Did Someone Say Recovery?

I wrote the piece below in response to a post over at financial blogger and trader extraordinaire Rick Ackerman's site. Apparently he is considering featuring it tomorrow. In the meantime, here is a link to a piece that just came out today that buttresses my assertions.

I expect that cognitive dissonance about the land is now both pervasive and immense. The number of unemployed, underemployed, and otherwise financially and economically imperiled has ratcheted up over the last few years, and though the economic deterioration that began in earnest in early 2008 seems to have, at least by some modestly credible measures, abated somewhat in the last few months, the new normal, such as it is, is distinctly less healthy, less favorable to most, than it was.

And yet, despite the immutable facts of a reduction in the standard of living for so many, we keep hearing talk of recovery, which is, by definition, absurd, since a recovery assumes the reclamation of a prior state. The only prior state that has been recovered is the one that Wall Street was operating in before the financial world, as we knew it, ended in a thunderous calamity. In fact, even that picture isn’t entirely accurate since Wall Street has now, de facto, if not de jure, captured at least two, if not all three, branches comprising the Federal Government.

And the Federal Government, whose agenda is unmistakably crafted and shaped by corporations, if we are operating euphemistically, and owned like a mindless piece of chattel (by the remnants of the FIRE economy) if we are not, in concert with the MSM, which is also the province, lock, stock, and barrel of “bottom line” concerns, are all in on maintaining -to the vast majority’s detriment- the grand, if tenuous, illusion of prosperity. That Matrix will continue to function as is until some critical number of those trapped within it lose even more than they have lost already. At that point, one imagines a genuine move towards revolution and freedom- which, as Kris Kristofferson observed, is “just another word for nothing left to lose”- will emerge in a such a way as to make the Tea Party movement look like the tepid, co-opted brew it is. Unfortunately, by then, it may well be too late. Vamos a ver.