Speaking of Recession

Jim Hightower:

For economists, a “recession” is a clinical term defined as two or more consecutive quarters of decline in the GDP. For several years, America's economy has been expanding, while the incomes of the majority of people have been falling, but economists haven’t cared. For them, the measure of a healthy economy is simple growth – not whether we all benefit from it.

[...]

[R]eal wages have been declining for more than five years.

[...]

When George W first ran for president, he was asked what his economic plan might be. “We ought to make the pie higher,” he answered. People laughed, thinking it was another of his verbal stumbles. Seven years later, we can see that he was serious. His plan was to put our national economic pie on the highest shelf, so only the elites can reach it. Now that the economy is falling into an “official” recession to go along with the unofficial recession that ordinary folks have long been experiencing, even the economists and politicians can see that Bush’s plan worked just as he wanted.

  Jim Hightower

Barbara Ehrenreich:

Now if those great and solemn economic indicators -- growth, productivity and employment rates -- have become de-coupled from most people's lived experience, then there's something wrong with the economists, the economy, or both. The clue lies in the word "most." We have become so unequal as a nation that we increasingly occupy two different economies -- one for the rich and one for everyone else -- and the latter has been in a recession, if not a depression, for a long, long time.

[...]

[A] revealing 2001 study by McKinsey also credited America's productivity growth to "managerial innovations" and cited Wal-Mart as a model performer, meaning that we are also looking at fiendish schemes to extract more work for less pay. Yes, you can generate more output per apparent hour of work by falsifying time records, speeding up assembly lines, doubling workloads, and cutting back on breaks. Productivity may look good from the top, but at the middle and the bottom it can feel a lot like pain.

[...]

What is this fixation on growth anyway? As a general rule of biological survival, any creature or entity that depends on perpetual growth is well worth avoiding, lest you be eaten alive. As Bill McKibben argues in his book Deep Economy, the "cult of growth" has led to global warming, ghastly levels of pollution, and diminishing resources. Tumors grow, at least until they kill their hosts; economies ought to be sustainable.

  Alternet

Reuters:

In 2006, the latest year for which Census Bureau figures are available, 12.3 percent of Americans were living in poverty, compared with 11.7 percent in 2001, the year of the last recession.

"It's unusual in an economic recovery that ... we still have poverty higher than it was in the recession that preceded it," said Sharon Parrott, a policy analyst for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank in Washington.

  Reuters

That would be the recovery where the rich recovered what little the poor had.

There's George's legacy: a war with no end, two recessions and an extra two million poor people. Nice job.