including the (mostly Democratic Party weighted) Federal Reserve hierarchy, whose interest rate “dot plot” could be truly a plot to exact revenge on Trump. Of course, that would blow up in their faces since proportionately the coastal elites own much more stock than the Trumpenlumpenprole red-staters, and they could be wiped out in a significant market crash triggered by rising interest rates. But that’s the thing about political rage: it’s the opposite of rational.

There’s no sign that the Democrat / Progs have recognized that their poisonous identity politics played a significant role in their electoral defeat. They will not abandon that endeavor in 2017. They will double-down on it. And as that happens, the Democratic Party will go the way of the Whigs in 1856 — with a whimper, not a bang. God knows who or what will replace them as a credible opposition to Trumpist crypto-Republicanism, although Trump himself stands a good chance of leading that party to oblivion, too, if my forecast of a big financial blow-up comes to pass.

The Oil Quandary

The pattern nicely describes the dynamic advanced by Joseph Tainter in his seminal work, The Collapse of Complex Societies: namely that over-investments in complexity lead to diminishing returns. That is, as you keep making your systems extra-hyper-complex, you get less value back for doing it, until you get to the point where there’s no benefit whatsoever, and then the system implodes. And that is exactly what has happened with oil and the economy that was engineered to run on it, and the financial system that evolved to manage the wealth it used to produce.

Vagrant Thoughts on Geopolitics

As I write just before New Year’s Eve, President Obama is trying to start World War Three with Russia as a parting gift to the voting public. I’m among the skeptics who think that the “Russia Hacks Election story” is a ruse to divert the public’s attention from the stupendous failure of the Democratic Party to win, as expected. Rather, Wikileaks should get the Pulitzer Prize for revealing so much about the nefarious workings of the Clinton Foundation and the Democratic National Committee.

Regular readers know I didn’t vote for Trump, that I heaped considerable abuse on him in the campaign commentaries. But I didn’t take any comfort in the nostrum about being “better off with the Devil you know (Hillary) than the one you don’t know (Trump).” Both candidates were awful, and the condition of the country is pretty awful as we turn the corner onto 2017.

If you’ve gotten this far, I commend and admire you hugely for your remarkable patience. Have a happy 2017 everybody, and don’t let our Trumpadelic president get you down.

Secrecy vs. transparency as "governments turn to bank loans rather than bonds."

You're right.

I need to stop giving his new ideas for borrowing and secrecy.

The Hidden Risks of a Growing Way to Pay for Infrastructure, by Lynnette Kelly (Governing)

More and more, governments are turning to bank loans rather than bonds. But too often the terms of the loans -- and who is first in line to collect -- are secret.

A perilous new financial risk may be hiding in the fine print of loan agreements in state capitals, county seats and city halls across the country. The cost could be high for millions of individuals whose investment dollars help finance the public schools, water systems, bridges and roads that we all rely on and which in many cases are in desperate need of repair.

Investment in the nation's infrastructure has long been a partnership between state and local governments and retail investors. State and local governments prioritize public projects, investment bankers provide products to help spread costs over the life of the project, investors buy in to earn reliable, often tax-free interest income, and then taxpayer dollars repay the bonds. Today, more and more communities are opting for alternatives to this traditional municipal-bond model in the form of direct loans from banks. Estimates are that the bank financing of public projects has ballooned to more than $155 billion with another $25-$30 billion being added each year.

Borrowing funds from a bank to build a bridge is not inherently problematic. The problems arise when the extent of the borrowing -- and the precise terms of the loans -- are a secret. For municipal-bond financings, states and communities have obligations under federal law to publicly disclose material information to investors at the outset. But no such disclosure requirements exist at the time they receive loans from banks. Investors who hold a city's outstanding bonds may have no idea that the city has taken on more debt or that the bank making the loan has made sure it will be first in line to collect if the city runs into financial troubles.

That's just what happened in Lawrence, Wis. The small town borrowed heavily from local banks, and it agreed to put the banks before the bondholders in the event it someday couldn't cover all of its financial obligations. When a major ratings agency learned of the unfavorable terms for bondholders, it quickly downgraded Lawrence's bonds to junk status. Bondholders who thought they were holding investment-grade paper are now left with a far riskier asset.

No one knows how many other Lawrences are out there ...

Strange, but you just never hear CM Blair talking about how the other half banks.

"Baradaran argues persuasively that the banking industry, fattened on public subsidies (including too-big-to-fail bailouts), owes low-income families a better deal."

If for no other reason than low-income families actually being ableto forget their troubles at the bright shiny water park -- right, Scott?

‘How the Other Half Banks,’ by Mehrsa Baradaran, reviewed by Nancy Folbre (New York Times)

In 1890 the journalist Jacob Riis published “How the Other Half Lives,” a powerful indictment of the horrific tenements of New York that gave rise to a significant housing reform movement. Mehrsa Baradaran, a University of Georgia law professor, reaches for a similar impact in her description of the oppressive financial environment that low-income families inhabit.

The answer to the implicit question contained in her title, “How the Other Half Banks,” is simple: The “other half” hardly banks at all. Many families below the midline of income distribution in the United States rely heavily on check-­cashing services, payday lenders and title vendors charging fees and interest higher than any chartered bank could legally impose. Financial deregulation enabled banks to slough off low-income customers even as it created new opportunities for storefront profit-taking.

This special musical request goes out to Main Source Bank.

I'm opposed to physical violence. That's why I learned to write.

Yesterday was a Pulp Fiction kind of day -- metaphorically, of course.

Ezekiel 25:17

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.

Well, it isn't like I've never been brushed off before. It comes with the territory.

I'll find another way to get it done, and it will make me a better person. Some of the advice proffered me yesterday may even prove to be useful, but I won't be thanking the institution for it, because the institution left me to dangle for months, and it would be dishonest of me to pretend that it feels good being left to writhe on a hook like a recently snared fish gasping ... well, you get the picture, don't you?

But to knowingly mix my metaphors, I know there's a better institution out there, one that really wants me. The trick is finding it, because when the day is done, I actually live what I do. In point of fact, I feel sorry for bean counters as a class, because it turns out that Teddy Roosevelt was right, and they'll never truly get it.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

Okay, so who wants to work with a growing, local, independent food, drink and brewery business? I'm open for chats, and this time, can it be with someone who actually drinks beer?