Who Knew Jack Welsh Was Even Alive... Let Alone On Twitter?

Within moments of the release of the September job numbers by the Bureau of Labor Statistics-- which showed an increase of 114,000 jobs and an unemployment rate falling to 7.8%, finally below the 7.9% Obama inherited from Bush and the GOP anti-worker agenda-- deranged and paranoid conservative Jack Welch, send out the above tweet. That led to dozens of other deranged and paranoid conservatives, from congressional war criminal Allen West (R-FL), crackpot satanist Bryan Fischer and wealthy agent of the Chinese government, organized crime figure Sheldon Adelson to handsomely paid Big Business propagandists Stuart Varney (Fox), CNBC's resident teabagger Rick Santelli and kooky hate talk radio queen Laura Ingraham, insisting the Bureau had doctored the numbers. How is that possible? Well, it isn't possible to doctor the numbers. But it's very possible to see how right-wingers think they could be doctored. 

There is nothing that marks a right wing sociopath more clearly than the projectionism inherent in them assuming that normal people are as amoral, grasping & devious as they are themselves. Of course Welch assumes everyone cheats. He built a career and a fortune on it himself. 

A decade ago, General Electric was the shining star of American business. Its longtime chief executive, Jack Welch, was named manager of the century by Fortune Magazine, and its stock seemed always to go up.

It ran a bewildering array of businesses but somehow always managed to make the expected profits. That record was viewed as proof of superior management, and the battle to succeed Mr. Welch in 2001 was watched all over the business universe. When a winner emerged, the losers quickly were hired to run other major companies.

G.E. is different now. The stock has fallen and the aura has dissipated.

This week General Electric agreed to pay $50 million to settle a suit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission that said the company fiddled with its books repeatedly early in this decade. In at least one case, that allowed it to preserve its reputation for making the numbers. Some of the details are eerily reminiscent of Enron.

...Another view of G.E.’s accounting standards emerged a few years ago in a book written by a man who worked there for six years in the early 1980s, before concluding the corporate life was not for him and entering a seminary. James Martin may be the only Jesuit priest with a degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

“The primary task of my first job was to issue very long, monthly statistical reports,” he wrote in his book, In Good Company: The Fast Track From the Corporate World to Poverty, Chastity and Obedience. “The first month,” he recalled, “I informed one executive that our results were coming in low” because of losses in overseas operations.

“So what?” replied the executive. “Just reverse a few journal entries.” Corporate headquarters, he explained, would come down hard on them if they missed the numbers.

Another boss told him he was “taking those accounting courses way too seriously."

The S.E.C. complaint makes it sound as if those days came back, assuming they ever left. It tells of corporate accountants discovering misstatements and secret side deals, and of more senior executives telling them to sign off on the books anyway. It outlines four separate violations, two of which it says descended to the level of fraud.

An uptick in employment numbers is a complete failure of the one heretofore successful policy of congressional Republicans since Obama was elected-- their dogged obstructionism and sabotage of the economy. Probably before this post is published Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Ed Royce (R-CA), Joe Pitts (R-PA) and Michele Bachmann (R-MN) will join their esteemed colleague Allen West in denouncing the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Boehner, Cantor, Ryan and their cronies are furious that unemployment is easing.

But more important to the kinds of people left behind in the Republican base... what will Donald Trump say? Unlikely any of them will feel chastened just because Paul Krugman was laughing at them. How did he get that Nobel Prize anyway?