I spend most of my time in Detroit, where none of the houses have been selling, where all the construction projects are on hold, where everybody who still has a job worries about that job. We are used to it.

I just went to Seattle for a week. Out there, people are just starting to realize how long their For Sale signs are lasting. They still imagine that all their brand new houses will find buyers. They seem to believe that gas will go back down to about $2.25 per gallon soon. They have less effective public transport even than we have in Detroit.

I fear the Northwest will have a sudden traumatic wake-up.

We've been running on economic fumes for decades, the artificial residue of a few years of real prosperity and productivity after WWII, when American was indeed a Colossus astride the world. We've been pretty good at figuring out ways to borrow against the future and shovel various accounts around but now it looks like we're out of tricks.

So now what? We sink for a while, maybe a long while, maybe a very long while, until we get tired of sinking and failing and begin to rebuild our lives and our country.

So we stop buying imported gewgaws to distract ourselves from meaningless lives and embrace core virtues again: hard work, thrift, discipline. We stop worrying about which celebrity's little sister is pregnant and we begin to revere inventors and scientists and smart people. We educate ourselves and invent things and make things again.

It will take decades, if any of that can ever really happen at all. It would only happen if the pain gets very, very bad, human nature and all.

There was a time when an event that caused a national crisis occurred the people we hired to manage our living conditions would make moves to correct the conditions . They were real Americans . What we have now is a gang operating for and racking in the cash from foreign lands and corporations . Operating clandestinely and openly to peel off more and more of American land , business , and jobs . Truman and Nixon both were Americans that made adjustments to prevent onditions similar to what we exsist with now . The present admin and their aides in congress care not about Americans . In this time of lose of income for Americans and higher cost of living not one penny has been cut from the money appropriated for foreign lands . Just think about this . WE BORROW MONEY TO GIVE AWAY , SOME OF WHICH IS KICKED BACK TO OUR LAW MAKERS . When the old politicians are proclaiming experience , keeping this business going is what they are talking about .

Shrink your debt.

Shrink your house.

Shrink your expenses.

Too many Americans wanted a war that they weren't willing to pay for, in blood and bucks. trillions were borrowed and are borrowed. One way to control the new trillions of debt is the cruel tax of inflation, where everything costs more and the dollar is worth less. This doesn't affect rich people, of course. And after their years of Bush's multiple tax breaks for the rich, they're richer than ever. And more muffled than ever from the coming suffering.

I am coming to feel that the economic downturn is real but lacks for drama. No brokers jumping from windows, no massive stock value crash, just the steady drip of increasingly bad news about the long-term viablility of our speculate, borrow, and build economy. Therefore, people in general, and the wizz-bang media in particular, are having trouble focussing on it.

On a related note, I read an article the other day about the renewed flow of massive wealth to the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia. These petrodollars, however, are not flowing back to the US the way they did in the 1970s. The Sheiks are diversifying, and investing more at home in preparation for the day when the money ceases to pour in. This outflow of wealth may make it harder for the US to restart its economy via a new round of investment and speculation. Is the current Administration the last which can go to the well and not hear a clunk when they lower the bucket? Our entire future now rests on the dollar remaining the global reserve currency. If that goes, expect the economy to shrink by twenty percent--permanently.

The decline in jobs is a non-economic trend, it may not recover in any event. Automation is taking jobs from workers, not foreign workers, who work in the industries from the last century. I really thought that BRIC nations would not succumb to Wall Streets back-to-the-future economic industrial plan for development.

These countries should not be building suburbs, freeways, and factories to produce an endless supply of gas guzzling cars. Wall Street loves it, because they understand it, to the dertiment of a world economy that requires a new vision.

Jaded as I am by this damned country, I think in the long run, the US will create jobs out of this oil crisis by leading the world developing alternative energy sources. Germany is the only country that has invested wisely in this regard, but we'll catch up. We always have, from the automobile (another German invention btw) to the Internet. Both presidential candidates are at least paying lip service to the need to invest in alternative energy but with high oil prices we may not even need their leadership (or want it - that's how we got corn ethanol).

You may be correct, but the United States was always able to either innovate or catch up because after about 1840 it had 1) vast wealth from agriculture and extractive industries (gold and silver, then coal and oil), 2) a huge population that statistically meant a concommitantly large number of smart people (the North alone had a greater population than Britain did in 1860 although much lower levels of per capita industiralization), and 3) a highly literate population with levels of secondary and university educational attainment only approached by Germany and matched by nobody. So we had money to invest, people to make and buy stuff, and the trained cadres to design, build, distribute, and market things. I would argue that America's advantage in 1 and 3 have collapsed compared to our economic competitors. We still have alot of people, many of them smart, but the system is so skewed towards having them invent finacial insturments, find legal and tax loopholes for corporations (or perform liposuction or nose jobs) that I doubt we will return to any Golden Age of US economic vitallity. I just hope that we can muddle through.