The Power Of Positive Dunking — Mavs’ Layoffs Slam Economic Hype

DALLAS, Texas You know reporting on the economy is still bad when you have to flip to the sports section.

In the Dallas newspaper.

Moreover, you know that the economy is still bad when the Dallas Mavericks professional basketball franchise laid off a few in its workforce late last month.

Don’t worry no actual basketball players were harmed.

Only eight employees on the “business side” of the organization’s 200-plus personel were given pink slips, said owner Mark Cuban.

“The economy has a stranglehold on everybody, and it’s no different for the Dallas Mavericks…,” wrote reporter Eddie Sefko in The Dallas Morning News Saturday, June 27, edition.

“The franchise has been operating under a hiring freeze for several months,” he added. “But with all professional sports teams facing problems with fewer sponsorships and drops in season-ticket renewals, many of them have had to reduce their workforce.”

This news, however, is one of many slams against a fiscal quarter worth of hype that the economy as a whole is improving.

Economist Dean Baker has pointed out that the mainstream media has all along been playing us like we were the Washington Generals.

In his piece “Economic Recovery Is Wishful Thinking,” the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. gave two examples of fudged figures that he later described as evidence of “cheerleading” not honest reporting on the state of economy.

One: National Public Radio fudged new home sales figures for the month of April, saying they were up from March when they were in fact down, he said.

“While this was true, the April figure was only 1,000 higher than a March level that had just been revised down by 5,000. April new home sales were 4,000 below the sales level that had originally been reported for March,” Baker wrote in early June.

Two: USA Today misrepresented durable goods orders as a “surge,” even though the figure was “based on a sharp downward revision to the prior month’s data,” he added.

Baker quipped, “This leaves the responsibility of reporting on the economy to others.”

So his prognosis?

“Any serious examination of the data shows that recovery is nowhere in sight. The basic story of the downturn is painfully simple. We have seen a collapse of a housing bubble which has devastated the construction sector and also caused consumption to plunge,” he wrote.

In other words, no one is consuming because they be broke as a joke!

Plus, American families and businesses can’t buy anything on credit because it’s all totally maxed out.

So don’t buy the “green shoots” economic recovery propaganda touted by investment giant Goldman Sachs.

If anything, those are “yellow weeds” cracking open our economic system ever wider, according to New York University economist Nouriel Roubini.

Roubini predicted in his piece “Ten Risks to Global Growth“ that spending due to President Barack Obama’s stimulus package will create a “short-term growth revival.” <