If Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin were alive today, they would be leading contenders for the Nobel Prize in economics

When the long-term discouraged workers are added back into the total unemployed, the unemployment rate in September 2009 stands at 21.4%.

Wait a minute! Those Obama socialists at it again? Nooooo. This was written by, Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration in an article called Marx and Lenin Reconsidered, (Counterpunch) Roberts continues:

In Marx’s day, religion was the opiate of the masses. Today the media is. Let’s look at media reporting that facilitates the financial oligarchy’s ability to delude the people.

The financial oligarchy is hyping a recovery while American unemployment and home foreclosures are rising. The hype owes its credibility to the high positions from which it comes, to the problems in payroll jobs reporting that overstate employment, and to disposal into the memory hole of any American unemployed for more than one year.

POW!

Marx predicted the growing misery of working people, and Lenin foresaw the subordination of the production of goods to financial capital’s accumulation of profits based on the purchase and sale of paper instruments. Their predictions are far superior to the “risk models” for which the Nobel Prize has been given and are closer to the money than the predictions of Federal Reserve chairmen, US Treasury secretaries, and Nobel economists, such as Paul Krugman, who believe that more credit and more debt are the solution to the economic crisis.

BAM!!

In this first decade of the 21st century there has been no increase in the real incomes of working Americans. There has been a sharp decline in their wealth. In the 21st century Americans have suffered two major stock market crashes and the destruction of their real estate wealth.

Some studies have concluded that the real incomes of Americans, except for the financial oligarchy of the super rich, are less today than in the 1980s and even the 1970s.

The main cause of this decline is the offshoring of US high value-added jobs.

SPLAT!!!

The expansion in debt that underlies this bubble has further eroded the US dollar’s credibility as reserve currency. When the dollar starts to go, panicked policy-makers will raise interest rates in order to protect the US Treasury’s borrowing capability. When the interest rates rise, what little remains of the US economy will tank.

If the government cannot borrow, it will print money to pay its bills. Hyperinflation will hit the American population. Massive unemployment and massive inflation will inflict upon the American people misery that not even Marx and Lenin could envisage.

CRASH!!!!

The entire Roberts piece is at Norms Notes.

And here is Paul Krugman's response in today's Times where he says not to worry so much about inflation in a deflationary time and calls out people like Roberts who talk about the falling dollar as a bad thing.