Don’t be fooled by declining wages, foreclosures and hungry children. Happy days are here again.

My shack in Tinicum was in a miserable state, so I paid Swamp Rabbit to help me clean and paint it. Afterwards, the place looked good from the porch but when I stepped inside, I fell through the floor into three feet of swamp water. It hit me that my shack was like the economy, a total wreck no matter how many times the media try to slap a new coat of paint on it and claim it’s as good as new.

Richard Wolff put it this way:

Here is the “recovery…” The top 1% of income-earners in the US took 19% of the national income in 2012, the largest share since 1928. That 1% also saw their average income rise by 31.4% from the current crisis’s low point in 2009, through 2012. The top 1% certainly enjoyed a recovery.

In total contrast, income for the other 99% rose by an average of 0.4% during the same period. Many of those people actually saw their earnings drop…

Many mass media corporations render the service of hyping the recovery eagerly to their advertisers. These advertisers wish to avoid association with bad news that might distress audiences. The mainstream media therefore offers up infotainment with economic recovery “highlights.” They also emphasize reports about countries whose experiences with the global economic crisis are worse than that of the U.S.

For example, immense attention focuses on Greece and Spain, rather than Germany or Sweden. The crisis has been far, far less damaging in the latter than in the former or in the U.S. Likewise, when the mass media here cover the high unemployment rates in certain European countries, they often conveniently omit that unemployment there does not affect citizens’ health insurance coverage, pensions, or most public services and subsidies as negatively as it does in the U.S.

I pulled myself out of the hole in the floor and began to rant: It’s no accident that America’s corporate media never present stories that compare quality of life in the U.S. and western Europe! It’s about time they started reporting what’s really going on!

The rabbit cracked open a bottle of Wild Turkey, his reward for helping clean up. “Great speech,” he said, “but who’s gonna pay them to write what’s real? Depressions are depressing, Odd Man.”