Cheap Energy Will Save Kentucky

This just in: Cheap energy – based on our never to decline coal deposits – will help the state succeed economically! And we in Lexington better get on board. We’ve got a duty to support our brother coal barons in the east.

The problem is that cheap energy has not helped our state succeed economically. We’ve had cheap energy since coal was found, and yet by any indicator one wishes to choose, we’re still one of the poorest states in the U.S.

Oh, NOW it will be different, some say…..That’s right: we’ll market ourselves to the rest of the world as a cheap place to do business. Cheap land, cheap wages, cheap energy. THAT will get the ball rolling!

Only it hasn’t. And it wont – a race to the bottom on cost will only get us to the bottom. So instead of rising, we languish, our people get fatter and less educated, mining and sprawl ravage our landscapes, and we get poorer by the year.

Yes, cheap electric rates seem to be a benefit. But all we are doing is eating the future. Our children will have to pay the costs we avoided. The dead mountains, the polluted water, the changed climate all come with costs. Perhaps they won’t curse us, but they damn sure will pity us for our foolishness.

Those people who promote coal are only doing so out of self interest: they’ve got money to make from coal barons, or they have to take orders from the people who make money from coal barons.

The Story of A Building Project: Does this sound familiar?

The Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest building, is set to open in early January. Right when the country it’s located in is going bankrupt.

From the AP: “The Burj Dubai — a steel-and-glass needle rising more than a half-mile (800 meters) — may be the last completed work from Dubai’s time of the giants. Most other of the unfinished super-projects announced in recent years, such as a second palm-shaped island or a tower to surpass the Burj Dubai, are either recession roadkill or being considered on a far smaller scale.

‘It’s now like a last hurrah to the boom years,’ says Christopher Davidson, a professor at the University of Durham in Britain who has written extensively about the United Arab Emirates.

‘Buildings like the Burj Dubai are born from the optimism of the moment,’ said Carol Willis, director of The Skyscraper Museum in New York. ‘That may not necessarily be the mood when the project is finished.’

….there’s some facts that are still closely guarded, including how much of the office and residential space is leased and whether the financial meltdown will make the Burj another tower of debt.”

Does any of this sound familiar to us here in Lexington?

Read the story here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091202/ap_on_bi_ge/ml_dubai_tallest_tower

A Reverse Peace Corps

After visiting the LaFollette, Tennessee area over Thanksgiving, I am more convinced than ever that many of us are living in a third world country.

From the devastated strip that passes for the community’s center, to the giant, feeble people hobbling from their old cars into fading fast food huts, to the trash and debris along what should be some of the most beautiful roads in America, I’ve seen first-hand that many places have reached the end.

The “Dream” is over in those places.  We’re hanging on, but losing our grip.  This is happening right before our eyes.  What we take for “normal” is disgusting.   We are accepting our way into oblivion.

We need help.  That’s where this idea comes in like genius:  ”We need a reverse peace corps in that people from the 3rd and 4th worlds ought to come to the developed world to help us with our non-physical dimensional lives so we can create some balance.”

This comes from Bob Banner over at www.hopedance.org

Think about it – couldn’t we learn something from people who are already where we are heading?  For far too long we’ve looked at them with pity and a measure of disgust.  Now, we ourselves are seeing what it’s like to live in this kind of “economy.”   We could learn how to live with less, do less damage, and have a better life.

Ah well, they don’t have the latest version of Call of Duty.  So we still rule!

East Tennessee: Who Knew?

What a great song:  Wagon Wheel – Old Crow Medicine Show

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2vJUadjdmo&feature=fvw

 

Fall Color

More east Tennessee

Fall Color

Been away in east Tennessee….lots of revelations about what’s going on in the country….found a perfectly formed, but really brown sycamore leaf

CoreLogic: 1 in 4 Mortgages Underwater

Kentucky appears to be doing better than most states – we didn’t have the insane housing overbuild that so many of the local elites really wanted (“Growth is Good”).  Maybe that’s because we aren’t attractive for growth – not all that many people want to move here.   But that doesn’t mean that in lots of areas of Lexington and the surrounding region underwater mortgages aren’t a big problem.  And there is no relief in sight.

From Barry Rithotlz: Here’s a stat to wake you up this morning:  23% of all mortgage borrowers in the US are underwater:

“The proportion of U.S. homeowners who owe more on their mortgages than the properties are worth has swelled to about 23%, threatening prospects for a sustained housing recovery.

Nearly 10.7 million households had negative equity in their homes in the third quarter, according to First American CoreLogic, a real-estate information company based in Santa Ana, Calif.

These so-called underwater mortgages pose a roadblock to a housing recovery because the properties are more likely to fall into bank foreclosure and get dumped into an already saturated market. Economists from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. said Monday they didn’t expect U.S. home prices to hit bottom until early 2011, citing the prospect of oversupply.”

There are 5.3 million U.S. households with mortgages at least 20% higher than the home’s value. And it gets worse, depending upon the vintage of the mortgage.

During the boom, appreciably worse: Of those who took out mortgages at the 2006 peak, more than 40% are under water.

Fall Color

Cercis canadensis – the last few leaves of the season…

Our Hungry Children

As we prepare to gorge ourselves on Thanksgiving food, take one small moment and think about this:  One-half of all American children will live in a home that receives food stamps.  One kid in two in this country will be hungry at some point within the next few years.  What on Earth is happening here?  Aren’t we the richest, most innovative, best place to live in the whole world? And 50% of our kids go to bed hungry at night?

We are fortunate to live in Lexington, we really are.  Things aren’t too tough here right now.  We kinda have a sense that things are bad elsewhere, but we have no idea just how bad they are in most of the country. But this isolation also keeps our mind closed to reality. And in many ways has hardened our collective hearts.  These are our children, American children.  Yet we can’t think of any way out of this, and so many people don’t even seem to care.   They subscribe to belief that fault lies with the individual, not with the system.  But when half of our children are going hungry, there damn sure is something wrong with the system.

What are we becoming? Where will this lead?

Read more here: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5huS1aDImykHCJxUuyNW-fbMSAbMA

What is the Purpose of the Economy?

“If we are not to be caught indefinitely in a trap we have designed for ourselves, we have to ask what an economy would look like if it were genuinely focused on making and sustaining a home – a social environment that offered security for citizens, including those who could not contribute in obvious ways to productive and profit-making business, an environment in which we felt free to forego the tempting fantasies of unlimited growth in exchange for the knowledge that we could hand on to our children and grandchildren a world, a social and material nexus of relations that would go on nourishing proper three-dimensional human beings – people whose family bonds, imaginative lives and capacity for mutual understanding and sympathy were regarded as every bit as important as their material prosperity.” Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury