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As the election campaign ground
on like a 3000-mile race between a greyhound and an armadillo, the media kept
harping on Barack Obama's vague promises of "change." We now know
what the main promise was: regime
change, right here in the USA, not in some place where the natives wear
strange headgear. Mr. Obama's victory was a moment of epochal exhilaration,
not least because he appears to be a decent and intelligent person self-made
from a humble background -- someone who has personally bought tube socks in the
K-mart, worried about money, and made many trips in a subway car.
The
current occupant of the White House, however, has sedulously prepared for his
successor the biggest shit sandwich the world has ever seen, and there is
naturally some concern that Mr. Obama might choke on it. The dilemma is
essentially this: the consumer economy we all knew and loved has died. There
will be pressure from nearly every quarter to keep it hooked up to the costly
life support machines even though it is dead. A different economy is waiting
to be born, but it is nothing like the one that has died. The economy-to-come
is one of rigor and austerity. It is not the kind of thing that a nation of
overfed clowns is used to. Do we even have a prayer of getting to it, or are
we going to squander our dwindling resources on life support for something
that is already dead?
A
case in point: the car industry. The Big Three, all functionally bankrupt,
are now lined up for bail-outs from the treasury's bottomless checking
account. Personally, I believe the age of Happy Motoring is over. Many
Americans have already bought their last car -- they just don't it yet. The
current low-ish price of oil is a total fake-out, having to do much more with
asset-dumping in the paper markets than the true resource supply-demand
equation. Most of the world (the media for sure) has ignored preliminary
leaks from the International Energy Agency's (IEA) forthcoming report which
forecasts global oil depletion to be 9.1 percent in 2009. This is a staggering
figure, very likely to offset whatever slack we see in global demand from the
worldwide economic crisis. In fact, the global oil markets are poised for the
most severe dislocations ever seen, meaning it's a toss-up what happens first
in the USA: a major
leg back up in oil prices, or shortages, hoarding, and rationing.
For
my money (literally) there are only two main reasons that any portion of the
car industry should be rescued at the present time: one, because we need somebody
to manufacture engines for military vehicles, and two, because we need
somebody to manufacture rolling stock for the revival in passenger railroad
service that will have to be a centerpiece of the future economy if we want
to remain a civilized nation.
Even the progressive factions of the public may
be in for much more "change" than they bargained for. The global
economy as we knew it is finished (despite British PM Gordon Brown's fatuous
suggestion that we are ready to formalize it). The world is about to lose its
"flatness" (sorry Tom Friedman) and get much rounder. For one
thing, the racket of American "consumers" gobbling up the output of
Asian factories in exchange for paper promises is over. For the moment, the
Chinese are struggling with epic factory closures with the sudden prospect of
a restive lumpenproletariet. The situation there is bound to get worse.
Before long, these broke-and-hungry masses may actually challenge the present
government. In the meantime, there's no telling what the (unelected) Chinese
government might do either to keep itself in power, or genuinely defend its
country's perceived economic interests. One thing is self-evident: we are not returning to the old
racket of toys-for-treasury-bills. One thing China might do in economic
self-defense is shed whatever US dollar-denominated paper is moldering in
their vaults before it becomes valueless altogether.
As
global trade relations wither, and they will, the US will be thrust back on
its own devices, at the same time that oil resources grow punishingly scarce.
Mr. Obama will have to contend with the necessary radical reform of all the
activities necessary for daily life here. Near the top of the list --
invisible to most of the public so far -- will be the question of how we
produce the food we need. Industrial farming is done, just as suburbia is
toast. Mr. Obama will have to apply plenty of ass-time to the first stages of
negotiating this bottleneck. I don't even know what he can do policy-wise,
though he can certainly make it plain to the public that we have to grow more
of our food close to home and do it with fewer engines and fewer oil-based
soil supplements. It is a problem of such surpassing difficulty that it was
not even close to being in the election arena. The transition will probably
occur by means of "emergence." Self-evident necessity will prompt
different behavior and different ways of doing things. Sooner or later, the
new arrangements will self-organize -- if we don't squander resources
defending an unsustainable status quo. One thing we can certainly predict is
that growing our food will require more human labor and attention -- meaning
there will be plenty of work for people currently losing their jobs at The
Footlocker and Arby's, but it's far from certain whether they will be happy
in their new vocations.
We're
going to have to resume making things in the USA again, too, probably at a
more modest scale, and probably fewer things than we are used to. We have no
idea yet how this is going to happen. Like agriculture, manufacturing culture
may have to return, if at all, emergently, as individuals and communities see
opportunity in advantages like proximity to water-power and water transport. My
guess is that corporate enterprise as we have known it -- at the continental
and global scale -- is done for. I would not bet on any of the Fortune 500
carrying on the manufacturing work of the future using the
plants-and-equipment that are familiar to them. The manufacturing of the
future may be more like cottage industry than Proctor and Gamble. Yet,
obviously, there will be tremendous efforts to prop up failing corporate
enterprise and prevent natural bankruptcies from occurring.
Similarly,
the retail part of the economy. Many observers think that Wal-Mart and its
clones are immune to the larger forces swirling around us. Just because many
cash-strapped people are hunting for bargains at WalMart these days does not
insure the survival of the Big Box model very far into the future. In fact,
in every trend we can see -- from the oil markets to events in China to the impoverishment of the US working class to the coming crisis in truck transport -- you
can easily discern fatal weaknesses in this model. Local retail (and its
support structures) is coming back. We just don't know how, yet, and we don't
know how much capital and effort will be squandered trying to rescue WalMart,
when the time comes. But the imperative re-scaling of commerce in America also represents huge opportunities for young people to get into their own
businesses.
Mr.
Obama will preside over the potential restructuring of all our systems, some
of them in ways he and his supporters have not imagined. We haven't begun to
see where fate will take higher education, but my guess is that it will no
longer be a "consumer" activity, and that the hypertrophied
land-grant diploma mills will have to to shrink or die as state financial
support withers away, and all sorts of unnecessary professions from
"public relations" to "marketing" cease to require
certified graduates. The luxurious central high schools, utterly addicted to
their yellow school bus fleets, will be left as a problem for the states and
municipalities. I don't believe they can be rescued, and they are already
failing in many other ways, not least, educating and properly socializing
young humans.
In
the months just ahead, Mr. Obama will certainly be swamped with
straight-ahead cash problems in every area of American life, from the
foundering pension funds to the bankrupt state treasuries to the beggaring
corporations to the starkly dispossessed and hungry masses of the jobless and
re-poed. I wasn't kidding when I came up with the label, "the long
emergency," to describe the storm that we are heading into, along with
Mr. Obama. Of course, the current president -- and Mr. Obama has been shrewd
to point out there is only one president in office at a time --has more than
two months to wreak additional havoc in the financial system. Right now, he's
asking Mr. O, "...do you want fries with that sandwich I made for you?"
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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