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White House Is Hit Hard by Unexpected Large Job Losses

October 3, 2009 (LPAC)—The "unexpectedly" very bad September job-loss report today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has shocked Democratic Congressional leaders and hit the White House hard. Not only did the economy reportedly lose 263,000 more jobs in the month, after Wall Street's "economists" had been predicting a loss of 180,000. In addition, the BLS' own systematic softening of the job loss in previous months this year, had to be exposed now, and it is very large—824,000 more jobs lost in 2009 than BLS had previously reported, bringing the total "official" job losses since Barack Obama took office close to 5 million.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis was put under repeated challenges to the "stimulus" bill in a CNBC-TV interview this morning, and finally blurted out, "We are doing everything we could possibly do to get job growth. We could not do more." The claim is not credible, as the interviewers noted. Vice-President Joe Biden implicitly admitted the "stimulus'" failure to create jobs, when he said at the White House, "Today's bad news does not change my confidence in the fact that we are going to recover—we will be producing jobs."

Then at a Joint Economic Committee hearing in Congress, Congressional Black Caucus leader and Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings found himself challenging Obama's "stimulus" act. Cummings complained to BLS head Keith Hall (who could hardly respond), "How could construction employment be falling by 66,000 a month all year, with the stimulus? Why are wages falling? Why is government employment falling?" The bewildered Cummings noted that the Presidential Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) had just claimed the creation of 800,000 jobs this year by the "stimulus," and plaintively asked Hall, "Do you see any sign of this at all?"

Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota complained to the hapless Hall that states like hers, with official unemployment 8% or less, were not getting any Federal unemployment insurance help, although cities in the states have much higher unemployment rates. Republican Rep. Kevin Brady said, "Christina Romer [head of Obama's CEA] sat right here in February and said the stimulus jobs gains would be greatest in construction and manufacturing! What happened?"

The September jobs report is bad economic news in every detail, and also shows businesses—many of them hit by a new and intensifying bank credit crunch—going back to layoffs to reduce the fixed costs on their books at the end of the fiscal year. According to the official, understated figures, the combined number of Americans either completely and officially unemployed, forced to work part-time, or dropped out of the labor force in the last 21 months, reached over 32 million, or over 20%. Discouraged drop-outs made the labor force shrink by somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000; average weekly wages fell again and the average work week fell to a record low 33 hours. States cut 10,000 jobs; cities cut 37,000 as budget blowouts worsened across the country. Manufacturers cut 51,000 jobs; construction companies, 64,000. The number of Americans officially unemployed more than six months jumped by 8% to 5.4 million.

And the huge -824,000 jobs "downward revision" for the year, exposed the fact that BLS has been using dubious "seasonal adjustments" and "virtual job creation" measures to mask how bad the Obama Administration employment collapse has been.


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