Warning bells just keep getting louder and louder as the countdown to the Crash of 2016 keeps ticking. Wall Street’s in denial, but the Washington Post warns: “U.S. economic growth slows to 0.2 percent, grinding nearly to a halt.” USA Today hears “Bubble Talk” at the Vegas “Davos for Geeks.” Earlier the Wall Street Journal warned, “declining population could reduce global economic growth by 40%.” Then recently the “slow-growth Fed” was blamed.

Wrong, former Fed chief Ben Bernanke counterattacked: “I’m waiting for the Journal to argue for a well-structured program of public infrastructure development, which would support growth in the near term by creating jobs and in the longer term by making our economy more productive.” But for years the Fed “has been pretty much the only game in town as far as economic policy goes.” Today “we should be looking for a better balance between monetary and other growth-promoting policies, including fiscal policy.”

Fiscal policy? No, Ben, not a chance. The GOP controls economic policy. And they will never give “growth-promoting fiscal policy” victories to President Obama and Hillary Clinton before the presidential election of 2016. Never. In spite of Bernanke’s obviously rational solution to the core problems of the American economy, one that would help the American people, the GOP will never, ever agree to fiscal stimulus programs that give the Democrats bragging rights and make Obama and Clinton look good before the elections.

The GOP is hungry for power, very hungry. They lost the presidency twice to Obama. They want it back. And now their collective ego is convinced that with the $889 million backing from the Koch Empire they can beat Hillary and take absolute control of the American democracy: win the presidency, hold Congress, gain the power to issue executive orders and veto legislation, appoint more than 6,000 insiders including cabinet officers, regulatory heads, federal judges, ambassadors, staff bureaucrats, and more. Yes, the GOP knows all that power is on the line in 2016.

Listen: 2016 sounds more and more like McCain/Palin’s 2008 loss when the GOP was also deep in denial about the coming market crash. Money manager Jeremy Grantham’s predictions see beyond the Big Oil-funded GOP’s gross denial, he sees that “around the presidential election or soon after, the market bubble will burst, as bubbles always do, and will revert to its trend value, around half of its peak or worse.”

Yes, a crash of 20%, worse than 2008 and 2000, with the Dow dropping below 10,000. No wonder our brains tune out, turn off, why we prefer happy talk and good news, even if it’s just a pep talk intended to mislead. Like before the 2008 crash when our Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson was telling Fortune, “this is far and away the strongest global economy I’ve seen in my business lifetime.” They don’t even know.

Later, after the crash, after running America’s monetary system 18 years, even former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan finally admitted to Congress, “I really didn’t get it until very late.” Today, it’s déjà vu all over again, for the GOP, Big Oil, the Kochs, as with Paulson and Greenspan earlier, they all won’t “get it” till it’s too late again. For power, they will sell their souls.

Pope Francis is No. 1 reason GOP will lose the presidency in 2016

Call it “Peak Conservativism,” whatever. No amount of money from the Kochs, Big Oil, can stop the coming paradigm shift in the global collective conscience — from the “mutant capitalist” ideology of Ayn Rand, the pendulum is swinging to the Pope Francis’ “moral imperative,” echoing Naomi Klein’s call for a worldwide revolution against capitalism.

In fact, the power grab by conservatives is already backfiring. They’re running real scared of Pope Francis, worried about his historic papal encyclical on “The Moral Imperatives of Global Climate Change Action” to be released next month, with its talking points on the sin of climate-science denialism.

Why so threatening? Because Pope Francis will deliver this historic message to a global audience in several historic speeches this fall: to the United Nations General Assembly, to a joint session of the U.S. Congress and to the World Meeting on Families in Philadelphia. All translated, reprinted and broadcast for billions.

Unfortunately for the GOP, the fossil-fuel industry recently exposed their overwhelming fear of Pope Francis, even made themselves look like fools when the Koch-financed Heartland Institute went to Rome during the recent Papal Summit on Climate Change and taunted the pope for backing the United Nations “climate-communist science,” comparing the pope’s fight against global warming with the church’s charges of heresy against Galileo and, earlier, Friar Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake.

Heartland even threatened Pope Francis with this strange accusation (coming from an avowed climate-science denier): Your “decision to enter into the realm of science” harms the church, adding this warning: “Do not do this again.” Bad move guys, don’t be misled by his charming smile, Francis really loves a good fight, he’s a former boxer. Looks like Heartland just lost a lot of points in this fight

Is America’s GDP rapidly becoming to a zero-growth economy?

Is America rapidly becoming a zero-growth economy

A recent McKinsey Global Institute study opened with this headline, a simple rhetorical question: “Can long-term global growth be saved?” Short answer: No. Killer headwinds. Here’s McKinsey, one of America’s top research and consulting firms, agreeing with Bernanke and clearly disagreeing with America’s Big Oil billionaires and GOP climate-science deniers. Listen:

“Over the past 50 years, global economic growth was exceptionally rapid. The world economy expanded six-fold. Average per-capita income almost tripled. Hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty. Yet unless we can dramatically improve productivity, the next half century will look very different.”

How different, how bad? “The rapid expansion of the past five decades will be seen as an aberration of history, and the world economy will slide back toward its relatively sluggish long-term growth rate.”

Warning: “The past half century has been a time of extraordinary economic expansion. Yet without significantly boosting the one engine the world economy still has — productivity growth — this period may prove to be a historic anomaly.” And primarily because of all the luddites running Big Oil, the Koch Empire, and the hard-right conservatives.

If all this sounds familiar, it should. A few years ago BusinessWeek asked: “Is the U.S. Condemned by History to Slow Growth?” The story opened with an “IMF warning that global growth would slip below 2%” soon. They reviewed Robert Gordon’s disturbing National Bureau of Economic Research study: “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds.”

History tells us for five long centuries before the 18th century the per-capita growth rate was just 0.2 percent per year. Then came the Industrial Revolution. For a few centuries U.S. “growth shot up,” to 2.5%, driven by many great innovations: Steam engines. Railroads. Electricity. And so many more.

But it has been “downhill since 1950, with annual growth averaging just 2.1 percent per capita through 2007.” Gordon warns America: “If the U.S. continues on its current trajectory, by 2100 the world’s biggest economy will wind up back where it started, at 0.2 percent growth per annum.”

Worse: Our Congressional luddites are not only in denial of global-warming science, like Greenspan they are in gross denial of the fact that their capitalist ideology is self-destructing the American economy, our democratic values and their precious capitalism.

Will GOP, Big Oil and the super-rich wake up to real threats in time?

McKinsey’s report is even more critical: They identified “10 enablers that could lift global GDP growth closer to its potential ... increasing transparency and competition, creating incentives for innovation, mobilizing labor, and further integrating the world economy.

But all this will be hard,” warns McKinsey. “Only sweeping change by the private and public sectors — and a smarter approach to growth — will overcome the forces that now threaten global economic prosperity.”

Truth is, they all know these solutions. But there’s no political compromising, no cooperation, no working together for a common good ... which is why the Fed and fiscal bubbles will just keep blowing bigger and bigger till they explode ... as predicted around the 2016 elections. Pope Francis’ “Moral Imperatives” just won’t be enough to win over Exxon Mobil, the Kochs nor the senators from the coal mining State of Kentucky, and they control the vote.

Maybe the coming revolution of the masses will get their attention. It’s dead ahead, waiting to explode.