But there is another side to this story. Scratch the surface, and there it is. It’s staring you right in the face… behind the happy faces on your TV screen… and the endlessly scrolling market ticker tape… and the slick White House announcements of a recovery just around the corner…

The US has become “a non-stop circus of the seven deadly sins,” says James Howard Kunstler. We turn to James today because he understands the world doesn’t stay still. And because he understands that the shifts produced by the current economic convulsion will reach deep into highly-leveraged societies that have grown fat from living beyond their means.

This story of change isn’t told in the mainstream, because the purpose of the mainstream media (helped generously by the pharmaceutical industry) is to soothe the population. A calm consumer is a happy consumer. And change – especially violent upheaval – doesn’t tend to promote calm. This from James:

A broad consensus has formed in the news media and among government mouthpieces and even some “bearish” investors on the street that “the worst is behind us” in this tortured economy. This view is completely crazy. It will only lead to massive disappointment a few weeks or months from now, and that disappointment might easily transmute to political trouble. One even might call the situation tragic, except a closer look at the sordid spectacle of what American culture has become – a non-stop circus of the seven deadly sins – suggests that we deserve to be punished by history.

The reason behind this mass delusion is not hard to find: it’s based on wishing, especially the wish to retain all the comforts, conveniences, luxuries, and leisure that had become normal in American life.  These are now ebbing away in big gobs for most of the population – while a tiny fraction of the well-connected pile on ever larger heaps of swag, enjoying ever more privilege. Those in the broad bottom 95 percent were content as long as there was a chance that they, too, could become members of the top five percent – by dint of car-dealing, or house-building, or mortgage-selling, or some other venture enabled by easy credit and a smile. Those days and those ways are now gone. The bottom 95 percent are now left with de-laminating houses they can’t make payments on, no prospects for gainful work, repo men hiding in the bushes to snatch the PT Cruiser, cut-off cable service, Kraft

“The times they are a’changin,” sang Bob Dylan. But we bet he never saw the following list of catastrophes coming to pass. This list of disasters is all lined up for the months ahead, according to Kunstler. He says it’s a new phase in our history, which he calls “The Long Emergency.”

• Government at every level is worse than broke.
• Our currency, the US dollar, is hemorrhaging legitimacy.
• Inability to service old debt at all levels or incur new debt.
• Bad (toxic) debt lurking off balance sheets everywhere.
• The housing bubble fiasco is far from over.
• Unemployment rising implacably.
• So-called “consumers” unable to consume consumables.
• Crucial energy import supply lines fragile.
• Food supply subject to energy problems and climate abnormalities.
• A world full of other societies who would enjoy watching us fail and suffer.

We have a catastrophe to add of our own. And you don’t have to wait months for it to happen. It already has. It’s a catastrophe that doesn’t need explanation. It comes courtesy of the Tax Foundation and can be represented in one single chart (hat tip, Fundmastery Blog).