The Spin doctors

I could today blog about the world fleeing Iran as if they knew the country was about to be bombed, or the US sweeping OWS sites like the midnight street sweepers during Mardi Gras, or the market orgasm over global bank interventions, but instead what drew my ire was today's spin on manufacturing, construction, and retail sales. What I'm about to demonstrate isn't going to come as any surprise to my peak oil friends and doomy economists.

Today the weekly unemployment claims come out and measures of construction spending and manufacturing levels. Plus we hear about car sales and retail successes. How these reports are dessiminated out into the media is a carefully crafted method of spinning reports as "getting better." A mandate that's been followed since Reagan who setup the plunge protection team, a team that seems to illicite help from fellow corporate media networks to spread the persistent good cheer. Acting like cheerleaders and motivational speakers they deliver the economic news, whatever it is, in the most polished light possible and with the knowledge that most readers don't even read past the title.
So here goes exposing their trickery. http://www.cnbc.com/id/45508352 Construction spending rises for third straight month! Wow, just wow, isn't that a sure sign that things are getting better? More construction spending? Wait a minute, in three months? What about since 2008? Doesn't matter, the reader see's "rises" and see's consecutive months. But let's dig around inside this deceptive title. What you find is this, "The Commerce Department said construction spending rose 0.8 percent in October to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $798.5 billion.

That's barely half the $1.5 trillion that economists consider healthy. Through the first 10 months of this year, construction spending is 2.9 percent below the depressed levels of 2010." Nearly 3% lower than the already depressed levels of 2010, much less pre-recessionary levels. Construction is flat and bouncing on the floor of a recession.

Then we have   http://www.cnbc.com/id/45508189  Manufacturing Growth Hits Highest Level Since June! Yay! Can you see the pom-poms yet? But again, let's dig into the article and actually read,

"It was certainly a decent outcome," Tom Porcelli, chief U.S. economist at RBC Capital Markets. "The internals suggest that manufacturing activity should remain at a fairly modest level and I think that's probably the best you could say about this report. You're not falling off a cliff but you're not gaining much momentum either."

"It's better than the alternative that most people were talking about even just a few weeks ago when there was talk of a recession and things were falling off a cliff," Porcelli added. "We're holding above break-even."

Break even! Does the title sound like we're breaking even? We've been bouncing around on the floor of a recession since 2008, and we've only been able to do that because of massive treasury and deficit intervention, a completely out of control formula to ruin.

Take away government spending, a necessary requirement when you're running a 1.5 trillion dollar deficit, and you have a huge cut in GDP. Factor that cut into the above "uncut" figures and you get a depression many times worse than the one in the 1930's. One could only imagine what a starving 1930's farmer would do to a cheerleader who cheered when the bankers came for the farm.

Then we have the persistent rah-rah that's been pumped by every network since Black Friday that Christmas is so much better this year for retailers. Well yeah.....if you open hours earlier and sell with even less profit margin to a recessionary consumer who knows this is the only day they can afford Christmas presents, you sell more. It's still flat bouncing on a deficit floor made of thin glass, and break it will.

The truth is American can't handle the truth.