The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

So Alan Greenspan kicked off the week by declaring that America's economic infrastructure was fundamentally sound. Apparently he hasn't noticed that we have become a nation of fat-assed infotainment zombies living in a toxic medium of car dependency, non-stop advertising, sugar addiction, and credit card binging.

The tanking markets and the falling dollar replied unambiguously.

I know ordinary people who are scrambling desperately to move their retirement funds out of the stock market. Foreign investors will be next in line. A hangover effect of America's 50-year industrial hegemony still props up the idea that dollar-backed corporate securities are the last safe refuge for floating currencies. But, guess what? We've outsourced our industrial hegemony. Now what America produces is cooked books, "creative" financing rackets, consumer debt, TV shows, fried snacks, parking lots, and movies about teen-age problems with body fluids. That's some economy.

We've reached an economic (and civilizational) dead end.

I believe that the next phase of our national experience will be about the inescapable need to downscale our economic relations and our living arrangements. By this I do not mean that we become a lesser nation than we were in the past. World events and historic circumstances will soon compel us to live locally and to recreate networks of locally-based, fine-grained economic relations to take the place of the high-milage, WalMart, suburban sprawl way-of-life to which we have unfortunately become habituated.

I believe the transition will be rather harsh. There will be some winners and lots of losers. The losers, for the most part, will be those who try in futility to continue the current arrangement. We will have to become a more rigorous people and find a national purpose (and personal purpose) greater than the freedom to comparison shop for chain store bargains.

I'll spell out what I mean by all this in the days ahead.