World War I—Its Causes and Consequences (pt 1)

Owing to the author’s and editors’ participation in this weekend’s Gaza protest, the following has been posted a little later on the scheduled publication day than usual.

Almost exactly 100 years ago, on June 28, 1914, shots rang out in the city of Sarajevo, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Assassinated on that day were the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and Sophie, his wife and Duchess of Hohenberg. Serbians and other “south Slav” nationalists struggling to create a federation of the small south-Slav nations—Yugoslavia, in their language—were held responsible. Within little more than a month, the entire world order as it had existed prior to June 28 completely unraveled. First Europe and eventually the world plunged into what was to become known as World War I.

Among the pillars of the world order that collapsed in 1914 was the international gold standard. Under this system, central banks issued banknotes that were actually promissory notes payable in gold coin of a definite fineness and weight to the bearer on demand. As late as mid-1914, in the imperialist countries, gold coins still circulated side by side with banknotes, which along with bank checks were used for large transactions. Everyday purchases and wages were paid in coins made out of silver or base metals.

The fact that currencies of the imperialist nations were defined as a certain weight of gold of a given fineness meant that there was, within the narrow limits of the “gold points,” fixed rates of exchange among the imperialist countries. In effect, a single currency—gold—existed among the imperialist countries, with pound-sterling, dollars, marks, francs, and rubles merely local names for the universal currency, gold.

The international gold standard encouraged a massive growth of world trade and international investment rivaling today’s “globalization.” Individual countries on the gold standard had to remain on it or their access to the London-based capital markets would be undermined.

Things had not always been this way. In the mid-19th century, currencies of most European countries—with the exception of Britain—were defined in terms of weights of silver, not gold. The Russian ruble was a paper currency and was not convertible into either gold or silver at the state bank. In contrast, the United States defined both a silver and gold dollar, along with a fixed legal rate of exchange between the two. This system was known as bimetallism.

But since the value of gold and silver—the quantity of abstract human labor needed to produce a given weight of gold and silver bullion—constantly changes, it was the “cheaper” dollar that actually circulated. Originally, this had been the silver dollar, but by the middle of the 19th century after the gold dollar was made slightly lighter—in effect devalued—the U.S. was, like Britain, for all practical purposes on the gold standard.

By mid-1914, all these currencies, including the Russian ruble, were on the gold standard. Only the currencies of semi-colonial or colonized countries such as China and Mexico were still defined in terms of weights of silver or were paper currencies. And in 1914, after years of populist resistance to central banking, the U.S. Federal Reserve System began operations establishing the centralized management that the U.S. gold standard had previously lacked.

Before 1914, the U.S. gold standard was managed by a combination of private for-profit bankers, such as J.P. Morgan, and the U.S. Treasury. The flaw in this system was that there was no mechanism to meet a sudden increased demand for currency as a means of payment such as tends to develop during crises. Under the old U.S. national banking system, when a crisis hit, panic-stricken depositors would attempt all at once to convert their deposits into cash. As a result, the crisis would rage unchecked until money capital, in the form of gold bullion eager to take advantage of the sky-high U.S. interest rates caused by the panic, arrived from overseas.

The cyclical crisis of overproduction that hit with full force in the fall of 1907, as had happened periodically during the 19th century, triggered a panicky run on U.S. commercial banks as depositors rushed to convert their deposits into cash. But the changing conditions of the early 20th century made bank runs much more dangerous than they had been earlier.

By 1907, the U.S. had emerged as the world’s leading industrial power. Far fewer of the unemployed could return to their family farms to ride out the crisis like many still could during the 19th century. But there was another factor at work. Because the U.S. had now emerged as the world’s leading industrial as well as agricultural power, a run on the U.S. commercial banking system threatened to crash the entire global capitalist economy. Therefore, a U.S. central banking system had to be created to allow a rapid expansion of the quantity of means of payment in a crisis.

The danger was that if this were not done, during a crisis so much money capital in the form of gold bullion in search of the highest rate of interest would be shipped to the U.S. from Europe and elsewhere that the European central banks would be forced off the gold standard. To protect the international gold standard, it was therefore necessary for the U.S. to create a system of central banking just as the European countries already had done that would make it easy to issue extra dollars in a crisis. The very knowledge by bank deposit owners that extra dollars could be created during a crisis would make bank runs far less likely. When the Federal Reserve System began operations at the beginning of 1914, the international gold standard was now secure. Or so it seemed.

Low-Wage Workers of the World, Unite!

On May 15, 2014, a worldwide strike of McDonald’s workers involved workers in at least 33 countries, both imperialist and oppressed.

While participation in the strike varied, and most workers who participated were out for only an hour or so, this was a historic event all the same. It points the way forward to a far more internationalist future for the workers’ movement. To understand why this is so, we have to examine long-term underlying economic changes making the low-wage movement both possible and necessary.

This post is part of a series that explores the evolution of imperialism and the world capitalist economy in the century that began with the events of August 1914—the start of World War I. Let’s go back, not a full century but rather half a century, to the year 1964. This is the mid-way point between 1914 and the present day.

In 1964, the postwar, post-Depression “Long Boom” (strictly speaking, a series of industrial cycles with strong booms and relatively mild recessions) was underway. Indeed, to all appearances the “boom” was gaining momentum. In 1964, the U.S. and world capitalist economy entered a cyclical boom following a period of stagnation—a pause in the long postwar expansion—that occurred in the wake of the global economic recession of 1957-58.

Over the next couple of years, the Long Boom picked up steam as it was fueled—in addition to purely cyclical forces—by U.S. federal government deficits created by the escalation of the Vietnam War (called the American war by our good friends in Vietnam), further increased by a huge regressive tax cut signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, backed up by the Federal Reserve Board’s then expansionary policies.

This was the heyday of Keynesian economics, and even many Marxists were inclined to see the Long Boom as the new norm of capitalism thanks to the increasing intervention in the economy of the capitalist state. The Johnson administration boasted that the U.S. economy was so strong that the government could follow policies that would provide both “guns and butter.”

Despite these “good times,” it was becoming obvious, even to bourgeois economists, that due to the growth of automation in industrial production, the rate of growth of traditional factory jobs, though still rising in absolute terms in both the imperialist and oppressed capitalist countries, would absorb only a small part of the coming generations of young workers. This was especially true in the United States and Britain, where long-term economic growth was much lower than in Western Europe and Japan. Many social scientists and other observers expressed fears that a permanent crisis of mass unemployment was inevitable.

With few exceptions, however, professional economists insisted there was no danger of a crisis of permanent mass unemployment caused by automation. What was really happening, they claimed, and had been claiming since concerns about the long-term effects of automation on employment first arose in the 1950s, was a shift from an industrial economy where most jobs were “blue collar” jobs in factories, mining, construction, and agriculture to a “post-industrial” economy where most jobs would be white-collar salaried office jobs.

Computerization and the automation linked to it, the economists insisted, was actually creating more jobs than it was destroying. As the role of computers grew dramatically in coming years, economists assured us, huge numbers of highly skilled white-collar workers would be needed to write the software programs that would run on all those computers.

As a result, the traditional blue-collar working class would fade away over the next few decades to be replaced by the highly paid “middle-class” white-collar workforce. Since salaried white-collar workers have little interest in unions, unions were becoming obsolete and had little future. These unfolding developments—along with the “boom” that many viewed as permanent due to government policies inspired by the work of British economist John Maynard Keynes—represented the final refutation of Marx, the economists explained to their university students.

Instead of Marx’s predictions of a society increasingly polarized between a relatively few, extremely rich capitalists, on one hand, and a great mass of low-wage blue-collar workers, on the other, the “free enterprise system” was allegedly evolving toward a society that would be made up overwhelmingly of a high-salaried “middle class” without the extremes of wealth and poverty that had marked the early days of capitalism.

Is Russia Imperialist?

What started out as a small-scale demonstration in Kiev’s Maidan—Independence—Square against the government of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in late 2013 has escalated into a crisis that in a worst-case scenario could develop into a full-scale shooting war between Russia and the U.S-EU-NATO world empire—“the Empire” for short. As more facts have came out, it has became clear that the demonstrations had a pro-imperialist, pro-Empire character from the beginning. In addition, it is now obvious that the U.S. government has been heavily involved since the beginning.

The one-sided U.S. media coverage of the “pro-Maidan movement,” as the pro-imperialist forces in Ukraine are called; the activities of U.S.-funded NGOs; and the U.S. role in the pro-imperialist “Orange Revolution” of 2004 all point in the same direction. In addition, as the crisis developed it was revealed on the Internet that U.S. diplomats favored right-wing neo-liberal banker Arseniy Yatsenyuk, or “Yats,” as the diplomats affectionately called him. Sure enough, right after the coup that overthrew Yanukovych, “Yats” was named prime minister of the new coup government in Kiev. But there is more.

According to Wikipedia, on April 18, 2014, Burisma Holdings, one of the leading oil and natural gas production companies in Ukraine, announced Hunter Biden’s appointment to its board of directors. “Burisma holds licenses covering the Dnieper-Donets Basin and the Carpathian and Azov-Kuban basins and has considerable reserves and production capability,” the on-line encyclopedia stated.

Hunter Biden, a lawyer, is the son of U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden. According to Wikipedia, Hunter Biden’s résumé includes multiple connections to the financial industry and government: “From 2001 to 2008, Biden was a founding partner of Oldaker, Biden, and Belair, LLP, a national law firm based in New York. He also served as a partner and board member of the mergers and acquisitions firm Eudora Global. Biden was chief executive officer, and later chairman, of the fund of hedge funds PARADIGM Global Advisors…. At MBNA, a major US bank, Biden was employed as a senior vice president.”

Wikipedia further reports: “In addition to holding directorships on the Boards of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, The Truman National Security Project and the Center for National Policy, he sits on the Chairman’s Advisory Board for the National Democratic Institute (NDI). The NDI is a project of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).” The NED is the organization that does what the CIA did covertly 25 years ago.

Change of Guard at the Fed, the Specter of ‘Secular Stagnation,’ and Some Questions of Monetary Theory

Ben Bernanke will not seek a third term as chairperson of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors – “the Fed.” President Obama has nominated, and the U.S. Senate is expected to formally approve, economist Janet Yellen as his successor. The Federal Reserve Board is a government body that controls the operation of the U.S Federal Reserve System.

“The Fed” lies at the heart of the U.S. central banking system, which under the dollar standard is in effect the central bank of the entire world.

A professional central banker

Janet Yellen is currently vice-chairperson of the Federal Reserve Board. She has also served as an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley and chaired President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic advisers. She headed the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2004 to 2010, one of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks within the Federal Reserve System. If there is such a thing as a professional central banker, Yellen is it.

Yellen will be the first woman to serve as head of the Federal Reserve Board and will hold the most powerful position within the U.S. government ever held by a woman. Yellen’s appointment therefore reflects gains for women’s equality that have been made since the modern women’s liberation movement began around 1969.

Like other social movements that emerged out of the 1960s radicalization, the modern women’s liberation movement began on the radical left. The very name of the movement was inspired by the name of the main resistance organization fighting U.S. imperialism in Vietnam – the National Liberation Front. However, as a veteran bourgeois economist and a long-time major policymaker in the U.S. government, Yellen would not be expected to have much sympathy for the 20th-century revolutions and movements that made her appointment even a remote possibility.

Significantly, Yellen was appointed only after Lawrence Summers, considered like Yellen a major (bourgeois) economist and said to be the favorite of the Obama administration to succeed Bernanke, announced his withdrawal from contention. Summers became notorious when as president of Harvard University he expressed the opinion that women are not well represented in engineering and the sciences because of mental limitations rooted in biology.

Summers was obliged to resign as president of Harvard, and his anti-woman remarks undoubtedly played a role in his failure to win enough support to be appointed Fed chairman. In addition, Summers attacked the African American Professor Cornell West for his work on Black culture and his alleged “grade inflation,” causing West to leave Harvard. This hardly made Summers popular in the African American community. His nomination would therefore have produced serious strains in the Democratic Coalition, so Summers was obliged to withdraw.

Ben Bernanke like Yellen is considered a distinguished (bourgeois) economist. He had devoted his professional life to exploring the causes of the Great Depression, much like Yellen has. Essentially, Bernanke attempted to prove that the Depression was caused by faulty policies of the Federal Reserve System and the government, and not by contradictions inherent in capitalist production – such as, for example, periodic crises of overproduction. Bernanke denied that overproduction was the cause of the Depression.

Like Milton Friedman, Bernanke blamed the Depression on the failure of the Federal Reserve System to prevent a contraction of money and credit. Bernanke put the emphasis on credit, while Friedman put the emphasis on the money supply. Blaming crises on currency and credit, according to Marx, is the most shallow and superficial crisis theory of all.

Michael Heinrich’s ‘New Reading’ of Marx—A Critique, Pt 4

Heinrich on crises—some background

A century ago, a discussion occurred in the Second International about the “disproportionate production” theory of crisis. This theory holds that crises arise because of disproportions between the various branches of industry, especially between what Marx called Department I, which produces the means of production, and Department II, which produces the means of personal consumption.

This led to speculation on the part of some Social Democrats that the growing cartelization of industry would be able to limit and eventually eliminate the crisis-breeding disproportions. This could, these Social Democrats speculated, give birth to a crisis-free capitalism, at least in theory. The revisionist wing of the International, led by such figures as Eduard Bernstein—the original revisionist—put its hopes in just such a development.

Assuming a rising organic composition of capital, Department I will grow faster than Department II. The Ukrainian economist and moderate socialist Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky (1865-1919), who was influenced by Marxism, claimed there was no limit to the ability of capitalism to develop the productive forces as long as the proper relationship between Department I and Department II is maintained. The more capitalist industry grew and the organic composition of capital rose the more the industrial capitalists would be selling to their fellow industrial capitalists and relatively less “wage-goods” to the workers.

Tugan-Baranovsky held that capitalism would therefore never break down economically. Socialism, if it came at all, would have to come because it is a morally superior system, not because it is an economic necessity. This put Tugan-Baranovsky sharply at odds with the “world-view Marxists” of the time, who stressed that socialism would replace capitalism because socialism becomes an economic necessity once a certain level of economic development is reached.

Michael Heinrich’s ‘New Reading’ of Marx—A Critique, Pt 3

In this month’s post, I will take a look at Heinrich’s views on value, money and price. As regular readers of this blog should realize by now, the theory of value, money and price has big implications for crisis theory.

As we have seen, present-day crisis theory is divided into two main camps. One camp emphasizes the production of surplus value. This school—largely inspired by the work of Polish-born economist Henryk Grossman, and whose most distinguished present-day leader is Professor Andrew Kliman of Pace University—holds that the basic cause of crises is that periodically an insufficient amount of surplus value is produced. The result is a rate of profit too low for the capitalists to maintain a level of investment sufficient to prevent a crisis.

From the viewpoint of this school, a lack of demand is a secondary effect of the crisis but by no means the cause. If the capitalists find a way to increase the production of surplus value sufficiently, investment will rise and demand problems will go away. Heinrich, who claims there is no tendency of the rate of profit to fall, is therefore anathema to this tendency of Marxist thought.

The other main school of crisis theory puts the emphasis on the problem of the realization of surplus value. This tendency is dominated by the Monthly Review school, named after the magazine founded by U.S. Marxist economist Paul Sweezy and now led by Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster.

The Monthly Review school roots the tendency toward crises/stagnation not in the production of surplus value like the Grossman-Kliman school but rather in the realization of surplus value. The analysis of this school is based largely on the work of the purely bourgeois English economist John Maynard Keynes, the moderate Polish-born socialist economist Michael Kalecki, and the radical U.S. Marxist economist Paul Sweezy.

Kalecki’s views on markets were similar to those of Keynes. Indeed, it is often said that Kalecki invented “Keynesian theory” independently and prior to Keynes himself—with one exception. Kalecki, like the rest of the Monthly Review school, puts great emphasis on what he called the “degree of monopoly.” In contrast, Keynes completely ignored the problem of monopoly.

Needed, a Marxist law of markets

A real theory of the market is necessary, in my opinion, for a complete theory of crises. Engels indicated in his work “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific” that under capitalism the growth of the market is governed by “quite different laws” than govern the growth of production, and that the laws governing the growth of the market operate “far less energetically” than the laws that govern the growth of production. The result is the crises of overproduction that in the long run keep the growth of production within the limits of the market.

This, however, is not a complete crisis theory, because Engels did not explain exactly what the laws are that govern the growth of the market. Unfortunately, leaving aside hints found in Marx’s writings, Marxists—with the exception of Paul Sweezy—have largely ignored the laws that govern the growth of the market. This, I think, would be a legitimate criticism of what Heinrich calls “world view Marxism.” As a result, the theory of what does govern the growth of the market has been left to the anti-Marxist Keynes, the questionably Marxist Kalecki and the strongly Keynes- and Kalecki-influenced Sweezy.

Michael Heinrich’s ‘New Reading’ of Marx—A Critique, Pt 1

The April 2013 edition of Monthly Review published an article entitled “Crisis Theory, the Law of the Tendency of the Profit Rate to Fall, and Marx’s Studies in the 1870s” by German Marxist Michael Heinrich. This is the same issue that published John Bellamy Foster’s “Marx, Kalecki, and Socialist Strategy,” which I examined the month before last.

Michael Heinrich teaches economics in Berlin and is the managing editor of “PROKLA A Journal for Critical Science.” His “new reading” of Marx apparently dominates the study of Marx in German universities.

The publication of Heinrich’s article brought about a wave of criticisms on the Internet from Marxists such as Michael Roberts who base their crisis theory precisely on Marx’s law of the “tendency of the rate of profit to fall,” or TRPF for short.

Today on the Internet, partisans of two main theories of capitalist crisis—or capitalist stagnation—are struggling with one another. One theory attributes crisis/stagnation to Marx’s law of the TRPF that Marx developed in “Capital” Volume III. The rival theory is associated with the Monthly Review school, which is strongly influenced by John Maynard Keynes and even more by Michael Kalecki. Unlike the supporters of a falling rate of profit theory of crisis, the Monthly Review school, like Kalecki, puts the question of monopoly and monetarily effective demand at the center of its explanation of capitalist crisis/stagnation.

In addition to publishing Heinrich’s attempt to prove that there is in fact no tendency for the rate of profit to fall, Monthly Review Press published an English translation of Heinrich’s “An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital,” originally published in German under the title (in English) “Critique of Political Economy—an Introduction.”

Is Michael Heinrich a new recruit to the Monthly Review school? In fact, we will see later that the Monthly Review school and Heinrich have radically different views on the questions of capitalist monopoly and imperialism. So at this point, it is more a question of an “alliance” between the Monthly Review school and Heinrich’s “new reading of Marx” trend against the TRPF school, whose leading academic representative today is Andrew Kliman, a professor of economics at Pace University.

The first thing I must say about Heinrich is that it is clear that he knows his Marx at least as well as any writer whose works have been published in English. He is also a remarkably clear writer. This reflects the fact that he has thoroughly mastered his material. This does not mean that Heinrich agrees with Marx on all questions. Indeed, Heinrich is more than willing to express his disagreements with Marx. And as we will see, Heinrich disagrees with Marx on some very important issues.

Monetary crisis in Cyprus and the ghost of 1931

In recent weeks, a financial, banking-monetary and political crisis erupted on the small Mediterranean island country of Cyprus. Here I am interested in examining only one aspect of this complex crisis, the banking and monetary aspect.

The Cyprus banking crisis was largely caused by the fact that Cypriot banks invested heavily in Greek government bonds. Government bonds appeared to be a safe investment in a period of crisis-depression. But then these bonds fell sharply in value due to Greece’s partial default in 2012—the so-called “haircut” that the holders of Greek government bonds were forced to take in order to avoid a full-scale default. The Cyprus banking and financial crisis is therefore an extension of the Greek crisis. However, in Cyprus the banking crisis went one stage beyond what has occurred so far in either the U.S. or Europe.

The European Union, the European Central Bank and the IMF imposed an agreement on Cyprus that involved massive losses for the owners of large bank deposits, over 100,000 euros. Mass protests by workers in Cyprus forced the European Union and the European Central Bank to retreat from their original plans to have small depositors take losses as well.

Since the late 19th century, central banks, like the Bank of England, have gone out of their way when they wind up the affairs of failing banks to do so in ways that preserve the currency value of bank deposits for their owners. The officials charged with regulating the banks prefer instead to wipe out the stockholders and sometimes the bondholders.

Why are the central banks and other governmental regulatory organs—like the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Agency, which was created under the New Deal in hopes of avoiding bank runs in the United States—so eager to preserve the value of bank deposits, even at the expense of bank stockholders and bondholders?

The reason is that if the owners of deposits fear that they could lose their money, they will attempt to convert their deposits into hard cash all at once, causing a run on the banks. Under the present monetary system, “hard cash” is state-created legal-tender token money. Whenever depositors of a bank en mass attempt to convert their bank deposits into cash, the reserves of the banks are drained. Unless the “run” is quickly halted, the bank fails.

A bank facing a run in a last-ditch attempt to avoid failure calls in all loans it possibly can, sells off its assets such as government bonds in order to raise cash to meet its depositors’ demands, and halts additional loans to preserve cash. Therefore, if there is a general run on the banks, the result is a drying up of loan money capital, creating a massive contraction in demand. This causes commodities to pile up unsold in warehouses, which results in a sharp contraction of production and employment. Soaring unemployment can then lead to a severe social crisis.

This is exactly the situation that now confronts the people of Cyprus. University of Cyprus political scientist Antonis Ellinas, according to Menelaos Hadjicostis of CNBC and AP, “predicted that unemployment, currently at 15 percent, will ‘probably go through the roof’ over the next few years.” With official unemployment in Cyprus already at a Depression-level 15 percent, what will the unemployment rate be “when it goes through the roof”? Throughout the Eurozone as a whole, official unemployment now stands at 12 percent.

Economic Stagnation, Mass Unemployment, Budget Deficits and the Industrial Cycle

A few months ago I had dinner with a some friends from the old days. One of them expressed the view that the current economic situation of prolonged economic stagnation, continuing mass unemployment, and falling real wages represented a fundamental change in the workings of the capitalist system. He asked what is behind this change? This a good question and is worth examining in a non-trivial way.

A month or so ago the media, which had been painting a picture of a steadily improving economy, was startled when the U.S. government announced that its first estimate showed that the fourth-quarter GDP declined at an annual rate of .01 percent. Though slight, this would be a decline nonetheless.

Those economists who make a business of guessing the U.S. government’s GDP estimate expected an annualized rate of growth of 1.5 percent for the fourth quarter (of 2012). This would represent a historically low rate of growth, but growth nonetheless.

The media has been working hard to create an impression of a recovery that is at last gaining momentum. Therefore, if we are to believe the capitalist press, a “new era” of lasting prosperity is on the way. This latest “new era” will be fully assured if only the Obama administration and both Democrats and Republicans can settle their differences on the need to bring the current deficit in the finances of the U.S. federal government under control.

This is to be done by some combination of “entitlement cuts” for the working and middle classes and very modest tax increases for the rich. With the tax question settled by the New Year’s Day agreement, the only question now is how deep the entitlement cuts will be, spending on the military and “national security” being largely untouchable.

Thrown somewhat off balance by the estimated fourth-quarter GDP decline, the economists, bourgeois journalists and Wall Street brokerage houses—ever eager to paint the U.S. economy in glowing terms in order to sell stocks to middle-class savers—explained that “special factors” were behind the slight fall in the estimated GDP, not a new recession.

The September 2012 Unemployment Numbers and the ‘Surplus Population’

This post concentrates on the U.S. economy. However, the basic trends are the same in all imperialist countries.

On October 5, the U.S. Labor Department issued its monthly estimate of unemployment for September 2012. Much to the surprise of most observers, the figures showed a drop of unemployment from 8.1 to 7.8 percent. For the first time in 44 months, unemployment dropped below the psychologically significant level of 8 percent.

The reported drop in unemployment gave a much needed shot in the arm for the Obama reelection campaign, which had been reeling in the wake of the president’s poor performance in his first debate with Republican challenger Mitt Romney. As could be expected, Democrats were delighted by the unemployment report, which at first glance seemed to indicate that the lagging recovery from the 2007-09 “Great Recession” was finally gaining momentum.

Republicans, on the other hand, were disappointed, and some could hardly hide their anger. Jack Welch, the former head of the General Electric Company and a staunch Republican, infamous for his “downsizing” and layoffs when he was head of GE, even hinted that the unemployment report was deliberately falsified by the Obama administration to boost the president’s chances of reelection.

Is it possible that Welch is right? As we will see, of far greater importance is what the Labor Department’s rate of unemployment actually measures.