Autocrats, plutocrats, authoritarian ideologues and elitists of all stripes speak often of the people’s inability to govern themselves in a complex world that requires expertise – namely, the self-justifying expertise of the elite themselves. With surprising frankness, federal appeals court Judge Richard A. Posner summed up the elite’s paternalistic rationale: Few citizens have the formidable [...]

That rasping, guttural sound you hear is the death rattle of the American dream.

This Friday 134 million American lemmings with credit cards will clog roads, parking lots, and cash registers, scurrying and reaching and inching along together to take hold of dead stuff. Then they’ll all reverse course, dragging the dead objects with them. This Friday 134 million American lemmings with credit cards will clog roads, parking lots, and cash registers, scurrying and reaching and inching along together to take hold of dead stuff. Then they’ll all reverse course, dragging the dead objects with them. Most of the objects they’ll burn lots of carbon to acquire travelled to America in huge ships burning lots of carbon (and toxic bunker fuel): manufacturing these objects burnt more carbon.

How else can we spend this Friday?

How did 43% of America’s population end up doing synchronized Anthropocene fire dances on a dangeously warming planet?

The usual suspects: Freud’s nephew and the Philadelphia Police Department.

China believes that the US is weak state with unbridled capitalism. Chinese industrial policy reflects that belief. Both political parties in the US agree, and neither will change anything. No wonder we have a jobless recovery.

A consortium wants half a billion in U.S. Stimulus money to create 2,000 Chinese jobs making turbines in Shenyang for a wind farm in West Texas. We’ve outsourced factories, technology and jobs. We must hold the line at off-shoring our tax dollars.

The economic relationship between China and the United States is the defining issue of our day. While debates over health care are vital to American society, and while challenges ranging from Iran to Afghanistan to North Korea are real, nothing will determine the arc of the coming decades – or will shape domestic life and prosperity in the United States – more than the emergence of China as a global economic superpower unrivalled except by America.

The next time you hear a rightwing American commentator praising the resolute will of Great Britain’s Iron Lady Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who showed steel against the British unions and those dirty Argentinians, breaking a union and humiliating an island defense force, take time to remember this: Maggie feared the Krauts.

Since last November, I have unexpectedly found myself blogging the auto crisis and bailout. Between my five-plus years consulting for an automotive company internationally and living in Michigan, I seemed to have the ability to explain the larger causes of the crisis that were largely missed elsewhere in the blogosphere and much of the traditional media.

So I took a tour of a steel plant today. There was a lot of hot, molten steel, but also high-tech computerized systems running the show, making sure just enough steel is poured into a mold at just the right temperature and speed, among many other functions. The tour was sponsored by the Alliance for American Manufacturing and the Campaign for America’s Future as part of the Netroots Nation conference here in Pittsburgh.

The Chamber of Commerce—that’s the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—proved once again how anti-American it is when it comes to supporting U.S. industry.

In Findlay, Ohio, unions had been organizing a parade and all-day event for this Saturday to highlight American-made products and the need for U.S. trade and economic policies that reward job growth in this country.