BartBlog

“Knees knocked last week from sea to shining sea as the shape-shifting monster of economic reality cut a swathe of destruction through the markets and financial ranks. The exact nature of this giant beast still remained largely concealed in a fog of accounting gambits, policy blusters, and reporting dodges, but a few intrepid scouts who glimpsed the behemoth up close said it looked like Godzilla with Herbert Hoover’s face.” […]“That crashing sound out there is the armature of confidence needed to support an economy based on faith that borrowed money will be paid back. It’s as simple as that. (Doesn’t seem so exciting now, does it?)”– James Howard Kunstler, “Fullblown Panic,” Jan. 21, 2008.

It really doesn’t matter what George W. Bush says in his final State of the Union speech January 28^th (at least we hope it’s final), no one in their right mind believes him anymore, and it will no doubt be the usual glib ghostwritten grab-bag of slippery evasions, eye-rolling distortions, promises that will never be kept, and stomach-turning mendacity that have been the hallmark of his previous annual appearances before Congress. Count on hearing we are making progress in Iraq and Afghanistan and blah, blah, zippity-doo-dah with a cherry on top.

But the most important thing that Boy Junior will dance around in his brow-furrowed mock seriousness is the hideous state of the economy: In yet another empty aircraft carrier deck strut, he’ll jabber on about his grim joke of a ‘stimulus package’ in our ‘strong economy,’ carefully avoiding any explanation of why we’d need any sort of stimulus package in such a robust economy. Isolated from the rabble in his Versailles on the Potomac, and committed to insuring that his corporate underwriters and Wall Street insiders wring every last cent out of the suckers who pay his salary, he’ll vociferously deny the reality most Americans are living every day under his catastrophic reign, refusing, like his Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, to admit the country is in a runaway recession much less, in some areas outside the luxurious lairs of the Power Elite, a full-kick depression.

If The Decider got out more, beyond his screened audiences and press conferences to his mostly deferential Royal Court media courtiers, and traveled off the beaten path in an old Ford, he’d find all is not well in Fly-Over Country; what was once cherry-colored ‘Bush Country,’ including his adopted home state of Texas, is now red-faced with anger as Americans lose their jobs, homes, and health insurance, and drain their bank accounts to fill up the family four-wheeler. Here are some of the blights the Little King might see, if he removed the neocon rose-colored glasses from his eyes:

In the Old South, the economic disaster has already hit most areas harder than Sherman’s army marching to the sea; big cities like Atlanta, Raleigh and Asheville can still keep their heads up, but elsewhere in the Bible Belt it’s a Generica wasteland with the dumbstruck denizens counting couch change to buy baby formula and Chinese-made clothing; in the Dixie border states and further north, bewildered suburbanites seek another part-time job on top of the two they already hold down just to afford the mortgage and car payments, while they cut down on Starbucks coffee and trips to the Crate & Barrel; in the Rust Belt, well-paying factory jobs have vanished and Blue-Vested income can barely pay for Daddy’s GMC to haul him to work; and in Corn Country to the west, government-subsidized agribusiness rules the roost, and the small farmer might as well be a “Grapes of Wrath” Okie, albeit one that has incurred millions in debt. Even on the coasts, outside of Manhattan and the celebrity villages of Los Angeles and Malibu, the millions of ‘nobodies’ are coming up a day late and a dollar short; and at Ground Zero for the passé dot.com revolution in San Francisco, and the overpriced subdivisions in Silicon Valley, and the locus of the personal computer in Seattle, most of the hardware, software and IT work has been shifted to cheap labor in Asia. Listen to the stories; the agony and rage are palpable.

Aside from this anecdotal evidence, we also have these proofs: If not for foreign investors, several major US banks and lending institutions would have closed their doors, just like during the Great Depression; the dollar has dropped to its lowest level in modern history, inflating prices, while our trade deficit and our national debt are at record high levels; our housing market has collapsed, and our unpaid credit card debt is astronomical; oil prices are at an all-time high, and our manufacturing base in nearly non-existent — even our service jobs are going overseas. You don’t have to be an economist to see that we are borrowing ourselves to death, and it simply can’t continue. You can’t spend what you don’t have, and you can’t make something out of nothing, and we no longer have the capacity to manufacture much of anything, a situation our benighted media and the jaundiced plutocrats running the show have failed to appreciate as they loot the national treasury. Only in the Ivory Towers of official Washington and the glass canyons of New York are they still worrying about staving off recession; everywhere else, it’s a harsh reality and it’s getting worse.

Out in the space between the coasts, heating bills have doubled, and it’s been a cold winter so far; some have been forced to move from homes to apartments; and those in apartments have moved to trailers, and some who were in trailers have even moved into tents on public land. Others sleep in their cars or vans, unobtrusively parked in lots or side streets off the main roads. Most of these Americans are working, some at more than one job, but can’t afford to maintain the standard of living they enjoyed even two years ago. If this isn’t a depression, I don’t know what is.

The ‘dismal science’ of economics, tied to the fluctuations of the stock market and the satirical fiction of rosy government economic figures, have not yet found a way to accurately calculate the misery index — in other words, the impact all of this is actually having on the average American. Without that, economics is just a lot of polysyllabic hogwash designed to nail a Master’s thesis, blow hot air up the skirts of the affluent, or secure university tenure, without relevance to the real world; no more substantial than Bush’s dizzy bleating that we have a ‘strong economy’ that’s doing so well we need a ‘stimulus package’ to salvage it.

Speaking of that ill-fated Bush ‘stimulus package,’ it will have no long-lasting effect; people will pay off a few bills with their ‘tax rebate’ and we’ll be right back to square one in a couple of months. This economy is an open sucking gut wound and Bush’s stimulus band-aid is not going to heal it. To even begin to correct the damage, we’d have to immediately quit these expensive overseas wars we can no longer afford, cut the defense budget by two/thirds, impose tariffs on corporations that import products and export jobs, crack down on corporate crime, strictly regulate the banking, lending and investment businesses, cancel trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA that work against our public interest, nationalize health care and bring down the cost, end all forms of corporate welfare and tax dodges, substantially raise taxes on corporations and those making over $200,000 a year, institute FDR-style job programs that pay a decent wage, ban corporate money from our political system, eliminate energy monopolies, and free ourselves from the bondage of foreign oil and the slave masters like Exxon Mobil that rack up obscene profits from peddling the stuff.

Since none of this will be done, we’re fated to watch the US sink to the level of a third-world country over the next twenty years, while other players in Europe and Asia call the tune economically. This time around, however, as the misery spreads, it will be worse than that of the 1930s – when Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932, he didn’t have a $9 trillion deficit burdening him, and he wasn’t borrowing money from overseas to finance our recovery. I just hope we come out the other side as well as our ancestors emerged from the Great Depression — and without a world war.

Unfortunately, some of us will only get the hint when they are unable to afford a new MP3 player. Don’t worry — that’s coming soon.