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Economy
United States

U.S. Jobs Report: Unemployment Down, Conspiracy Theories Fly

EconomySourcesWORLDCRUNCHCountriesUnited States

BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS, WASHINGTON POST, CNN, SALON (USA)

Worldcrunch

The U.S. unemployment rate fell below 8% for the first time in nearly four years, according to the September jobs report released on Friday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The unemployment rate decreased to 7.8% in September, while total non-farm employment rose by 114,000. Employment increased mostly in the health care (+17,000 jobs), transportation (+9,000) and warehousing (+4,000) sectors. Total employment rose by 873,000.

The manufacturing sector lost 16,000 jobs.

Average hourly earnings for all private nonfarm employees rose by 7 cents to $23.58.

The last time the unemployment rate was this low, reports CNN, was in January 2009, when President Obama was inaugurated. Ever since the beginning of the crisis, this monthly report has been the most intensely scrutinized economic indicator.

This is a good jobs report in a still weak economy, according to the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. Good, but not great.

But hard numbers didn't convince all. Within minutes of the report’s publication, Twitter filled with conspiracy theorists claiming the books were cooked. They even included former General Electric chief Jack Welch.

Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers

— Jack Welch (@jack_welch) October 5, 2012

Fox Business analyst Stuart Varney said, “There is widespread mistrust of this report and these numbers, because there are clear contradictions,” reports Salon. "How convenient that the rate drops below 8 percent for the first time in 43 months five weeks before an election!" added Varney.

Labor economist Betsey Stevenson wrote, “anyone who thinks that political folks can manipulate the unemployment data are completely ignorant of how the BLS works and how the date are compiled.” Plus, adds Klein, if the White House was manipulating the numbers, wouldn’t they make them higher than 114,000.

No wonder Obama looked so tired during debates. He was up all night personally writing a fake jobs report.

— Indecision (@indecision) October 5, 2012

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Society
Holocaust

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp who lived with his family close to the camp. Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, a favorite to win at the Cannes Festival, tells Höss' story, but fails to address the true inhumanity of Nazism, says Die Welt's film critic.

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

A still from The Zone of Interest by

SocietyGermanyUnited StatesSourcesPolandDIE WELTfeatured-postCountriesGermany
Hanns-Georg Rodek

-Essay-

BERLIN — This garden is the pride and joy of Hedwig, the housewife. She has planned and laid out everything — the vegetable beds and fruit trees and the greenhouse and the bathtub.

Her kingdom is bordered on one long side by a high, barbed-wire wall. Gravel paths lead to the family home, a two-story building with clean lines, no architectural frills. Her husband praises her when he comes home after work, and their three children — ages two to five — play carefree in the little "paradise," as the mother calls her refuge.

The wall is the outer wall of the concentration camp Auschwitz; in the "paradise" lives the camp commander Rudolf Höss with his family.

The film is called The Zone of Interest — after the German term "Interessengebiet," which the Nazis used to euphemistically name the restricted zone around Auschwitz — and it is a favorite among critics at this week's Cannes Film Festival.

The audacity of director Jonathan Glazer's style takes your breath away, and it doesn't quickly come back.

It is a British-Polish production in which only German is spoken. The real house of the Höss family was not directly on the wall, but some distance away, but from the upper floor, Höss's daughter Brigitte later recalled, she could see the prisoners' quarters and the chimneys of the old crematorium.

Glazer moved the house right up against the wall for the sake of his experimental arrangement, a piece of artistic license that can certainly be justified.

And so one watches the Höss family go about their daily lives: guiding visitors through the little garden, splashing in the tub, eating dinner in the house, being served by the domestic help, who are all silent prisoners. What happens behind the wall, they could hear and smell. They must have heard and smelled it. You can see the red glow over the crematorium at night. You hear the screams of the tortured and the shots of the guards. The Höss family blocks all this out.

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