I just finished reading Kunslter's book, which the following article summarizes...while I don't necessarily buy all of his predictions , its pretty clear that we can't keep doing things the way we're doing...it's no accident that Frank Ghery's garish, flash in the pan novelty architecture frequently crosses Kunstler's sights.

The Long Emergency

What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?

JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER

Posted Mar 24, 2005 12:00 AM

A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above fifty-five dollars a barrel, which is about twenty dollars a barrel more than a year ago. The next day, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times business section. Apparently, the price of oil is not considered significant news, even when it goes up five bucks a barrel in the span of ten days. That same day, the stock market shot up more than a hundred points because, CNN said, government data showed no signs of inflation. Note to clueless nation: Call planet Earth.

Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that "people cannot stand too much reality." What you're about to read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.

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- People cannot stand too much reality. Though not directly applicable to Atlantic Yards, the enormous expenditures of oil, steel and glass to build another useless building (stadiums are usually 'obsolete' in less than ten years) and complete refusal to seriously tackle traffic transportation and infrastructure problems represents the ultimate hubris and greed of the New York elite.

At the very least, it is an extraordinarily short-sighted misuse of public funds and and clear case of living now, and making future generations pay later. When you're a globalist, what you do to a local community doesn't really matter, I guess.

If anything it will probably the last large scale criminal-act-under-the-guise of-public-works that our elite will be able to take. In many ways it's something like the penchant institutions that are about to crumble have for building large scale useless symbols of power (Versailles, the Sears Tower are examples).

Another parallell in the book is the manipulation of environmental laws by big corporations. Thus, Marriot corporation buys a small coal processing plant, sprays some natural oil on it to meet the bare miniumum requirements of some misguided 'environmental law' and Voila! they are able to claim to be green and get a huge tax write-off in one fell swoop while not really doing anything for the environment at all, and, in fact, actually causing more pollution. Thus is the state of ethics today when stockholders commend them for such behavior because...well it increases profit, and as long as its legal it's okay, right?

Ratner's Atlantic Yards scam is also an example of this, meeting environmental green certification for buildings while tearing down perfectly good structures, letting others decay so they can tear them down, and building energy intensive impractical architecture by a trendy, vapid 'architect'. As Kunslter reminds us, there is no thing that loses its value faster than something that is valued for being up-to-date. But Ghery is not even up-to-date, he's relic of a super-elite whose way of thinking is a throw back to the 1960s, outdated planning that are personally profitable but long term disasters for communities.