Both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama will give us happy talk about maintaining entitlement benefits (e.g., Medicare and Medicaid) that cannot possibly be sustained. They will talk about energy self-sufficiency. They will talk about creating jobs. They will tell us that we can somehow ‘grow’ our way out of our economic distress. But neither candidate will admit that technology now destroys more jobs than it creates, because to do so would be to commit political suicide. The fact is that none of the happy talk will ever come true. Instead, the Federal Government, with the tacit approval of both major political parties, continues to run trillion-dollar-plus deficits year after year in a futile attempt to spend our way out of our economic problems and to sustain an economic model that cannot be sustained.

This single image sums up the impact that High Frequency Trading machines (HFTs) have had on our markets volume and liquidity since 2007

At this point you may be tempted to think that America has been through extremely tough economic times before (The Great Depression for example) and came through them okay. So what is so different now? Well, the truth is that the character of the American people is dramatically different. At the time of the Great Depression, the American people were tough, self-sufficient people who knew how to live off the land. Today, most Americans are weak, spoiled little children who will throw a temper tantrum whenever anyone tries to take their toys away. The character of the American people has been decaying for decades, and there is no way that the current crop of Americans has any chance of weathering a horrible economic depression the way Americans back in the 1930s did.

Early-adopters believe that the nation and the world have turned a corner. They understand something the media either ignore or deny. They’re betting on a future of local food systems, not global agribusiness; of community credit co-ops rather than too-big-to-fail Wall Street megabanks; of small-scale renewable energy projects, not a world-spanning system of fossil-fuel extraction, trade, and consumption. A future in which we do for ourselves, share, and cooperate.

The farmers that I have come to know as I’ve become more involved in the local foods movement are genuinely great people. Their enthusiasm for the quality of their products is infectious, and I never have to worry as I see recall after recall of factory foods announced.

The economic elite have launched an attack on the U.S. public and society is unraveling at an increased rate.

$700B -> $12T