It's actually the entire world. For instance, here's a report from the UK:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/iainmartin/4295219/Gordon-Brown-brings-Britain-to-the-edge-of-bankruptcy.html
Everybody wants to blame everybody else, of course. Debt is simply promising tomorrow's productivity to pay for something today. That's easy to do and rationalize when the productivity curve is a positive exponential. Unfortunately, when the world primary energy production curve is plotted with EROEI factored in, we've more than definitely passed our peak. Adding insult to injury, distribution has been widening exponentially. The upshot is that there's been no way to mitigate the loss of energy delivered per capita.
Most folks are incapable of intuiting the relationship between energy as it relates to their standard of living except as it's applied in the most simple of presentations like the cost of fueling the car. The idea that the costs to purify water, produce & distribute junk mail, ship bananas thousands of miles to market, ad nauseum, will rise exponentially is just too big of a stretch--it's so much easier to blame the Republicans, the Democrats, Global Warming... you name it.
Of course, it's not a reality that people can accept either because the ramifications are too horrible. There's nothing more disturbing than the idea that even if we could confiscate all the money supposedly hoarded by The Evil Rich and redistribute it we'd still be just as bad off. Doesn't matter as it can't create energy. Worse, said money's evaporating pretty quickly, or rather the value of it is.
There are those who believe that The New Economy is going to fix all that. There'll be Cheap Energy for The Masses, who will finally be freed from The Tyranny of the Evil Corporations. They seem to think this as if said corporations were some parasitic living entity all their own. Sorry, folks, those corporations are us--they employ us. I guess it's a stretch for some folks to understand that a large company actually performs its function (produces its product) in a more efficient way than the same volume of "work done" produced by a group of smaller companies.
I've been at a large plant that produces Lexan (polycarbonates) this week. It was originally owned by GE but has been purchased by Sabic recently. With the economic slowdown, the demand for their product has dropped dramatically. A plant like that was never designed to "turn down" to the required extent. What happens is that the cost-per-ton of product rises as the plant is throttled back. They're planning on shutting the plant down soon for awhile due to the slowdown in demand. It was going to be for four weeks... then eight... now 16. This dynamic permeates our industrial society.
Yes, we can certainly create a bunch of jobs. What we ultimately cannot do is what so many folks actually want: reverse the negative trend of discretionary spending.
