The real war vs the election of 2012

Blinded by Greed

The larger economy, the politicians and corporations, were blinded by greed.  The individuals were too weak, unorganized, and sedated by cheap goods and ready credit.  The politicians were seduced with the need to keep power too busy seeking campaign support to govern effectively. Raising money was their own power and re-election was job one.  Job two was addressing special interest groups with voting blocks which were easiest to seduce with single issues that did not affect the false prosperity which we accepted without questioning the basis for it, either as a country or as individuals.  But we were obligated to fight to achieve our prosperity, but somehow did not understand we had to continue the fight to keep it.  The Chinese realized this and continued the fight long after they had achieved reasonable aims shifting the balance of power towards them.

Fight is another word for being challenged and rising to those challenges.  If we do not face the challenges we have to create them.  Fortunately, the universe has left us with enough challenges so that we are not even close to addressing even the easy challenges that lie before us with short term intelligence much less long term intelligence.

After the OPEC attack, the U.S. economy seemed to come back stronger than ever, the dollar was stronger than ever, a burdensome debt had been reduced to a manageable amount by devaluation.  

However, the economy was rotting at the core through outsourcing without attention to the future.  Fat corporations were outsourcing to increase their profits in the short term, ultimately these companies would wind up with worthless case and with no manufacturing as foreign companies who had manufactured for them took over the profit centers, Lenovo becoming what IBM had been.

We are weak and lazy and corrupt

Wealth encourages sloth.  Technology changed the way that politicians interacted with the public and how the public interacts.  Given wealth, the politicians lost their focus of governing and competing, they accepted themselves as rulers of an empire without enemies.  They used technology to stay in power while doing less than nothing. 

The rest of the world did not stop competing, they did not have the luxury. Evolution and competition favors those who are under pressure, not those who sit fat and lazy on top.  To compete from a position of dominance requires short term and long term intelligence and the leadership to use it.  Leadership means the ability to make hard choices and the will to enforce them.

Our politicians ceased acting with an eye towards short term issues, they have almost never looked at long term issues so they did not cease to look at long term issues so much as they never looked for them.  This left just immediate intelligence to rule the country, what works right now. 

Logic took a secondary role to special interest agendas.  The special interests cannot be asked to look at short term or long term consequences since they have an present agenda.

Our country is out of control.  Our leaders are hiding, entrenched behind their static defense.  Static defenses have failed since the invention of gun powder…by the Chinese.  A static country always moves backwards.  The strength of our country for two hundred years was that it was not static.

Rising to the competition is the goal we must set for ourselves.  We should have a target of besting our competition, at almost any intelligent price.  The failure to win has consequences, but the salvation of our culture, should be reward enough to win.  If we do more than just survive, if we win, so much the better.  But at present we are losing without a significant fight.