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The world can certainly do better than this. Here's why.

Sunday, February 3

CRANKing the Economy

Crank is a gritty, crime-ridden, action-packed story of a man, poisoned, who must track down those responsible for his waking state of death before he meets his inevitable and imminent end. The only way for him to stay alive, however, is to continuously stimulate his heart to keep beating. Using one stimulant or another -- from cocaine, to adrenaline, to defibrillator pads -- to delay the effect of the poison. So it is that a man, dead already, is kept alive by adequate stimulation.

This story of the US economy -- and, consequently, the US-backed global economy -- is strikingly similar. Fundamentally poisoned -- and, incidentally, poisonous -- America looks for yet another way to stimulate its dying enterprise of rampant capitalism. The nations "leaders" now speak of the necessity of economic stimulus for the survival of the American economy. This cash infusion is to counter-balance an age of debt-promotion, deficit spending, and the mortgaging of every aspect of the future. "Why pay today what can be put off until tomorrow?" has been the constant credo.

Is it poetic justice that millions of Americans, living beyond their sustainable means, are being thrown out of their homes? Is it fitting that a housing industry, run amok, and a banking/lending industry, also run amok, now have people caught between the horns of debt and homelessness? Well, let's examine, briefly.

The American dream hinges on obtaining everything you ever want while paying very little in personal cost to get it. As such, lending institutions found it very lucrative, stimulating, to support the dreams of Americans everywhere by financing them. Such financing came at ever lower rates and with ever more promises of future financial security. Even those people who had equity in their homes -- ownership of their homes, really -- began to borrow money against their property to exercise the "right" to live the dream. Unfortunately, time has caught up with many of these people.

The belief that other variables in life would not vary, such as cheap and plentiful sources of energy, is a fundamental flaw -- poison -- in the design. As such, some of those that had borrowed to live the dream were then caught financing the dream. Many of these, having not accounted for the hidden costs of their cars, houses, businesses, and -- yes -- children, found themselves incapabable of remaining financially solvent. It used to be that there was only enough loose credit for the extra TV or an new living room set. You remember the commercials screaming, "no money down, no interest, no payments until 2000!". Soon enough the same was being said for cars. A torrent of 0% financing options hit the industry to keep it afloat. Then, it was time. Houses could be bought with a high-ratio mortgage and no money was required at the time of signing. And, AND, the builder was throwing in five appliances. It was time, people thought, I can finally afford my own home, my dream home. The dream is alive.

Until now. The crunch is in full swing. We are catching up to the future. Whereas it used to be only couches and cars to be repossesed, now it is homes. Homes. The places where children are supposed to grow, trusting that they will always be there, are disappearing. What psychological effect this will have, considering the number of broken families it will generate and the number of unstable living situations will result, is of untold proportion.

Further, it is becoming impossible to sell a house because the markets wherein all of these forclosures are taking place are clustered. They are in suburbia. Now that it is being realized, slowly, that suburbia is an expensive way of living - not only in terms of property values but in terms of expense to the planet - it is also becoming less difficult to find a niche in the city. Could it be, then, that within a single generation humankind will witness both the exodus from, and return to, city life? Should this happen, every city in several western countries wil be surrounded by disconnected slums populated by disenfranchised minorities. Ironically - an ultimate irony, here - it will be the white, middle class that suffers on the periphery if, and only if, the the change is as rapid as could be estimated.

It is not only the homes of our families that have been mortgaged off. It is the entirety of the future. To again mention poetic justice, isn't it fitting that the mortgage taken by industrial and economic enterprise has been postponed so long that it cannot be paid? These enterprises have been operating beyond sustainability for much longer than American families. As such, corporations, banks, and industries stand to be evicted from the Earth as immediately as the overspent American family. The threat, however, is that the collapse of industry and economy necessarily takes humanity with it. With environmental pillage taking center stage as it never has before, more people must come to realize that the final home humanity can be cast from is the planet. The debt humanity owes the planet dwarves any conceivable scale of debt generated by banks and other lenders. Truly, any such debt scale only contributes to that which is owed the planet.

For all these reasons: changes in the environment, faltering international relationships, faltering family relationships, waning supplies of natural resources, more virulent diseases, and so on; the decisions made so long ago must be faced. That, instead of perpetuating the practices of the economy that have made it both strong and poisonous, we ought to undertake to make the economy sustainable and healthy. Doing so would, certainly, require we promote some different dreams. Dreams that promote gains for the future instead of the immediate. Dreams that benefit our children instead of us. Dreams that distribute wealth instead of concentrating it. Dreams that are not summed up with the phrase, "Whoever dies with the most toys, wins."

To be accurate, Crank is a remake of a much better 1940s film entitled Dead on Arrival, wherein the anti-hero must determine why he was poisoned before he dies. That film offered no reprieve to its central character, no stimulation to balance the effect of doom. With all of the realities that we must face up to, "emergently", dead on arrival may prove the more fitting of the two titles.

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