[CitizensTruth] Good Article

[Ragen Gillam]

From: From:
http://www.alternet.org/environment/108481/zombie_economics:_don't_bail_out_
the_system_that_gave_us_suvs_and_strip_malls/

Zombie Economics: Don't Bail out the System that Gave Us SUVs and Strip
Malls

By James Howard Kunstler - November 25, 2008

Why squander our remaining resources on a lifestyle that doesn't have a
future?

Though Citicorp is deemed too big to fail, it's hardly reassuring to know
that it's been allowed to sink its fangs into the Mother Zombie that the
U.S. Treasury has become and sucked out a multibillion dollar dose of
embalming fluid so it can go on pretending to be a bank for a while longer.


I employ this somewhat clunky metaphor to point out that the U.S. government
is no more solvent than the financial zombies it is keeping on walking-dead
support. And so this serial mummery of weekend bailout schemes is as much of
a fraud and a swindle as the algorithm-derived-securities shenanigans that
induced the disease of bank zombification in the first place. The main
question it raises is whether, eventually, the creation of evermore
zombified U.S. dollars will exceed the amount of previously created U.S.
dollars now vanishing into oblivion through compressive debt deflation.

My guess, given the usual time-lag factor, is that the super-inflation
snapback will occur 6 to 18 months from now. And the main result of all this
will be our inability to buy the imported oil that comprises two-thirds of
the oil we require to keep WalMart and Walt Disney World running. At some
point, then, in the early months of the Obama administration, we'll learn
that "change" is not a set of mere lifestyle choices but a wrenching
transition away from all our familiar and comfortable habits into a stark
and rigorous new economic landscape.


The credit economy is dead, and the dead credit residue of that dead economy
is going where dead things go. It came into the world as "money," and it is
going out of this world as a death-dealing disease, and we're not going to
get over this disease until we stop generating additional zombie money out
of no productive activity whatsoever. The campaign to sustain the
unsustainable is, besides war, the greatest pitfall this society can stumble
into. It represents a squandering of our remaining scant resources and can
only produce the kind of extreme political disappointment that wrecks
nations and leads to major conflicts between them. I don't know how much Mr.
Obama buys into the current adopt-a-zombie program -- his Treasury designee,
Timothy Geithner, was apparently in on this weekend's Citicorp deal -- but
the president-elect would be wise to steer clear of whatever the walking
dead in the Bush corner are still up to.

All the activities based on getting something for nothing are dead or dying
now, in particular, buying houses and cars on credit, and so it should not
be a surprise that the two major victims are the housing and car industries.
Notice, by the way, that these are the two major ingredients of an economy
based on building suburban sprawl. That's over, too. We're done building it,
and the stuff we've already built is destined to lose both money value and
usefulness as the wrenching transition goes forward.

All this obviously begs the question: What kind of economy are we going to
live in if the old one is toast? Well, it's also pretty obvious that it will
have to be based on activities productively aimed at keeping human beings
alive in an ecology that has a future. Once you grasp this, you will see
that there is no reason to despair and more than enough for all of us to do,
so we can recover from the zombie nation disease and get on with the next
chapter of American history -- and I sure hope that Mr. Obama will get with
the new program.


To be specific about this new economy, we're going to have to make things
again, and raise things out of the earth, locally, and trade these things
for money of some kind that we earn through our own productive activities.
Don't make the mistake of thinking this is optional. The only other option
is to go through a violent sociopolitical convulsion. We ought to know from
prior examples in world history that this is not a desirable experience. So,
to avoid that, we really have to put our shoulders to the wheel and get to
work on things that matter, and do it at a scale that is consistent with
what the world really has to offer right now, especially in terms of
available energy.

In my view -- and I know this is controversial -- a much larger proportion
of the U.S. population will have to be employed in growing the food we eat.
There are many ways of arranging this, some more fair than others, and I
hope the better angels of our nature steer us in the direction of fairness
and justice. The prospects of a devalued dollar imply that we very shortly
will not be able to get the all the oil-and-gas-based "inputs" that have
made petro-agriculture possible the past century. The consequences of this
are so unthinkable that we have not been thinking about it. And, of course,
the further implications of current land-use allocation, and the
property-ownership issues entailed, suggests formidable difficulties in
rearranging the farming sector. The sooner we face all this, the better.

 

CLIP - Please read the rest at
http://www.alternet.org/environment/108481/zombie_economics:_don't_bail_out_
the_system_that_gave_us_suvs_and_strip_malls/

 

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