Collapse in Construction Illustrates U.S. Jobs-Lie
Articles & Blogs - US Commentary
As the U.S. “economic recovery” continues, through simply uttering ever-larger lies with its economic “statistics”; next on the agenda is another farcical, monthly jobs report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics this Friday. Even with the steady drop in the weekly lay-off numbers, they are still at a level 50% higher than any break-even point in the labour market – based upon historical patterns (see “Wall Street Invents NEW Jobs Propaganda”).
The claim by propagandists in the U.S. government and media that the U.S. economy is creating 50% more jobs than normal – to offset those lay-offs - lacks even a shred of plausibility. There are many ways to prove unequivocally that the U.S. economy is still losing vast numbers of jobs each month (likely somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million/month, given current parameters). One easy way is to point to tax receipts.
Revenues for all three levels of government continue plummeting downward, without even the slightest sign of deceleration, let alone stabilization. To suggest the U.S. economy is now producing jobs on a net basis, or (at least) not losing any more jobs (which has already been telegraphed by the propagandists) begs the question: “where's the beef?”
Surely if millions of jobs are being created to offset all the lay-offs then those people would be paying taxes? Apart from the fact that all these “phantom employees” are apparently only paying phantom taxes, the next obvious question is who is doing all this hiring?
It's not government. As pointed out earlier, in the midst of the greatest collapse in government revenues in U.S. history, the three levels of U.S. government have just begun the massive job-slashing necessary to postpone debt-defaults for a few more years (months?).
It's not the retail sector. U.S. retailers couldn't even improve upon last year's dismal holiday shopping season, which (until this year) was the worst in 40 years. They did not stock up on inventories, meaning that even if the goods they sold were made in the U.S. (and few are), that there was no demand to boost manufacturing employment. Selling fewer goods means hiring fewer workers. With the only area of retail “strength” in the U.S. economy being on-line sales (which require virtually no workers), there certainly has been no hiring in this sector to offset all the lay-offs.
Obviously the supposed “surge” in hiring is not coming from the financial sector. Even if we believe absurd claims of not only solvency, but “profitability” from the U.S. banker-oligarchs, even in the best of times, the financial sector is the precise opposite of a “labour-intensive” occupation. Banks aren't lending money, and it takes very few employees to simply spend all your days trading in equities markets.
This leaves only construction as a possible source of U.S. employment “strength”. Numbers released today show that the U.S. construction sector is at its weakest point in the last six years. Year-over-year numbers show that U.S. construction spending was 13% lower than a year ago. Construction spending has now been falling officially for every month since the “U.S. economic recovery” supposedly began (seven consecutive months).
Think about this for a minute. One year ago, we were at the worst of the global deflationary panic, and the U.S. economy was plummeting downward at the fastest pace which the U.S. government has admitted to date – and now construction spending is 13% lower than that. It becomes very easy to demonstrate that the U.S. economy is only generating “phantom jobs” when the propagandists in the government forgot to invent a “phantom sector” - which could serve as the source for all these supposed jobs.
In this mind-numbing, brainwashing campaign by the U.S. government, the sheep have been lulled into such an intellectual coma that the U.S. government sees no need to do anything more than crank-out its fraudulent numbers. There has been no consideration, at all, of any attempt to produce any logical/factual basis for their employment fabrications.
Perhaps this is of necessity. When you are engaging in a campaign of compulsive lies, the more lies which are uttered, the greater the chances of being completely exposed. In other words, it's one thing to simply claim that the U.S. economy is no longer losing jobs. It is lying of yet another order of magnitude to invent this fiction on a sector-by-sector basis.
Yes, the BLS does break down its employment numbers on a sector-by-sector basis. However, the details are completely ignored by the propaganda-machine – only the “headline number” is reported. Meanwhile, the BLS simply falsifies employment data for every sector, but only by relatively small increments each month.
These monthly fabrications have gradually added up. While the weekly lay-offs have only decreased by 1/3 from their peak level, the net job losses have supposedly been reduced 100%. Based on historical patterns, the current rate of lay-offs (totaling slightly less than 2 million per month) suggests net, monthly job losses of about 750,000 to 1 million lost jobs per month.
Certainly, with Wall Street oligarchs controlling somewhere close to 75% of all U.S. equities trading, and with their minions in the media “reporting” whatever outlandish fabrications are fed to these talking-heads, the continuing “rally” in U.S. equities markets demonstrates nothing, except that these markets are being set up for another crash.
Wall Street has bid-up prices for ten consecutive months, with seven of those months being based upon an “economic recovery” which never began. With U.S. markets and U.S. economic fundamentals continuing to move as polar opposites (in the real world), the disconnect between valuations and values approaches an extreme equal to or greater than that at the peak of the U.S. housing bubble – when Chief Propagandist, Ben Bernanke was bragging about the United States' “Goldilocks economy”.
Given that Bernanke has recently been expelling his hot air with the same vehemence as when he was pumping the first U.S. housing-bubble, contrarians would be well-advised to remember how much a Ben Bernanke “prediction” is worth (hint: it has about the same value as a U.S. dollar).
Keep in mind that in the rigged-casino known as “U.S. equities markets”, it is totally unnecessary for the government to report (officially) the next “downturn” in the U.S. economy, before U.S. markets begin their next crash. Indeed, in order for the oligarchs to make as “clean” an exit as possible, we will likely see U.S. markets sell off for several weeks (labeled as “profit taking”) before the government “greases the skids” by acknowledging a “double dip” - in an economic collapse which never came close to subsiding in the real world.

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