Authored by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,

As the dog days of summer wind down, it’s hard not to notice how the climate is suffering brutally right now across many areas of the globe.

Crop failures have hit hard across Europe. Australia is under an intense drought. Warm water representing ‘archived heat’ has penetrated deep into the arctic. Coral reefs are dying through mass bleachings. The stocks of ocean fisheries are in deep trouble. Insect and bird populations remain in a state of collapse.

It couldn't be any more clear that our society's demands for ever-more "growth" are taking an increasingly dangerous toll. "Growth" is now the enemy of life on the planet; yet there are precious few leaders willing to admit as much.

What we need is less pressure on vital ecological systems and precious remaining resources. But good luck finding a politician willing to admit that.

Though a refreshing exception is French environmental minister Nicolas Hulot who dramatically resigned his position last week, on live television, declaring “I don’t want to lie to myself anymore.” His view is that the government is not addressing the major environmental issues properly and he didn't want his presence to give the false appearance that it was. Kudos to Nicolas, though I’m not sure that losing such a rare principled person in government is a step in the right direction.

Operating On Blind Faith

Most politicians appear to think that there are no big issues out there ecologically-speaking. Of course, very few of them spend any time outside or understand where their food even comes from. Most subsist on the blind faith that our planet will somehow always bounce back from the abuses we inflict on it, despite reams of mounting evidence that it's hitting a mulitplying number of breaking and tipping points.

Sadly, the mainstream media chooses to toss wedge issue after wedge issue, ususally in the most inflammatory ways it can, at an increasingly irate general populace that has almost zero clue about the true source of the shocks (financial, economic, and ecological) they are experiencing. This prevents society from having an informed discussion about the real risks we should be concerned with.

As heart-tugging a topic as 'border kids' might be, the monster asset price bubbles blown by the central banks get almost no attention in the media -- despite their ability to destroy the futures and dreams of pretty much everyone reading this article.

Our media is failing us, badly, by focusing on symptomatic issues that enrage and divide us, while remaining silent on the causal matters of vital importance to all of us.

In other words, you’d do well to ignore the pre-packaged opinions being spoon fed into your mind by the media professionals. Instead, look at the data yourself and come to your own conclusions about what's happening.

Notice the near complete lack of insect diversity and numbers? What about the collapsing populations of frogs and reptiles? How about the missing seabirds? Did you know that humans have worked their harvesting down to the lowest part of the food chain and are now netting krill -- removing the base of the pedestal for the oceanic food chain?

Why is it so hard for our culture to recognize that an economic model founded on the idea of perpetual exponential expansion, while living on a planet with finite resources, is a thoroughly unworkable idea? How can we all so blithely ignore the obvious indicators screaming that we’ve already hit the limits of that model?

The lengths to which humans are now going for new deposits of oil, copper, water, arable land and other essential economic inputs are staggeringly desperate. Each should be a warning sign unto themselves.

But taken together?

Ignoring them requires the same degree of self-deception that addicts employ in their belief that they still have things under control, and can stop anytime.

Yeah, right. Somehow ‘that day’ never arrives. It’s always just one more fix, one more day.

Except in this case it’s just one more election, one more quarter of growth, one more injection of central bank money.

Frustrating? You bet.

Trying to elevate the critical observation that pursuing infinite growth on a finite planet is not only impossible, but a really terrible idea, has been a frustrating endeavor.

We here at PeakProsperity.com have been at this for over a decade, and we can tell you first-hand, Folks, this ain't easy.

While the logic support it is extremely straightforward, it runs afoul of the majority’s entrenched belief systems. So even the most basic and compelling of data is ignored. Instead, tortured anecdotes are held up as “proof” that their treasured belief systems are correct.

Here’s an example.

Anecdote: “Electric car sales are up 40% in Europe!” Somehow this is proof that we're on the right track. Electric cars are going to rapidly replace internal combustion cars, and thereby solve all the issues related to the world's addiction to fossil fuels. Basic data: "There’s not enough cobalt or lithium to even replace 25% of all cars on the road, let alone 100%. EV cars still consume extraordinary resources, and release a huge amount of carbon in their manufacture. Massive subsidies are required to make them economically attractive, even to wealthy citizens of wealthy nations, so they aren't well suited to the bulk of the world’s population. And if these cars were somehow all powered by electrcity from solar and wind, those energy sources are still themselves massively dependent on fossil fuels for their mining, manufacture, transportation, installation and replacement.” The basic data says that instead of salivating over expensive and advanced personal transportation methods designed to preserve the status quo of our current failing infrastructure, we should instead be dedicating a large part of our efforts towards mass transit, relocating our work/play/farm spaces so that they are closer together, and use vastly fewer resources to deliver the same services we rely on.

Recently I’ve been frustrated by the efforts to convince Americans that our democracy is under attack by outside agents when there’s ample evidence -- concrete, hard, firm evidence which I’ve repeatedly covered -- that US elections have been spitting out improbable and even sometimes impossible election results for the past 14 years, ever since insecure, low-integrity eVoting platforms and central tabulators were introduced.

Yes, nefarious agents may well indeed be undermining our democracy. But the real villains appear much more domestic than foreign.

There’s nothing more poisonous to the notion of democracy than fraudulent election outcomes. Nothing. And yet the number of people rising up in protest on this issue may as well be zero, as long as we’re rounding to the nearest whole percentage. Meanwhile millions are up in arms about the still-unproven allegations that Russia tipped the recent presidential elections with a laughably tiny amount of social media ads.

For those interested in more detail on just how badly manipulated recent voting results have become, read my recent account on the topic here. And then, just for fun, take a look below at the voting “architecture” put in place in Ohio under its disgraced Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell and which delivered a very surprising win for G. W. Bush over John Kerry. The pre and exit polls both showed an overwhelming win for Kerry. Oops! The new Deibold electric voting machines (which Blackwell owned a stake in) instead reported a surprising win for GWB:

Click to Enlarge

You don't have to be an IT expert to detect that there are numerous places for bad actors to insert themselves into this system and romp about with the vote totals. It’s a ridiculous joke of an architecture that, honestly, seems to have been specifically-designed to allow fraud.

In fact, this schematic reveals that the shady company “entrusted” to add up the vote totals had inserted a key piece of machinery as a “man in the middle” and not as a mirror server. That meant that the vote totals could be easily manipulated in a way that could not be undone or later refuted.

Even the most unschooled of individuals must be aware that vote counting cannot ever be a matter of "trust us". With so much on the line, it must always be assumed that cheating is going to happen, not that it might happen. Checks and balances need to be in place to counter such abuse.

Several important questions emerge. Why did Kerry, knowing all of this, concede defeat so graciously within 24 hours? Why was such an obviously corrupt architecture put in place and not challenged? Why does it still persist to this day? Why have no major news outlets run a major investigative inquiry and publicized a huge expose on the utter lack of integrity within the US voting system? Why do we have a perfectly secure system in place for using a credit/debt card to buy a $2 slushy at 7-11, but somehow secure and trustworthy voting remains a mysteriously-unachievable outcome for a nation as advanced as the US?

The simple that explains all this: Voting is rigged, and the entire power structure wants it that way.

The wonder of it all is that there are a lot of people in Ohio desperately up in arms about Russian meddling right now, blissfully unaware that their entire state is shot through with election fraud courtesy of both major parties.

Yes, their democracy is under attack, and it has been for a long time. But it certainly isn’t the Russians designing, installing, and defending the Ohio voting systems.

The Outlook Is Deteriorating Fast

There are lots of things that we should be very concerned about and practically none of them are to be found on the news. In the rare cases they are, they're presented without meaningful context and very rapidly replaced by trivial distractions.

We should be asking ourselves why that’s the case.

More to the point, you need to understand that very serious risks to your future prospects, well-being and liberty are building. The mounting warning signs are all around you if you look for them, though they'll be carefully filtered out from the nightly news or your social media feeds.

Getting access to good information is difficult these days. And it's getting harder, not easier. Only a few massive corporations own nearly all of our media outlets. They have a narrative they want sold, often developed with the goverment, and they invest billions to refine their craft of delivering it. Better algorithms, in-product placements, and mentally-addictive formats for delivering you distracting, emotionally manipulative context that has practically zero positive bearing on your life.

In short: it’s a rigged game. Perhaps it always has been, but in today's digital age, the tools of state are becoming ever more crafty, sophisticated and complete.

Gone are the days when our financial markets served as important signals about the health of the economy. Today, they've been replaced by ““markets”” that central bankers and other bureaucratic planners utterly own and control. The only signals they send are what those running the show want us to hear.

Our precious ecosphere is disintegrating. The fossil fuels bonanza we are hopelessly addicted to is ending. But there is no Plan B to deal with these existential challenges (beyond the elites' private plans to bunker down and ride out the trouble when it begins).

The message to take from this is: You are on your own. There’s no benevolent government preparing to step in and sort things out for you if/when collapse arrives. Your pensions are already gone -- the math is cruelly certain on that. Self-interested corporations set the rules. Power will never be fairly redistributed due to elections.

Were a future of unlimited growth possible, these worries wouldn't really matter. But it isn’t. So none of this is fine. Now that the pie is no longer growing, the obvious truth is that the rigged system is handing over a larger and larger portion of that stagnant pie to fewer and fewer people.

That’s an incontrovertible fact. But it's reported by the media as if it were a wayward comet nobody expected that just showed up in the night sky. Rich people getting richer, what are you gonna do?

Never mentioned is that the system is rigged to create that outcome. And that the central banks have engineered it on purpose.

It’s time to wake up and see what’s really going on.

This is especially true right now for anyone with assets in the US equity ““markets””. With indices back at all-time highs, record complacency reigns. But scratch lightly on the "everything is awesome!" veneer, and an ugly picture of accelerating rot and instability immediately appears

In Part 2: The Outlook For The Markets Is Deteriorating Fast we expose the truly frightening contagion currently decimating a long list of emerging market countries and explain how it threatens to bring down the world economy with it. Collapse happens from the outside in, and the periphery is falling fast...

Yes, the entire system is rigged. But when a breaking point is reached, and things get so bad they spiral out of the control of the manipulators, Look out below!

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)