kunstler nails it one more time. there will be no v curve;

Spring is popping now with a ferocious energy that can only remind the sullenly sequestered masses that life is going on without them. Every living thing is busy making-and-doing out there, except the poor humans, idled without work or purpose. That won’t last long. People don’t submit automatically to zombification when some pissant bureaucrats issue them $1200 checks. They yearn to bust out like everything else on this living planet. And if they can’t do it in a good way, well….

The mega-machine we constructed to drive this society has sucked a valve and thrown a rod. The machine is broken, no matter how much more fuel the mechanics pump in. (One suspects somebody may have topped it off with Karo syrup.) Anyway, the machine got too big and too complex, with too many extraneous bells and whistles, and with way too much computerized cybernetic control built-in, so the mechanics barely noticed it was coming apart (they were too busy partying). That big machine is smoldering in a ditch for the moment. The dazed and bloodied passengers realize that the ride is over, and now they must march on to get somewhere, anywhere, away from this miserable ditch and the wreckage in it. The fine spring weather is their only consolation.

And so here we are at a fraught moment in the convergent crises of corona virus and the foundering economic system that it infected, with all its frightful pre-existing conditions. Of course, it isn’t capitalism, so-called, that is failing, but the perversions of capitalism, starting with the appendage of the troublesome term: ism. It isn’t a religion, or even a pseudo-religion like Zoroastrianism or communism. It’s simply the management system for surplus wealth. In a hyper-complex society, the management of wealth naturally grows hyper-complex, too, with lavish opportunities and temptations for chicanery, cheating, fraud, and swindling (the perversions of capital). It’s in the interest of the managers to cloak all that hyper-complex perversity in opaque language, to make it seem okay...........read more..........