Did You Hear?

The recession is over! Celebrate! Break out the champagne and caviar and dance the night away! What’s that? You say you can’t afford champagne? Get some Brut! What? Caviar is too rich for your pocketbook? Maybe some Cheez Whiz will do? Wait, you can’t dance the night away because the only job you could find is the graveyard shift at the 7-11 for minimum wage, even though you have a PhD in Astrophysics? Join the club, we’ll meet you in the morning!

I don’t know which standards are used to determine whether or not a recession is over, but it seems like the only idiot retarded enough to really believe that phooey is Christine O’Donnell. You must have some ruby encrusted blinders on to not see the thick misery, spread like a fine mist across the nation in these deeply troubling economic times.

Did any of us ever really believe that these jokers were dealing straight with us? I hope not, because, according to them, not only is the recession over, it has been over since July of 2009. That’s a year and a half ago.

The only thing stopping me from screaming obscenities is the fact that these shmucks are so deep in their own delusions they have no actual connection to the real world and, thus deprived of all real sensation, could never hear my frustrated, grunt-laden cursing.

I mean, I’m no economics major here, I barely understand how my credit card works, like most good Americans, but I can see a few things real clearly:

1. I have a master’s degree and still can only find .4 of a full time job in my chosen profession and am, therefore, living under the official poverty line
2. The Food Bank I now have to go to in order to survive has half the product on the shelves and in the freezers as it did when I was, much more happily, volunteering there a mere two years ago
3. No one I know is secure in their job unless they are very close to retirement and, in their cases, the opposite is true and they are so secure in their jobs they just might stay there a few more years in order to try to recoup some of the major losses they suffered to their retirement funds in the general malaise of the manic markets over the past few years
4. Most people I know who are looking for work can find nothing even close to the jobs that they would’ve expected to be able to find at this point in their careers and, therefore, are being forced to either stay, indefinitely, on unemployment or, disgustedly, accept jokes of jobs for a pittance
5. Stuff costs way too dang much. The same amount of money I had just a few years ago lasts me half the time it used to, even though I am buying less unecessaries
6. I don’t get fifty two credit card offers a month
7. People I know are losing their homes
8. People I know can’t find affordable housing
9. States cannot support the basic programs that we rely on like education, law and social services.
10. Shops are still empty in my home town, too many shops.

So, I’d like to know what these other fools’ ideas about the economic recession are. What, exactly, do they base their findings on? What are the criteria? The stock market? Whatever. If recession is defined by arbitrary criteria or other characteristics that don’t actually affect our everyday lives, what is the reason I could ever have to actually listen to these money-monkeys’ ideas about what is or is not a recession?

Let’s just change the terms. This is a bad economy. Period. People are poor and unable to meet their own basic needs to a level that is unsatisfactory. The economy will be good when this is no longer true. Perhaps the recession is over for Wall Street, but the bad economy trundles on for the rest of us. Cheers to false cheese frostings on Saltine crackers, hope you don’t get shot tonight at the corner mini mart.