What Economic Crisis?

Well, it has been a few months since I last wrote, proving my own inability to contribute regularly to this blog. Yet the thoughts remain here to return to when I am ready. In the past few months a lot has changed. Gas prices are back down to below what they were last year at this time, though everyone still complains about the price at the pump (last year prices). Yet now we have a full scale financial meltdown (there I said it too, in case we haven't heard it enough) and have a brand new president. So its good news all around. I doubt I am the only person who is getting tired of hearing about the various companies that are failing due to a misplaced confidence in their own blind calculations in the pyramid scheme of the American housing market. I saw this coming two and a half years ago and I am no economist or financial analyst. I was wondering if I was crazy then for not understanding how these new unregulated derivatives were such a great thing. I am still wondering if I live in my own simple world of madness as I lay in bed in the morning listening to the radio, each day announcing a new way to give money to the people who made the bad judgements to get us into this situation. They can't be serious, can they? And if they are, we can't seriously be considering giving them money, can we? Oh, we are.

Well, I am very excited. This is the time I have been waiting for, for years. The unsustainable, intensive care capitalism that has been the corporate status quo for decades has finally revealed itself for what it truly is, a charade. A facade of material wealth inflated by bad loans and an enormous throughput of fossil fuel energy. When both of those fragile props are shaken, the whole system shudders, wobbles and falls. As we wobble, it is laughable that we are actually considering trying to prop up the edifice with more bad loans (2 Trillion from the future taxpayers of the U.S.) or with the throughput of more energy (Clean Coal, Syngas, Drill, Baby, Drill!) It reminds me of a story about the Alewife fish in lake Erie. Alewives were introduced to the lake by game managers to provide food for the sport fish (salmonids) of the lake. The problem is that the baby alewives didn't provide the food for the salmonids as hoped. Instead the alewives ate the same food as the baby salmonids, and even ate the baby salmonids themselves, and so reduced the total sport fish population. The alewives were so good at eating the food in the lake that eventually their populations got really big. As part of this equation, Lake Erie was quite polluted with excessive algae growth from nutrient runoff and phosphate detergents. As the Clean Water Act began to be enforced the algae growth was reduced, causing a cascade up the food web, leading to a major die off in the alewife population. Dead alewives by the truckloads were washing up on the beach. The alewife population in the lake became so reduced that it was nearly extirpated entirely. Which would have been good, since they were artificially introduced and caused a lot of problems in the lake. Yet, groups formed to call for actions to Save the Alewives. Not everything that goes away is bad.

I feel like the financial bailout, the talk of keeping property values high or growing, the bailout of auto manufacturers, trying to keep the price of oil and gas low, trying to keep food cheap and low quality, trying to keep retail sales high for the holidays is all trying to Save the Alewives. We have heard about the problems caused by all these behaviors, in our culture, in our communities, in our families, in our environment, in our foreign relations, in our own health, and yet now when they are on the verge of a natural death, we are putting these failing systems on life support. Perhaps it is time to let them go and move on. That is when the excitement starts.