I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
The election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States may well be a turning point in American history. A man of profound decency, eloquence, calm and straightforward thinking, President-elect Obama’s steady presence could change the tone and direction of American political discourse. That might stop the mud flying so hard and fast, and even see some wise thinking and sound action replacing it.
But I’m afraid Obama, and the new Congress, won’t be much help to local businesses around the country in the short haul.
Every corner of the nation is suffering in the early days of a complicated and possibly long-term recession in which a new kind of economy will replace the funny money, throwaway society we’ve created over the last 50 years and which came to a head in a set of financial Ponzi schemes that almost caused a total global financial meltdown.
A country can’t have its financial way of life run like the mob’s casino while the world runs out of oil and clean water, chokes on dirty coal and is deluged by violent and unpredictable weather.
In Albuquerque and New Mexico, national troubles usually take a year or so to arrive. But the downturn in the economy is here, right now, full blown and on time for the holidays. Even a venerable Albuquerque institution like American Home Furnishings is having its hard times.
Local retail is hurting all over. Contractors and skilled craftsmen are idle. Advertising isn’t selling and local media are feeling the pinch. Late or slow payers are wrecking the budgets of many companies. The unsold housing inventory is nothing short of humongous. Realtors are drumming their fingers. National retail outlets are closing, leaving their staffs jobless. Older people who had been saving for retirement have watched the fruit of their life’s work diminish so much they’re out competing again for jobs. Young people can’t find good paying work as it is. And prices mount, despite the temporary respite in gas prices.
If this is a long recession, Albuquerque and New Mexico will be in deep trouble. Many of us are completely unprepared for hardship. Our economy is on old-fashioned boom economy based on the illusion of limitless growth and expansion. And it’s going bust.
A new concept of growth needs to drive a new kind of economy.
We need do away with the idea of growth as simply meaning more and bigger stuff, more junk, more buildings, more people.
The circumstances of our times -– overpopulation, resource depletion, wild weather, and a near criminal financial system -– will force us to look at growth a different way, and associate it with quality, not more and bigger.
A high-quality, long-durability view of growth will emerge to compete with the SUV, mortgage ripoff, planned obsolescence view of growth. We’ll always have our Cadillac dandies with the 20,000-square-foot houses. But the economy won’t be able to rely anymore on convincing everybody they should aspire to live that way.
Most of us will come to want, because we will come to need, good products, local products, well made cars and appliances with lasting power.
Places like Albuquerque will prosper again, but in a very different way. It’s not a green revolution, per se, but when the fat gets taken out of the economy, a new niche for high quality, reasonable goods will appear.
An economy bolstered by growth-as-quality thinking will capitalize on two emerging trends –- the re-localization of commerce and the decentralization of energy.
The ever-rising price of gasoline, and the transition time it will take to cycle into a different kind of transportation fuel, will make hauling goods long distances prohibitively expensive. Gasoline has already tripled in price since 2000 causing an increasing number of jobs to return to our shores from Asia.
And these jobs will land not only in big population centers, but in hometowns across the country. Just as it’s getting too expensive to cart goods across the globe, it’s getting too expensive to truck many kinds of goods across the country. And that cost, along with a long-term credit crunch and a slow recession, leads to stagflation — going nowhere fast and at great expense.
This is a tough, but good, situation for enterprising local entrepreneurs.
One of the greatest opportunities will be found in the cost savings of decentralized energy, and all the manufacturing and service jobs that will produce.
The national grid will become more clogged and vulnerable as electricity takes up the slack for gasoline as a transportation fuel. Big coal and big nuke do not lend themselves to a decentralized solution. But national gas, solar, wind and biofuels do.
It’s entirely possible many of the nation’s towns and cities will opt to become electricity independent, opting off the grid, wholly or in part, to run their power by alternative sources.
And more and more households will see the long-term financial sense of detaching from the grid and its big suppliers, and augmenting or replacing coal and nuclear power with private solar power.
In a re-localized green economy, entrepreneurial opportunities abound, especially as the world’s climate becomes more chaotic.
In New Mexico, drought products and services such as catchment devices, gray water recycling, and drought-sensitive horticulture will have a good market. So will weather-change products like roofing, insulating and home retrofitting. Multi-modal transportation products will do well after their startup costs, especially the kind of transports that get people to buses and trains from their homes and work.
Agricultural products will begin to flourish locally again as food trucked in from thousands of miles away will become too costly. Mending, repairing and recycling will also have a renaissance when the throw-away society becomes too expensive for most of us. There is a huge potential here for entrepreneurs to augment, or even replace, wage work that’s below a living income.
One can also imagine, in a re-localized economy, a large array of tutorial and educational products not supplied by colleges and universities and high-tuition private education providers. There will be a new opportunity for local arts and entertainment as well.
Troubled times like these are full of rich possibilities. And with an administration in Washington that isn’t devoted to Big Oil and Big China over local business, who knows how prosperous we might become?
