Orwellian manipulation of government economic statistics, par excellence.
The moving average of the Non-farm Payrolls marked the downturn in the economic expansion with amazing clarity by a steep drop in late 2007. It will also mark the bottom and a sustained upturn when it arrives.
"The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. Power will achieve its murderous potential. It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."
R. J. Rummel, Mass Murder and Genocide, 1994