by: Gus Lubin and Michael Kelley

Gas prices may finally be cutting into American sprawl, as cities have started growing faster than suburbs and people are driving less than they used to.
 
So what happens if gas prices keep going higher?
 
You can't live in a cities like Merriam, Kansas without driving everywhere, as Maggie Koerth-Baker observes in Before the Lights Go Out.
 
We looked at the cities that spend the most at the gas pump, with 2010 data from consumer data site Bundle. You can imagine what will happen in these places if prices double, triple or worse.

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by: Le Monde

With a quarter of the 3.3 million reported American home foreclosures, Florida exemplifies the human suffering, suburban rot and political confusion that have become legacies of the economic and housing crisis. —ARK

At some locations the misery is especially apparent. At Magnolia Court, a run-down apartment block in Orlando where the perimeter fence is a distant memory, two-thirds of the properties have been foreclosed. When a bankruptcy court has ordered liquidation, the owners wait for the sheriff to come.

Some apartments, purchased by real-estate agents for next to nothing, house tenants looking for the lowest possible rent. Others dwellings, empty and vandalised, have been taken over by squatters and drug dealers. Claiming to be the landlord, crooks extort rent from them.

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by: Porter Standsberry

The numbers tell us America is in decline… if not outright collapse

 I say “the numbers tell us” because I’ve become very sensitive to the impact this kind of statement has on people. When I warned about the impending bankruptcy of General Motors in 2006 and 2007, readers actually blamed me for the company’s problems – as if my warnings to the public were the real problem, rather than GM’s $400 billion in debt..

The claim was absurd. But the resentment my work engendered was real.

So please… before you read this issue, which makes several arresting claims about the future of our country… understand I am only writing about the facts as I find them today. I am only drawing conclusions based on the situation as it stands. I am not saying that these conditions can’t improve. Or that they won’t improve.

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by: Terrance Heath

When 77-year-old Greek pensioner Dimitris Christoulas sat down under a tree in Athens' busiest public square and committed suicide — shooting himself in the head not far from Parliament, and leaving behind a letter blaming the government's austerity policies for driving him to it — his act launched protests in Greece, and became another example of the price  austerity exacts from those least responsible for and least able to pay the debts that austerity policies are intended to help the country pay. Christloulas's story offers a snapshot of austerity's consequences for the elderly, the young, the middle- and working classes, and just about everyone outside of the one percent — and not just in Greece, but right here at home too.
 
Despair
 
He was a retired pharmacist, who left behind a wife and daughter when he died. That one man, whose name no one outside of his family and friends had reason to know, could spark attacks on police and yet another round of protests in Greece speaks to how many Greeks identified with his plight. Perhaps only the location Dimitris Christoulas chose for his final act, and his decision to leave behind a final message set him apart from countless anonymous Greeks for whom austerity yielded nothing but despair.
 
Despair was not Christoulas's first response to austerity. First, he got mad. According to friends, Christoulas joined in protests against the government's austerity policies. He joined a citizens' movement against austerity, called "Den Plirono — which translates to "I won't pay." Yet, Christoulas did pay. The reality life under unyielding austerity took the fight out of him, and he gave up. Christoulas went out with a bang and one last gesture of outrage at Greece's government. But ultimately he decided that life under austerity was not worth living.
 
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by: Carlo Alcos

Money printing to deal with massive debt will lead to a collapse in the economy by 2013, predicts Ray Dalio.

WELL, THIS IS WEIRD. Earlier today I was speaking with my ex-wife (and still best-friend) about the current economic situation. I expressed my thoughts about what I think is an impending collapse, of course predicating it with my statement that “I’m not paranoid or a doomsday person.”
 
Later in the day I received an email sent through the contact form on my blog from “Stef”, someone I don’t know. The subject just said “interesting read” and all that was in the body was this link to a Business Insider article published yesterday.

I never open these kinds of emails but the title, which showed in the URL of the link, piqued my curiosity: the-head-of-the-worlds-biggest-hedge-fund-sees-economic-collapse-due-to-money-printing-by-early-2013. The universe is trying to tell me something, I thought.
 

The article, which was originally published on a blog called Zero Hedge, tells how Ray Dalio — head of Bridgewater, the world’s biggest hedge fund — predicts the collapse of the economy in “late 2012 or early 2013″ due to money printing. He says that countries heavily in debt, including the US, will print more money to deal with it. “There hasn’t been a case in history where they haven’t eventually printed money and devalued their currency,” he said in an interview printed in The New Yorker.

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by: Tana Ganeva

For decades, cities all over the country have worked to essentially criminalize homelessness, instituting measures that outlaw holding a sign, sleeping, sitting, lying (or weirdly, telling a lie in Orlando) if you live on the street.

Where the law does not mandate outright harassment, police come up with clever work-arounds, like destroying or confiscating tents, blankets and other property in raids of camps. A veteran I talked to, his eye bloody from when some teenagers beat him up to steal 60 cents, said police routinely extracted the poles from his tent and kept them so he couldn't rebuild it. (Where are all the pissed-off libertarians and conservatives at such flagrant disrespect for private property?)

In the heady '80s, Reagan slashed federal housing subsidies even as a tough economy threw more and more people out on the street. Instead of resolving itself through the magic of the markets, the homelessness problem increasingly fell to local governments.

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by: Robert Reich

Luxury retailers are smiling. So are the owners of high-end restaurants, sellers of upscale cars, vacation planners, financial advisors, and personal coaches. For them and their customers and clients the recession is over. The recovery is now full speed.

But the rest of America isn't enjoying an economic recovery. It's still sick. Many Americans remain in critical condition.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the economy grew at a 3 percent annual rate last quarter (far better than the measly 1.8 percent third quarter growth). Personal income also jumped. Americans raked in over $13 trillion, $3.3 billion more than previously thought.

Yet it's almost a certainty that all the gains went to the top 10 percent, and the lion's share to the top 1 percent. Over a third of the gains went to 15,600 super-rich households in the top one-tenth of one percent.

We don't know this for sure because all the data aren't in for 2011. But this is what happened in 2010, the most recent year for which we have reliable data, and there's no reason to believe the trajectory changed in 2011 or that it will change this year.

In fact, recoveries are becoming more and more lopsided.

The top 1 percent got 45 percent of Clinton-era economic growth, and 65 percent of the economic growth during the Bush era.

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