Recession? Surely not!

We continue to be assured — by the President of the United States, no less, and on more than one occasion in recent weeks — that America is not in a recession. George W. Bush clearly stated, on February 26, 2008, that “We're not in a recession, I don't think we will go in a recession. We're in a slowdown, and there's a difference.”

I’d like to appeal that to the Supreme Court, if you don’t mind, and specifically to the late Justice Potter Stewart, whose most well-known observation I now paraphrase:

I shall not today attempt further to define what I understand it to be; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.

Justice Stewart was referring to pornography; I’m talking about what’s going on with our economy, something equally obscene.

For almost a year now, even the casual news consumer has been aware of a disturbing rise in the number of foreclosures, a trend that began well over two years ago, by my reckoning. By last summer it had blown up into what came to be called “the sub-prime mortgage crisis,” with the potential to take down our national economy, along with big chunks of the rest of the world.

If, in my anger, I were to digress here to place blame (hint: the bottom line is greed) I’d not get to the point of the piece, which is to offer a reality check as we move into the spring and summer and on to the election season that follows.

Fact: Gasoline prices are moving beyond affordability for ordinary folks, with no relief in sight. It was $1.59 a gallon in January 2001.

Fact: The price of gold, which always rises when an economy is sinking because investors consider it the safest place for their money, reached $1,000 an ounce last week. It was $268 in January 2001.

Fact: The value of the American dollar has dropped so low that it is no longer the universal currency it once was. That makes everything we import more expensive — the good news, perhaps, would be to put lead-painted toys out of our reach.

Fact: Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc., a leading investment banker and brokerage firm, announced last week that it had insufficient funds to pay all its investors, thereby generating a minor run (shades of 1929) and a near 50% plunge in its stock value; it was finally bailed out by J. P. Morgan Chase, who purchased it for $2 a share, with the help of a short-term loan from the Federal Reserve. How did this happen? The hedge funds they had established on the basis of sub-prime mortgage holdings had tanked.

Fact: 80, 000 American jobs were lost in just January and February of this year. But last week Mr. Bush assured us that unemployment rates remain low. Anyone care to square those numbers for me?

I know one thing: A person who has exhausted unemployment benefits no longer counts as unemployed; nor does a computer programmer or engineer who has taken a job tending bar or pushing carts at Wal-Mart or flipping burgers; nor, by the way, do all those real estate agents who gave up because homes aren’t selling — along with other small business owners who have seen their incomes wither away, they are independent contractors and not even eligible for unemployment benefits.

But look! See all those ads than in high-gloss magazines and on television for luxury items — homes, vacations, cars, jewelry! See all those store shelves groaning under the weight of more stuff than we could ever consume, more choices than a sane person would welcome.

Surrounded by such affluence, you’d be tempted to think Mr. Bush is right, that things are hunky-dory, just a little slow. And that the tax cuts worked, by the way.
Except he’s wrong, and we fail to recognize that at our peril.

I’ll come back to my point: It’s time for a reality check as we move through spring and summer into the election season. We need a new direction in this country.

Like most of America I have been stunned by the incredible turnout to vote in primaries all across the country. However large or small the state, the number of voters has in some cases more than doubled from years past. Photographs of long lines at polling places, huge rallies for candidates, stories of frantic election judges running out of ballots, all told the tale:

We are really anxious to move on.

In a beloved Disney cartoon, Donald Duck and Goofy undertook to paint a fence: Goofy got to painting faster and faster and Donald Duck asked him why. “I’m trying to get the fence finished before I run out of paint,” explained Goofy.

All those folks lined up, all the enthusiasm, all the rallies, all the participation, all the attention to every bit of campaign news? We are just trying to get the thing over with before any more damage is done.