After a highly successful and exhilarating DNC convention the last few days, we should have expected and should have been prepared for the Republicans and their friends/allies in the media to come out swinging today with whatever remotely "negative" news or information that could be spun negatively, to deflate us with their false "Obama's doomed!" narratives.
Yet I see people engaging in all sorts of hand-wringing and sighing at today's unemployment report - which is not a bad report by any standard, but in fact a positive trend when you factor in the last five years jobs numbers for the same month of August. We just came from a beautiful convention, where we were presented with FACTS about this President's record of job creation. We were also presented with FACTS about what the Republicans have done in the last 4 years and are still doing to prevent any improvement on the economy.
So why are we simply rolling over and accepting the Republicans' and/or media's framing of today's jobs report? Since when is 96K new jobs a reason to feel defeated? That is 96,000 people who did not have jobs last month who are now employed. Think about this: In August of 2008, we LOST 84,000 private sector jobs. Furthermore, the margin of error in this report is 100K, so this jobs report is NOT statistically different from last month's report in which 141K private sector jobs were added!!
The media are not honest brokers in this situation. They operate at the behest of the corporations who hire them. The media pundiots have NOTHING to lose if Romney gets elected - they will still earn their 6-7 figure salaries, and better yet, get to keep their tax cuts for the 1% that they belong to. So of course, they're going to work harder than ever over the next two months to create a negative, discouraged mindset in the general electorate, but particularly among President Obama's supporters.
These are the hard questions that the pundiots should be asking the Republicans in congress as well as the local/state Republican government officials, but simply refuse to do:
1. Why are the Republicans in congress obstructing the President's jobs bill, which has been sitting in congress for the last 12 months?
2. Why is it that in Republican-controlled states, public sector jobs are being lost at twice the rate of that in Democratic-controlled states?
3. John Boehner, can you cite for us exactly how many jobs bills has your Republican controlled created since you were sworn in January 2011? What exactly did those bills contain? Where can we get a documented link to those jobs bills that the GOP house created?
4. What specifically will Mitt Romney do policy-wise that is DIFFERENT from what was done in the years before 2009, when the economy was losing over 200K jobs a month?
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So please, let's continue our positive and upbeat outlook for the next two months and stop letting the cable news dictate how we should be feeling about a single jobs report or any other such event. Their job is no longer to inform and educate, but to misinform, confuse, and advance a selfish corporate agenda to benefit the 1%.
At this point regardless of the unemployment figures, there's unlikely going to be much change one way or another between now and November 6. So we need to simply move on, armed with the facts of what is REALLY happening, not what some media pundiot or Republican operative hopes it to be.