After a year in which it seemed that the new administration was merely an extension of the old, many people are waiting to see some of the “change” they were promised. Others fear that change, seeing it as moving us down a road to Soviet-style destruction, and therefore, they oppose the initiatives of the new administration.

In my own view, the new administration came in with too many expectations. It was expected that the President would be able to walk on water and to cast out evil & selfish bankers. In fact, the President has worked hard not to offend the banks and insurance companies, a much more moderate approach than his most extreme backers expected. He was expected to put millions of people back to work. It is likely that his ’shovel-ready’ public works programs had the effect of using federal funds to pay for projects that would have been built anyway, with state and local funding. It was expected that he would bring a surge of assistance to the urban areas where low-income minorities have been left out of the productive side of the economy. He has actually been a little preoccupied–it isn’t just White people that sometimes ignore the needs of the inner cities–with other parts of his job. There are other areas such as these, but the point has been made that many Americans thought they voted in the Messiah, and are finding that he is just another man.

This year has barely even started, but I see it being a time when everything we thought was so secure will be exposed as being built upon sand. The idea that the government and its various regulatory bureaus can provide for us and protect us from the cold, cruel world is likely to be shown as false. Back in the 1930s, Herbert Hoover and then Franklin Roosevelt tried interventionist “let’s do something to put people to work” policies. They did not succeed at ending the Depression. Congress tried to reduce oversupply with the Smoot-Hawley tariff act, putting up barriers to a wide variety of imports. The result was predictable: our trading partners retaliated with their own trade restrictions, and the economy sunk even lower. The thing that finally brought an end to the Great Depression was war: World War II, with its nearly unlimited demand for munitions and weaponry.

I’m trying to point out that government intervention isn’t going to save us from this mess. Because this isn’t just a recession or even just a depression. This is a time of transformation, similar to the one we experienced at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This has been going on underneath the covers for some time, but with the massive job losses and the wholesale nationalization of the auto industry, we can finally see it clearly. The government cannot save us, because the government does not know what is going on, nor does it know what is going to arise to replace the big industrial companies. None of us know what is going to arise.

That is why we’ll face challenges getting the economy started–putting people to work again–as we learn that allocating money for “shovel-ready” public works projects mostly shifts payment responsibility for projects that were already going to be built away from state and local governments (the taxpayers of that area) onto all of us who pay federal taxes. We’ll find that this isn’t just about big make-work programs. This is about the de-industrialization of America, coupled with the export of the high-tech jobs that we thought were going to be the replacement for the manufacturing jobs being lost. America is at a crossroads, and no one seems to know where to go next.

The challenge, then, for you and I, is going to revolve around building and maintaining our small, locally-owned businesses. We need to be the ones who reshape our communities. One way that we can do this is to local-source most of our products, services, and labor. By doing this, we can help our own towns and cities to regenerate some of the jobs that were lost. Now, I have to be clear that you won’t find everything you need in your local community–at least, not if your community is like mine–but you can expand that to cover in-state production or in-country production. Do not forget that not every product produced nearby is sold out of a storefront. Sometimes, you may need to buy online–don’t forget to look for PayPal or Google Checkout instead of giving your financial information directly to every vendor–in order to get goods and services that are being produced relatively close to your homebase.

The econolypse isn’t just about the recession. Your challenges aren’t either. Get ready to face your challenges and do not let yourself be cowed by the howling and noise of the large out-of-area corporations (LOOACs) who are even now lined up to request special favors from the government. You have a job to do, and your town or city is depending on you (even if they don’t know it).

In a way, it is a good thing that judges are questioning the authority of government agencies to act. On the other hand, Comcast and the cable industry are creations of the FCC, in that it was federal rules that gave them the ability to do what they do. Just as with the telephone companies, FCC rules, including the choice to allow them to cut out ISP intermediaries for their high-speed Internet access services, is at the heart of the problem.

You see, if I sign up for dial up service, I might be able to get it through my local telephone company. There are, or were, dozens of companies (including AOL) that offered such Internet access across the country. Locally, Sunrise Internet Services offers it to this day.

If I want high-speed Internet across DSL or cable connections, the company that owns the lines does not have to allow other companies to compete, thanks to decisions made by the Commission. This decision was the one that enabled Comcast to take anti-consumer actions such as polluting the downloads of its paying customers. The errors the FCC (and Congress and the Department of Justice) made dating back into the late 1990s are what allowed Comcast and other “last-mile” owners to act with impunity toward consumers.

This is a pretty amazing animation that shows just how widespread and how deep the recession has been.

The only thing is, this is not just a recession. It might not even be just a depression. It seems to be a permanent inflection point in the national economy. If you look at the job losses, for example, most of them are gone forever. Chrysler, for example, will probably close entirely in 2010. The current and former employees are not going to get their jobs back. Ever.

Unfortunately, the government’s recovery efforts are focused around two things: protect the banks and get state governments (and their contractors) spending, so that their employees will spend, in the hope that we can return to the conditions of recent times. We all know that the conditions of recent times were an illusion, that America has been losing industry after industry and exporting its middle-class jobs since the late 1970s. Thus, we all know that the government’s efforts, as the now stand, are doomed to failure. We, and most other nations, are ignoring the lessons of this econolypse.

Do not get me wrong. They very well could convince enough consumers that things are better so those consumers will be willing to take on debt to buy more stuff. They could very well convince enough bankers and business managers that things are better so they will be willing to make more loans, make more products, and hire more workers. But it will not last. The economy has fundamentally changed, and we would do better to face the facts and act accordingly.

In many ways, this is equivalent to the Industrial Revolution, when farm labor dried up and factory jobs arose to replace them. Many people decried the end of their traditional employment, but their complaining had no impact on the eventual replacement of their whole economic basis. That base was replaced with one focused solely around the exchange of currency, with the use of mechanical equipment to replace the human and animal labor that had previously powered the whole world’s economy. The only thing is, it is not apparent what the new model will be, nor what business structures will arise to exploit it.

Still, we do know that hyperglobalism [PDF] has made every community very dependent upon the choices of strangers in remote places. We know that information assymetries of the type that brought down the financial industries will continue to exist. Therefore, we ought to try very hard to “close the circle” in our communities. Do you have a local banker, local baker, local butcher? Does your local baker have a nearby miller to supply his flour? Does that miller and that butcher have a local farmer to supply the grain and the meats? Does your local construction guy get his lumber from a locally-owned hardware store, and does that hardware store have a nearby lumber mills to supply its own needs? We need to build networks of small, locally-owned businesses (SLOBs), whether they are family-owned businesses (FOBs), minority-owned businesses (MOBs), owner-managed businesses (OMBs), woman-owned businesses (WOBs), or community-based groups (CBGs).

At least until things start to gel, and we can understand what the new world will look like, your best bet is your nearby community. If you are betting that your future economic lifeline will come through some large, out-of-area corporation (LOOAC), you will probably be disappointed. It is up to YOU and your family members, friends, and neighbors, to work in “coopetition” and help trap a larger fraction of your area’s income within the community. Close the circle or prepare to starve.