For OpEdNews: Daniel Patrick Welch - Writer
These recessions are getting shorter and shorter. If you delay admitting it's happening until "it" really hits the fan, then claim it's all better while "it" is still spraying all over you, eventually it will become a complete non-event, like the ho-hum 'discouraged workers' who keep pushing those jobless claims down. Good going, guys! Way to take one for the statistical team!
The other intriguing development about the "modern" recovery is that it miraculously continues to be a "recovery" without some previously indispensable component. Under Clinton and Bush, we were introduced to the "jobless" recovery. Now, with foreclosures yet to peak and record upside down mortgages still to blow, we are apparently being fed the "homeless recovery." See? With each recovery, we can begin to see past those boring necessities that clouded our vision in the past. With joblessness and homelessness becoming old hat, I can't wait for what's next--maybe a foodless recovery or an airless recover--for future administrations to bestow on us.
All hilarious sarcasm aside (and I am a hoot, aren't I? Isn't misery funny?!) it is a terribly disheartening time. I can't remember a time where the chirping of the Talking Heads Chorus or the Powers That Be was more completely in synch, while at the same time being so completely out of touch with the experience the rest of us are living.
Not that journalists and cheerleaders have had separate job descriptions for quite awhile now; still it boggles the mind to hear people meekly 'report' as fact the data that spews forth like clockwork from government and industry mouthpieces. The THC and PTB are still chirping over the so-called 3.6% housing "jump" when the sample included an 11% margin of error. No one needs a degree in statistics to see through such a load of crap. Yet the spewing is allowed to continue.
The only recession concession the THCPTB team will make is that the non-existent recovery is 'fragile' until consumers start loosening up their spending habits again. Duh. A whopping 70% of GDP is from consumer spending--there simply is no economy without us buying as much crap as we can get our hands on. Now, people may finally be catching on to the fact that working 80 hours a week at a job they hate to finance the overvalued glorified cottage in the suburbs, which is mortgaged for more than it is worth to finance the never-stop-spending lifestyle that keeps them on the treadmill--that it all kind of SUCKS! Shhhhhh! The system will simply collapse if the people actually figure this one out.
Well, guess what, THCPTB? They're onto it. And the whiff of panic is growing stronger in both quarters, among the Talking Heads whose job it is to convince people to keep spending, and the people who have no money left to spend. THERE IS NO MORE MONEY for folks to spend, and therefore, there can be no sustained return to The Way Things Were. Those who think economics can't really be that simple have forgotten the old joke about the economist stranded on the island with the chemist and the physicist: they have one can of beans, and will starve if they can't figure out how to open it. After the chemist and physicist trade long and improbable solutions about boiling it or throwing it up in the air (the longer-winded and more boring the better for the joke, unfortunately) the economist smoothly steps in and says, "okay, ASSUME a can opener..." Why would they know what they are talking about when the whole game has been one step above reading tea leaves and flipping a coin? Of course, that's not fair to the coin flippers--they're right half the time....
Continued>>>
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Recession-is-Over--No-by-Daniel-Patrick-Wel-090924-927.html
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