Why the Bailout Won’t Work
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America was built on cheap oil and there are no viable alternatives to sustain our present usage. Not nuclear or solar or wind power will allow us to continue living as as we have been. Now that oil has peaked, America has to finally face that our way of life is unsustainable.
The House of Representatives voted against a measure on Monday to bailout the mess created by the mismanagement of funds in the financial sector by some guys in suits who for some reason aren’t really getting very much heat for it.
Ok, you fucked everything up for everyone. Here’s $700 billion.
Makes me want to go out & fuck something up.
Could we at least force them to put away their luxury SUV’s & drive used Pintos or force them to marry their mistresses or something ??
Anyhow, eventually the Politicos will approve some kind of package. Which will be like placing a band aid on a gun shot wound. That wound being greed itself which is 100% legal under Capitalism & has been bleeding the souls of the little people since the dawn of this experiment we call America. The only problem with that band aid we call a bailout package is that it isn’t going to fix anything.
Here’s why :
The financial crisis we are in was predicted a long time ago. By a bunch of smart guys no one listens to bcuz for one, they’re smarter than everyone else & no one likes a know-it-all & two, no one liked what they had to say. Who wants to hear that the party is over ??
These very men whose job it is to compile & analyze the data have been saying for years that America was doomed for failure, a disaster waiting to happen. That’s bcuz this country was predicated upon a lie. That lie was that there would always be an unlimited supply of cheap oil.
Back in the 40’s & 50’s when Americans left the cities to move into the suburbs & railroads were destroyed by the car manufacturers in favor of 3 lane highways (which we somehow ended up paying for as taxpayers – thanks GM !) a disastrous chain of events was set in place that we are finally seeing play out on the national stage.
You see when America moved out into the suburbs they gave away their only shot at a sustainable way of life & a future for their children. The energy required to sustain a country at that level of waste & foolhardiness where we were commuting 20 -50 miles each way to get to work was simply beyond the means of the world’s supply of oil & the planet in general.
If we had worked harder on improving living conditions for ourselves in the city when we wanted to move to the suburbs to get away from it all ( & there were capitalist wolves only too happy to oblige us) we could have averted this disaster or at least postponed it long enough to find a solution. But as it is we are coming off of oil hard & fast & the withdrawals as we can see, aren’t going to be pretty.
For one, there’ll be soaring food costs & the leisure & entertainment sector of the economy taking a nose dive on par with Tom Cruise’s career trajectory bcuz people aren’t going to be spending their dead presidents on extras as they won’t have any extra cuz it will all be going into the gas tank & to the power bill. No more dinner & a movie & certainly no more vacations (bye bye Las Vegas).
Even if we switch over to Solar & Wind power immediately (which isn’t going to happen) we still don’t have the capacity to power all the cars & all the homes we have built at their present level of consumption not to mention all the homes we are set to build due to our growing population & their power & transportation needs.
The housing mortgage crisis in case you were wondering is just a distraction to draw attention away from the real cause of this mess & that is: Illegal Immigrants. ( Oops, sorry .. I‘ve gotta stop watching Lou Dobbs. ) No the real cause is our reliance on oil & our unsustainable way of living. It had to end sometime & that time is .. well, 15 minutes ago.
Even if the entire state of Kansas decides to take one for the team & move to Bulgaria where they got like 15 camels for every camel & we throw in Rhode Island for good measure houses in suburbia will still end up sitting cold, dark & vacant. And our landfills will still contain more than a few SUV’s. Yet no one seems to want to be the one to say that the American way of life is an unsustainable one & that Americans need to move back into the cities, stop driving small-apartments-on-wheels & simply stop consuming all this useless stuff.
A man by the name of Dr. M. King Hubbard predicted that U.S. oil would peak in the 70’s & it did. Of course he was a laughing stock until then even though he was the preeminent expert in his field when he made the prediction in 1956. Well, he also predicted Global oil would peak in the 1990’s. The gas crisis which drove up prices & drove down demand in the 1970’s may have delayed that imminent reality but look, here we are.
It is obvious that if we had remained on the train & in the city & not converted to the ultra inefficient automobile & moved to the ‘Burbs that we’d be facing an entirely different scenario. A passenger train uses far less fuel per passenger, requires far fewer government subsidies, causes fewer deaths & also pollutes less than a comparable amount of automobiles. And moving someone 5-10 miles instead of 20-50 would’ve also helped.
Based on these numbers if we hadn’t adopted the automobile in the first place we wouldn’t be facing this crisis.
Which may end up saving us in the end.
One of the most overlooked upsides to this energy crisis is it is forcing us to rethink our way of life & that is having a positive effect. Pollution, obesity, accident fatalities & healthcare costs are all down since we are all driving less. Not to mention our being forced to walk, carpool & use more mass transit will only increase our familiarity with our neighbors & thereby increase our sense of community which is what we’ll need to find solutions for the coming crisis.
Ordinary Americans are going to have to take matters into their own hands & learn to rely on one another whether that means combining households/incomes once blackouts increase or establishing a community task force to find sustainable ways to supply electricity to their homes once we go completely off-grid or simply pitching in to start their own community bus system to get around.
Gone are the days of peering over our neatly manicured hedges or over the steering wheels of our SUV’s to gaze upon neighbors we call strangers. This energy crisis is going to force us to get to know one another. To meet as equals who are no longer divided along tax brackets & levels of affluence. But who are going to need each other if we are going to survive & even thrive in this the New America.
This is the End of the World as we know it. Goodbye 4-lane highways & suburban sprawl. Goodbye pollution, separatism & isolation.
Hello brand new world.
2 Comments
Wow, great job.
I like what you write here and I like your enthusiasm for the coming changes. However, I disagree that we’ll see these coming changes in how we relate to one another. And here’s why.
The capitalist system we live in is based on two things, capital and markets. It needs existing capital in order to create and then it needs markets in order to get more capital. Notice how there is no mention of the environment, the Earth, the planet, universe, people, etc… That’s because our current system privileges those with capital and those who are able to find and/or create new markets.
Enter the “Green” revolution. So far, most green products have been marketed to the wealthier folks among us. That’s not going to prevent harmful effects from climate change, everyone knows this. “But it’s a start,” they say. And in some sense, they’re right. Only, it’s not going to be the ‘Green’ products that we currently think of that prevent harmful climactic changes. Rather, it’s going to be new ‘Green’ hard-core industrial products and processes that will be used to build the green and other products we use each day, the buildings, trains, automobiles, bikes, planes, etc… Anyway, the point is, our capitalist system will find its markets, build its capital, AND prevent human-destroying effects from climate change.
The bailout is only one way to provide a capital foundation to newly emerging markets. Will it make life better for those of us without the ability to take advantage of the new $250,000 FDIC limit … no. I don’t think most of us will even notice any differences or changes … unfortunately. The changes we’ll notice will be in the big financial companies and large corporations. Their products will change. Their practices will change. But our capitalist (and therefore oppressive, exploitative, and dominating) system will remain the same.
The only way for a system to change is for people to realize that it’s the system that needs to be changed. And, like you write above, in order to change the system, we need to come together. We need to “meet as equals who are no longer divided along tax brackets & levels of affluence. But who are going to need each other if we are going to survive & even thrive in this the New America.”