2014 Olympia, WA - Before Obama there was a fairly clear delineation between Progressives on the left and the right, but they all shared one unifying principle: Welfare progressives on the Left and Warfare progressives on the Right all loved big government. When the progressives on the Left got Obama they thought he would usher in a renewed age of Welfare progressivism. Except, he turned out to be a fusion of the worst of LBJ and W: Welfare and Warfare.

The fundamentals of the economy are terrible, but there is a wave of entrepreneurial innovation that is countering the economy destroying policies of the progressives. Probably the most profound and far reaching will be the E-Cat, Andrea Rossi's power generator now being prepared for commercial deployment by Industrial Heat, LLC, a Cherokee Investment Partners company.

A 1 MW power plant is already in test-commercial operation and the public announcement is close if not imminent. The physics behind the E-Cat are not yet entirely clear, but for lack of a better term many describe it as Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, or LENR for short. Back in the 1980s another term was used for it that turned out to be inaccurate: "cold fusion."

The Coefficient of Performance (COP) exceeds 10. That is, it is putting out more than 10x as much energy as is used to propagate the reaction. This will spark an energy revolution. The E-Cat uses Nickel and Hydrogen. The Nickel powder gets converted into heat energy and copper. Nonpolluting and abundant, this will drive the cost of energy down and utterly disrupt the geopolitics of the past century. No more need for, let alone dependence, on foreign oil.

This will also destroy the petrodollar. But then, the days of the petrodollar are already numbered as China and Russia lead the way toward denominating oil trade--and world trade--in national currencies rather than the petrodollar.

So while the global and American economies will be stoked by the E-Cat, Americans will also experience massive price inflation as the prices of imported goods (everything from jeans and sneakers to pots and pans) will soar until a new (though always temporary) equilibrium is reached.

Crypto-currencies like Bitcoin might become the new international medium of exchange. Who can say? But one thing is very clear: booming global economies will rescue Big Governments both here and abroad, which, unless there is a fundamental and massive shift in citizen attitudes toward government, will link our burgeoning prosperity to increasingly intrusive and totalitarian-leaning government.

Government has a legitimate place. But the once exceptional America has been replaced by the USA Empire that has now become a fascist police state. I am cautiously optimistic about our economy, but not about the future of our freedom and liberty.

Regards,

Rod Van Mechelen

Rod Van Mechelen is the author of What Everyone Should Know about Feminist Issues: The Male-Positive Perspective (the page now includes several articles by other authors), and the publisher of The Backlash! @ Backlash.com and Cowlitz Country News. He is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and served on the Cowlitz Indian Tribal Council from 2002 to 2012, on the Cowlitz Indian Health Board from 2002 to 2011, Cultural Resources Board from 2004 to 2012, on the Education Committee from 2006 to 2010, as the tribe's volunteer webmaster from 2003 to 2012, on the Economic Development Committee for a few years, as chair of the tribe's Awards & Recognition Committee from 2008 to 2012 and chair of the communications committee 2010 to 2011, plus a few other things all in addition to his "day job," which he still has.