No More Jobs?

 Popular Economics Weekly

“Consumer confidence inched up in June as falling oil prices in recent weeks provided some relief to consumer inflation fears,” said Dana M Peterson, Chief Economist, The Conference Board. “Consumer appraisals of current business conditions were slightly more positive compared to last month. However, perceptions of the current labor market softened measurably as the percentage of consumers saying jobs were ‘hard to get’ rose to 22.5%, the highest level since January 2021 (22.8%). Conference Board

 

MarketWatch

The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey highlighted what was behind the meager total of 57,000 new jobs in June – the fewest in four months. The job market may not recover from the damage the Trump administration has done to the U.S. economy anytime soon.

Some 755,000 worker dropped out of the labor force in June because “jobs are hard to get,” said the Conference Board’s survey.

What's more, job gains in May and April were revised down to a combined 277,000 from a previous 351,000 - 74,000 fewer than previously reported.

Trump’s Iran War disaster is probably the main reason for the job losses because higher energy prices from the Middle East are elevating inflation and slowing down hiring for years to come. Wall Street is hoping the A.I. revolution will boost labor productivity to such an extent that it will tame inflation, but without creating many new jobs.

The other culprit for fewer new jobs? Federal immigration officials have detained more than 10,000 people in the last five days, reports the NYTimes, a major surge that has stemmed from a push within Immigration and Customs Enforcement to increase arrest rates. Immigrants won in the latest SCOTUS rulings that ICE cannot hold them without due process, which might slow down the roundups because it means a bond hearing.

The shrinking labor force will shrink economic growth as well since fewer workers means less will be produced; unless the A.I. delivers on it promises of higher producivity. And that will take years. But that means fewer workers, anyway. There will be more robots, Claude, ChatGPT, Open AI, etc., etc. and a shrinking workforce that pays less taxes to support public policies, social security, Medicare and public debt don’t forget, which is soaring, of course.

Well, many of the new jobs will be in the lower paying healthcare industry — hospitals, doctor's offices, dentists, nursing homes and so forth — that created 47,000 of the 57,000 new U.S. jobs in June.

The big question will be how to support our public policies that serve all Americans in the future (and preserve jobs), rather than more Republican policies that continue to favor the concentration of wealth via A.I. or whatever, driving U.S. ever closer to insolvency.

Harlan Green © 2026

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

President Trump the Bully

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

 “With yesterday’s tragic news, we are calling for an immediate deescalation of tensions and for state, local and federal officials to work together to find real solutions.” Letter signed by 60 Minnesotan CEOs

CNBC.com

It has taken the ICE killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti for Minnesotan CEOs — among the most powerful and wealthiest Americans, says CNBC — to cause President Trump to blink, to back down from the Storm Trooper tactics of his immigration police in Minneapolis.

Minnesotans and the American public are learning how to counter what they are seeing with their own eyes, the real Donald Trump. His actions and those of his followers are the behavior of bullies, led by a megalomaniac with a very limited attention span and unlimited need for attention in the words of Mary Trump, his niece and a Clinical Psychologist, whose single-minded purpose is to gather as much wealth and power to himself as possible.

     It is a bully mentality that has infected Trump’s MAGA followers and leaders of the Republican Party as well, which sometimes takes tragedies such as happened in Milwaukee to open our eyes. There is little mystery to his actions.

Donald Trump’s success in business, such as it is, was due to his bullying tactics that browbeat investors and lenders to such an extent that he could no longer rely on U.S. investors and banks to finance his projects, but came to rely on Russian oligarchs instead who needed to hide their wealth from the Russian people.

Such a mentality has led to increased bullying in schools since the COVID-19 pandemic, and even gun violence. It is a mentality that attempts to impose a bully's version of reality on the real world for the sole purpose of domination.

Evidence of Trump's bullying behavior also comes from the exaggerated use of his hands, which is the body language and mannerisms of a bully reports Groff Beattle, a professor of Psychology at Edge Hill University who specializes in gestures,.

Also comments such as "mentally sick", "dummy", "looser" or "looked disgusting" are all examples of bullying language on Trump's Truth Social site. Furthermore, he has mocked the disability of reporter Serge Kovaleski, portrayed immigrants and foreigners as dangerous people, rapists or "criminal aliens", and demonstrated a significant lack of respect for women generally.

How does one oppose such destructive behavior? First, remember that bullies will prey on the weakest, and avoid confrontation with those stronger because of their own insecurities. Trump preyed on naïve students and the elderly in his Trump University scam. And he stiffed workers and employees when building his Trump Casinos either by paying them less than was contractually agreed to, or not at all via numerous bankruptcies.

It is a lesson NATO members at DAVOS have just learned that is being reflected in their speeches as they search for other countries to move their businesses.

Combine it with what many Psychologists have termed Trump’s Malignant Narcissism, a particularly dangerous form that means he will do anything, break any law to get his way.

Trump is now supporting Central and South American regimes backed by drug cartels in pardoning former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was serving a 40-year sentence for drug trafficking.

In standing up to what has proven to be a soulless, amoral administration Minnesotans are fighting for more than their own state, they are fighting to prevent a world that President Trump and his oligarchs want to restore in South and Central America for their own benefit by supporting right wing narco-states that have as little regard for life.

Harlan Green © 2026

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Another Civil War?

 Popular Economics Weekly

“The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.” JB Pritzer, Governor of Illinois

 

CBS

Historian Heather Cox Richardson has been documenting the irrational talk of President Trump, who seems to be trying to distract the media from the bad economic news and his involvement in the Epstein files in her quote from Governor Pritzer that she cited above.

“Today the social media account of President Donald J. Trump posted an AI-generated image of Trump as if he were Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore from the 1979 film Apocalypse Now in front of the Chicago skyline with military helicopters and flames and the caption “Chipocalypse Now.” Kilgore loved the war in Vietnam in which he was engaged; his most famous line was “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” said Professor Richardson

I believe it’s worse than that. He seems to want to foment a civil war by threatening to “invade” Chicago and New York as he invaded Los Angeles, using armed red state National Guard troops. The message is clear. Red southern states are finally able to invade blue northern states, something they couldn’t do in the 1860s civil war!

Can it also be a pretext for stopping the vote in upcoming elections by declaring some form of martial law? The courts have stopped his alien invasion rationale to date for rounding up undocumented immigrants and deporting them without due process.

But economic growth keeps being revised downward. In the Labor Department’s latest revisions, the economy created 911,000 fewer jobs in the last months of the Biden presidency and early stages of the Trump administration, indicating the labor market began to weaken far sooner than previously believed.

The updated employment figures from April 2024 to March 2025 could cause the Federal Reserve to lower short-term interest rates even more in September — and beyond. The latest downward revision is the biggest since at least 2000, reports MarketWatch’s Jeffry Bartash.

As a result, the pace of job creation from May through August slowed to 27,000 a month, one of the worst stretches since 2010 if the pandemic era is excluded.

Trump’s desperate attempt to deflect media attention now that the SCOTUS shadow docket has just allowed him to ignore the Fourth Amendment ban on indiscriminate search and seizure, will give Democrats plenty of political ammunition for the upcoming elections. The Supreme Court decision means ICE can stop any Hispanic looking, or Spanish speaking, person who must prove to their satisfaction that they are a US citizen or here legally.

It is an incredible overstretching of authority. And the immigration roundup in general will harm legal immigrants and minorities as well. Will Americans vote for a political party that blatantly breaks the Fourth Amendment, other than the hard line MAGA base that believes anything Trump says?

It is why Trump wants to rename the Defense Department as the Department of War, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is now talking and acting like a White Supremacist to rally Trump’s base.

I believe that Trump will touch a nerve that he hadn’t counted on, Americans’ love of freedom. Trump preaches the opposite, the right to imprison many Americans on almost any pretext.

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen