'Green Shoots' of Recovery? Don't Fall for the Media's Economic Triumphalism

Unemployment is still increasing at over 600,000 people a month ... last report was low by 220,000 due to the business birth/death rate for business ... believe me, 220,000 people were not hired for new businesses in May.

States, counties, cities and schools are in big trouble, sales and income tax receipts are crashing. They will severely cut back services and employment ... Almost all these government entities have to balance their budget, the cuts will have to be made and made almost immediately ...

It's worse than you think Joshua ...

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We got ours, Goldman Sachs, and It's your tough luck you didn't become an investment banker.

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Another drag on any recovery is the deteriorating public health scene in America.

It stands to reason that six years of Republican hegemony will have a terrible effect on public health.

The violent crime rate skyrocketed under Bush II--after going down for eight straight years under Bill Clinton.

Under Bush II, the infant mortality rate started to go up for the first time in 40 years (after reaching an all-time low under Clinton).

Bush's EPA was pro-pollution. Under their watch, pollution in the Great Lakes is on the rise.

They set a weaker standard for lead pollution in air, and for lead paint cleanup, than their independent scientific advisors recommended. If you multiply this decision times a million, you get a sense of what an unimaginable mess our environment must be in. With the corporate media reporting virtually nothing, we can only guess.

We will also need to take care of an unprecedented number of wounded soliders. The same advances in medical technolgy have saved lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. have also left us with many times more wounded to take care of than in any earlier war.

Then there's the brain damage from all the cell phones, but never mind...

So even if those green shoots were real, they'd find little sunlight. The Republicans have left us a sick nation--with no money and no healthcare system.

It's a piss-poor time to have the Worst Democrat Ever™ in the White House, but them's the breaks...


Rupert Murdoch in Pain

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Notice that gas prices are rising again? Global demand is creeping up as Europe and China shake off the recession and begin rebuilding their economies.

They are recovering more quickly than the U.S. because, unlike the U.S., their treasuries were not looted by the very people who were supposed to be rescuing them. In the U.S. these were the same people who caused the financial disaster in the first place.

The higher gas prices will further drain the resources of businesses and the public sector in this country. All this is the upshot of the "extreme capitalism" that has shaped the U.S. for the past 30 years. It has destroyed our economy and turned our government into a cabal of gangsters who apparently can't make a minor policy change without obtaining the permission of their billionaire bosses. And the decisions they do make -- such as Obama's plan of issuing trillions of dollars in new debt -- are so compromised by corruption that they scarcely have an impact. Now the rest of the world is poised to move on without us. And America looks more and more like a banana republic every day.

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My great fear is of yet another Jobless recovery . I remember this phenomena being talked about as we recovered from the last recession .
We are told that jobs are a lagging indicator so even IF recovery occurs it doesn't help the unemployed . Even then as you pointed out there is the likely hood that those jobs will actually pay less .
I too am so tired of the media seeming to consider the Dow and Wall Street as the means of evaluating our economy .

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'"But as Roubini notes, "Inflation may indeed become the path of least resistance for policymakers, as it is easier to run the printing presses and cause inflation than it is to implement politically difficult tax increases or spending cuts."'

Ben the Professorial Princetonian Printer has been shovelling worthless greenbacks into bank vaults for a year now; everybody from AIG to Goldman has been "given" money. (For this you need a Phd?). If money is a promise to pay by a bankrupt govt, we are flush with "wealth".

The problem is that those IOU's are largely held by foreigners-the Chinese, Koreans and Indians. They are not amused by our Smooth Leader and his Princeton/Harvard gang of "economists". (I've said before on Alternet-is there something wrong with state university or small private college graduates?) The Ivy League clique that screwed us about Vietnam, Iran, Iraq and Palestine has brilliantly stripped the richest nation on Earth of its wealth, except for an even narrower class of billionaires and investors than the rich-loving Bush mob.

The dollar will be dumped, and should be, as the world's reserve currency. Watch oil prices soar as the article notes. Watch the cost of our overseas bases explode(good, bring troops home). Watch the price of feeding your family and paying your rent or mortgage become impossible(oh, that is bad).


We may eventually put a few more folks back to work. But what will they receive as compensation? Tickets to a White Sox game? A free burger at Five Brothers? A Portugese Water Dog?

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Because of Algorithmic Trading you can't rely on what you see in the stock market. It may all be - an almost certainly is - a programmed illusion.
This rip-off will go on until someone pulls the plug on Wall St.

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I remember during Reagan's administration that every time a company laid-off workers and closed domestic factories and shifted production to Bongo-Congo Wall Street rewarded the executive board of said company and its major shareholders by increasing stock price. Now what kind of shit is that?

I mean, if the boss closes plants and fires workers doesn't that mean whatever marketing decisions he's made flopped? In a reality-based society shouldn't firing workers and closing manufacturing facilities be seen as a sign of failure?

Not in the United States, obviously.

Now these same conscienceless pricks are rewarding themselves for being incompetent morons with our money! For figuring out how to make shitpotsfull of money without having to actually make anything, these pricks have ruined an economy and none of'em are going to jail!

In fact three of'em are in the administration!

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But the U.S. and its obese citizenry are about to have an epiphany, and learn one of life's great lessons. Decadence has its price, and the price for a nation is always decline and fall.

"A state that dwarfs its men . . ."

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You never had it so good! Advertise a position and watch a stampede of applicants.

Threaten your existing workers with "right sizing" if they get too uppity. If they protest, just retort with " the economy is bad".

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As gloomy as this very realistic assessment is, it seems to ignore the very real possibility that there will not EVER be a return to normalcy. Normalcy involved liquidating the planet of its carbon-based fuels, fertile soils, fresh water and biodiversity. To borrow a phrase from an apt song, "you don't know what you've got till it's gone."

The future will be NOTHING like the past. Eventually we are going to have to embrace the end of growth...or else we'll just go down fighting.

Dave Gardner
Producing the documentary
Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity
www.growthbusters.com

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can you have a recovery when people are running out of unemployment benefits and dropping off the 'official unemployment roles'(looks good on paper!!!)...

where only 40% of applicants for unemployment actually qualify in the first place for various reasons...

a few months ago, the yard signs for 'for sale' looked like little soldiers along the road... now about every 5th house is doing a great job growing weeds and dandelions...

one county around here is freaking out about mosquito containment costs due to standing water around abandoned properties... the county can't figure out who actually owns these homes to send them the bill... so county is making all owners pay higher tax to cover mosquito spraying not budgeted for...

apartment rentals are way down too... but not the rent... where are people going???

gonna get lots worse... fast...

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While the media talks about recovery, it's obvious to everyone else that no such thing is happening. There will be no return to normalcy. Instead the "death spiral" will continue until our sports-obsessed idiotic citizenry wakes up to find tent cities everywhere, overwhelmed food pantries, and foreigners who have been brought in by the likes of Microsoft to take the jobs not yet outsourced. I blame Bush and Congress and now Obama for not standing up to the banksters.

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As people watch and listen to the corporate mass media looking for signs of recovery it boggles the mind that any faith can be placed in what they say about anything. It is all bullshit! They lie about eveything. It's one long slick commercial for a system in death throws and they are calling it dancing. Our "way of life" is unsustainable and it is collapsing around our ears. If it has not got to you yet, it will. If you belive that the criminals that own this country will save you or would even bother to piss on you if you were on fire you're deluded. Like Ronnie the coward president said "you ain't seen nothing yet"

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The fact is that certain aspects of the economy are not getting worse. But improvement seems a long way off. Our standards and our idea of financial security have changed. We are thinking 'bare bones' and basics. Learning to live with less. But the people who get to the point of having nothing and no prospects don't get much news coverage. Unemployment figures have not been accurate in many years. Fewer people lost jobs last week - because fewer people are employed than the week before, not to mention the year before. I don't see anything encouraging out there. The stock market is NOT and never has been an indicator of the health of the economy. It's good that the DOW is showing signs of recovery
but it has nothing to do with the rest of the news which is not good. ANNA

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For some time now they have had the luxury of too many people needing too few jobs. What the supply-siders love and promote. Overpopulation is good for them. The more of us there are the cheaper we are forced to become. Even if the economy is more expensive to live in.

Things are so bad that besides the false job adverts, they do what they can to filter out as many job applicants before they apply! They will do anything to make it hard to even see them. No hope of anything. Also people at work will gladly have their pay reduced to keep their job. Also one person now doing 2+ jobs for the same pay. No overtime (gone way back in the 1990's) and little worker protections. The jobs aren't solid in any fashion, too many are short term contracts with no benefits. Whatever bad elements of a job you can think of it is offered in that way for the past 10 years or more.

I wonder if Mises, Hayek and Friedman are looking from the Ghost Zone and laughing in joy at our plight?

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One of two things will be the result of our current actions:
There'll be enough of a "recovery" for the guvmint to declare an end to the crisis, and business as usual will continue on its self-destructive path, or
The whole rotten edifice will collapse, leaving almost everyone except those with golden parachutes destitute.
We're screwed either way, and will have to rebuild our society from scratch. Don't count on us doing it right because the bad guys will be there, biding their time.

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In 1938 the unemployment rate held at 19%, and five years later it fell to below 2%, and for 1943, 44, 45 it held below 2%. A massive public jobs program reversed unemployment and finished the Great Depression. It amounted to a transfer of wealth. Idle wealthy bank accounts bought government bonds and that money transferred into working people's paychecks, and the Depression was over. The war was a great motivator. We have all the resources necessary except willing capital resources, and for that we have the power of taxation. Eisenhower kept the income tax at 90% for incomes above $3.4 million a year. If we were to repeat that policy we could see daylight again. Child poverty stands at 27.3% today, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Food stamps are used by one in nine (but I can't give you the source). There are solutions. Jack Rasmus, a economics professor, presents some. See KyklosProductions.com, or see Warren Brussee's blog at wordpress for confirmation of the bleak economy. Dollars and Sense magazine has a great analysis. Write your Congressman. We are not out of the woods. We need to shift the distribution of wealth and income away from the top one percent and establish stable aggregate demand or purchasing power. We need a democratically supervised capitalism that raises wages, that tightens the job market thru public job creation, that creates full employment at living wages. See my blog, http://benL8.blogspot.com This was a thorough and competent analysis of the state of the economy. Very good article.

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We are judging improvements in the economy by how fast we return to that which initially caused the problem. We can not go back to our lying cheating ponzi scheme financial institutions ie; being in debt as a way of life. We cannot return to raping the resources of the planet at an alarming rate, producing ,buying and throwing away. In fact we cannot return to anything that resembles the past without hastening our demise. The present improvement bubble will eventually burst and will make the last financial fiasco look like a child's broken piggy bank.

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AND WHAT IS CONGRESS DOING TO HELP THE PEOPLE OF THIS NATION? TAKING BRIBES FROM SPECIAL INTERESTS.

AND WHAT IS OBAMA DOING FOR THE PEOPLE OF THIS NATION? PUTTING THE FEDS IN CHARGE OF WALL ST WHO IS BRIBING CONGRESS WITH OUR BAILOUT DOLLARS WHILE HALLIBURTON IS STILL GETTING BILLIONS AND WE ARE STILL SPENDING TEN’S OF BILLIONS ON FABRICATED WARS FOR PROFIT.



By Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O'Rourke


June 22, 2009

Comparing the Great Depression to now for the world, not just the US
This and most other commentary contrasting the two episodes compares America then and now. This, however, is a misleading picture. The Great Depression was a global phenomenon. Even if it originated, in some sense, in the US, it was transmitted internationally by trade flows, capital flows and commodity prices. That said, different countries were affected differently. The US is not representative of their experiences.

Our Great Recession is every bit as global, earlier hopes for decoupling in Asia and Europe notwithstanding. Increasingly there is awareness that events have taken an even uglier turn outside the US, with even larger falls in manufacturing production, exports and equity prices.

In fact, when we look globally, as in Figure 1, the decline in industrial production in the last nine months has been at least as severe as in the nine months following the 1929 peak. (All graphs in this column track behavior after the peaks in world industrial production, which occurred in June 1929 and April 2008.) Here, then, is a first illustration of how the global picture provides a very different and, indeed, more disturbing perspective than the US case considered by Krugman, which as noted earlier shows a smaller decline in manufacturing production now than then.

It's a Depression alright
To sum up, globally we are tracking or doing even worse than the Great Depression, whether the metric is industrial production, exports or equity valuations. Focusing on the US causes one to minimize this alarming fact. The "Great Recession" label may turn out to be too optimistic. This is a Depression-sized event.

That said, we are only one year into the current crisis, whereas after 1929 the world economy continued to shrink for three successive years. What matters now is that policy makers arrest the decline. We therefore turn to the policy response.

Policy responses: Then and now
Figure 4 shows a GDP-weighted average of central bank discount rates for 7 countries. As can be seen, in both crises there was a lag of five or six months before discount rates responded to the passing of the peak, although in the present crisis rates have been cut more rapidly and from a lower level. There is more at work here than simply the difference between George Harrison and Ben Bernanke. The central bank response has differed globally.

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They also agreed with the fiat money economy that got us here..

Mr. Holland........you need to study Austrian Economics and sound money a bit more.

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to avoid rioting in the streets...that is part of their job to keep people "calm" and "pliable".

..... so you will hear every month some of this crap which tries to make things upbeat and you should all discount it.... The media however should be questioning these positive statments every step of the way.

Oh really? Unemployment claims went down? maybe briefly but just wait until the June numbers hit with all the teachers laid off in California alone! And you can bet your life it is not yet hit bottom....no matter what lies these people tell!

California has the highest unemployment maybe ever and we are in recovery??? Bull!!!

Who is in recovery??? The Banks and Insurance companies who Obama is giving everything too and nothing to the public in the form of lower mortgages... no appeals yet to greedy landlords to lower rents to acceptable levels to keep people in their homes....and a possible screw-the-US-public deal with the evil Insurance Companies to once again rip off the public and government with mismanaging of healthcare, who once again will decide who has enough money to deserve to live and who should die.

We have to keep pummeling Obama and all the bought and paid for rich, publicly (that is paid for by you and me taxpayers!)and generously insured Representatives and Senators and other politicians until WE get EXACTLY what WE WANT and need for a change. Send emails daily...faxes too. Rangel's office received over 8,500 in one day and some fax machines even broke down. Do that to every person you can reach from your district/State. Tell them we will vote their fat carcasses out of office...every one of them if necessary!!!

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The above reads like more recycled psycho-babble from the usual status quo farce machine. That would include the pseudo “progressive” burbling of Paul Krugman from his CFR, Princeton, Big Media propaganda bullhorn.

These are a laundry list of recurring symptoms NOT causes.

In other words, no mention of the fact the economy – and therefore the nation -is run by a private bank monopoly better known as the “Federal Reserve” Corp. that creates ersatz counterfeit credit out of thin air in trade for real public debt and exclusive ruling class banking privilege. Not a word about the fact the elite global banking industry that created the meltdown at profit regulates its own toxic misdeeds through what amounts to a “FED” extortion racket.

It’s called organized corporate crime.

Of course private oligarchs in charge of the national economy, government and media organs may not be the only pathology behind the madness of endless faux “war on terror” under perpetual Wall Street Bailouts with all the rest. But that reality is certainly enough to make Fascism a real and present psychosis.

Upshot: this Alternet story is devoid of the practical reality it pretends to offer. It’s about as useless a decoy as the Obama regime and the one before it.



In 1913, the money power of the country was taken away from the people. By constitutional privilege it belongs with the Congress, but it was given up in the Federal Reserve Act. The Federal Reserve is no more Federal than Federal Express. But yet it has the power to determine the direction and use of money in our economy. If we could take that power back and put the Federal Reserve under Treasury, we start to be in a position of being able to control monetary policy on behalf of the United States people.
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (former Presidential candidate at Congress C-Span January 9th, 2009)

“Over time whoever controls the money system controls the nation.”
Stephen Zarlenga (Director American Monetary Institute)


“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the government of the U.S. ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”
President FDR (on de facto Fascist rule in a letter to corporate monopoly charlatan “Colonel” Edward M. House, co-founder of the Council on Foreign Relations and political fixer for the ruling class. House also handled President Wilson. 11/21/ l933 from the book "F.D.R.: His Personal Letters" - New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce 1950)

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Mr. Holland's report on U.S. economic reality is the most accurate such work I have seen anywhere outside the European press, and for that he is to be commended. But he nevertheless omits -- perhaps because of his reluctance to acknowledge the historical truth of class struggle -- any discussion of the ruling-class motives that ultimately determine our economic fates. And he thus fails to recognize that the miasma in which we are drowning literally has no bottom.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument the ruling class recognized the onset of terminal climate change and petroleum bankruptcy years before such knowledge trickled down to the general public. For example the mathematical construct known as Hubbert’s Curve -- so-called “Peak Oil” -- has been known since 1956, which means the prerequisite research began long before. The greenhouse effect -- the cause of global warming -- was discovered and quantified in the 19th Century. Which makes it legitimate to ask for how long -- and to what extent -- U.S. policy has been shaped by ruling-class awareness we live in the looming shadow of a double apocalypse so devastating it has no precedent in human experience.

President Richard Nixon’s largely forgotten declaration of war on the U.S. working class in early 1974 gives us an important clue. Interviewed by William Randolph Hearst Jr. for Hearst Newspapers, Nixon astounded Hearst by stating that the average worker was entirely too pampered and that federal policy would be reshaped to deliberately increase domestic hardship. This interview was published on Page One of every Hearst newspaper within days of Nixon’s second inauguration but has since vanished down the Orwell hole. Nevertheless the fact that (save for high-tech industries) the last year U.S. workers got a real raise was 1973 -- raise defined as an increase in disposable income -- proves beyond any doubt Nixon was speaking for the ruling class.

The only possible explanation for such a radical shift in domestic policy so long before the death of communism is that the (hereditary) corporate aristocracy recognized the forthcoming eco/petro crisis and so began the hoarding, looting and suppression of liberty by which it hopes to amass sufficient wealth and power to ensure its survival.

Subsequent events -- union-busting, methodical destruction of community, nullification of the Constitution, conversion of the Presidency to an imperial despotism, draining of economic resources -- all substantiate this Occam’s Razor estimate. Especially damning evidence is provided by the withdrawal of funds that is destroying the U.S. newspaper and publishing industries. These are not economic accidents: like public schools that methodically promote illiteracy and ignorance, the destruction of these industries are deliberate contractions of the information flow. Money is not ephemeral; it is a tangible, zero-sum commodity. As with the money looted from the economy at large, dollars withdrawn from newspapers and publishing houses are merely moved elsewhere.

It is important to remember -- as objective analysis demands -- that the real ruling class is so inconceivably wealthy, it is beyond reach of economic fluctuations. Thus it is also legitimate to ask where these aristocrats are hiding the money they are draining from the economy in the guise of “recession” -- a question the capitalist economists dare not address and about which socialist economists can only speculate. Meanwhile Nixon’s 1974 declaration indicates the economic hardship we have suffered ever since is an attack by economic vampires that will end only when the U.S. has been sucked dry of its liquid assets, reduced to a withered (Third World) corpse and abandoned. Which means that for those of us in the working class, there will be no recovery -- not now not ever -- and that to imagine otherwise is utter folly.

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Ohio's economy is in a downward spiral.The state budget must be balanced by the end of this month. Revenue has sharply fallen.

One of the things on the chopping block is public library funding. My county will lose all of its branches if this goes through, decreasing information access for many rural people with no money for books or internet access.

http://www.olc.org/SaveOhioLibraries.asp

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