We need to watch and learn from our front row seat

Goulburn Valley people, and their Australian fellows, have a front row seat to watch the removal of another rivet in the superstructure supporting the U.S.

America's President,
Mr Barack Obama.

U.S. president, Barack Obama, has argued for a package of tax cuts and government spending aimed at invigorating his country’s economy.
The package, worth about $US447 billion ($A421 billion), is ill-directed, being aimed at a return to business as usual and in doing so appeasing most Americans who see their comfort in living as they have for many decades.
Rather than spend the country’s wealth on a way of life that is unquestionably unsustainable, Mr Obama and those around him, should overtly embrace the hope, audacity and the idea of change that saw him elected in 2008.
America is staring at economic collapse; a societal breakdown that will end its world hegemony and is the natural outcome of what former political philosophy professor and noted author, Sheldon Wolin, has described as “inverted totalitarianism”.
Wolin sees decided danger in the dysfunctional marriage between government and the corporate world, a union that he argues has routed democracy leaving America with a militarized, industrial complex.
Survival of that complex hinges on an obedient populace, one, which in Wolin’s terms, is distracted and titillated by such things as sport, entertainment and discussion and debates about what are ultimately unimportant matters.
And so while democracy survives in name, what America has, and Australia trails along behind, is inverted totalitarianism – a facade claiming social equity, but which is really a process favouring a few.
Mr Obama’s plan does have tax cuts for both employee and employers and billions to prevent teacher lay-offs and hire more police and fire officers, and it would spend $50 billion to improve highways, railroads, transit and aviation.
Examined, however, through the prism of climate change and seriously depleted energy resources, the plan’s outline quickly becomes distorted and dated.
Rather than grasp at exhausted ideas, the Americans need to abandon what once worked, and failed, allowing them to embark on an adventurous and exciting new project that would fundamentally change the fabric of its society.
Such systemic change is resisted by an American elite that appears unable to comprehend the fraying of its empire and beyond that is so misled by its own beliefs and values, that its impending doom goes unseen.
Rather than rescuing flailing and failing companies, the U.S. should be advancing concepts that call for the localization of communities and employing the idea of late author and influential economist and statistician, E.F. Schumacher that “small is beautiful”.
America is the world’s biggest and most influential economy and as its collapse will render ours destitute; we need to watch attentively, and learn, from our front row seat.