evidently an economic avalanche works the same as a snow avalanche - starts small and ends up enormous.
I don't believe for a second that our present economic downturn was caused by bad home loans or the banks or whatever other bullshit. With Reagan it was the dreaded welfare mom that was the reason for our national woes - I didn't believe that bullshit, either!

What kills me is how profoundly almost everyone misses the point. Our system sucks. Our free market economic system leaves not only millions of Americans in poverty, without healthcare, with our average life span actually dropping - but this system leaves over a billion humans without even clean water to drink. While some wallow in luxury literally unfathomable to others, billions live lives of poverty, disease, desperation and hopelessness. Capitalism is a big lie - it does not even exist. Of course the system meant to maximize resources in the hands a few elite humans is imploding under its own weight. The free market system did its job and over time accumulated so much wealth into relatively so few hands that the fatally unbalanced system crashed and burned. To me Capitalism is a religion, pure and simple. It cannot be proven. It is a theory that has never once be substantiated by a successful experiment. With enough regulation and manipulation by a moneyed elite, a bastardized form of capitalism has functioned though very poorly in reality, in my opinion. Classic case of the Emperor wearing no clothes.

"America is the greatest nation on earth. Capitalism is better than any other economic system. America has the greatest health care on the planet" and on and on and the lies are repeated ad nauseum and as in some Orwellian Doublespeak after a while the people come to believe that black is white and white is black.

I think the seriousness of what is happening is beginning to really sink in - that it is not simply another recession. Like a ship weakened by decades of neglect and decay, our system is breaking apart in the rough seas of the open ocean. I knew it was coming and still cannot believe it so I understand the head in the sand mentality. I thought our civilization would continue quite a bit longer just under its own momentum but I now see that this is the proverbial beginning of the end. Shit, thought I would be able to cruise through old age and die peacefully in my sleep before the shit hit the fan. No such luxury, it appears.

We have taken a world - a planet in space - that provides an abundance of resources for all of us and singlehandedly turned it into a world of poverty, want and need.

I imagine areas of the United States of America will be abandoned within two years - areas of the southwest where I live. This stimulous will fail and after a couple years the might of our federal government will faulter against this mighty economic foe. The weight of a worldwide economic disaster will swamp even our federal government and towns, cities and then entire states will simply cease to exist - no local, state or federal government. No power. No water. No sewage. No medical care. No food. No law. Populations will converge on areas like the coasts forming "safe zones" where a beleaguered federal government will fight to maintain civilization in these compressed areas. There will be near total economic collapse and our fascist tendencies here in Amerika will not serve us well in this coming disaster as the only hope for survival will be full blown collectivization which only a federal government could provide. Others parts of the world will likely do better even with less resources than we have here in Amerika.

Now the stage is set for Murphy - one of the set laws of the universe - Murphy's Law. Now comes the super volcano, the asteroid, the weaponized virus, the four horsemen of the apocolypse or The Machine or whatever ...