In a heated appearance on MSNBC’s Hardball Friday, Jack Welch doubled down on his unsupported conspiracy theory that the Obama administration cooked the books on today’s improved jobs numbers.
Chris Matthews asked the former General Electric CEO to explain where the accusation came from. Welch said:
“All I can talk about are some of the numbers. We had 600,000 government jobs added in the last 2 months. We had 873,000 jobs by a household survey which is a total estimate from 50,000 phone calls. Of those 600,000 were temporary workers. Chris, these numbers are all a series of assumptions. Tons of assumptions. And it just seems somewhat coincidental that the month before the election, the numbers go one tenth of a point below where they were when the president started, although I don’t see anything in the economy that says these surges are true.”
Matthews voiced his suspicion that Welch’s assertions are based in political bias against Obama, not economic concern. He asked Welch what evidence he has that the Obama administration got to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and doctored data. Welch confirmed he hadn’t spoken to any economists, analysts, or accounting specialists:
“I have no evidence to prove that, I just raised the question.”
Matthews wasn’t satisfied; accusing a presidential administration of manipulating data is “Nixon stuff,” that goes beyond raising a question. He gave Welch one last opportunity to walk back the claim. Welch declined, “I don’t take back any part of that tweet.”
Former Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Keith Hall dismissed Welch's claim on Friday, telling The Wall Street Journal it is "impossible to manipulate labor survey data." Leading economist Jared Bernstein called Welch’s accusation “outrageous;” Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis dubbed it “ludicrous.”
UPDATE at 11:09 p.m. ET: In a later appearance on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, Welch said “I should have put a question mark on the end of that [tweet], let’s face it,” Welch said.
*NBC Universal, the parent company of NBC News and MSNBC, is a joint venture of Comcast and General Electric since 2011. Jack Welch was General Electric’s CEO until 2001.
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All repubs do is throw it out there to see if it sticks. Fox noise well call it news and push this story. Anything to stop Obama. This is serious allegations to just throw it out with no way to prove it. Mitt looked at it as bad news because he does not care that this might be good for us.
Be honest.
This made up unemployment number is straight out of Chicago.
Take your head out of the sand. There are a lot of people who read these posts. Do any of you know someone who got a job recently ????
NOW Be honest people...
RCM,
Here's some honesty for you. Stop whining.
YES!
I'll take that as a "no" and you agree with me. Thank you for participating
All right RCM, since you don't want to accept that some people are honest with their posts, my son-in-law got a new job just last week. Is that good enough for you?
RCM, your argument is absurd. the answer to your question is yes. 3 of my friends out of work for over 7 months got full time jobs in the last week.
I it is 7.8% why on earth would anyone think thats good!!??
Silly post.
It's good when the month before the number was higher.
Actually it doesn't mean squat and is why even the liberal thinktanks have called it a statistical anomaly. Furthermore, economists don't use this number in their calculation except when viewing larger periods of time for a trend.
I always thought he was over-rated in "saving" GE. He probably used the technique he claims "they" used to pad his numbers.
It is still sad to see another new nutcase conspiracy buff
Government jobs are a drain on the economy. What do they
produce? And this data was from a phone survey?
The Oblamo people will follow like lemmings and never
question anything, Many still claim he won the debate?
The man is a very talented liar and great at reading his
teleprompter. Worthless without it as proven during the
debate.
Those who post pejorative permutations of the President's appellation deserve to be ignored.
Yeah, what Invisible said. :)
How silly to claim that government jobs are a drain on the economy. The biggest drain are private sector CEO's. ANY company could do just as well without them, leaving the operations to the Board of Directors.
Desoto you must be podagee stfu
If it is true that the DOL employment figures were rigged, imagine the size of the conspiracy to do so. Has to be hundreds of DOL people and an equal number in the administration.
The numbers weren't rigged. The Republican reaction is.
Welch, Adelson and the Kochs are just upset that with all their expenditures on this election, it may still get away from them. Come on voters. Do not let them buy this election. REGISTER AND VOTE!!!!!
Absolutely.
We're in a street fight with thugs. Let's just out-thug them the rest of the way.
another drone report from a Karl Rove robot. hey, i don't know if this is true, but i still believe it! the keyword is CONSPIRACY - thats a gem of a adjective from the brain of Karl Rove, who masterminded the two successful campaigns of the most incompetent and unresponsive President, ever! lets make a new reality for the base and swing voters - could this be true? well, it appears that the labor department issues a jobs report each month for the past month and they do this whether its positive or negative. last month, it was not so good and Mitt chimed that the POTUS continues to fail. Now its a positive report and MItt says it is skewed to the left. which is it Mitt? oh, i forgot you have to phone Karl so he can advise you how to answer and throw the electorate off the real trail.
Chris Mathews is a hard core in fighter and he challenged this chicken hawk and the chicken responded by playing dummy. typical GOP stance. now that i have said, i want you to carry that around in your memory for a few days.
BTW, by definition, theories are based oon facts. If Welch has no facts upoon which to base his theory, then he has a fantasy not a theory.
Numbers do not add up... so there is a cooking whomever did it, did it nicely and his numbers will not be challenged till next Month after election. :)
Biggest Job Search since 1983 happening in 30 Days... 6% Improvement in Jobs market people will be elated all over...
Stop whining, Tom.
Get over it. Sometimes the numbers go against your guy and this time they did.
tom the fat lady is singing
Welch has in common with most conservatives the attitude that facts are not real things out there, but just statements that can be freely altered to fit whatever political conclusion they wish to assert.
It is unprofessional and shows a lack of integrity to spread an unsubstantiated rumor about unemployment statisitics before an election. Rest assured, if you pulled that kind of crap working under Welch, you would have been toast.
You're comment is right on the mark.
I said it before, the Repubs smell blood where there is nothing more than a self-inflicted healing wound. The feeding frenzy clouds their senses.
The Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics data are patently goofy but not for the reasons Jack Welch suggested . . .
Nevertheless, Jack Welch's observation that the data does not match economic reality is absolutely correct . . .
This is not difficult to understand if you happened to stay awake during your Economics courses in college, but best wishes on understanding it otherwise, really . . .
Really! :-o
P. S. One way to begin discovering clues is to ponder whether the employment data match what you observe when you examine the various aspects of the economy with particular focus on the standard definition of "full employment" occurring when the unemployment rate if 5 percent . . .
In other words, the most recent official unemployment rate is 7.8 percent, which is not significantly greater than 5 percent, so one thing to ponder is whether everything suddenly will be fabulous when the unemployment rate drops 2.8 percent . . .
And one way to put this into perspective is to consider that you have 100 jelly beans, and each jelly bean is a percent . . .
Is the economy so close to being perfect that just 3 more jelly beans will map to everything being spanky?
You make the same ridiculous and unsupported assertion as Welch did, and therefore deserve to be similary rebuked. Just because you don't like the numbers doesn't change them. Get over it, crybaby.
@Jefferson:
There is nothing to like or dislike about numbers; they are numbers, and numbers are interesting . . .
Consider the seasonally adjusted participation rate, which is the percentage of working age people who are participating in the officially defined "workforce" or "labor force" . . .
In September 2011 it was 64.1 percent and one year later in September 2012 it is 63.6 percent . . .
To put this into perspective, in the 1950s and 1960s the participation rate was approximately 59.3 percent (59.4 percent for the 1950s and 59.2 percent for the 1960s), but the key bit of information is that this is the combined average participation rate for working age men and women, where one of the important factors that continues to get short shrift in the media is that the participation rate for working age men in the 1950s and 1960s was 84.9 percent (86.4 percent for the 1950s and 83.3 percent for the 1960s), which provides a clue to one of the most significant aspects of the economy that Jack Welch observed intuitively but was not able to explain in an immediately logical way, since while he probably did not sleep through Economics courses when he was in college, this is the type of information one discovers as the direct consequence firstly of recognizing that something does not make sense and then secondly as the direct consequence of embarking on an effort to determine precisely why, which for the typical CEO mind is not something that tends to be on the radar screen . . .
To be clear, I am not suggesting that there is a "jobs conspiracy", but as noted in my previous post to this discussion, I am stating that the numbers coming from the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics are patently goofy, which is what Jack Welch so correctly observed, but without having the epiphany required to explain it . . .
In other words, as Jack Welch looks at the economy with a keen focus on jobs, what he sees does not correlate to the employment data the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is providing, because while the naive interpretation of the BLS employment data suggests that the economy is near full employment, the fact of the matter is that the economy is nowhere near full employment . . .
And there are three primary reasons:
(1) Over the past 60 years, more women have started working . . .
(2) Over the past 60 years, fewer men are working . . .
(3) Of the men and women who are working, fewer of them have jobs which match their highest and best use with respect to skills. training, and expertise . . .
As a few examples, there are women with graduate degrees doing work as clerks and office assistance; there are men with graduate degrees doing work stocking shelves at grocery stores; and there are men and women who cannot get a job doing anything even though they have good if not advanced skills, training, and expertise . . .
Yet, if you look at only a specific subset of the BLS numbers and simply accept the numbers as being automagically all-knowing and all-revealing, then you get the curiously puzzling sense that something makes no sense, hence the "jobs conspiracy theory" . . .
And there is a "Jobs conspiracy" but instead of being the result of playing games with the numbers, it is a matter of specifically and intentionally deciding against explaining what the numbers reveal, since what the BLS numbers reveal is vastly troubling from the perspective of the health and well-being of the economy, where at present (a) the economy is not healthy and (b) it is unlikely that the economy will become healthy until the basic problems are solved, which in the grand scheme of everything makes it a "sin of omission" rather than what Jack Welch hypothesized as a "sin of commission" . . .
Jack Welch is absolutely correct in his intuitive observation that there is "sin", but it is not a "sin" which is easy for him to identify based on his particular mindset and perspectives, in part because when he was working as a CEO either intentionally or inadvertently he was promoting the labor force changes that now apparently perplex him so greatly . . .
For reference the seasonally adjusted participation rate for working age men in September 2011 was 70.5 percent and the participation seasonally adjusted participation rate for working age men in September 2012 was 70.1 percent, which maps to a small drop rather than a gain . . .
When you compare these participation rates for working age men to the participation rates for working age men in the 1950s and 1960s, and then account for the increase in population which occurred over the past half century or so, this maps to a significant number of working age men who are ready, willing, and able to work but for whom there are no jobs, even though at a high and simplistic level quite incorrectly using the standard definition of "full employment' it becomes possible for dunces to proclaim that everything is spanky, when the fact of the matter is that nothing about the economy is spanky . . .
And there also is the matter of respect, where although Jack Welch might not be the king of number crunching economists, he is a brilliant businessman and his intuition is absolutely correct . . .
Yet another fact of the matter is that relegating everything to the universe of 160 character text messages and 140 character Twitter tweets does not map to being able to understand much of anything, with the consequence that pablum becomes the primary entree on the menu, really . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablum
Really! :-o
P. S. These are the links to the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics data referenced in this post:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.toc.htm
http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1999/12/art1full.pdf
The information exists, and there are no mysteries once you discover how to wade through all the obfuscation, for sure . . .
For sure! :-D
I was taught you don't start running your mouth unless you are sure you're right and have the facts to back it up. Obviously Jack wasn't taught this. Just some old guy, whose time is passed, he is bored and wants to stir up @!$%#. Oh how easy it is with a twitter account!
Welch, like Romney, possesses a CEO mentality which means that he listens to nobody when his instinct tells him that he's right. More often than not, a CEO's instincts are wrong....forcing others to bail them out publicly while praising them privately.
The days of a CEO building something are long gone. Now they're recruited by headhunters, receive ridiculous compensation, and move on after damaging what was at one time fixable.
either your with the economy or against it and against the US jobs neo cons get over it..its getting better. im a 100% disable combat veteran
I do not believe a word this Obama appointed Sec.of Labor puts out....Her job counts on his re-election..Thousands got full time jobs in the last three months..SERIOUSLY... Who is this administration kidding???!!
Your argument makes no sense. You say that the administration are liars and yet assert yes thousands have gotten jobs. You yourself have canceled the argument. Fact is more and more are finding jobs while the labor force is shrinking due to a large population of baby boomers retiring. There are less entering the force than leaving it.
Jack gives Much Too Much credit to the Government to pull that off (lol). How can you give Jack to much credit for being anything other than an angry old white man? He needs to get a life and do something with all of his millions to help the other 99%
I think Jack Welch is a crazy Obama hater and racist to top it all. His old GE did not do well compared to other companies (like MacDonalds, i.e.). His lunatic rants against our President routinely appear at CNBC where he is always welcomed to speak. People like him cannot stand the idea of a black president. Enough said.
If the figures went the other way Welch would have praised the BLS to the sky for doing their non-political job. It must be a tough being a multimillionaire and watching your net worth soar during the Obama presidency. Greed knows no bounds with these guys.
Mr. Welch's golden parachute must have failed to open.
Thank you, Averagetaxpayer. He probably wasn't wearing a helmet to break his fall either. At least his comment leads me to believe that although I have no proof.
Whats a matter Jack, you sense your GOP Neocon donations & tax breaks going down the toilet ? Don't worry, after Mitt concedes he will send you a pair of Mormon Magic Undies for your troubles
Let me get this straight: negative stories about the Democrats are gospel truth. Positive stories are because someone cooked the books.
I heard Welch's statement on the radio--I didn't realize he had such a squeaky little voice. Napoleon complex?
This is NOT newsworthy!!!! Clowns like this SHOULD NOT even be entertained. Kids in schools across America are taught each day to provide evidence and/or data to support a hypothesis.
I said it on his twitter feed and I'll say it again here. "Jack Welch is a washed up & out of touch ex-CEO who is trying to stay relevant!" Regardless of what side of the isle you reside, recognize that Jack is inserting himself into conversation, without any proof, simply because he is used to managing by fear. I worked under him - way way under him - at GE for many years. Everyone thought he was a brilliant leader when reality was he lead by fear. I also spent SO many years listening to him cramming "integrity" down our throats. He even once said that "without integrity we are nothing" and no one will respect us. I can't remember though if that was before or after he started cheating on his wife. Any word of "integrity" that spewed out of his mouth after that moment simply was met with laughter by employees. Jack Welch and the nonsense that comes out of his mouth is laughable. Wish he would simply go join the other 1% at Augusta and retire - for good!
Thanks for your insight from your work experience. Welch was good at manipulating the press and GE data, and not the leader many folks thought he was. I'm glad you confirmed my observation of this arrogant, narcissistic leader who is now pandering and pimping for Romney
Welch is a scatterbrain who, like Romney, spouts off without facts or details.