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To: Terry Maloney who wrote (226620)	3/9/2003 11:47:17 PM
From: Mark Adams	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 436258

btw, has anybody mentioned lately how this is going to end so badly? globalpublicmedia.com An extract So we now have got an economy that is based on suburban sprawl. But what makes it even more problematic is this, is that, all the wealth that we’ve been investing in it also represents at the same time a tremendous, monumental, misallocation of resources. We’ve been investing all of our national wealth for the last fifty years in the infrastructure for a daily life that has no future. There’s no future in the suburban sprawl way of life and that’s where all of our money is. And so not only are we running our economy on it but we’ve also stuck all our wealth in it. And that is the real tragedy of where we’re at now because the fabric of our daily life, the suburban cul-de-sacs, the strip malls, the parking lagoons, the commercial highway strips, you know, all the stuff that Americans are familiar with as the daily setting of their lives, really does not lend itself to retro-fitting for a different kind of future, for a more energy efficient future, or a different kind of energy future. So what I imagine is that it’s going to represent a kind of an economic catastrophe, as its disutility becomes manifest and its associated value vanishes, and the people who have invested their life savings in things like McHouses and suburban property of all kinds are going to find that they’ve been ruined and impoverished by this mis-investment. And I think the net effect is we’re going to see a mad scramble in the suburbs as people try to get out, and of course there are going to be very few buyers for this stuff, and the value of all the property of all kinds, commercial, residential, office, you-name-it, is going to crash and there’s going to be a kind of fight over the table scraps of the twentieth century out there. And it’s going to be very messy. It’s going to create a huge amount of political distress, recrimination, finger pointing, scape-goating. My own theory is that Americans will vote for corn pone Nazis who will promise to restore the Golden Age of the nineties and of course that will be a promise they will not be able to keep. We’re going to see a new class of Americans who I call “The Formerly Middle-Class”, and they’re going to feel a tremendous sense of having been swindled out of their entitlements to the American Dream, which is to say the life of the Drive-In Utopia, the life of suburban sprawl, which the world will no longer permit them to live in and they’re going to create tremendous domestic political turmoil in the attempt to hold on to those entitlements which cannot be held on to. So I think it’s going to be a big god damn mess. I think it’s probably going to lead to violence; it may lead to some degree to the dissolution of our democratic institutions in the United States. And we may not recognize our nation by the time the dust settles. globalpublicmedia.com