- As I noticed with over 300 emails responding to Part
1 of this series, old paradigms die hard. Most readers 'saw' what I wrote
about because they could see it occurring in their own communities and
across America. Others 'balked' because they couldn't imagine the 'change'
coming. Others live in denial of our shifting world.
-
- Whether we like it or not, history sweeps us into its
vice-like grip like a Florida alligator. Sometimes it hits unexpectedly
like an Oklahoma tornado-no warning! At other times, a society can unravel
like Charlie Sheen this week! If you look around the United States, the
warnings and symptoms of our future-hit us over the head daily.
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- · Rising gas prices
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- · Cost of food rising
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- · Home heating costs rising
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- · Mercantile goods rising costs
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- · Wages dead or lowering
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- · Unions losing clout
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- · Poverty growing
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- · 43 million Americans subsisting on food
stamps
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- · 15 to 22 million Americans unemployed,
underemployed
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- · No chance to ever regain full employment
as we add 3.1 million immigrants annually
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- While I present solutions at the end of each column,
it won't do any good if we fail to implement them. Our own Congress languishes
in bed with those that hire, work, feed, house and support endless legal
and illegal immigration-the main driver for our overloaded civilization.
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- If you watched Diane Sawyer and David Muir on ABC this
week, you observed in amazement that the average American home features
just about everything "Made in China" or some other country.
We shut down our own manufacturing to disable our ability to produce products.
Who did that? Answer: U.S. Congress and presidents for the past 30 years
that could not see past their noses.
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- However, on Wednesday night's broadcast, David Muir and
his team discovered that we can furnish a home entirely with American products
when we take the time to shop! And, just as inexpensively-and better quality!
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- Folks! We drown in $14 trillion of debt and another $1.3
trillion in trade deficits to China! Any way to dig out of it? Any way
to pay it back? How can we when we don't manufacture anything to sell?
Result: we will continue to become poorer as the Middle Class degrades.
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- WORLD ON EDGE; AMERICA ON THE ROPES
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- "World on the Edge" by Lester Brown: "One
thing is certain-we are facing greater change than any generation in history.
How did we get into this mess? Our market-based global economy as currently
managed is in trouble. The market does many things well. It allocates resources
with an efficiency that no central planner could even imagine. But as the
world economy expanded some 20-fold over the last century it has revealed
a flaw-a flaw so serious that if it is not corrected it will spell the
end of civilization as we know it."
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- ENERGY, POLLUTION, ENVIRONMENT
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- "The indirect costs, including climate change, treatment
of respiratory illnesses, oil spills, and the U.S. military presence in
the Middle East to ensure access to the oil to grow to a cost of $12 per
gallon. Similar calculations can be done for coal," said Brown. "We
delude ourselves. Leaving such huge costs off the books is a formula for
bankruptcy. Environmental trends are the lead indicators telling us what
lies ahead for the economy and ultimately for society itself. Falling water
tables today signal rising food prices tomorrow. Shrinking polar ice sheets
are a prelude to falling coastal real estate values."
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- These observations come from THE top experts in the world.
We ignore these realities at our peril. Yet, we avoid them, like we languish
with the immigration invasion. At some point, it becomes bigger than we
can solve-and our civilization degrades with it.
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- WE FEED ON THE ENVIORNMENT LIKE A RABID DOG
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- "Modern economic thinking and policymaking have
created an economy that is so out of sync with the ecosystem on which it
depends that it is approaching collapse," said Brown. "How can
we assume that the growth of an economic system that is shrinking the earth's
forests, eroding its soils, depleting its aquifers, collapsing its fisheries,
elevating its temperature, and melting its ice sheets can simply be projected
into the long-term future? What is the intellectual process underpinning
these extrapolations?"
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- How about a bunch of intellectual innumerates leading
us in the White House and Congress?
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- One look at California illustrates our failing economic
systems. Gaze upon Wisconsin's demonstrations. Same with Colorado, New
York, Massachusetts and many more! Our states cannot pay their bills!
They're broke! In debt! And, millions of citizens cannot secure a job.
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- Dr. Albert Bartlett, <http://www.albartlett.org>www.albartlett.org
, talks about the dilemma of 'exponential growth'. "It's time to
educate the educationally credentialed but innumerate experts, (innumeracy
is the mathematical equivalent of illiteracy), who say that growth is inevitable.
They fail to recognize that after maturity for any entity, continued growth
is either obesity or cancer."
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- Do you think California, now at 38 million, will become
more viable with its projected addition of 20 million more people by 2040?
Exactly how will they water, feed, transport and warm themselves? How
about their quality of life? Standard of living?
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- With continued growth, Dr. Bartlett said, "Growth
will produce more well-to-do people, more homeless, more unemployed, more
people living below the poverty level, more traffic congestion, higher
parking fees ($5.00 an hour already on East Coast, Source: CNN 3/2/11),
more school crowding, more crime, more unhappy neighborhoods, more expensive
government, more taxes, higher taxes, more air and water pollution, higher
utility rates, more crowded highways, less democracy, higher food costs
and more destruction of the environment."
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- What's good about any of that my friends and why am I
one of the few addressing it?
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- Like two boys playing catch perpendicular to the glass
door of their house, hopefully, a parent walks out and advises them, "Boys,
play catch parallel to the glass so it won't get broken." They respond,
"Okay dad!"
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- Solutions to our situation by a reader:
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- · Change 'Free Trade' to 'Fair Trade'
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- · Term limits with teeth for Congress
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- · Two party system is totally corrupted
by corporate money, and we must create a viable 3rd party
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- · Real access laws and the denial of free
access to corporate interests
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- · Denial of corporate interests their
current 10,000 votes to a citizen's 1 vote
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- · A return to Constitutional Law and the
de-establishment of precedent law
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- · A return to a genuinely independent
judiciary
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- · A return of sovereignty to citizens
instead of to a state bureaucracy to which ordinary citizens have no genuine
access
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- · The end of secrecy as a form of government
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- · Stop creating wars around the world
where we have no business
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- · Moratorium on all immigration
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