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You probably learned about the Food Chain in sixth grade. It goes like this:
Tree draws nutrients from soil.
Beetle eats woody parts of Tree.
Bird eats Beetle.
Cat eats bird.
Wolf eats cat.
Wolf dies, decays to soil.
Tree draws nutrients from soil.
Its the food chain, a linked succession of life-sustaining events that stretches back to the dawn of time.
What about the money chain? Have you heard of that?
It goes like this:
Wheat draws nutrients from soil.
Farmer harvests wheat.
Farmer sells wheat to Mill.
Mill converts wheat into flour (value added), sells flour to bakery.
Bakery makes doughnut (value added to product), sells it to girl.
Girl takes doughnut (service added) to man stranded in his car in traffic; girl reaps generous tip.

This really happened. The girl's name is Stacy; the time was 1973; the man was in a long gas-station line because of the OPEC-generated fuel shortage; the Donut was a Dunkin', and I heard about this on All Things Considered.

The sequence of events illustrates the money chain.
Money is circulating every day among people everywhere. Its what people do. Some folks have a little extra, maybe enough to make an impulse purchase--like a doughnut--purchased merely because some energetic 7-year-old, gently guided by her father, provides the go-get-'em service while hungry people are stuck in a gas line.

Like I said, this really happened. During the gas shortage of 1973, a guy (thousands of people, actually) was waiting in his car in a long line of cars, to buy gas. Seven-year-old Stacy positioned herself in a parking lot where she could strategically approach the stranded motorists. It was an improvised  opportunity borne of a a child's courage, her father's wise resourcefulness, a potential buyer's appetite relative immobility. young Stacy converted the circumstance into a profitable activity.

Stacy was thinking out of the box. Although the drivers' vehicles were motionless or crawling, the girl's  neurons were firing on all cylinders, devising a way to make lemonade, as it were, out of a lemony situation.
Ventures like hers have made the USA the prosperous country that it is today.

Oh yes, we are still prosperous, relative to most the of people who live on this developing planet. We are still prosperous, even if many of us are stuck in the right place at the wrong time, or in the wrong place at the right time, or just stuck in the employment line, maybe a line like the one you'll see cast in bronze at the Roosvelt Memorial across the lake from the Jefferson Memorial in Washington.

What about you? Have you explored  the money stream to see if there's a little liquidity stream pooling up in your environs where you might gather a few buckets of cash? Or some other resource. Have you checked it out? Have you opened your eyes, as Stacy did, to the  possibilities for increase right around the corner from you, or a few exits down the beltway, a few stops away on the subway.
Or are you just waiting for something to land in your lap? Expecting a phone call from Employment Security? Listening for a knock on the door from the union boys?
Don't hold your breath; look around. You may find a silver lining in those clouds.

Its the American way, and the only way we'll ever get out of this mess, because I hate to tell ya, Virginia, but there ain't jobs out there for everybody. Some of us are going to have to spring out for the promised land. Better get busy and find something to do. You might be the next Bill Gates, or Oprah.

Economic growth has always been driven by emerging nations.
As the sun once set on the British Empire, it is now, in its unstoppable path from east to west to far east, now going down on the the good ole days of the good ole USA. The time of our manifest destiny expansion is winding down.

Now we have, instead of the good ole days for which we older Americans yearn, the good new days, which our children and grandchildren will inhabit, while we take on more passive, though hopefully wiser, roles. Our golden age of adaptation is begun. We need to adjust our goals and practices to accommodate the great moving mandala of opportunity.

Can we meet the challenge of our age, or will we atrophy into welfare statism while crying prescription-drug-laden tears into our beer?
The times they are a changin'.  We must rise with our acquired storehouse of knowledge (one if by land) and wisdom (two if by sea). Here's the first principle for our next phase of development: 
Necessity is the Mother of Innovation.

Our great growth phase is over. Merryn Somerset Webb, in a valiant search for the occluded silver lining, grapples with this inconvenient truth in her article in yesterday's Financial Times.

She passes along a statistical observation which she had gleaned from James Anderson, which  points out that the rate of global growth peaked in the mid-70s at 5%. "Since then," notes Ms. Webb, "it has been around a respectable 3 per cent."

It seems to me that this "rate of global growth" slowing coincides with  the big-picture decline of our own overall economic growth. It is a natural development that, we now find, has landed us in the present predicament, not unlike the "stagflation" of that late 1970s malaise.

But our present malady is surely more severe, and much deeper in its effects upon our comfortable existence.

And its root cause is this: the torch of economic dynamism is now being passed to a new set of runners. The new movers and shakers of capitalistic endeavor of our era have, in this round, a little more state-controlled coordination than in previous thrusts. Like it or not, this is the way things happen in a planetary development fueled upon fewer resources than we humans had before. The Hegelian dialect is surely demonstrable here in the great scheme of things. Capitalism and Statism are merging, as we speak, to produce something entirely new--something that is intrinsically more restrictive than the old models, and yet somehow, necessary. It is the way progress happens in the 21st century.

Conservatives are not comfortable with this. I am, myself, a conservative, but also a realist. Good ole-fashioned competition, in the future, will require more exquisite channels of organization. And there's no way we Americans, for instance, can perpetuate this prosperity thing without playing by the new rules. Those new regs, dictated not by us fat'n'happy yankee consumers but by the new kids (China) on the capitalist block require more correlation with government.

Read 'em and weep, free-market absolutists.
Nevertheless, there is hope yet for us entrepreneurs and wannabees. There is most assuredly a worldwide thrust of free enterprise, also by necessity, on the micro level. This is happening in China, and it can happen again here. Like the great irony of life itself, in order to think big, we must again learn to think small.

The new young-bucks in the global chemin de fer are now laying another BRICK in the superstructure of planetary wealth and development. Merryn Somerset Webb also mentions in her FT article the somewhat symbiotic interplay of  imitation and innovation by which economic  processes expand. These principles for efficiency and improvement mortar together the fundamental building materials: capital, education, and technology transfer.

All together they constitute a new  economic lattice-work that will surpass our obsolete edifices.

These inevitable changes will hit some of us pretty hard. But as the old gaming challenge goes: Put up or shutup.  Or written another way: Quit y' er whinin. Get used to it. Or stated yet another way:

Do or die.

While we have a dire need to renovate the way we comfort-seeking Americans do things, what we  really need now in the face of such challenges is optimism.

 President Obama, among many hope-seeking others, supplies it. Yesterday he told auto workers: " Don't bet against the American worker. Don't bet against the American people." Jackie Calmes reports in her New York Times article that our President hopes to drive the now-subsidized automakers toward overhauling their operations and make necessary sacrifices.

Sacrifices? Yes.

In other words, change with the times.  Necessity is the mother of Innovation. We've got some Federal Reserve Notes to send in your direction, but you've got to make good use of them.

Is that possible? Is it possible that highly-institutionalized, multi-layered redundant American industry can figure this stuff out and make best use of both governmental loans and stockholder investments? Is it possible they (we) can emerge from this camel through the eye of a needle downsizing tribulation better equipped to prosper in future conditions?

Our life depends on it.

You carmakers--both owners and workers--better get busy doing the right things to make us leaner and stronger, not fat and happier.

That kind of surgery doesn't happen without a few cuts.
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Meanwhile, back at the tranche:  Has anyone built any trains in this country lately? Do we even know how anymore?

Praise God for the NAACP, an organization in which a person is still able to publicly testify, without nitpicky persecution, about what God has done for her.

Shirley Sherrod recently addressed a convention of their members at the Freedom Fund banquet. She delivered a powerful, timely message for  that organization, and indeed for our nation during this perilous time. You may want to watch Shirley's entire address as it has posted online, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9NcCa_KjXk

Her testimony constitutes an exemplary demonstration of how one person who has love, a constructive attitude, and a little help from God can overcome adversity. Ms.Sherrod has persevered though lifelong persecution and  hate to make a positive impact on a dysfunctional society. Hers is a rare contribution in a world ithat desperately needs  help.
I'd like to share with you a few selections from what she told the NAACP that night of March 27, 2010. The rest of this blog consists of quotes I have selected from Ms. Sherrod's message: 

"I knew that on the night of my father's death (in June, 1965, ed.), I felt I had to do something.I had to do something in answer to what had happened. My father wasn't the first black person to be killed. He was a leader in the community. He wasn't the first one to be killed by white men in the county. But I couldn't just let his death go without doing something in answer to what had happened. I made the commitment on that night at the age of 17 that I would not leave the south, that I would stay in the south and devote my life to working for change..."

(Later...)
"Two weeks after I had gone to school at Fort Valley, they called and told me that a bunch of white men had gathered outside our home one night and burned a cross...."

"My mother and my sister were out on the porch, with a gun...she saw some of them; she recognized some of them. She said: 'I see you. I know who you are.'"
"She became the first black official in Baker County, just 11 years later, and she is still serving, y'all.  She's chair of the board of education, and she's been serving almost 34 years."

"I didn't know how I would carry out my commitment that night..."

"...that night...I was back in one of the bedrooms praying, asking God to show me what I could do.  I didn't have... the path wasn't laid out...there that night...I just made a decision that I would stay and work (instead of moving up north, ed.),  and young people,  I want you to know that when you are true to what God wants you to do, the path just opens up, and things just come to you.  God is good; I can tell you that."


"...I've come a long ways. I know that I couldn't live with hate, you know. As my mother had said to so many, "If we had tried to live with hate in our hearts, we would probably  be dead now. But I've come to realize that we have to work together, and it's sad that we don't have a room full of whites and blacks here together tonight, because we have to overcome the divisions..."