The Bush economic policy - delusion, denial, and outright lies (but everybody's STILL out shopping)

from the la times...

It's the holidays. You do what you have to do.

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You could almost run that old Lone Ranger theme -- the famous William Tell Overture -- as the soundtrack to the local news stories I watched here in Boston on Thanksgiving day featuring perky local news "correspondents" stirring a buying frenzy with upbeat reports on manic consumers racing into malls for "midnight madness" sales.

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[O]ur media is deeply complicit in promoting and encouraging mindless consumerism through newspapers, commercials and newscasts. This is a well-practiced formula mirroring TV's promotion of the war in Iraq, as the line between selling and telling disappears. Media outlets are amply rewarded with endless ad revenues hyping all the discounted goodies you can get, with the Boston Globe packing no less than 43 advertising-sales supplements (down from 47 a year ago) into a paper that had wall-to-wall Macys ads, including some offering $10 coupons to bribe you the stores.

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I’ve been visiting some of the people who have been most affected by the subprime mortgage debacle. It’s a largely bewildered, frightened group that includes people like Dorothy Levey, a 79-year-old widow who sits alone inside the small house she has lived in for 41 years, afraid to answer the telephone or the door.

She has every reason to be worried. The monthly note on her house in the city of Markham, just outside Chicago, is approximately 100 percent of her meager monthly income. Broke and behind in her payments, Ms. Levey expects a foreclosure notice to show up any day, followed by a visit from “the sheriff, or whoever they send to tell you to get out of your own home.”

While the media coverage has focused on the high rollers who created the subprime frenzy (“If you can breathe, we’ll give you a loan”), the hapless victims have remained in the shadows, condemned to economic ruin.

After faithfully making mortgage payments for decades, Ms. Levey and her husband, Dan, were persuaded to take out a new loan, ostensibly for debt consolidation, in 2002. It was like plunging into quicksand. Dan was seriously ill at the time and he died two years later.

To this day Ms. Levey does not understand what she and her husband of more than half a century had agreed to. The terms might as well have been written in Sanskrit.

But she kept trying to meet her obligation. She exhausted her savings. She lost her car. She stopped buying clothes and cut back on food. But there was no way to keep up with the payments.

“I had to go to the state and tell them I was hungry,” she said.

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We are a country obsessed with consumption, which would be fine if we seemed to be fulfilled getting bigger TVs but having less time to watch them. But, in the aggregate, that's not the case. "The things that we get used to most easily and then take for granted are our material possessions -- our car, our house," writes Layard. "But there is lots of evidence that people underestimate the process of habituation." The amount of happiness we think we'll get from a new house, and the amount of happiness we actually get from a new house, are not the same.

So why the ceaseless search for stuff? In a word, competition. It's worth it to stay ahead in the rat race. Researchers have asked people which they'd prefer: a world in which they made $50,000 but everyone else made half that; or one in which they made $100,000 and everyone else made twice that (prices are the same in both worlds). The majority preferred the first world. They would happily make less money, as long as everyone else made even less money.

yeah, yeah, yeah... so, what time did YOU have to get up yesterday to be among the first in line at the store...?


Sitting on the hard asphalt since 3:30 a.m.,
Lidia Marin of Santa Ana checks in with relatives
in front of Fry's Electronics in Fountain Valley [CA]

but at least SOME of the headlines strike a cautious note...

Crowds pack stores, but will the buying continue?

The Holiday's Shopping Season Can't Stop the Coming 'Severe Recession'

Lost in a Flood of Debt

Despite economy, malls and stores jammed

odd as it may seem, not a single one of those articles mentioned the collapse of the dollar... not one... for THAT story, you have to read the foreign press, such as this from süddeutsche zeitung via spiegel...

[T]he fall of the US currency has political and economic implications far beyond the present financial market crisis. Until recently, American politicians could nod along with Nixon-era Treasury Secretary John Connally, who said 'The dollar is our currency, but your problem.' ... This summer, that changed. Many investors fear a recession in America, and, even more importantly, they doubt their money is really well taken care of in the hands of the world's superpower.

meanwhile, back in california...

"I really can't afford this TV -- I'll be making monthly payments on my credit card until this time next year," the 19-year-old Laguna Niguel resident said. "But it's the holidays. You do what you have to do."

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