Christmas and Mardi Gras as a way of life?  That's what the American lifestyle came to be starting in 1980s, Kurt Andersen contends in his Time magazine piece.  But the party may be finally ending with the economic crisis we find ourselves in now.  We might need to go back to the old-fashioned ways of making more money than we spend as individuals and producing more stuff than we buy overseas as a country.  Now, that's a radical idea! You can push and you can prod, but we are not going to budge on the stimulus, America (says Europe).  The Europeans say they have no need for further stimulus right now because their social safety nets, derided in good times by free market disciples as sclerotic impediments to growth, are automatically providing the spending programs that the United States Congress has to legislate. The World Trade Organization (WTO) says protectionism will extend the global recession, or so the headlines in many papers scream this morning.  But the WTO also says, “There is no indication of an imminent descent into high intensity protectionism, involving widespread resort to trade restriction and retaliation.” It must be hard to stay on message when the world economies are falling apart.  How about sounding the alarm for rebalancing current accounts, since huge imbalances contributed to the current crisis?  No word from the WTO on that.