WorldNetDaily loves to blame everything it can on President Obama, including capitalism at work in the form of failing businesses. WND’s Bob Unruh puts a renewed focus on this in the wake of far-right-fringe radio host (whose website is hosted by WND) Michael Savage’s baseless, paranoid declaration that Obama would deliberately sabotage the economy as he left office:
Talk-radio host Michael Savage recently warned his listeners that President Obama could “crash” the economy “on his way out the door.”
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But there are indications the disintegration already has begun.
For example, American retailing icon JCPenney has slashed its payroll, cut hours and frozen overtime.There also was the bankruptcy of Aeropostale, a retailer targeting teens. It had lost money for more than three years before announcing it will close 113 stores in the United States, in addition to its 41 stories in Canada, as it seeks to “achieve long-term financial stability.”
The sporting goods giant Sports Authority is trying to sell off parts the company, and hundreds of stores are closing.
Needless to say, in his rush to blame these stores’ woes on Obama — for which he provides no direct action committed by the president that led to said woes — Unruh mostly ignores the actual reasons these retailers are in trouble. We know he deliberately ignored them because they were in the articles he linked to support his story.
Regarding JCPenney, the story to which Unruh linked specifically cites slow sales earlier this year as well as continued recovery from a disastrous turnaround effort a few years back which led to “its shares declining 51 percent.”
While Unruh did admit that Aeropostale “had lost money for more than three years,” the story to which he links points out that “sales declines had accelerated recently — plummeting 16% in the most recent quarter” and that fast-fashion chains like H&M, Zara and Forever 21 are eating older chains like Aeropostale for lunch.
And the story to which Unruh links regarding Sports Authority points out that the chain has been “saddled with debt and an inefficient operations base.”
Unruh also omits one other crucial fact: None of those stories even mentions Obama, let alone blames him for the state of their retail chains.
Unruh also copies-and-pastes the ludicrous claim from features analyst Michael Snyder that “In impoverished urban centers all over the nation, it is not uncommon to find entire malls that have now been completely abandoned.” That’s true, but again, that has nothing to do with the “Obama economy.” As we pointed out last time, malls as a general rule are not built in “impoverished urban centers,” as Snyder claims; they’re mostly found in prosperous suburban and exurban areas.
Additionally, Unruh’s laughable attempt to blame the decline of malls on Obama is undermined by his quoting of another analyst pointing out that “The heyday of malls seems to be passing.” Which, again, is not Obama’s fault.
Unruh goes on to quote CNSNews.com blaming Obama for the current low labor force participation rate, ignoring the fact that — as we’ve pointed out when CNS does it — the number is meaningless because most people who aren’t in the labor force aren’t looking for work because they’re retired (like a majority of baby boomers) or students.
Unruh concludes his article by taking Obama out of context:
Just a week ago Obama, in an interview with New York Times Magazine, admitted he could have done more to help the economy.
“I can probably tick off three or four common-sense things we could have done where we’d be growing a percentage or two faster each year,” he said. “We could have brought down the unemployment rate lower, faster. We could have been lifting wages even faster than we did.”
Actually, the context of the interview was Obama saying he could have done these things if Republicans were interested in cooperating with him in doing them, which they weren’t: “But without Congress, the big legislative moves, the ones that would really change history, seemed past.”