46.2 Million in Poverty? How to Lie With Statistics.

by Francoise Arouete Looking for a good investment in these trouble times? Try riot gear. On September 17, 2011, CNN reported that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is worried that high U.S. unemployment could lead to the same kind of riots here that have swept through the UK, Europe, and North Africa. He has reason to be concerned. CNNMoney reports that Aluminum bats, police nightsticks and other weapons dominated the "movers and shakers" list of hot-selling items in Amazon.uk's Sports shop on Tuesday as riots spread across Britain for the third day. At Amazons UK web site riot gear sales are soaring. One of the top items, an aluminum Manchester Riots baseball bat, gained a whopping 6,541% on its "sales rank" over the past 24 hours. Hows that for an investment opportunity? When asked about the poverty rate, which allegedly rose to 15.1% in 2010, its highest level since 1993, according to census data released Tuesday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloombergs responded, "You have a lot of kids graduating college, [who] can't find jobs. That's what happened in Cairo. That's what happened in Madrid. You don't want those kinds of riots here. ... "The public is not happy. The public knows there is something wrong in this country, and there is. The bottom line is that they're upset."" According to the census data about 46.2 million people are now living in poverty, 2.6 million more than last year. Imagine the response if the more honest truth was told for more accurate government statistics put the figure closer to 56 million Americans which is roughly 18.5% of the population.

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Most college students who have taken Journalism 101 are probably familiar with How to Lie with Statistics (I still have the 1954 edition, 34th printing!) which has, for decades, been the seminal text book for students and still remains required reading for would be journalists. Too bad even the best journalists are too lazy to ask questions and hit the books rather than swallow whatever pablum is spoon-fed by the bureaucrats. But I guess thats why we have Julian Assange and Wikileaks which, come to think of it, have been rather quiet lately. While it's no surprise the gutless and sold-out corporate media participate in the frauds their betters warn against I am utterly miffed that Truthdigs Robert Scheer (like almost everyone else) laps up and regurgitates the mitigating propaganda dished out by the bureaucrats. Its not the Scheer is wrong but that he does not realize how more than right he is. As journalist/muckraker David DeGraw (who did do his homework) substantiates, the more accurate figure is over 56 million But why quibble about the suffering of 10 million more impoverished Americans? Add a million or two here and there and aluminum baseball bats become objects for Amazon speculators. The lie is that the census measures poverty based on costs of living metrics established in 1955 56 years ago! Try to convince a single person living in New York or San Francisco, or any metropolitan area, that they don't live in poverty because their income exceeds $25K and you arguably invite every Molotov cocktail you get crammed down your throat and shoved up your posterior. Professional journalists should do their homework and ask questions where complainant hacks fail to make distinctions with a difference. The more accurate and honest measurement of poverty, which factors in vital cost of living variables, comes from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Compare the distinction with a very real difference: In 2008, the Census reported that 39.8 million Americans lived in poverty. However, based on NAS calculations, 47.4 million Americans lived in poverty that year. Therefore the Census undercounted by 7.6 million people. DeGraw points out that by using NAS methodology, which factors in vital cost of living variables, at least 56 million Americans, roughly 18.5% of the population, lived in poverty in 2010 and that's 10 million more than the Census Bureau and the compliant corporate media propagandists are reporting. Unlike the Census poverty measure, the NAS measurement gets little, if any, mainstream media coverage. Gee wiz. Way do you think that might be? Perhaps The Establishment" knows that journalists left and right will, almost without question, chew whatever dried bone is tossed over to them and perhaps the cynics in charge also know that the so-called crackpot' Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. was spot-on when he railed from his pulpit that Page 2 of 5

The Establishment knows that if it wants to control We the People You gotta keep the people ignorant. You gotta keep the people ignorant! The propagandists who enable the spin-doctors have tried to pull the wool over our eyes about the unemployment rate too. The official national unemployment rate is 9.1%, but most experts agree that figure is misleading and prefer the more honest underemployment rate which, according to CNN, hovers at about 16.2% because it includes people who have given up their job search and those who are forced to work part-time because they cant find full-time jobs. Fortunately the 9.1% lie is less audaciously fomented and mainstream journalists have at least begun to be more honest if only in passing mention. Senator Bernie Sanders (D. Vt.) writes that the poverty level in America is now largest number on record. According to the same census report about 49.9 million Americans also lack health insurance and that number has soared by 13.3 million since 2000. Moreover, Sanders writes, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has both the highest overall poverty rate and the highest childhood poverty rate of any major industrialized country on earth. This comes at a time when the U.S. also has the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth with the top 1 percent earning more than the bottom 50 percent. According to the latest figures from the OECD, 21.6 percent of American children live in poverty. This compares to 3.7 percent in Denmark, 5 percent in Finland, 5.5 percent in Norway 6.9 percent in Slovenia, 7 percent in Sweden, 7.2 percent Hungary, 8.3 percent in Germany, 8.8 percent in the Czech Republic, 9.3 percent in France, 9.4 percent in Switzerland. I suppose we can take some comfort in that our numbers are not quite as bad as Turkey (23.5 percent), Chile (24 percent) and Mexico (25.8 percent). [Emphasis mine.] Those who manage to pull their heads out of the vast wasteland' of corporate media understand that, if Americans had a reliable clue about how badly we have really been screwed, the streets might break to riot just as they have in nation after nation in the EU but which (gee, have you noticed?) the corporate press scrubs from the evening news. After all WeDuhPeeeple must be kept in a buying mood and the friends-of-Big-Brother K-Street-compliant-corporate media cant risk our actually finding our how badly Wall Street screwed up England, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and now France and who knows who is next. The most you will see or hear is a passing mention on the news.

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If you want to discover the truth you will have to spend research time you probably dont have only because you are running as fast as you can to not fall farther behind. With manufacturing so slowed and the supply so glutted we can only wonder what kind of trouble is brewing in Communist China or India where Western capitalists keep our out-sourced non-union slave labor beneath the wheel and under the boot. In the end the rise of the rest may not be the sure bet Fareed Zakaria claims will be the new world order after the mobs burn our illusions in revolt against the Shock Doctrine of disaster capitalism and against The New Rulers of the World During the so-called Arab Spring, when U.S. sponsored police states pulled the plug on the Internet to quash Free Speech, American diplomats and public officials like Hillary Clinton self-righteously railed against governments that pulled the plug and turned their American-made weapons against their own people. We in the U.S., of course, would never do such a thingor so the self-serving self-righteous hyperbole flew. If you actually believe that then contact me immediately for I have some under-water ocean-front property in Arizona that Id like to sell you. As Dustin Slaughter reports from Public Record, Citizens have been prevented from exercising their right to peaceable assembly in New York City because the force established to serve and protect civil society, the NYPD, has become a counter-intel paramilitary force. And in San Francisco, the Department of Homeland Security has been monitoring protests against Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), an organization that [see video ] has committed egregious acts of police brutality and, with the help of telecom companies, shut down cell communication of activists here. The fundamental right to peaceable assembly? Bill of Rights? It is now apparently illegal to even plan to meet. Of course, no right is absolute and I am not saying BART was wrong (I really dont know enough). All I am saying is lets not delude ourselves; those who think our police will not turn their guns against their fellow citizens who peacefully demonstrate dont know the history of even this living generation.

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When governments lie I am only shocked that people feign shock. All Governments Lie. All empires also fail and crumble under the bankrupting weight their own imperial over-reach. We can leave the cockeyed optimists to audaciously hope for American exceptionalism. Perhaps Rev. Wright misspoke when he said, God damn America for the simple truth may be that our corporate BART protests. Photo by Anna Vignet owned America (which is largely multi-national and has no national fealty ergo persons but clearly not citizens) may not merely have dammed itself but that, as Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges tells us, we are taking the whole planet with us and the sky really is falling. Francoise Arouete Copyright Francoise Arouete 2011

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