All the while that a large percentage of the American population is experiencing economic frustration and hardship, the government and the financial media are telling them that recovery is underway, that the unemployment rate has come down, that construction and home sales are rebounding. These are self-evident lies, but the lies meet few protests.
Because of the holiday, jobs and employment data for June were released on Thursday. The financial media pumped the holiday weekend full of good news -- 223,000 new payroll jobs and a drop in the unemployment rate from 5.5% to 5.3%, a number that is closing in on full employment.
This is a totally false picture. Here is the true one:
The payroll jobs figure reported last month for May was revised down by 60,000 jobs. Net of the revision of the overstated May payroll jobs, the job increase was 163,000, not 223,000. This method of overestimating jobs for the good news effects and then quietly revising them later is one of the deceptions used by The Matrix.
The 163,000 payroll jobs are jobs, not employed people. Increasingly the jobs are part-time and one person may have two or three of the jobs. In June the number of people with full-time jobs declined by 349,000.
The 5.3% unemployment rate (U3) is achieved by not counting millions of unemployed people. If you have been unable to find a job and have not looked for a job in the previous four weeks, you are not included in calculation of the 5.3% rate. The financial media emphasizes this misleading rate even though the government provides a second measure of unemployment (U6) that counts the short-term discouraged workers. The inclusion of short-term discouraged workers, that is, those who cannot find a job and have given up looking, doubles the unemployment rate to 10.5%.
As part of its policy of replacing truth with propaganda, about 20 years ago the government ceased counting long-term discouraged workers among the unemployed. When the long-term unemployed are included, the rate of unemployment in the US in June was 23.1%.
A 23.1% rate of unemployment is what the government, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, the financial media, and the Ivy League economists who shill for the One Percent call recovery.
If Greeks are unable to discern their own interests when they vote Sunday, Americans have no right to say anything about it as Americans have proven over and over that they are incapable of knowing their own interests.
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