October Surprise Again

Imagine you are President Obama. You are being overrun by events of your own making. ISIS is cutting off people’s heads in Iraq, so you just started a third war in Iraq and expanded it to Syria, something even President Bush wasn’t dumb enough to do. You are threatening war with Russia, the country with the world’s second biggest nuclear arsenal, in Ukraine, something else even Bush wasn’t dumb enough to do. You invited Ebola into America, and, no surprise, it came. You invited an unprecedented invasion of illegal immigrant children to flood the US, and you are spending taxpayer money to find them homes in every state and to give them lawyers. Another mystery virus, Enterovirus D68, has killed more Americans than Ebola, and may be linked to the illegal immigrant children.

You’re also drowning in scandals. You coerced all US personnel with knowledge of the Benghazi massacre into silence, but a group of contractors, US veterans all, exposed a number of lies you and Hillary Clinton told about that night. In a brazen cover-up, the IRS continues to clownishly destroy records about targeting conservative groups. Your Secret Service director just resigned in scandal. Under constant, well-deserved fire, your closest public ally, Attorney General Holder, suddenly announced his resignation. That usually precedes a major revelation of corruption, and Holder has plenty of scandals of his own in his closet including Fast and Furious.

In other words, you’re in deep political doodoo and an election is just four weeks away as of this writing. Republicans threaten to take over the Senate where Harry Reid has shamelessly provided you cover since Republicans took the House in 2010. Your former CIA chief and Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta,  just released a book throwing you under the bus. RealClearPolitics puts your approval rating at 43 percent. Faced with overwhelming evidence, even some Democrats have concluded you are intentionally harming the country. Not one Democrat will allow you to campaign on his behalf.

But you have one thing working for you: the bubble economy of the super-rich continues to swell, producing phony numbers that make it appear the economy as a whole is improving, albeit at a snail’s pace.

You also have the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) under your command to exaggerate the economy on your behalf. This is nothing new. The BLS lies about the economy every month. The economic numbers it releases to great fanfare are almost always quietly revised down a month later. It does this regardless of whoever is in power because it promotes the power and legitimacy of the state, not just one party.  The BLS publishes perpetual propaganda to make it appear the economy is doing better than it really is. But from time to time, it goes even further overboard than usual for the political benefit of its boss, the president, regardless of party.

Obama seriously needs the help now, so it was no surprise that the September jobs report released by BLS the first Friday in October was abnormally rosey. Bloomberg reports, “A surprisingly powerful surge in hiring pushed unemployment to a six-year low of 5.9 percent in September as the U.S. labor market showed renewed vigor. ” Even establishment economists, the supposed experts who continually overestimate the strength of the economy, were surprised at how much the BLS fudged the numbers to benefit Obama. Bloomberg expounds, “The drop in unemployment was the biggest surprise, exceeding all forecasts. The rate, which is derived from a Labor Department survey of households, was projected to hold at 6.1 percent, according to the Bloomberg survey median. Estimates ranged from 6 percent to 6.2 percent.” But dropping the official unemployment number below 6 percent carries a huge psychological advantage, so the BLS provided it. The BLM even increased the August numbers, which is practically unheard of.

But as always, the more important information is buried in the fine print. Newsmax reported, “The so-called participation rate, which measures the number of Americans employed or looking for a job as a share of the working-age population, decreased to 62.7 percent, the lowest since February 1978, from 62.8 percent a month before.”

Also, depressed wages remained stagnant, and a record number of young, black teens and women aren’t working. Obama is waging economic war on the middle class, women, and minorities, contrary to what the headlines would have us believe. Even the S&P just hit an eight week low.

This is deja vu from two years ago. In August 2012, right before the Obama-Romney election, BLS reported an unbelieveable and psychologically important drop in unemployment from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent, and Obama subsequently won the election despite the labor participation rate falling significantly then too. Voters tend not to read past the headlines.

So Obama is up to his old tricks, but while the Waldorf Astoria Hotel sold for a record $2 billion, making the Hiltons even richer, laid off and part-time workers, women, and young blacks know this economy is only working for Obama and his super-rich cronies, not the poor or middle class.