Example. The fuel supply cycle to rural Alaska is a real puzzle. We take crude oil from Prudhoe Bay, ship it thousands of miles to refineries in California, take the diesel, put it in tankers, ship it to Unalaska holding tanks, offload an reload it into coastal tankers, ship it to Kotzebue, offload it and reload it into lightering barges, offload it into coastal holding tanks, then reload it into river barges and send it up the Kobuk river, to be sold at $10.00/gal. That is, sold at $10.00/gal approximately 300 miles from where the crude was originally extracted. Then we take our state revenue from petroleum taxes and use the money to offset the cost of fuel oil to heat Kobuk homes, schools, and clinics, and offset the cost of $2.00 / kwh electricity generated from the expensive fuel. All of this shipping, handling, distant refining, then shipping, handling and re-handling of both the fuel and the petroleum revenue has been the pattern for so long, we have come to think of it as ‘normal’. The TAPS pipeline and the Dalton Highway are less than 200 mi east of Kobuk. Just a little bit of the appropriate infrastructure, well-placed, and rural fuel oil becomes locally accessible and affordable, the cost of electrical generation drops, and our labor force benefits from the new employment.

I agree with the McMansion thesis. People in the lower 48 are learning the hard way, that just like they did in the 1930′s, an economy based on flipping houses back and forth to one another doesn’t end well, just like flipping tech stocks back and forth doesn’t end well either. But, that won’t stop the madmen at the levers of government and the Fed from trying to inflate the next bubble. The stock market is well on it’s way and they are doing everything they can to get the housing bubble floating again. Forget about ‘Cash for Clunkers’ and the ‘First Time Home Buyer Tax Credit’ for destroying the currency. Just clawback all the money they handed over to Government-Sachs, Citi Bank and the rest of the felons, then mail each citizen a million dollar check and be done with it.

Well, I’d say to those in the oil industry to wake up, ever since Nafta we have been losing American jobs. The computer industry was hit big time. The same thing happened then, for every well paid high tech job that was lost it affected ‘other’ jobs that their income had supported. We were just coming out of that big high tech blow when wall street and the banking crisis hit the wall, the auto industry, all of this is affecting everyone’s job.

Granted, what I saw in Colorado was too many people living high on the hog of two good incomes, buying huge monster houses with ridiculous sq. footage that took loads of expensive new furniture to fill, driving big new gas guzzling suv’s, and probably in debt up to their eyeballs. I don’t live there anymore but I bet a ton of those big boom $300,000-$700,000 houses are on the market or foreclosed. I shudder to think of the house payment. Who would want to heat something that big after last years heating costs.

Being frugal is always a good idea in my book.

But my heart aches for those who have already lost their homes and belongings, whole families are living on the streets.

There are two enormous problems with the economy that need to be fixed before anything will improve.

The financial ‘TBTF’ cartel must be broken. CEO’s that cratered their firms and ran weeping to CONgress need to be either thrown in prison or strung up by there necks to lampposts. The worst and most outrageous part about it that even though this depression has been going on for the better part of 2 years, nothing has been reformed! Banks are still allowed, nay encouraged to use dodgy, Enron style ‘mark-to-fantasy’ accounting, and the government has stepped in to backstop trillions of dollars of garbage loans for them. It’s like giving a blood tranfusion to a corpse in the hopes of reviving it! It makes no sense at all. All goverment backstops should be pulled immediately and all the scumbags on fraud street and K street that created this nightmare should be tried for treason.

The second problem is the Military-Industral-Security complex. Any country that runs a system that pays it’s corporate executives lavish bonuses and pays for-hire mercinaries four figure day-rates while it’s senior citizens watch their social security checks shrivel up and see it’s middle class get forcloused upon and sent to a homeless shelter deserves to come tumbling down. Fiscal conservative democrats and republicans always prattle non-sense about ‘we can’t afford healthcare for every citizen!’ What this country really cannot afford is to continue bombing brown people with our multi-billion dollar military toys on the opposite side of the planet and maintaining permanent military bases across the globe to protect western corporate profits and support puppet governments. Obama and the rest of the spineless jacklegs in CONgress need to get us out of the billion dollar boondoggle money pits of Afghanistan and Iraq before we really do bankrupt the empire. Of course, Boeing, KBR, Northrop, Blackwater and the rest of these big companies will never allow that to happen. Besides, the hole we’ve dug for ourselves over the past 30 years is so deep, for all intents and purposes, we’re ‘all in’ now anyway.