While people can resist the cheap-stuff propaganda and not worship at Wal-Mart, Ikea, and other big-box cathedrals-and stay out of the path of a mob of fundamentalist consumers-it is difficult to protect oneself from the slow death caused by consumer culture 

Reprinted from Z MAGAZINE

The political theater of the moment in Washington is focused on the illusion that we can find new ways of keeping the old ways going.

So far -- after two weeks in office -- the Obama team seems bent on a campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs, to attempt to do all the impossible things listed above. Mr. Obama is not the only one, of course, who is invoking the quest for renewed "growth." This is a tragic error in collective thinking. What we really face is a comprehensive contraction in our activities, especially the scale of our activities, and the pressing need to readjust the systems of everyday life to a level of decreased complexity

Reprinted from ALTERNET

Dr. Albert Bartlett, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Colorado University, urges economists to learn the laws of nature. Non-material values - creativity, dreams, love - may expand without limit, but materials and energy in the real world remain subject to the requirements of thermodynamics and biology. "Growth in population or rates of consumption cannot be sustained. Smart growth is better than dumb growth," says Bartlett, "but both destroy the environment."

Reprinted from GREENPEACE

PHOTO: Greek Vase depicton of Cassandra meeting her fate

 So what’s a doomer chick to do but throw in the towel and her spiked mitts and admit she’s beat?  I can’t out-doom the Wall Street Journal - Wall Street invented our doom, and who better to describe it.  The old button ”I eat stranger things than this with my breakfast cereal” is increasingly true - me and my gardens and my ordinary human poverty are just plain dull. 

ORIGINAL BLOGPOST

We stand on the edge of the failure of all of American's retirement assets.  Literally all of them.  

The road ahead is a rough one.  Our nation faces an unprecedented economic mess of which we have only seen the beginning, but that mess is of our own making.  We have "enjoyed" false prosperity for more than a decade fueled by intentionally-overinflated asset prices that represented not real wealth but rather a chimera grown from ridiculous and outrageously fraudulent actions by many throughout our credit, banking and regulatory systems.

Reprinted from MARKET TICKER

[The global economy, thanks to Peak Oil, is running on empty. --CB]

The global economy will collapse in 2009, resulting in the worst recession in the post WW II period. The commercial real estate sector is highly leveraged and will collapse beginning in late February or early March as major retailers fail, leaving vacant rental space that will not be filled. This will lead to further failures in the finance and banking sectors and higher unemployment which is at 13% and growing. 

Original BLOGPOST