The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

The New York Times reported Saturday that car sales fell 30 percent in October, commenting that "strong auto sales this year have been a key contributor in propping up consumer spending, which in turn has been the main impetus of economic growth."

This ought to raise several troubling issues, the most obvious one being: is that all our economy is about? Buying and selling cars? In a way, the anwer is yes. The US economy is now based on the creation and maintenance of suburban sprawl and all its furnishings and accessories. Cars happen to be major accessories. So are suburban houses (Realtors call them "homes" to try to instantly invoke an emotional connection to what is, after all, just another consumer product).

What keeps the cycle of car-buying and house-buying going? Easy credit. Loans. Often with little-to-no collateral involved. Often to people with poor records of repaying loans.

What happens when the pool of all potential borrowers (even the most marginal) shrinks to near zero and even deceptive gimmicks, like "zero-percent financing," fail to bring in new ones? Then there is no more economic activity in the United States because we don't do anything else here (except make movies, TV shows, and pop music and only a tiny percent of Americans can be in show biz, though practically everyone wants to be). We've outsourced the actual making of most mundane products to distant nations where people work for peanuts. Everyday retail trade is conducted through "efficient" national chain stores, not through local networks of complex, fine-grained economic relations. We subsist on Caesar salads the components of which travel an average of 3000 miles from field to table (unless you belong to that segment of the population who get by solely on chicken McNuggets, Hostess Ho-Hos, and Pepsi Cola, which travel the same truck routes as the Caesar salads).

These elements point in the direction of a system unwinding. More tragically, as it unwinds, we will be stuck with all the unsustainable furnishings -- the farflung commodity housing, the redundant chain stores, the countless miles of blacktop in need of continual repair, the gazillion cars that we can no longer afford to replace (not to mention the unsold inventories of no-longer affordable new cars). We'll be stuck living in places that are not worth living in, and not worth caring about, with no networks of local economic interdependency, far from any food supplies.
These are our prospects even without probability of international military mischief, Jihad, de-stabilized oil markets, and terrorism.

There's really only one reasonable way out of this predicament: the re-scaling of America and the reconstruction of local economies.

We are not prepared.

On the same page in the business section as that Times story on car sales, was another story about the fantastic success of the Humvee, the military super-car that has become a status symbol among the hyper-suburban rich. A marketing consultant named Dr. Clotaire Rapaille was quoted as saying: "People told me, 'I can protect my family [in a Humvee]. If someone bumps into me, they're dead.' People love this feeling."

Now that's marketing savvy!