No surprise, but Obama and the Washington establishment have messed up in a truly grievous and calamitous way.

BO and AIG.

Given a once-a-century chance to save the nation from the ravages of global capitalism into which it had plunged itself, the Democrats and their bureaucratic allies have given us more – staggeringly more – of the same.  Instead of turning the entire economy around so that it could provide real salvation from a world facing economic meltdown, unstable currencies, global warming, peak oil, industrial pollution, starvation, depleting freshwater, over-fishing, rising oceans, overpopulation, the perils of overgrowth, and the collapse of civilization as we have known it – our last chance, surely, so to do – instead of even thinking about that, they have decided that unchecked corporate-financial capitalism, now “stimulated” by enormous funds loaned to us from Asia and the oil sheikdoms, would fix what it had broken.

I’m not just saying that the packages and bailouts and a $3 trillion budget will essentially fail and that we will have depression with us for a good long time. That’s an opinion held by most people not deluded by the asinine liberal consensus.  I’m saying that those measures ignore all the over-arching world-threatening perils that the nation and the world now face.

Global warming is real; its effects will be disastrous.  Its basic cause is human activity promoting economic growth, consumption, materialism, higher living standards, population increase, longevity, infrastructure expansion, and urbanization.  Those are, mind you, the evils that will bring on the perils of increasing greenhouse gasses, desertification, starvation on a global scale, unchecked migrations, introduced diseases, drowning cities, unbreathable air, unbearable heat, chaotic storms, and severe population die-off.  

And yet those evils are the very things that global capitalism is all for.  Those are at the heart of the very economic life we have created, where, basically, every one of the seven deadly sins, including sloth, is celebrated. Those are what the American way of life has been all about – and, if anyone were sentient enough to see it, those practiced in excess were what brought about the current economic crisis.

And those are what we, and the rest of the industrial world, are supposed to restore and enlarge and improve and extend under all the policies and proposals now being advanced.  What amounts to something like $2 trillion is scheduled to be spent in the next few months in the United States in aid of this cause, the greatest public works and spending project in the history of the planet.

How deep the sickness has gone, how deep the madness penetrates.  The man dying of strychnine poisoning quaffs another cup of it.

If you wanted to pick one single element of American society contributing the most to the present predicament – I don’t mean just the economic collapse, but all the rest – it would be gas-powered vehicles.  They are responsible for considerable amounts of direct pollution, not just in the driving but the manufacture, plus that associated with building the highways, bridges, parking garages, and all else they require.  They are the principal guzzlers of gasoline and diesel, that huge download in our national budget. They are the main reason for urban sprawl and suburban squalor and all the houses (and mortgages) that get built for their drivers there.  If you wanted to do something serious to get our society going in the right direction, you would, for starters, work to eliminate cars and trucks, end the federal highway program, promote high-speed rail and battery-operated minivans, provide white bikes in every city, and above all create localized economies with minimal transportation needs and very little shipped in. And stop building houses and subsidizing people to buy them and get to them by car.

But that’s not what Obama & Co. ever even stopped to think about.  No, they have done everything possible to coddle the American automobile and its attended needs.  The Democratic Congress authorized a $25-billion plan to retool and modernize auto factories in 2008, then another $24 billion for GM and Chrysler, and then Detroit came back for $17 billion more.  The stimulus act goes on to provide at least $180 billion for building highways and other infrastructure, and another $50 billion for states to spend largely on infrastructure.  In addition, Big Oil also is getting some $20 billion in tax breaks and subsidies, and fees to the government for offshore drilling will continue to be waived.  And the budget provides no less than 1,321 earmarks for transportation, few of them for the good kind.

Not just more of the same, but lots more of the same.  They blew it.

Somehow nobody in or near power has any sense that the fundamental problems are a result of growth.  That growth, which is the engine of modern global capitalism, is the cause of pollution, waste, global warming, war and empire, and all the rest of our surrounding perils.  It simply can’t go on, gang, and at this time of implosion we had a chance to establish some controls and limits to ensure a safe and measured path away from it and toward a stable, sustainable, small-scale, steady-state economy.

In addition, though no one is talking about this, the stimulus bill and the subsequent budget display the same relentless commitment to empire, and the military might to sustain it, that has been the essential cause of our excess spending for the past 20 years.  Obama is upping the “defense” budget to $664 billion, including $200 billion to go on fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – just as though he was elected as a hawk rather than peace president – and the “intelligence” budget to $65 billion.  And in case you missed it, he has installed as head of the State Department’s crucial Office of Policy Planning a certified imperial hawk, Princeton’s Anne-Marie Slaughter, who wants to impose American-style “democracy” around the world

In other words, at a moment when the U.S.  could realistically draw in from its overstretched and over-costly worldwide reach – at least 750 bases in 130 countries, plus eight fleets with 280 ships on permanent active duty, with two active wars – the Obama team has decided to go on as if nothing had changed, or needed changing.   And paying for it as if we actually had the money.   The opportunity was at hand, given the economic mess, to start dismantling the unnecessary empire maintained by an unnecessary military force that is more bloated than all the rest of the world’s armies put together, and to put that money and the soldiers back into American life.

But no, Obama & Co. aren’t interested in that, either.

The essential problem is that no one in positions of power, or advising them from lobbies, universities, or think tanks, has any conception of a third way, a way beyond failed corporate capitalism and government-sponsored socialism.  It’s not that no one has thought of what that way would look like, for a great many critics of industrialism and the global economy have proffered many choices for a century and more: the Distributists, Catholic Workers, Agrarians, Country Life and back-to-the-land movements, Georgists, anti-globalists, anti-petroleumists, communitarians, green planners and builders, and a wide variety of community-centered, anti-big-government thinkers and writers in this country and England.  But they have been ignored.

Alas. For it is now more than ever that this country needs to, has the chance to, chart itself a new course, built on the idea of small, thriving local economies, human-scale communities, self-sufficient food and energy production, the development of  local talents for local needs.  That is the only way to escape the looming tragedies that gigantism and global capitalism are preparing for us.

We had a chance.  But Obama & Co. blew it.

Kirkpatrick Sale, Vermont Commons editor-at-large and author of a dozen books, including After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination (Duke), is the director of the Middlebury Institute.