Americans love to be lied to. This explains United States election results over the last four decades.
The less than perfect individual in the mirror takes on almost heroic dimensions amid unrelenting assurances that it is representative of American exceptionalism. Wars that bleed our treasury and our youth seem almost noble amid unrelenting assurances that we’re making the world safe for democracy. Climate change is a lie made up by greedy scientists who want big grants for their work. Guns don’t kill, people do. We are a Christian nation and God intended it that way. Marriage is between a man and a woman; anything else is bestiality, as bad as buggering a donkey. Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Iran is making weapons of mass destruction and Syria used chemical weapons on its dissidents. Cops can and should shoot every young black male who runs away with his hands up, wears a hoodie or menaces the neighborhood with Skittles. There’s no such thing as too much oregano.
Remember Pearl Harbor, the Alamo and the Cold War: Russians are bad. Americans and their European puppets are good. Thus when Obama and Putin rubbed shoulders the other day in China, even the supposedly left-leaning Huffington Post told us that relations between the two “have turned icy over Moscow’s backing of separatist violence” in Ukraine. The AP reminded us of “Russia's provocations in Ukraine.”
A few inconvenient truths have been swept under the rug here. Ukraine had a democratically-elected president who was more inclined to side with Russia than with the European Union and NATO. The U.S. spent more than $5 billion — including sending a cadre of neo-Nazi thugs to Poland to be trained at a secret base in insurrectionist dirty tricks — to foment violence and effect a coup d’etat. The democratically-elected head of Ukraine sought asylum in Russia while the U.S. saw to the installation of Willie Wonka as its puppet in Kiev. The people of Crimea, who have historically thought of themselves as Russian, voted — again, in a fair, democratic process — to reattach themselves to the motherland. The rest of the world knows this. But Americans only know that the “problem” in Ukraine is Putin’s fault and, oh Pshaw!, we just might have to nuke the bastards.
Meanwhile, back in the zoo called Washington, Republicans think they have seized control of the legislative part of the government apparatus. The same media who accept as fact Putin’s “provocations” in Ukraine have been telling us that this is so. In fact, neither party controls much of anything. The country is run by same pack of filthy rich corporations and oligarchs who put Reagan in office. The government maintains a big, well-oiled machine that spews out for public consumption what the oligarchy wants us to hear.
A small part of that machine, called the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), told us recently that the unemployment rate has declined to 5.8% and that 214,000 new jobs were created in October. That, the media lemmings told us, is good news. What the media do NOT tell us is us that the BLS statistics do NOT take account of the millions of Americans who have
become so discouraged from looking for jobs that do not exist, that they have quit looking.They are unemployed but not counted as unemployed.
Dr. Paul C. Roberts, a treasury department official in a Republican administration, knows how these things work. He writes:
The uncounted unemployed can be measured in the sharp 21st century decline in the labor force participation rate. It has declined because there are no jobs to participate in. But Washington (and) the media lie. They say the participation rate is down because the baby boomers are retiring. However, he participation rate of baby boomers is actually the highest of all and the only one that is rising. The reason is that with the Federal Reserve’s sole concern with the welfare of a small handful of mega-banks —the ones that sit on the board of the New York Federal Reserve Bank — real interest rates are negative. Therefore, retirees have no income from their retirement savings. To supplement their Social Security pensions (a rigged CPI prevents or minimizes cost-of-living increases), retirees take the temporary, lowly paid jobs that are all that the US economy can produce. These jobs do not provide sufficient income with which to form a household.
The US economy no longer creates First World jobs. The US economy creates jobs for waitresses and bartenders, hospital orderlies, and retail clerks. The complexion of the US work force is becoming Third World.
Look at the BLS payroll jobs report for October 2014: 209 thousand private jobs created and five thousand government jobs created. Where are the private jobs? Almost all of them–181,000–are in lowly paid private services. Retail trade with 27,100 jobs, wholesale trade with 8,500 jobs, and transportation and warehousing with 13,300 jobs and 48,900 jobs. With middle class retail stores closing and even dollar stores failing and with consumer income (except for the rich) and credit (except for student loans) shrinking, do you really believe that consumer spending supported almost 50,000 new jobs in October?
Where is the money coming from?
The vast amount of money that the Fed has created has gone into the handful of mega-banks to support the banks. The banks are not buying consumer goods.
The BLS reports that 37,000 new jobs were created in October in professional and business services. Employment services, such as temporary help services, account for 24,000 or 65% of these jobs.
Another old standby is education and health care services, which provided 41,000 new jobs. Health care and social assistance provided 27,200 of these jobs and home health care services provided 7,400 of these jobs. Together lowly paid services provided 84% of the jobs in health care services.
The major jobs sector in America (is) waitresses and bartenders. Waitresses and bartenders are classified under “leisure and hospitality,” which claims 52,000 new jobs in October.
Here are some other hidden, but disturbing, facts: In October job cuts rose 68% from the previous month and 12 percent from the previous year. So far there have been 414,591 job eliminations in 2014 with 51,183 of these coming in October.
Where are the job cuts? Retail store closings have produced 38,948 retail job reductions in 2014 with 6,874 of those coming in October. Yet, the BLS reports consistent job growth in retail jobs. Hewlett Packard cut 5,000 jobs in October, bringing its year’s total to 21,000 lost jobs. Microsoft eliminated 6,509 jobs in October for a year to date layoff of 55,511, a rise of 92 % from 2013. In October the electronics industry cut 1,648 jobs, bringing the year to date loss to 18,153. The telecommunications industry cut 5,217 jobs, bringing the year to date loss to 20,038, an increase of 81% from 2013.
In other words, good-paying jobs are being replaced by low-paying jobs.
That, alas, is one of the inconvenient truths Americans don’t want to hear. They want to hear the likes of Joni Ernst talk about her love affair with her 9 mm handgun.
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