The Heavyweights of Blogging

The most widely-read bloggers have in common that they're good enough that lots of people want to read them. My own favorites are Kunstler and Duncan Black. Especially Duncan Black, because Kunstler's not really a blogger.

James Howard Kunstler is more of a journal-ist (but not a "journalist") who posts a weekly column on Monday mornings, as opposed to the daily-and-hourly type of politics and news blog that Duncan Black keeps up. Kunstler also writes books, both fiction and non-fiction, like "A World Made by Hand" (the former) and "The Long Emergency" (the latter).

This morning, in a piece called "Lagging Recognition," he said this: "Americans will never again buy as many new cars as they were able to do before 2008 on the terms that were normal until then: installment loans. Our credit system is completely broken. It choked to death on securitized debt engineered by computer magic and business school hubris. That complex of frauds and swindles coincided with the background force of peak oil, which meant, among other things, that economic growth based on ever-increasing energy resources was over, and along with it ever-increasing credit.

"... I'm not saying this to be a "pessimistic" grandstanding doomer pain-in-the-ass, but because I would like to see my country make more intelligent choices that would permit us to continue being civilized, to move into the next phase of our history without a horrible self-destructive convulsion."

Duncan Black preserved his anonymity as the blogger Atrios, writing a blog called "Eschaton" until 2004, when he was outed by some right-wing butthole or other. He took it in his stride and changed nothing. Like Kunstler, he's an economic pessimist, and the evidence and energy he brings to his short, choppy posts is beautifully concentrated. Rather than linking to Atrios's posts in what follows, I'll link to his sources.

Today Atrios wrote, "A recovery without jobs isn't really much of a recovery. An increase in GDP, if it happens, might cause lots of financial pundit happy talk but without jobs it's pretty meaningless."

And also, "It Does?"

Ezra (Klein):

'In other words, it doesn't seem like we know a lot more than we knew a few months ago. The economy certainly 'feels' better, and that's been enough to drain the urgency from some of these questions. But have the questions really gone away?'

(Atrios responds) The real economy is actually a hell of a lot worse. We have fewer panicking banksters and their mouthpieces in the financial press, so CNBC feels a lot better, because the liquidity crisis is at least temporarily gone. But the liquidity crisis was never the problem, just a symptom. And away from the world of big finance, the economy feels much worse."

Catboxer here. I guess the bad news and the good news are the same, judging from all the people I know of who are both honest and know what they're talking about, namely, we're never going back to the way things were.

Yes, my friends, that's change you can believe in. And count on it, there'll be some changes made, courtesy of that superlative songwriting duo, Billy Higgins and W. Benton Overstreet:

Now there's a change in the weather
And a change in the sea,
And from now on there'll be a change in me.
My walk will be different, my talk and my name,
Nothing about me is going to be the same.
I'm going to change my way of living
And if that ain't enough,
Then I'll change the way I strut my stuff
I must adapt to my environment or I'll fade away,
There'll be some changes made today,
There'll be some changes made.