Reuters: The Great Recession was even worse than thought, and we almost had another this year!

[originalpckelly]

http://www.cnbc.com/id/43943125

"The 'Great Recession' was even greater than previously thought, and the U.S. economy has skated uncomfortably close to a new one this year.

New data on Friday showed the 2007-2009 U.S. recession were much more severe than prior measures had found, with economic output declining a cumulative of 5.1 percent instead of 4.1 percent.

The report also showed the current slowdown began earlier and has been deeper than previously thought, with growth in the first quarter advancing at only a 0.4 percent annual pace.

The data indicated the economy began slowing in the fourth quarter of last year before high gasoline prices and supply chain disruptions from Japan's earthquake had hit, suggesting the weakness is more fundamental and less temporary than economists had believed."

So, we almost had a contraction this year. And what do you bet we did and someone is going to come out a year or two from now and say this all started this year at that quarter?

[originalpckelly]

1. kick

I know the world is about to end, but this isn't great.

[leveymg]

2. They'll revise the data again and find the recession never ended.

Indeed, for tens of millions of Americans who lost so much, it never did, and there has been no help from Washington.

[Justina For Justice]

3. Millions Are Still in a Great Depression, Here and Now.

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs and cannot find another one. They have lost their health insurance and many have lost their homes. Forty million Americans are on food stamps, which are not sufficient to adequately feed an average family.

Only Wall Street has "recovered" from the economic crisis they caused because, and only because, trillions in tax dollars were loaned to them at 0% interest from U.S. taxpayers funds. They used our free money to buy up competitor companies and put the rest into U.S. Treasury bonds, for which the taxpayers are paying them interest.

What we have seen and are seeing is the massive looting of the middle class in order to make the very rich even richer. It's past time to unite and organize to stop the looting and to replace the capitalist economic system with one that provides for human needs and development. It can be done!

[dreamnightwind]

4. You got that right

Every word.

Providing for human needs and, more generally, needs of the entire biosphere, creating a context for a sustainable society that gives dignified lives to its citizens is the ultimate measure of an economic system, or should be.

So just out of curiosity, where are you coming from? Socialism? Links to proposed solutions?

Thanks for your post.

[Justina For Justice]

6. Capitalist Economics Are Destroying Our Planet, But Together We Can Change That!

We can create a new economic system which will abolish the mad drive for profits that drives corporations to strive for constantly increasing profits to justify their CEO's obscene multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses at the expense of the workers who produce the goods we all need to survive. We need to be producing goods for their use value -- because people want and need them -- not for the profits they will generate for the corporate CEO's.

The workers who produce the goods and the consumers who need them must, together, make the decisions about what is produced and how it is produced, not a minuscule number of wealthy "managers" at the top. The managers current wealth comes from the decades of hard labor they stole from their workers and the excessive profits stolen from the consuming public. If we take those unearned profits back and put them to social uses we could feed, house, clothe and provide health care to all our citizens.

Sounds like a big job, I know, but it can be done if we join together in neighborhood and work place groups to decide how we want our society to function and then taking what at first might appear to be small steps to regain control of our economy and our lives. Small groups can network with other small groups in their neighborhoods and towns to plan ideas and actions and, where warranted, take them jointly together. This might be as simple as starting sharing networks for internet Wifi and mutual technical assistance as we all need to share information to make good decisions.

Once a communications network is established, we can form food cooperatives, neighborhood gardens, credit union cooperatives, and even joint solar power and medical services cooperatives to hire local doctors and dentists to provide services at reasonable cost to all our neighborhoods. The possibilities are limited only by the limits of all our imaginations and energy to work to create them.

Many people -- with a variety of great skills -- are unemployed right now feeling personally worthless even though it is not their fault. It's the fault of the inhuman economic system which now owns our politicians as well as all our production and distribution systems. Their ownership is based on past thefts. Time to re-establish the values and priorities of our local communities by changing the rules of the economic game so we all can live with human dignity, not just the less than .001% of our population that, now, effectively owns us all. The skills of the unemployed, if shared with their communities, could put our whole society back to work -- for human beings, not obscene profits.

If those who are now out of work knock on the doors of their neighbors, find out what their needs are and what their skills are, we could begin to trade and share our skills and enrich our communities.

Capitalist economics has forced the whole world to live on its terms -- the drive for profit controls them. They now own most of our elected officials and write the legislation and rules to increase their own profits. It is a global phenomenon. (Look at Rupert Murdoch's strangle-hold on British politics. He has done the same in the U.S. and Australia. He and his family own and control hundreds and hundreds of media companies throughout the world. His companies control the information we receive, and so we are bombarded by propaganda telling us how great capitalism is. It has been great for him, not the majority of us. And he is not the only CEO who has done the same. But there are probably less than 1000 such capitalists controlling our world. Together we are millions. (Forty million of us in the U.S. need food stamps when there is plenty of resources for all -- if we work together. We can take it back -- if we work together, locally and globally to create a decent society for all

We can create a decent society which puts human needs and development as our priority, unleashes enormous creativity, and restores human values, if we work together. Start locally, talk to your neighbors and work mates now!


(I don't care what this new economic system we can create will be called; it will find its proper name as long as it gives us all back control over our jobs, neighborhoods, environments and human lives.)

[dreamnightwind]

9. Wow!

Another awesome post.

Welcome to Democratic Underground.

I've been looking into this group, which is working on many of the things you mentioned:

http://www.transitionus.org/

Just checking them out, not involved with them yet, so I don't know if it's the right direction. They look great on paper.

Also worth a look is this group:
http://www.rootsaction.org

There are many individuals who, in some vague but inactive way, agree with all of this. But they're not organized, and for the most part they're not doing a whole lot about the problems, just feeling hopeless and powerless to bring real change.

Your post suggests a local, decentralized bottom-up change. That's been a goal of people for a long time, funny how little progress gets made, at least that's been my experience. I agree it's a good way to go, if we can make it happen.

Also though with so many people aimlessly drifting in the brackish backwaters of capitalism's runoff, we need a way to get people involved and working together towards this change, many people are lost and need direction in their struggles. Hopefully something will emerge that can give such people a meaningful direction to put their energy into. But knocking on neighbor's doors and just starting on our own would be a good thing too, no doubt.

Have a good one.

[Selatius]

5. With the way things look, even without a default, we're looking at a contraction for Q4 2011.

This summer's economic performance has been lackluster, and the job creation front is abysmal. Only 18,000 jobs created in the last month? That's not good at all. If it turns out this year's holiday shopping season is an absolute disaster, I wouldn't be surprised. Insufficient aggregate demand.

But, government numbers aside, I'll tell you straight up that the Great Recession never ended. I would tell you what the US economy did was "bottom bounce," where the US economy finally hits the floor, then bounces up off it like a ball, then goes back down and settles near or on the floor.

[JCMach1]

7. This is the Tea Party Recession, government cut-backs and the uncertainty created by their policies

is fueling the down-turn of the economy.

[gulliver]

8. Recession is less than half of the picture.

There should be a "general welfare" statistic that reflects true status. Bush and the Republicans did not just change the rate of economic growth during Bush's tenure. They changed the tangible and intangible economic status of the United States as a whole for the worse. We focus too much on the recession, which was just a transient statistic. It was the altimeter that only showed us losing ten feet of altitude as Bush crashed the country in the ditch. The true loss statistic (crashed economic car, ruined lives, mired in the ditch) is the one that really matters.

People say we are still in a recession, but what they really mean is that we are still in the ditch the Republicans drove us into. The fact that we are no longer in a technical recession just allows the guilty to escape. We're still in the ditch.