One of my most popular columns was about escaping from the Matrix existence in which Americans live. It is a world of disinformation and misinformation in which facts are fiction, and abstract theories are substituted for empirical reality.
Official government statistics are make-believe. The government makes inflation and unemployment disappear by how it defines inflation and unemployment, and it makes the economy grow by how it defines Gross Domestic Product. The definitional basis determines the statistical result.
For example, in his report on the official GDP revisions released July 31, John Williams (shadowstats.com) writes that “academic theories, often with strong political biases, have been used to alter the GDP model over the years, resulting in “Pollyanna Creep,” where changes made to the series invariably have had the effect of upping near-term economic growth.” In other words, definitional changes produce economic growth whether or not the economy produces economic growth.
Inflation is made to disappear by substituting lower priced items for higher priced items and by defining price rises as quality improvements. Thus, the higher prices don’t count as inflation.
Unemployment disappears by defining discouraged workers who cannot find employment as people who are no longer in the work force. They simply are disappeared out of the ranks of the unemployed. It reminds me of Punjab’s magic blanket in the old cartoon strip, “Little Orphan Annie.” Punjab disposed of problem people by covering them with his blanket, or perhaps it was a rug, and they disappeared.
Despite the absurdity of the government’s data, Wall Street awaits with baited breath each new release to decide whether markets should go up or down or stay the same.
In other words, the financial markets themselves take guidance from make believe numbers. In short, capitalism is rudderless. It has no reliable indicators. Everything is rigged to support the Matrix which keeps the population in a stupor.
Certainly the monthly payroll jobs number is misconstrued and has undeserved influence. If the economy is down, a jobs number significantly higher than the approximately 130,000 new jobs required to stay even with population growth is seen as a beacon of recovery. But the number is so distorted, as John Williams explains, by shifting and unstable seasonal adjustments and an average monthly add-on of 52,000 jobs from the “birth-death” model that no one really knows what the number is. Only a statistician like John Williams who is very familiar with the government’s data procedures can make much sense from the official statistics.
I take a simpler approach. I look at where the reported jobs are alleged to be. In the 21st century, the jobs created by “the world’s largest economy” have been lowly-paid, non-tradable, domestic service third world jobs. Manufacturing and tradable professional service jobs such as software engineering have been moved offshore to low-wage, low-salary locations. The savings in labor costs have enriched corporate executives, Wall Street, and shareholders.
I have made this point monthly for many years, and it has had no effect on economists, policymakers, money managers, or financial markets, all of which continue in their make-believe world of make-believe reality.
Here we go, one more time. Of the 161,000 reported private sector jobs gained in July, 157,000 or 97.5 percent, are in non-tradable domestic services. A non-tradable service is a job that produces services that cannot be exported, such as waitresses, bartenders, hospital orderlies, retail clerks, warehousemen. Thus, no matter how large the number might be, it cannot reduce the huge US trade deficit. Most of these jobs are part-time jobs without health or pension benefits. People in these jobs tend to live hand-to-mouth. These jobs do not produce sufficient income to drive a consumer economy.
Of these 157,000 reported jobs, 63,000 or 40 percent are reported to be in trade, transportation, and utilities. Of these 63,000 jobs, 60,500 of them or 96 percent are in wholesale and retail trade.
Before we go to the next category, ask yourself if you believe that in an economy that has had no recovery, in which there are no new manufacturing or construction jobs, in which the labor force participation rate is down, in which shopping center parking lots are far from full, stores with such a poor sales outlook would hire so many people in July?
Financial activities account for 15,000 of the reported new jobs. The Federal Reserve accounted for 80 percent of these jobs and bill collectors for the rest.
Professional and business services accounted for 36,000 of the new reported jobs. About half of these jobs were temporary help services and services to buildings and dwellings.
Health care and social assistance accounted for 8,300 jobs of which ambulatory health care services comprised 80 percent.
Waitresses and bartenders contributed 38,400 jobs. I have previously noted the anomaly of a population without good employment prospects or rising incomes going out to eat and to drink more and more often, so often that waitresses and bartenders comprise each and every month a significant percentage of the new employees.
In her commissioner’s statement accompanying the jobs report, Erica Groshen acknowledges that 8,200,000 or 6 percent of the currently employed are “involuntary part-time workers” who cannot find full-time employment.
The July 2013 payroll employment level of 136,038,000 stands 2,018,000 below the employment level in January 2008, which was 5 years and 7 months ago. If it requires 130,000 new jobs each month to keep employment equal with population growth, the US economy is behind by 10,728,000 jobs. These missing jobs show up in the declining labor force participation rate and the large number of discouraged workers who are no longer counted as unemployed.
Obviously, there is no economic recovery, despite the reporting of such by the presstitute financial press. Most likely the US economy is sinking further into a depression. The numerous indicators of economic collapse are ignored by economists and financial media busy at work weaving the Matrix to support The Lie.
As former executives of the “banks too big to fail” and their proteges run the US Treasury, the financial regulatory agencies, and the Federal Reserve, US economic policy has been focused on bailing out the excessively large banks created by mindless deregulation. The purpose of US economic policy is to save the large banks from their bad bets on poorly understood new financial instruments in the gambling casino created by deregulation.
The architects of financial deregulation, such as former Senator Phil Graham and President Bill Clinton were rewarded for their service with fortunes of their own. The free market dupes, who aided and abetted Bill and Phil and misrepresented the repeal of financial stability as a new beginning for laissez faire capitalism, still pretend that the crisis resulted from Congress requiring banks to make mortgage loans to poor black people who could not pay.
The lack of reality in America is extreme. I do not believe anything like it has ever existed in the modern world. Essentially, no one in government or out understands anything.
The combination of the power of vested interests with ideological thinking remote from empirical reality is destroying the US economy and the economic prospects of the American people. The employment profile of the US economy is increasingly that of a third world country. Economic security, except for the rich, has disappeared. A large and growing percentage of the population experiences the insecurity of poverty or near-poverty, while the waiting lists for $50 million yachts expands. The distribution of income is so skewed upward that people of enormous wealth bid up the prices of used Ferraris from the 1950s and 1960s to $12,000,000 and $35,000,000. I can remember when a used Ferrari was something that a person with a moderate income could afford to purchase. I have a friend who bought and sold for $9,000 in the 1960s the Ferrari that last sold for $35 million.
Detroit, once the fourth largest American city and the manufacturing powerhouse of the world, is bankrupt. The populations of the cities that once were America’s thriving manufacturing base are declining. Cleveland has boarded up homes. St. Louis has 20 percent of its homes vacant. Welfare is under attack by the Republicans and even some Democrats as the plight of the population worsens and despair rises.
Washington only responds to the half dozen powerful, rich private interest groups that fund election campaigns. The American people have no one to represent them. The American people have been placed outside the system of “democratic capitalism” which is only for the one percent.
As Jeffrey St. Clair has made clear, America no longer has a left-wing. America is a right-wing world in which people, including “progressives” have been brainwashed into perceiving reality in racial contrast: the whites are well off and the blacks are poor and destitute.
This is the false reality of the Matrix. As whites are a larger percentage of the population than blacks, there are more poor whites than poor blacks. Moreover, the percentage of poor whites is growing. The way the jobs-offshoring, bail out the rich, US economy operates today makes every one poor, including the remnants of America’s once flourishing middle class. It is not a racial issue. It is a class issue. A few people have the power, and they are driving everyone else into the ground. The US government is their agent.
So go wave the flag, support the troops, believe the government’s and media’s lies, but unless you are the well-connected one percent, don’t expect any future for your children. You have been sold out by “your” government. Obama is making pretty speeches, but only the stupid will be fooled.
Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book The Failure of Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Roberts’ How the Economy Was Lost is now available from CounterPunch in electronic format.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/07/the-new-economy-is-the-no-jobs-economy/
From Good Jobs To Bad Jobs To No Jobs – The Tragic Downfall Of The American Worker
There was a time in America when virtually anyone that wanted a job could go out and get one and the United States boasted the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world. Sadly, those days are long gone. Back in 1969, 95 percent of all men between the ages of 25 and 54 had a job. But now there are millions of Americans in their prime working years that cannot find a job. Millions of others are working low wage jobs or part-time jobs because that is all they can get. The other day I went to a large retail store and I got into a conversation with the lady who was checking me out. She said that she had worked professional jobs all her life, and that she had taken this job to tide her over as she searched for a new job, but now she had been there for two years with no end in sight. I felt really bad for her, because she was obviously a sharp lady with a lot of skills. But this is the new reality. Good paying manufacturing and professional jobs are being replaced by low paying service jobs. We are transitioning from an economy with plenty of good jobs to an economy with plenty of bad jobs. The next stage in our transition will be to an economy where it seems like there are no jobs for anyone. We are witnessing the tragic downfall of the American worker, and it is heartbreaking.
Many of our politicians insist that things are getting better for American workers, but that is simply not true. Just look at the chart below. Back at the start of 2008, the percentage of working age Americans with a job was sitting at about 63 percent. Since then it has fallen below 59 percent and it has stayed there for over 3 years. After every other recession in the post-World War II era the employment-population ratio has always bounced back. That has not happened this time...
If this number was going to recover, it would have done so by now. We are rapidly approaching the next major economic crisis and the percentage of working age Americans with a job is going to go even lower.
And our politicians are certainly not helping matters. Many of the things that they have done are actually going to accelerate the loss of good jobs. For example, as one small business owner recently pointed out, Obamacare is going to force businesses all over the United States to minimize the number of full-time workers they are using and replace them with part-time workers...
Here is what I am doing for the rest of the year -- working with every manager in my company so that as of January 1, 2013, none of our employees are working more than 28 hours a week. I think most readers know the reason -- we have got to get our company under 50 full time employees or else I am facing a bill from Obamacare in 2014 that will be several times larger than my annual profit. I love my workers. They make me a success. But most of my competitors are small businesses that are exempt from the Obamacare hammer. To compete, I must make sure my company is exempt as well. This means that our 400+ full time employees will have to be less than 50 in 2013, so that when the Feds look at me at the start of 2014, I am exempt. We will have more employees working fewer hours, with more training costs, but the Obamacare bill looks like about $800,000 a year for us, at least, and I am pretty sure the cost of more training will be less than that.
This will be unpopular but tolerable to most of my employees. The vast majority of them are retired and our company is merely an excuse to stay busy, work outdoors, and get a little extra money.
But this is going to be an ENORMOUS change in the rest of the service sector. I have talked to a lot of owners of restaurants and restaurant chains, and the 40-hour work week is a thing of the past in that business. One of my employees said that in Hawaii, it was all the hotel employees could talk about. Many chains are working on mutli-team systems where two teams of people working part-time replace the former group of full-time employees. 2013 is going to see a lot of people (who are not paid very well to begin with) getting their hours and pay cut by 25%. At the same time that they are required, likely for the first time since many are relatively young, to purchase health insurance.
How could we be so foolish?
Unfortunately, this is not something new. Our economy has been replacing good jobs with bad jobs for quite some time. If you can believe it, 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.
Will nearly all of us eventually be working in fast food restaurants or stocking shelves at retail giants like Wal-Mart?
Amazingly, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.
No wonder our middle class is being absolutely destroyed.
At this point, wages as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time low in America. As millions more good jobs are shipped out of the country, the competition for the remaining jobs will become incredibly fierce and that number will get even lower.
Many Americans that actually do have jobs right now find that they simply don't make enough to take care of themselves and their families. They are called "the working poor", and their ranks are growing steadily. Today, about one out of every four workers in the United States brings home wages that are at or below the federal poverty level.
American households are getting poorer at a time when prices continue to rise. Median household income in America has declined for four years in a row. Overall, it has fallen by over $4000 during that time span.
But have the prices in the stores declined?
Of course not.
No wonder middle class families are feeling more financial stress than ever before. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 85 percent of middle class Americans say that it is harder to maintain a middle class standard of living today than it was 10 years ago.
The transition from good jobs to bad jobs in our economy has been taking place for a very long time, and it is not going to be reversed overnight. Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs. Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs. There are less tickets to the middle class than there used to be, but neither political party seems interested in stopping the flow of good jobs out of the country.
If we keep doing the same things that we have been doing, we will continue to get the same results.
When I was young, I was told that there would always be "good jobs" available for anyone that got a good education and that worked hard.
What a crock of baloney that turned out to be.
According to a paper that was recently released by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, only 24.6 percent of all jobs in the United States qualify as "good jobs" at this point.
In a previous article, I detailed the three criteria that they used to define what a "good job" is….
#1 The job must pay at least $18.50 an hour. According to the authors, that is the equivalent of the median hourly pay for American workers back in 1979 after you adjust for inflation.
#2 The job must provide access to employer-sponsored health insurance, and the employer must pay at least some portion of the cost of that insurance.
#3 The job must provide access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan.
More than 75 percent of all jobs in the U.S. today are not "good jobs", and things are not looking promising for the future.
No wonder so many families are barely surviving these days. Right now, approximately 77 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck at least some of the time. That is a dreadful number.
But if you still do have a job, you should consider yourself to be fortunate.
There are millions upon millions of Americans out there without any job at all.
Did you know that 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor's degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed during 2011?
Hordes of fresh college graduates are entering the marketplace each year only to find that the good jobs that they were promised simply are not there.
And now it looks like things are getting even worse. This week Citigroup announced that it plans to eliminate 11,000 jobs in an attempt to reduce costs. But Citigroup is far from alone. We have seen dozens of major layoff announcements since the election. If you doubt this, just see this article and this article.
It is time to wake up and admit that our economy is in an advanced state of decline, that we need to quit shipping our jobs out of the country, and that what we are doing now is clearly not working.
If we are "the greatest economy on earth", then why are approximately 48 percent of all Americans either considered to be "low income" or are living in poverty?
We need to return to the principles that our Founding Fathers founded this country on or else things are going to get a lot worse and people are going to get very, very angry.
Our politicians have been pitting different groups of people against one another and many of them have been blaming the wealthy for all of our problems. Never before in my lifetime have I seen so much anger directed toward those that have money. This anger is even being expressed in ways that you would not normally expect. For example, the California Federation of Teachers recently produced a video that portrays wealthy people peeing on poor people. That shocked me.
Eventually, all of this anger is going to lead to violence if we are not careful. When the next major wave of the economic crisis strikes and unemployment gets significantly worse, I fear for what might happen. I believe that it is very possible that we may see mobs of struggling people storm into wealthy neighborhoods and play "Robin Hood" with their possessions.
Instead of hating one another, we need to return to the principles that once made our economy so great. Those principles would enable everyone to prosper.
Unfortunately, this country continues to turn away from those principles and hate and anger continue to grow.
If we continue down this path, the end result is going to be a complete and total nightmare.
It is possible to turn this economy around. But we can't do the same things that we have been doing. We have to start making better decisions.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/from-good-jobs-to-bad-jobs-to-no-jobs-the-tragic-downfall-of-the-american-worker