_

Most of our work this winter and spring has been, in one way or another, about the U.S. economy and the efforts to get people to do something about it.  Nothing I see there dissuades me from my pessimism.  We're entering the post-prosperity era, and no one, not regular people, not the elites, not advocates, not politicians, seem prepared to engage with that reality.  The U.S. middle class has been duped and betrayed by the cheerleaders of market capitalism; the poor are consigned to their dead ends with that same righteous contempt that Charles Dickens portrayed so vividly; the rich are spinning out their ponzi schemes, and the clear-thinking ones are no doubt trying to time their exit jump.  The government is on the verge of being destroyed as a functional institution; the mass media have discredited themselves with each new debasement (and left people to find their place in the archipelagos of a fragmentary and polluted internet infoscape).


The politics of the moment are summed up by a joke making the rounds among liberals:  "A Tea Partier, a Union member and a Wall Street Banker are sitting around a table with 10 cookies on it.  The Banker grabs nine of the cookies and gets up to leave.  He pauses, and says over his shoulder to the Tea Partier, You better watch out, that Union guy wants your cookie."


I wonder about the declining number (and quality) of the cookies we will squabble over.  The U.S. has all the symptoms of a declining empire, but we may not decline alone.  The era of cheap, concentrated fossil energy is drawing to a close, climate destabilization is meeting or exceeded the worst-case scenarios of the climate scientists (and still we continue on the same path, undeterred), and there is no political will or vision to do anything at the scale necessary to change things.

_