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The Reality of Economic Recovery
Great news, America! Having just celebrated Labor Day, we can now bask in the revelation that our long economic nightmare is over. Forget recession, much less a depression, our country is poised to spring into a new era of financial prosperity!
We know that this is so because we're being told so by top economists, Wall Street bankers and others in the know. To put the icing on this happy economic cupcake, President Obama even interrupted his Martha's Vineyard vacation late last month to announce that he was reappointing Ben Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve banking system.
In our country's high-flying financial circles, Ben is being hailed as "a monumental figure" for engineering the multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street giants. Those giants are now claiming to be profitable again, and the Dow Jones average has begun to tick upward, so there's joy in the upper stratosphere of our economy, and those who dwell there have blessed Bernanke's ordainment as the high priest of America's monetary policy.
And why wouldn't they love him? After all, the compassionate Bernanke and other bailout officials allowed them to retain their high positions in the Wall Street hierarchy (despite their demonstrable ineptness, malfeasance and failure). So happy days are here again, and banking executives are now popping champagne corks and showering themselves with bonuses and perks - as if nothing unpleasant had happened in the past couple of years.
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and other banking baronies have already set aside billions of dollars each to divie up at year's end - bonus booty for their self-indulgent barons.
This is irrational exuberance at work, but - hey - a big bonus is the perfect psychotic sedative, making one's irrationality seem normal.
Meanwhile, if you're among the vast majority of Americans who do not reside at the top, chances are that you don't measure economic recovery by Wall Street profitability, stock prices and executive bonanzas. A more relevant measure for you might the availability of good jobs.
If so, good luck.
Since our present economic dive began (not long after Ben took the helm at the Fed, by the way), our economy has shed almost 7 million more jobs than it created. Indeed, there are fewer jobs available today than in 2000, even though about 12 million additional workers have entered the job market since then. While bankers are hoisting self-congratulatory flutes of Dom Perignon and giddily reverting to the irrational, grab-all-you-can ethic of executive pay, our country's official jobless rate is headed beyond 10 percent.
Consequently, wages are down, household income has fallen in eight of the last 10 months and consumer spending is now nothing but wishful thinking. This is why workaday folks are less inclined than their Wall Street brothers to enshrine Bernanke's "monumental" likeness on Mount Rushmore.
Well, say most politicos and pundits, even the job situation is improving. In July, they note, the unemployment rate dropped by one-tenth of one percent. What they did not note is that this speck of "good" news was not the happy result of more people getting jobs. Rather, the blip was caused by the fact that 450,000 Americans had become so discouraged by their months of fruitlessly searching for work that they simply gave up the hunt in July.
In statistical la-la land, you see, those who aren't actively looking for jobs are not counted as unemployed.
Maybe they should take the advice recently suggested by The Onion: Get drunk. Just before Labor Day, this satirical newspaper's lead story was headlined, "Nation's Unemployment Outlook Improves Drastically After Fifth Beer." According to the Onion's parody, economists found that out-of-work people's spirits perked up somewhere between the third and fourth beer, but the fifth brewski was when things turned really rosy for them.
Behind the official stats, the real jobless numbers are sobering. When you tally up the officially unemployed with discouraged workers and the underemployment (part-time workers who want full-time jobs), 19 percent of Americans - 30 million people - can't find the work they need. This is our economy's true crisis, and there can be no happy talk until we deal with it.
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33 Comments so far
Show AllThe dam is going to burst...soon.
While our media was focused on revealing Obama's secret plot to teach kindergarteners to goosestep Bloomberg news reported on Monday that the U.N. is working to create a new currency to replace the unstable dollar for international trade.
When the dollar loses its role as the world's reserve currency strap on your lifejacket and tuck your head between you legs because it's going to be a rough landing.
Not only will we be unable to finance our wars and military bases but importing the goods (including oil) we're all so dependent on could come to a halt overnight.
There's no Santa Claus, Easter Bunny or Recovery.
Our economy is taking on water.
And the dollar will not be able to soak it up for much longer.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=aSp9VoPeHquI
The lack of single-payer medical insurance in the US causes millions of American workers to delay their retirement 5, 10, 15 or more years as they stay in their jobs solely for the employer-provided medical insurance, thereby reducing employment opportunities for young Americans.
As we watch "health care reform" being steered in the direction of a NO INSURANCE COMPANY LEFT BEHIND Program, the resulting health care cost increases will cause more Americans to delay their retirement, further reducing employment opportunities for young Americans and further increasing the unemployment rate, especially among young Americans.
The question for Obama is: How many of those unemployed young Americans will vote for you in 2012 ?
"No Insurance Company Left Behind"
Great Description!
"No Insurance Company Left Behind"
Great Description!
May be a swine flu pandemic will help with ours, and the world's, unemployment by reducing the numbers of workers available. This appears what happened with Europe and the bubonic plague during the Middle Ages
i don't think the disease will, but the vaccine might...
I wish the recovery-pushing pundits and politicians would be forced to abide by Hightower's dictum: "there can be no happy talk until we deal with it."
Obviously they have "juked the stats" to give the appearance of a recovery for the bankers and their ilk just enough to tout a recovery and pat themselves on the back, believing they did the right thing.
I think we're at the calm before the storm point. We're at that phase in the horror movie where everyone in the cast thinks the danger is over when it's only gathering force to attack with twice the viciousness, gobbling up the false hope and anything else it can get. But when things do go bad, the bankers and politicos will be there with plenty of words to explain why it couldn't be helped. It could be helped, WE could be helped, but they will have explanations why that isn't true,
On the whole I agree with this analysis. Where I deviate is on one aspect of the Stock Market. I am retired but not in what Mr. Hightower calls "the upper stratosphere of our economy". My benefits go up and down with the stock market, hence I am not totally unhappy that the Dow goes up. I am sure that there are millions of "non-stratospheric" retirees like me.
a very valid point...
we are trapped in an economic existence, seductively held to the ground upon which, and the shelter within which, we reside by the comforts industry, chemistry and other technologies have enabled...this is no small thing...our psychological makeup has been conditioned to view this life as necessary, to view life without such as impossible...our current economic systems reinforce this point, supported by very real violence, for emphasis and complicity...
this view must change to one that honors and allows for, first and foremost, the health of the entire living planet, with all of the myriad varieties present appreciated for their important participation in a functioning whole...
we have, willingly, removed ourselves bodily from the living world, the very world that physically IS our body, and accepted the idea that this planet is one vast resource, available for purge and plunder, to be commodified and manufactured via the cheapest costs, and sold to those who pay the most...this will result in nothing...a whole planet of nothing...well, nothing but garbage, largely toxic...
we must make changes in our social structure that will ease well-founded fears, such as homelessness, and allow progress away from industrial and chemical destruction, and toward harmonious interaction, to be made without sacrificing life's necessities...a review of what life's necessities, rights and responsibilities are would naturally be a major part of such a psychological shift...
food and potable water will be of ever-increasing importance, and the regeneration of locally-growing edibles cannot be overstated...time to turn off the tv and get dirty...we don't have much time...
Global Start Date: September 22, 2012...agrarian, acoustic life...let's get those gardens growing!
Since most of us with money in stocks are subject to the ups and downs of the market, we need to be concerned that much of the market run up during the past six months has been based on various forms of corporate welfare such as TARP, Federal Reserve handouts, cash for clunkers, and it appears that health care reform will be a NO INSURANCE COMPANY LEFT BEHIND program.
The US Government continues to abandon its role to create a firm foundation upon which business can thrive, opting instead for ever increasing corporate welfare for special interests.
How long will the Chinese keep loaning the US money to pay for corporate welfare ?
"when" the US government, which since its inception or the inception of the Entity Called "united states of america" --
founded its existence upon BUSINESS OF AMERICA IS BUSINESS -
it already laid the path for increasingly greater and wider and deeper distasters.
this is just another of those phases in its ever-increasing SUICIDAL and MURDEROUS system and culture and "civilization".
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
The United States of America existed for its first hundred years with numerous town councils who chartered themselves the power to review, extend or revoke the business operating licenses of business owners who ran their businesses from their localities. It was not until the late 1870s that corporations began pushing for "equal protection" rights under law that would arbitrarily equate the rights of corporations to those of flesh & blood human beings. Once "equal protection" was granted to the corporations they shrugged off local control over their business licenses, ran amok and rapidly morphed into the gigantic, multinational and legally unaccountable entities that now rule over almost every aspect of our lives. The first Gilded Age was the almost immediate result of what has since been an ever more unstable cycle of "financialized" over-speculation, boom and bust. The New Deal was an attempt to smooth out the jagged edges at the bottom of the bust phase of the cycle and to de-concentrate some of the wealth, but the underlying problem of too much corporate power over the political, legal and economic system was never addressed.
America exists today under a type of oligarchical fascism that has become more suicidal in many respects, and definitely more openly and wantonly murderous in its foreign policy (as tolerated by both the political class and the general public). Any honest analysis of fascist forms of government will reveal that they all have a strong component of ruling-class self-delusion, an intense desire on the part of the ruling elite to indoctrinate the public into their delusion, and the most self-destructive tendencies of any modern form of government. In that sense, the contemporary U.S. is moving deeper into fascism. Even the giddy level of capitalist glee in the latter part of the "Roaring Twenties" never carried with it the kind of multi-decade, propaganda intensified, extremist top-down partisan class hatred we saw before and after last year's bank bust. The fear on the part of wealthy right-wingers in this country (and on the part of many elitist superficial liberals & progressives) that many more of them might have to actually live like one of their average service wage workers is palpable.
The DLC Dimocrats and Fed Chairman Hognanke know this, and have been robbing Peter to pay Paul to delay the inevitable structural realignment downwards for as long as possible. The Dims are propping up our zombified dual economy (investor class vs everyone else) because they think that the longer they can hold out maybe they won't get caught holding the electoral bag when the heavier shoe drops. No Party unity there: Every little regional corporatist weasel is out for him- or herself. Max Baucus is a fart in a trance with himself. Joe Lieberman and Harry Reid are perfect specimens. If they'd had any brains or guts the Dimocratic "leadership" could've built a rock solid, multi-racial, youth-revitalized constituency that would have kept them free of electoral trauma for years, if not decades. They really are a sad, craven and sorry bunch of fools. They don't deserve their salaries, let alone their free health care and cost of living adjusted Congressional pensions (set for life after one term).
The Republicans are the real sick and sordid spectacle right now--completely unhinged, frothing at the mouth and all the moderates gone the way of the pterodactyl. Some of them think they are being clever barbing about "Obama's" rising unemployment--even to the point of having the nerve to assert the need for stimulus spending they were hissing and screaming against two months ago. But if our schizophrenic electorate puts them back into power in 2012 their only economic plan is more tax cuts for the already morbidly obese richest 1%. They've got nothing. Their only chance would be to steal and rename New Deal programs and try to thus hoodwink the ignorant masses. On the other hand, the Dims are so sold out they might let them get away with it. After all, the Dimocrats did let George W. Bush in 2000 buy the votes of the heartland by promising (and later delivering) huge increases in FDR era agricultural subsidies with nary a squeak. $400 Billion dollar increase per year was the figure as I recall. Good old big spending W. the full extent of whose spending we NEVER hear about.
All of the above is why progressives and alienated liberals should say to hell with both parties and build a united Progressive Party ASAP.
Woo-hoo! I like the way you think, DUBET. The Transition Network has already started this work, check it out.
I see a bad storm coming our way...the increasingly frantic and shrill right-wing nutcases are just having a temper tantrum, and they are like a giant toddler that just keeps getting madder. Wall Street has gone off the charts in terms of pay scales for people who essentially just move money around...waitresses work harder. Climate change is speeding up and surprising even the scientists who had dire predictions two years ago. We've reached the end of cheap oil which is having, and will continue to have massive implications throughout our economy and our culture.
The whole thing is going to blow soon- I have no idea what this is going to look like (maybe I just don't want to think about it), so I am involved with the Transition Towns network to help prepare my own community for this inevitability. NOTE: This does not look like a "survivalist" camp but more like small towns of the 20s and 30s, and for it to work we definitely need each other more than we need guns.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
An old Republican I knew loved the war profits he was making from the soaring value of his oil stock. He either didn't care or chose not to think about the cost of those profits in blood (Americans and civilians) and national treasure. The market plumpies we're seeing now are the result of Bernanke's artificial equity bubble pumped up (at a cost to the nation of $Trillions of dollars) for the elite banking & investor class, who--not lending that money out as it was intended--had no better place to put it than the market. That, and the comparatively minute effect of Obama's half-assed "stimulus" spending. But Bernanke is running out of juggling tricks, millions more homes and commercial properties are set to foreclose, real unemployment figures are a worsening nightmare with no end in sight, and Obama may have burned too much political capital (and probably lacks the guts) to be able to go back and obtain real stimulus spending from our rotted Congress. Enjoy your stock blips while ye may, the clock to a much deeper Depression is still ticking.
Super stagflation lies ahead. Remember the late 70's! Once the dollar folds everything we import which is almost everything we consume ( remember we off shored our manufacturing) will go way up in price. Energy will go up and a big chunk of our food will as well.
Jim Hightower, are you counting all the people who don't show up as unemployed because they are in college, or incarcerated?
I think in the last depression the unemployment rate quoted was 25%. It is my belief that we are approaching that rate, if we are not there already. But we all can afford TVs, so there will be no riots...
You're correct to see Hightower's math error. There are over 310 Million "Americans". 19% is just about 59 Million. Shadowstats has a better figure of 22%, and I peg the actual workforce at 200 Million, which gives us 44 Million un- and under-employed. Add in the dependent children of those 44 Million, and you have 100+ Million people who will soon be in direr straits as there unemploymeny benefits get cut thanks to Clinton's welfare "reform."
The difference between this depression and the last one is; we put this one on the Credit Card.
The real underlying "all things considered" unemployment rate has surged above 20% and it is continuing to rise at this writing.
Meanwhile, the powers that be are really just Herbert Hoover redux, as far as 90% of the population is concerned. But this time, they are "doing the Hoover" in such a way that at least the upper 10% can come out of the depression sooner rather than later.
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Kucinich, Sanders, and all all other progressives, need to unify into a party like this: http://www.ndp.ca/ now controlling two provinces, Manitoba and Nova Scotia, controlling large regional metro areas including Toronto and Vancouver, and controlling 36 of 305 Commons seats, and is therefore a substantial player in the multi-party Canadian parliamentary system.
Priors and links to all my CD favorites: http://www.unity-progress.blogspot.com
Jim Hightower makes living here in Texas a whole lot easier.
Breaking: I've been appointed head of Obama's Death Panels. Sara goes first:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82JYLt-ZDUU
There is a short article in HuffingtonPost that says insider trading is way up, and that means selling off. The insiders are not confident.
Once again, the Onion screws up and has a true headline. Remember "Reagan's Body Dies?"
I have read that behind-the-scenes -- "insiders are not confident."
Thanks for the referral -- I'll read the article.
When seen as ecologic problems, our economic problems become clear.
well said...if only the need to put the ecology first were as clear...
Huge JH fan, but even he's doing it now:
"...and there can be no happy talk until we deal with it."
Few are as well-versed on this issue as Common Dreamers. Yet piece after piece lays it out, once again, without even a hint of a "deal with it" solution.
Look around - where the hell are 12-18 million jobs going to come from in the next year... 3 years... 5 years? Is there something besides tumbleweeds on the horizon I'm missing?
Is the reason so many writers choose to avoid the "deal with it" question because there simply does not appear to be any way to deal with it?
I have gone to several town meetings, for various green and economic reasons. The core case has often been taken up by someone more financially well off than me to speak against the moving in of big money.
My points have sometimes come at the end of long evenings of discussion, and not been brought up again, even by thoes on my side, after being told over a drink later that same evening how important they were.
I am finding fewer and fewer democratic actions are effectively dealing with anything. And no, I am not suggesting undemocratic actions. Then we would be no different than glen beck.
Oh wait. He has too much money for me to be like him.
Love
Zero
They are intentionally driving the economy off a cliff.
A suggested way to beat it.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/THE-PUBLIC-OPTION-IN-BANKI-by-Ellen-Brown-090806-616.html
A suggestion that Lehman Brothers didn't fall apart but was pushed.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Economic-9-11-Did-Lehman-by-Ellen-Brown-090907-844.html
And this one combined the economic situation with the pandemic to suggest that the bankers and corporations have MUCH bigger things in mind that just taking all we own and destroying the economy.
http://www.NaturalNews.com/026503_pandemic_swine_flu_bioterrorism.html
"As the anticipated July release date for Baxter's A/H1N1 flu pandemic vaccine approaches, an Austrian investigative journalist is warning the world that the greatest crime in the history of humanity is underway. Jane Burgermeister has recently filed criminal charges with the FBI against the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations (UN), and several of the highest ranking government and corporate officials concerning bioterrorism and attempts to commit mass murder. She has also prepared an injunction against forced vaccination which is being filed in America. These actions follow her charges filed in April against Baxter AG and Avir Green Hills Biotechnology of Austria for producing contaminated bird flu vaccine, alleging this was a deliberate act to cause and profit from a pandemic."
That thesis is echoed by Dave Hodges in Depopulation by Inoculation in which it is suggested that those with the billions want not just more of everything but at this point also want much, much less of annoying ordinary people altogether.
http://farmwars.info/?p=1355
Hightower wrote this before Obama's big speech to Congress, which began with reassurances of the bright economic outlook. "We're not out of the woods yet," Barack the Ciceronian orator intoned, but the miracle is working. Happy days are right around the corner, just like they are with the magnificent health care reform package he's certain Congress will pass, just because it's so fair, brilliant and timely. So yeah, the economy may not have looked all that great yesterday, on 9/9, but aftet that stirring speech we all know how good it's going to be. 'Scuse me while I sing "America the Beautiful."
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
To compare Barack Obama or his remarks in any way, shape or form to Marcus Tullius Cicero is a crude insult to Cicero. Obama would crap his britches were he compelled to speak real truth to power. Cicero was executed for speaking truth to power. Obama would never pay such a price.
Malcolm X had a name for white corporate culture step'n'fetchits like Obama. It's like comparing Martin Luther King, Jr. as the "black Moses" to Barack Obama's horse gush about his generation being the "Joshua generation." What a load. Some of MLK's contemporaries should have immediately plumbed Obama a new one for elevating himself to such purely rhetorical and untested stature. He's a narcissist too much smitten with his own image and self-imagined political acumen. He's never learned MLK's admonitions about Vietnamization of other countries coming at the domestic expense of American potential. He doesn't understand the key role the government can have in both creating economic opportunity for all and regulating corporations in order to push them to maximize the creation of opportunities for all. He has failed to ensure that new and effective levees are built to protect New Orleans from future category 3 to category 5 hurricanes. He has failed to devise a plan to rebuild affordable housing for the mostly poor and black victims of Hurricane Katrina. He ignores the bloated percentages of blacks and hispanics in our prisons and the inverse relationship between education and prison spending. He reneged on reforming NAFTA with new labor and environmental protections. He refused to fight for the voter check cards for the labor unions. I've never heard him mention women's or children's issues as a discreet subject even once. His environmental cant is hot air and bogus carbon credits. He sacrificed Van Jones so fast it probably gave Rush Limbaugh vertigo.
By comparison, Cicero was successful as an attorney, consul and litigator before Republican magistrates and Julius Caesar--even opposing and dissecting Caesar's previous court decisions before Caesar himself and occasionally winning. He was a beneficial influence on Julius Caesar and, had Caesar not been assassinated, Cicero might have persuaded him to return power to the Senate, consuls and tribunes upon his death to avoid the inevitable upheaval of dictatorial succession. After Caesar was killed factional chaos erupted and the move toward permanent dictatorship soon consolidated around Caesar's nephew, Octavian. Octavian's supporter, Marc Antony, ordered Cicero--ever the staunch Republican--be beheaded, and his hands cut off--head and hands to be hung over the Rostra (speaker's forum in Rome) to rot as a threat to all who would speak or write against the new dictatorship of the Caesars. The best and truest leaders have always had the courage to face that threat.
Hoping for a magic Gv't solution is a false hope.
Use the Interstate Commerce clause to open the insurance market to all every where.
No more cute State insurance deals for some companies.
Transperant open markets will end No Insurance Company Left Behind, not more Gv't mumbo jumbo.
Sounds like we have the making of a perfect storm. But are the Uber rich as weather proof as they believe they are? The mad hatters who presently run things seem be getting madder by the minute. Another World War will not get us out from under this mess, but simply destroy everything and possibly lead to man's extinction. One also wonders when the wage slaves in China, India, and other countries will begin to rebel. And how much will these massive fortunes be worth in the midst of world-wide Chaos?
You gotta love government statistics, it can only be compared to Christian math...
If we want economic recovery, we need to start addressing the issue of H-1B visas.
Dr. Norman Matloff testified on this issue to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Immigration on April 21, 1998. Nowadays you would never know it by the way our politicians and reporters are talking. You can find Dr. Norman Matloff'f writings by doing an internet search on his name.