We’ve spent the last 200 years mechanizing and automating everything possible. Substituting fossil fuels for human labor and computer circuits for contemplation. “Labor-saving” has become “labor-destroying”. Yet it never occurs to us that there could be any such thing as too much productivity.

As James Howard Kunstler say, “It’s all good”…as long as the economy keeps growing every year. But planet Earth ain’t getting any bigger. The highest-quality, most easily extracted resources are gone, and now we’re strip-mining an Arizona-sized chunk of Canadian forest for goo, and even thinking about scraping the barrel at 25,000 feet. How do you spell “desperation”?

Plus there are limits to how much credit you can vacuum out of the future to jack up present consumption. So when people get frugal, when hundreds of millions of Americans finally realize we don’t really need all the junk we’re getting, unemployment skyrockets. People are terrified that no one else needs them. With good reason. Decade after decade, our economy has “decided” that more and more of the essential jobs should be done by machines.

As citizens, we sure as the devil don’t ACT like we want other Americans to have jobs. Except we’re not citizens anymore – we’re cogs in the economy. As consumers our fidelity is to the lowest prices – getting as much as possible for as little as possible – flaunting our wealth – dying with the most toys. As investors we want the highest rate of return. If these things are incompatible with living wages, health care, honoring pension obligations, supporting local communities…well to hell with them. We’re rational, after all.

But what about good-old-fashioned self-reliance? Right. We don’t even want to employ our own legs anymore to get from “a” to “b”. Of course it doesn’t help that 50+years of Happy Motoring has undermined, destroyed, and prevented the formation of pedestrian-oriented, transit-supportive communities.

Yes, Greenspan and his disciples are clueless. But so are people who think that with a dose of hard reality; and if only the government stops “interfering”; the economy will turn around and grow and everything will be OK again.

We ain’t in Kansas anymore.

Let’s talk turkeys, almost too many to mention, Ben Bernanke, The Fed, Congress (except Ron Paul), Goldman, AIG, GM, Chrysler, B of A, Citi, economists, the list goes on and on. Too many helpings of these turkeys already and the leftovers are going to be more like hangovers.

Cheers.