Cargo-cult capitalism continues
January 26th, 2009 by Jim JustThis paragraph from an “advice to Obama” piece by Engineer-Poet at The Oil Drum is enough to induce despair:
Cargo-cultism and ghost dances are alive and well in America today. You can “drill here” all you want, but dry holes benefit no one. You can start the “shovel-ready” road projects, but people who drive less and less every year will get no use out of them. You can make ethanol out of corn, and watch the nation’s best topsoil wash down the Mississippi to expand the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. All of these cults have their constituencies. All of them will want more mandates, more money, more power. If you’re going to be the one to fix this mess you’ve inherited, all of them must be told “No.”
The reality is that nobody is going to be told “no”, even under the new administration. We’re going to drill, everywhere, until we’ve sucked the last drop of oil we can from the Earth. We’re going to waste hundreds of billions of dollars propping up and bailing out our automobile infrastructure. We’re going to throw billions at biofuels, dead zones be damned, and we’ve got a new big-ag Secretary of Agriculture to lead the charge.
The stimulus should emphasize creating a post-carbon infrastructure, not on rebooting the “consumer economy”. Yet one-third of the $825 billion stimulus plan is slated to be wasted on tax cuts intended to get “consumers” spending again.
God forbid that we be treated like “citizens” rather than “consumers” – or to be asked to act like citizens, capable of considering the best interests of this and future generations.