by Daniel Patrick Welch

These recessions are getting shorter and shorter. If you delay admitting it's happening until the shit really hits the fan, then claim it's all better while the shit is still spraying all over you, eventually it will become a complete non-event, like the ho-hum 'discouraged workers' who keep pushing those jobless claims down. Good going, guys! Way to take one for the statistical team!

The other intriguing development about the "modern" recovery is that it miraculously continues to be a "recovery" without some previously indispensable component. Under Clinton and Bush, we were introduced to the "jobless" recovery. Now, with foreclosures yet to peak and record upside down mortgages still to blow, we are apparently being fed the "homeless recovery." See? With each recovery, we can begin to see past those boring necessities that clouded our vision in the past. With joblessness and homelessness becoming old hat, I can't wait for what's next--maybe a foodless recovery or an airless recover--for future administrations to bestow on us.

All hilarious sarcasm aside (and I am a hoot, aren't I? Isn't misery funny?!) it is a terribly disheartening time. I can't remember a time where the chirping of the Talking Heads Chorus or the Powers That Be was more completely in synch, while at the same time being so completely out of touch with the experience the rest of us are living.

Not that journalists and cheerleaders have had separate job descriptions for quite awhile now; still it boggles the mind to hear people meekly 'report' as fact the data that spews forth like clockwork from government and industry mouthpieces. The THC and PTB are still chirping over the so-called 3.6% housing "jump" when the sample included an 11% margin of error. No one needs a degree in statistics to see through such a load of crap. Yet the spewing is allowed to continue.

The only recession concession the THCPTB team will make is that the non-existent recovery is 'fragile' until consumers start loosening up their spending habits again. Duh. A whopping 70% of GDP is from consumer spending--there simply is no economy without us buying as much crap as we can get our hands on. Now, people may finally be catching on to the fact that working 80 hours a week at a job they hate to finance the overvalued glorified cottage in the suburbs, which is mortgaged for more than it is worth to finance the never-stop-spending lifestyle that keeps them on the treadmill--that it all kind of SUCKS! Shhhhhh! The system will simply collapse if the people actually figure this one out.

Well, guess what, THCPTB? They're onto it. And the whiff of panic is growing stronger in both quarters, among the Talking Heads whose job it is to convince people to keep spending, and the people who have no money left to spend. THERE IS NO MORE MONEY for folks to spend, and therefore, there can be no sustained return to The Way Things Were. Those who think economics can't really be that simple have forgotten the old joke about the economist stranded on the island with the chemist and the physicist: they have one can of beans, and will starve if they can't figure out how to open it. After the chemist and physicist trade long and improbable solutions about boiling it or throwing it up in the air (the longer-winded and more boring the better for the joke, unfortunately) the economist smoothly steps in and says, "okay, ASSUME a can opener..." Why would they know what they are talking about when the whole game has been one step above reading tea leaves and flipping a coin? Of course, that's not fair to the coin flippers--they're right half the time....

Only such a fantasy world could yield a phrase like "the real economy" as if it is something that has to be actually described. In "the real economy," people are frantically going about the business of trying to do more with less, getting used to a new and grim future in which their dwindling incomes are expected to pay for more goods and services as government abandons them in a thoroughly bipartisan orgy of throwing money at the banksters and criminals who are already obscenely rich to begin with.

People look around them, talk to each other, work next to each other, fight with each other, and they know. They stop listening to the THC--induced buzz and live their lives. And on a recent trip to the mall to see how all these new green shoots were doing, it all comes into focus. It was raining, so the parking lots were packed as people flocked to the the local cathedral, the modern-dayhouse of worship that is the suburban shopping mall. But inside people were more or less wandering around like zombies, buying one or two things from the anchor stores or shops blasting sales, two-for-one, and discounts of 110% (okay, I made that one up). But I couldn't make up the fact that one store had a huge orange sticker screaming that it had been SEIZED...damn, that's a sobering shot of reality shoppers really didn't need. Or the overheard conversations: "I'm tired--let's find a couch and sit and stare..." Or the fact that there was a line, but only at one store: the Dunkin Donuts! Green shoots my ass. There may be hope in the plain fact that the people aren't as stupid as those in power think they are.

And take housing, for instance. No one knows what they are talking about, as the aforementioned statistical White Lies, Big Lies, and plain old Whoppers attest. The only real measure of what something is "worth" is what people have recently been paying--actually paying--for similar things. This is easier than it sounds to bypass the THC and Bernanke's Banksters, at least on a small scale. I was curious about the local market, so I started keeping track of a simple trend, recent sale prices as a function of assessed value. Of course, real estate agents will claw their eyes out and everyone in the business will scream that assessed value shouldn't be confused with market value. It needn't be. As the only constant applied by a local taxing authority to all properties, all it needs to do is serve as a backdrop for price fluctuation.

In June, a sampling of one- and two-family homes yielded an average sale price of around 88.8% of assessed value--a very grim picture indeed, as assessed values are already considered to be low. In July, the much vaunted "jump" did indeed yield a local blip--up to about 92.8%, though but for a frantic flurry in the last two days of the month the average would actually have gone down. The brutal news is, when trying to do the same analysis for August, there was almost no data to analyze once throwing out highs and lows for statistical balance. Of the slim pickings in sales (less than half the volume of the two prior months), the average had dropped to around 80% of assessed value. Yikes. And this trend was visible, with a little digging, weeks before the recent "surprising" drop in August sales that is just now making news. A small picture, admittedly, but what else can we trust when we are being blamed for not stoking the recovery by spending money we dont' have?

And in this traditionally crowded college town, where lack of sufficient housing is always an issue, ubiquitous "for rent" signs persist into October, long after the crush of returning students has settled into the new semester. Meanwhile, billions of our dollars are being spent on endless wars--another bipartisan boondoggle. And trillions--yes, trillions--can be pulled out of thin air to prop the whole thing up. Remember that the next time you need a bake sale to fund extracurricular activities at your kid's school. People know that there is something terribly wrong. And the only good news is that they may, finally, have stopped listening to the THC.

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© 2009 Daniel Patrick Welch. Reprint permission granted with credit and link to http://danielpwelch.com. Writer, singer, linguist and activist Daniel Patrick Welch lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts, with his wife, Julia Nambalirwa-Lugudde. Together they run The Greenhouse School (http://www.greenhouseschool.org). Translations of articles are available in over two dozen languages. Links to the website are appreciated.