GR Press Announces End of Recession….Again

Last Monday, November 8, the Grand Rapids Press ran an article which explained that Michigan was finally “climbing out of the recession.”

But let’s not get excited. The Press has run a number of articles saying the same thing over the past few years. Back in 2008, we had “Fifth Third Exec Predicts End to Credit Crisis,” in which we were told that we hadn’t even had a recession yet: “Stapley sees an end that could come soon enough [thanks to the Wall Street bailout] to avert a true recession—or at least make any national recession short-lived.” Then in 2009, we had “Is Recession Really Over?” with a Fifth Third bank official explaining how things were going to improve and the stock market was about to rally. More stories were scattered throughout 2010: “Economic Panel Says Recession Ended in June 2009”;  “There’s No Shortage of Money, There’s a Shortage of Confidence”; “Stocks Post Meager Gains Despite Strong Jobs News”; and one of my personal favorites, “Do Extended Unemployment Benefits Discourage Job Searches?” Right…it’s those lazy workers’ fault that they don’t have new jobs yet! How could I not have seen that?

So you can’t blame reporter Jackie Headapohl for being just a bit tentative this time around. Her Monday article was headlined with a question (“Is Michigan Finally Climbing Out of the Recession?”) and is not based on any investigative work of her own. Instead, it recaps a recent article in Crain’s Detroit which predicts “mild economic growth” for the state in 2011. But, Crain’s adds, “…it will be quite a while before [Michigan’s] unemployment rate gets to the national level—at least a year.”

Or never.

First let’s recap a few facts that GRIID has featured in recent articles on this site:

•Grand Rapids’ poverty rate now stands at 25 percent.

•Its current “official” unemployment rate is 10.5 percent.

•In September 2010, foreclosures jumped 30 percent over August’s numbers.

Add to those statistics a new study that shows that across the country, 77 percent of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck.

Every time the Grand Rapids Press has run an article announcing the end of the recession, or reminding people that the recession ended in June of 2009, readers write in protest, saying, “Not as far as I’m concerned!” So what’s going on? Why do the capitalists keep insisting that everything’s back to normal?

As Bill Moyers would say, “Welcome to the plutocracy.”

Moyers gave a speech in October as part of this year’s Howard Zinn Lecture Series. He chose a topic that he feels is vital to our understanding of our current situation: we have been robbed. We now live in a society where the wealth distribution is equivalent to, or worse than, it is in banana republics such as Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Guyana. A concerted effort began in 1980 to demolish the middle class and shift wealth into the hands of the richest Americans. The government, the media, and the financial industry have conspired together to hide that fact from us. So Moyers decided to lay out the entire scam in his lecture:

•The richest 1 percent of Americans take home 24 percent of the country’s income. That’s almost 10 percent more than the wealth gap during the Gilded Age, where the richest 1 percent had corned 15 percent of the nation’s wealth.

•CEOs now make an average of 531 times as much as the average worker.

•American CEOs have cut, in the past decade, one in three manufacturing jobs in the U.S.

•Under the Bush tax cuts, which will now probably be re-instated, the richest 0.1 percent of Americans will receive about $370,000 in tax cuts…and it will not “trickle down” because studies show this class invests tax-return money, not spends it.

•From 1950 to 1980, an even distribution of wealth across the classes created an average income which rose from $17,719 to $30,941, or about $661 a year.

•But from 1980, when Reagan took office and the official plundering of national wealth began, to 2008, the average worker’s income has gone from $30,914 to $31,244. That means over the past 20 years, our average income has only risen $303. That’s $15.15 a year.

It’s called what Moyers calls “wage repression.” It’s created two different Americas. And that’s clearly class warfare.

Moyers states:  That’s how financial capitalism works today: Conserving cash rather than bolstering hiring and production; investing in their own shares to prop up their share prices and make their stock more attractive to Wall Street. To hell with everyone else…If this were a functioning democracy, our financial institutions would be helping everyday Americans and businesses get the mortgages and loans – the capital – they need to keep going; they’re not, even as the financiers are reaping robust awards…The  super-rich earn their fortunes with overseas labor, selling to overseas consumers and managing financial transactions that have little to do with the rest of America,  while relying entirely or almost entirely on immigrant servants at one of several homes around the country.

Moyer’s entire speech can be read here. It’s well worth the time.

And it explains a lot. The capitalists are telling us the recession is over because for them, it is. In fact, between the bailout dollars on Wall Street, the constant squeezing of wages and the invented “jobs deficit,” good times have never been better for them. But the other 90 percent of us are trapped in the gray world of a recession—a recession that those in power have a vested interest in continuing, if possible, forever.

Mainstream newspapers like the Grand Rapids Press help corporations maintain the smoke-and-mirrors illusion that things are just not as bad as we think they are. That’s the purpose of those jolting, occasional articles about the end of the recession. It’s a weapon of mass confusion, and an effective one, considering how much has been stolen from us and how little we still understand about the criminals who robbed us.