The Book of Jobs

Flailing (v): 1. Swing or move in a random unstable way. “Her arms were flailing.”

                    2.  Clumsy or ineffectual.  “their flailing attempt to save the company”  

Yesterday, the Jobs Report for June was released.  But this isn’t exactly about that.  In part it is, but that can be dealt with in just a few sentences, starting with “Only 57,000 jobs were added, half of the 116,000 expected.”  There, you get the gist.  But no, instead, this is about how the White House chose to handle it, in its inimitable White House style, unable to be honest, deal with reality and admit mistake. 

What White House “spokesperson” (sic) Karoline Leavitt posted on social media was a quote, albeit without attribution.  Only if you’d checked and saw she was following up on a previous headline she quoted from Breitbart – always the model of objectivity (sic) in news – would you have known that’s where the quote was from. 

She posted this take on the poor Jobs Report that showed only half the number of jobs expected were added --

"The June jobs report showed that the foreign-born labor force has fallen sharply over the past year, a sign that President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration is reshaping the composition of the U.S. labor market.”

First of all, even if you take this quote as an appraisal of what the Jobs Report said, it’s wrong.  After all, foreign-born labor is not inherently “illegal” immigrants.

And second, this interpretation is like starting a news story about the sinking of the Titanic, “The maiden voyage of the luxury ocean liner Titanic from England showed how thrilled the passengers were upon reaching the American shore.”

 Actually, there’s a third point to the Jobs Report.  It’s that it was also announced that the figures from the two previous months, April and May -- which the Trump administration touted as proving the great success of their economic policy (sic) -- had to be revised lower by 74,000 fewer jobs.

So, that whole “foreign-born labor force” free fall has apparently been going gangbusters.

 But this wasn’t the White House’s only effort to twist reality and find great news from job loss.  As I mentioned, Press Secretary Leavitt – who rarely has met a falsehood (the polite term) she didn’t embrace like a long-lost brother – had also quoted a headline from that same Breitbart “news” (sic).  That headline was --

“Trump Effect: The U.S. Workforce Is Becoming More American”.

 As I replied to her tweet, “You say this like it’s A Good Thing.”

In reality, a massive part of the job market is made up of immigrants doing jobs that most American-born citizens won't do. Hard labor at minimum age.  Lose those jobs, and industries like farming and hospitality are in huge trouble.  In fact, when Florida tried a major crackdown on illegal immigrant labor a few years ago, the big farm owners raised such hell about how this would crush their business that the state law was quickly changed.  And when the Trump administration had its huge immigration crackdown in California, saying that they’d be going after everyone, the farming and hospitality fields made it know that this was a Really, Really Disastrous Idea for them – and the Trump people quickly added an “Well, except for…” update.

Also, it worth noting the interesting but little-known (to the Trump administration, apparently) piece of trivia that immigrants who are U.S. citizens are, in fact, actually...Americans!

What most impressed me about what Ms. Leavitt wrote on behalf of the White House, desperately trying to milk something, anything “positive” from the dismal Jobs Report – no matter how racist and wrong it might be – is how she was able to type it with her arms flailing.