WAR NUMBERS
At last, the Bushites have realized that they must face reality in Iraq, so they’ve launched a major new offensive in their war effort. Unfortunately, their offensive is against you and me.
The reality they face is that their war is a disaster for our troops, our treasury, our world reputation, their own credibility, and perhaps their political future, so they’ve decided to do what they do best: play politics with war. Anyone who criticizes their obvious failures is blasted as giving comfort to terrorists, and even the moderate Democrats who call for a timed withdrawal of our troops are lashed as being cut-and-run traitors.
However, in their eagerness to slime opponents and put a happy face on the mess in Iraq, the Bushites are revealing their own callousness, exposing themselves as rank opportunists and canting hypocrites. Their true feelings were expressed on June 15 when George’s chief PR flack, Tony Snow, was asked if Bush had any reaction to the fact that the death toll for U.S. troops in Iraq had just surpassed 2,500. Snow got his back up and snidely responded: “It’s a number.” He then added, “Every time there’s one of these 500 benchmarks [in troop deaths], people want something.”
Uh, yeah, Tony – that’s because such a number is not a statistic to those who have loved ones at risk in your war. Those are 2,500 sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, friends and family. They are not “a number;” they are people.
But, of course, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Snow, and the rest don’t have any close relatives or friends in Iraq. They are fighting their war with our loved ones – so, it’s just “a number.”
After his comment, Snow babbled on about how well things are going in Iraq. A reporter finally interrupted to ask if Bush had even been told about the benchmark. Snow snapped back, “I don’t know. I’m sure he will hear about it.”
IGNORING NEWS OF THE PEOPLE
America’s working poor recently suffered another body blow in Congress – but you probably missed the news, since it barely made a blip on the media establishment’s radar.
The blow came in the Senate, which voted down a modest increase in our nation’s minimum wage. This is front page news to millions of families that are trying to survive on jobs that pay at or near a minimum wage that’s been stuck at $5.15 an hour for nearly a decade. But the media barons, who devote lavish coverage to the prosperity enjoyed by the economic elite, didn’t see this as a story. The New York Times, for example, relegated it to a single paragraph on page 22 at the tail end of a column covering eight other topics.
Had they deigned to look into the story, here are a few important facts they would have found:
•There are 7.3 million Americans working for minimum wage. Another 8.2 million of us are paid only a dollar or less above the minimum.
•Seventy-two percent of minimum-wage workers are adults. The average worker brings home more than half of his or her family’s weekly income; a third bring home 100% of their families’ earnings. Sixty percent of these workers are women; 760,000 are single moms.
•$5.15 an hour is a gross pay of $10,500 a year for full-time work – poverty pay.
•The last increase in the minimum wage has been entirely eroded by inflation – the purchasing power of $5.15 today is the equivalent of $4.23 in 1997, the year the wage was raised from $4.25 an hour.
This is not merely an economic story, but a deeply moral issue – especially at a time when workers have greatly increased productivity and helped generate historic levels of growth and profits. If the media chieftains wonder why they’re losing readers and viewers, they might note that they callously ignore news of real importance to ordinary folks.
This article appears in July 14 • 2006.