I never did hold out much hope for the grandest of Obama's grand plans. There were just too many perfect-storm factors aligning against him. Bush and company trashed the country like a bad tenant who already knows that they're not getting their security deposit back. The long-term trends in the economy had been there for decades: increasing inequality, collapsing personal savings, surging household debt, skyrocketing health insurance costs, and steadily upward-creeping unemployment. We were living on borrowed time, on hallucinated money, and the Jenga stack that is America has finally tumbled. And while I admire Obama's attempt to tackle everything at once, and I understand that we have to go much deeper into debt to try and spend our way out of the current recession, the new President is not doing the one thing that would make all of this bailout and stimulus activity semi-sensible: he is not getting us out of the Iraq and Afghanistan sinkholes, which would free up billions of dollars and millions of productive man-hours to accomplish domestic recovery. These occupations cannot fulfill the WW2 equivalent of economic stimulus, even if we do stay there for 100 years. Obama needs to come clean and tell the American people, "Look, we can't be a sprawling bully empire and pull our domestic nuts out of the economic fire at the same time." We have to make a choice on where to spend our precious resources, and the needless wars in Mesopotamia should end.

In any case, the collapse of the American Algorithm is obviously triggering some serious global problems. The G20 are meeting in London today, to try and come up with some plan for recovery, accompanied by the usual fierce protests at the rich countries' control over the fate of debtor nations. Stimulus money is flowing around the world, but global depression still looms, since the overconsuming American suburbanite was the linchpin of so much stuff. Remember all those warnings through the years, about how Americans were only X percent of the world's population, but consume Y percent of whatever? Well, global depression is what happens when that grossly disproportionate system of consumption implodes. The global clearinghouse for resources that was the American flabby thigh and short attention span has dried up. The result is a rapidly downscaling world economy, with Chinese factories sputtering and oil markets swinging wildly.

In this horrible present, Americans need to be asking themselves, "to what do we expect to recover?" We're really whistling past the graveyard here if we think that the 80s, 90s, and early Oughts way of life is going to return full-fledged, only with hybrids, windmills, and soy milk plugged in for older throughput materials. The old arrangements are cooked. Every last shred of value has been wrung out of the lives of regular people, and nothing is left upon which to build the next bubble.

Yes, of course we need green jobs, and sustainable energy projects, and reinvigorated local manufacturing, and better labor union protections, and reconnected civic organizations, and all that. But the real question is, from what launching pad or home base will people be able tackle all of these issues? What new ratios between work, living spaces, transportation, and consumption make sense for a future of declining oil supplies, collapsing ecosystems, and lower overall economic activity? As I have indicated in earlier posts, I do not think the standard social form of One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling will work as a home base much longer. I realize it's hard to fathom, because all of our ideas about work, individual responsibility, achievement, success, and the like, have been coiled around the person and the nuclear family for decades. It's hard to imagine that these patterns have become obsolete and insufficient, because they seem to have "worked" for so long.

But in fact, the current social form has actually been dysfunctional for quite some time. We have managed to paper over this core inadequacy with a series of economic bubbles and steadily increasing household debt. But the One Person-One Job/One Family-One-Dwelling algorithm has been decimating our ecological, economic, and psychological landscapes. We now find ourselves broke, addicted to legal and illegal drugs, amazingly under-equipped for non-service-sector work, and wallowing in a baking biosphere. We shove more superfluous people into our prisons and armies than the rest of the world put together. And after decades of economic "growth," we live in a society unable to provide basic health care to huge swaths of its populace.

So we should be making arrangements to create a more collective social form, to serve as a sturdier home base from which to approach the wider challenges of economy and ecology. We still need markets, corporations, and an active national government. And we should still try to reinvigorate local communities and activities. And of course, we should pursue more sensible environmental policies, from energy conservation to improved fuel efficiency standards to wind turbines. But the series of collapses we're seeing right now are making it perfectly clear that there just isn't enough real substance in the current way of doing things to preserve a full-employment, maximum-consumption lifestyle. In fact, as we'll try to look at next time, the vaunted economic growth of the last few decades has actually consisted of a large and growing percentage of damage control. Consumer capitalism has created so much personal, ecological, and social disintegration, which it must do to perpetually "grow," that a good portion of our national income is based on healing our own self-inflicted wounds.