*this article links energy and environmental issues with the
financial problems.*
**
*DISARRAY
by James Howard Kunstler*
The dark tunnel that the U.S. economy has entered began to look
more and more like a black hole recently, 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 passel 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 bad 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.
Regards,
James Howard Kunstler
for /The Daily Reckoning/
*Editor's Note:* 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
==============================
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