Also, one of our future guests, Gregg Gerritt, Prosperity for RI. com, has been gracious enough to write an article (and blog), and off Renewable Now the chance to have him as a guest on our blog. We'll include the first part today, and we'll finish tomorrow.
Here, by the way, is the link to the entire article if you want to read it all right now: http://prosperityforri.org/?page_id=108.
And here is part 1. :The Shrinking Economy: Time to Get Real about Ecology
Greg Gerritt
For weeks after the 2010 elections the mass media continued to produce election analysis with the premise that the American electorate is very good at kicking out the party in power when the economy is not doing very well. Not doing well appears to mean the economy is not growing fast enough, at least 3 percent and preferable 4 or 5 percent a year. The articles claim that without this rate of growth unemployment rises and a swath of Congress pays with their seats.
Neither party has been able to find a path out of the endless morass we find ourselves in, at least not using the conventional wisdom and the conventional approach to governance. So we end up in gridlock and a holding pattern that allows the large corporations and Wall Street to continue to loot America while the rest of us struggle. We throw the bums out of Congress whenever we have to bail out the rich after another bubble bursts. We replace them with other bums who will continue to bail out the rich. Such is progress
My premise, and that of many others who look closely at the linkage between ecology and economy, is that due to ecological collapse it may no longer be possible to grow the economy of the United States. The conditions essential for rapid economic growth -- a massive infusion of natural resources and cheap places to throw the tras -- are no longer applicable to the United States or for the most part on the planet. Cycles of prosperity in the industrial west are becoming ever shorter, and are based more on bubbles and chicanery than actual production. Wall Street and the government pretend that we have economic growth, but if the U.S. adopted some sort of full-cost accounting, refusing to count capital depletion as income, not adding the repair of the damage done to communities by industrialism to the economy, but rather subtracting the damage and cost of repair from the economy, the numbers would show the U.S. economy was actually shrinking. It would not even register the phony growth we now see only during bubbles.
The proximate cause of the economic crash were the financial games played by Wall St. Some claim the continuation of the economic slowdown is the tax structure or the size of the government. The reality is that it is the destruction of ecosystems and depletion of natural resources: the overfishing, deforestation, erosion, elimination of wild things, dirtying of the water and fouling of the air, that has caught up with us. Our technology is not going to fix this in a way that opens the door to growth ever after. Until the political parties describe what is really going on, why a gearing down is appropriate and necessary and how they are going to engineer it rather than doing ever crazier things to prop up the appearances of growth, they will alternate in failed policies and majorities in Congress.
The original version of this essay, available at http://prosperityforri.org/?page_id=95 <http://ProsperityForRI.org/?page_id=95> provides a variety of links to the ecological data and the data that points out that nearly all of the growth in income in the US has for more than 20 years gone to the richest 1% of the population. For at least 40% of the population their actual wealth, wealth, not income, has already shrunk. In other words both ecological collapse and the complete stagnation of the economy are our daily reality despite what the media tells us about the American Dream.
Gregg, thanks you so much for being on the show and contributing to the blog.
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