"Conservatives” cannot grasp that the U.S. economy has spiraled into the black hole of surplus production (over-capacity), over-indebtedness and thus surplus labor: the endgame foreseen by Marx but staved off for decades by globalization, the transformation of the home economy into a Plantation Economy supported by debt-serfs (two poorly understood phenomena I describe in Survival+) and the financialization of the U.S. economy into a state of profound debt-dependency akin to a junkie addicted to smack (with the mercantilist nations and global bankers being the pushers). Thus we have “conservative” commentators claiming that unemployment would magically fall 50% once we stop sending out unemployment checks. Uh, right. These pundits really need to get out in the real world once in a while."