Another Fraudulent Jobs Report — Paul Craig
Roberts
Another Fraudulent Jobs Report
Paul Craig Roberts
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:
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.” If 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.
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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