Last Sunday morning at 8:45 (July 27) the U.S. State Department announced via Twitter that it had satellite images proving artillery was being fired from Russia into the Ukraine. And apart from the U.S. media, the world almost fell down laughing.
The ‘proof’ was a series of blurry photos taken by a commercial – not government – satellite. They show vague marks and dark spots labelled blast marks and shell craters from Russian rockets.
To the reporters covering the State Department, the pictures showed what looked like “a bunch of holes in the ground,” although little of that scepticism made it into their stories.
To say that the “proof” has been regarded as unconvincing — outside the U.S. — would be generous. It has been treated like a re-run of Colin Powell, shredding his personal credibility before the United Nations with grainy photos of balloons and fanciful computer-generated graphics.
“We have first hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails,” Powell boldly promised a statement that is reminiscent of similar claims made now in current government briefings.
None of it was true.
Is It Different This Time?
Maybe. Could be. Perhaps. We just don’t know if the State Department is doing the same old tap-dance around the truth, which is part of the problem.
Because the U.S. government has so often claimed to have “proof “ that either didn’t exist or didn’t prove what was promised, it has established a reputation for bending the truth.
And as you might expect, fewer people are now willing to give them the benefit of the doubt when they say this time they have proof certain, but they just can’t reveal it. National security.
(The exception is the mainstream U.S. media, which show a touching faith in what they are told by important but unnamed officials).
Why Should You Care?
Obviously any government has a problem when much of what it says is not accepted at face value. But there are two other important points about this endless stream of “truthiness.”
The first is that the target of the constant deception is you.
The State Department isn’t releasing this maybe-real evidence of Russian culpability in hopes of persuading foreigners. Foreigners, except those closely allied with U.S. interests, simply don’t believe it, even if their governments won’t call it out.
This is propaganda for domestic consumption, to build domestic political support. The target is you.
The second problem with this enthusiasm for making the facts fit the policy, rather than the reverse, is that it carries over into areas that have more immediate impact on the U.S. than mere life and death in foreign places.
The same tendency to spout self-serving untruths designed for domestic political advantage is found in the government’s economic data. We will see two examples this week in the employment data and the GDP estimates.
Massaging The Data
This week we’ll get the first estimates of the GDP for the second quarter of 2014. Our guess is that they will be pretty good, certainly better than the disastrous Q1 numbers. On Friday we’ll get Non-Farm Payrolls, and they will probably be pretty good too. At least on the surface.
But the surface will be misleading, because the way these statistics – and many others – are calculated and used presents a cheery outlook that is not really justified. The data have been selected and massaged to make them seem better than they are.
The GDP print, for example, is directly affected by the estimates of inflation. If the total production of goods and services is 5% higher this year than last, the economy is booming. But if prices have increased by 10% in the same time, then we aren’t producing more, we’re just paying more. The unit of measurement – money – has been devalued.
Inflation
The measure of inflation – really the measure of the devaluation of the currency – is one of the most controversial statistics the government publishes.
The latest annual inflation rate for the United States is 2.1% through the 12 months ended June 2014.
But the method of calculating inflation has been changing with every new administration since Jimmy Carter. And all of the changes have worked to reduce the reported rate of inflation.
By one credible estimate (from Shadowstats.com) if the U.S. inflation rate were still calculated in the way it was in 1990, the true rate would be almost 6% — about three times as high.
Under-stating the rate of inflation has the effect of over-stating the growth of both GDP and the U.S. stock markets.
According to one reckoning, if the Dow Jones index were re-calibrated using some constant measure of value instead of the continually-devaluing U.S. dollar, it would be trading at 266 this week.
Employment
The other government statistic that attracts almost universal scorn is the official unemployment rate. We’ll get those numbers this week as well
Last month the government reported an official unemployment rate of 6.3%. But that’s just unemployment among the people who get counted.
If your benefits run out, if you work a single day, if you stop looking for work, if you get a part-time job or if it has been two years or more since you last worked, you are no longer considered unemployed. You are “not in the labor force.”
Last year the U.S. population increased by about 2.3 million people and the number of people employed increased by about 1.9 million (although a lot of those jobs were flipping burgers).
But the number who became “not in the labor force” increased by 2.2 million. All of the increase in employment – and the politically-important improvement in the employment rate – was caused by people no longer being counted as unemployed.
The real unemployment rate, using the government’s own figures, is over 12%.
Repeating History
The problem is that bad data causes bad decisions, and that applies equally to decisions about the economy or about war and peace.
Almost exactly a century ago this month the first World War began, largely because the leaders of the major European countries all came to believe their own propaganda.
But there is another anniversary coming; 50 years ago, on August 4, 1964, the U.S. began an exercise in unrestrained propaganda and excessive faith in the government that resulted in another bloody, brutal war.
On the night of August 4, a U.S. destroyer on “routine patrol” — actually a military mission — in the Gulf of Tonkin reported it had been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats.
President Lyndon Johnson immediately went on national television to repeat the accusations –without producing any supporting evidence — and announce a retaliatory bombing attack on North Vietnam. The American war in Vietnam had begun.
But there had been no attack. In fact the U.S. destroyer was part of a covert attack on North Vietnam. And Johnston almost certainly knew it.
Johnson’s duplicitous speech was widely applauded by U.S. media. The Los Angeles Times, among many others, urged Americans to “face the fact that the Communists, by their attack on American vessels in international waters, have themselves escalated the hostilities.”
It was vital to America’s national security. Everybody said so.
But it was not true.
Instead Johnson and later Nixon – aided by a criminally-uncritical media — prosecuted a foolish and unnecessary war that ruined a generation and resulted in more than 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties. Today we buy their exports and send them foreign aid.
Sound familiar?
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