Capitalism's Crisis Deepens by Richard D. Wolff

Author:Richard D. Wolff
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, ebook
ISBN: 978-1-60846-655-9
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2016-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

The So-Called Recovery

Recovery? What Recovery?

July 28, 2011

The so-called economic recovery since mid-2009 was chiefly hype, a veneer of good news to disguise and minimize the awful underlying economic realities. The few (large corporations and the rich) who bear much of the responsibility for the crisis made sure that the government they finance used massive amounts of public money to support a recovery for them. The mass of the population was excluded from the government-financed recovery for the few. We now have the summary official statistics to expose this grotesque injustice.

In economics, as in other fields, pictures and graphs are sometimes worth more than a thousand words. So it is with a summary graph prepared by a group of economists at Northeastern University in Boston. Their short report18 exposes the basic lie in claims by politicians, media spokespersons, business leaders and others that the US economy has been in an economic “recovery” since early 2009.

What did recover in the United States, partly or wholly, were only corporate profits (especially those of banks) and the stock markets. Figure 6 (the report’s chart 14) shows three vertical bars indicating the size of profit and stock recoveries from the second quarter of 2009 through the first quarter of 2011.

Figure 6. Percent Changes in the Indices of Corporate Profits, Stock Market Prices, Selected Hourly/Weekly Wages, and Aggregate Employment from 2009 II to 2011 I (2009 II–100)

.

Source: Andrew Sum and Joseph McLaughlin, “Who Has Benefitted from the Post-Great Recession Recovery? A New Look at the Growth Performance of Jobs, Wages, Corporate Profits, and Stock Price Indices During the First Two Years of Recovery,” Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, May 2011 (Chart 14, p. 8); available at http://bit.ly/1QhG8EG.

What did not recover by the first quarter of 2011 is shown by the five remaining bars in the chart. Those tiny bars show what happened to payrolls and employment. From the depths of the crisis in early 2009 until mid-2011, there has been absolutely no recovery in wages or jobs for US workers.

The crisis of the capitalist system in the United States that began in 2007 plunged millions into acute economic pain and suffering. The “recovery” that began in early 2009 benefited only the minority that was most responsible for the crisis: banks, large corporations, and the rich who own the bulk of stocks. That so-called recovery never “trickled down” to the US majority: working people dependent on jobs and wages.

The countless claims of “recovery” as if it were a general economic event spread across the entire US economy are lies. They hide the tragic truth of ongoing economic crisis for the many.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.