Yesterday morning, GOP chairman Michael Steele guest-hosted Bill Bennett’s talk radio show. During the program, one caller said he could “debate” whether or not the U.S. is currently in the midst of an economic crisis. Steele laughed in agreement and claimed that “[t]he malls are just as packed on Saturday.”:
CALLER: I can really debate about how about that economic crises is because I look around and I don’t see people spending any less money than they have been.
STEELE: I’ve heard a number of people say that across the country. [LAUGHTER] The malls are just as packed on Saturday. [LAUGHTER]
CALLER: The malls are just as packed. … You still can’t get seat in a restaurant.
Listen here:
Despite Steele’s claim that consumers are packing shopping malls, they don’t appear to be spending their money there. Indeed, Gallup found that last month consumer spending among all Americans reached a 15-month low and is 27 percent lower than last year’s figures.
Additionally, Reuters reported yesterday that vacancies at regional and strip malls are soaring to record highs:
Vacancies surged at U.S. strip malls in the first quarter and set a record at U.S. regional malls, as the deterioration in the retail real estate sector accelerated, according to real estate research firm Reis.
“I’m extremely skeptical,” Reis Research Director Victor Calanog said. “This is the first pullback we’ve seen in 17 years that really affected retail properties directly.” Vacancies at U.S. strip malls rose to 9.5 percent, up 0.6 percentage point, the largest single quarterly rise since Reis began publishing quarterly figures in 1999, Reis said in a quarterly report released on Wednesday.
The reasons for this are clear. Just yesterday, the Labor Department reported that 654,000 Americans applied for first-time unemployment benefits, while the “number of people staying on benefit rolls rose to a record 5.84 million in the prior week.”
More puzzling, however, is the fact that Steele has previously tried to portray himself as taking the curent economic crisis seriously. He’s spoken often about the need to stimulate the economy and critiqued Obama’s own attempts to do so. Now, however, Steele seems ready to dispense with the facade and admit that the economy is not something he understands as well as he should.
But even more troubling is the fact that in reality, Steele knows the facts, he cannot be ignorant and we know that. The bigger question that should concern us the role of denial of reality as a device in the toolbox of fascism.
Why is Silvio Berlusconi down playing the seriousness of the Aquila Earth quake? He has mede statements to the foreign press about the comfortable conditions of the refugees in their "camping tents". He has gone on about how the survivors need to practice positive thinking like he does. He has told the survivors that they should be grateful to the government for the assistance they are recieving. The Italian government has actually turned away foreign assistance. At noon today, we saw the local news report about how a disappointed volunteer group of firemen from Tulle in the Correze were banned from helping in the rescue and relief efforts by the Italian Army. The firefighters had paid all of their own expenses to come to the aid of the Italians.
Fascism actively engages in a war to control anger and the perceptions of the masses as a tool to shift the blame from reality to fantasy.
Why did we see Jeb Bush on Sean Hannity's show last night pleading to the administration to stop blaming his brother for the current economic problems? He actually said,
“If I had one humble criticism of President Obama, it would be to stop this notion of somehow framing everything in the context of, ‘Everything was bad before I got here,”
when, in fact, the Bush Jr. administration started right off the bat to criticize the Clinton administration for the economy it had inherited as a framework in which to couch it's tax reforms.
Indeed, after 9/11, the attempts to lay the blame at Clintons feet were non stop and over the top!
2 comments:
Great post, Micro. Maybe that Steele character, I don't know him, is like some of the others who don't often believe in what they carry on about. That came our recently about Glenn Beck.
About Berlusconi, what can I say? He's a clown in the way that the dictators and old-time monarchs can be. We're supposed to have a Republic here, but you know how that goes.
Mike, I just looked at your blog and saww your post of Booker T & The MGs...too cool.
I gotta find me some music here!
I have posted about Steele here before and even did his portrait on a piece of toasted bread.
He is the Chairman of the Republican Party and is a real case.
They voted for him because he was to be their Anti-Obama...he's a conservative Black Republican but he has turned into a problem...
and they seem to be stuck with him, because the Republicans, they are percvieved to have this little race problem? And if they fire their token conservative leader because he wasnt to make the party so hip hop cool that even one armed midgets want to join....that was a Steele quote...
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