At a time when the nation is in dire need of competent leadership, the Republican Party is struggling mightily to identify a person to present their case for regaining the White House. I need not spend time or space here presenting the manifest shortcomings of the candidates currently vying for the honor. Given the fact that all of them oppose the notion of global warming, and the science on which it rests, it is easy to understand the nature of the Party’s dilemma.

But it not just the matter of their anti-intellectual, don’t-try-to-confuse-me-with-facts rejection of science that leaves one slack-jawed and stunned that engenders the sense that something is seriously awry with the Republicans. It is the Party’s overall rejection of reason, coupled with its seemingly obsessive commitment to protecting the best interests of the elite minority while ignoring those of the vastly larger group of middle-class and poor people, which has convinced me that something is seriously amiss where Republicans are concerned.

This is highly unfortunate for the nation because the Democrats desperately need intelligent, organized, politically aware opposition. Without it, they will continue to muddle about in a mediocre fashion, timid, confused, and largely directionless regarding the nation’s most important problems. Thus, with no significant change in the Republican Party, there’s a good chance the nation will be stuck in the same rut we are currently enduring, even if Obama is re-elected.

The Tea Party partisans tried to subject the GOP to a radical makeover, but their conflicted, anti-intellectualism, has arguably served to make matters worse. This is significantly due to the abject fear that mainstream Republicans (if it even makes sense to suggest that such a species still exists) have of being targeted by the seeking-targets factions deeply embedded in Tea Party ranks. It is also due to inherent shortcomings in the Tea Party’s overall political agenda, which, kindly speaking, is more about hate and fear than it is about inclusion and solidarity.

Having deliberated on the matter, I have a recommendation that could constitute a brilliant solution to our collective need for a new political order. The Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS) should take over the Republican Party, and transform it into a powerful Liberal antidote to the Democratic Party. This would solve numerous problems. For example, it would empower the currently unfocused potential of OWS. Most important, if OWS takes over the Republican Party, it will provide a stunning, historically significant, transformation in the existing balance of power of the sort necessary for enacting fundamental reforms supportive of the best interests of the 99 percent of the population going down slow under the current social, economic and political regime.

Think about it…

The dictator, who would be Africa’s king, was slain under murky circumstances shortly after he was dragged like an animal from his last refuge. Rather than a palace, government ministry building, or fortified compound, the refuge was a crude, concrete drainage pipe, covered with asphalt, desert sand and randomly applied bits of graffiti.

The magnificently determined young men who dragged the cold-hearted tyrant from the drainage pipe say he was dazed, wounded and bleeding when they finally got him. They also say he begged and pleaded for mercy, hoping hopelessly that his life would be spared.

Video images of the scene indicate that a large, angry crowd immediately gathered around the wounded tyrant when it became apparent that the profusely bleeding old man in their custody was indeed the deposed dictator. With casual, intense confidence, they moved in for their final assault in much the same manner as lions prepare to feed on a downed, but not yet dead, water buffalo.

With terrified eyes, he searched the faces of the jeering members of the crowd, obviously hoping to identify a friendly face. He may also have been attempting to engender via his forlorn, searching gaze some semblance of the deference and fear he had employed for many decades to cow them and their counterparts in every section of the nation into absolute submission to his will.

But the tyrant’s time had come, and the angry crowd was bent on exorcising his malign influence. First, they viciously beat him. Blood gushed from his head, and covered much of his face and upper body as the brutal attack intensified. He stumbled repeatedly in response to the intense pummeling, but his captors showed no mercy. The last images of him alive show a profoundly frightened old man at the moment of recognition that his time among the living was coming to a brutal, inglorious end.

His frenzied attackers responded in accordance with the behavior he had used for decades to maintain his absolute, tyrannical domination over their lives. For now, we are left the finality of it all. His bruised, battered half naked corpse is currently on display on the grimy floor of an otherwise empty cold storage locker.

People are being admitted to the gruesome scene to view the tyrant’s remains, each one wearing a mask to contain the stench. Those standing in the long, winding line outside the chilly locker are patient, intent on viewing the iconoclastic tyrant’s deteriorating corpse with their own eyes.

He was always an elusive figure, hard to understand and impossible to predict. Moreover, he artfully played his hand such that he was sometimes an enemy, and at other times a questionable friend. Whatever the guise, he was always extremely dangerous. Libya’s graveyards and killing fields are filled with the corpses of those who miscalculated the depth of his cruelty, or engendered his ire.

I am pleased that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has been removed from power, and troubled by the horrible manner in which he was put to death. Unfortunately, viscous, homicidal outcomes are dominant, if not entirely necessary, components of the final days portion of the self-serving script by which dictators commonly live and frequently die.

Apparently uncaring and oblivious to the needs of their less fortunate counterparts huddled far below them in the working classes, they are engaged in a full scale assault on the nation’s tattered social safety net.

They are opposed to paying higher taxes, universal health care, extending unemployment benefits and public employee labor unions. Exercising “let-them-eat-cake” ignorance, and condescending disdain for common people, they have instructed their minions in the U.S. Congress to do their best to eliminate Social Security, and possibly federal assistance to victims of catastrophic natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and floods.
Out of touch with the vast majority of citizens because of class-oriented Apartheid, they are largely clueless regarding the problems, dreams, surging passions, and emergent hostility of the tens of millions of their less fortunate counterparts huddled on the bottom rungs of our vastly inequitable socio-economic order.

The results of this profound disconnect could prove disastrous for conservative elites, who have been largely shielded up to this point by their running dog mouthpieces in Congress, and the compliant, fellow traveling mainstream news media. The disconnect may also prove to be the source of the largest, and most important, demand for fundamental reforms to emerge in the U. S. in more than a generation via the rapidly expanding Occupy Wall Street movement currently roiling civic sensibilities in 150 U.S. cities, with new ones joining on a daily basis.

Although the Occupy Wall Street movement is first and foremost a heartfelt response to domestic inequality, it is obviously receiving inspiration from the revolutionary transformations fueling the so-called “Arab Spring” in North Africa and the Middle East. The major economic and cultural differences between the scene of the Arab Spring and the United States notwithstanding, there are several good reasons to seriously consider the possibility that revolutionary activities of the sort that are deposing long entrenched dictators and their elite cronies in North Africa and the Middle East might be launched on these shores.

For example, many of the economic and political problems at the heart of the turmoil currently underway in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria Yemen and Bahrain exist here in the U. S. Like those nations, the U.S. is dominated by remote, wealthy elites who consistently manipulate politics and economic affairs in ways that undermine the best interests of the vast majority of their fellow citizens.

For domestic and global reasons, poor people the world over are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. The cost of living is rising, jobs are increasingly scarce, and comfortable living wages are as difficult to obtain as assured avenues of upward mobility.

One of the most important similarities between the nations in North Africa and the Middle East most prominently engaged in fundamental economic and political transformation and the U.S. involves young people. In Africa, the Middle East, and much of the rest of the Third World, large numbers of young people are finding it difficult to obtain employment commensurate with their education and training. As a result, many of them have concluded that major societal reforms are in order.

The U.S. also has a large cohort of unemployed, and underemployed college graduates. For example, the current unemployment rate for college graduates in this nation is the highest since 1970, and it is on the rise. Some of those unemployed graduates are prominent participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement. And as protests have spread beyond New York to other cities around the nation, it is becoming apparent that the nascent movement is potentially capable of producing a massive campaign of civil disobedience dedicated to taking on, and dislodging, the nation’s conservative elites.

Political spokespersons for conservative elites are doing their best to inhibit dialogue about the profound economic disconnect between their patrons and the other 99 percent of the population purportedly represented by the Occupy Wall Street movement. The conceptually primitive epithet they launch against those who directly, and coherently, addresses the issue in public is “class warfare.” By making the accusatory allegation, they seem to be seeking support from the general public via the terms of an unwritten gentleman’s agreement that it is verboten to discuss U.S. domestic problems in such a manner.

Nonetheless, the truth of the matter is that the common people in this country do not, and have never, accepted this particular mode of censorship. This fact is clear beyond question for those familiar with working-class culture. Any sampling of the literature, music and daily gab of working-class people reveals a healthy preoccupation with the great divide between the so-called haves and have-nots.

If the mainstream news media were more closely associated with working-class people, their culture and position in society, they could serve as valuable venues for facilitating dialogue between elites at the top, and the other 99 percent of the population. But that’s not what the mainstream news media are about, and that’s why they are obviously tentative and confused regarding the best way to report on the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Obviously, the nation’s major mainstream news organs could “embed” journalists with the demonstrators in the same manner as they rushed to do just that with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But there is little likelihood that any of the dominant mainstream organs of the press engage the protesters in this manner. This is largely due to recognition that accurate, intimate, unbiased reporting about the movement will almost certainly help it become larger, and more influential.

The key point to be understood is that mainstream U.S. journalism abandoned working-class perspective reporting many decades ago. One of the most unfortunate results is that public dialogue in this nation is unbalanced. Fortunately, voices that have been long banished from the public arena, dominated as it has been for decades by the mainstream media, are now being distributed and shared via so-called New Media. This is as much the case in San Francisco, Chicago and New York as it is in Cairo, Damascus and Tripoli.

Wherever in the world one encounters the emergent dialogue regarding justice, human rights and peace, the inequitable division of wealth and income between elites and everyone else is a prominent component of the most important problems agenda. Those who address this issue don’t necessarily consider themselves to be engaging in “class warfare.” They feel they are addressing a structural economic problem that is key to the future of every kind of human society.

Here in the United States, few of those who use the class warfare epithet to stifle serious public dialogue about structural economic inequities are willing to acknowledge that the nation has been subjected to such warfare for several decades. One of the most popular terms used to describe the process is “Reaganomics.” Other than being hard edged, and heartless regarding the needs and suffering of the defenseless, it is not a new philosophy. Rather, it is a form of brutal economic Darwinism wherein a divide is severely drawn between haves and have-nots. Wealthy people do not need Social Security, nor do they need worry about affordable health care, or unemployment benefits. The fact that most citizens do need such programs seems irrelevant to the elites, and that’s one of the reasons why their representatives in Congress are doing everything they possibly can to eliminate them.

Thus, the political component of Reaganomics is probably best understood via the not so stealth effort to dismantle, or at the very least, disable, the segments of government capable of protecting the mutual best interests of common citizens. Social Security is clearly the last best mode of financial security available to average citizens. Without it, people will necessarily be more accommodating, and possibly subservient, to those with great wealth and power. Those who doubt the accuracy of this contention should probably spend time in any large society that does not have a system of social security for senior citizens.

My key point is that the U. S. has been the scene of an intense class-oriented “war” for quite some time, and that Conservatives are the ones who have been the most distinguished participants. This has been the case at least since Ronald Reagan’s era.

Since that time, Conservatives, in the service of elite interests, have implemented numerous social, political, legal and economic policies that have handsomely compensated the wealthy, while decimating the middle and lower classes. As a result, the wealthiest 10 percent of the nation’s citizens currently possess a larger percentage of total annual income than at any time since the 1920s. Furthermore, the top 10 percent of U.S. earners currently receive almost 50 percent of the income produced in the nation on an annual basis.

Since the Reagan era, the top .01 percent of U.S. earners has enjoyed a six-fold increase in income. Conversely, during that period the other 99 percent of the population has experienced long bouts of unemployment, skyrocketing rates of homelessness, catastrophic rates of mortgage default, rising food insecurity, declining prospects for better employment and sagging home values.

The profound difference between the windfall increase in wealth accruing to elites, and the anemic economic circumstances of the tens of millions arrayed below them in the national economic pecking order, is clearly apparent in the data pertinent to income growth.

While inflations adjusted income for middle-income earners rose 21 percent between 1979 and 2005, elites at the top experienced a 480 percent increase in income. Thus, economic inequality is undeniably at the root of the national economic crisis.

Dry, but telling, statistics presented in a recent report on Income and Poverty by the U.S. Census Bureau, reinforce the point. Median household income in the U.S. in 2010 declined 2.3 percent from the year before, according to the report. In addition, the nation’s official poverty rate last year was 15.1 percent, up from 14.3 percent the year before.

The Census Bureau report also notes that between 2009 and 2010, the number of people living below the poverty line in the U.S. increased from 43.6 to 46.2 million. That constituted the fourth consecutive annual increase in the number of poor people in the nation, and the largest on record during the 52 years during which such statistics have been tallied.

Other reports from other agencies, public and private, provide similarly depressing statistics regarding the relatively rapid decline in the standard of living for tens of millions of U. S. citizens. As a result, underemployment, unemployment and underwater are terms that have become synonymous with this deeply troubled period or confusion and comprehensive middle-class decline. They are shorthand terms used to describe the social and economic carnage being endured by those who are being slowly, but inexorably, pushed into desperate, degrading circumstances.

Those who lose their homes are sometimes lucky enough in the aftermath to move in with relatives or friends. But far, too many end up homeless. Most often, the hapless thousands who have been forced into the streets because they can no longer afford to pay for any sort of roof over their heads seek to survive as best they can in absolutely miserable circumstances via luck, guile, and the sporadic kindness of strangers.

Members of every age group are experiencing stress, and frequently bewildering confusion, which results in part from recognition that those who have worked hard and played by the proverbial rules are seemingly no more secure than those who do not. The fact that the vast majority of elite participants in the Wall Street excesses that engendered the current economic crisis have not been prosecuted is not lost on the tens of thousands of U.S. citizens from the lower classes who have relatives languishing in prisons as a result of criminal activities which pale in comparison with the arguably illegal, billion dollar schemes commonly engaged in by members of the elite banking class.

Most important, the economic and political crisis in which the U.S. is currently enmeshed is undermining the long held notion that we are a nation unified via a commonly understood and supported Social Contract. Inherent in any such contract, no matter the nation involved, is the basic agreement that members of society who support the law and engage in responsible labor can expect to live honorable, if not wealthy, lives.

Quite clearly, this nation’s working class people have kept their part of the bargain where our grand Social Contract is concerned. They have done the work, fought the wars, supported the political system, and provided private and public support for the halt, lame and indigent. Moreover, they have done this for generations.

In addition, they have embraced education at every level, and sought to improve the social, cultural, spiritual, and yes, political quality of the nation in ways that are primarily responsible for virtually everything that is good where the United States of America is concerned.

Nonetheless, recent events suggest that a critical mass of people has concluded that the nation’s elites are violating the Social Contract. This mode of thinking is frequently expressed as anger with politicians, bankers, politicians, members of Congress, and, of course, Wall Street “fat cats.” As indicated, the Occupy Wall Street movement is a manifestation of this particular sentiment. The belief that the nation’s Social Contract is being systematically violated, and that the economic and political systems are rigged in favor of elites has acquired enhanced urgency and broadened credibility during the past few years, primarily because of lingering effects from the recession.

The crippling financial burdens that have become common among members of the middle class due to the recession may well be the factor most responsible for legitimizing, and mainstreaming, the broadly shared belief that major reforms are in order. Many of those who share this belief had, up until recent times, considered themselves solidly middle-class, and thereby exempt from financial distress of the sort commonly associated with the poor.

They were undoubtedly influenced in their thinking by the rhetoric of permanent success and prosperity inherent in the messages flowing from the mainstream news and entertainment media.

Thus, when the first victims of the current financial catastrophe were identified as largely blue collar works and typically poor and ignored members of racial and ethnic minority groups, the common consensus was that they were responsible for their plight because of assumed personal shortcomings. Once the misery spread to the middle-class in the form of job layoffs, depleted unemployment benefits, short sales and depleted 401K accounts, people began to adopt more balanced and sophisticated critiques of the nation’s economic and political systems.

The process led directly to the surprisingly large number of relatively comfortable, middle-class people participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Their emergent consensus is that the nation’s wealthy elites are systematically violating the nation’s Social Contract, and that major reforms of an unprecedented nature need to be implemented in order to set things right.

It is too soon to ascertain what the recommended reforms will turn out to be, and whether they will have revolutionary ramifications. Nonetheless, it is already abundantly apparent at this early stage in the process that this nation’s economic elites are in for the fight of their lives, a fight that a critical mass of the other 99 percent of the population has come to believe it cannot afford to lose.

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Like much of the rest of the world, I watched with bated breath last week as Tea Party activists in the U.S. House of Representatives held the government hostage over the debt ceiling issue. It was a riveting drama, and my sense is that we are going to experience more of the same.

Now that the extremists know they can control the national agenda via threats to bring the entire system down, it is highly unlikely they will relent and pursue their retrograde political agenda in a more balanced and responsible manner.

My most important concerns about this new set of Washington gangsters focus on the anti-intellectual, don’t-try-to-confuse-me-with-facts dimension of their worldview and rhetoric. In a classic sense, they are “barbarians” intent on destroying traditions, programs and institutions they barely understand. Moreover, some of them appear to have an uneasy relationship with sanity.

I am also concerned with their hostile attitude toward government. However many times Ronald Reagan alleged “government is the problem,” the truth of the matter is that government most certainly is not the source of the most important problems facing this nation. I suspect this truth is most apparent to those who have spent significant time living abroad.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to recognize what one’s government is and isn’t without living abroad. This is largely due to the fact that living under the authority and auspices of another government provides one with a kind comparative perspective that few Tea Party extremists possess. As a result, many of them are intent on destroying the one institution most crucial to all of our long-term best interests.

In addition to destroying government as we know it, bringing down Obama and making him a one-term president is a primary objective of Tea Party gangsters. They have a right to vehemently hate the black guy, and I recommend that they take their best shot regarding their effort to hurt him and his supporters.

But they do not have the right to destroy the nation’s economy, and the crucially important social safety net developed over generations via the sweat and toil of people committed to each other and the common good.

Nonetheless, minus organized pushback on a massive scale by those who reject the Tea party’s “let’s burn down the house” assault, the gangsters may well get their way via shakedown tactics virtually identical to the ones they used to roll the national government last week.

Nonetheless, as far as the military mission in Libya is concerned, I stand with those who consider it necessary and wise. If no action had been taken to halt Colonel Qaddafi and his forces, it is certain that the rebel strongholds would have been overrun. Had this occurred, a bloodbath would have ensued. We don’t need any more of those on our watch.

I assume that those who oppose preventing the bloodbath are sincere, at least some of them. But some of them are clearly up to no good. For example, the cold hearted U.S. Republicans slinking about in front of television cameras complaining about the role the U.S. is playing in the effort to keep Colonel Qaddafi from savaging his countrymen and women are acting true to form.

On the one hand, members of this group have a long history of minimizing the deaths of poor people, domestically and abroad (note their opposition to the life saving health legislation recently passed by Congress). On the other hand, they are clearly using the current crisis to bash President Obama. That’s pretty much what they are about 24/7 these days.

No one should be surprised that people such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are opposed to the allied military intervention in Libya. One senses that they see Colonel Qaddafi as one of them. Each of them has a vested interest in validating the proposition that dictators are something other than abominable criminals. Nonetheless, the inspiring, anti authoritarian movement sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East is rendering such figures obsolete. One senses that their time is coming to an end, and that their blustering about the sovereign rights of self aggrandizing, anti-democratic figures such as themselves are destined to fall increasingly on deaf ears.

I must acknowledge that I am somewhat surprised by the number of Liberals and Leftists who oppose the allied rescue mission. Supporting the Libyan opposition is something that is synchronous with their alleged support of people power. But many of them are deeply disturbed by the allied effort to pry the bloody, murderous hands of the fiendish Libyan dictator from the very throats of that besieged nation’s long-suffering, outgunned citizens.

In response to the allied mission, numerous Leftists and Liberals are rancorously claiming that nothing more is happening in Libya than an imperial gambit aimed at capturing oil. Preoccupied with their ossified theoretical musings, and misbegotten dreams of somehow being accepted as members of a so-called “vanguard” group, they appear to me to be heading instead for the proverbial “junk heap of history” they have always assumed to be the catch basin for their Conservative opponents.

It is too soon to determine how events will eventually unfold in Libya, but two things are crystal clear even at this early stage of the titanic struggle: Qaddafi’s days are numbered, and democracy is on the rise in ways that will transform the geopolitical character of the world as we have known it for a century or more.

The vast majority of Libyans, as best we can ascertain at this moment, want freedom and democracy. Person after person has strode forth since their rebellion’s inception proclaiming that the time has come for their nation to come in from the proverbial cold, and establish a constitutionally-based society committed to due process, law, order and healthy engagement with the rest of the world. In order to accomplish these objectives, they rightly assert that they need to rid the nation of the malign influence of Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi “by whatever means necessary.”

The quixotic Col. has responded with wild accusations, tear gas, mercenaries, indiscriminate killing, and vows to waging an unrestrained war dedicated to crushing his opponents. Each day’s news reports prove that he is absolutely committed to keeping his word, and we can understand why. If he loses, death is probably his only option: whether by the mob or the hangman’s noose.

Those engaged in the fight against the Colonel and his small band of vicious allies are portraying their titanic struggle in similarly grim terms. If they win, they will have created for themselves the possibility of living normal lives. If they lose, they will die. That is more or less the rule in Africa: take out the dictator and consequently acquire the right to rule. Those who attempt such a maneuver unsuccessfully must prepare to die. There’s no middle ground ending in such struggles. And there are few middle ground options for the United States.

Thus, given our position as the dominant global power, we are faced with the question of what to do. We can support the Libyan people, or do nothing and probably end up watching them getting crushed by the Colonel’s domestic supporters, augmented by foreign mercenaries, who are obviously willing to kill indiscriminately until they are called off like a pack of crazed, wild dogs.

I recommend that the United States Government put together an appropriate force and orchestrate, with help from like-minded allies, Colonel Qaddafi’s immediate departure. At the very least, this course of action will provide us something that we will never achieve from our current posture in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that’s the unquestioned status of being on the so-called right side of history. That is something we, and the beleaguered Libyan opposition forces, desperately need at this pregnant, pivotal moment.

The second development I am watching is the massive revolt currently underway in Madison, Wisconsin, where citizens from every sector of society are besieging the state government in response to the attack on unions being waged by the newly elected Republican governor. However, the immediate confrontation in Wisconsin is resolved in the short run, my strong impression is that it is a precursor of similar confrontations to come in possibly every section of the United States.

Although I am always hesitant to speculate on the character of the future, the unprecedented events unfolding in Tripoli and Madison move me to comment on things to come. I should also note that I am not I am not projecting my desires regarding the ramifications of the historically significant confrontations currently underway in Madison and Tripoli. Instead, I am addressing potential long-range ramifications of the information we are receiving from witnesses and participants in those confrontations.

As far as Libya is concerned, it is apparent that Colonel Gadhafi’s days as the nation’s dictatorial leader are coming to an abrupt halt. However brutal and blood curdling his efforts to remain in power, the critical mass of public opinion in his nation, and around the world, has turned inexorably against him. The only substantive question at this point is how many corpses he will leave in his wake. Score another victory for democracy, and the indomitable will of human beings to be free.

On the surface, the stately demonstrators in Wisconsin would appear be in another universe, focused on problems categorically different from those being fatally contested in Libya. But that is only partially true. Struggling to sustain the weight of two imperial wars, a staggering financial crisis, and the immediate prospect of having their legal right to collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions eliminated, a critical mass of Wisconsin citizens are engaged in a showdown confrontation with their government. Much is at stake, and the whole nation is watching with bated breath.

Most important, there is a distinct possibility that the urge to confront government officials via mass demonstrations may well end up sweeping out of Wisconsin and across the U.S. in much the same manner as it is in the Middle East. Should this occur, U.S. political leaders of every stripe could end up in the immediate future desperately perusing retreat options–in much the same manner as their tone deaf, heartless, autocratic counterparts in the Middle East?

Such alterations of the dominant narrative pertinent to client leaders at the far periphery of the U.S. Empire are all too common. Thus, Pakistan’s Musharraf, Cuba’s Batista, Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-Shek, Haiti’s Duvaliers, Korea’s, Park Chung Hee, Chile’s Pinochet, Marcos of the Philippines, Nicaragua’s Samoza, the Shah of Iran, and, indeed, Saddam Hussein, received similar treatment as their usefulness to the Empire waned. There are many others, and their crimes against humanity are numerous, and quite often heinous. Even though such figures are invariably feared and hated by their subjugated people, they have tended to remain in office, sometimes for several decades, largely due to critically important assistance provided by the U.S. Government.

There are several reasons why dictators are among the most favored leaders of nations that exist within the orbit of imperial U.S. power. Moreover, they are relatively easy to understand. Dictators keep things simple. As long as they are satisfied, little time, energy and resources need be allocated to the fractious, frequently inconvenient needs, demands and dreams of the people they rule. Demands for freedom, and the right of democratic participation in government, are neither convenient, nor particularly congruent with the overarching geopolitical strategy of the U.S. Government. Thus, leaders of the U.S. government, Democratic and Republican alike, tend to prefer dictators to democrats as leaders of subjugated territories. And this is particularly the case in volatile areas such as the Middle East.

In any event, it does not take genius to understand that such a policy has a glaring weakness, which is the fact that subjugated people eventually lose their fear and take on dictatorships in struggles of the sort we have witnessed in locations as diverse as Romania, Germany, the Philippines, Tunisia and now Egypt. Furthermore, potentially Egyptian-style revolts are currently bubbling to the surface in Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen and the West Bank. Things appear calm in Saudi Arabia at this moment, but my best guess is that royal princes throughout the kingdom are probably keeping their escape jets fueled up, and prepared for immediate departure, should their subjects become infected, and emboldened, by the democracy virus.

Here in the U.S., those who preside at the apex of imperial power are clearly worried. They prefer to talk of their love of Democracy, but hard power of the sort they trade in on a daily basis is based on autocratic authority. The crowds in Cairo are exposing the contradiction. Much is at stake, and the probability is that the U.S. Empire will have a dramatically different shape and context by the time the impressive people’s revolution currently underway in Egypt runs its dramatic course.

The signs of stagnation and decline stemming from economic weakness are both numerous, and deeply troubling.  They include the persistent high level of unemployment, and underemployment; the tens of millions of people who have lost their homes; expanding debt at every level of government; massive annual trade imbalances, and a shell-shocked populace burdened by exorbitant debt.

However much the stock market has gone up in the past year or so, the destructive impact of the recent Great Recession continues to haunt the pocketbooks and lives of most citizens.  Recognition that the Federal Government’s debt load has climbed to $100,000 for each individual citizen is also a growing source of alarm among those who understand its long-term, negative ramifications.  Those who wonder what such ramifications might be should consider the current dilemmas of Greece and Ireland, if not residents of the former Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of that particular empire’s inglorious collapse.

Here in the U.S. these days fear and uncertainty about the economy dominate daily life, and few serious conversations go on beyond a few minutes before one or all the participants mention some aspect of the financial uncertainty that haunts our lives.  As a result, workers in virtually every sector of our society are experiencing unprecedented anxiety.  And this includes many of those employed in industries and occupations that have heretofore been considered safe havens from economic distress.

Much of the anxiety is obviously tied to the nation’s stubbornly high rate of unemployment.  Government statistics indicate that approximately one out of every ten workers is unemployed.  Thus, virtually every citizen knows someone who is out of work, with few prospects of being employed any time soon.

Hunger is another source of anxiety and suffering.  Last year 17 percent of U.S. households experienced significant food insecurity.  And one in every four children in the nation resides in a home suffering chronic food insecurity.  Food banks and community shelters do what they can to provide assistance to those in need, but they are few indications that this problem will disappear for the next several years.

The chaos permeating the housing sector, which is engaged in a slow motion collapse, is an additional major source of anxiety and fear.  Millions of homeowners are “underwater” on their mortgages because they owe more on their homes than they are currently worth.  Moreover, the completely bewildering dilemma of those caught in this particular economic tsunami is being made worse by the continuing downward drift in the value of their homes.

Millions have been evicted from their homes because they could no longer afford to pay their mortgages, and current projections indicate that several millions more will lose their homes during the next three to four years.  Moreover, each home lost because of unemployment, or a bank’s foreclosure, deals yet another wound to the neighborhood in which it is located because of the corresponding decline in taxes collected by municipal governments already strapped for cash.  At this point, there seems to be no clear end point for the downward spiral in government and community resources due to the ominously expanding housing crisis.

The net result of crises such as the imploding housing market is that the United States is in an economically weakened state compared to recent decades.  On the other hand, China, India, and several South American and African nations are amassing impressive economic clout via rapidly expanding economies.  Moreover, current economic trends indicate that during the decades immediately ahead such locales will pose serious, and possibly destabilizing, economic competition for the United States.

Unfortunately, most indications are that the full ramifications of economic challenges emanating from previously poor and downtrodden sectors of the world are barely understood by this nation’s leaders, and even less so by most citizens. 
 The jingoistic, know-nothing, angry, irrational, Tea Party partisans can be cited to highlight the nature of our dilemma. The Tea Party crowd wants to turn back the clock, and re-embrace policies and procedures that were only barely appropriate when they were in use decades ago. Unfortunately, the world they seek to live in no longer exists.

And their mantras extolling the benefits of “small government” are based on simplistic, if not totally ignorant, perceptions of the world in which we currently live, not to mention the one we will inhabit in the years immediately ahead.

The China factor can be used to elaborate the point.  Current commentary in Washington, D.C. about China’s allegedly undervalued currency is indicative of broad confusion in this nation regarding the Middle Kingdom’s awesome economic performance during the past three decades.  China’s economy is not outperforming ours solely because of its currency valuation.  Better organization of national priorities, including strategic investments in industries and people, is probably more important to China’s overall economic success than the yuan’s contested valuation.

In any event, my best sense is that alarmed dialogue about China’s economic prowess will inevitably expand, and become more urgent. Moreover, as the full extent, and global ramifications, of China’s rapidly expanding economic clout become more readily apparent in this nation, the critical significance of the commentary presented here now will be more readily apparent.

Moreover, a recent cover story in The Economist asserted that India’s economy is poised to exceed China’s in the not too distant future.  The key point to be understood is that expansive, global change of the sort that realigns the grand, geopolitical balance of power, is clearly underway. The process will, of course, produce winners and losers. Economic viability will be one of the ultimate determinants for nations hoping to end up among the ranks of the winners.

Given this, much more serious attention needs to be devoted to the long-term viability of the United States in the increasingly integrated, global economic system. Given the nation’s abundant resources, the possibility of auspicious prosperity is on the so-called table. Unfortunately, the U.S. has numerous structural peculiarities that also render it vulnerable to being eclipsed in the economic sphere by nations better prepared to compete in the global economic arena.

One of the most ominous early indicators regarding the overall fitness of the U.S. regarding the unprecedented challenges dead ahead is the high rate of unemployment here in the United States. Republican Party spokespersons, and their running dog Tea Party accomplices, lay much of the blame for high unemployment on President Obama’s policies. 
 It is not clear whether they actually believe this to be the case. Some of them obviously do, but the probability is that vast majority of those who make the charge simply find the nation’s first non-white president to be a convenient whipping boy.

Mainstream members of the Democratic Party provide different explanations as to why the nation’s rate of unemployment remains worrisomely high. Their consensus seems to be that the business community is being unreasonably cautious, and that when that caution dissipates happy days will return. 
 I beg to differ.

The high U.S. unemployment rate is due to many factors; one of the most important being the fact that much of the work previously performed here has migrated across the globe to places such as India and China. Moreover, as Bruce Springsteen noted, those jobs are not coming back.

In order to get U.S. workers back to work in numbers commensurate with the best interests of workers, and the nation at large, we need to acknowledge that if we continue along the current course, the inevitable outcome will be more unemployment, and more precipitous national decline.  China are not surging ahead of the U.S. in terms of productivity and overall economic growth because its leaders are unfairly manipulating their currency.

If auspicious prosperity could be achieved by such a simple maneuver, the United States, and much of Western Europe, would be aggressively engaged in doing the same. 
  The Chinese are outperforming us because their system is better suited to compete in the global arena than ours. Given this, U.S. leaders, in every sector, need to devote far more attention to studying the Chinese system, and far less to accusing them of improper trading practices. Most important, our leaders need to acquire better understanding of the manner in which the Chinese coordinate government and business operations such that they function as a unified entity, easily capable of dominating virtually all would be competitors.

Our current economic strategies are not sufficient to withstand the challenge.  Therefore, we need to implement major reforms, or prepare to be eclipsed, probably during the decade dead ahead.

It is impossible to spend time in the company of such people and not notice their incessant preoccupation with food. This is true of academic settings, as well as social gatherings and interpersonal situations that in more normal times might be focused on love, sports, the weather, the cost of living, politics, etc.

I find it fascinating that otherwise normal people are so deeply engaged in this curious fixation. In the company of such folks, the term “organic” has an almost holy significance. Funds permitting, they restrict their diets to organic materials. I understand the logic of this approach to consumption, even though I am aware that much of the science pertinent to organically produced fodder, has not substantiated many of the miraculous claims associated with the give-me-organic-or-give-me nothing-but-water crowd.

As indicated, I see where the organic crowd is coming from, and I am fully supportive. I am also supportive of the vegans, who are probably more insightful and accurate in their overall approach to eating than their strictly organic cohorts. Though related to vegans in many ways, the folks about whom I am commenting in this post are more broadly defined with regard to what they eat and why. Moreover, the aspect of their behavior that gives rise to this comment is not focused so much on what they eat and why as it is on their approach to food itself.

These folks use food to validate their identities and core purposes in life. I might understand this tightly focused, all encompassing, focus on food much better if they were farmers, or directly engaged in the actual processes of growing crops, as it were.
But they are not farmers, nor are they cowboys, or ranch hands, and they do not intend to ever be such. Moreover, the vast majority of them don’t live anywhere near anything that can honestly be called a legitimate farm.

The closest they reside to such operations is the perimeter land that surrounds their sleekly manicured suburban enclaves. For those who reside in inner city metropolitan areas, as do the vast majority of the so-called “foodies,” local parks and roadway medians might be their closest access points to land that might be used to seriously produce food (but only after the soil is treated to remove lead residue deposited over many decades by automobiles and other motorized vehicles).

Common subjects of discussion engaged in by the food-is-my-newfound-religion people range from growing, preserving and canning to restaurants, retail practices, “evil” advertising, the Whole Foods experience, and, of course, returning to the land, ostensibly to revel in dirt and produce that with which they stuff their faces. I have encountered the return-to-the-land fantasy numerous times in the past, and most often during times of national stress engendered by events such as wars, major disasters, and periods when the national economy is in the toilet.

The inelegant point I am attempting to make is that I perceive a massive, disconcerting, disconnect between foodies and the world in which we cohabit. Whether they realize it or not, nutrition is not their real issue. My best sense is that they are actually responding to unacknowledged factors such as the recent “Great Recession, the U.S. Empire’s declining fortunes, the rise of China and other colored peoples around the world, and the constricting net of cultural, political and economic globalization that is slowly, but inexorably, cutting the previously smug, and largely clueless American middle classes down to size.