Stephen Lendman: America's Sham Economic Recovery!

Official government data are manipulated. Credibility is entirely lacking. Reported good news is hype. Grim underlying reality is suppressed. The monthly Labor Department jobs report is typical. Progressive Radio News Hour regular economist Jack Rasmus calls the latest January one "largely statistical legerdemain." A reported 243,000 non-farm jobs reported lacked credibility. Manipulation manufactured them. Even the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) admits: "The confidence level for the monthly change in total employment is on the order of plus or minus 430,000 jobs." With that level of accuracy, why bother reporting them at all. Monthly numbers are meaningless. January's reflect the problem. Rasmus said those allegedly created aren't actual jobs. "They represent seasonal adjustments made to the raw data" January numbers, in fact, reflect "an anomalous upward revision of the raw jobs data, due to assumptions about seasonality and alleged new business formations." Comparing actual versus seasonally adjusted figures show marked differences. Data reported for December 2011 and January 2012 revealed "an incredible 7 to 10 fold increase in the difference between" seasonably and non-seasonally adjusted figures. For January, raw data showed large job losses, not gains. Included were "about 300,000 construction jobs, another 600,000" retail ones, and "400,000 in business professional services, since most businesses trim their labor force at the start of the year to keep costs down." In addition, hundreds more were lost for a 2.7 million total overall. Reporting 243,000 new jobs denies reality.