More Good News

After describing the spin over the attempted terrorist bombing yesterday, today's commentary undertakes to reveal manipulation of the public in puffing an at best barely noticeable to non-existent recovery that Obama is being feted with credit for when TARP was passed and "Helicopter Ben Bernanke" began throwing money at Wall Street when the last George Bush was still President. My contention is that any recovery is incidental to all the grotesque government intrusion into the markets and the breathtaking squandering of our tax dollars by Washington. We should never forget that after the billions in bailouts at our expense, some of the Wall Street firms that benefited from taxpayer largess are handing out huge year end bonuses. So traders, bankers, and brokers who forgot basic fiduciary responsibility and helped put us in a sinking boat with their insanely risky investments will celebrate a glorious New Year greatly enriched at our expense while over ten percent of our workforce remains jobless. And more spin is in play here with glowing reports about the purported recovery. The media hypes a 3.6% increase at retail sales over the holidays but fails to put it in proper context that the baseline of sales in the prior year reflected catastrophe with the previous year's sales as bleak as in the Great Depression. So there may have been a slight increase in sales and profits but even this better number looks anemic when you study sales just two years back (2007). The media will crow about the great job their boy Obama is doing, but the widely despised last President Bush only presided over one worse Christmas sales season. I will admit the numbers may have improved marginally- from depression to mere prolonged (hopefully not endless recession), but this occurred in spite of government interference, not because of any brilliant recovery plan by Obama, Geithner, and Bernanke.