This is Not My Beautiful Economy, Part 3

  I got exactly one-half of a napkin at every meal I had at my grandparent's house on my dad's side of the family when I would visit. Everyone at the table got that too - one half of one napkin, carefully torn down the double-layered seam. And even while it became a bit of a joke as I grew older, it never stopped my grandma from doing it. She couldn't NOT do it.


On my mom's side of the family, my grandparents never wanted to stay on the phone of a long distance call with any of us for very long, no matter the occasion. It wasn't because they were angry curmudgeons or they didn't want to know what was going on in our lives. It was because they could hear the telephone cash register ringing as the minutes grew longer. Regardless of who initiated the call or the phone rates, the nagging urgency of a growing phone bill left them with the unavoidable desire to communicate only that which was absolutely necessary and then leave all the other details to an effusively written letter.

This is still evident today even if it's a free cell phone call with my grandma. The habit is written into her DNA.

As a child, I had long attributed behavior like that as endemic to their age - as though it was just something that old people do when they get to a certain stage in their life. When my grandma would be at a loss for understanding how her children could buy "SO MANY" presents for their family on Christmas, I figured she had gotten to the point where Christmas just wasn't as important to her as it was to them.

Naturally this assumption was off the mark as I had always assumed my world in a post-industrial consumer-driven economy was the way the world naturally worked - past, present, and future. What I guess I didn't notice until recently was that consumer goods and conspicious consumption rather rapidly became the very foundation of our economy. And the more goods created, purchased, consumed, discarded and repurchased - the more jobs there were, the lower the interest rates became, the "stronger" the economy was.

This is why, apparently, we are now staring down at the abyss as consumer spending is showing signs of dropping off as job losses, foreclosures and economic insecurity in general is slowing our drive to buy. With credit limited or cut off for many people, spending power throughout the US is being restrained.

Media reports on the economy are showing the rather rapid and destabilizing effects of decreasing consumer purchasing.  This is scary stuff. Jobs are being shed at a rate I've never seen in my lifetime. We are headed into a pernicious widespread deflationary economy which, we are told, will be bad for us all.

Nearly 75% of economic activity in the US is consumer spending. So clearly, even a 5 or 10% drop in consumption is going to knock the economy on its heels. It's also why we are hearing calls from those on high that we should not live in fear of a shrinking economy....that it is, in fact, THAT fear which is keeping us from doing what we've "always" done - BUY.

That consumeristic dogma is alive and well right now. Just last month, Respected Thoughtful and Clear Minded New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman urged us, in light of a downward spiraling economy, to go shopping - equating it, as Bush did right after 9/11, to an act of civic responsibility, the best way We the People can demonstrate our patriotism.

But of course, we can't do it all by ourselves; we need to re-open those credit flood gates. So what are we seeing yet again from the Federal Reserve when our economy slows down? Lowered interest rates. Get lending going, increase that credit limit on your credit card...get fake cash BACK out there doing what it's done for so long - propping up our post-industrial economy and rendering us into consumer spending patriots.

In almost every article I've read about what to do about the economy, the underlying assumption is we need to get consumer spending back on track. Whether that's through increased federal funding of public works programs that will employ thousands of laid off workers or giving billions, perhaps trillions, to banks and financial organizations to get the cash back out there so people can get back to shopping - the bottom line is the same: save the consumer economy.

Here's the problem: the growing consumer economy is, and always was, unsustainable. It has the same bleak future as oil consumption because it is in essence the same phenomenon: producing an infinite number of products with a finite amount of resources.

Next time you find youself in ANY retail store, but particularly the box stores, look around you and ALL the products on the shelves. Notice how many different sizes and varieties  for each type of good are available. Also, look at the durability of the toy section, the household good department, and even the electronic section. The variety of options are essentially endless and nothing is built to last. Now imagine that store and multiply it by the number of towns and cities across the country with the same items on its shelves.

Now, perhaps you think increased recycling will help produce a sustainable loop in this process. Think again. As Andrew Leonard pointed out in a recent blog on "How The World Works," a bad economy is also bad for the economic viability of recycling programs.

"So the plastic, cardboard and newspapers that you leave out on your curb become valuable only when society is already consuming so much plastic, cardboard and newspapers that the leftover scraps become useful. Which could be one way of saying that only when society over-consumes does garbage become a tradable commodity."

Beyond that, according to the Worldwatch Institute, at our current level of demand for consumer goods, "even the most sophisticated waste recovery techniques" could not keep up with the need to exploit more native raw materials to produce consumer goods.

This is the foundation of our economy that we are trying to save. Does it not strike us as completely neurotic to want to put our time and energy into propping up this hollow and self-destructive form of existence? Are we so unimaginative that we can't think of ways of putting our global capital into some other, perhaps more conservative, way of living?

I know that my grandparents learned to live through a depression by spending on an "as-needed" basis and budgeting and saving. The grim fact that it took the subsequent generation to live beyond their means, buy on credit, take out loans and grow the size and value of their homes to "boost" the economy should not be the rationale we use to "fix" our economy. Because of the limits on consumer spending and the nonexistence of discretionary income, my grandparents found other things to do with their lives than shop. Can we?