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The Great Unravelling - by Stephen Lendman
Friday's jobs report threw more cold water on so-called recovery. Since 2008, Main Street America's been in Depression.
Conditions have worsened, not improved, because of force-fed austerity, not badly needed stimulus to create jobs, reemploy people, and revive real economic growth, not the illusory kind since the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) officially declared June 2009 the end of recession.
At 11:05AM on July 8, Obama commented from the Rose Garden, doing what he does best - dissembling and distorting reality to conceal what's going on and why.
His best shot was saying:
"We still have a long way to go and a lot of work to do to give people the security and opportunity that they deserve."
In fact, since day one in office, he's done precisely the opposite, an agenda still in place. It includes bailing out criminal banks, their complicit counterparties, and other corporate favorites, as well as waging multiple imperial wars. At the same time, he stiff-armed budget strapped states and spurned efforts to create jobs, leaving unemployed Americans largely on their own sink or swim.
His latest excuse is "know(ing) that we'd have ups and downs on our way back from this recession. And over the past few months, the economy has experienced some tough headwinds - from natural disasters, to spikes in gas prices (because markets are manipulated), to state and local budget cuts" that lost jobs because federal aid was cut off when most needed.
Nonetheless, he said "we can make this better." Indeed so, but "we" don't because resources are diverted elsewhere, not where they're most needed, and that pattern will continue unchanged.
On July 8, the Labor Department reported 18,000 new jobs created. Its Household Survey showed 445,000 lost. In fact, the dismal job picture is exacerbated by monthly BLS reports saying:
"The confidence level for the monthly change in total employment is on the order of plus or minus 430,000 jobs."
Emphasize more "minus" than "plus" during hard times.
By reengineering employment data accurately based on how calculated in the 1980s, economist John Williams reported 22.7% unemployed, not the fictitious 9.2%, showing a very sick economy.
The only sensible comments from a Wall Street Journal editorial headlined, "The Jobs Double-Dip" were that:
-- most "Americans believe the economy is still in recession"
-- millions of lost jobs since 2008 haven't been regained; and
