Thread: OBAMA'S 'DOCTORED' JOBLESS RATES MASKS DANGER

OBAMA'S 'DOCTORED' JOBLESS RATES MASKS DANGER

Hides economy about to slip back into recession

Published: 6 hours ago
JEROME R. CORSI



NEW YORK – Anticipating the mid-term 2014 elections in November, the Obama administration appears to be manipulating unemployment numbers to mask an economy about to slip back into recession.

The Bureau of Labor Force announcement that unemployment dropped from 6.3 percent in March to 6.1 percent in April was partly attributable to the more than 92 million Americans classified as out of the labor force, reducing the labor participation rate to 62.8 percent, a historic low dropout rate that has remained the same since April.

Adjusting the BLS unemployment number to report what is known as “U-6” – a measure that includes total unemployed, all persons marginally attached to the labor force and the total part-time employed for economic reasons – unemployment in April was 14.6 percent.

Still, on the eve of the July 4 holiday, President Obama claimed at a tech incubator meeting in Washington, “We just got a jobs report showing that we’ve now seen the fastest job growth in the United States in the first half of the year since 1999.”
The Commerce Department reported in April that the GDP grew at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 0.1 percent in the first quarter, the second-worst quarterly performance since the recession ended in mid-2009.

Hidden in the jobs report released Thursday showing non-farm employment advanced at a seasonally adjusted 288,000 in June, the Labor Department also reported the number of persons employed part time because they were unable to find a full-time job increased by 275,000 in June to 7.5 million.

Manipulated unemployment rates

According to John Williams, an economist known for arguing government reports manipulate “shadow statistics” of economic data for political purposes, drops in the unemployment rate as reported by the BLS have become virtually “meaningless.”
“The broad economic outlook has not changed, despite the heavily distorted numbers that continue to be published by the BLS,” Williams wrote in his subscription newsletter on ShadowStats.com. “The unemployment rates have not dropped from peak levels due to a surge in hiring; instead, they generally have dropped because of discouraged workers being eliminated from headline labor-force accounting.”

Williams recreates a ShadowStats Alternative unemployment rate reflecting methodology that includes “long-term discouraged workers” that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (in 1994 under the Clinton administration) removed from those considered “unemployed,” in any of the government’s unemployment measures.

The BLS publishes six levels of unemployment, but only the U3 unemployment rate gets the press. The headline number does not count as unemployed those “discouraged” workers who are workers without jobs who have not looked for work in the past four weeks because they believed no jobs were available.

Williams has demonstrated that it takes an expert to truly decipher BLS unemployment statistics.

The U6 unemployment rate is the BLS’s broadest measure. It includes those marginally attached to the labor force and the “under-employed,” who have accepted part-time jobs when they are really looking for full-time employment. Also included are the short-term discouraged workers.

Since 1994, however, the long-term discouraged workers, those who have been discouraged for more than one year, have been excluded from all government data.

The only measure BLS reports to the public, as the official monthly unemployment rate, is the headline, seasonally adjusted U3 number.

Williams calculates his “ShadowStats Alternative Unemployment Rate” by adding to the BLS U6 numbers the long-term discouraged workers, i.e., those workers who have not looked for work in more than a year, but still consider themselves to be unemployed.

Williams argues that his ShadowStats Alternative Unemployment measure most closely mirrors common experience.
“If you were to survey everyone in the country as to whether they were employed or unemployed, without qualification as to when they last looked for a job, the resulting unemployment rate would be close to the ShadowStats estimate,” Williams explained to WND.

The headline BLS unemployment rate has stayed relatively low because it excludes all discouraged workers, Williams argues.

As the unemployed first become discouraged and then disappear into the long-term discouraged category, they also vanish from inclusion in the headline labor force numbers. Those workers still are there, however, ready to take a job if one becomes available. They are unemployed and consider themselves to be unemployed, but the government’s popularly followed unemployment reporting ignores them completely.

Here is a more complete unemployment table that includes the seasonally adjusted unemployment percentages for U3 unemployment, as well as the same for U6 unemployment, followed by the ShadowStats Alternative Unemployment rate, comparing April 2013 for March and April 2014:



Increasingly, critics like Williams believe the seasonally adjusted U3 numbers reported by the BLS as the official monthly unemployment rate do not give a reliable picture of the true magnitude of unemployment in the United States.

“Underlying economic reality and the fundamental drivers of economic activity would suggest a general upturn in U.3 in June, but the BLS’s continuing purge of discouraged workers from the unemployment rolls and headline labor force would argue in favor of a lower rate,” Williams wrote in his subscription newsletter June 25.

The BLS definitions conveniently exclude from the definition of unemployed those who have grown so discouraged that they are not actively looking for work in the past year, without distinguishing those who would look for work if there were a reasonable chance their job search might result in employment.

Obamanomics: an economy of part-time jobs

In August 2013, the House Ways and Means Committee documented that seven out of every eight new employees under Obama have been part-time employees, as approximately 90 percent of all jobs created in the U.S. economy since 2009 have been part-time.

“The headlines citing last week’s jobs report as the lowest unemployment rate in years may have been technically accurate, but they are also reminders that looks can be deceiving,” the House Ways and Means report noted.

“The reality, as you dig into the latest jobs data, reveals that few are finding the full-time work they want and need, and many are forced to accept part-time employment.”

To support the argument, the House Ways and Means Committee produced the following table drawn from Bureau of Labor Statistics:



The House Ways and Means Committee linked to an article published Aug. 4, 2013, by Associated Press economics writer Paul Wisemanthat said: “So far this year, low-paying industries have provided 61 percent of he nation’s job growth, even though these industries represent just 39 percent of overall U.S. jobs, according to Labor Department numbers analyzed by Moody’s Analytics.”

Wiseman noted part-time work has made up more than 77 percent of the job growth so far this year, with part-time work defined as being less than 25 hours a week.

Appearing on PBS’s “McLaughlin Group,” in October 2013, real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman said 88 percent of the jobs that had been created that year were part-time jobs.

“A large part of the reason for that number of part-time jobs, which is unprecedented in American history, is because people are apprehensive about the impact of Obamacare and the costs of Obamacare on full-time jobs.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/07/obamas-do...04T8H5rSBpX.99

It looks like they are starting earlier this election season.

Did The BLS Give Obama A Major Election 2012 Gift?


(Photo credit: Wikipedia)


Just one month before the 2012 election, the Obama campaign received a major illegal campaign contribution from the Commerce Department. The Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported on October 5, 2012 that the nation’s unemployment rate suddenly dropped sharply over the prior month, from 8.1% to 7.8%. That supposedly ended the longest period in the nation’s history with unemployment over 8%, except for the Great Depression, which occurred under President Obama.

Just before the election. How convenient.

That was totally unbelievable at the time, and I and others said so then. In my Forbes column the very next week, “President Obama’s Unemployment Still Stuck at 14.7%,” I noted how inconsistent the supposed unemployment drop was with other contemporaneous economic data. The sharp unemployment drop supposedly resulted from a total of 114,000 new jobs created in September, 2012, according to the Establishment Survey of business payrolls of the Bureau of Labor Statistics that the Obama Administration had been emphasizing throughout its first term. But economist John Lott noted atFoxnews.com that the working age population had grown by 206,000 in September, 2012. With normal labor force participation during a recovery from a steep recession, that would have required 138,000 new jobs that month, just to keep pace with population growth, let alone to reduce the unemployment rate.
Moreover, the BLS also reported for September, 2012 that the number of full-time jobs declined by 216,000 in that month. The supposed 0.3% drop in unemployment that month was also inconsistent with that data. The unemployment rate had never before in American history declined by nearly a third of a point in one month, while the economy was losing over 200,000 full time jobs in the same month.

That supposed drop in unemployment in September, 2012 was also wildly inconsistent with GDP growth at the time, reported as a meager 1.3% in the second quarter of that year, in long term decline from 1.6% over the first half of that year, 2% in 2011, and 2.4% in 2010. President Obama’s pitiful economic growth record has been only half of normal long term economic growth for America, and only a third or less of the historic growth from a deep recession, such as the Reagan recovery from the 1981-1982 recession.

The American historical record over the nation’s entire history has been the deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery. Too many people are giving Obama a pass on his disastrous economic performance because the recession was so bad when he entered office. That view is held predominantly among the low information voters who are literally clueless about the realities of the nation they live in. The severity of the recession was precisely the foundation for a booming economic recovery to come out of it, which the well informed Obama who does know that real American economic history was expecting. But Obama’s consistently anti-growth economic policies got in his own way, and prevented that recovery, which is still baked in the cake, and will break out spectacularly, once America is liberated from the current, Obama Democrat, economic repression.

The statistical decline in the unemployment rate for September, 2012, came out of a supposed highly implausible 873,000 new jobs for that month reported in the separate, Household Survey, which is conducted for the BLS by the Census Bureau. That is highly inconsistent with the results of that Survey for both before and after September, 2012. That same Household Survey reported a decline of 119,000 jobs in August, 2012, and a decline of 195,000 jobs in July, 2012, when the Obama Administration told us the Household Survey should be ignored because it was highly unreliable.

Moreover, if the Household Survey found 873,000 new jobs created in September, 2012, that should have been followed by similar increases for quite some time. The economy shows no record of suddenly creating nearly one million new jobs for a month, and then going back to the doldrums thereafter. But that is exactly what the Obama economy has done, once Obama squeaked through to reelection.

But now comes evidence that the September, 2012 jobs report was doctored after all. The New York Post reported on November 18 of this year,

“Just two years before the Presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report….And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond one employee – that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today. ‘He’s not the only one,’ said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.

Post reporter John Crudele added, “The Census employee is Julius Brockman, according to confidential documents obtained by The Post. Brockman told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at the Census.”

The next day, November 19, The Washington Examiner reported,

“The House Oversight Committee is demanding answers from the director of the Census Bureau after a news outlet reported that Census employees may have fabricated data for a jobs report that showed a significant drop in unemployment under President Obama just a month from Election Day 2012. Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., wrote Tuesday to Census Bureau Director John Thompson calling the allegations in the New York Post ‘shocking.’ Issa requested information about Julius Brockman, the employee the Post said fabricated data after being unable to reach the people who had the information he needed….Issa wants all of Brockman’s emails, his list of supervisors and any material related to a government investigation of Brockman’s actions, which according to the Post took place in 2010 and escalated in the months leading up to the election.”

That same day, November 19, Crudele reported in the New York Post,

“I don’t know how high up in the Census Bureau the orders to fake unemployment survey data came from, but the director of the Philadelphia region was aware of those charges against one of his field representatives back in 2010. Fernando E. Armstrong, the regional director at the time, admitted as much in an internal Census report I have reviewed. And that field representative, Julius Brockman, who filed as many as 100 fake reports a month – and admitted to me faking household survey reports – was not the only field rep to do so, according to a Census source. And the source insists that the faking of the household survey, which could fudge the unemployment rate, is still happening.”

Crudele added, “The source told me that ‘multiple people’ were doing what Brockman was doing – making up people and attaching jobs so Census could meet the quota of interviews required by the Labor Department. Brockman said he was told to falsify data by a supervisor. And Brockman got paid by the interview, so cutting corners and filing more surveys got him more pay.”

The best evidence that shenanigans and falsification of data was going on in the Commerce Department in September, 2012 is the data analysis discussed above, which appeared in my own Forbes column back in October, 2012. And I stand ready to testify to explain and point all that out yet again.

Obama apologists have already begun to attack and disparage the sources of these reports of Obama Administration falsification and fabrication of data, which may very well amount to federal crimes. But these apologists themselves have been given a free ride for far too long, and are now vastly contributing to the accelerating economic, and military, decline of America. They need to be directly called out, and held to account, for what they are doing to the rest of us.

America is suffering today from a rapidly gathering stock market bubble that is even more obvious than the housing bubble was in 2006, if not 2007. And with the appointment of Janet Yellen to head the Fed, President Obama is doubling down on the very same policies creating that bubble, and recreating the foundation for a much bigger financial crisis and crash than in 2008.


Moreover, the foolish flower child Obama/Kerry policies regarding Iran’s development of nuclear weapons are creating the foundation for a much, much ruder awakening one morning than on 9/11. More on these developing American tragedies in future columns.

Just remember, you were forewarned here of the lies you were being told during Campaign 2012. And you can now be forewarned here of even greater, developing American tragedies than that election, the greatest political error of the American people in history, is turning out to be.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterfer...ion-2012-gift/