Tom Friedman is a liar

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The shrill conservative, Dr Paul Craig Roberts, who is on the side of the American middle class calls out the liars who claim that free trade creates jobs.

The claim that jobs offshoring by US corporations increases domestic employment in the US is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated. As I demonstrated in my syndicated column at the time and again in my book, How The Economy Was Lost (2010), Slaughter reached his erroneous conclusion by counting the growth in multinational jobs in the U.S. without adjusting the data to reflect the acquisition of existing firms by multinationals and for existing firms turning themselves into multinationals by establishing foreign operations for the first time. There was no new multinational employment in the U.S. Existing employment simply moved into the multinational category from a change in the status of firms to multinational.

If Slaughter (or Cohen) had consulted the Bureau of Labor Statistics nonfarm payroll jobs data, he would have been unable to locate the 5.5 million jobs that were allegedly created. In my columns I have reported for about a decade the details of new jobs creation in the U.S. as revealed by the BLS data, as has Washington economist Charles McMillion. Over the last decade, the net new jobs created in the U.S. have nothing to do with multinational corporations. The jobs consist of waitresses and bartenders, health care and social services (largely ambulatory health care), retail clerks, and while the bubble lasted, construction.

These are not the high-tech, high-paying jobs that the �New Economy� promised, and they are not jobs that can be associated with global corporations. Moreover, these domestic service jobs are themselves scarce.

We have another example of Obama change not so much.  It's really sad that we have to go to the Conservative/Libertarian site American Thinker to document Obama'a failure to change things for the middle class but we do. 

The United States needs to concentrate on jobs, jobs, jobs. But the Obama administration is engaged in discussions with China, India, Brazil, and Russia. It sponsored and entered into negotiations for a regional Asia-Pacific trade agreement, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement, with Australia, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Not one industrial job has been created or ever will be.

So we are told the secret of sucess is to retrain the labor force.  But what are you going to retrain them to do?  Roberts:

In mid-October Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs puppet Tim Geithner gave a speech in California in the backyard, or former backyard, of 60 Minutes� Silicon Valley dispossessed upper middle class interviewees in which Geithner said that the solution is to �educate more engineers.�

We already have more engineers than we have jobs for them. In a recent poll a Philadelphia marketing and research firm, Twentysomething, found that 85% of recent college graduates planned to move back home with parents. Even if members of the �boomeranger generation� find jobs, the jobs don�t pay enough to support an independent existence.

The financial media is useless. Reporters repeat the lie that the unemployment rate is 9.6%. This is a specially concocted unemployment rate that does not count most of the unemployed. The government�s own more inclusive rate stands at 17%. Statistician John Williams, who counts unemployment the way it is supposed to be counted, finds the unemployment rate to be 22%.

The financial press turns bad news into good news. Recently a monthly gain of 64,000 new private sector jobs was hyped, jobs that were more than offset by the loss in government jobs. Moreover, it takes around 150,000 new jobs each month to keep pace with labor force growth. In other words, 100,000 new jobs each month would be a 50,000 jobs deficit.

How do we know that the US is becoming a banana republic?  Dr Paul Craig Roberts:

I sent a letter to the Wall Street Journal, but the editors were not interested in what a former associate editor and columnist for the paper and President Reagan�s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy had to say. The facade of lies has to be maintained at all costs. There can be no questioning that globalism is good for us.

The only media exposure Dr Roberts can get these days is on the liberal Thom Hartman show.