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About TheCenterLane.com
TheCenterLane.com offers opinion, news and commentary on politics, the economy, finance and other random events that either find their way into the news or are ignored by the news reporting business. As the name suggests, our focus will be on what seems to be happening in The Center Lane of American politics and what the view from the Center reveals about the events in the left and right lanes. Your Host, John T. Burke, Jr., earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston College with a double major in Speech Communications and Philosophy. He earned his law degree (Juris Doctor) from the Illinois Institute of Technology / Chicago-Kent College of Law.
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Jobs And Propaganda
August 10, 2009
On Friday, Wall Street celebrated a “less bad” Employment Situation Report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Although the consensus estimate for jobs lost during the month of July was 345,000 — the report from the BLS on Friday recited that non-farm payrolls decreased by 247,000. You may have heard the BLS referred to as the “Bureau of Lies and Statistics” by those who see BLS reports as “cooked data” for propaganda purposes. Criticism of the spin given to the report could be found at the Zero Hedge website, which featured an entry with the title: “The Truth Behind Today’s BLS Report” with quotes from such authorities as consulting economist John Williams and economist David Rosenberg. Mr. Rosenberg was quoted as providing this caveat:
At The Atlantic Online, Daniel Indiviglio wrote a piece entitled: “Did the Unemployment Rate Really Go Down?” Among his points were these:
Claims of “good news” about the unemployment picture are regularly contradicted, if not by our own personal experiences, then by those of our relatives and friends. Beyond that, we see daily reports of middle-class families using food stamps for the first time in their lives and we read about escalating bankruptcy filings.
One article I found particularly interesting was written by Nancy Cook for Newsweek on August 7. It concerned the problems faced by teenagers this year, who sought summer jobs. They weren’t able to get those jobs because they found themselves “competing with unemployed adults who are now willing to take positions that were considered entry-level in prerecessionary times.” Ms. Cook discussed how the inability of teenagers to obtain summer jobs impairs their personal and professional development:
I find it difficult to believe that normal, human, retail investors would find so much encouragement from reading about the BLS report. The use of the BLS data to justify Friday’s market pop appears as just another excuse to explain the ongoing inflation of equities prices, caused by banks playing with TARP and other bailout money for their own benefit.