Bad is good. Quagmire is progress. And jobs destroyed are jobs “created or saved,” says the Obama administration. A political columnist points out that “one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language.”
The writer was George Orwell, adding that “political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Wind power turns out to be central to Obamathink in more ways than one. The chosen one promised that the power of wind would bring jobs, and so it did: Joe Biden’s. Obama said wind would be a surprisingly potent energy source, and so it is: It fuels the White House spin machine. But does anyone think the West Wing wind has any “appearance of solidity”?
The administration boasts that it has “created or saved” about 1 million jobs, even as the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced a loss of 558,000 jobs in October. Not only is unemployment still increasing, but the rate of job loss is still accelerating.
“The ‘created or saved numbers’ are meaningless,” Joseph Lawler writes on Politico. “Employment is 3 million jobs below what the president’s Council of Economic Advisers had predicted it would be.”
The Associated Press discovered that an outfit called the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council reported that the stimulus had enabled it to save 935 jobs — out of 508. How so? Everyone at the center got a 1.8% pay raise — so the director of the place multiplied the number of jobs by 1.8 to obtain the number of jobs saved. The number of jobs was supposed to be multiplied by .018, yielding a “created or saved” figure of nine. Nine, 935 — what’s the difference? Both numbers are equally fabricated.
Another Associated Press report noted, “A child care center in Florida said it saved 129 jobs with the help of stimulus money. Instead, it gave pay raises to its existing employees.” The head of the center maintained that it did so to keep employees from quitting and taking better-paying jobs, not joining the ranks of the jobless.
If it makes economic sense for the feds to borrow money to give Georgian community activists and Floridian babysitters raises, where is your raise? Where is mine? Either AP has joined the vast right-wing conspiracy to discredit the administration, or the administration is discrediting the administration.
Here in New York, The Post reported that although the Obama administration had “created or saved” 25,526 jobs in the city, the mayor’s office admitted that the number of new jobs was, more likely, less than 300.
An example of the bait and switch: The city used $18 million of stimulus money to give 19,518 teenagers minimum-wage summer jobs. Based on a formula required by the feds, these became 2,882 “full-time equivalent” jobs, even though the seven-week gigs were long over by the time the report came out.
Just to blow a little more wind, the administration announced this week it will be holding a “jobs summit” in December. Why, when the stimulus did such a great job of solving the jobs crisis?
The next summit will build on the massive success of the Fiscal Responsibility Summit (February), the Economic Recovery Advisory Board meeting (May), and the Beer Summit (July). Weren’t you wowed by all the recovery and fiscal responsibility and racial healing that ensued?
Confronted with a similar crisis, the previous administration insisted for several years that Iraq was moving in the right direction. Eventually the statement became true, but by then it was too late for the politicians. People don’t like it when things are going badly, but dislike festers into disgust when leaders insist against all evidence that things are going well. Disgust, once it takes root, is difficult to turn back into good will. Ask any divorce lawyer.
Obama took office with the best wishes of the citizenry, but if he keeps telling us he’s creating or saving jobs that are disappearing he will soon find himself held in contempt by the court of public opinion. Three of the last seven presidencies (Nixon’s, Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s) were severely damaged, in the public mind, by perceived lying.
And yet in none of those three cases did the cruel truth confront the average person as starkly as economic strife does. You learn about a White House dalliance or an Iraq casualty on the news. You learn about unemployment on your street, in your office, in your home, in your pink slip.
It’s going to be a long time, maybe years, before most Americans believe the economy is running smoothly. If Team Obama doesn’t start telling the truth about the economy, it should think about creating another way to save its own jobs.