The official story of the Great Depression is that it began with the stock market crash of 1929. Wrong.

Depressions don't instantaneously explode in a country, they creep up. The big financial crash was preceded by years of financial manipulation by Wall Street hucksters, wage declines for the majority of workers, a growing epidemic of farm losses and malign neglect by President Herbert Hoover. Even when it came, Hoover continued to insist that the economy was fundamentally sound, that Washington should simply stay the course and let the market work its magic.

If this sounds familiar, that's because George W. is the Hoover of 2008. In April, for the fourth month in a row, the American economy lost jobs, but Bush insisted that strong action is unnecessary, noting that "only"? 20,000 jobs were lost last month and boasting that the unemployment rate was still at 5 percent.

First of all, the unemployment rate misses the depth of the problem. For example, it does not count "discouraged"? workers — some 400,000 people who've been out of work for so long that they've given up looking. Also, if you worked even one day at a temporary job during the month, you're counted as "employed."?

This raises the deeper flaw in job numbers, which is that they cover up the decline in people's income. Even during the Great Depression, the vast majority of folks had jobs. But today, just as then, the hours of those jobs have been cut back, and millions of people who need full-time work are only able to find part-time jobs.

Meanwhile, as rank-and-file workers (which make up 80 percent of the workforce) see their incomes stagnate, they also see the cost of gasoline, food, health care and other basics skyrocket. When the average pay for eight out of 10 Americans is not even keeping up with the cost of living — look out.

AUTOCRACY IN ACTION

Is it 1984 already?

Even George Orwell would not have imagined George W., who keeps pushing a post-Orwellian, autocratic America in which a supreme executive can operate in secrecy, beyond the reach of law. We've had illegal domestic spying, falsified intelligence, presidential annulment of laws, torture, unconstitutional defiance of congressional authority ... and more. Now comes news of another twist from the Bush-Cheney bag of tricks: secret law.

This disclosure came at a Senate hearing on the use of clandestine legal opinions by the Justice Department to justify waterboarding and other torture methods employed by the CIA. At the April 30 hearing, an administration spokesman magnanimously agreed to share certain parts of selected secret opinions with some members of Congress.

It wasn't much of a concession to Congress' constitutional oversight responsibility, but during the hearing, the spokesman suddenly asserted that Bush has the inherent power to ignore or alter existing executive orders issued either by him or previous presidents. Here's the kicker: The Bushites claim they can do this without telling anyone!

Executive orders have the full force of law, and unilaterally altering them behind the White House curtain means the published law is not what it says it is. An astonished Sen. Russ Feingold pointed out that "it is a basic tenet of democracy that the people have a right to know the law." Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse was more scathing, saying that such a claim of executive power turns our national law books "into a screen of falsehoods behind whose phony regulations lawless programs can operate in secret."

It's time for Congress to hold these outlaws accountable for their Orwellian, un-American power grabs. Congress should not merely express outrage — but bring the perpetrators to trial.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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