Its seems a no-brainer, but no one wants to discuss it. If our previous economic boom was based on shady business practices then there is no way to 'recover' without exposing ourselves to the same risk. Recovery will only happen if Americans become willing to accept a lower quality of life. Which is conceivable we'd be willing to do, except that no politician or business person is willing to pitch that idea cause they know its a career-ender.

I've had my belt tightened for years so this economy isn't such a shock to me. Robert Reich is right, we can't base a prediction of what a recovery will look like because we're in uncharted waters. I think most people I know realize things will never be the same again, that the way we were living was unsustainable and sacrifice will be necessary moving forward. Even when my salary does go back up eventually (I'm in school for a mid-career change), I don't see that I'll ever get back to spend, spend, spend.

A consumer economy based on the assumption that we can perpetually use a finite amount of resources for an infinite amount of demand is gone.

Recovery will come not just when everyone feel more secure, but when buying things--for fun, doesn't make you one responsible for global poverty, carbon-catastrophe, ignorance-is-bliss, glum. We've got to sexy-up buying things again. Stop this move to make it something to not just be careful about, but to apologize for.

Or we will end the ability of the planet to support other than a remnant human population.

The oil economy is evil. No other way to describe it - around it are arrayed every sin - greed, arrogance, envy, selfishness, ignorance, murder, duplicity, and so on.

Consider Dick Cheney - is he not the face of the petroleum economy? Does he not embody all the sins of it?

I'm getting ready so my family has a fighting chance to survive the inevitable fall of this unholy death worshipping ideology.

I am not smart enough to disagree with Robert Reich's diagnosis of an X-shaped crash-and-recovery cycle. I AM smart enough to know that this might be the kind of historic veering-off point that makes prior expertise based on vanished models meaningless.

If he is right about it(and I think he is), we all need to start thinking about how to make a low-consumption economy work.

Doing nothing but pissing and moaning and blogging and tweeting about it. Otherwise you'd be out there in gladiatorial combat with us older folks. And while we're a lot more ruthless about it than you are, we've lost a step. So anything you can do to take yourselves out of contention would be appreciated. Thanks.

Reich writes:

"Eventually consumers will replace cars and appliances and other stuff that wears out, but a recovery can't be built on replacements. Don't expect businesses to invest much more without lots of consumers hankering after lots of new stuff."

Why? The planet can't survive our overconsumption. I don't know why we can't live with enough, not scads and scads more than enough.

It says something about our economy, and our lives, when I can find a whole section in my local bookstore on organization and "decluttering." I don't think many of our ancestors were plagued with "clutter." I am. Almost everyone I know is. Drowning in it. It's a major lifestyle change, a conscious effort every day to avoid it, to deal with it, to not let it into the house.

We can't consume our way out of this by buying clutter.

What the banksters have done, aided & abetted by Obama is to, by

design, totally bankrupt America, creating a debtor's abyss from which there is no escape.

And once again Robert Reich spouts gibberish instead of telling

the truth. Even calling the FASCIST induced economic disaster we are in a recession rather than a depression or a wake is insulting.

Too many people have lost their jobs, homes, futures, life savings ,& have maxed out credit cards, for a recovery to take

place.

It's ironic that Arnold TERMINATED California & Obama destroyed

the rest of the U.S.

Enslavement is upon us, and England now has a new colony.

Personal reactors are coming (home improvement stores won't be able to keep them in stock).

Miracle hovercars (and the job creating changes to roadways which will be needed to handle them).

Love potions (game changers in the dating industry).

And we'll outsource these so that we can be freed to innovate some more.

What's happening is not the end of everything, it's the end of a form of "adolescent capitalism" that was born out of a vast inheritance we stole from its inhabitants and bilked for all it was worth. Americans had it all fall into their laps, and the best of the competition (Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan) squandered much of what they had in fratricidal wars that left America virtually unscathed.

We had it all, and we ran through it in two-plus generations of getting and spending. We reached a point where we consumed much more than we produced and leveraged our asses off. Massive investments in things that kill other people, and the inability fo the rest of the world to figure out how to ween themselves from the copious dollars Uncle Sam distributes willy-nilly may buy us some time to weather the cape and learn to live within our means. But that will take a lot of guts and an ability for us to walk away from the adolescent economy we built in the 20th century. I'm not expecting it all to turn out well.

Great commentary Robert. I hope that your future elaboration takes into account that no social class gets a larger share of any pie without organizing and fighting for it. There are some exceptions, of course. Peasant incomes in Europe went up following the great plagues when half of them died. A combination of labor organizing and vast new imperial conquests will do it like in the 50's and 60's. Or perhaps a YES magazine supra-class democracy will descend from the sky and re-organize all the balance sheets of bankrupt capitalism to usher in Sweden. I await your political economy.