29 May 2010 By Keith Johnson Give me a job, give me security 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. 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%. 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 Calzada of King Juan San Carlos 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
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