Pretend and Spend and Success will Come.

The Gospel of Economic Prosperity: Lessons from the Great Depression Part XVIII. Pretend and Spend and Success will Come.

The snow of twenty-nine wasn’t real snow. If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

The gospel of infinite prosperity is back in full bloom. Echoing from the television talking heads and radio pundits preach that the economy is on the mend because we have spent our way into prosperity. This recovery, as we are led to believe, is occurring even though jobs are being lost at the rate of 2.5 million a year and this is somehow good (or less bad in their words). We are now led to believe that jobless recoveries are simply part of the new economic landscape. This coming from a group of people that missed the largest recession since the Great Depression (maybe they should avoid predictions for a few years). Since the recession started in December of 2007, a painful 20 months indeed, the U.S. economy has shed 6.9 million jobs. That is the official number. If we dig deeper, we have 26.3 million unemployed and underemployed workers in the economy. For a recession that is the “worst since the Great Depression” we sure got out of it fast.

Getting out of it fast is what we are being led to believe. Yet the public is being fed a bunch of nonsense from the gospel of infinite prosperity. Much of this philosophy was also part of the Roaring 20s. The near religious belief in the big business culture of the U.S. Of course, much of this has influenced the way the crony capitalist have infected Wall Street with their cannibalistic method of destroying wealth for the country for short-term gain. The notion that spending trillions of dollars and giving authority to those that have led us to financial Armageddon is perverse as it is backwards. If anything, it simply demonstrates that Washington and Wall Street are wedded at the hip while ignoring the plight of the average American.

For a country that talks about the “small business owner” the reality is much different. During this economic crisis it is the mighty who are receiving the biggest handouts. You don’t see Jim’s local hardware shop getting a bailout. But Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and JP Morgan all received their piece of the economic handout. And look at all the bank failures. In relative terms, the small are being allowed to implode. In reality, they hold very little of the banking wealth. The U.S. currently has 8,195 banking institutions according to the latest FDIC report. 116 institutions or slightly above 1 percent own and control 77 percent of all banking assets.

And wealth inequality is at record levels once again: