"Go Shopping"

In an eerie echo of counter-culture hero and loonie retailer Earl (Madman) Muntz; San Francisco retailers are "slashing prices, in some cases selling items below cost"! YES! "We have not yet begun to shop." Not only are the shoppers out of control, as they have been for many years, consuming everything that comes to hand with both hands, so to speak; now it appears that, just as the shoppers "Gotta Shop" just so the sellers "Gotta Sell". It's in the blood. "What will it take to put you into this {product-I'm-trying-to-sell}?, they cry". With a nation of compulsive sellers selling to a nation of compulsive buyers, it's no wonder that Treasury Sec'y Hank Paulson is focused on topping up the lender's money supply. They're gonna need every penny. Once everybody is far enough in debt, the economy will have recovered its robust appearance, as victims of Consumption (the tubercular kind) are also wont to do.
Even President-Elect Obama seems to be intent on returning the nation to its massively unsustainable levels of overconsumption, lacking any clear pathway to a healthy economy that depends on rational levels (of slightly less unsustainable levels) of consupmtion.