Thank-you for the invitation but I am not sure I completely agree with your position. While I can agree it may not always be the best usage of the English language, if I hear someone use the word “basically” I take it to mean that they are speaking about something on basic terms for whatever reason.

If some people choose to perceive what I say as having a condescending tone maybe they will have to live with it, the same as I have had to live with being laughed at over the past twenty-five years for 1) growing much of my own food 2) wearing mostly second hand clothes, and for the past three years 3) using my bicycle as a primary form of transportation. This happens to be a way of life that I wholeheartedly recommend to everyone.

Personally I have always found it exceedingly rude that so many find it advisable to trash the planet and in so doing the entire human race. It has been both my belief and experience, even that the impending environmental problems that we will eventually face are a reflection of the hatred that most people have towards most other people and towards every life form.

Anyway, there is a term to describe the “great equilibrator” that you mentioned. The term is Global Labor Arbitrage (foreign outsourcing, H-1B and L-1 visas, mass immigration). (I would love to see Tom Ashbrook do a show on this subject with economist Paul Craig Roberts (Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for the Reagan Administration).

An excellent summary of Global Labor Arbitrage is available here: http://outsourcing.yuku.com/topic/364

I’ve been writing a novel for some while now. The time frame is set during the coming depression–the one from which the U.S. never fully recovers. If this isn’t the one–the recession we’re in–then it’s only a prelude to the inevitable. As for the program’s subject material as cited, cities, towns and villages don’t recycle buildings that sit on acres and acres of municipal lands. They tear them down. It only takes a day or two. . .hasn’t anyone noticed? City councils have no vision. They’re made up of ordinary citizens who haven’t a clue. . .not a moment’s worth of insight, which is why this country is headed toward it’s final great depression.

With each day that passes during the financial crisis we’re experiencing I am more and more encouraged to keep writing and finish my work. And as it turns out, what I’ve produced so far seems to require very little revision as a reasonable predictor of the future.

If you’re at all interested, the program I’m citing failed in one important aspect. . .the current America and the one we’ll be living in shortly bear little resemblance to each other. The reason for this, which I think you may even have breathed out loud at one point, is the looming reduction in the ordinary American’s standard of living. It’s to be a permanent reduction with the trappings of mad consumption and the foolish waste of past generations visible in ruin far into the future. Major cities will have their “empty sectors,” which is the title of one of my chapters, and they will have them for the simple reason that there will be no budget capital for what many scholarly futurists have been conditioned to think of (and wishfully so) as urban redesign and revitalization.

Why the “inevitability” as I said earlier? Because just as I’d written back in the Ross Perot days of the ’80s, economic globalization–the supposed panacea of consumerism and the narcotic of choice among giant industrialists–is to become the great “equilibriator,” neglecting the indulgence if you don’t mind, which Perot characterized way back then as the “giant sucking sound” of jobs leaving the country. In other words, if you can’t heed the words of a visionary, you’ll be doomed to experience them first hand. Things that have been beyond the average American’s consciousness where third world living conditions are concerned will become everyday realities in the lives of most Americans.
Another of your guests–his bent being a dislike of municipal zoning regulations, obviously–predicted “mixed re-use” of these giant structures, treating us to his vision of parks, walkways and green spaces scattered tastefully among residences, schools and industry–all coexisting peacefully in small enclaves of paradise. Could anyone fail to hear the incessant call to develop, develop, develop in this man’s voice? We are at the end of development. Development has been a big part of the slash-and-burn mindset that’s gotten us this far into the disaster we’re experiencing. We’ve developed the flood basins along rivers and even the oceans. We’ve developed in the unstable areas of hillsides. We’ve developed in wetlands and swamps like the Okeechobee in Florida. We’ve developed on top of prime ag-land in California simply because people like the climate for living and raising their kids. The problem is that kids of the future may not have enough to eat once prime agricultural land is no longer available for producing food. And the follow-up to all of this?. . .water. Develop, develop, develop. . .right up to the limits of our natural resources and our infrastructure. If all this and much, much more hasn’t become an obvious enough problem to date, it soon will be. Famine in 21st Century America? Don’t count it out.
—-
Fred “Fritzwilliam” Bracy
Ventura, CA 93001
Blog at lit.org/fritzwilliam

Please join my campaign to eliminate the tedious use of the word ‘basically.’

Here is the reasoning::

The word “basically” is an overused verbal tic which demeans and condescends to the listener. It is at the same time a way for the speaker to inflate his own self esteem by flogging and repeating words that appear to emphasize personal knowledge.

It is a fault which has become, I fear, some sort of custom or accepted colloquialism.

This is the campaign to banish ‘basically’ permanently.

I see people at the McCain/Palin rallies chanting “drill baby drill” and while I know we need oil do we have to really consume 25 to 30% of the worlds resources to get around?

Why is that people want to live so far away from the place of work that to get there they are up a 3, 4 in the morning and don’t get home to after 9 in the evening.

We move to the exurbs because we want to have our back yard and pool and a lawn, and a larger entertainment room with a HUGE FLAT SCREEN TV”S to go with our HUGE SUV and our HUGE BUTTS. We go to super sized Wall Marts to buy super sized stuff to fill our huge McMansions.

How is it that we have become so ugly, nasty, mean and selfish. So reptilian.

What the hell happened?

In the past, we worked our way out of a recession with the help of the federal government providing some kind of stimulus package. In one to three years, the economy was back on a growth track and there were no serious, long-term casualties. We continued to spend and consume as in the past.

That was then and this is now.

Our economy has too much debt. Our federal government is running record-breaking federal deficits and the American consumer is dangerously overextended with mortgage and consumer debt. This has happened at the same time as the value of his principle asset, his home, has fallen in value by 20 to 30 percent. Further, we have been transferring our wealth to oil producing countries at a rate of $700-billion per year and other nations are getting stronger economically.

The federal government is doing the right thing spending money to revitalize the financial infrastructure of our economy and trying to stimulate short-term demand. These actions are necessary to prevent a depression and the total collapse of our economy: not to prevent a recession. The recession is here and will not go away soon.

In the long term, we need to reduce the amount of debt that we use to support our life style; or change our way of life. This is true as a nation, as investors and as individuals. If we do not, we will lose the economic battle with the rest of the world and the United States will no longer be the super power that we perceive.

Reducing our use of debt means that less money will be available to consume. Less consumption converts to less demand for the goods and services produced and excess capacity in the system to produce and deliver the products. Excess capacity will mean less demand for retail space and that in turn will mean lower rents for commercial properties and higher vacancies.

Lower rents, higher CAP rates and conservative underwriting will mean lower values for commercial properties.

Recovering from a hangover is painful.

Eventually the environment will not be able to sustain all of the garbage which will be the next big crisis that everyone will be shocked to see.

When I was ten years old back in 1974 and saw all of the crappy, obviously-not-meant-to-last buildings being thrown up on 28th Street in Grand Rapids, Michigan and asked “Where they were going to end up? In a landfill? But this is only one street in one city in an entire country in an entire world!!!”

Basically, this issue has been around for a long time and defies even the logic of a simplistic 10-year-old!

I’m so pleased that the big box stores are disappearing. They have overtaken and developed so much land it is sick. Close down these stores and return the land to recreation.

I know it is upsetting and flys in the face of lots of “current truths”, but I suggest that there is freedom in listening to this program without the filter of “knowing what is so”. As Martin Luther King said, the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

My thanks to BUR, the program speakers and all who have commented.

Our economy is a mess because we do make anything any more. We’ve relied on financial tricks and uber-consumerism to support our economy. Our jobs have been going, going, gone.

I’m not a protectionist chicken-little, but let’s get real. We won’t have an economy without the jobs that support the middle class. The middle class is more than bankers and computer programmers. It will take blue collar jobs all levels of white collar jobs to rebuild our economic foundation.

Two and this is the biggy, a consumer economy, where will the money come from, any jobs if they survive will not pay enough cause of the surplus of labor available world wide, but no one is going to pay you to just go shopping, even uncle sam who has supprted the consumer economy with large budget deficits is a broke uncle.

A consumer economy is dead, the technology that was created to help us has also rendered us useless and worthless, whether the right that does not want you to get an abortion and just procreate, or that left that assumes that every ignorant, lame brained moran has a right to make babies are both wrong. The sooner we start stopping people from making useless litte kids that will only become a burden on the environment and natural resources. First step is to be to stop paying people for making children and next to pay them for NOT having any kids

Most areas have property taxes favoring the resale of buildings with the ‘holding costs’ being deferred until the sale is completed. We have one store that was vacant for 30 years in the center of our small downtown main street.

Local governments can implement these local self reliant strategies.

Simply put, no one has objected strongly enough to the stranglehold real estate outfits maintain on local governments and ordinances. They have been allowed to legislate at will.