Was 30 Years of "Progress" just Vapor?

The myths we live with, the happy figments of our imaginations, sometimes run up against hard realities. That's when things get interesting. Party time!?

So, can we park "free market capitalism" and "trickle down economics" in the eternal dustbin of history?

As always, John Robb at Global Guerillas has a mind-opening take on what's happening to our global economic system. He and James Howard Kuntsler are two of our most perceptive observers - with highly polished axes to grind.

How about this from Robb:

"Would we have been better off if the benefits of massive productivity growth over the last three decades had been shared with hundreds of millions of Americans? Of course. In fact, it is hard to see any other way, other than an open decision making process, which would be able to deal with the growing complexity of the modern world -- from globalization to technological change to growing instability.

Can this be error be corrected? Probably not. Most Americans have fallen deeply into debt (mirrored by the US government) in an attempt to maintain lifestyles (or an illusion of progress). They don't have the financial resources for any meaningful decision making power left and worse, there isn't any recognition that a concentration of decision making was even a problem in the first place. In fact, given that most of the last 30 years of American economic investment is now vapor, it's hard to imagine us avoiding economic catastrophe."