JAMES KUNSTLER: Growth

[Tace]

James Kunstler -- Clusterfuck Nation

Americans ought to regard the word "growth" with trepidation. When invoked by presidents and economists, it is meant to imply ideas like "more" or "better." It's a habit of thinking left over from the exuberant phase of the industrial age, when there was always more of everything to get. Nowadays, though, as we enter terminal years of cheap energy, the word "growth" invokes a new set ideas.

For instance, "impossible." With the price of oil edging toward $70-a-barrel now, and likely to flirt with $100 by the end of the year, the effect will be higher costs for virtually all products and services, and tremendous stress on every socioeconomic organism from the family to government at all levels to the Ford Motor Car Corporation. The only "growth" we might expect under these conditions is the growth in our exertions to stay where we are, and the truth is that many of the weak will simply fall behind.

Another idea that "growth" might invoke would be a fear of an unstoppable rising population competing for scarcer resources: incomes, energy, food, shelter. Surely this is one of the specters behind the illegal immigration issue, a dawning recognition that the American cornucopia is becoming an emptier basket, with fewer fruits, less energy, and not many gold nuggets left in it.

For those of us positioned against the suburban juggernaut, "growth" invokes the destruction of more landscape, the conversion of pastures and croplands into McHousing subdivisions, with a long menu of additional liabilities -- not least being the huge investment in a living arrangement with no future. One would think the "homebuilders" could see this coming -- with oil edging toward $70 -- but the truth is that their companies are programmed for only one kind of behavior -- to keep building 3000 square foot McHouses 27 miles outside Dallas, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Denver, et cetera. Since they won't change the programming, then they will continue their destructive behavior until circumstances make it impossible for them to continue -- when the housing bubble blows up in their faces -- and then the companies will just die.

more

http://worldnewstrust.org/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=2915

[xchrom]

1. k & r

[brokensymmetry]

2. K&R n/t

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[Demeter]

3. Growth Just Means Bigger, More of the Same: We Need Improvement!

Improvement is the goal of technology, but in its zeal to strip Reality, science, and ethics out of public discourse and corporate boardrooms, the GOP has left us with obesity, deficits, unemployment, and other kinds of unhealthy growth. Defeat the GOP and the DINOs!

[The2ndWheel]

4. Improvement of what?

Growth.

[Demeter]

5. Obvious Needed Improvements

1) Energy supply, demand, usage, efficiencies: the whole Carter plan that Reagan trashed, with suitable updates for the advances in technology since 1976.

2) Public Health: national local and personal; from the basics of water, sanitation and pollution to single-payer health care and prevention, nutrition, and education on how to live healthy.

3) Education: Scrap the crap and give to each at his or her ability a life-long opportunity to develop the mind and body with the skills of successful life.

4) Election Innovations: reform the electoral process and drain the pus pockets that infect the public body. Public financing, limited campaigning, NO corporate participation on any level.

4) DeBushify the government: other countries have found it necessary to root out corruption after being defiled by totalitarians. We are no exception there.

5) Break the corporate nightmare. Corporations must be chopped down to size, so that they serve their shareholders, the people and the nation, not the other way around.

I'm sure you can think of others to add.