Shall We Spend?

[karlsie]

I was annoyed, exasperated, irritated with the online news appraisal of our economy, "Americans are Saving when They Should be Spending". I don't know about anyone else, but i find it increasingly more difficult to just keep up with the costs of living on my wage, let alone buy some fancy new gadget i don't need just to keep the market glutted. I'm tired of the guilt trip laid on the people. The American people are at fault for credit card maxing. They are at fault for the housing bubble. Now they are to be blamed for not spending. Give me a break. Guilt tripping is another manipulation, another means of making people feel bad just for wishing to insure their own survival. Let's continue to lay the guilt directly where it belongs; on the banks, the lenders, the advertising media, the corporate giants. They swayed the public with their self-interested policies. Now it's time to find something that works that doesn't involve continuing to feed their broken machinery.

[grainnerhuad]

I agree, this is a lie that most Americans have bought into. It deserves to be addressed. Are you going to do it? Or maybe since we have so many writers from different areas we can do it jointly siting what we see in our own area. Pink slips are the order of the day in California where I live due to the fact that our elected officials can't come up with a budjet. Plus I'm pissed that they voted (several years ago) that while they can pink slip every other state worker, their salaries would never not be paid.

[karlsie]

Not to mention they feel justified in giving themselves raises to offset the soaring costs of living. I feel like a mouse being played with by a cat. I've been trying to debate my personal treatment of the subject. I tend to agree, Grainne; each one of us will have a different perspective, in accordance to our different demographic locations. Solutions can only come in working from the ground up because you can't build a house without a foundation.

Obviously, consumers cannot cater to the needs of manufacturers; manufacturers must cater to the needs of consumers. The needs that have not been met are energy saving devices that break away from oil dependency, as well as oil-free goods. We have not yet seen affordable housing become available, or opportunities for small businesses to once again thrive (remember when Wal Marts bumped out most of the mom and pop stores?) We have few affordable options for healthy organic foods, and pay for our nutritional deficiencies with pharmaceutical prescriptions. The merchandising mind is still caught in the dynamics of a throw-away society and the only thing we can afford to throw away are the derelicts of post modern thinking.

[grainnerhuad]

Karla I am particularly interested in how things are for you in Alaska. Having never been there and you being the only person I know from there, I always got the impression that Alaska's economy was at least in part driven by oil and dependant on oil driven technology. Thinks like snowmobiles and airplaines and boats. Not to mention heating and lighting. How is Alaska saving or can they save money and break away from oil dependancy? How do you get healthy and organic foods year round. Really I think this is hard for most of the nation California being an anomoly, or abomonation, however you choose to look at it. Is Wal Mart taking over Alaska? What about outside the big cities and towns. So many great north questions.

[karlsie]

Well, Grainne, your questions are certainly helping me to focus in on how i should treat the subject from my geographic location. You are right; Alaska is an oil dependent state. We derive a large percent of our revenue from oil; although i'm not sure how much at this time; i'll have to check the statistics. Our permanent fund is amassed from oil dividends. We are basically stock holders. Oil generates (again i'll have to check statistics) in large part, our electricity and of course, our transportation. The high cost of fuel this year has greatly handicapped our work force as the average person commutes at least thirty miles a day to and from work. Despite the fact that we have our own gas company; Tesoro; and three refineries; two of which are in minimal operation (don't ask me why, ask the oil men) we still pay at least a dollar a gallon more for fuel than in the Continental US. The number of people who can't afford to work a low-paying job because of the prohibitive transportation costs has become appalling. This exasperates the unemployment rate and also jeoparding the remaining small businesses and companies as they can't afford to pay higher wages and struggle to keep employees.

However, we have a large number of natural energy resources, including wind, water (hydro-electric), natural gas and geo-thermal pockets. Most Alaskans would not mind a smaller permanent fund dividend if they did not have to pay so much for oil generated electricity. In coastal and central Alaska, the primary heating source is natural gas, coal or wood. The far northern villages must use fuel oil as they don't have a natural gas pipeline, and coal or wood are unavailable. Our largest coal supplier is located in Healey, a small town one hundred miles south-west of Faibanks, and the timberline ends just below the Arctic Circle.

Organically, most of us probably eat better than the average US citizen. The fertile Matanuska Valley, which stretches over two hundred miles, supplies potatoes that would rival Idaho's for texture and flavor. It also grows fifty pound cabbages, radishes as big as two thumbs squeezed together, eighteen inch long zucchini's, green beans, peas, lettuce, chard, broccali, spinich, cauliflower and beets. The Valley farmers offer range fed beef an buffalo as well as organic milk. Poultry is available and farm fresh eggs.

However, our mainstay is fish and wild game. We probably eat as much fish in one week as the average American eats in three months, and our freezers are always full of moose, caribou and reindeer sausage. In the summer, we harvest for berries. I can pick ten gallons easily, in a two mile circumference, of cranberries, currents, raspberries and rose hips, all of which grow in the woods, ckse to the house. If i climb to the top of the mountain, i can come back with gallons and gallons of blueberries. Nearly all our indigenous plants are edible and a large number of them have medicinal properties. We have only two poisonous plants; wild celery and hemlock; and only one poisonous berry; the dogwood.

There is already an International effort toward an organic food exchange co-op, and Alaska has been invited to take part in this exchange because of its clear ability to produce. Getting our legislators to think beyond anything other than saturating themselves in oil however, is a whole different story.

Yes, we have been completely saturated with Wal-Marts, and McDonalds, Home Depot and Starbucks coffee shops. If a town has four thousand people in it, you can expect to find a golden arch. I felt pretty sad to see so many small businesses close down; so many mom and pop stores, local hardware providers who worked as handy men on the side, so many small cafes with the smell of real pies being baked in the kitchen, our own hand crafts shunted aside for Chinese imitations and Eskimo Barbies, something was so inexorably lost. The personal touch, the friendly banter, the leisurely idling to catch up on all the gossip. Of course, you can still find them, ouside the hub of Anchorage. Most of Alaska is rural, but most of our rural towns are very small and very far apart.

[grainnerhuad]

Karla thanks for answering my questions and in doing so you have almost completed your entry! Now I am pissed too at the box stores and such. Hand crafts and small town feel is what people down here "say" they go to Alaska for. I did know about the giant vegtables but figured your growing season was limited. I had no idea so much was produced. Neither did I realize your elevation was so similar to mine in that it supports Dogwoods naturally. Interesting stuff. I had to chuckle when you said rosehips as part of your berry collection. I myself grow them at my house. When I sent them to the school both raw and cooked into a tea for pioneer day. The parenets and teachers had no idea they could be eaten. Then I had to explain it was probably best not to grab any old rose hip off their hybrid roses in front. LOL!

[Mr. Subversify]

The larger issue of spend -to-survive as an economic platform points to broader problems with the way this modern free market economy functions. I can remember Bush Sr. asking America to get out and spend in his waning days in office. The cult of the free market insists that consumer spending keeps markets afloat. Its true that our money helps businesses survive. However, there is a difference between purchasing needed goods at the local grocer and getting the $7 Extra Grande Late at the chain store coffee shop.

As we are a "free" market, chain franchises that make their cash flow off of consumer discretionary spending borrowed heavily to fund their expansion into every nook and cranny of American Society - even in Alaska. While times were good, this appeared to be a profitable venture, however now that the market is saturated and times are bad, these businesses die on the vine leaving behind debt, layoffs and politicians telling us to spend more. Screaming loudest still is the banking industry, who not only is hurt by the existing financial crisis but can't lend the very money it needs to maintain profitability. A few short years ago, these same institutions where lending out so much money that their profitability made most of their funds top performers.

So now the magic cure is to ask consumers to spend more, so saith the free market apostles. Its a limited and myopic view that only makes sense to someone that doesn't live in the real world where friends are getting laid off and hours are getting cut back. Perhaps rather supporting a system of trickle down and trickle up the larger questions should be asked about how the market can be better managed to prevent catastrophic collapses. People are blindly pumping their money into retirement accounts on the advice of investment managers which helps fund the expansion business. The free market advocates tell us to patiently wait while the market sorts itself out, and in that time the human calamity is an unfortunate stepping stone towards building the next great economic boom. At some point things will turn around and we'll all likely be surfing the waves of prosperity once again, but one wonders if there couldn't be away that society could protect itself from the downturns in the economy - and I think the first step would be getting everyone to acknowledge that the free market isn't really free, that society has a vested interest in the performance of business and the types of businesses that function within the markets. This would suggest that society be allowed to have some manner of control - hinting at other "S" words.

[karlsie]

,;p[---------------------Okay, give me a couple of days. Stacy, you've added a perspective for me to mull over. Society does, ultimately, have control over production. What society refuses to buy, cannot be sold. ,

o m\ If you're wondering about the strange lettering, that's my ferret's encrypted code. I got up to get a cup of coffee, and she frantically took over with her own keyboard message. I was going to erase, yet after staring at it for several minutes, decided why should i censor Oogley? After all, what could be more subversive than a ferret?

Grainne, i live at the north-western edge of a rain forest that i believe begins in Washington. Our dogwood is stunted but it grows everywhere. As children, we amused ourselves with making wreaths from the flowers. The rose hips are very prolific. They are a bit smaller than domestic ones, and a bit more tart. They make an excellent jam.

We are constantly learning new ways to grow produce. We even grow our own tomatoes and cucumbers now, by keeping them in greenhouses or under plastic tents. We have apple trees and are cultivating a northern cherry. Vegetables grow so large for two reasons. One, is because the soil is incredibly fertile. It's the thick, black, ground product left behind by the glaciers only a couple hundred years ago. It remains nourished through a rapid decomposition process due to a high nitrogen content, and through the periodic dusting of volcanic ash. The other reason has to do with our nearly twenty-four hours a day of direct sunlight from the middle of May to the middle of July. Plants mature incredibly rapidly during this season. Our indigenous plants are so hardy, that within a few months of fresh paving for a road, the grasses are pushing up through the cracks and even dandelions crowd along the edges.