‘Another Phony Jobs Report From a Government That Lies About Everything’

The 179,000 jobs created in May and boasted about by the Obama administration are no more than “the usual lowly paid non-exportable domestic service jobs — the jobs of a third world country,” former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts writes.

According to Roberts’ number crunching, here’s how the bulk of those jobs break down: retail, 27,700; wholesale trade, 7,900; ambulatory health care services, 15,300; servers and bartenders, 38,100; local government, 13,000; amusement, gambling and recreation, 12,500; temporary help, 25,600; business support services, 4,300; services to buildings and residences, 6,400; accounting and bookkeeping, 3,100; architecture and engineering, 4,900; computer systems and related, 6,000; management and technical consulting, 3,200.

“For a decade this has been the jobs profile of ‘the world’s most powerful economy,’ ” Roberts points out. “It is the profile of third world India 40 years ago. The jobs that made the U.S. the dominant economy have been moved off shore by corporations threatened by Wall Street with takeovers if they did not increase their profits.”

The United States now has more hotel maids, bartenders and servers than manufacturing workers, Roberts notes. “The U.S. has twice as many people employed in government than in manufacturing,” and virtually no new jobs for the “vast number” of recent college graduates.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

Paul Craig Roberts:

Today President Obama’s economist said that the notch upward in the unemployment rate was because the economic outlook was so good that more people were encouraged to enter the labor market than there were new jobs available.

The conclusion is inescapable: The same government that lies about weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein’s al-Qaeda connections, Iranian nukes, and so on, also lies about jobs, the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, rigs every financial and commodity market, pretends that terrorism is such a threat that the US Constitution must be set aside and that Americans are safer without the protection of habeas corpus and due process.

Read more