by Paul Craig Roberts / April 5th, 2014
The March payroll jobs report released April 4 claims 192,000 new private sector jobs.
Here is what John Williams has to say about the claim:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) deliberately
publishes its seasonally-adjusted historical payroll-employment and
household-survey (unemployment) data so that the numbers are neither
consistent nor comparable with current headline reporting. The upside
revisions to the January and February monthly jobs gains, and the
relatively strong March payroll showing, reflected nothing more than
concealed, favorable shifts in underlying seasonal factors, hidden by
the lack of consistent BLS reporting. In like manner, consistent
month-to-month changes in the unemployment rate or labor force simply
are not knowable, because the BLS cloaks the consistent and comparable
numbers.
Here is what Dave Kranzler has to say: “the employment report is
probably the most deceptively fraudulent report produced by the
Government.”
As I have pointed out for a decade, the “New Economy” jobs that we
were promised in exchange for our manufacturing jobs and tradable
professional service jobs that were offshored have never shown up. The
transnational corporations and their hired shills among economists lied
to us. Not even a jobs report as deceptive and fraudulent as the BLS
payroll jobs report can hide the fact that Congress, the White House,
and the American people have sat sucking their thumbs while corporations
maximized profits for the one percent at the expense of everyone else
in the United States.
Let’s look at where the alleged jobs are. The BLS jobs report says
that 28,400 jobs were created in March in wholesale and retail sales.
March is the month that Macy’s, Sears, JC Penny, Staples, Radio Shack,
Office Depot, and other retailers announced combined closings of several
thousand stores, but more retail clerks were hired.
The BLS payroll jobs report claims 57,000 jobs in “professional and
business services.” Are these jobs for lawyers, accountants, architects,
engineers, and managers? No. The combined new jobs for these middle
class professional skills totaled 10,400. Employment services accounted
for 42,000 of the jobs in “professional and business services” of which
temporary help accounted for 28,500.
“Education and health services” accounted for 34,000 jobs or which
ambulatory and home health care services accounted for 28,000 of the
jobs.
The other old standby, waitresses and bartenders, accounted for
30,400 jobs. The number of Americans dependent on food stamps who cannot
afford to go out to eat or to purchase a six-pack of beer has almost
doubled, but the demand for restaurant meals and bar drinks keeps
rising.
There you have it. This is America’s “New Economy.” It the jobs exist
at all, they consist of lowly paid, largely part-time employment that
fails to produce enough income to prevent the food stamp rolls from
doubling.
Without growth in consumer income, there is no growth in aggregate
consumer demand. Offshoring jobs also offshores the income associated
with the jobs, resulting in the decline in the domestic consumer market.
The US transnational corporations, pursuing profits in the short-run,
are destroying their long-run consumer base. The transnational
corporations are also destroying the outlook for US universities, as it
makes no sense to incur large student loan debt when job prospects are
poor. The corporations are also destroying US leadership in innovation
as US corporations increasingly become marketeers of foreign-made goods
and services.
As I predicted in 2004, the US will have a third world work force in 20 years.
The unemployment figures are as deceptive as the employment figures.
The headline unemployment rate of 6.7% does not include discouraged
workers. When discouraged workers are included among the unemployed, the
US rate of unemployment is 3.4 times higher than the announced rate.
How many times has John Williams written his report? How many times
have I written this article? Yet the government continues to issue false
reports, and the presstitute financial media continues to ask no
questions.
The US, once a land of opportunity, has been transformed into an
aristocratic economy in which income and wealth are concentrated at the
very top. The highly skewed concentration at the top is the result of
jobs offshoring, which transformed Americans’ salaries and wages into
bonuses for executives and capital gains for owners, and financial
deregulation, which produced financial collapse and the Federal
Reserve’s bailout of “banks too big too fail.” The trillions of dollars
of new money created by the Federal Reserve has produced massive
inflation of stock prices, making owners even richer.
Sooner or later the dollar’s value will suffer as a result of the
massive creation of new dollars. When that occurs, the import-dependent
American population will suffer a traumatic drop in living standards.
The main cost of the bank bailout has yet to hit.
As I write I cannot think of one thing in the entire areas of foreign
and domestic policy that the US government has told the truth about in
the 21st century. Just as Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass
destruction, Iran has no nukes, Assad did not use chemical weapons, and
Putin did not invade and annex Crimea, the jobs numbers are fraudulent,
the unemployment rate is deceptive, the inflation measures are
understated, and the GDP growth rate is overstated. Americans live in a
matrix of total lies.
What can Americans do? Elections are pointless. Presidents, Senators,
and US Representatives represent the interest groups that provide their
campaign funds, not the voters. In two decisions, the Republican
Supreme Court has made it legal for corporations to purchase the
government. Those who own the government will decide what it does, not
those who vote.
All Americans can do is to accept the serfdom imposed on them or take
to the streets and stay in the streets despite being clubbed, tasered,
arrested, and shot by the police, who protect the power structure, not
the public.
In America, nothing is done for the public. But everything is done to the public.
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