Disarray

     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.

   

Comments

[Dave]

ha, didn't even read it yet.

[RJG]

There you go again Jim with the doom and gloom of the "problem"..
etc..

Why don't you ever provide us some real "solutions"..!?..

Eheheheh.. just kidding..
great stuff..

Thanks..

[Dave]

ok, not bad. but instaed of building more stupid stuff, eg, railroads, solar plants, nucular stuff, &ct., it's time to just rip up what we can while we can. you know, bust the dams so the fishes can swim and the waters can cleanse, not build more dams. just more wishfull thinking, but of a different variety than someone who wants a big screen tv.

[farmerhunt]

Jim, this reads like a first class tract. If there are no copyright restrictions, I'd like to make unlimited use of this as a handout to local politicos, neighbors, etc.

[Dave]

if we were real real real real smart, we could delay, maybe even manage the dieoff. but we're not. let's just get it on. well actually we are right now, so forget i said that.

rip up the roads, now. or bomb china.

[Dave]

i love that sand pile analogy. that guy stole it from me, no shit. he told me he was going to, but i was too drunk to care. now i'm sorry.

rudi,

please post your link again this week. i promise to try to understand your site and post there and stuff. but remember my conditions.

[farmerhunt]

I see Dave is still around. I really don't have time to wade through his flotsam to find serious stuff, so until he's brought under control, I'm staying out of comments altogether.

[DanaJ]

Jim, unfortunately, we will probably be building hi-ways way after they are no longer needed, there is too much crony-ism in the contracts, and they are too lucrative. Here in Sonoma Co, CA we have Hwy 12, essentially a hi-way to nowhere that cost who knows how many 10's of millions of dollars. To the north of Santa Rosa, the state spent hundreds of millions widening the hi-way where it wasn't needed, while to the south there is a daily disaster where the hi-way SHOULD have been widened. They are starting to widen part of it at the cost of millions per mile. I still cant figure out how it can cost so much per mile. The construction co's are making out like hi-way bandits. Even tho gas has stayed above $3/gl and looks like $4/gl this year, SUV sales have slowed only a little. I regularly see guys at the gas station bitching cause it cost them $100 to fill their big trucks tank 1/2 full and it only lasts a week. IDIOTS. But will they give up the Big Truck Fantasy? No. Oh well, too bad.
Keep up the writing Jim, I always enjoy it.

[asoka]

JHK said: "We'd better prepare psychologically to downscale all institutions, including government, schools and colleges, corporations, and hospitals"

First we'd better get population growth under control.

Otherwise we'll be building even more and paving over even more productive farm land.

[bud4wiser]

JK, a nice enough rant, as ranting goes, but gosh you want fix everything in one essay!

First things first, before you can make wisecracks about highway construction you have to have GM declare bankruptcy. Or else no one "gets it."

Before you make cracks about railroad service, you have to have truck/freight service prices become objectionable.

Before you make cracks about 7-story buildings, you have to have a few people die of heat stroke during a July power blackout.

You see Jim, you can't rant effectively without concrete examples of failure. Surely, all the things you describe will come to pass, but not until the clueless are hit over the head with the "hammer of reality."

So far only one minor example exists. Katrina - and it hurt mostly poor black people. (And God did it anyway)

If you want to rant about changing the public consciousness - you'll have to wait until car companies can no longer afford advertising on broadcast television. America won't change until the advertising does.

JK, you're so far ahead of the curve, the mainstream can't see your light. Predict the date of GM's bankruptcy, and then you'll get some attention.

[oneEyeOpen]

Jimmy,

We haven't even begun to see the devastation of consumers run amok. Tata Motor's $2500.00 car has not yet been launched. China saw 8 milion new car sales last year and that is withut the benefit of the inexpensive Tata. (Did I mention that the Tata is an Indian car? Lets not forget Indian car sales.)

True wastage on a gynormous level is only beginning to rear its ugly head. You ain't seen nothin yet my friend. Think we're behind the energy eight ball already? Try flashing forward a few short years.

[Dave]

i know it's a little early in the week for this, but i've been obcessing on modest mouse lately.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=WI3nK2pafTE&feature=related

dedicated to farmerhut.

[Dave]

an ASPO meeting.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=dwL7ARHwM9k&feature=related

[StephenB]

An interesting Op-Ed in today's Boston Globe (from a Harvard egg head no less) that finally gets that keeping $ and control of those $ *local* in the community counts in matters economic:

Where Have You Gone, George Bailey?
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/01/14/where_have_you_gone_george_bailey/?page=1

"Today's securitization leaves no room for knowing your customer and other intangibles. All that matters is that by hook or by crook - too often by crook - an application passes the statistical hurdles necessary to qualify a loan for inclusion in a package.

"Securitization didn't come out of the blue. It is the latest stage in the unbridled expansion of markets. And central to an impersonal market system is the same process that makes George Bailey irrelevant: algorithmic knowledge, the knowledge of formulas, eclipses experiential knowledge, the knowledge of life that [George] Bailey brought to bear on the lending process."

It's funny when some idea ordinary folk like us have known for a long time gets "discovered" and dreamed up by academics.

Stephen B.
suburban MA

[Farmgal]

Good one Jim.

My state is worrying about fixing our roads and bridges- the infrastructure is aging and there isn't enough cash to fix it as we fund it from the gasoline tax and if we sell less gas as the prices rise-our tax inflow decreases. We have also repeatedly raided this fund for other stuff. Meanwhile we have a minimal mass transit system in just a few places in the state-for me to take the bus-which means driving 20 miles just to catch it- I have to turn teaching for 3-4 hours into a 12 hour day....I still do it, especially when the roads are bad but clearly mass transit is limited here.

Also saw today that Toyota is announcing they will have a plug-in hybrid by 2010-yipee- lets use electricity generated by ??? to charge the cars which will only go 7 miles before needing to use their gas engines...... Not sure I see the point here-maybe I'm missing something in not getting all excited about it.

BTW-re:this site- I also don't get why some posters(who is this "Dave") and a few others, post repeatedly every time- with what appears to be private banter. Is this their entertainment or what? I don't see the point of it-maybe this should be confined to a private e-mail exchange? It very much interferes with the ability to have a civil and useful conversation on this site, imo, for what that's worth. Too bad- it had gotten under control for awhile but seems to be falling back into disaray.

[Dave]

ok, i'm done.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=_PrhGkguKSE&feature=related

[Dave]

farmgal,

gimme something to talk about. i'd be happy to, really. you stated an opinion, ok. fine.

what do you want to talk about? that some roads are messed up and electric cars are a no go?

no, not to be rude and stuff, aren't we, i mean anybody who takes 5 minutes to look around, past that? if you want to talk about the real shitz you and famerhut should hang around during the week a little. just sayin'.

[oneEyeOpen]

Money Quote of the day:

“If we were lucky enough to open up the entire outer continental shelf and then we were lucky enough to invent quickly enough seismic equipment to start doing some sort of a high-grading of where we should drill, and then we were lucky enough to have a growing fleet of newer offshore rigs that could drill wells and we just discovered two new North Seas, then there’s grounds that we could basically spend four or five hundred billion dollars and maybe end up ten years from now with six million barrels a day of fresh supply.

But the problem is that each one of those things that I said, ‘If we were lucky enough,’ we don’t have. And to create each one of those is going to take ten to fifteen years to do. And ten to fifteen years from now, our 73 million barrels a day of current crude production could easily be down to 50 or 45. So you say even if you had another 6 million barrels per day, you can’t climb back out of the hole”. -Matt Simmons-

[Nicholas Paredes]

While many of the current problems and some of the solutions can be agreed upon, my impression is that incorporating the rural into the urban isn’t the task at hand. In Chicago much of the city is flat and frankly wasteland at the moment due to abandoned manufacturing facilities. But, there were skyscrapers in most urban areas prior to the oil economy, and there will be even more after.

A glass box may constitute our idea of the category, though its history is more varied. Density is a way to conserve. Thinking that the business of maintaining billions of people is going to simply vanish in favor of localization, or more horrifying for many Chicagoans, local government, is in my mind ill considered.

It is doubtful that any of these plans will be discussed until it is too late to implement them well, particularly mass transit or Amtrack. The beginning of Gravity’s Rainbow comes to mind. Off to the rooftop for a banana… Hopefully, we’ll apply our efforts afterwards to building rather than becoming modern day vikings.

It took fifty years to accomplish, it’s going to take fifty years to undo.

[Dave]

here's a hint. anything i say is much more appropriate to you and your situation. JHK, is into his whole ASPO, head of the bandwagon, celebrity thing. like we're going to build railroads? and where are we going to build them to? and for what? and then what?

very silly. but that's ok. everyone has a right to be silly in my book.

[oneEyeOpen]

"everyone has a right to be silly in my book."

And everyone has a right to color your silly face out side the shaky lines.

[Roland A.]

You're right--Americans are going to maintain their expectations for life as usual until something breaks their psychological entrainment. Part of the problem is the entire system, itself. We live in a corporatist system. Everything comes from some bloody corporation, and the corporations are sustained by this fiat currency, debt-based, fraud-based, financial system. Unless it's activily trying to grow and consume resources, it dies--and it will fight till then end to maintain its power. People are just dupped into this belief system and they're going to go along with it as it's the only reality they know, which just shows how successful this corporatist system has been with the sciences surrounding human behaviors.

[Riddick]

"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."

This statement by JHK is the most chilling and likely to come to fruition IMHO. I do not believe the NASCAR "gimmie" hat wearing jackrod driving public will take kindly to realizing that Ford and GM or perhaps Toyota sold them a pile of expensive scrap metal. Nor will the Lexus Moms and BMW "aloofs" fare any better.

I watched a terrifying documentary on the rape of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany prior to WWII. The glorious Allies (France & Britain) sold the truly democratic, vibrant and western-oriented Czechs down the river to appease Hitler. Of course, history demonstrated the results of that grand strategy.

What disturbed me most were the grainy black and white scenes of pile upon pile of grotesquely thin human detritus (the Jews, Gypsies and subversives). Their mangled bodies all bizarrely odd arms and legs, their heads often still with weirdly coiffed hair. The bulldozers shoved the piles into vast pits for removal, not unlike working on a vast in-fill for one of our glorious highways.

To watch fellow humans treated in such a manner was beyond words and utterly disgusting. I have no words yet again for the sight. The Holocaust museum in DC shows the truth even better. And for every museum and memorial to human injustice, there are thousands upon thousands more who suffered beyond comprehension in isolation only to die, their existence erased.

Mankind is the total contradiction of utter horror and amazing grace and sacrifice. I just keep getting this gut feeling that when TSHTF for real, no kidding, we may be seeing bulldozers and in-fill over here. Not a pretty thought. But I keep recalling how Tito kept the lid on Yugoslavia until his death and then the reality sprung forth like a coiled viper that had been pent up and waiting to strike for a century.

[Riddick]

"At the same time, begin planning comprehensive regional light-rail and streetcar operations."

It seems that streetcars are indeed an option in the DC suburbs:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/13/AR2008011303609.html

[XER]

We haven't learned how to die, becuase we haven't learned how to live.

We all need to wear a sign around our necks thay says, "Under Construction, Please Excuse Our Mess."

It's time to abandon reason for wisdom. Our thinking must change, before anything else can.