American Workers Taking Hit From Global Economy

Without an industrial base and with mounting war costs, American workers are headed for troubled times.

 

Exclusive To American Free Press

By Mike Blair

 

Traditionally, American workers have experienced good times during war but not so in the current push for a globalist economy by international banking interests and multi-national corporations.

In past wars, America’s factories and manufacturing interests geared up to produce products needed to fight battles. Today, America’s war needs are being filled by foreign factories.

A good share—maybe most—of the country’s industry has been shipped by multi-national interests to third world countries where labor is plentiful and cheap.

While 200,000 Reserve and National guardsmen have been called up, it would normally be expected that temporary openings would be available until they return. This, however, has not happened. There was a loss of 357,000 jobs across the nation in February, followed by an additional 108,000 in March.

Since 1998 more than 2.5 million jobs have been lost, mostly to foreign countries.

Currently, there are 8.4 million American work ers who are unemployed. Of that total 474,000 workers became discouraged and dropped out of the job pool.

With the erosion of manufacturing jobs many Americans have been forced to find work in lower paying service-sector jobs in restaurants, hotels and stores.

However, these jobs, too, are starting to decline.

In March jobs in the service sector dropped by 94,000 and in February it was even worse with a loss of 256,000.

As might be expected the banking industry was one of the few sectors of the U.S. job market to show gains in February and March, although the Labor Depart ment does not readily have figures available to indicate how much.

It was expected that low mortgage interest rates would create many new jobs in the construction industry this spring.

But an expected boom has not occurred and only 21,000 new construction jobs became available in March.

Economists are becoming increasingly worried that America is heading for more troubled times.

All of this is in spite of—or because of—President Bush’s $75 billion request for money to attack Iraq and the vast sums that will be needed in the future to rebuild it.

“It’s hard to ignore the feeling that we’re much closer to a double-dip recession than seemed likely even a month or two ago,” said Bill Cheney, chief economist of John Hancock Financial Services.