The United States economy shed another 308,000 jobs in the month of February, bringing the official jobless toll up to eight and half million. (The official jobless rate always underestimates the true unemployment numbers, since it does not count those out of work for a very long time, and those who have simply given up on looking for work). This took place after the millions of jobs shed in the last several years during a ‘recession' which began officially, in the spring of 2001. The measure of consumer confidence dropped to about 79 per cent, and the retailing sector has been heavily hit in the recent rounds of job cuts, and this after a dismal Christmas retailing season, where sales were generated through deflationary price cuts, generating lower profits for the retailing sector.

During the Ronald Reagan years an experiment was tried on the economy which was nicknamed ‘trickle down economics'. According to the theory the more wealth that was transferred to the extremely rich top percentile, the better everything would get for everyone down at the bottom, the workers and consumers who provide the base for the economy. Reagan instituted the ‘don't tax and then spend' policy of the Republican party, which was supposed to lead to a huge surge in the economy, by cutting taxes for the very rich, who would then ‘trickle down' this money to the base of the economy. (You will notice that it is not called ‘flood down theory' but rather ‘trickle down theory', this being in line with the saying ‘Greed is good' which one then began to hear around the same time, since it is said that human greed is the great engine that drives the American economy, and though people might want to just keep getting richer, they would have a strong motivation to rather trickle down money so as to get even richer over the long haul). Trickle down economics has been thoroughly discredited, in that all that statistics prove that all that happened during the Reagan years was that a massive transfer of wealth took place, and truly the rich just kept getting richer while the base of the economy kept getting poorer.

Reagan also forced through the ‘Free Slave Trade' concept, where jobs would be exported to low wage nations and then cheaply produced goods would be imported and sold for higher profits. It was this slave trade that was responsible for the temporary surge in profits combined with a resulting stock market bubble, that was then referred to as ‘the Reagan miracle'. The end result of the transfer of jobs and the resulting downward pressure on wages and benefits has been described as ‘the great race to the bottom'. Wage cuts, wage freezes, union busting and other accompanying tactics only further eroded the bottom of the market, creating what I call the ‘trickle up economic pain effect' which eventually led even large multinational corporations to do such things as cook the books and try all sorts of trickery to hide the fact that they were no longer showing profits as the hangover from the Reagan years began to severely impact the economy toward the end of the nineties.

According to the mathematical analysis performed by Albert Einstein of all the Great Depressions which hit the economy over the past couple of centuries, gross income inequality combined with the resulting erosion at the base of the market in a market based economy leads to increasingly severe Great Depressions, with the severity of the depression being in direct correlation to the how extreme the income inequality has become in a society. It is impossible for a market based economy to remain stable when jobs and wages are eroded and slashed at the base, with the money supply becoming top heavy and concentrated in the hands of tiny percentage of the population. Much like a ship with huge weights attached to the top of a tall mast, the economy becomes top heavy, destabilizes and then spirals into destruction with further job cuts further eroding the base of the market, leading to lower sales leading to further downward pressures on prices (‘deflation') leading to reduced profits, and further job cuts, and so on.

Currently Japan is fighting with deflation, the Germany economy has stalled, and the price slashing over the Christmas season in America is the first clear sign of deflationary pressures building in the American economy, with the recent job slashes in the retail sector a second strong indication. The recent huge job cuts is another signal that due to the Free Slave Trade and the trickle down economic theory, America is now on the verge of something far worse than an ordinary ‘recession' (a sort of pot hole in the road) but heading into a deep gulley. Time will tell.

 http://money.cnn.com/2003/03/07/news/economy/unemployment/index.htm
It was this spiral that an economist was worried about in the story as it was reported on the CNN site, when he said of the third of a million job cuts in February, and the hard hits being taken by the retail sector in the recent times, " "What worries me the most is a slip backward becoming a spiral downward. Jobs are the linchpin of both consumer confidence and consumer spending. We can't sustain many more losses like this without that downward spiral getting started," said Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial Services."

Now this dangerous situation with the economy does also impact on any analysis of warfare and the current political climate in the United States of America as it slips and slides towards of a form of extreme right wing fascism and the establishment of a ‘fuhrer state'. During the last Great Depression in the thirties a tiny elite had gained massive wealth and had capsized the economy in the process, leading to the surge of the left onto the political scene. Right wing extremism surged around the world, leading to dictatorships and fascism and then to aggressive wars to exploit the resources in other countries as these right wing dictatorships looked for relief from their economic woes, without of course, doing goodness but rather by doing evil, so as to protect that status quo. The same imperialist impulses are rapidly developing in America as once again the economy is under dangerous threat due to the extreme social inequality that has developed in the country since the Reagan Revolution (as it was called) and also due to the great race to the bottom, the erosion of jobs and wages, which leads directly to the massive hangover after the temporary binge of Free Slave Trading. Greed is not good, and neither is any other kind of sinful wickedness, and sooner or later, when the grapes of wrath have ripened on the vines, any country of nation that practices sinful ways finds themselves working those wine vats of wrath, and bottling copious amounts of that deleterious and unwanted wine. Yes, the great wheel of history is a cruel and ruthless bitch in that way, to be sure, and so now, given how hard it is to fix the damage, and the great forces of reaction that will resist any real, meaningful change, it now appears that the United States is about to embark on a Nazi like era of aggressive wars, wars for cheap oil and other exploitable resources in just one more sinful attempt to make some greedy gain and put off the day of reckoning...

What this means, is that you can obey the draft, should that become required at some future time, as the situation escalates and American hubris and arrogance and extreme violence do not prove to be quite the grand and majestic things some delusional types like to desperately force themselves to believe that they are...Yes, you can send your kids off to die to protect the status quo, being sinful to save oneself from past sinful conduct, so adding sin onto sin, and while you are at it you can be overwhelmed by the most powerful delusions, convincing yourself that evil can triumph and sin can bring in a harvest of the grapes of blessings, if you are just evil and violent and sinful enough. Just one more sin should do it...

For those not interested in wickedness, mass murder of children, oppression, the crushing of civil rights, the rise of fascism and extremism, and every other sort of wicked reactionary sinfulness, there are good alternatives. Foremost, the cure must address the illness, and should the country slide into depression, the solution is not fascist imperialism, robbery, and warfare, nor is it appropriate for you to ‘die for you country' in some far off land, but rather redistribution of wealth is the solution. Furthermore an appropriate ‘economic stimulus plan' would once again not consist of sinful destruction and blowing things up and bombing (thus destroying even more of the base of the economy in the process) but rather in a novel concept, not being sinful or greedy but rather taking all your wickedness money, almost a trillion dollars a year spent on killing tools every year, and spending it all on a great Marshall Plan for the planet, doing something decent for the billion who go without even one square meal everyday. You cannot have social inequality without having social inequality, after all, and when you look at a country like Columbia, for example, a very tiny elite of feudal landlords are the ‘rightful owners' of three quarters of the land and wealth in the country and many millions live in utter squalor, while the country is convulsed by violence and rebellion, and soon enough, given that Washington pays for oppression in nations around the world, soon enough Americans don't feel very safe, even at home. If you want to be safe, you must stop sinning, and those who practice wickedness must drink the wine that is produced at harvest time.

Woe to the nation that turns justice into poison, and which thrusts righteousness and peace to the ground, who hate the one who brings charges against the sinful wrongdoers, and despise those who speak nothing but the truth. Woe to the nation that oppresses the poor, grinding them down, extorting from them and leaving them even more wretched and miserable than before. Therefore, although people have built mighty mansions built out of marble and hewn stone, they shall not live in them. Though they own massive vineyards, they shall not drink the wine from them, for monstrous and many are their sins, those bullies who attack and slaughter the innocent, hold entire nations hostage, who corrupt justice in the courts and push the poor and destitute out of the way. Hate evil and love good, and establish justice on the planet. Then it may be that good times and favor may yet be shown to this planet.

And yet people thrust aside all thought of the evil day, and thus they hasten the reign of violence and wickedness on earth, and they do not grieve over the ruin of the planet. And so, time and time again they are abandoned to their terrible fate, as violence reduces to the great houses to rubble and the small houses are shattered. ‘Have we not won power through our own great strength,' they boast. Listen then, to this, you who grind the faces of the poor, buying the weak for a piece of silver and the selling the poor for the price of a pair of cheap sandals. Will not the earth quake on account of this? Will not everyone who lives upon it be brought to grief and mourning? The whole earth will surge and seethe like the River Nile, and subside like the River of Egypt. The earth will be plunged into strife and darkness, and feasts will become times of mourning, and everyone will be dressed in mourners clothes, for it will be a very bitter day. The pillars are struck and the whole porch is shaken, and the roof comes crashing down on the heads of the people. Woe to the nation that practices godless sinfulness, the nation that can never practice simple decency, common justice, or righteousness, peace and truth. Woe to that wicked place when the time to harvest comes around, and the grapes of wrath hang heavily on the vines.

.A related page :
The Great Depression. George Bush vs Einstein on economic policy

According to the mathematician, Albert Einstein, the policies of George Bush are likely to result in another Great Depression. To quote a recurring quip, 'I know George Bush, and let me tell you, George Bush is no Albert Einstein.'
 http://www.awitness.org/journal/great_depression.html