Posted by
Bill Crawford on Saturday, June 05, 2010 10:14:48 PM
The expectation was that Bob Gibbs could open up the press gathering early this week by announcing the creation of 430,000 new jobs, along with a drop in the unemployment rate to 9.7%.
The problem was that the compost those numbers were built on was public knowledge days before the Labor Department released the official info.
Here is how it breaks down: over 90% of those new jobs are federal government jobs. Almost all of those are Census Bureau jobs.
Wait, it gets better. Reports have been coming out from all over the country that Census workers are being hired, trained and almost immediately laid off. Then they are rehired, sometimes more than once, so they can count as a new job each time. This was all supposed to happen under the cover of darkness, so we would all marvel at the economy rebounding.
Maybe if this was Chicago, it all could have been sat on. Instead, the Labor numbers came out, even the wire services were following it with the bulls**t it was based on, and the Dow Jones dropped 300 points in one day.
A great historical lesson passed by us way back in 1986. Chernobyl blew up, and the Politburo realized within two days that they no longer could control the information about it. It was said to be the beginning of the end of the Soviet Communist Party.
Obama's West Wing is chock full of academics. Didn't any of them take any history courses? Even at the 100 or 200 level? The internet has created a world more transparent than ever. Even amateurs like me have access to information. Did they really expect to get away with this stuff?