Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily managing editor David Kupelian complains in a Nov. 26 column that "a great deal of what passes for 'objective reporting' on the economy is little more than “laundered” press releases from the government (and other power players like the Federal Reserve) whose credibility depends on continually deceiving the public."
And how does Kupelian respond to this purported deception? With actual deception.
Let's begin, as Kupelian does, with the unemployment rate. Kupelian uncritically promotes the evidence-free conspiracy theory by Jack Welch and other right-wingers that the October unemployment numbers released by the government were delilbefrately "fudged" to make President Obama look good. Not only does Kupelian bother toreport the lack of truth behind Welch's claim, he tries to reinforce it by ranting about the "real unemployment rate":
OK, time out. Amid all the bickering over whether the “official” unemployment rate is 8.1 percent or 7.8 percent, it’s easy to forget that all these numbers are just a fairy tale created by the government and promoted by the elite media.
“You know what the unemployment rate really is?” asked Texas Rep. Ron Paul earlier this year. “It’s probably closer to 20 percent.”
As the Washington Post reported, Paul, a popular but long-shot GOP presidential candidate during the primary season, “has long argued that the unemployment figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics are inaccurate and that the country has actually been in a depression for the past decade.”
Said Paul: “If you want to really know why the American people feel badly about the economy, it’s that the unemployment rate is escalating. It’s very high. But if you take … the number of people employed, 132 million people, it’s the same number that was employed in the year 2000. There have been no new jobs produced.”
And how does the government arrive at only 8 percent unemployment? Easy, just leave out lots of unemployed people from the calculations.
Let’s break it down. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “In September, 2.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force.” Even though these individuals “wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months … they were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.” In case you missed that: The government is openly admitting that 2.5 million unemployed Americans were not counted as officially “unemployed.”
That’s just for starters. The government’s “official” unemployment stats also don’t include part-time workers who want and need full-time work. As the PolicyMic.com blog summarized, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 7.8 percent figure “does not include unemployed members of the workforce who are not actively looking for work; nor does it factor in workers with part-time jobs who are seeking full-time employment. When these workers are included, the (U-6) un/underemployment rate for September remained at 14.7 percent as it had been in August.”
In an article titled “The Real Unemployment Rate,” Fox Business News analyst Elizabeth MacDonald does the math and arrives at virtually the same number: 14.5 percent unemployment.
But the idea that the U-6 rate or any number Ron Paul made up is the "real unemployment rate" is simply false. The U-6 rate includes "underemployed" people who have jobs but are looking for better ones, so it's not actually an "unemployment rate" at all.
Kupelian also rants about the Federal Reserve and "fiat money" :
Consider: Most Americans today recognize that the federal government has become a gigantic, malignant cancer. That’s barely a metaphor – government literally has become a parasitic growth on a once-healthy body politic, drawing substance and energy from it, ravaging the healthy “cells” (productive individuals, families and businesses) in order to feed a malignancy so ravenous it threatens the very life of the “host organism,” America.
But all this could not have happened without the “food” of fiat money.
There was a time when the nation had an honest, constitutional monetary system backed by gold and silver. (“No State shall … make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts,” says Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution.) This, all by itself, constituted a massive barrier to the unrestrained growth of government, since one cannot create gold or silver with a printing press.
All that changed in 1913, when under the presidential leadership of progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act. Pushed through on Dec. 23, the night before Christmas Eve, and largely along party lines (only two House Democrats voted nay and none did so in the Senate), Wilson immediately signed it into law.
This was a blatant violation of the Constitution, which specifies in Article I, Section 8 that “The Congress” – not some private banking cartel – “shall have Power … To coin Money, [and] regulate the Value thereof.” From that point, it was all downhill.
For the next two decades, until 1933, Federal Reserve notes were still redeemable in gold and silver, until President Franklin Delano Roosevelt outlawed private ownership of gold. Between then and 1963, all Federal Reserve notes were redeemable in “lawful money,” which by then meant only silver.
In fact, FDR did not "outlaw private ownership of gold"; his executive order banned the hoarding of gold, which was beleived to be making the Depression worse, and permitted individuals to keep small amounts of gold and gold coins with collectible value.
Kupelian appears to be advocating a return to the gold standard. But some have argued that a rigid gold-standard monetary system in the U.S. would have made the recession even worse because it would have constrained the Federal Reserve from taking the actions it took to rescue the economy.
