The Economy is a Lie, too

[Crewleader]

Economics / Recession 2008 - 2010 Sep 22, 2009 - 03:06 AM

By: Paul_Craig_Roberts

Americans cannot get any truth out of their government about anything, the economy included. Americans are being driven into the ground economically, with one million school children now homeless, while Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke announces that the recession is over.

The spin that masquerades as news is becoming more delusional. Consumer spending is 70% of the US economy. It is the driving force, and it has been shut down. Except for the super rich, there has been no growth in consumer incomes in the 21st century. Statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com reports that real household income has never recovered its pre-2001 peak.



The US economy has been kept going by substituting growth in consumer debt for growth in consumer income. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan encouraged consumer debt with low interest rates. The low interest rates pushed up home prices, enabling Americans to refinance their homes and spend the equity. Credit cards were maxed out in expectations of rising real estate and equity values to pay the accumulated debt. The binge was halted when the real estate and equity bubbles burst.

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article13663.html

[villager]

1. Along with the cake, you mean?

;-)

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. And the word "assets" means debts.

The language used in banking/accounting is misleading.
The rules they now use are mis-leading.
Somewhere around the 80's debt became money.
But now the debtors cannot borrow and want out of their debt.
End of party.

[Why Syzygy]

3. It IS over for THEM! They got trillions.

Why worry when all your gambling losses have been covered? Deal 'em up. They're ready for the next hand.

[jotsy]

4. Call me a whack a doodle if you will, but...

I keep asking myself what the PTB has to gain from feeding the kind of fear and division we find ourselves surrounded by and inevitably return to a really creepy notion time and again. Is it possible that civil war and the death of a nation is the way they've chosen as the means to provide themselves cover for what they've already stolen?

My advice to all of us is to learn what we can about localized sustainability. They can't play this shell game forever and when the jig is up, my bet is the corporatocracy will abandon us in favor of more profitable publics.

[tama]

6. Divide and conquer

"what the PTB has to gain from feeding the kind of fear and division we find ourselves surrounded by"

That is what Power Over the Other has been allways based on: fear and division, divide and conquer. The division goes very deep, all the way to linguistic division between subject and object, the Great Divide between culture and nature - subjective/cultural "civilized" dominance and control over externalized objectified nature. Division between Power and the Other.

Looking for an elitist conspiracy to blame, while not denying all kinds of elitist and other conspiracies, is not helpfull, it's just another form of creating and maintaining divisions. In carefull thinking and silent awareness it can be realized that the division is a loose-loose game. TPTB is not just an external elite class/conspiracy, it is also internalized pattern and structure - present allready in this division between external and interior.

Localized sustainability is one if not The Solution to this Great divide, besides being the most practical answer available. This local experience and life is not dependent from externalized Other and Power to control externalized, objectified Nature, this is dependent from larger inclusive whole or succession of larger inclusive wholes, local ecosystem, biosphere, planet etc. This unmeasurable vastness that is hologrammically present in each of it's locations, in true self.

[tblue]

5. We're just pawns on the chess board. We think we have power (we vote) and then look what happens.

But we are fat, complacent, fearful people, we Americans. We don't have anything like the courage of the people of
Honduras

or Iran

or the Amazon.


Why do we take it? Did they have less to lose than we?

[notesdev]

11. We got pictures like that

Just check out the photos of the tea parties. There's a reason they're so popular, even if they are almost universally misconstrued in progressive circles.

/paglia

[raccoon]

7. Great article, especially this:

"If measured according to the methodology used when I was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, the unemployment rate today in the US is above 20%."

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. http://vdare.com/roberts/all_columns.htm

[phantom power]

8. Deliberate smoke-blowing aside, I think there is something else...

which is that GDP was historically a good surrogate measure for economic health back when we had a manufacturing economy. The fact that GDP can uptick while unemployment is increasing seems to me like a symptom of the fact that our economy has been decoupled for some time from actually producing anything.

[Strong Atheist]

9. K&R. nt.

[TheWatcher]

10. SILENCE TERRORIST!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Recovery Is Real. The Recovery Is Real. You are getting rich off The Dow while you sleep. Bubble Economics will save the world and cure all ails. Questioning The Recovery is Terrorism. There's a Sale At Pennys.