The Media's Lies of Omission!

By Rich Kozlovich

As I watched the news the last few days I became fully aware of how many talking heads on television really are just that….talking heads. With all smiles and a hail fellow well met attitude they announced the latest piece of propaganda that the current rate of unemployment was now only 8.5%; and this was on Fox News. Happy Days Are Here Again!

That really is “Pious Baloney”!

These are the people at the center of information. How can they fail to analyze this stuff based on reality? Does anyone over there ever read a history book? In the Roosevelt administration they had bumps in unemployment also, but the massive amount of government interference from both Hoover and Roosevelt kept knocking the economy back into depression. Unemployment peaked at about 25% during the Roosevelt administration and averaged about 15% until 1942 when WWII broke out.

So what? This is important because many of the same kind of policies are being carried out as were done during the Wilson, Hoover and Roosevelt administrations. Obama wasn’t the first to decide that he had the power to overturn the U.S. Constitution and throw people into prison on his say so….Wilson oversaw the modern world’s first fascist government during WWI, and did throw people into prison without charge or trial.

The similarities are striking to anyone who reads a history book occasionally! But back to the unemployment rate! I knew this was a false statistic just because of the similarities between this ‘recession’ and the stuff that went on during the Great Depression.

In an article entitled, Lies, Damned lies, and Statistics the author outlines “The U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, reported on January 6, 2012 that employment rose by 200,000 in December, indicating a decline by 0.6% since August to current unemployment rate of 8.5%.” by saying; ‘Ahh, but not so fast…let’s look at how these figures are being reported, and dig into the Labor Force Participation Rate:” As he outlines why this 8.5% figure is wrong he notes that to get the real rate of unemployment we need to address the real number of unemployed by 7,304,000 more!

So what does that actually mean to the true unemployment rate? When you take into consideration the U-6 unemployment rate, “or alternative unemployment rate that includes “total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force” ...."the U-6 unemployment rate adjusted for the historical 67% Labor Force Participation Rate would come in at 19.9%.”

Everything we are told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality. I recently drove through Chesterland, Ohio which is in one of Ohio’s richest counties and was booming for years because of the income level of the people living there. I was stunned at the number of businesses that were closed and how many buildings that were empty and for sale. I have long known the unemployment rate was higher than reported because I knew about this U-6 system and had estimated on my own that the rate had to be between 15 and 20 percent.

So if a bug man knows this I have to ask; why don’t the talking heads know this? And if they know it why don’t they say it? I think this all qualifies as “lies of omission”. Don’t you think?