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The G-20 came
to Washington for the weekend and sucked all the air out of the city before
announcing that they were really
serious about patching all the leaks in the foundering ship of
globalism. Well, they have to at least pretend that they are doing something.
Meanwhile, the former bit player known as reality has taken center stage in
the ship's main lounge. It is putting on an act even gnarlier
than the Kit Kat Klub show in Cabaret.
This reality show is
sending some clear signals to the denizens of the real and really crowded
world. The main signal is that the trade and financing rackets of recent
decades are over. The extravaganza of economic hypergrowth
based on cheap resources is over. The promiscuous swapping around of risk and
rewards is over. There is no global institutional framework for managing the
impairment left in the wake of this binge. It will be up to the individual
nations now to figure out their national lives and livings.
Alas, the financial
impairment is still on-going world-wide and has quite a ways to run before it's finished working its hoodoo on the so-called advanced
economies. The lame duck US economic posse so far has done everything
possible except the two things that really matter: allow the
fraudulent securities at the heart of the problem to be exposed to the light
of day to determine their actual value;
and allow those companies who trafficked in them to suffer the full
consequences by going out-of-business. For the moment, they're content to
shovel cash into the truck-bed of every enterprise in America that shows up
at the Treasury loading dock. This can only have the effect of eventually
destroying the value of that cash.
President-elect
Obama's cagey appearance on 60-Minutes
showed that he's hardly in a position to say anything of substance about this
country's predicament as long as the old posse holds the levers of the
economic machinery -- and retains the ability to run it into the ground
before January 20, 2009. So many tribulations are now underway in our
Republic that it is hard to fathom what the head of the federal government
might do besides act as a kind of psychological counselor-in-chief to a land full of people in distress.
The world has changed
faster than anyone realizes. One big question is how long the American people
will stumble around in a daze before we get back to work doing constructive
things in this country -- and by that I mean activities scaled to the
resource realities of the years just ahead. More specifically, I mean how we
are going to grow the food we eat without massive quantities of diesel fuel
and petroleum-based "inputs" and also how we are going to make any
of the useful products we need in an energy scarcer time.
Perhaps Mr.
Obama knows that we're not going back to anything even close to the
business-as-usual that shaped our lives for the generations born after 1945.
I would advise him to begin thinking about this by dividing the problem into
two parts. The first part is how his government might handle the sheer
emotional fallout of a people whose standard-of-living will be pulled out
from under them. For a while, perhaps the first year or so, the public is apt
to be trusting and generous, especially regarding a president who has had some
acquaintance with being short of cash himself, and who can speak English both
clearly and empathetically. Mr. Obama stands a good chance at playing that
role successfully, at least for a while.
The second part,
though, is the more difficult operational and administrative matter of
promoting the necessary downscaling of all the essential activities of daily
life. This is especially difficult given the current trend of the government
suddenly taking ownership of everything, from the banking system perhaps to
certain areas of heavy industry (if Detroit gets its way). The Obama
government will have to resist the temptation to prevent enterprises from
failing. These failing things have to get out of the way before new
activities can get underway. It will also require government leaders to tell
the public the hard truth that it can't do everything we would like it to do.
The fiasco of medical care
is certainly a product of connivance between greedy and heartless insurance
companies, profit-driven hospitals, and avaricious drug-makers. But the
public itself is responsible for its own suicidal diet of double cheez burritos and Dr. Pepper. How about a national
health-care system with one basic requirement: to qualify, participants must be
within ten pounds of their appropriate weight. Pretty harsh, huh? Maybe. But
times are harsh too, and bound to get harsher. This system would have the
great advantage of being absolutely clear. Let the United Way and other
charities devote their resources to educating the recklessly obese about diet
and exercise so they can eventually qualify.
The transportation
quandary suggests that we have to move away from the private automobile and
commercial trucking, and that the airline industry is certain to contract
dramatically. When are we going to start the discussion about rebuilding a US
public transit system that was once the envy of the world? It no longer
matters how much Americans love their cars, or even how much investment we've
made in car infrastructure. At some point, we just have to face the fact that
democratic mass motoring is no longer on the program. Nor is a
commercial economy based on incessant motoring. One other implication of this
is the necessity to use our waterways for moving things and people again. Has
anybody noticed, for instance, that the once-bustling New York City Harbor,
possibly the biggest and best sheltered deepwater harbor in the world, has
next-to-zero operating docks left along its massive perimeter? While you're
at it, have a look at the waterfronts of Louisville, Cincinnati, Kansas City
and a score of other inland port cities on great navigable rivers. What
you'll see are condo sites, festival marketplaces, picnic grounds, and plain
old empty lots -- everything but the infrastructure for commerce. We can't
afford this anymore. We have to put these places back to work.
The G-20 leaders in
Washington last week made a lot of noise about ramping up domestic spending.
In the decades to come, this will not happen without import replacement --
which is just what it sounds like:
instead of importing things you need, you make them at home, and people get
paid a living wage to do it. Import replacement, by the way, is exactly how
the United States rose in the 19th century to become the world's preeminent
manufacturing nation. It doesn't foreclose trade with other countries, but it
self-evidently changes the terms of that trade, and it would spell the end of
the kind of predatory "globalism" that has led to the current state
of gross imbalance and reckless destruction.
I believe this
will happen whether we like it or not, because these things occur in cycles
and the current cycle is obviously ending with a thundering crash of
economies, modes of operation, habits and practices, and expectations. For
better or worse, we have to move on to new ways of doing things.
I regard the
most dangerous fantasy in America right now to be the wish that we can keep
running things just the way they are now (my recurring synecdoche of WalMart, Walt Disney World, and the interstate highway
system) by replacing oil and gas with "alternative fuels." This
just ain't gonna happen.
We're going to use every kind of alt.energy there
is and they will still require us to live very differently than we did the
past sixty years. The public just doesn't get this. I don't know whether
President-elect Obama gets this. I hope he does, and I hope part of his new
mission will be to clarify this state of affairs for the public in clear and
effective speech. It's going to tick off a lot of them, but it's the theme
music playing in the reality lounge right now, and Mr. Obama would be advised
to take up the tune.
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is
available at all booksellers.
James Kunstler has worked
as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a
staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write
books on a full-time basis.
His latest nonfiction book, "The Long
Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the 21st
century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of
subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest,
and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when
the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat
locally grown food.
You can purchase your own copy here
: The Long
Emergency .
You can get more from James Howard Kunstler -
including his artwork, information about his other novels, and his blog - at
his Web site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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