Changing Ruts

Why Our National Denial is Killing Us

by John Kelley / May 22nd, 2008

In the northern Michigan where I spent much of my life, there is an interesting condition that occurs each spring. The dirt and gravel roads turn to mud each day as the sun melts the snow and thaws their surface, and then they freeze each night as the temperature drops. In the daytime the roads are rivers of mud, making it easy to slide, skid and get stuck. It gets so bad that some rural schools have mud days, because buses can’t get down the dirt roads without getting stuck.

In the late afternoon the temperature drops refreezing the ruts of the last vehicles of yesterday in the new day’s mud. Driving then isn’t that bad as long as you stay in one of the rows of ruts. Turning is a rough adventure, as you have to fight the steering wheel to get your car out of one rut to another. It stays that way for a few weeks to a month, and then the snow is gone. The ground thoroughly thaws allowing the surface water to drain away, the grader comes through and the roads return to their normal washboard surface.

America is stuck in a rut, an invisible rut of our own making. We know we are in a rut, one that is carrying us off the road, but have little clue as what to do about it. We know our level of consumption is killing us, gasoline and food prices being the wakeup call, yet we have no clue as to how we are going to get out of this mess. Politicians at all levels in both parties are so dependent on maintaining our path in the rut they manufacture their own facts to confirm it. The most obvious evidence is to exclude food and energy prices as a measure of inflation. Hence the fed can declare inflation still manageable at 1.9% when it is really 11.7%.

The causes of our energy-money trap are many but the biggest one is policy. Despite identifying the problem of foreign dependence on oil 30 years ago, corporate control of government has kept us on this plan for self destruction actually increasing our per capita use of oil significantly during the same time. We have had government officials at the federal, state and local level who have opposed higher mileage standards, supported oil company subsidies while reducing them for green alternatives (Reagan wiped out most of Carter’s energy alternative subsidies in the first 60 days of his administration), encouraged consumerism around the world to increase profits driving up demand, loosened investment and banking regulations promoting speculation, and most importantly reduced our dollar to worthless paper.

To hide our national slide and maintain profits, there has been a consistent piling up of government debt, a constant attack on wages and benefits for workers, outsourcing of production capacity, a constant attack on freedom in the name of security and a steady criminalization of the poor to justify exclusion from the promise of progress in America. “Economic Growth” has been completely decoupled from the cost of living and quality of life.

Bush kicked it up a notch, coming off the dot com crash, then the economic impact of 9-11 he was looking at sliding into a recession while moving to control mid-east oil reserves, necessary to maintain an oil based economy. The solution, run the presses, print money, lower interest rate, moving from an economy that was based in production to one based in speculation.

To continue to put actual capital into the economy required getting citizens to give up the equity capital they held. That was done by promising every day Americans to leverage all of that equity in the great speculative game of Wall Street speculation including buying their own debt. That debt was encouraged by pushing bigger houses, SUVs and unneeded crap on credit cards they couldn’t pay for through a whole new spectrum of “financial products”. The result was the biggest transfer of wealth in the history of the country. As our personal and national debt increases exponentially, the presses run faster and faster to keep the bubble growing to prevent the inevitable collapse, insuring it will be bigger when it does happen. When it does the big guys take what is left, your house, your savings, and your car.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/05/changing-ruts/