Anyone who understands that it is impossible to raise employment by raising public-spending – admittedly a very small number – would understand that unemployment in the US was never going to improve given the economic policies of the Obama administration. But you can get the official unemployment rate down either by creating more jobs or by getting those who used to have jobs to drop out of the labour force. The above graph is from this story, with its quite ominous heading, Gallup CEO: I May “Suddenly Disappear” For Telling Truth About Obama Unemployment Rate. There really is a reason to worry for anyone who says anything that is even a step or two outside the accepted PC grid, although I think he is a tad on the paranoid side. Getting fired and left in disgrace is more the modern style. As for the unemployment data, this is the full story:
Years of unending news stories on U.S. government programs of surveillance, rendition and torture have apparently chilled the speech of even top business executives in the United States.
Yesterday, Jim Clifton, the Chairman and CEO of Gallup, an iconic U.S. company dating back to 1935, told CNBC that he was worried he might “suddenly disappear” and not make it home that evening if he disputed the accuracy of what the U.S. government is reporting as unemployed Americans.
The CNBC interview came one day after Clifton had penned a gutsy opinion piece on Gallup’s web site, defiantly calling the government’s 5.6 percent unemployment figure “The Big Lie” in the article’s headline. His appearance on CNBC was apparently to walk back the “lie” part of the title and reframe the jobs data as just hopelessly deceptive.
Clifton stated the following on CNBC:
“I think that the number that comes out of BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] and the Department of Labor is very, very accurate. I need to make that very, very clear so that I don’t suddenly disappear. I need to make it home tonight.”
After getting that out of the way, Clifton went on to eviscerate the legitimacy of the cheerful spin given to the unemployment data, telling CNBC viewers that the percent of full time jobs in this country as a percent of the adult population “is the worst it’s been in 30 years.”
That he has much he has much to worry personally about I have my doubts, but professionally, he will have become a target. This transgresses the Democrat narrative and he will be savaged by the usual far-to-the-left media liars the US is full of (see Brian Williams).
But as important as the labour market is, this is the major story at Drudge, and it really ought to be on the front page of every paper in the world, given its significance. It won’t be, but if we are hoping to lower unemployment and raise living standards, the kinds of lies we are now so used to will have to be called out a bit more often.
So it is, and we small band of brothers (and sisters) know it all too well. But what about the media, and our political leaders and the scientific grants-receiving community and those who seek wealth and power through green-related scares. From the story:
Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.
This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.
Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.
Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded. This has surprised no one more than Traust Jonsson, who was long in charge of climate research for the Iceland met office (and with whom Homewood has been in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version completely “disappears” Iceland’s “sea ice years” around 1970, when a period of extreme cooling almost devastated his country’s economy.
It may surprise them, but how many here will be surprised? No one any longer even reacts to the lying, so routine has it become. Just imagine if we didn’t have the net.
Law of Markets 