how to save the world

Its consequences — unemployment, underemployment, low wages, low product quality, and endemic poverty — are visible everywhere in North America, and the disease is spreading. The solution — duties on imported goods and services that can reasonably be produced locally — is enough to make globalists and ‘free’ traders foam at the mouth, and they have invested heavily in politicians to make sure it doesn’t happen.

With the advent of $130/bbl oil and $4/gal gasoline ($5-6/gal in Canada and Australia, $8-9/gal in Europe, $3/gal in China) the Wal-Mart Dilemma is starting to be felt in many products that are made of or dependent on oil, such as:

• food
• transportation
• heating and air conditioning
• health products
• clothing
• road and energy infrastructure

What will the average citizen do when these goods become unaffordable? Here’s my take on how the Wal-Mart Dilemma will play out:

1. We will eat less healthy foods. The cheapest foods are the processed, canned goods made from leftover food products, the stuff that would never sell if presented in its natural state on the shelves. Sugar, corn and soybeans are still very cheap, despite their appeal as bio-fuels. Because we’re mostly (thanks to the Wal-Mart Dilemma and the Two-Income Trap) underpaid, overworked, two-income families, there is no time or energy to prepare healthy meals from scratch, so we’ll continue to patronize take-out junk food places, but buy more of the cheaper, less nutritious items on their menus.
2. We will buy very cheap ‘second cars’. Two jobs means two cars are needed by most of our suburban sprawl families, but despite the jump in gasoline prices, only 20% of the cost of car ownership is fuel. Rather than going to unaffordable hybrids and diesel vehicles, we will buy new Chinese and Indian-made $2500 ‘junk cars’ as their second vehicles, letting them keep the luxury of one gas-gulping SUV (for the illusion of safety), while keeping the overall cost of car ownership at 1990s levels even with $7/gal gasoline. “Your turn to take the Tata to work, dear!”
3. We will use space heaters and room air conditioners (made guess where?) instead of central ones. With ever-larger homes to heat and cool, there will be no money for re-fits, so we will close off unused rooms and condition smaller areas (as much as possible given the laws of thermodynamics) to the temperature we’ve become accustomed to.
4. We will use alternative remedies instead of prescription drugs. 
5. We will buy no-name clothing (made guess where?) and put fake brand names on it. The kids will never know. In fact, they’ll show us how.
6. We will start simultaneously importing and selling (and leasing back) our infrastructure. The Alberta Tar Sands equipment and labour pool is the latest model for this. Huge amounts of equipment are brought in because it’s too expensive to build it here. Cheap labourers build it in China, and other cheap labourers are imported to install and operate it. In return, China gets to own part of the project. US agriculture pioneered this model, and ‘seasonal labourers’ (many of whom will stay on under the radar, doing other work for under minimum wage in jobs and conditions we wouldn’t accept) will become the way in which more and more domestic infrastructure is established and maintained.

This is the Wal-Mart Dilemma turned into an entire self-defeating economy, and the vicious cycle of unemployment, underemployment, low wages, low product quality, and endemic poverty will become our way of life. It’s a consequence of (a) the structure of our dysfunctional economy and (b) human nature — to work around ‘problems’ with the minimum possible change to our lifestyle, rather than making long-term, sensible but difficult fundamental changes — like buying (and making) only expensive hybrids, revamping public transit, making our homes energy-efficient, buying durable, local, sustainable goods and “eating food, not too much, mostly plants“. We will, instead, become third-world nations.

There are those that think $7/gal gasoline is just what we need, that it will bring about needed economic reforms and changes in behaviour. They justaren’t paying attention.

1. Lie about what’s going on. Tell the people the war is being won, or is at least winnable. Tell them inflation is almost non-existent, and be consistent about it in the face of all the evidence that it’s really out of control. You need to do this in order to crush the unions and suppress strikes and demands for cost-of-living wage increases. Tell them that unemployment is low, by excluding all the people working multiple part-time jobs and all the people who have given up even looking for work. Don’t even think about computing how many are seriously underemployed. Pay junk scientists to deny global warming and how industry is ruining people’s health. Tell them that the staggering, unrepayable levels of debt are too hard for the average person to understand, and nothing to worry about. And make sure you have control of the media, so they echo all the lies without so much as a whimper.
2. Print lots more money. Don’t worry about the fact it will soon make your currency worthless in international markets. Let your banker friends loan it to the average citizen, way beyond what they can repay, so they can buy shoddy imported junk and feel as if they’re getting wealthier. Bail out your banker friends with taxpayer money when the debts go bad. When that runs out, print even more.
3. Dumb down the education system. Under no circumstances allow anyone to teach economics in secondary schools. Starve the system of funds, and force teachers to pass illiterate students anyway. Under no circumstances allow anyone to teach students what’s happening elsewhere in the world, or what happened in history (especially the history lessons of wars and the Great Depression).
4. Make the economic victims feel guilty and responsible. Perpetuate the myth than anyone can be rich and powerful if they work hard. When the poor get ill on the only food they can afford, blame them for gluttony, smoking, drinking and not exercising. Portray the homeless as lazy, and the unemployed as incompetent and shiftless. Let religions that preach dependence on the state as shameful, irresponsible and unworthy of admission to heaven run the schools and charities.
5. Crank up the propaganda machine. Follow the three rules of tyrants everywhere: Oversimplify, Distort, and Smear. Oversimplify complex issues, and reduce them to absurd black vs. white dichotomies (“you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists”). Distort the truth through Orwellian names (“clean skies act”) for your most grievous outrages, and by repeatedly misrepresenting the facts (“Saddam had WMD and supported Al Qaida”) and mis-quoting opponents out of context. Smear opponents and critics by repeating barefaced lies about them until they’re accepted as truths. If that doesn’t work, blame ‘illegal’ immigrants for all the problems you face.
6. Steal: Steal from future generations to keep today’s citizens at bay. Incur debts that future generations will never be able to repay — you’ll be long gone by then. Exploit struggling nations by using global banking and trade consortia to strongarm them to give up their resources and labour for next to nothing, and accept your garbage, overpriced munitions, and worthless money in return.
7. Make your economic partners co-dependent. If they sell you so much that they can’t afford to lose you as a customer, you can dictate price, and everything else. Make it abundantly clear that if you go down, so do they.
8. Punish whistle-blowers and intimidate opponents. What’s a little torture or ‘disappearing’ of dissidents to foreign prisons in defence of the homeland? It provides an example for what might happen when citizens misbehave.
9. Promise to do something within ten or twenty years. Say you’ll wipe out the debt in twenty years, or reduce carbon emissions in fifty. No one will remember then what you promised today, and you won’t be around anyway, so the failure will be blamed on the next guy. Meanwhile you sound like you care about the problem when you don’t.
10. Lower expectations and crush hope. When you get into power, paint a dismal picture of what you’ve inherited from the previous administration. Warn of the need for hard work and austerity ahead. Say that wars will take many years to win, but by spending much more on them they might be modestly shortened. Reassert that there is no alternative. Steal an election or two, so people give up voting for president. Gerrymander the boundaries of electoral districts so people give up voting for representatives. Ifthat isn’t enough, give all the police tasers.

It now appears that Barack Obama has enough delegates to win the Democratic Party nomination for this November’s election. He will be running against the heir apparent to the most unpopular president in history. When Bill Clinton left office eight years ago, he was much less unpopular, yet his bumbling was still too much for his successor, Al Gore, to overcome (though, thanks to the inability of the US system to accurately identify the winner of the election, we may never know who actually won in 2000).

So why is John McCain, who has done little to distance himself from his incompetent and despised predecessor, running neck and neck in the opinion polls with Barack Obama?

If you’ve read Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting With Jesus, you’ll know why. There is a core group of white, uneducated working class Americans, perhaps 30% of the total electorate, who would vote for any Republican for president (other than those directly tainted with the Iraq failure). That core group is spread across most of the states other than New England, NY/NJ and the West Coast states. Those 39 Southern, Central, Midwestern and Western states are worth 385 of the 538 electoral college votes.

There is a comparable percentage of Americans who would vote for just about any Democratic nominee, but they are concentrated in the remaining 11 states, with only 153 electoral votes between them. The main so-called “battleground” states, Michigan, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota, have 105 electoral votes between them. All of them have large, white, working-class populations, and are the Republicans’ to lose (or to steal). Look at the state-by-state polls and they are likely to pick up Pennsylvania and Michigan from the Democrats, giving McCain well over 300 electoral college votes.

So despite the fact that McCain is following the dismal Bush, in an economy that’s in a shambles thanks to Republican mismanagement, he would probably win the election over Obama today, and the muckraking, xenophobia-stirring and fear-mongering the Republicans do so well has barely begun. Why is this Republican core vote so solid? Joe explained it simply: White, uneducated working class Americans don’t believe politicians can or will do anything to improve the economy, health care, education, or the environment. The only area of difference they can perceive is the war against Iraq, which they have now been brainwashed to believe is synonymous with the war against global terrorists. And, here’s the kicker:

They are mad at Bush not because he entered a brutal, expensive and devastating war under false pretenses, at a cost of at least a trillion dollars, bankrupting the nation in the process. They are mad at Bush because he didn’t win the war.

Remember: The vast majority of Americans have never owned a passport. All John McCain has to do is say, over and over again, with his war medals displayed, that he will win the war, against Iraq and then against Iran and other deemed ‘enemies’ of America. His supporters can focus their attention on anti-immigration rhetoric and stirring up fear of more attacks (and of rising crime). With that strategy, he can’t lose. And he won’t.

If the Democrats can’t muster any better than a neck-and-neck contest after the Republicans have been overwhelmingly acknowledged to have made everything vastly worse for the past eight years and sunk to the lowest level of presidential popularity in poll history, they have lostbefore they’ve begun.