Lately we've heard a lot of noise from politicians and economists about a slowdown in economic growth, AKA, a recession. Our perpetually wise leaders decided that if they just borrowed a few hundred dollars from China for each and every one of us and slipped it into our pockets five or six months from now, the economic engine would once again roar to life and we would restart our habitual frenzied trinket and toy buying, the corporate-approved method of pursuing happiness. This whole "recession" seems to have been hardly anticipated, hence the panic-mode response.

Looming on the horizon and fast approaching is an economic cataclysm that has been predicted and understood for fifty years: the end of cheap energy in the form of petroleum. People who hear about it usually seem to thing it will somehow affect their automotive habits more than anything else. While that will happen, by far the biggest effect will be on food supply, as we now invest 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to plow, cultivate, fertilize, harvest, process, and transport our food for every 1 calorie that ends up on your plate.

Now it seems that the "wise leaders" in whom we have entrusted the fate of our world might have done something about this, or, even at this late date, might at least try to alert the still somnolent masses of the catastrophe about to overtake them. To do so, however, would be to run at cross-purposes with the globalist corporate oligarchy, which will continue to gain political and resource wealth only as long as the people are kept sedated with gadgets, entertainment, and assurances of a continuing bright and secure future. So don't expect any of the leading corporate lackey front-runner candidates to say anything soon.

Meanwhile, it is relatively easy to predict that the grudgingly acknowledged problem of global warming, combined with the depletion of fresh water resources and economically extractable minerals, the mass wasting of topsoil, and the aforementioned decline in cheap fossil fuels, will shortly converge upon our nation to produce an economic chasm that will make the Great Depression look like a crack in the sidewalk. Added to these woes are the inexcusable explosion in debt assumed by government during the "fat years" of cheap oil and America's ongoing balance-of-trade deficit, a problem worsened by the corporate-friendly "free trade" agreements of the '90s.

So enjoy your life at this moment at this pinnacle of comfort before you join the rest of humanity in the long plunge to chaos and despair that will be the story of this century.

Repeatedly in the Republican presidential debates I have heard Dr. Ron Paul apply the fundamental principle of Christianity, the "Golden Rule", to assess the problems the United States is having in relation to Islamic nations. All the other potential leaders, including the Democrats, must have very weak imaginations not to be able to envision a scenerio that reverses the current one, in which a hypothetical "United States of Arabia" had invaded Texas on the pretext of ousting its governor and was fighting guerrilla Christian insurgents trying to rid their state of the offending occupation forces.

The American government's meddling in the internal affairs of other countries and the use of government data gathering and military might to support the corporate exploitation of resources and to open up commercial markets has got to be resented as a cultural assault. The insensitivity of America's approach to the Middle East has made a monumental hash of our relations with Islamic states and engendered the resentments that are now manifested as violence against us.

Ron Paul advocates a return to America's traditional stance in the world of friendly neutrality and non-interference with the internal affairs of other nations. That is the way of a republican democracy; the alternative is empire, with its hierarchical concentration of wealth and power and its disregard for human freedom.

No current candidate for President has a platform so closely aligned with George W. Bush as John McCain. A vote for John McCain is a vote for 4 more years of the train wreck that has been the Bush Administration. Expect continuing bloodshed and deepening debt. Anyone who thinks that corporate taxes are too high and that the fight against Islamic terrorists is the "transcendent issue of our times" is unacquainted with reality. Terrorists attacks are a reaction against American economic and cultural intrusion into a region having the resource we need the most: petroleum. A real political maverick would level with the American people on this, as Dr. Ron Paul has.

In fact, the defining, and infinitely more threatening, issues of our time are, in no particular order: burgeoning population growth, declining availability of fossil fuels, global warming, loss of fertile soil to erosion and misappropriation, and fresh water depletion. For the United States, you can add the explosion of government deficit spending and the chronic and growing balance-of-trade deficit. The average American faces the horrendous consequences of all of the above, plus skyrocketing costs for medical insurance and higher education.

I only wish I could live in John McCain's world, where we could fix everything with corporate tax cuts and the deaths of a few terrorists, but responsible people have the misfortune to be burdened with perception, a habit of linking effect to cause, and dealing with real problems rationally.