The Depression currently unfolding will be deeper, longer and more destructive than the Great Depression.

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1. A Federal government which since the "Reagan Revolution" of 1981 (e.g. don't tax and spend, just borrow and spend) has borrowed during so-called good times on a scale once reserved for rare Keynesian stimulus to combat serious recession. Thus we find ourselves at unprecedented levels of debt (comparable in terms of GDP to the entire cost of World War II) and our current Depression has barely begun.

2. A corrupt-to-the-core corporate structure riddled with bogus accounting, reliance on financial trickery for profits and misdirected/worthless regulatory oversight.

3. A banking sector of such debauchery and fraud that the excesses of the 1920s are reduced to the pranks of slighty-naughty choirboys and girls.

4. A Federal system of entitlements (Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security) which has grown far faster than the underlying economy for decades and now threatens the very solvency of the government itself, so stupendous are the future obligations.

5. A global military hegemony which costs more than all the other militarys and intelligence operations of the entire world put together. The U.S. military consumes more oil than the nation of Sweden (9 million residents).

6. An industrial, transportation and energy infrastructure that, rather than being rebuilt during the past 26 years of debt-based "prosperity," has crumbled in a long decline. Rather than invest in electrical power grids and energy-efficient transport systems, the U.S. squandered the trillions of borrowed dollars on toys, gewgaws, electronics made elsewhere, malls and commercial towers with only transient value and millions of bloated, inefficient poorly constructed homes no one needed or could afford: "assets" which were not productive at all, "assets" which are now capital traps on a scale heretofore unimaginable

7. A paucity of U.S. savings (and thus of domestic capital) with only one historical parallel: the depths of the Great Depression when unemployment was 25%.

8. A huge reliance on financial leverage, debt, borrowing and trickery for corporate profits; the U.S. exports soybeans, increasingly worthless dollars and "financial innovations" which are now exploding in economies from Ireland to India with the destructive force of superweapons. In exchange for this dubious paper, we have accepted actual tangible goods from the rest of the world.

They are now slowly waking up to the fact they've been conned on a scale few can grasp.

9. Globalization has reworked the global supply chain in an astonishingly brief period of time. As a result, the arbitrage of currencies (foreign exchange a.k.a. forex), wages, governance (less is more profitable) and environmental regulations (zero is the most profitable) have all placed advanced post-industrial economies like the U.S. at great structural disadvantages.

10. The U.S. claims to be competitive but much of this competitiveness is highly selective and thus illusory. Everything in the U.S.--labor, goods, buildings and taxes--is high-cost, overregulated (except for finance, banking and governance) and vulnerable to unpredictable lawsuits and officially sanctioned looting. Other than recent immigrants, non-U.S. employers find the workforce is often surly, unappreciative, narcissistic, entitlement-obsessed, unhealthy, poorly educated, unmotivated and more inclined to get-rich-quick schemes than actual enterprise or productivity.

The middle management labors under impossible demands to enrich stockholders next quarter and heavy turnover insures few stay in any job long enough to learn it effectively. Team cooperation is a doublespeak fraud imposed by "facilitators," creating a phony work environment where employees and managers alike pretend to care. This bogus environment breeds a looting, game-the-system mentality in which everyone is grabbing for all they can before retirement, restructuring, reassignment, resignation or getting fired.

A "quarterly profits are God" mentality reduces the workforce (even the good workers) to units of input which are pared back or hired without regard to morale or loyalty. This managerial and cultural pathology makes a mockery of worker loyalty and breeds the very qualities of distrust and "I got mine" attitude which undermines both productivity and workplace happiness.

11. Last but certainly not least, the U.S. economy is highly depedent on cheap, abundant fossil fuels--the very fuels which are in the global depletion phase, happy stories about unlimited natural gas and tar sands to the contrary.

For all these reasons, we can anticipate the Depression currently unfolding will be deeper, longer and more destructive than the Great Depression.
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