Barack Obama Doesn’t Care About White People!

At Clusterfuck Nation, all-knowing wise man of the Peak Oil cult Jim Kunstler muses on the unfurling disaster that is Hurricane Irene:

That story is still developing. A lot of people will not be able to get around for a long, long time, especially in Vermont and New Hampshire, where the rugged terrain only allows for a few major roads that go anywhere. Even the bridges that were not entirely washed away may have to be inspected before people are allowed to drive over them, and some of these bridges may be structurally shot even if they look superficially okay. There are a lot of them. If you live in a flat state, you may have no idea.

The next story is going to be the realization that there’s no money to put it all back together the way it was. The states don’t have the money. The federal government is obviously broke, and an awful lot of the individual households and businesses will turn out to not have any insurance coverage for this kind of disaster where it was water, not wind, that destroyed the property. I don’t know what the score is insurance-wise along the mid-Atlantic beachfront towns – but remember, insurance companies were among the biggest dupes of the Big Bank mortgage-backed securities racket, and when the new claims are toted up they may find themselves in a bail-out line.

I usually skip past Kunstler’s articles in my Google Reader because he’s the literary equivalent of Metal Machine Music - a repetitive cacophony of meaningless noise that never, ever ends. When he isn’t chastising middle-class whites for not wanting to live in decrepit cities with barely sentient thugs as their neighbors or pimping one of his crappy novels, he’s proclaiming that we’re all going to be living in the Talking Heads’ world of nothing but flowers very, very soon. Kunstler’s been saying it for years, his moronic groupies never losing their faith in him no matter how many of his predictions are proven wrong. And none of them have noticed that he’s a first-class hypocrite – he preaches about the evils of urban sprawl but lives in Saratoga Springs, which would be an uninhabited backwater stuck scrounging for Revolutionary War tourist dollars were it not for massive white flight from Albany, Schenectady and Troy turning it into a posh suburb.

But Kunstler may have a point here. While my part of Vermont was pretty much spared from the floods, pretty much the rest of the state to the south and east, including the capital Montpelier, is below water. New Hampshire, western Massachusetts, and eastern New York are also pretty hard hit. Whole towns are cut off from civilization due to the destruction of roads and bridges. The flooding is so bad in my old stomping grounds that the freaking highways as far as a hundred miles west have been closed to keep one bridge from collapsing. And the economy is in far shabbier shape now than it was in 2005, meaning that Irene’s gigantic bitchslap to the Northeast is going to cause more pain and suffering than Katrina ever did.

I’m of the opinion that disaster preparedness should be a local responsibility first, with the federal government only stepping in in extreme situations, because locals are more knowledgeable about the disasters that can befall their homes than some clown in Washington. But I’m in the minority – decades of centralization has made Americans utterly dependent on the feds, blaming them whenever things go wrong. While I sincerely doubt the patchouli-scented Marxist trust-fund cases in this state will abandon their golden calf so easily, it’s not hard to see the Republicans using Hurricane Irene to slap the president around. Plus, the fact that Barack Ohoover and the Democrats have done jack shit to combat the recession means he’s already on thin ice. Desperate times breed lunatic leaders. You were warned.

Tagged as: Barack Obama, Jim Kunstler