Chilean president accused of cooking poverty data

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Sep 11, 1:19 PM EDT
Chilean president accused of cooking poverty data
By EVA VERGARA and FEDERICO QUILODRAN
Associated Press

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) -- The Chilean president's efforts to squeeze political advantage from his campaign to reduce poverty have backfired, opening him up to accusations that he distorted statistics to show progress on a campaign promise.

No one can deny that President Sebastian Pinera has made real efforts to combat poverty, fostering job creation and providing cash handouts to the poorest Chileans.

But his claim that his government has lifted one of every four people out of extreme poverty led to an embarrassing clash with a prestigious U.N. agency, which publicly distanced itself from the government's numbers. Doubts grew as well because officials let 49 days pass before explaining on Friday how they calculated the figures for the once-every-three-years household income survey.

Pinera himself had ratcheted up the pressure in May when he reiterated his campaign promise to defeat extreme poverty before he leaves office in 2014.

Read more: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LT_CHILE_POVERTY_NUMBERS?SECTION=HOME&SITE=AP&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

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(The current Chilean President is a supporter of the late torturing, mass murdering, Richard Nixon-assisted coup General Augusto Pinochet.)

[jtuck004]

1. Which is worse, cooking the numbers or ignoring them? n/t

[Peace Patriot]

2. It's not surprising that Pinera would cook the books.

He is all flash and glitz and, despite his training in economics, like so many "Wall Street" types, money, to him, is a number. It is not feeding and clothing your kids on $715 dollars a month (a poverty example at the end of the article). It is an abstract thing that multiplies exponentially, if you start out with a lot of it, and can be twisted and turned in bizarre ways, for instance, to invite investment on the bet that people won't be able to pay their mortgages. Maybe it's that he learned economics at Harvard. In any case, he's a breed of politician that I particularly loathe--the Reagan "trickle down" type. Such bloody liars!

And the source of this article, AP, also does their own journalistic version of cooking the books. Consider this sentence:

"No one can deny that President Sebastian Pinera has made real efforts to combat poverty, fostering job creation and providing cash handouts to the poorest Chileans." --AP

I don't call them the Associated Pukes for nothing. They love rightwingers, and even when rightwingers mess up, they will find some way to help the rightwinger out of his difficulty. The help they give Pinera, here, is partly in the word "real"--"Pinera has made real efforts to combat poverty"--and also in the first phrase, "No one can deny...".

They don't give us any facts to support either statement (that Pinera made "real efforts" and that "no one can deny" it). The statements are an assertion of the REPORTERS (or their bosses). So typical of AP! Here, they are editorializing to SOFTEN the charge against Pinera that he LIED about poverty statistics. They preface the UN agency's oubjections with their own assertion that Pinera made a "real" effort to help the poor and "no can deny" it.

IF these AP assertions have any truth to them--and the stats in the second half of the article make them very questionable--they should be at the end of the article as background/context. The news here is that a UN agency has basically called Pinera a liar. Why do they rush to his defense before they even mention the UN agency?

I'm even suspecting the following scenario:

The reporters write the first sentence (which is not kind to Pinera): "The Chilean president's efforts to squeeze political advantage from his campaign to reduce poverty have backfired, opening him up to accusations that he distorted statistics to show progress on a campaign promise."

Their editors under direction of the owners (who love rightwingers) then interpose the second sentence: "No one can deny that President Sebastian Pinera has made real efforts to combat poverty, fostering job creation and providing cash handouts to the poorest Chileans."

The reporters then had to continue by means of the word "But": "But his claim that his government has lifted one of every four people out of extreme poverty led to an embarrassing clash with a prestigious U.N. agency...etc."

AP reporters often enough write like Pukes (and some no doubt are Pukes). They have their jobs and careers to consider. But this arrangement of sentences has an editorial smell to it. ("No one can deny..."! I mean, what kind of reporting is that? It wouldn't pass muster in a 8th grade essay!)

The article is in fact lengthy and brings into yet more doubt that Pinera has reduced poverty or made any "real" effort to do so. So the editorial sentence--sentence #2--gets even more peculiar and suspicious. Most news consumers don't read past the first few sentences, so that's where the help to Pinera had to be given. The editorial object, here, is to paint Pinera as a good guy despite the UN agency criticism --i.e., to leave the impression on superficial readers that Pinera really tried hard and maybe doesn't deserve this "embarrassment." This is otherwise a more hard-hitting article than is normal for AP when reporting on rightwingers. Sentence #2 stands apart as a really sloppy piece of writing that doesn't fit the facts.

The article ends with a poignant reminder of the reality of on-going poverty in Chile and actually consults and quotes a poor person--adding further to the discrepancy of tone between sentence #2 and the rest.

All in all, it's an amusing example of how rightwingers even when they are wrong are right, in the land of the Associated Pukes.