If you haven’t benefited from any of these economic miracles, don’t feel too bad: There are lies, damned lies and statistics, and when those fail, you can always use the nuclear option: economic statistics, which can easily be stretched and twisted to make things look better than they actually are. Case in point: Is the unemployment rate too high? No problem, just stop counting people who have dropped out of the work force as well as those who’ve been kicked off the unemployment roles but who still don’t have jobs. If that doesn’t do the trick, count partially employed workers — i.e., people who work twenty-five hours a week at Walmart for minimum wage — as fully employed. Bingo! Unemployment just shrank like magic.
It’s all hollow propaganda that every administration and its partisans use to bamboozle us. If the president at the time is a Democrat, phone up Vox and the Washington Monthly; if he’s a Republican, tell Matt Drudge and Sean Hannity. They’ll spread the good news, which will then be used to succour the faithful and bully the naysayers. The fact is, inequality is still growing. Wages are still stagnant and/or declining, people are in debt up to their eyeballs and they have shitty, overpriced healthcare. Unemployment is still much higher than the official rate, and even though economists tell us there is no inflation, rents are sky high, and food and gas prices are rising too. When Walmart is the largest employer in the country, something is deeply, fundamentally wrong.
When the space between official government statistics and the reality of people’s lives becomes too great, a country becomes disillusioned and cynical. This morphs into quiet, seething anger, which finally bubbles over and expresses itself in rage. We’re not at the third stage yet, although Trumpism is a flashing red warning light, but if we stay on our current path we definitely will be. When that happens, you can bet the country isn’t going to turn left. There are no FDRs in our future. When the lid blows off this pot, our childish, unreflective, anti-intellectual population is going to double down with Trump (or whatever Trumpian facsimile happens to be available at the time), and turn hard right. Children want a big strong daddy who’s going to make things all better. Trump (or Pence, or Ted Cruz) can play that part much better than any lefty on the American political horizon.
This has all reminded me of a post I wrote in 2011 called “A Worm’s Eye View of the Recovery.” I had just seen Barack Obama on TV blathering about the wonderful recovery we were then experiencing, and I remember thinking, what recovery? Things were better than in the immediate wake of the economic crash, and according to the narrow definitions economists use for such things, we were technically recovering, but this gave a deeply misleading impression about how things really were. Life on the ground was still shitty — much worse than life before 2008 — and there were precious few indications that it was ever going to get better (it hasn’t). Yet there was the president, cheerfully tossing off abstract statistics about GDP and the employment rate, as if this were ironclad proof that happy days were here again. It inspired me to write a post which, it turns out, was the only thing I’ve ever written that threatened to become viral. It didn’t, and my brush with internet fame proved fleeting. Alas, my blog remains a lonely and obscure outpost in the series of tubes called the Internet. Sigh.
Anyway, since I don’t have anything new to say, I’ve decided to recycle this old post which still holds up, in my opinion. The economic situation it describes is bleaker than things at present, though not, I think, for much longer, but our political situation is much more dire. Anyway, it’s still worth a couple of minutes of your time.
You don’t have to be a comedian to get a laugh in my neighborhood. All you have to do is walk up to someone, just about anyone, and say, “Hey, cheer up, we’re in a recovery.”
You may not get a belly laugh, but you’ll definitely hear something in the nature of a chuckle or a guffaw, or at least a snicker followed by a sarcastic eye roll.
I’ve got bankruptcy to the left of me, foreclosures to the right, and all manner of human degradation in between. When I mount the crow’s nest to get a look around, this is what I see: one guy who just got laid off, and now he and his wife are living on his unemployment and her pension. Once his claim runs out, they could be in for some severe austerity. On the other side, there’s a single mother who’s hours have been cut in half and who’s in the process of losing her home. The family right next door is also in dire circumstances. Dad is underemployed and mom has lupus. They were going to cancel Christmas this year, but all the neighbors pitched in and got presents for their kids. George W. Bush would have considered it uniquely American.
There’s even a guy whose wife just left him for another women. That’s not an economic problem, I know, but it fits in rather snugly with the general theme of misery that runs through these parts. It is so unrelievedly dismal you almost have to laugh, at least in a tragicomic sort of way. I know countless people who’ve been laid off and just flat out can’t find another job. I hear a new horror story every week, and I often find myself just shaking my head and saying, “You have got to be freakin’ kidding me!”
Most people aren’t starving or sleeping under bridges, mind you (though some are). They are subsisting, but only precariously. They’re just muddling along through this grim subterranean world of near poverty, chronic anxiety, and deepening gloom. The most accurate word to describe their condition is submerged. I should emphasize that these people I’m referring to aren’t regular members of the working poor. Until a few years ago, they all had what could loosely be described as middle class lives. They weren’t getting rich, to be sure, but they worked every day, paid the bills, and enjoyed their weekends. Life wasn’t glamorous but it was okay. At any rate, it was a slightly more varied and enriching experience than the grinding, joyless struggle it’s become.
Hard times are not unusual here, but there has never been this kind of prolonged malaise, and it’s leading to a sense of hopelessness and futility that is unique. In the past, people could more or less shrug off hard times because they knew they were temporary. Hang in, tough it out, things will always get better. Historically they always have. That belief is gone. It’s been replaced by the growing conviction that things are never going to improve. Life as we knew it has become extinct. It’s all gone forever, and there is nothing in the future but deep black uncertainty.
The other day I was struck by this weird feeling of deja vu. Where had I seen this kind of listlessness before? Where had I observed this sort of laggard, slumping despair? Then I remembered. It was back in Russia during the Yeltsin years. It was the exact same atmosphere: Things were shitty and getting worse. Life was shabby and dilapidated. Their rulers were corrupt and didn’t give a damn. Cosmically rich oligarchs were cannibalizing the country, and the system was so badly broken there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it. Drink up.
(Interestingly, that’s when Vladimir Zhirinovsky rose to prominence. He’s a right-wing clown worthy of our own Republican party, a Slavic Pat Buchanan. “We like a lot of the things he says,” the people I lived with told me, “but we would never support him because he’s crazy.” Score one for the intelligence of the Russian people. Would that the American electorate was that sophisticated.)
In the words of the inestimable Charles Pierce, people got no f***ing jobs, people got no f***ing money. And, I would add somewhat ominously, people got no f***ing hope.
There doesn’t seem to be any real rage yet, except, of course, among the right-wingers, who are blaming all the wrong people for all the wrong things, just like the right-wingers near you. People aren’t raising hammer and sickle flags and demanding blood. Me and a retired math professor down the street - a raging lefty like myself — are the only ones who seem to be approaching that enlightened stage, but then we’re both intellectuals, ha ha. There is, however, a very distinct mood of hostility towards our elites. I don’t want to exaggerate here. It’s mild, but it’s definitely there. It’s noticeable. People are aware that their suffering hasn’t been caused by their own failings (the Republican view), nor is it the result of a natural economic downturn, a good old fashioned “market correction” that, given a few well placed pokes and prods, will eventually just cycle away (the Obama view).
No, they’re fully cognizant of the fact that they’ve been ripped off, plain and simple, and the criminals who did it not only walked away scott free, but are still in charge of the show. Hence the pessimism. Hence the despair. Things aren’t getting better because they can’t get any better: the convicts are running the prison, and they ain’t doin it with our best interest in mind. People have perceived this basic fact and it’s made them cynical.
When Obama and his supporters speak of the recovery as if it’s an established fact, it just sounds like so much hollow BS. That’s what the recovery looks like down here on the mudsill.
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