© Sharpy/John VachonJune 1941. Rain. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The Case/Shiller index reports a "broad-based slowdown" for US home prices, and that in the rear view mirror that looks at Q3. So that's not where those 3.89% came from, it wasn't housing (wonder what it was). The Gallup Christmas survey lost 8% of exuberance in one month. What this adds up to is that Americans may not spend all of that saved gas money, and that means there's a real danger of deflation coming to America too - as if Japanese and European attempts to export their own were not enough yet.
While the media continue to just about exclusively paint a picture of recovery and an improving economy, certainly in the US - Europe and Japan it's harder to get away with that rosy image -, in ordinary people's reality a completely different picture is being painted in sweat, blood, agony and despair. Whatever part of the recovery mirage may have a grain of reality in it, it is paid for by something being taken away from people leading real lives. US unemployment numbers are being massaged three ways to Sunday, as is common knowledge, or should be; the amounts of working age people not working, and not being counted as unemployed either, is staggering.
But there's a very large, and growing, number of people who do work, but find it impossible to sustain either themselves or their families on their wages. That's how the recovery, fake as it even is, is paid for. And this will have grave consequences for many years, if not decades, to come.
If a government would come clean with its citizens, explain the overwhelming debt situation a nation is in, that everyone will have to do with less at least for a while, and then openly start restructuring the debts, those consequences would be much less damaging. But all governments choose to talk about only recovery and growth, and to let their people suffer the consequences of the policies enacted to achieve these goals, even if after 6-7 years of crisis and dozens of trillions in stimulus, we're no closer to either. Quite the contrary. We're not in 'drive', we're stuck in 'reverse'. We're backing up. We're moving backwards.
For more graphs and explanations, see original article.
There's much more at the link, and every word is worth reading. The mental consequences of the gutting of our societies by governments and the financial industry does not get nearly enough scrutiny. We act, or politicians and media do, as if millions of people losing their jobs, and over half of young people in certain nations never having had a chance of a job, is just a matter of numbers, of mere statistics.
And then all sorts of 'experts' claim it's all just the price to pay for technological progress, that will make everything so much better for everyone some sunny day soon. But that sunny day will never come, the techno happy ideal version of the future has already died with the debt incurred to facilitate it. We need to take a step backwards, or we'll continue to drive backwards. Or be driven, to be more precise, since we've handed over the steering wheel to people who have no intention of taking us where we want to, and should, go. They are only intent on taking us where they can squeeze us most.
Thing is, there's precious little left to squeeze. And they know that much better than most of us do. That's why it's imperative that we should get rid of these clowns, or there'll be a whole lot more trauma. We can organize our societies, and we can even organize ways to downscale them peacefully . But not with those at the helm who see us only as mere entities to draw blood from.
We need to be a whole lot more assertive about this; we shouldn't want to be surrounded by traumatized friends and family members and neighbors There's nothing good for us in that. It'll be used against us in increased surveillance and clampdowns and all that comes with it.
We can have good jobs for everyone, all it takes is to have what we need, produced in our own communities and societies, instead of having it shipped over from China. It's not rocket science. It's just that there's a certain segment in society, which unfortunately happens to be the most powerful one, that doesn't want us to do that. They want more and bigger, not smaller and better.
Until we solve that issue, things will keep getting worse. And not just a little bit. We need to find leaders that actually represent us, our needs and desires and ideas, and we need to find ways to elect them. If we don't, we face a very bleak future in which there won't be much left for us to choose. Or enjoy. We live in a pivotal moment in time, but we don't recognize it for what it is. We seem to think it's all some minor hiccup. We are dead wrong.
read The Automatic Earth for years. These are very smart, dedicated people - Raol and Stoneleigh. Take a look at their analysis. They may not be clued in to or talking about psychopathy but they know what this is! They are working on describing HOW the psychopaths are destroying everything. Check them out.