No quick fixes for us

If our crisis is really, as most folks are saying, about jobs, then we are destined, I hates to tell ya Buckwheat, for yet another rude awakening. Over the next two years we'll come face to face with the rude discovery that Repubs are just as clueless about quick-fixes for employment as the Dems have turned out to be.

The tea party crowd is strong on individual liberty and empowering the people to control their government instead of the other way around. That's good. But their policies of dispersed government and free enterprise will take years to produce benefits under the present conditions of catastrophic economic rearrangement. Capitalism, having been usurped by derivative-wielding uber-speculators, has crashed. It will have to be reinvented at the grassroots level by We the People to reflect the enterprising improvisations of a desperate populace who would otherwise find themselves tyrranized by a very strong current toward 21st-century statism.

Democrats are now dazed with deer in the headlights shock over the sudden dissolution of their overzealous progressive mandate; they are being herded, temporarily, into a dunce corner until we collectively discover that the Repubs don't have any effective quick-fixes for putting folks back to work either.

A year or two from now when the Repubs are shown to be equally clueless at blood-from-a-turnip employment schemes, maybe we'll begin to face our real economic problem.

Which is?...

We're not manufacturing much stuff any more, because folks in the developing world can make everything so much cheaper. Like it or not, that's what has happened, and will be happening for the next century or so, if our planet sustains us for that long.

Consequently, we are going to have find something else to do in America to keep ourselves busy, housed and fed.

And what might that busyness be?

We could start by cultivating food again, locally. That's what we started out doing several hundred years ago. And we were pretty dam good at it too. Production of healthy food needs to be our once-and-future emerging industry; at least that way most folks will have something to eat while they renegotiate their mortgages. Those expansive suburban backyards will have to take on a decidedly agricultural character, instead of the keep up with the Joneses lawn-yawn vanity that has castrated their productive use for the last sixty years.

It's hard work, though. Ask the Mexicans who've been doing that gathersome labor for us for the last few decades. Maybe we'll sweat off a few obese pounds, though, as we learn once again about the true meaning of the phrase "back to work."

When we get too pooped with farming in the back .40, we can take a break, head for the garage, and tinker for a while with solar collectors, windmills and battery-powered soapbox derby cruisers. That's the true meaning of power to the people in this era of peak oil perkitude.
You think I'm kiddin'? Well, maybe a little bit.