LBO News from Doug Henwood Adbusters Spinning the Economic News Last Friday a Bloomberg.com headline read: “U.S. Stocks Gain, Treasuries Drop as Unemployment Rate Declines”. Let’s have a look at the reported decline in the rate of unemployment. Do you believe that the US auto industry added 28,000 jobs in July amidst GM bankruptcy, sell-off and close-down of GM auto divisions, and demise of GM suppliers? No? Well, that’s what the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. The 28,000 new jobs were created by “seasonal adjustments.” More phantom jobs were created by the “Birth-Death Model.” The employment outlook was further improved by pushing another cadre of workers, who have been unemployed for too long, off the unemployment rolls. All sorts of distortions can find their way into the official statistics. Nominal retail sales figures can increase from an uptick in inflation. An increase in real GDP can be the result of underestimating inflation. Other distortions come from the year to year comparisons.
Mega Não ! The Brecht Forum Peeling Oniontown Photos by Nadia Shira Cohen Dick with his grandsons, closing his makeshift pig pen for the season as winter approaches. Dick Smith, known as the "Grandfather" of Oniontown, breeds pigs in order to sell them for slaughter. There are certain places that, by their very nature, seem forsaken. Afghanistan is one. In Dover Plains, the very word Oniontown causes people to frown, as if confronted with a foul smell or some unpleasant, long-repressed memory. No one, not even the residents of the settlement, can definitively say where Oniontown’s peculiar name originated. In the 1800s, poor white tenant farmers settled in the area. In the final piece of his series, Kilgallen and his photographer drive away from Oniontown, past lavish country estates, and the photographer invokes the noble savage, saying, “I doubt if a lot of rich people who live in those estates are happier than the people we saw in Oniontown.
The Angry Arab News Service. A source on politics, war, the Middle East, Arabic poetry, and Art Swans Commentary racismreview.com The Top Ten Percent policy is one of the key issues in the case filed by Abigail Fisher against the University of Texas now before the Supreme Court. Fisher alleges that her rejection from the University of Texas was based on discrimination due to her race (white). One of Fisher’s principal arguments is that the Top Ten Percent Rule has produced sufficient levels of diversity, i.e., that it already increases minority enrollment. A number of states such as California, Texas, and Florida have created “Top Ten Percent” (TTP) rules that guarantee admission to public universities for students who graduate in the top ten percent of their classes. In Texas, House Bill 588 created this rule in 1997 as a way to avoid the stipulations of the Hopwood v. Texas case that barred the use of affirmative action in application decisions. A recent working paper posted on the University of Michigan’s National Poverty website discusses the impact of the TTP plan on admissions at Texas public universities.
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