The Post-Partisan Emporium

That Untraversed Land John Michael Greer It’s been just over a month since  I started talking  about how the predictions set out in 1972 by  The Limits to Growth  were coming true in our time. Since then the situation has become steadily worse. As I write this, rolling blackouts are leaving millions of people in China to huddle in the dark and shutting down yet another round of factories on which the West’s consumer economies depend, while China’s real estate market lurches and shudders with bond defaults.  In Europe, natural gas supplies have run short, sending prices to record levels, while in Britain, the fuel they call petrol and we call gasoline is running short as well.  Here in the United States, visit a store—any store, anywhere in the country—and odds are you’ll find plenty of bare shelves. Insofar as the corporate media is discussing these shortages at all, they’re blaming it on the shutdowns last year and on a lack of truck drivers to haul goods to market. They’re not wholly

Thanks to St. Jimmy (Russian American) for recommending this article... Do Americans Know What a Massive Ripoff American Life Really Is? What it Means When I Say America is the World’s First Poor Rich Country umair haque I’ve recently moved to the States — shudder — for a year or two. And I’m shocked at how expensive just  life  is. For no good reason at all. When I put my economist hat on, a fact becomes clear to me. American life is a gigantic rip-off, one of the world’s biggest, and that’s why America is now effectively a country of poor people, and that makes it a nation of angry, cruel, and selfish ones, too. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start over.  American life is the biggest ripoff in the world .  Or at least one of the biggest, in the top five, certainly. Just…existing. It costs way, way more than it should. So much so that America cannot ever move forward as a society. So, trapped in a cycle, which economists call a “poverty trap,” Americans now  stay poor . Ameri