"Consumerism" Is Dead -- Can Obama Lead Us to a Downscaled Lifestyle?

[NicholeW.]

"Consumerism" Is Dead -- Can Obama Lead Us to a Downscaled Lifestyle?
By James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler.com. Posted February 26, 2009.

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/128920/

The public perception of the ongoing fiasco in governance has moved from sheer, mute incomprehension to goggle-eyed panic as the scrims of unreality peel away revealing something like a national death-watch scene in history's intensive care unit. Is the USA in recession, depression, or collapse? People are at least beginning to ask. Nature's way of hinting that something truly creepy may be up is when both Paul Volcker and George Soros both declare on the same day that the economic landscape is looking darker than the Great Depression.

It's not too late for President Obama to start uttering these truths so that we can avoid a turn to fascism and get on with the real business of America's next phase of history -- living locally, working hard at things that matter, and preserving civilized culture. What a lot of us can see now staring out of the abyss is a new dark age. I don't think it's necessarily our destiny to end up that way, but these days we're not doing much to avoid it.

[mina.magpie]

an awful lot of reasonable people have begun to ask whether President Obama is a stooge of whatever remains of Wall Street, with Citigroup and Goldman Sachs's puppeteer, Robert Rubin, pulling strings behind an arras in the Oval Office.

Waaay valid question.

EDIT: Though the budget and the budget speech did sound more in the right direction.

Mina.

[NicholeW.]

I think if you focus on that you miss the rather more valid questions asked later.

[lisagurl]

living locally, working hard at things that matter, and preserving civilized culture

But it seems that civilized culture is one of greed and self preservation.

[Alyssa M.]

As Americans engage in an orgy of bashing greedy bankers (and ertainly they deserve some of the blame) I ask: how much debt have you yourself taken on? My debt is about 10% of my annual income (all my debts, not balanced by, e.g., retirement savings, which gives me positive net assets). The average in America is 100%. See:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2009/02/household_debt_vs_gdp.html?ft=1&f=93559255

Now, why the huge rise since 2000? It's nice to blame Bush, and certainly his buy-buy-buy rhetoric bears part of the gain. Another part is Greenspan encouraging people to borrow-borrow-borrow (and he pushed ARMs in particular circa 2005).

A third part is the dysfunctional relationship between China and the West (and certainly Bush and Greenspan are implicated in this). China began lending to the West like mad after the Asian financial crisis in 1998, basically behaving like all the banks we deplore, in order to avoid another domestic or regional economic crisis by racking up a surplus. The West acted like all the irresponsible borrowers we ought to equally deplore. LOTS of people saw this problem coming and have warned about it for years. Here's a discussion:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/opinion/02krugman.html

-- edit --

Oh, yeah, there was a point to all that!

I expect we'll reduce our consumerism to an economically sustainable level. If Obama is really good, we might even move toward environmental sustainability (through taxes reflecting environmental externalities of consumption). But Obama wasn't, as widely rumored, born in a stable in Bethlehem. So for any fundamental change in human nature, we'll have to wait a bit longer.

~Alyssa

[Lisbeth]

Well, our lifestyle has been reduced to food, medicine, shelter, heat, and telephone/internet. Tain't much more than that.

[RebeccaFog]

Well, our lifestyle has been reduced to food, medicine, shelter, heat, and telephone/internet. Tain't much more than that.

Mine's always been like that.  With little to no debt.

[tekla]

I love JHK and the way he writes, he's been on this train for a long time now, and I don't think the life he is describing is an uncivilized culture, except in the sense that he is talking about people really doing, like, physical and mental work.