Demonstrators protest the proposed 700 billion USD Wall Street bail-out in front of the New Yoprk Stock Exchange in the Financial District in New York on September 25, 2008. In response to the global financial crisis, protesters, from a variety of activist groups, denounced the capitalist system, Wall Street and the administration of US President George W, Bush. AFP PHOTO/Nicholas ROBERTS (Photo credit should read NICHOLAS ROBERTS/AFP/Getty Images)
As regular readers and all good Scissorheads know, MPS finds it is weird that all the major dailies have a Business section, but none of ‘em have a Labor section. Anyway we mention this because The WaPo is tying itself into knots to make the good employment news into bad economic news:
The labor market shattered expectations in January, as the economy added 517,000 jobs and the unemployment rate dropped to 3.4 percent, a low not seen since May 1969, according to data released Friday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Job gains had been steadily dropping for months, but January’s stunning job growth reflects unexpected tightness in the labor market, even amid fears of a looming recession as high profile layoffs spread across the tech industry.
Here is the paragraph that is spinning as fast as it can. Follow the logic (if you can):
The Federal Reserve has been in an all-out effort to lower inflation, hoping it can manage to hoist interest rates without slowing the economy so much that it undercuts strength in the labor market. But that task appears much more difficult to pull off, with scant signs of a cool down in a labor market that created more than a half million jobs in January.
“Our goal is to do X but we cannot do X because X is happening.”
It’s not much of a hidden secret that the Fed is always on the side of Big Bidness, and nothing would make their constituents happier than to have to pay lower wages and have fewer benefits, but as long as employees are in short supply, well, that’s not going to happen.
(And as the Boomers are hitting retirement age, employers are gonna be in this position for a long, long time. It’s one of the reasons that the GOP wants to increase retirement age. )
Yes, I know that the Fed has two contradictory prime directives: 1) Fight inflation and B) promote full employment.
So much of the inflation we’ve been experiencing lately has actually been price gouging. One might think after looking at the eye-popping profit and loss statements that the Fed would do something about it as part of their inflation-stomping mandate, like, I dunno, MAKING A CRIMINAL REFERRAL TO THE DOJ.
But we cannot hurt Corporate America, so for the good of the country, we need to screw the proles. Got it.
Mock Paper Scissors 
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads.
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Job growth under Biden’s watch has been impressive. Not sure why the papers don’t cover labor news. I remember when, as a child reading the papers, they were on it in every edition…
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A hyper-capitalist society despises labor, and will even attempt to brainwash labor into despising themselves.
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It starts with calling them “Human resources” like something that gets dug out of mountainsides by giant digging machines.
Fritz Lang *TRIED TO WARN US!!!”
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DH and I continue to wonder at the frame of “inflation” for price-gouging, also.
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“Well inflation is making everything cost more, so naturally we make more money because we had to raise prices”
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Seems akin to reporting a notable COLA to Social Security as bad news because it is driven by inflation.
Tell me. effers, if an inflation driven COLA is bad news, how about you try dealing with that inflation without the COLA?
Which brings us to that “chain COLA” or whatever it was called, claiming that a COLA too low to deal with inflation was fine, because seniors could just forgo lobster in favor of chicken.
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Yes lobster cat food is so much more expensive than chicken cat food/
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I once observed an old woman who, frankly, didn’t look very healthy shuffle her way into a store’s cat food section and select several different flavors to place into a store check-out bag. Then she shuffled right on out the nearest door.
I can’t say whether she needed to feed her cats or feed herself. But it did appear that she couldn’t afford either.
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A sight that would make Paul Ryan’s heart proud and Rick Scott’s nethers tingle
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Yeah, they’d get that tingle from tackling her for shoplifting.
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Nah, too much work for them…but they would watch as the rent-a-cop tackled her.
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May of may not be off topic…
But it’s funny.
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The best description of inflation was spoken by Cheech Martin’s character in the movie “Tin Cup.” Just after Kostner gets the “shanks” and I paraphrase: “Everybody gets them, nobody knows where they come from. They just show up like a virus.”
It lets all the so called financial wizards off the hook about having to explain why all
the money us working folks have is now worth less and all the Corporations are making massive profits. And always seems to happen after we see wage gains.
Like after the temporary labor shortage after the pandemic cooled down and they had to pay higher wages to attract employees. And suddenly someone is yelling “inflation” that ends up being what looks like the Corporations just taking back all the extra wages and more. At least it looks that way without any real explanations from the financial big brains.
A little Sunday winning, about something I can’t do anything else about.
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I see the Fed behaving more than a little like the French Armed Forces Command in 1938…enormously over-prepared for the last war.
The last time we had inflation (and the last time it was enormously worse! I was there in the 70’s for ‘stagflation’) it had underlying causes different than this time. It was exacerbated by a supply shock , the OPEC Oil Embargo, but it was plausibly due to rising worker wages, along with the US printing money to fight the Vietnam War.
We finally shed the last vestiges of the Gold standard and let the dollar float on the world market. Then came OPEC to shock the system and Fed Chair Volker triggered a brutal recession by raing interest rates to sky-high levels.
It worked, albeit with ginormous suffering; but the Boomers were just entering their most prodictive earnings years and so it came back.
So that set the pattern for the Fed beating inflations, which they did zealously, because it was the equivalent of the trench warfare of WW1.
“Higher employee earnings” == “Danger of inflation!!”
Now we had two massive shocks: a longer Demographic one, caused by the Great Retirement of the Boomer generation (delayed by the 2008 Great Recession) and the pandemic, demand supression for two years and the subsequent supply chain issues caused by the sudden explosion of demand exacerbated by the decades-log emergence of the global market and supply chain.
Suddenly, whether you can buy the goods you want depends on whether a factory in China is closed or not.
This isn’t AT ALL like the inflation of the 70’s, but the Fed is fighting it as if it were. (I reccomend reading Krugman on the subject…he’s been right about it all along so far.)
Fighting new war with the tools of the last war.
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Krugman is the one thing I miss about the Times.
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