We expect ever-grosser competitive lying from the presidential primary candidates. We should expect no less from the media "analysts," politicians and academics competing for big business favors. With those expectations, we might be less disappointed by what we get.
These days, the hype about "economic recovery" is intense. Obama pitches it as a reason to reward him with campaign donations and votes. The money should flow in from the business community that wants badly to hide the fact that recovery has - from the beginning of this crisis - been only for them at the expense of recovery for everyone else. They need a president who hypes "recovery" as if it's about helping everyone in some general or "fair" way. The votes should come, Obama's team calculates, because average people are becoming increasingly desperate. They want someone in power who might help them even just a bit.
The Republicans had planned to use the economy against Obama (as he did against them in 2008). The recovery hype drove them to emphasize instead contraception, religion and the ever-popular Iran-bashing. By abandoning their attacks on "Obama's bad economy," Republicans leave the field to those hyping recovery.
The major media take their cues from politicians and their orders from the mega-corporations that own them. Mainstream academics, lowest on the public relations hype totem pole, celebrate recovery, too. Then they remember that they are supposed to be independent thinkers, so they find something about "the recovery" to "debate." That turns out to be, yet again, whether government interventions help or hinder economic recovery. In reality, big business leaders and the top politicians they control collaborate ever more closely for their mutual benefit. To mainstream academics falls the public relations task of pretending that big business and the government are adversaries.
However convenient to some, to speak of economic recovery today is false. There is no general improvement in economic conditions, let alone the sustained, self-reinforcing economic upturn that the word "recovery" is supposed to mean. Here is what we know early in March, 2012. The "good" news is about unemployment (slowly declining for a few months), retail sales (slowly rising) and especially sales of automobiles (rising quickly). It is also about corporate profits (high) and General Motors' (GM) profits (record high). Finally, the stock market had a nice upturn over recent months as well. That's pretty much it for the good news.
