It Is Worse Than You Think

Trey Smith

In the first decade of the 21st century, Detroit, Michigan, lost 25% of its population. Gary, Indiana, lost 22%. Flint, Michigan, lost 18%. Cleveland, Ohio, lost 17%. In St. Louis, Missouri, 19% of the housing is vacant. These population losses were not the result of the Black Plague or killer viruses or a nuclear attack. They were the result of corporate CEOs, pushed by their own greed, by the greed of Wall Street and that of large retailers such as Wal-Mart, aided and abetted by “our” government, into moving millions of manufacturing, software engineering, information technology, engineering, research, development, and design jobs offshore.

The process of moving American jobs offshore left cities, counties, and states with shrunken tax base.The resulting state and local budget deficits are being used to dismantle public sector unions and to cut social services. Public assets, such as water companies, and future income streams from parking meters, toll roads and bridges, are being sold off to foreign buyers in order to insure another year of local and state government solvency.

In the first decade of the 21st century, Americans lost 5,500,000 manufacturing jobs. US employment in the manufacture of computer and electronic products fell by 40%; in the production of machinery by 30%, in motor vehicles and and parts by 44%, and in the manufacture of clothing by 66%.

In other words, in ten years the US economy was decimated by jobs offshoring for the sole purpose of higher rewards to capital in the form of multi-million dollar executive bonuses and large shareholder capital gains. A few hedge fund executives were paid a billion dollars in annual renumeration and a couple of dozen of them were paid $500 million in annual compensation. What sense does that make? Huge fortunes paid for one year’s work, not in productive activity but in destroying the financial system and the value of pensions that tens of millions of Americans had worked their lives to achieve.
~ from The Dismal Economic Outlook For The New Year by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts ~

These figures are astounding!! If the mainstream media was as liberal as we're always told it is, this sort of info would be plastered on the nightly news. The fact that you can only read it on a few progressive websites here and there should tell you that the liberal mainstream media is another one of those great myths!

When we consider that the construction of new homes is way down, governments are shedding public sector jobs and, as shown above, manufacturing is really low too, what kinds of jobs predominantly are being created? The answer should be damn obvious: service-based jobs, the ones that tend to pay the least and offer few, if any, benefits.

Yesterday, I shared another of Roberts' articles which stated that the unemployment rate isn't half as rosy as the government maintains. So, what we're left with is a double whammy. Far more Americans are out-of-work than the federal government is reporting plus, of the jobs that are being created, most of them pay around minimum wage or slightly above.

How on earth can the economy get back on track under these conditions? The simple answer is that it can't and it won't.