By Jackson Thoreau
WASHINGTON, D.C. – He met me in a bookstore not far from the headquarters of the Labor Department. He was middle-aged, gray at the temples, wearing a look of utter frustration.
"First of all, we never met, you know what I’m saying? I’ll deny I ever met you, if anyone ever asks," he said, as we grabbed a table in the bookstore café.
"I understand," I said. And I did – I was used to people telling me a bunch of wild things, then denying they ever talked to me.
He nodded. "I’ve worked at Labor for 29 years. I’m one year short of getting a pension that will allow me to finally retire from this hell-hole. I don’t know why I’m jeopardizing that." He sighed. "Nothing much makes sense anymore."
"You have that right."
He looked at me, his eyes piercing mine. "You know what O’Neill said, what Clarke said, that’s just the tip of the iceberg with this administration. You know what Kerry said, about these guys being a bunch of lying crooks. That doesn’t begin to cover it."
"Tell me something I don’t know."
"The economy is the key to this election. Bush knows it, Rove knows it, Kerry knows it, everybody knows it. National security means nothing if people don’t have at least some hope of getting and keeping a good enough job to feed their families."
"I’m with you."
"You know these latest job figures, about the U.S. economy creating 308,000 jobs in March, going far beyond economists’ projections? The ones Bush is using to say his tax-cuts-for the-wealthy program is working?"
I nodded. "They’re fake, right?"
"These guys taught Enron and Andersen how to cook the books." He leaned in closer. "You can’t believe the pressure Labor has been under in the last few months to come out with some really positive job growth numbers. They even sent Cheney over to have a private session with Chao. She’s not as bad as some in the administration, but she caved in to the pressure. Most people would."
"What did Cheney tell her?"
"He said he would make it very uncomfortable for her unless she found some new numbers to justify a large gain in jobs. Very uncomfortable. He used the kind of language he did to Wellstone right before his plane crashed."
I nodded. "These guys don’t mess around."
"So we found some new numbers. They’re mostly jobs that were shipped to India, to China, to Mexico, and other countries. We counted anyone who moonlighted as a waiter or pizza delivery guy or whatever as another job gained." He looked at me closer. "Hell, they’re all just guesses anyway. Educated guesses, but guesses, nonetheless. Oh, we use a lot of fancy surveys and formulas and projections about how many businesses will go under, and do a lot of other research to make the guesses seem official. But in the end, your guess at the number of jobs out there is as good as mine."
"I understand they’re guesses. But why did Cheney and Chao let the numbers get so low in the first place? I mean, you would have thought they would have dipped some after Sept. 11, but to decline so long to hit 3 million jobs lost….That’s hard to believe they let it go so low."
His voice got lower, to almost a whisper. "You remember Reaganomics? The trickle-down theory that never trickled down to the middle class, let alone the poor?"
"Sure, I remember. That kind of crap logic helped turn me from a sportswriter into a political activist."
"Well, these Bush 43 guys have taken that theory to another level. Their whole economic plan is based on deceit. Smoke and mirrors, it’s just damn smoke and mirrors."
"What do you mean exactly?"
He leaned in closer. "Think about it. Who is the Bush 43 administration’s main constituency?"
"The wealthy. Just like them."
"Right. And what do wealthy people mostly have their money in? Stocks and bonds. Especially stocks in their own companies. How do you think corporate net worth reached a damn record $10 trillion last December? How do you think we went so fast from a job-seekers’ market, where more people were getting benefits like health insurance, to a CEO’s market, where everyone is just glad to have any old job, even if there aren’t any benefits, and the ones at the top rake in everything except the crumbs? That just doesn’t happen by itself. It’s planned."
I looked away, trying to think. "How did they do it? Through finding excuses to keep interest rates so low it’s not worth saving any money in banks or CDs?"
"That part of it. Every chance he has, Bush 43 reminds Greenspan that he’s most to blame for his father losing in ’92. That’s crap, of course. But Bush believes those interest rate rises in the months before the ’92 election did his father in. So he’s been fanatical at trying to keep interest rates so low. An increase in jobs too fast would give Greenspan a reason to increase interest rates to keep inflation from rising too much. That’s why the White House told Chao not to come out with a big jump in jobs in January. We were about to say back then that jobs had increased by about 450,000 that month. But at the last minute, we set it back to only about 100,000, which we later ‘revised’ to 159,000. Think about that, will you? How can you trust a process in which we have to revise numbers by more than 50 percent only a couple of months later?"
I nodded. "And just when Bush and Cheney need the bump in jobs, after the Democratic primaries are done and the Dems aren’t getting the media attention, when it’s time to start campaigning, he gets you guys to do that. So even if Greenspan increases interest rates a little from here until November, it won’t be enough to make most people notice. Most people will welcome the seemingly more jobs."
"Yeah, the jobs that are mostly created in India and China and Asia and on our computer files and some blackboards stashed deep within the bunkers under the White House."
"Bunkers? So that’s what all that construction around the White House is about? They’re digging deeper bunkers to protect them from atomic bombs or something?"
At that, he stood up to leave. "That’s another story, my friend. Watch your back."
Before I could tell him to do the same, he was gone, as if he disappeared into the night mist.
I just sat there staring into my reflection in the table. Was he a patriotic whistle-blower with a conscience who wanted to do his part to stop the neo-con empire? Or was he a self-serving bureaucrat sent over by Rove to blow some more smoke towards me to further confuse the issue?
All I knew for sure was that it was just another night inside the beltway, and I had too much on my mind, as usual. Hell, I knew a long time ago the Labor Department fabricated its figures. But if only I could find that secret passageway into the White House bunkers, then I’d have a real story to tell…..
Jackson Thoreau is an American writer and co-author of We Will Not Get Over It: Restoring a Legitimate White House. The 120,000-word electronic book can be downloaded on his Internet site at http://www.geocities.com/jacksonthor/ebook.html. He is working on another book, The Strange Death of the Woman Who Filed a Rape Lawsuit Against Bush & Other Things the Bush Administration Doesn't Want You to Know. Some chapters from that can be read at http://www.geocities.com/jacksonthor/know.html. He can be contacted at jacksonthor@yahoo.com or jacksonthor@justice.com.
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