Life Expectancies Dropping, Wages Falling, Food Rationing Reported -- What the Hell is Going on?

Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on AlterNet's blog, PEEK.

For years, we've been financing our consumption with debt, offshoring our manufacturing base and living large -- at least some of us -- off of one speculative bubble after the next.

We can talk about stagnant wages and how dramatically inequality has increased, but that frames it passively, as a sort of natural phenomenon. But that obscures the fact that it's been an active process, with the wealthiest Americans gaming the system for a bigger piece of the pie at everyone else's expense. Meanwhile, we've been investing bupkis in our future, expecting, perhaps, to remain on the top through nothing more than raw American exceptionalism.

It's a model that was never sustainable. As the GAO once put the obvious, famously, "By definition, what is unsustainable will not be sustained." And it appears we're paying the piper, although nobody knows how much the bill will be, exactly.

A few signals of what's shaping up to be quite a crisis ...

According to the New York Sun:

Many parts of America, long considered the breadbasket of the world, are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon: food rationing.