OK, I give up. When I hear Ed of the Ed Show calling for help for GM until things get better. Problem is they are not going to get better.
I have already advanced my reasons why. Cars of the personal variety are not an option for millions, as they once were. They cost more than our economy will be able to create. Likewise metrosprawl houses.
What we have needed for decades and what I have been saying for months is an economy that goes beyond the superficial fixes of green, to a recreation of living, the creation of new settlements where work and residence and education and health and entertainment are publicly available in communities where people walk to where they need to be.
Cyberspace makes this a possibility.
If we bulldozed the cookie cutter burbs with two car and more garages and started building new settlements connected by simple public transit, we would be on the way to a sane economy.
Maybe the President knows this and knows he cannot say it. But we need to have a gradual denouement of the truth. If I am wrong, my bad. If I am not, we are going to throw more and more billions at a problem that no one yet understands.
For more, hit the “pattern language” tag or search the phrase on this blog. Mr. Ed is dead wrong. But he is hardly alone.
ADDENDUM: This is not an invitation for a ripple of economic consequences stemming from a mega-failure. It is an invitation to go much farther than any in the Obama Administration have gone in imagining a change that will in fact accomplish many of its aims, including
1. Ending our dependence on oil.
2. Making a sustainable economy with a profusion of new jobs because each new or remade community will have micro-institutions that serve populations of up to 10,000 — preventive health, all-ages educational nodes utilizing high speed, sports and recreation, etc..
3. A vast simplification of governance accompanied by a massive overhaul of zoning to permit mixed usage and the building of scaled new eco-infrastructure. For example, common wind turbine for a community of 10,000, common solar paneling for the same community, common recycling and water reprocessing, and so forth.
I do not expect any of this to come without a struggle, but I do expect our economy to languish until something new and evolutionary that promises a better way of living is put in place.
