Tejek this is the reality of where we are heading..Obama and his (new) team need to understand it; find the 'new path' and get ahead of it; and LEAD/there are many wise people who see the path.
There is Kunstler
kunstler.com
There is Gregor
"Poverty and the American Suburb
Posted: 26 Jan 2010 08:46 PM PST
If 1 in 8 Americans is currently on food stamps then household budgets are clearly stressed enough to be affected by changes in the price of gasoline. Given that oil (and gasoline) made its biggest advances starting in 2004, it was revealing to see the latest study on poverty from the Brookings Institution. Their study showed what many in the peak oil community have been forecasting for years: poverty growth in the US between 2000 and 2008 was strongest in the suburbs:
By 2008, suburbs were home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country. Between 2000 and 2008, suburbs in the country’s largest metro areas saw their poor population grow by 25 percent—almost five times faster than primary cities and well ahead of the growth seen in smaller metro areas and non-metropolitan communities. As a result, by 2008 large suburbs were home to 1.5 million more poor than their primary cities and housed almost one-third of the nation’s poor overall.
It’s equally unsurprising that many of the mega-suburban regions like Florida and Southern California were picked up in the Brookings study as being particularly hard hit in the 2007-2008 period. The price of oil started its march higher in 2004 but of course the most punishing gasoline prices came in in 2007 and 2008. Just as you would intuit, large populations tied to the automobile and with few public transport options took the biggest hits:
Western cities and Florida suburbs were among the first to see the effects of the “Great Recession” translate into significant increases in poverty between 2007 and 2008. Sun Belt metro areas hit hardest by the collapse of the housing market saw significant gains in poverty between 2007 and 2008, with suburban increases clustered in Florida metro areas—like Miami, Tampa, and Palm Bay—and city poverty increases most prevalent in Western metro areas— like Los Angeles, Riverside, and Phoenix. Based on increases in unemployment over the past year, Sun Belt metro areas are also likely to experience the largest increases in poverty in 2009.
Jeff Rubin has a very good post up on his new website, making the same case that many of us have made for years (and especially since the financial crisis hit). And that’s this: the unsustainable nature of the automobile complex has been known for some time but was revealed in spectacular fashion during the triple-digit-oil price period. And thus it’s really a form of craziness that the government went ahead and invested in Detroit Autos after the collapse of the credit bubble. | see also my May 2009 post: Lost Pearblossom Highway."
–Gregor
Document: The Suburbanization of Poverty: Trends in Metropolitan America, 2000 to 2008, Brookings.
and there is:
Jeff Rubin
“A Massive Public Investment in Obsolescence
Posted by Jeff Rubin on January 13th, 2010 under SmallerWorldTags: auto industry, bailout, china, oil industry, oil prices, public transit vehicles, triple-digit oil prices • Comments
As North American taxpayers take a look at the gleaming new models on display at Detroit’s auto show this week, they might well ask themselves just why they poured billions of dollars into saving GM and Chrysler when no one else would.
Politicians, local car dealers, parts suppliers and the auto workers’ unions told them it was to protect strategically vital jobs in their economies. But far from being essential to our economic future, those jobs are rapidly becoming obsolete—at least in this part of the world, where they are being funded by taxpayers’ money.
With GM car sales in China up over 60 per cent this year and North American sales still down from last year, I know what I’d be doing if I were running the company.
I’d take the bailout money given by the taxpayers of countries with shrinking auto markets, like the US and Canada, and use it to build new car plants in China and other countries where car sales are booming. (GM already sells almost as many cars in China as it does in the US.)
But I’m sure the company promised not to do that.
Even so, the bailout is a losing proposition for North American taxpayers, who have become the de facto owners of the company. US car sales are a shadow of what they once were, and in a world of triple-digit oil prices, they will become even fainter.
There were four million fewer cars on American roads last year than there were the year before. As oil prices climb ever higher, some 50 million more vehicles will be heading for the exit lane over the next decade.
Is that the kind of market outlook the taxpayer should be investing in?
But invest they have. American taxpayers ponied up some $40 billion last year. The federal government in Canada, along with the provincial government of Ontario, anted up $14.5 billion in direct taxpayers’ assistance to GM and Chrysler—a bailout equal to half those jurisdictions’ entire annual corporate tax collection.
Just think of the public outrage that would follow if the government gave the money directly to the oil industry instead. Yet the auto and oil industries are two sides of the same coin—over half of all the oil used in North America is burned in our cars.
During World War II, Detroit went from manufacturing cars to making tanks and bombers literally overnight. Today, couldn’t all those unemployed auto workers be re-employed to make what their economy really needs—more public transit vehicles—so that when those fifty million Americans get off the road, there’s a bus or mass rapid transit vehicle for them to get on?
That way, if we’re going to spend billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, we’ll be investing in our future, not in our past."
The US needs a strategy of DEVOLVING your 'Imperial over reach'
and transferring that investment into s sustainable democracy! |
