Shocking! Unemployment shoots to 17.3%

Editor's Note: The following report is excerpted from Jerome Corsi's Red Alert, the premium online newsletter published by the current No. 1 best-selling author, WND staff writer and senior managing director of the Financial Services Group at Gilford Securities.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics appears to be intentionally understating the current unemployment rate, most likely with an aim to bolstering the Obama administration's claim that the unemployment rate is improving as jobs are created in a recovering economy, Jerome Corsi's Red Alert reports.

In a news release on Feb. 4, the unemployment rate was reported to have fallen 0.4 percent to 9.0 percent in January 2011, even though only 36,000 non-farm jobs were created.

The report further claimed the number of persons unemployed in January 2011 decreased by about 600,000, to 13.9 million people, while the labor force was unchanged.

"Truthfully, it's all in the classifications," Corsi explained. "Tracking down the different definitions of unemployment used by the BLS is an exercise in how the Obama administration lies with statistics."

The monthly unemployment rate report turned out by the BLS defines unemployment as those currently without a job who have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks and are currently available for work.

This definition conveniently excludes from the definition of unemployed those who have grown so discouraged that they are no longer looking for work, as well as those who are considered under-employed because they have been forced to accept part-time or lower paying full-time employment because no other jobs are available.

Looking at the unadjusted data, the unemployment rate jumps to 17.3 percent for January 2011, not the 9.0 percent originally reported in the monthly BLS unemployment rate release.

Corsi added, "Clearly the Obama administration will do anything possible – including manipulating data – to avoid having to admit to the American public that after having spent billions in stimulus funds and trillions in deficits, unemployment in the United States for January 2011 was 17.3 percent."

For information on how the unemployment rate is calculated, read Jerome Corsi's Red Alert, the premium, online intelligence news source by the WND staff writer, columnist and author of the New York Times No. 1 best-seller, "The Obama Nation."

Red Alert's author, who received a doctorate from Harvard in political science in 1972, is the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-sellers "The Obama Nation" and (with co-author John E. O'Neill) "Unfit for Command." He is also the author of several other books, including "America for Sale," "The Late Great U.S.A." and "Why Israel Can't Wait." In addition to serving as a senior staff reporter for WorldNetDaily, Corsi is a senior managing director in the financial-services group at Gilford Securities.

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