Despite a non-stop barrage of overly optimistic press releases based on phony statistics, ongoing coverups of fraud, and tea readings, the economy is closer to complete collapse today than it was at this time last year. The truth that the spinmeisters dare not speak is that the gears of trade, from the ports of Asia to the shopping mall down the street, are grinding to a halt. That’s because the engine of world commerce, 300 million American consumers, is sputtering. With over 20 percent of the workforce unemployed or underemployed, seeing no prospects in the near future or maybe ever again for jobs that pay a living wage, and with millions of employed fearing the same fate, it should not be surprising that they’ve cut way back on their purchases of big-screen TVs, hot tubs, eye liner, SUVs, and other such merchandise. They have more important things to worry about, like hanging on to their homes, several million of which are either being foreclosed or have already been taken back by lenders who withhold them from the market in their “shadow inventory,” to forestall a further plunge in property values. The resulting reductions in sales, income, and property tax revenues has brought local, state, and federal governments to the brink of insolvency.

Meanwhile, the major financial institutions responsible for looting and pillaging America through crooked investment schemes and then losing the booty in a final orgy of gambling have been bailed out, at a cost of trillions in taxpayer dollars, and given access to additional taxpayer cash at little or no interest to finance another round of schemes and scams, to reinflate the NYSE and NASDAQ and otherwise create the illusion of a recovery-in-progress, and their CEOs and executive wiseguys and henchmen have been handed Get Out of Jail Free cards and envelopes stuffed with huge bonuses for a job well done. As bad as this mess of an economy is — and it’ll get worse when overvalued stocks and derivatives, bad commercial real estate loans, underfunded pension plans, troubled bank closures, sovereign debt defaults, and other ticking time bombs explode — it’s the least of the problems facing mankind as I blog these words.

It’s not nearly the threat to us and our children and grandchildren as any one of these crises: climate change crisis, vanishing fertile land crisis, food supply crisis, mass extinction crisis, depleted mineral crisis, peak energy crisis, dying ocean crisis, fresh water crisis, and the crisis that underlies every other — overpopulation. Worse, all of these crises are simultaneously underway! Read more about them here. You’ll be less likely to waste as much time worrying about the economy when you realize that we’re facing the end of the world as we know it.