You have been lied to.

I mean seriously, you have. Well over a year ago, Americans were told that the recession had ended. First-time claims for unemployment were dropping, the unemployment rate was consistently shedding weight every month, and manufacturing was taking off. Everything was "just peachy."

Or not quite. Dig a little deeper and you found that most of our "new jobs" were in the service sector (In economics, that's basically a snake eating its own tail), that a whole mess of people had stopped searching for work, and this newest nugget, that the Gross Domestic Product dropped 2.9% in the last quarter- the largest decline in 5 years.

So what's going on? It's like a Jerkyl-and-Hyde economy. We got our first whiffs of it with the new term coined a number of years ago, "jobless recovery", but the oxymoronic nature of our economic news just hasn't stopped coming.

So what do the politicians do? They give you more lies. The St. Louis Fed Chief tells you its an "aberration," others tell you it was a harsh winter or a perfect-storm scenario. You are expected to gobble it up since after all, winter is an abberation, or caused by global warming. Who knows?

Have you seen food prices lately, those of you who actually shop for yourselves? Yet we are told that the inflation rate is a meager 1.8%. Mind you, that's excluding "food and fuel", and doesn't take into account that the formula for calculating inflation has been manipulated so much that what would have been 10% inflation 40 years ago now clocks in at 2%.

What about the stock market, the bread and butter of "the 1%"? Surging. All of you who thought the president was going to take on "the 1%", guess what? You were wrong. Go ahead, blame the other party. Fact is, you were lied to. The politicians will never take on "the 1%", because those people bankroll their campaigns. It doesn't even matter which party they belong to.

Oh, btw... the stock market is indexed to the dollar. As long as inflation keeps coming, we're going to keep seeing records. Don't get too excited... but you will still make more money there than you will with your savings account (the interest from which doesn't even cover inflation). Yeah, and they wonder why Americans aren't saving.

This lovely little rant/PSA isn't meant to indict the president or the ruling party or to put blame on any particular ideology or person. Its a lot more than that. My goal here is to encourage you folks to open your eyes and put down the partisan hatchets you love slinging around on here. You've been lied to and manipulated, moved to attack each other over superficial social policy and the assignment of blame. You have been encouraged to buy into the notion that with a single-party government, all this can be fixed, that everything will go back to normal.

Well it won't. Welcome to the new normal. You are a witness to a dying world economy. China has empty cities, the Middle East has decended into chaos, Africa is rife with civil war, Europe is in the throes of a lost generation, and America is enduring a measured decline. Meanwhile you focus your attention on gay marriage, climate change, legalized drugs, gun control, and why Obama should be impeached. A lot of good any of that will do.

How much longer will you take this? How much longer will you keep digging into each other's backs? Years will pass and the "republicans" may well take over the government, but nothing will change, only the narrative. The "liberals" among you will suddenly become pessimists, the "conservatives" optimists. Well maybe its time for everybody to become realists.