Aaron, I agree that we need to get on with our response and prepare for winter and a new spring. I do not agree however that we have 20 to 30 years of decline left before we are faced with winter. We are just a few months away from running out of gold to buy off China, and very soon the world will lose faith in the dollar as a reserve currency. We will not be well seated at the new Bretton Woods table when it is clear that Fort Knox is empty and without world currency reserve status the dollars will flood home and swamp us.More importantly we are living under the thumb of an Oligarchy that is neither Republican nor Democrat and the illusion that we live in a democracy is diverting us from getting on with preparations for winter. I call the puppeteers MiLords. They are not the 1%, they are the .1% which is equivalent to one in a thousand (a mil) and as I point out in my blog, they are not united in their ideology but rather are only concerned with what Winters calls the “Income Defense Industry.” http://visualizingintrinsicvaluealignment.blogspot.com/2013/12/milords-are-not-united_9261.html
MiLords are quite happy with our bickering since it diverts attention away from our plight. And because they are not united and monolithic we find it hard to mount a revolution against them. So it behooves us to go under ground and prepare for winter relearning how to be locally productive. We need to relearn the meaning of true credit based enterprise and shun the debt based paradigm of the Fed.
Fusion Enterprise:
I found your blog really insightful and I love that you have been able to discern the nonsensical game being played as a spectator sport in our political arena these days. It does insure that "Milords" can act under the cover of the duopoly that is funded by them to create the illusion of choice. It's been so very clear between the last few administrations that there is a trajectory being followed by all who get into the White House and that We the People vote for those who refuse to serve the public, while being hoodwinked by a trumped up cultural war.–Thank you FOX TV
The trajectory can be easily seen with the destruction of FDR's protection policies in banking and the unfettered war machine running up the bill to the tune of trillions while feeding privatized interests. I call it game, set and match (after Len Deighton's novels) I also call it global inverted communism.
While we lose our jobs so the corporations can show a profit on Wall St. There will be no safety net and the victims of the process will be defamed and blamed for their predicament.
Globalism is the arbitration of the cost of labor and acts as a cover for smashing the public sector of all nation states, privatizing it and make the former middle class pay for all services and access through the nose. They want to own all the world's wealth, resources and real estate. The billions who will have been robbed will be their renters. Welcome to neo-feudalism.
Paul Chefurka shared this and added " this Ted talk goes straight to the heart of the matter in explaining how the political economies we live in actually function.".
From Haidt "If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between "for" and "against" is the minds worst disease."