Over the next 18 months, brace yourself for a lot of hand-wringing about the economic crisis we’re in. Every so often, we’re going to be told the "recovery" is just around the corner.  Oh, let’s be clear: the worries will have NOTHING to do with what is actually happening to PEOPLE. It will have a lot to do with politics–trying to manage how voters think the economy is doing, rather than actually trying to heal an economy that simply isn’t working for most people.

    And the managers of the perception game are in deep trouble because they don’t seem to get the basic problem: this is all about wages.

   The "recovery" continues to be a mirage–even the business traditional press is nervous:

The world’s largest economy may be facing a growth problem.

After a disappointing first quarter, economists largely predicted the U.S. recovery would ramp back up as short-term disruptions such as higher gas prices, bad weather and supply problems in Japan subsided.

But there’s little indication that’s happening. Manufacturing is cooling, the housing market is struggling and consumers are keeping a close eye on spending, meaning the U.S. economy might be on a slower path to full health than expected.

"It’s very hard to generate a rapid recovery when rapid recoveries are historically driven by housing and the consumer," said Nigel Gault, an economist at IHS Global Insight. He expects an annualized, inflation-adjusted growth rate of less than 3% in coming quarters—better than the first-quarter’s 1.8% rate, but too slow to make a meaningful dent in unemployment.[emphasis added]

   This piece reveals a lot mainly because it highlights the two things you need to keep asking yourself when you hear the mumbo-jumbo from the two main political parties about the "recovery".

 First, "Growth" is almost meaningless. When the president rushes to the Rose Garden or concocts a made-for-TV photo op at a factory to hype some quarterly stat going up, it is not telling us very much–other than more stuff is being made somewhere.

    Yeah, a few more widgets are being made–but, particularly when those increased numbers are pathetically low, it will not tell us much about whether peoples’ wages are going up and whether the well-being of people is on the rise. It might tell us that a few corporations are making more money–and adding to the over one trillion dollars in cash sitting in corporate bank accounts. But, as for real people–not much.

   Second, it is almost comical to watch people not want to say the obvious:

While things aren’t nearly as bleak as they were during the depths of the downturn, qualified buyers seem to be holding back, possibly because they think prices still have further to fall. "It’s a little scary," Mr. DePhillips said. "I don’t know what to attribute it to."[emphasis added]

   Duh. Dude, people don’t have money. People don’t have work. People are leveraged out to the max because wages have not gone up for years–and the credit cards have no more room.

   The financial crisis, yes, was bred out of greed and stupidity.

   But, what we don’t seem to want to be pretty clear about is this: the financial crisis was an obvious outcome of the robbery of the average worker over the past 30 years by a bankrupt economic system that cannot be fixed.

   It is still an economic system anchored on cheating people out of a decent paycheck for a day’s work, and taking away their health care and their pensions. And, then, obviously, when greed and avarice run rampant on Wall Street, letting the robber barons of the financial and corporate world come up with crazy-ass "instruments" designed simply to increase profits, then, yes, people with no other place to go for cash–meaning, with no pay checks–will climb on that bubble, mesmerized and desperate to find any place they can go to for money (in this case, over-inflated homes).

   If our political leadership really cared about the people, they would understand this crisis is first and foremost about wages. About paychecks. About having a decent job.

   They would not be pimping for foolish so-called "free trade" deals–which have exacerbated the wage decline and evaporation of decent paychecks.

   Instead, they’d be talking about real jobs. With real paychecks. With unions.

   But, they aren’t.

   So, the rest is a sideshow. The recovery is a mirage.