Deal With Reality Or Reality Will Deal With You

That's the slogan over at Life After The Oil Crash, which is an interesting site to browse if you're feeling a little too at peace with the world. Or if, like me, you're interested in the 'realities' that just might be lurking behind the headlines.

It's not a conspiracy site like, say, Global Research. It will occasionally link to places that are a little more fringe than people like to go, but the majority of its articles are from mainstream sources such as the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Atlantic Monthly. And it doesn't deal exclusively with Peak Oil...far from it. In fact...well, a quick tour of their Breaking News for February 16, 2010 is instructive.
Just a few of the articles you'll find:

• From Yahoo!, this: an article called 'Kiss that V-Shaped Recovery Goodbye: the U.S. is Worse Than Greece, Says Economist';
  
• From the New York Times, Wall Street Helped Mask Debt Fueling Europe's Crisis; "
• From CBS News,The Coming Foreclosure and Commercial Real Estate Storms

There are a host of others, none of which paint a pretty picture.

In what I feel has to be related news, the DOW was up 170 points yesterday and is cruising well above 10,000. This makes no sense at all to a casual observer: between the PIGS debt crisis in Europe (that's Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, and who wants to bet they'll have to find a longer acronym soon?) to the clamping down on stimulus in China to the ongoing mess in the U.S., there doesn't seem to be any reason for markets to keep chugging along like this.

Unless you don a tin hat. Then it makes perfect sense: the fat cats running things on the Street are doing just fine, thank you very much. They had a little scare there, oh, about a year ago, when it looked like the gravy train was about to derail, but they managed to convince the U.S. government to shovel buckets of bucks their way, and that's why the Wall Street bonuses still run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

I really do think that's the truth of it: the idea wasn't to save the economy, nothing so noble as that. The idea was to look like they were saving the economy whilst they were lining their own pockets.

The banks are still playing hot potato with billions of dollars in bad paper, and (mostly) refusing to acknowledge that's what they're doing. We the public remain largely shielded from the realization that nearly our entire economy has been built on 'something for nothing' quicksand.

I don't mind saying this is all a little unnerving. Not so much the slow-motion financial collapse, which is bad enough, but the steadfast and resolute determination to pretend there's nothing wrong at all. Move along, nothing to see here, cities, states and countries teetering on the edge of bankruptcy is no big deal, just keep on keeping on. Reality is dealing with us...don't you think it's high time we started dealing with reality?