Just one month before the 2012 election, the Obama campaign received a major illegal campaign contribution from the Commerce Department. The Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported on October 5, 2012 that the nation’s unemployment rate suddenly dropped sharply over the prior month, from 8.1% to 7.8%. That supposedly ended the longest period in the nation’s history with unemployment over 8%, except for the Great Depression, which occurred under President Obama.
Just before the election. How convenient.
That was totally unbelievable at the time, and I and others said so then. In my Forbes column the very next week, “President Obama’s Unemployment Still Stuck at 14.7%,” I noted how inconsistent the supposed unemployment drop was with other contemporaneous economic data. The sharp unemployment drop supposedly resulted from a total of 114,000 new jobs created in September, 2012, according to the Establishment Survey of business payrolls of the Bureau of Labor Statistics that the Obama Administration had been emphasizing throughout its first term. But economist John Lott noted atFoxnews.com that the working age population had grown by 206,000 in September, 2012. With normal labor force participation during a recovery from a steep recession, that would have required 138,000 new jobs that month, just to keep pace with population growth, let alone to reduce the unemployment rate.
Moreover, the BLS also reported for September, 2012 that the number of full-time jobs declined by 216,000 in that month. The supposed 0.3% drop in unemployment that month was also inconsistent with that data. The unemployment rate had never before in American history declined by nearly a third of a point in one month, while the economy was losing over 200,000 full time jobs in the same month.
That supposed drop in unemployment in September, 2012 was also wildly inconsistent with GDP growth at the time, reported as a meager 1.3% in the second quarter of that year, in long term decline from 1.6% over the first half of that year, 2% in 2011, and 2.4% in 2010. President Obama’s pitiful economic growth record has been only half of normal long term economic growth for America, and only a third or less of the historic growth from a deep recession, such as the Reagan recovery from the 1981-1982 recession.
The American historical record over the nation’s entire history has been the deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery. Too many people are giving Obama a pass on his disastrous economic performance because the recession was so bad when he entered office. That view is held predominantly among the low information voters who are literally clueless about the realities of the nation they live in. The severity of the recession was precisely the foundation for a booming economic recovery to come out of it, which the well informed Obama who does know that real American economic history was expecting. But Obama’s consistently anti-growth economic policies got in his own way, and prevented that recovery, which is still baked in the cake, and will break out spectacularly, once America is liberated from the current, Obama Democrat, economic repression.
The statistical decline in the unemployment rate for September, 2012, came out of a supposed highly implausible 873,000 new jobs for that month reported in the separate, Household Survey, which is conducted for the BLS by the Census Bureau. That is highly inconsistent with the results of that Survey for both before and after September, 2012. That same Household Survey reported a decline of 119,000 jobs in August, 2012, and a decline of 195,000 jobs in July, 2012, when the Obama Administration told us the Household Survey should be ignored because it was highly unreliable.
Moreover, if the Household Survey found 873,000 new jobs created in September, 2012, that should have been followed by similar increases for quite some time. The economy shows no record of suddenly creating nearly one million new jobs for a month, and then going back to the doldrums thereafter. But that is exactly what the Obama economy has done, once Obama squeaked through to reelection.
But now comes evidence that the September, 2012 jobs report was doctored after all. The New York Post reported on November 18 of this year,
“Just two years before the Presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report….And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond one employee – that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today. ‘He’s not the only one,’ said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.
Post reporter John Crudele added, “The Census employee is Julius Brockman, according to confidential documents obtained by The Post. Brockman told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at the Census.”
The next day, November 19, The Washington Examiner reported,
“The House Oversight Committee is demanding answers from the director of the Census Bureau after a news outlet reported that Census employees may have fabricated data for a jobs report that showed a significant drop in unemployment under President Obama just a month from Election Day 2012. Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., wrote Tuesday to Census Bureau Director John Thompson calling the allegations in the New York Post ‘shocking.’ Issa requested information about Julius Brockman, the employee the Post said fabricated data after being unable to reach the people who had the information he needed….Issa wants all of Brockman’s emails, his list of supervisors and any material related to a government investigation of Brockman’s actions, which according to the Post took place in 2010 and escalated in the months leading up to the election.”
That same day, November 19, Crudele reported in the New York Post,
“I don’t know how high up in the Census Bureau the orders to fake unemployment survey data came from, but the director of the Philadelphia region was aware of those charges against one of his field representatives back in 2010. Fernando E. Armstrong, the regional director at the time, admitted as much in an internal Census report I have reviewed. And that field representative, Julius Brockman, who filed as many as 100 fake reports a month – and admitted to me faking household survey reports – was not the only field rep to do so, according to a Census source. And the source insists that the faking of the household survey, which could fudge the unemployment rate, is still happening.”
Crudele added, “The source told me that ‘multiple people’ were doing what Brockman was doing – making up people and attaching jobs so Census could meet the quota of interviews required by the Labor Department. Brockman said he was told to falsify data by a supervisor. And Brockman got paid by the interview, so cutting corners and filing more surveys got him more pay.”
The best evidence that shenanigans and falsification of data was going on in the Commerce Department in September, 2012 is the data analysis discussed above, which appeared in my own Forbes column back in October, 2012. And I stand ready to testify to explain and point all that out yet again.
Obama apologists have already begun to attack and disparage the sources of these reports of Obama Administration falsification and fabrication of data, which may very well amount to federal crimes. But these apologists themselves have been given a free ride for far too long, and are now vastly contributing to the accelerating economic, and military, decline of America. They need to be directly called out, and held to account, for what they are doing to the rest of us.
America is suffering today from a rapidly gathering stock market bubble that is even more obvious than the housing bubble was in 2006, if not 2007. And with the appointment of Janet Yellen to head the Fed, President Obama is doubling down on the very same policies creating that bubble, and recreating the foundation for a much bigger financial crisis and crash than in 2008.
Moreover, the foolish flower child Obama/Kerry policies regarding Iran’s development of nuclear weapons are creating the foundation for a much, much ruder awakening one morning than on 9/11. More on these developing American tragedies in future columns.
Just remember, you were forewarned here of the lies you were being told during Campaign 2012. And you can now be forewarned here of even greater, developing American tragedies than that election, the greatest political error of the American people in history, is turning out to be.
[First published at Forbes.]
Peter Ferrara, J.D., is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute and an advisor for entitlement reform and budget policy at the National Tax Limitation Foundation.
