Obama administration plans to close International Labor Comparisons office By Alec MacGillis
Obama Adopts Bush Plan to Hide Outsourced Job Data
The U.S. is hemorrhaging jobs thanks to terrible trade policies. Instead of fixing the problem, Obama wants to hide the data.
The Bush administration had a nasty penchant for trying to bury bad economic news - a nasty penchant that I was intimately familiar with when working on the House Appropriations Committee. One of the most egregious examples of this came in 2003. Here's the Washington Post on 1/2/03:
snip
Like a scorekeeper for the world, a tiny unit within the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks globalization's winners and losers, and the results are not always pretty for the United States. Manufacturing jobs here, for example, have fallen faster since 1979 than in Canada, Germany or Japan. Compensation for those jobs dropped here in 2008 but jumped in South Korea and Australia. Soon, however, Americans may be spared the demoralization in these numbers: The White House wants to shutter the unit that produces them.
In his State of the Union address, of course, Obama called for a massive expansion of the NAFTA trade model into Colombia, South Korea and Panama. So you can bet this announcement by the White House is no accident - it's preemptive.
Apparently, no matter which party is in power, when bad news hits, the response is bury the news - don't address the actual problem.....
http://www.alternet.org/economy/145901/obama_adopts_bush_plan_to_hide_outsourced_job_data
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