Prairie Fire Journal

According to economists associated with the National Association of Business Economics (NABE), the American economy is no longer in recession. What's so funny about all of this is that the membership of NABE is populated mostly by the very people who got us into this economic mess in the first place. These are the same economic fortune tellers who repeatedly said we weren't in a recession even as the country plunged into a financial meltdown.

These are the economists who cheered on the rising stock market and housing bubble, saying everything was just dandy, even as workers' wages stagnated and declined to a point where many families found themselves having to borrow against the equity in their homes just to keep pace with the rising cost of living. These are the economists who thought banking and financial deregulation was a good thing.

Now these same economists who just got through driving the economy over a cliff are telling the American people that we are in a jobless recovery. This is absolute nonsense. Obviously nothing has changed and these alleged economic experts haven't learned a damn thing. Jobs are everything. And not just any jobs, but good paying jobs. And the economy is still based predominantly on consumption rather than production. If people have no jobs and there is no genuine wealth production, then what will fuel an economic recovery?

According to the NABE lard heads, Wall Street and its phoney wealth derived from thin air is going to once again bring us economic prosperity. Take a look at the shrunken value of your stock-based 401k plan and you can see just how phoney the Wall Street-created wealth really is. Nothing is produced, it's all a big pyramid scheme destined for repeated crashes. Workers are paid less but encouraged to buy more in order to fuel the economy. That requires workers to borrow more money and use more credit cards. It's an economy based on debt production, not wealth production.

Those who don't learn from history are destined to repeat it, and it's apparent that those who are driving the American economy are a bunch of amnesiacs. They are simply re-inflating the bubble once again so that a few years from now we can replay this whole mess all over again. An economy that is 70-percent based on consumer spending is nothing more than a house of cards that is destined for repeated economic collapse. That is where we are in America, and that's where we're headed.

What America has isn't change, it's just more of the same.