Say Anything Blog

Mark Finkelstein

Another leftie spouting Marxist economic ideology

Steve Fraser might look mild-mannered, but when it comes to economic doomsaying, he is the Rocky Marciano of recession, the Tiger Woods of turndown, the David Beckham of depression.

Speaking of bending one, Fraser’s LA Times column of today, “Symptoms of an Economic Depression,” twists U.S. economic data into a harbinger of impending doom. Fraser begins by falsely claiming that “no one wants to utter the word ‘depression.’” In fact, Fraser himself, a left-wing labor historian, wants not merely to utter the word, but to bellow it with a 10,000 megawatt bullhorn. Why? Because, as he predicts in that same column:

This perfect storm [of a bad economy] will be upon us just as the election season heats up, and it will inevitably hasten the already well-advanced implosion of the Republican Party.



I’m setting forth below excerpts from Fraser’s breathless jeremiad. Hide the sharp objects, but note how he writes largely in generalities and conclusions largely devoid of supporting data.

* It is not only a matter of mass foreclosures. It is not merely a question of collapsing home prices. It is not simply the shutting down of large portions of the construction industry (which is inspiring some of the doom-and-gloom prognostications). It is not just the born-again skittishness of financial institutions that have, all of a sudden, gotten religion, rediscovered the word “prudence” and won’t lend to anybody. It is all of this, taken together, that points ominously to a general collapse of the credit structure that has shored up consumer capitalism for decades.

* The equity built up during the long housing boom has been the main fallback position for ordinary people financing their big-ticket-item expenses, from college educations to consumer durables, from trading up in the housing market to vacationing abroad. Much of that equity has suddenly vanished, and more of it soon will. Also drying up fast are the lifelines of credit that allow all sorts of small and medium-size businesses to function and hire people. Whole communities, industries and regional economies are in jeopardy.

* All of that might be considered enough, but there’s more. Oil, of course. Here the connection to Iraq is clear; but, arguably, the wild escalation of petroleum prices might have happened anyway. Certainly the energy price explosion exacerbates the general economic crisis, in part by raising the costs of production all across the economy and so abetting the forces of economic contraction. In the same way, each increase in the price of oil further contributes to what most now agree is a nearly insupportable level in the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit. That, in turn, is contributing to the steady withering away of the value of the dollar.

* Finally, it is vital to recall that this tsunami of bad business is about to wash over an already very sick economy. While the old regime, the Reagan-Bush counterrevolution, has lived off the heady vapors of the FIRE sector, it has left in its wake a deindustrialized nation, full of super-exploited immigrants and millions of families whose earnings have suffered steady erosion. Two wage-earners, working longer hours, are now needed to (barely) sustain a standard of living once earned by one. And that doesn’t count the melting away of health insurance, pensions and other forms of protection against the vicissitudes of the free market or natural calamities.

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Read the whole thing.

This American leftie continues to illustrate the fact that what’s bad for America is good for the lefties.

They are praying for economic disaster, along with losing to the terrorists. Not the right bunch to run our country at all.