how many economists does it take to ...

"a dismal june employment report shows that employers are adding nowhere near as many jobs as they normally do this long after a recession has ended. unemployment has climbed for three straight months and is now at 9.2 percent. there is no precedent, in data going back to 1948, for such a high rate two years into what economists say is a recovery. the excruciatingly slow growth is confounding economists..."

associated press 7-9-2011

one would think that the "science" of economics would be as discredited as alchemy and its practitioners as outdated as the local barber bleeding bad humors as a cure for anything...such is the hold on the popular imagination of a three piece suit that any lunkhead at a university can put one on and be regarded as knowledgeable about matters in the real world...which is not to say that folks at universities are all lunkheads....only that education and a title are not proofs against stupidity or a disconnection from reality...word out here on the street is that the recession has never come to an end and the pronouncements of certain segments of the intelligentsia based on bogus numbers and books cooked from political considerations are met with derision and, usually, contempt...unemployment would be at least 18.4 percent if the lying scum at the department of labor didn't cook their books by discounting the poor souls who have flat given up on ever working at a "real" job again...the fed has interest rates at near 0%, the deficit is up to an unreal amount, and the whores are playing politics to disguise the fact that policy options have run out and the shit is about to hit he fan...i annoy some people when i talk about smaller and more local economies and voice a healthy disrespect for "the market", capitalism, industrial agriculture, corporate personhood, and the merits of "growth" as a mechanism for anything beyond the aggrandizement of the avarice of a select minority of low-life scum at the top of the institutional ponzi scheme embodied by the hamiltonian third republic...oh well...everything old is new again...check out " The Limits to Growth" from 1970 and "The End of Growth" by richard heinberg that was published this year.