Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
Do you remember when real reporters existed? Those were the days before the Clinton regime concentrated the media into a few hands and turned the media into a Ministry of Propaganda, a tool of Big Brother. The false reality in which Americans live extends into economic life. Last Friday’s employment report was a continuation of a long string of bad news spun into good news. The media repeats two numbers as if they mean something—the monthly payroll jobs gains and the unemployment rate—and ignores the numbers that show the continuing multi-year decline in employment opportunities while the economy is allegedly recovering.
The so-called recovery is based on the U.3 measure of the unemployment rate. This measure does not include any unemployed person who has become discouraged from the inability to find a job and has not looked for a job in four weeks. The U.3 measure of unemployment only includes the still hopeful who think they will find a job.
The government has a second official measure of unemployment, U.6. This measure, seldom reported, includes among the unemployed those who have been discouraged for less than one year. This official measure is double the 5.3% U.3 measure. What does it mean that the unemployment rate is over 10% after six years of alleged economic recovery?
In 1994 the Clinton regime stopped counting long-term discouraged workers as unemployed. Clinton wanted his economy to look better than Reagan’s, so he ceased counting the long-term discouraged workers that were part of Reagan’s unemployment rate. John Williams (shadowstats.com) continues to measure the long-term discouraged with the official methodology of that time, and when these unemployed are included, the US rate of unemployment as of July 2015 is 23%, several times higher than during the recession with which Fed chairman Paul Volcker greeted the Reagan presidency.
An unemployment rate of 23% gives economic recovery a new meaning. It has been eighty-five years since the Great Depression, and the US economy is in economic recovery with an unemployment rate close to that of the Great Depression.
The labor force participation rate has declined over the “recovery” that allegedly began in June 2009 and continues today. This is highly unusual. Normally, as an economy recovers jobs rebound, and people flock into the labor force. Based on what he was told by his economic advisors, President Obama attributed the decline in the participation rate to baby boomers taking retirement. In actual fact, over the so-called recovery, job growth has been primarily among those 55 years of age and older. For example, all of the July payroll jobs gains were accounted for by those 55 and older. Those Americans of prime working age (25 to 54 years old) lost 131,000 jobs in July.
Over the previous year (July 2014 — July 2015), those in the age group 55 and older gained 1,554,000 jobs. Youth, 16-18 and 20-24, lost 887,000 and 489,000 jobs.
Today there are 4,000,000 fewer jobs for Americans aged 25 to 54 than in December 2007. From 2009 to 2013, Americans in this age group were down 6,000,000 jobs. Those years of alleged economic recovery apparently bypassed Americans of prime working age.
As of July 2015, the US has 27,265,000 people with part-time jobs, of whom 6,300,000 or 23% are working part-time because they cannot find full time jobs. There are 7,124,000 Americans who hold multiple part-time jobs in order to make ends meet, an increase of 337,000 from a year ago.
The young cannot form households on the basis of part-time jobs, but retirees take these jobs in order to provide the missing income on their savings from the Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy, which is keyed toward supporting the balance sheets of a handful of giant banks, whose executives control the US Treasury and Federal Reserve. With so many manufacturing and tradable professional skill jobs, such as software engineering, offshored to China and India, professional careers are disappearing in the US.
The most lucrative jobs in America involve running Wall Street scams, lobbying for private interest groups, for which former members of the House, Senate, and executive branch are preferred, and producing schemes for the enrichment of think-tank donors, which, masquerading as public policy, can become law.
The claimed payroll jobs for July are in the usual categories familiar to us month after month year after year. They are domestic service jobs—waitresses and bartenders, retail clerks, transportation, warehousing, finance and insurance, health care and social assistance. Nothing to export in order to pay for massive imports. With scant growth in real median family incomes, as savings are drawn down and credit used up, even the sales part of the economy will falter.
Clearly, this is not an economy that has a future.
But you would never know that from listening to the financial media or reading the New York Times business section or the Wall Street Journal.
When I was a Wall Street Journal editor, the deplorable condition of the US economy would have been front page news.
Greetings,
If you wish to see an honest prediction of what is in our future then I say look no further than the Enclosure Movement. Take a good hard look at what the elites did to their own countrymen and then project that onto the United States. The digital walls and fences are about to go up and those excluded will be no better off than those that suffered through this in years past.
Nickel Thrower , where can I find information on the Enclosure Movement ?
Nickel Thrower , I googled it . Not much information. Be hard to do in this with so many of us owning high power rifles.
Nickel….Never heard of it but you made me look it up. I interpret your comment as follows: Since the rich have done so well under QE and ZIRP, including Hedge Funds, Private Equity Groups, Banksters, and Int’l Corps, and the middle class has taken the financial brunt of those Gov’t policies, I expect in the future a lot of foreclosures. Property values will go down but the taxes for those properties will increase dramatically due to obligations of city/town budgets and pensions. The the rich will then swoop in and claim huge amounts of property for pennies on the dollar.
Greetings,
The enclosure movement in England was much worse than even that. The nobility used their control of parliment to fence off or “enclose” their lands. Families, farms and entire villages were forced off of lands that the nobility claimed belonged to them. Many wished to use those lands to graze sheep as the wool and clothing industry was taking off. The landless peasants were forced into the cities where living conditions were nothing short of unbearable.
Many like to claim that this was just wonderful but I disagree. Have a look at how the libertarians view it.
You’ll see that what happened to those people is exactly what is happening here – exactly.
Here is a teaser:
“The enclosures created a new organization of classes. The peasant with rights and a status, with a share in the fortunes and government of his village, standing in rags, but standing on his feet, makes way for the labourer with no corporate rights to defend, no corporate power to invoke, no property to cherish, no ambition to pursue, bent beneath the fear of his masters, and the weight of a future without hope. No class in the world has so beaten and crouching a history.”
NickelT…..the English peasants aren’t as well armed as we are. Just try and take my family property….t he only dirt they’ll get is a dirt nap.
@Buckhed
I agree with your sentiments but they wont take your property by force and when they do you won’t have any idea as to whom should be on the receiving end of your shootin’ irons. They’ll do it through bureaucratic red tape. One day you will receive a knock at the door and men with weapons at the ready will escort you from your home before you have any idea as to what just happened. You’ll find out that you didn’t apply for the special “own some land” permit or that you failed to pay some tax no one told you you had to pay.
Land confiscation is one of the oldest tricks in the book.
Finally, with hundreds of thousands of pages of laws, regulations, rules, requirements and obligations at their disposal, those that want your stuff have every legal means to take it while you are busy just trying to live your life.
This was on Zerohedge and the Daily Pfenning:
“One of the biggest drivers of the so-called recovery (in addition to the Fed’s $4.5 trillion balance sheet levitating to S&P500 and the offshore bank accounts of 1% of the US population) has been the US consumer: that tireless spending horse who through thick, thin, recession and depression is expected to take his entire paycheck, and then some tacking on a few extra dollars of debt, and spend it on worthless trinkets.
Sure enough, for the past 8 years, said consumer has done just that and with the help of the endless hopium and Kool-Aid dispensed by the administration, and by the political and financial propaganda media, spent, spent and then spent some more hoping that “this time it will be different.”
This all came to a screeching halt earlier today when courtesy of the latest New York Fed Survey of Consumer Expectations, we learned that the US consumer has finally tapped out. Households reported that they expected to increase their spending by just 3.5% in the next year, a major drop from the 4.3% the month before.
This was the lowest reading in series history.
Worse, when adjusting for household inflation expectations, which have been relatively flat if modestly declining around 3%, real spending intentions, when adjusted for inflation, just crashed to a barely positive 0.5%, down over 60% from the prior month. This too was the lowest print in series history.”
Consumer spending expectations has reached “a low for the series history” and the Fed is getting ready to hike rates? Are you kidding me?”
The Enclosures Acts were also how the rich effectively stole all public property (e.g. “The Commons”) and, through a series of related moves, most publicly held resources (e.g. mining rights, grazing rights, navigation rights, etc) in the UK, and privatized it.
This has also been ongoing in the United States in recent years, as everything from interstate highways, to public land, to watersheds, to libraries and stadiums are sold off/leased off/given away. Expect more, and worse.