{"id":352311,"date":"2018-03-15T18:05:25","date_gmt":"2018-03-15T17:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/forget-the-dow-jones-hows-doug-jones\/"},"modified":"2018-03-15T18:05:25","modified_gmt":"2018-03-15T17:05:25","slug":"forget-the-dow-jones-hows-doug-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/forget-the-dow-jones-hows-doug-jones\/","title":{"rendered":"Forget the Dow Jones. How\u2019s Doug Jones?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Language matters. For example, the words that corporate and government officials use to report on the health of America\u2019s economy can either make clear to us commoners what\u2019s going on \u2014 or hide and even lie about the reality we face.<\/p>\n

Consider the most common measurement used by officials and the media to tell us whether our economy is zooming or sputtering: Wall Street\u2019s index of stock prices. The media literally spews out the Dow Jones Average of stock prices every hour \u2014 as though everyone is waiting breathlessly for that update.<\/p>\n

The thing is, nearly all stock<\/a> is owned by the richest 10 percent of Americans. So the Dow Jones Average says nothing about economic conditions for 90 percent of us.<\/p>\n

For the true economic health of America as a whole, we need to know what I call the Doug Jones Average. How are your average Doug and Dolores doing?<\/p>\n

\"stock-market-stocks-economy-inequality\"<\/p>\n

The New York Stock Exchange (Thomas J. O’Halloran, 1963 \/ Library of Congress)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

As we\u2019ve seen, stock prices keep rising to new highs. But wages and living standards for the middle class and poor majority have been held down<\/a> by the same corporate and political “leaders” telling us to keep our eye on the Dow.<\/p>\n

To disguise this decline, they play another dirty language trick on us when they issue the monthly unemployment report. Currently, with the unemployment rate down to 4 percent, they tell us America’s job market is booming.<\/p>\n

But that only reflects the number<\/em> of jobs, not the dollar value of those jobs in terms of wages and benefits. Having lots of people doing poorly paid work is hardly a healthy job market.<\/p>\n

Notice that they don\u2019t measure the stock market by the number of stocks out there, but by their value<\/em>. They should measure our job market the same way.<\/p>\n

Of course, they\u2019d only do that if they gave a fig about all of us Dougs and Deloreses. And that speaks volumes about their bias for stock-owning elites.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The post Forget the Dow Jones. How’s Doug Jones?<\/a> appeared first on OtherWords<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This piece was reprinted from Other Words<\/a> by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Language matters. For example, the words that corporate and government officials use to report on the health of America\u2019s economy can either make clear to us commoners what\u2019s going on \u2014 or hide and even lie about the reality we face. Consider the most common measurement used by officials and the media to tell us […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2523,"featured_media":352312,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-352311","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2523"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352311\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}