Prairie Fire Journal

It's amazing what kind of bullshit will ooze out of the mouth of economists and government statisticians.

On the one hand there's the economists who this week claim that the recession is over. These are the same jarheads who during all of 2008 said we weren't in a recession, but then in 2009 admitted that we were in one and that it actually began in December 2007. And now it's over. Really? American workers are still losing their jobs at a rate of over 200,000 every month. The official national unemployment rate continues to rise and will be over 10 percent by the end of the year. The real unemployment rate is closer to 20 percent. Millions more workers are facing wage cuts or only working part time.

Then on the other hand we have the statisticians who crunch the inflation numbers. According to them, 2009 will be a year of "negative inflation." Bizarre terminology. Until recently I never heard of negative inflation. I thought inflation was when the price of most stuff went up, and deflation was when the price of most stuff went down. But now we have the oxymoron of negative inflation. You can't find bullshit this thick, even in Texas. The purveyors of negative inflation must not do their own shopping.

However, what's really at play here is the fact that when the number crunchers do their fancy calculations they leave out most of the stuff that ordinary people buy. That's why, even though most items in the supermarket continue to rise sharply in price, the statisticians can claim we have negative inflation. They do the same thing with the unemployment rate. Leave out most of the people who are actually unemployed and things don't look as bad statistically as they really are.

But, hey, the Dow hit 10,000 today and taxpayer-bailed-out banks are prospering from their rape-and-pillage of credit card customers by jacking up APRs before a new law kicks in in 2010. Isn't it sweet how Congress gives the loan sharks plenty of lead time to fuck us all before they supposedly rein-in the crooks. It's all just smoke and mirrors. Nothing has changed. The economy is improving for the robber barons, while the working class continues to crash and burn. That's as it was under Bush and the Republicans, and that's how it continues to be under Obama and the Democrats.

The recession may be over for the fat cats, but the working class is still in a depression.