When It Comes to Jobless Figures Dishonesty and Propaganda Reign

By Dave Lindorff

Once again we got a cheery report from most of the media about employers hiring, albeit “not enough,” and about the jobless rate falling, albeit “it’s still too high.”

The proximate cause of this latest round of propaganda from the corporate media is the latest monthly jobless figure reported out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which said that employers had added 80,000 net new jobs  (actually they found that private sector employers had added 104,000 jobs while public agency employers had pink-slipped 24,000 people), and that the official unemployment rate was 9.0 percent, just a notch lower than last month’s 9.1 percent figure.

The Associated Press, which is now the de facto national desk for the eviscerated national newsmedia, trumpeted these anemic results with a headline reading: Employers add 80K jobs, Rate dips to 9.0 pct.  This was followed by an upbeat lead, credited to AP Economics Writer Christopher S. Rugaber (who surely should know better if he’s an economics specialist) that read: “WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. jobs crisis may be easing slightly on the strength of a fourth straight month of modest hiring and a dip in the unemployment rate.”

Only it’s not that simple. For one thing, economists agree that the economy would have to be adding 150,000-200,000 jobs a month just to keep up with the number of people who are entering the labor force, so this is really going backwards. For another, most of the jobs being created are low-paying and often temporary, which is not going to do much if anything to boost consumer spending, which accounts for almost three-quarters of Gross Domestic Economy in the hollowed-out US economy.

Credit goes to Yahoo! News, which at least acknowledged that these latest states from the BLS mean things aren’t all that great. In it’s report, headlined October Jobs Report: Deja Vu All Over Again, reporter Daniel Gross correctly called attention to the fact that the public sector was undermining the meager job gains made by the private sector, as well as the fact that the decline in the jobless figure is not the result of the new jobs, but of more people just giving up looking for non-existant jobs and being dropped from the statistics...

   For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new award-winning independent alternative online newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/885