Shepherd
11-20-2007, 07:11 AM
AS WE APPROACH THE POST-THANKSGIVING SHOPPING SPREE
Pre-publication draft: Criticisms Requested, to [email protected]
By Shepherd Bliss (2370 words)
As Americans head into the annual holiday shopping orgy, it is a good time to explore how our excessive spending damages us. The ten busiest shopping days of the year are between the day after Thanksgiving and two days before Christmas.
“War is too important to leave to the generals,” I remember hearing as a young officer in the US Army during the l960s. “The economy is too important to leave to the economists” I have been thinking recently, as we experience the decline and possible fall of the US economy. Yet there is not much attention in the mass media to analyzing and contextualizing what is really happening to the US economy.
Professional economists writing in and quoted by the mainstream media tend to use relatively mild words like “correction,” “slowdown” and “troubled” to describe what is happening with the US economy. They often reassure us that we are just in a normal cycle, at the expense of telling more of the truth. Denial persists.
Such economists seem more intent to prop up a failing economy than help us prepare prudently for the ongoing deterioration and its multiple consequences. They seek to reduce fear so that people will continue to over-consume, buy, spend, and shop, rather than take direct actions as citizens that could address the underlying systemic problems. Our extensive spending habits are exhausting our human and environmental resources, such as fossil fuels and water. Our over-consumption fuels the increasingly chaotic climate.
Thanksgiving to New Years is the time of year that Americans tend to gorge themselves—on food and other objects. We consume precious resources as if there were no limits. The American Dream is that of excess—bigger cars, houses, and everything. Our swimming pools, golf courses, pampered lawns and guzzling Hummers create a false illusion of prosperity beneath which is a declining economy. The hidden costs and limits to growth are catching up with us.
Our nation and many of its households have gross debts. People are spending way beyond their means, reaching further than they can manage, as the recent subprime mortgage fall reveals. “Pay as you go,” the economist Scott Nearing used to say when I visited him at this farm in Maine during the l970s. We need to get back to this old-fashioned wisdom.
I do not mean to predict specifically what is going to happen with the US economy or when. I do want to note some of its fault lines that could create a crash. Economic predictions are difficult to make with any real certainty. I do want to connect some of the dots and raise an alarm while we may still have time to make some changes in our own personal economies and impact the whole.
I’m not an economist—far from it. For the last 15 years I have worked mainly as a farmer and taught a few college courses in communications, psychology, spirituality, and the humanities. While at Harvard University for most of the l970s I did join the Union of Radical Political Economists (URPE).
A RUSSIAN COMPARES THE USA & USSR ECONOMIES
An article at www.energybulletin.net by a Russian now living in the US, who is also not an economist, recently came to my attention. In an excerpt from what has expanded into a book to be published next Spring Dmitry Orlov writes, “I am not an expert or a scholar or an activist. I am more of an eye-witness. I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and this has given me insights to describe what the American collapse will look like.” Orlov’s pending book is entitled “Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects.”
The word “collapse” caught my attention, and seems appropriate to how I would describe what may be happening to the US economy. I appreciate Orlov’s eye-witness posture. My perspective is that of an activist writer seeking to stimulate more direct citizen activism.
I recently wrote an article titled “The US Economy—Recession, Depression, or Collapse?” It was posted on over a dozen websites in the US, Europe, and Latin America and produced around a hundred online comments and a variety of emails directly to me. This response stimulated me to keep the conversation going with this article.
Orlov describes various ingredients in the collapse of “modern military-industrial superpowers,” including a shortfall in the production of crude oil, foreign trade deficit, runaway military budget, and a ballooning foreign debt. He compares the USSR and the USA on these matters, adding the importance of “a humiliating military defeat.” Iraq may be to the USA what Afghanistan was to the USSR. Even with its $1 trillion military budget--larger than those of all the rest of the world combined--the US has been unable to subdue tiny Iraq.
Yet Washington continues to threaten to expand its war-making to Iran. “Any attack (on Iran) would probably double the price of oil,” writes Stanford University Professor Joel Brinkley in “What If the US Bombed Iran?” in the Nov. 18 San Francisco Chronicle. This would “drive US gasoline prices well above $5 per gallon,” according to Brinkley. The de-stabilizing consequences to the US economy of just one of the many factors that threaten our oil supply could be devastating. Many military analysts think that a US attack on Iran is likely. US war-making creates an insecure and unstable economy. Arms manufacturers profit, but at the expense of the rest of us.
A series of dominos are falling and more are likely to fall. The subprime mortgage collapse, for example, has threatened some of the US’s largest banks and financial entities. As our Earth’s climate gets more chaotic, that will further impact many elements of the economy, including the environment on which it is dependent. Modern industrial societies are based on fossil fuels; as these supplies diminish and as the demand for them increases—especially in rapidly industrializing China and India-- many aspects of contemporary life will be impacted, especially our food, which has become so dependent upon oil.
As the US economy has been declining in recent years, those of other nations have been accelerating. The unity brought about by the European Union and the strengthening of the economy of that region—though not without problems—can be seen in their currency. Whereas the euro and the dollar were on a par five years ago, today the euro is worth about one and a half times as much as the dollar.
The US is at risk that the countries that it owes money to, like China, will call in those debts, thus deepening our downward spiral. There has been increased talk recently (even at the recent OPEC meeting) of oil-producing countries in the Middle East and elsewhere going off the dollar standard in favor of the euro, which now appears to be more stable and secure than the dollar. Even some people in the US are asking to be paid in euros, rather than dollars.
So how do the mainstream newsweeklies cover the changing US economy? The U.S. News and World Report’s editor-in-chief Mortimer Zuckerman wrote “The Yellow-Light Economy” on Oct. 22. “The August panic seems like ancient history,” he assured us. He must be color blind, since that light is now red and may cause a screeching halt.
Three weeks later, in the Nov. 12 Newsweek Robert Samuelson wrote “Our Great Recession Obsession.” At least he uses the R word, which many economists have been avoiding. He details the threats—the housing “collapse” (he does use the word), oil prices, and credit problems. He leaves out a few little details, like the declining value of the US dollar.
Orlov writes about “a worthless national currency, and unhappy international creditors unwilling to extend further credit.” The US economy and many households are living off credit for which they do not have the collateral. Samuelson fails to mention that the US is already the world’s largest debtor nation. How much further in debt can we go without crashing? Some analysts even say that it is technically bankrupt, and could become practically and functionally bankrupt, if China and those to whom the US owes so much call in those debts.
It’s not a pretty picture for the US economy, regardless of how economists try to spin it. Yet humans can be very adaptable and resourceful, especially when we work together to solve common problems.
Yet Samuelson assures us that “by and large, recessions are problems, but not tragedies.” Tell that to older people on fixed budgets. He reassures us that “since World War II, there have been 10 of them, or one about every six years. On average, they’ve lasted 10 months.” He even gleefully talks about the “often-overlooked benefits” of recessions. How come I am not reassured?
“We’ve been there before,” Samuelson calmly asserts. In fact, the US and the world economies have never been to where we currently are and where the trends are leading us. We even have a US president and vice-president openly talking about World War III and the use of nuclear weapons. Talk about damage.
“The market for existing homes is ‘hitting the low right now,’” a Nov. 14 Cox News article quotes the hopeful “chief economist for the National Association of Realtors as saying at the group’s recent annual conference.” He predicts a “modest recovery.” Yet a Dow Jones News report on the same day starts as follows, “The chaos in the mortgage market is only going to get worse in 2008.” Which economist to believe?
“Stiff upper lip” are more words that come back from my military training, which was designed to make me obey, rather than think. We need to be thinking outside the box these days and responding to the mass media about how it distorts reality, including that of our worsening economy, in order to cheerlead for consumption, especially during the holiday spending spree.
READERS RESPOND
Following are some of the comments sent in by readers of my article posted on various sites:
“Let’s talk about solutions,” Sunspot writes. “I’d like to challenge anyone willing to share some of their most inspiring actions taken to change our current situation for the better.” This helped organize the comments that followed, and many people responded with what they are actually doing.
One reader sent in a quote from Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine, “An economic system that requires constant growth generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological, or financial.”
Another wrote, “I often entertain the notion that a deep economic depression is just the medicine the US needs.”
Carolyn Baker on her website Carolynbaker.net writes that collapse “is not a future event but one that is unfolding now.” She recommends that people see the new documentary “What a Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire.” (www.whatawaytogomovie.com.)
“Please, Mr. Bliss. collapse? Hardly. there are still football games to watch, shopping malls to roam and bars to frequent. We have so much it can’t possibly go away. We’re RICH!, “Sunspot later playfully wrote.
A house of cards creates the cover of Richard Heinberg’s new book Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Decline. It is an apt image for the US economy. Perhaps we are living in what has been described as a “false economy” and as a “façade” that may soon topple. There are many blows that could cause the fragile house to fall down.
WHAT TO DO?
So what can citizens do? Actually, quite a lot. Choosing the appropriate place to live as things begin to decline more rapidly is important. For a variety of reasons, including a good job offer, in 2003 I moved away from my home of over a dozen years, though I did not sell my farm. After three good years in Hawai’i teaching college I decided to move back to my farm in semi-rural Sonoma County, Northern California. This is where most of my friends live, so I decided to take my stand here. Rooting oneself in the best possible place is crucial. The climate is mild here, the growing season long, the soil good, and there is adequate water.
But the most important thing is what economists call “social capital”—good people, many of whom I know, and community. Though “the grass may seem greener” elsewhere, staying where one has friends and has lived for a while is crucial. “Stay put, get to know your place, your bioregion, your water, soil, farmers, city councils, Board of Supervisors, political parties…” writes HopeDance publisher Bob Banner in the new book Sustainability: Radical Solutions Inspiring Hope (www.hopedance.org).
The economic problems of the current Sonoma County economy include that it is too based on three industries—wine, tourism, and technology. As the decline deepens expensive wines, travel, and new gadgets will become less important. So the key for our county’s survival, as well as that of others, will be to diversify the economy, which used to be more diverse. Many different kinds of businesses meeting local felt needs would be crucial. Redirecting one’s purchasing behavior more toward local industries will be crucial to rebuilding local economies.
Whereas less than 2% of Americans are currently farmers, we need to expand this number. The average bite of food in the US travels 1500 miles from field to fork. Such long distance transportation, especially for food from overseas, will become increasingly expensive. The creation of community gardens will be essential for survival. Fortunately, we have a lot of gardeners, who can expand their skills and apply them to agriculture.
I feel a rumbling at the base of the US economy, as if it were a volcano threatening to erupt. While living in Hawai’i for three years recently I watched Kilauea explode. The US economy may be on the verge of such an eruption. Prudent planning is in order, or one risks being damaged.
(Dr. Shepherd Bliss, [email protected], is a semi-retired college teacher who currently teaches at Sonoma State University. He has run Kokopelli Farm for most of the last 15 years and has contributed to over 20 books, most recently to Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, www.vowvop.org.)
Pre-publication draft: Criticisms Requested, to [email protected]
By Shepherd Bliss (2370 words)
As Americans head into the annual holiday shopping orgy, it is a good time to explore how our excessive spending damages us. The ten busiest shopping days of the year are between the day after Thanksgiving and two days before Christmas.
“War is too important to leave to the generals,” I remember hearing as a young officer in the US Army during the l960s. “The economy is too important to leave to the economists” I have been thinking recently, as we experience the decline and possible fall of the US economy. Yet there is not much attention in the mass media to analyzing and contextualizing what is really happening to the US economy.
Professional economists writing in and quoted by the mainstream media tend to use relatively mild words like “correction,” “slowdown” and “troubled” to describe what is happening with the US economy. They often reassure us that we are just in a normal cycle, at the expense of telling more of the truth. Denial persists.
Such economists seem more intent to prop up a failing economy than help us prepare prudently for the ongoing deterioration and its multiple consequences. They seek to reduce fear so that people will continue to over-consume, buy, spend, and shop, rather than take direct actions as citizens that could address the underlying systemic problems. Our extensive spending habits are exhausting our human and environmental resources, such as fossil fuels and water. Our over-consumption fuels the increasingly chaotic climate.
Thanksgiving to New Years is the time of year that Americans tend to gorge themselves—on food and other objects. We consume precious resources as if there were no limits. The American Dream is that of excess—bigger cars, houses, and everything. Our swimming pools, golf courses, pampered lawns and guzzling Hummers create a false illusion of prosperity beneath which is a declining economy. The hidden costs and limits to growth are catching up with us.
Our nation and many of its households have gross debts. People are spending way beyond their means, reaching further than they can manage, as the recent subprime mortgage fall reveals. “Pay as you go,” the economist Scott Nearing used to say when I visited him at this farm in Maine during the l970s. We need to get back to this old-fashioned wisdom.
I do not mean to predict specifically what is going to happen with the US economy or when. I do want to note some of its fault lines that could create a crash. Economic predictions are difficult to make with any real certainty. I do want to connect some of the dots and raise an alarm while we may still have time to make some changes in our own personal economies and impact the whole.
I’m not an economist—far from it. For the last 15 years I have worked mainly as a farmer and taught a few college courses in communications, psychology, spirituality, and the humanities. While at Harvard University for most of the l970s I did join the Union of Radical Political Economists (URPE).
A RUSSIAN COMPARES THE USA & USSR ECONOMIES
An article at www.energybulletin.net by a Russian now living in the US, who is also not an economist, recently came to my attention. In an excerpt from what has expanded into a book to be published next Spring Dmitry Orlov writes, “I am not an expert or a scholar or an activist. I am more of an eye-witness. I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and this has given me insights to describe what the American collapse will look like.” Orlov’s pending book is entitled “Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects.”
The word “collapse” caught my attention, and seems appropriate to how I would describe what may be happening to the US economy. I appreciate Orlov’s eye-witness posture. My perspective is that of an activist writer seeking to stimulate more direct citizen activism.
I recently wrote an article titled “The US Economy—Recession, Depression, or Collapse?” It was posted on over a dozen websites in the US, Europe, and Latin America and produced around a hundred online comments and a variety of emails directly to me. This response stimulated me to keep the conversation going with this article.
Orlov describes various ingredients in the collapse of “modern military-industrial superpowers,” including a shortfall in the production of crude oil, foreign trade deficit, runaway military budget, and a ballooning foreign debt. He compares the USSR and the USA on these matters, adding the importance of “a humiliating military defeat.” Iraq may be to the USA what Afghanistan was to the USSR. Even with its $1 trillion military budget--larger than those of all the rest of the world combined--the US has been unable to subdue tiny Iraq.
Yet Washington continues to threaten to expand its war-making to Iran. “Any attack (on Iran) would probably double the price of oil,” writes Stanford University Professor Joel Brinkley in “What If the US Bombed Iran?” in the Nov. 18 San Francisco Chronicle. This would “drive US gasoline prices well above $5 per gallon,” according to Brinkley. The de-stabilizing consequences to the US economy of just one of the many factors that threaten our oil supply could be devastating. Many military analysts think that a US attack on Iran is likely. US war-making creates an insecure and unstable economy. Arms manufacturers profit, but at the expense of the rest of us.
A series of dominos are falling and more are likely to fall. The subprime mortgage collapse, for example, has threatened some of the US’s largest banks and financial entities. As our Earth’s climate gets more chaotic, that will further impact many elements of the economy, including the environment on which it is dependent. Modern industrial societies are based on fossil fuels; as these supplies diminish and as the demand for them increases—especially in rapidly industrializing China and India-- many aspects of contemporary life will be impacted, especially our food, which has become so dependent upon oil.
As the US economy has been declining in recent years, those of other nations have been accelerating. The unity brought about by the European Union and the strengthening of the economy of that region—though not without problems—can be seen in their currency. Whereas the euro and the dollar were on a par five years ago, today the euro is worth about one and a half times as much as the dollar.
The US is at risk that the countries that it owes money to, like China, will call in those debts, thus deepening our downward spiral. There has been increased talk recently (even at the recent OPEC meeting) of oil-producing countries in the Middle East and elsewhere going off the dollar standard in favor of the euro, which now appears to be more stable and secure than the dollar. Even some people in the US are asking to be paid in euros, rather than dollars.
So how do the mainstream newsweeklies cover the changing US economy? The U.S. News and World Report’s editor-in-chief Mortimer Zuckerman wrote “The Yellow-Light Economy” on Oct. 22. “The August panic seems like ancient history,” he assured us. He must be color blind, since that light is now red and may cause a screeching halt.
Three weeks later, in the Nov. 12 Newsweek Robert Samuelson wrote “Our Great Recession Obsession.” At least he uses the R word, which many economists have been avoiding. He details the threats—the housing “collapse” (he does use the word), oil prices, and credit problems. He leaves out a few little details, like the declining value of the US dollar.
Orlov writes about “a worthless national currency, and unhappy international creditors unwilling to extend further credit.” The US economy and many households are living off credit for which they do not have the collateral. Samuelson fails to mention that the US is already the world’s largest debtor nation. How much further in debt can we go without crashing? Some analysts even say that it is technically bankrupt, and could become practically and functionally bankrupt, if China and those to whom the US owes so much call in those debts.
It’s not a pretty picture for the US economy, regardless of how economists try to spin it. Yet humans can be very adaptable and resourceful, especially when we work together to solve common problems.
Yet Samuelson assures us that “by and large, recessions are problems, but not tragedies.” Tell that to older people on fixed budgets. He reassures us that “since World War II, there have been 10 of them, or one about every six years. On average, they’ve lasted 10 months.” He even gleefully talks about the “often-overlooked benefits” of recessions. How come I am not reassured?
“We’ve been there before,” Samuelson calmly asserts. In fact, the US and the world economies have never been to where we currently are and where the trends are leading us. We even have a US president and vice-president openly talking about World War III and the use of nuclear weapons. Talk about damage.
“The market for existing homes is ‘hitting the low right now,’” a Nov. 14 Cox News article quotes the hopeful “chief economist for the National Association of Realtors as saying at the group’s recent annual conference.” He predicts a “modest recovery.” Yet a Dow Jones News report on the same day starts as follows, “The chaos in the mortgage market is only going to get worse in 2008.” Which economist to believe?
“Stiff upper lip” are more words that come back from my military training, which was designed to make me obey, rather than think. We need to be thinking outside the box these days and responding to the mass media about how it distorts reality, including that of our worsening economy, in order to cheerlead for consumption, especially during the holiday spending spree.
READERS RESPOND
Following are some of the comments sent in by readers of my article posted on various sites:
“Let’s talk about solutions,” Sunspot writes. “I’d like to challenge anyone willing to share some of their most inspiring actions taken to change our current situation for the better.” This helped organize the comments that followed, and many people responded with what they are actually doing.
One reader sent in a quote from Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine, “An economic system that requires constant growth generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological, or financial.”
Another wrote, “I often entertain the notion that a deep economic depression is just the medicine the US needs.”
Carolyn Baker on her website Carolynbaker.net writes that collapse “is not a future event but one that is unfolding now.” She recommends that people see the new documentary “What a Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire.” (www.whatawaytogomovie.com.)
“Please, Mr. Bliss. collapse? Hardly. there are still football games to watch, shopping malls to roam and bars to frequent. We have so much it can’t possibly go away. We’re RICH!, “Sunspot later playfully wrote.
A house of cards creates the cover of Richard Heinberg’s new book Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Decline. It is an apt image for the US economy. Perhaps we are living in what has been described as a “false economy” and as a “façade” that may soon topple. There are many blows that could cause the fragile house to fall down.
WHAT TO DO?
So what can citizens do? Actually, quite a lot. Choosing the appropriate place to live as things begin to decline more rapidly is important. For a variety of reasons, including a good job offer, in 2003 I moved away from my home of over a dozen years, though I did not sell my farm. After three good years in Hawai’i teaching college I decided to move back to my farm in semi-rural Sonoma County, Northern California. This is where most of my friends live, so I decided to take my stand here. Rooting oneself in the best possible place is crucial. The climate is mild here, the growing season long, the soil good, and there is adequate water.
But the most important thing is what economists call “social capital”—good people, many of whom I know, and community. Though “the grass may seem greener” elsewhere, staying where one has friends and has lived for a while is crucial. “Stay put, get to know your place, your bioregion, your water, soil, farmers, city councils, Board of Supervisors, political parties…” writes HopeDance publisher Bob Banner in the new book Sustainability: Radical Solutions Inspiring Hope (www.hopedance.org).
The economic problems of the current Sonoma County economy include that it is too based on three industries—wine, tourism, and technology. As the decline deepens expensive wines, travel, and new gadgets will become less important. So the key for our county’s survival, as well as that of others, will be to diversify the economy, which used to be more diverse. Many different kinds of businesses meeting local felt needs would be crucial. Redirecting one’s purchasing behavior more toward local industries will be crucial to rebuilding local economies.
Whereas less than 2% of Americans are currently farmers, we need to expand this number. The average bite of food in the US travels 1500 miles from field to fork. Such long distance transportation, especially for food from overseas, will become increasingly expensive. The creation of community gardens will be essential for survival. Fortunately, we have a lot of gardeners, who can expand their skills and apply them to agriculture.
I feel a rumbling at the base of the US economy, as if it were a volcano threatening to erupt. While living in Hawai’i for three years recently I watched Kilauea explode. The US economy may be on the verge of such an eruption. Prudent planning is in order, or one risks being damaged.
(Dr. Shepherd Bliss, [email protected], is a semi-retired college teacher who currently teaches at Sonoma State University. He has run Kokopelli Farm for most of the last 15 years and has contributed to over 20 books, most recently to Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, www.vowvop.org.)