Keith Johnson
Revolt of the Plebs
May 26, 2010
Give me a job, give me security
give me a chance to survive
I’m just a poor soul in the unemployment line
my god, I’m hardly alive
Styx—Blue Collar Man
Last week, Barrack Obama brought his stage show to a manufacturing plant in Youngstown Ohio and took credit for 290,000 new jobs added to US payrolls in April. “The fact is, our economy is growing again,” he boasted “Any fair-minded person would say that if we hadn’t acted … more people across America would be out of work today.” He’s speaking of course of the $787 billion Recovery Act that pumped even more counterfeit cash into the economy and is now redeemable (at interest) by the Federal Reserve from your American tax dollar.
The only legitimate jobs that can point to economic growth are those that create, produce or manufacture tangible goods.
At least it put people to work, right? Well, let’s take a look at some of those jobs, shall we. Already, 66,000 of those new hires will start getting their pink slips by the beginning of June. I’m speaking, of course, of the Federal employees hired to conduct the 2010 Census. Then there’s the 26,000 new jobs hired by temp agencies and day labor outfits. Those jobs you can kiss goodbye.
The most significant increase to the job market was in professional and business services (80,000). These jobs are primarily in the field of advertising and public relations, employment services, computer support, consulting and research.
The leisure and hospitality industry saw the third highest increase in new workers (45,000). We’re sure to find a few top dollar chefs and country club managers thrown into that mix, but the vast majority of these new employees are working the grill at your local Burger King.
If we tally this up, the above accounts for almost 75% of the new jobs added to US payrolls referred to in the first paragraph. Unfortunately, none of this employment is sustainable without a vibrant and robust manufacturing base. We don’t have that. Instead, we have a service economy. All of the above mentioned jobs (with the exception of the Federal Census) are service related. Advertising and public relations are done for companies that import products from China or India while your average fast food employee is busy assembling tacos from produce shipped in from Brazil and Honduras.
So what about those manufacturing jobs? Were any added to US payrolls in April? As Obama gloated over the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Employment Situation Summary last Tuesday, he and his supporters were quick to point out the significant rise in manufacturing jobs (44,000). What they didn’t tell you is that there is always a rise in production from our manufacturing sector in the first quarter. Companies need to restock inventory after the holiday buying season. That’s now over, and just three days after Obama gave his Youngtown address, the same Federal agency (BLS) that released the Employment Situation Summary came out with its devastating Mass Layoff’s Summary. Who took the biggest hit? You guessed it: manufacturing. According to this article from Reuters news service:
The Labor Department said the number of mass layoff events — defined as job cuts involving at least 50 people from a single employer — increased by 228 to 1,856 as employers shed 200,870 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis.
The number of mass layoffs in the manufacturing sector totaled 448 resulting in 63,616 initial jobless benefit claims, the department said. That was more than 24,000 higher than the previous month, but well below the 125,000 initial jobless claims in the manufacturing sector a year ago.
The Labor Department said the manufacturing sector accounted for 23 percent of all mass layoffs and 28 percent of the initial claims filed in April.
The U.S. jobs market is lagging the broader economic recovery that started in the second half of 2009. Since December 2007, when the worst recession in 70 years started, the U.S. economy has shed more than 8 million jobs and the latest data suggest it will take some time to make up for those losses.
That pretty much supplants all those enthusiastic claims about a growing economy, doesn’t it? At least it does in terms of our unemployment situation. Right now, unemployment is still hovering at 22% if we go by the government’s own (U6) number of 17.2% combined with the pre-1994 defined ‘discouraged workers’ added back into the equation. It’s even worse if you’re under the age of 25. For the roughly half of high school graduates under 25 and not in college, the average is somewhere close to 37%.
Ever since 1913, we have slowly been slipping away from an agrarian society to one that is increasingly dependent on foreign imports. Over the last ten years, this incremental suicide has accelerated us into an almost exclusively service-based economy. Today, there are over 2.7 million people working in the fast-food industry. This is a 43% increase over the last decade. We cannot sustain an economy on these kinds of jobs. Neither can we sustain an economy by hiring people to stock shelves with Chinese goods and man cash registers at your local Wal-Mart. Even worse are the needless Federal subsidy funded increases in law enforcement employment. We don’t need another SWAT team in a retirement community in South Florida or more traffic cops milking the people out of the few remaining consumer dollars they have left to spend. The only legitimate jobs that can point to economic growth are those that create, produce or manufacture tangible goods. These jobs create new wealth while the others take from it.
Of course we are daily apprised of how our government is planning to fix this crisis and bring manufacturing back to America. Their solution: green jobs. Unfortunately, green jobs are the last thing we need and will actually destroy what’s left of our existing manufacturing base. The Obama administration plans to bring the Spanish model of a green economy to America. But even Spain now admits that their own model has wreaked devastation on their economy. Their renewable energy initiatives have destroyed 2.2 jobs for every new “green” job created.
Writing in “Study of the Effects on Employment of Public Aid to Renewable Energy Sources,” economics professor Gabriel Calzada of King Juan San Carlos University in Madrid reports:
“As President Obama correctly remarked, Spain provides a reference for the establishment of government aid to renewable energy. No other country has given such broad support to the construction and production of electricity through renewable sources. The arguments for Spain’s and Europe’s ‘green jobs’ schemes are the same arguments now made in the U.S., principally that massive public support would produce large numbers of green jobs. The question that this paper answers is ‘at what price?’
“Optimistically treating European Commission partially funded data, we find that for every renewable energy job that the State manages to finance, Spain’s experience cited by President Obama as a model reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about 9 jobs lost for every 4 created.”
The economy is dead. Regardless of what anyone says about a recovery, there is no brining back to life something that has already breathed its last breath. You can keep the patient on the operating table as long as you want, but eventually you’re going to have to put a sheet over its face. The recovery is a lie. The hospital staff has applied rouge to the cheeks and rigged the electrocardiograph machine to fool the American people into believing there’s still hope. They can get away with this for a while, but soon the body is going to start to bloat and put off a terrible stink. Then the game will be up.
Trends forecaster Gerald Celente is famous for stating, “When the people have nothing left to lose, they lose it!” Right now people still have a lot to lose and the only thing that keeps them from “losing it” is fear. They’re afraid of losing what little they have left and will believe any lie if it separates them from the anguish of dealing with the passing of something they have come to love. But soon, when the dollar takes its final bow and the corpse is finally placed into the ground, that fear will turn to anger—and that’s when things will really start to get interesting.
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