By Jeff Gerritsen 11/05/2008

America, celebrate, enjoy, and savor Obama's election victory.   It has been a long, hard 28 years since this country was taken over by the right wing neocon's.  We now have hope that this country will not become another corporate fascist state ruled by transnational corporations.  Senator McCain's concession speech was gracious and I hope will mark the beginning of our national healing the national wound this campaign inflicted.

President elect Obama spoke eloquently and truthfully about our current condition. We have an awesome challenge ahead of us. 
However, let us not forget the challenges that lie ahead for this country.  We have 28 years of disastrous policies that need to be undone.  They are:

1. Insane economic trade policies. America was sold a "bill of goods" with Milton Friedman / Chicago school of economics free trade nonsense.   These policies need  rolling back by wise implementation of protective tariffs and import duties.  For example if it costs a dollar to make a widget in the USA and corporation xyz can make the same widget in China for 20 cents, then an 80 cent import tariff needs to be applied to each item imported.  Also profits made on foreign subsidiaries of a USA corporation doing business overseas need to be taxed - period! 
2. National healthcare funding by the government. Yes I mean a "single payer" health insurance.  I want the government to finance the cost of health care not run it.  I want the for profit health insurance companies put out of business.  In other words expand medicare for all.
3. Global climate change or climate wierding.  Lets face it - its real and has a significant man made cause.  We need to quite fooling ourselves and deal with it.
4. Peak oil.  This is just as real as climate change.  Lets not kid ourselves any longer.  Empires, economies can only run on energy.  We won't have growing supplies of energy in the future.   I researched this for the last four years and have concluded the hoped for techno-fix is a cruel hoax.  Lets not fool ourselves any longer.  Our empire, economy, and standard of living will contract as the supply of fossil fuel contracts.  Lets plan on it and enact policies that deal with the issue such as the oil depletion protocol (http://www.oildepletionprotocol.org/) defined by Richard Heindberg.
5. Lets redefine the economic growth concept and by extension continuous money supply growth.  We can't have an economy on based upon growth no matter how small the growth percentage.  Even at one percent growth - compound growth will hyper inflate our economy in 72 years.  To quote James Howard Kunstler, we need to base our economy on fruitful activity not mere growth.
6. I can't leave the peak oil discussion without mentioning two very important challenges.  They are the suburban build out in this nation and the personal automobile. Neither of these horrible choices this nation made in the last 150 years is a part of post peak oil future.  You would do best to start the process of removing these albatrosses from our collective lives.  We need to find another living arrangement, and rebuild our dilapidated passenger rail and trolly service through this country.  This task alone will employ millions and rebuild our crumbling infrastructure.
7. Finally this discussion would not be complete without a discussion of this planets human population.  Lets quit fooling ourselves, we have dramatically overshot this planets carrying capacity back when oil was discovered.  My educated guess is this planet can support about two billion people - IF WE USE HEAVY APPLICATION OF PERMACULTURE techniques to replace our industrial farming practices.  Otherwise we are doomed to world wide starvation when fossil fuel based fertilizers are no longer available in the quantities needed for industrial agriculture.  See "The Skil" website for a discussion on this concept and a solution.

This is only a brief, high level view of the challenges we face.  For additional references see the following websites:

Oil depetion protocol by Richard Heindberg

Energy limits and human evolutionary impacts on cultural collapse by Jay Hanson

Culture Change by Jan Lundberg

Richard Heindberg's website

Life after the oil crash by Matt Savinar

The tradgeic commentary on American suburban society by James Howard Kunstler