The false
reality constructed for Americans parallels perfectly the false reality
constructed by Big Brother in George Orwells’ dystopic novel 1984.
Consider the constant morphing of “the Muslim threat” from
al-Qaeda to the Taliban, to al-Nursra, to ISIS to ISIL, to Daesh with a jump to
Russia. All of a sudden 16 years of Middle East wars against “terrorists” and
“dictators” have become a matter of standing up to Russia, the country most
threatened by Muslim terrorism, and the country most capable of wiping the
United States and its vassal empire off of the face of the earth.
Domestically, Americans are assured that, thanks to the Federal
Reserve’s policy of quantitative easing, that is, flooding the financial
markets with newly printed money that has driven up the prices of stocks and
bonds, America has enjoyed an economic recovery since June of 2009, which must
be one of the longest recoveries in history despite the absence of growth in
median real family incomes, despite the growth in real retail sales, despite
the falling labor force participation rate, despite the lack of high
value-added, high productivity, high wage jobs.
The “recovery” is more than a mystery. It is a miracle. It
exists only on fake newspaper.
According
to CNN, an unreliable source for sure, Jennifer Tescher, president and CEO of
the Center for Financial Services Innovation, reports that about half of
Americans report that their living expenses are equal to or exceed their
incomes. Among those aged 18 to 25 burdened by student loans, 54% say their
debts are equal to or exceed their incomes. This means that half of the US
population has ZERO discretionary income. So what is driving the recovery?
Nothing. For half or more of the US population, there is no
discretionary income there with which to drive the economy.
The older part of the population has no discretionary income
either. For a decade there has been essentially zero interest on the savings of
the elderly, and if you believe John Williams of shadowstats.com, which I do,
the real interest rates have been zero and even negative as inflation is
measured in a way designed to prevent Social Security cost of living adjustments.
In other words, the American economy has been living on the
shrinkage of the savings and living standards of its population.
Last Friday’s employment report is just another lie from the
government. The report says that the unemployment rate is 4.4% and that June
employment increased by 222,000 jobs. A rosy picture. But as I have just
demonstrated, there are no fundamentals to support it. It is just another US
government lie like Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use
of chemical weapons against his own people, the Russian invasion of Ukraine,
and so forth and so on.
The rosy
unemployment picture is totally contrived. The unemployment rate is 4.4%
because discouraged workers who have not searched for a job in the past four
weeks are not counted as unemployed.
The BLS has a second measure of unemployment, known as U6, which
is seldom reported by the presstitute financial media. According to this
official measure, the US unemployment rate is about double the reported rate.
Why? the U6 rate counts discouraged workers who have been
discouraged for less than one year.
John Williams counts the long-term discouraged workers
(discouraged for more than one year) who formerly (before “reforms”) were
counted officially. When the long-term discouraged are counted, the US
unemployment rate is in the 22-23 percent range. This is born out by the clear
fact that the labor force participation rate has been falling throughout the
alleged “recovery.” Normally, labor force participation rates rise during
economic recoveries.
It is very easy for the government to report a low jobless rate
when the government studiously avoids counting the unemployed.
It is an
extraordinary thing that although the US government itself reports that if even
a small part of discouraged workers are countered as unemployed the
unemployment rate is 8.6%, the presstitute financial media, a collection
of professional liars, still reports, in the face of the government’s
admission, that the unemployment rate as 4.4%.
Now, let’s do what I have done month after month year after
year. Let’s look at the jobs that the BLS alleges are being created. Remember,
most of these alleged jobs are the product of the birth/death model that adds
by assumption alone about 100,000 jobs per month. In other words, these jobs
come out of a model, not from reality.
Where are these reported jobs? They are where they always are in
lowly paid domestic services. Health care and social assistance, about half of
which is “ambulatory health care services,” provided 59,000 jobs. Leisure and
hospitality provided 36,000 jobs of which 29,300 consist of waitresses and
bartenders. Local government rose by 35,000. Manufacturing, once the backbone
of the US economy, provided a measly 1,000 jobs.
As
I have emphasized for a decade or two, the US is devolving into a third-world
workforce where the only employment available is in lowly paid domestic service
jobs that cannot be offshored and that do not pay enough to provide an
independent existence. This is why 50% of 25-year olds live at home with their
parents and why there are more Americans aged 24-34 living with parents than
living independently.
This is not the economic profile of a “superpower” that the
idiot neoconservatives claim the US to be. The American economy that offshoring
corporations and financialization have created is incapable of supporting the
enormous US debt burden. It is only a matter of time and circumstance.
I doubt that the United States can continue in the ranks of a
first world economy. Americans have sat there sucking their thumbs while their
“leaders” destroyed them.
Paul Craig
Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of
prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored
with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how americans lost the
protection of law, has been released by Random House. Visit his website.
Copyright © 2017 Paul Craig Roberts
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