Current situation:
The White House is in full-panic mode. In fact, the falling stock market has the administration so worried that Bush delivered a speech Friday detailing a “stimulus package” designed to rev-up flagging consumer spending. Sheer panic is in the air. Fed chairman Bernanke’s appearance on Capital Hill on Thursday turned out to be a total bust. Bernanke was supposed to calm jittery investors with promises of rates cuts and easy credit. Instead, his gloomy predictions put the market into a tailspin sending the Dow Jone’s down 306 points by Thursday’s end. Now Bush and Co. are trying to pick up the pieces and restore confidence in Wall Street – fat chance!

So what do we really have going on in the good ol US of A? How about 26 years of disaster economic policy called “Reganomics” that has hit the implacable barrier of PEAK OIL. Will the proposed stimulus package put forth by W have any real effect? Will it ease the pain felt by so many Americans? I contend W's (and congresses stimulus plan) are nothing more than giving a “crack head” on their death bed one last massive dose of crack. The addict rouses from their near comatose state only to realize the desperation of their condition and finally fall into the waiting arms of death!

Okay, great, now that you've really depressed me, what do we do?

How about a real stimulus plan that rebuilds our country to face an energy poor future where we can thrive, experience social connectedness, and have an opportunity to be free? Okay, I'll bite, so what is it?

1. Stop “Empire Building” in Iraq. The Iraqi war has cost nearly a HALF TRILLION dollars to date. Add Afghanistan, returning veterans needs, and the total societal costs will end up totaling nearly TWO TRILLION dollars.

2. Start thinking beyond the car. They are at the heart of the domestic problem. And trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only make things much worse. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life. This obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs could really prove fatal. It is especially unhelpful that so many self-proclaimed "greens" and political "progressives" are hung up on this monomaniacal theme. Understand this: cars are not part of the solution (whether they run on fossil fuels, vodka, used frymax™ oil, or cow dung).

Stop all highway-building altogether. Instead, direct public money into repairing railroad rights-of-way. Put together public-private partnerships for running passenger rail between American cities and towns in between. If Amtrak is unacceptable, get rid of it and set up a new management system. At the same time, begin planning comprehensive regional light-rail and streetcar operations.

3. End subsidies to agribusiness and instead direct dollar support to small-scale farmers, using the existing regional networks of organic farming associations to target the aid. (This includes ending subsidies for the ethanol program.) We have to produce food differently. The Monsanto / Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix this. Farming will soon become closer to the center of American economic life. It will have to be done more locally, at a smaller-and-finer scale, and will require more human labor. The value-added activities associated with farming - e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils - will also have to be done much more locally. This situation presents excellent business and vocational opportunities for America's young people (if they can unplug their Ipods long enough to pay attention.) Oh, one big problem, the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly retrieved from the dumpster of history. Get busy.

4. Ending agribusiness subsidies presents huge problems in land-use reform. Get busy. Oregon may have a head start but is far from an example to model.

5. We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our nation organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami ...) will support only a fraction of their current populations. We'll have to return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be re-inhabited. Our cities will contract. Cities that are composed proportionately more of suburban fabric (e.g. Atlanta, Houston) will pose especially tough problems. Most of that stuff will not be fixed. The loss of monetary value in suburban property will have far-reaching ramifications.

A. Begin planning and construction of waterfront and harbor facilities for commerce: piers, warehouses, ship-and-boatyards, and accommodations for sailors. This is especially important along the Ohio-Mississippi system and the Great Lakes.
B. In cities and towns, change regulations that mandate the accommodation of cars.

C. Direct all new development to the finest grain, scaled to walk-ability. This essentially means making the individual building lot the basic unit of redevelopment, not multi-acre "projects."

D. Get rid of any parking requirements for property development.

E. Institute "locational taxation" based on proximity to the center of town and not on the size, character, or putative value of the building itself.

F. Put in effect a ban on buildings in excess of seven stories.

G. Begin planning for district or neighborhood heating installations and solar, wind, and hydro-electric generation wherever possible on a small-scale network basis.

H. The stuff we build in the decades ahead will have to be made of regional materials found in nature - as opposed to modular, snap-together, manufactured components - at a more modest scale.

I. Building codes and zoning laws will eventually be abandoned and will have to be replaced with vernacular wisdom.

6. We need to prepare for the end of the global economic relations that have characterized the final blow-off of the cheap energy era. The world is about to become bigger again as nations get desperate over energy resources. This desperation is certain to generate conflict. We'll have to make things in this country again, or we won't have the most rudimentary household products.

A. Provide business startup knowledge, tax credits and subsidies to small local businesses by ending transnational corporation subsidies (corporate welfare).

B. We will make things again in America. However, we are going to make less stuff, have fewer things to buy, and fewer choices of things.

C. This will require rich, fine-grained, multi-layered networks of people who make, distribute, and sell stuff (including the much-maligned "middlemen").

D. Don't be fooled into thinking that the Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet shopping is totally dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be cheap.

E. The Internet also is predicated on electric power systems that are completely reliable. That is something we are unlikely to enjoy in the years ahead.

F. Do you have a penchant for retail trade and don't want to work for a big predatory corporation? There's lots to do here in the realm of small, local business.

G. As a practical matter, we are not going to re-live the 20th century. The factories from America's heyday of manufacturing (1900 - 1970) were all designed for massive inputs of fossil fuel, and many of them have already been demolished. We're going to have to make things on a smaller scale by other means.

7. We better prepare psychologically to downscale all institutions, including government, schools, colleges, corporations, and hospitals. All the centralizing tendencies and gigantification of the past half-century will need to be reversed. Government will be starved for revenue and impotent at the higher scale.

A. The centralized high schools all over the nation will prove to be our most frustrating mis-investment. We will probably have to replace them with some form of home-schooling that is allowed to aggregate into neighborhood units.

B. A lot of colleges, public and private, will fail as higher ed ceases to be a "consumer" activity.

C. Therefore provide “free” education up to a PHD level in return for six years of government service.

D. As a footnote, corporations scaled to operate globally are not going to make it. This includes probably all national chain "big box" operations. They will be replaced by small local and regional business.

8.We'll have to reopen many of the small town hospitals that were shuttered in recent years, and open many new local clinic-style health-care operations as part of the greater reform of American medicine. We do this by instituting a “single payer” health care program – ending the “death grip” on Americans by for profit health insurance companies. Health care is a right by virtue of citizenship!

9.Prepare psychologically for the destruction of a lot of fictitious "wealth" -- and allow instruments and institutions based on fictitious wealth to fail, instead of attempting to keep them propped up on credit life-support. Like any other thing in our national life, finance has to return to a scale that is consistent with our circumstances -- i.e., what reality will allow. That process is underway, anyway, whether the public is prepared for it or not. Therefore we fully fund and index Social Security for true inflation so that Americans will know they won't find themselves living in the street when they can no longer work.

10. The age of canned entertainment is coming to and end. It was fun for a while. We liked "Citizen Kane" and the Beatles. But we're going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery-makers, and singers. We'll need theater managers and stagehands. Therefore we aggressively support the Arts in our schools and communities with public funding.

And finally, life in the USA will become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will be re-scaled. I can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail - everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge institutions. If you can find a way to do something practical and useful on a smaller scale than currently being done, you are likely to have a future with food in your cupboard and people in the local community who will esteem you.

This is my 10 point progressive economic stimulus plan. It's not perfect, you knew that, but it's intended to start the community conservation for solutions. Heavens knows, what we've done the last 26 years hasn't work, so lets look at solutions that worked before, remember FDR?