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Economic
Catastrophe--Disarray
by
Jim Kunstler
The
dark tunnel that the US economy has entered began to look more and more like a
black hole last week, sucking in lives, fortunes, and prospects behind a
Potemkin facade of orderly retreat put up by anyone in authority with a story to
tell or an interest to protect -- Fed chairman Bernanke, CNBC, The New York
Times, the Bank of America.... Events are now moving ahead of anything that
personalities can do to control
them.
The
"housing bubble" implosion is broadly misunderstood. It's not just the collapse
of a market for a particular kind of commodity, it's the end of the suburban
pattern itself, the way of life it represents, and the entire economy connected
with it. It's the crack up of the system that America has invested most of its
wealth in since 1950. It's perhaps most tragic that the mis-investments only
accelerated as the system reached its end, but it seems to be nature's way that
waves crest just before they
break.
This
wave is breaking into a sea-wall of disbelief. Nobody gets it. The psychological
investment in what we think of as American reality is too great. The
mainstream media doesn't get it, and they can't report it coherently.
None
of the candidates for president has begun to articulate an understanding of what
we face: the suburban living arrangement is an experiment that has entered
failure mode.
I
maintain that all the "players" -- from the bankers to the politicians to the
editors to the ordinary citizens -- will continue to not get it as the disarray
accelerates and families and communities are blown apart by economic loss.
Instead of beginning the tough process of making new arrangements for everyday
life, we'll take up a campaign to sustain the unsustainable old way of life at
all costs.
A
reader sent me a passle of recent clippings last week from the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution. It contained one story after another about the
perceived need to build more highways in order to maintain "economic growth"
(and incidentally about the "foolishness" of public transit). I understood
that to mean the need to keep the suburban development system going, since that
has been the real main source of the Sunbelt's prosperity the past 60-odd years.
They cannot imagine an economy that is based on anything besides new
subdivisions, freeway extensions, new car sales, and Nascar spectacles. The
Sunbelt, therefore, will be ground-zero for all the disappointment emanating
from this cultural disaster, and probably also ground-zero for the political
mischief that will ensue from lost fortunes and crushed
hopes.
From
time-to-time, I feel it's necessary to remind readers what we can actually do in
the face of this long emergency. Voters and candidates in the primary season
have been hollering about "change" but I'm afraid the dirty secret of this
campaign is that the American public doesn't want to change its behavior at all.
What it really wants is someone to promise them they can keep on doing what
they're used to doing: buying more stuff they can't afford,
eating more shitty food that will kill them, and driving more miles than
circumstances will
allow.
Here's
what we better start
doing:
Stop
all highway-building altogether. Instead, direct public money into repairing
railroad rights-of-way. Put together public-private partnerships for running
passenger rail between American cities and towns in between. If Amtrak is
unacceptable, get rid of it and set up a new management system. At the same
time, begin planning comprehensive regional light-rail and streetcar
operations.
End
subsidies to agribusiness and instead direct dollar support to small-scale
farmers, using the existing regional networks of organic farming associations to
target the aid. (This includes ending subsidies for the ethanol
program.)
Begin
planning and construction of waterfront and harbor facilities for
commerce: piers, warehouses, ship-and-boatyards, and
accommodations for sailors. This is especially important along the
Ohio-Mississippi system and the Great Lakes.
In
cities and towns, change regulations that mandate the accommodation of cars.
Direct all new development to the finest grain, scaled to walkability. This
essentially means making the individual building lot the basic increment of
redevelopment, not multi-acre "projects." Get rid of any parking requirements
for property development. Institute "locational taxation" based on proximity to
the center of town and not on the size, character, or putative value of the
building itself. Put in effect a ban on buildings in excess of seven stories.
Begin planning for district or neighborhood heating installations and solar,
wind, and hydro-electric generation wherever possible on a small-scale network
basis.
We'd
better begin a public debate about whether it is feasible or desirable to
construct any new nuclear power plants. If there are good reasons to go forward
with nuclear, and a consensus about the risks and benefits, we need to establish
it quickly. There may be no other way to keep the lights on in America after
2020.
We
need to prepare for the end of the global economic relations that have
characterized the final blow-off of the cheap energy era. The world is about to
become wider again as nations get desperate over energy resources. This
desperation is certain to generate conflict. We'll have to make things in this
country again, or we won't have the most rudimentary household
products.
We'd
better prepare psychologically to downscale all institutions, including
government, schools and colleges, corporations, and hospitals. All the
centralizing tendencies and gigantification of the past half-century will have
to be reversed. Government will be starved for revenue and impotent at the
higher scale. The centralized high schools all over the nation will prove to be
our most frustrating mis-investment. We will probably have to replace them with
some form of home-schooling that is allowed to aggregate into neighborhood
units. A lot of colleges, public and private, will fail as higher ed ceases to
be a "consumer" activity. Corporations scaled to operate globally are not going
to make it. This includes probably all national chain "big box" operations. It
will have to be replaced by small local and regional business. We'll have to
reopen many of the small town hospitals that were shuttered in recent years, and
open many new local clinic-style health-care operations as part of the greater
reform of American medicine.
Take a
time-out from legal immigration and get serious about enforcing the laws about
illegal immigration. Stop lying to ourselves and stop using semantic ruses like
calling illegal immigrants "undocumented."
Prepare
psychologically for the destruction of a lot of fictitious "wealth" -- and allow
instruments and institutions based on fictitious wealth to fail, instead of
attempting to keep them propped up on credit life-support. Like any other thing
in our national life, finance has to return to a scale that is consistent with
our circumstances -- i.e., what reality will allow. That process is underway,
anyway, whether the public is prepared for it or not. We will soon hear the
sound of banks crashing all over the place. Get out of their way, if you
can.
Prepare
psychologically for a sociopolitical climate of anger, grievance, and
resentment. A lot of individual citizens will find themselves short of resources
in the years ahead. They will be very ticked off and seek to scapegoat and
punish others. The United States is one of the few nations on earth that did not
undergo a sociopolitical convulsion in the past hundred years. But despite what
we tell ourselves about our specialness, we're not immune to the forces that
have driven other societies to extremes. The rise of the Nazis, the Soviet
terror, the "cultural revolution," the holocausts and genocides -- these are all
things that can happen to any people driven to desperation.
This
essay is herein reprinted with the author's
permission.
Posted March 17,
2008
URL:
www.thecitizenfsr.org
SM 2000-2011
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