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Transcript #131 Hannity May Lie, But The
Actual Economic Data Tells The True Story Partially hyperlinked to sources.
For all sources, see the data
resources page. Sources you'll
hear include: the New York Times, the Nation magazine, McClatchy Newspapers,
Harper's Magazine, MSNBC, and the websites of Barack Obama, John McCain, and the
Federal Reserve of St. Louis. A topic like this
one is necessarily going to involve a lot of numbers.
Most are in the first half of the podcast.
Trying to memorize them is not an option.
Just let them wash over you so you get the general feel. One or two will
stick in your mind to use in your water cooler debates. If you're more
systematic about these things, you can check out the transcript to write some of
the numbers down. Let's start by
listening to that master propagandist, Sean Hannity. He's speaking to
former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele, another right-winger. As you'll hear,
even Steele hasn't drunk as much of the Kool-Aid as Hannity: audio:
Hannity Hannity:
It’s funny, with all the good news out of Iraq, and the war has been a
success—we didn’t lose it; the surge has been a success—it didn’t fail.
Obama’s going to make the case the economy’s faltering today—did
anyone show him the economic numbers? Steele:
The ones that just came out. Hannity:
The unemployment rate in this country has been—and we won’t hear this
tonight—has been lower than the average of the last four decades; interest
rates low, inflation low; we got out of the Clinton/Gore recession, we got out
of the negative impact of 9/11 on the economy.
Is that gonna fly? Steele:
Well, no, it’s not gonna fly, because it doesn’t make their argument.
And the reality of it is two things.
1) Yes there are families out
there that are struggling, that are in difficult times.
You can’t belittle that, you cannot forget that.
You couldn't get
Hannity to admit that. Continuing
on… Steele:
But at the same time, not every homeowner in America has a subprime mortgage.
Not every worker in America has lost their job.
There’s growth and opportunity that’s still out there.
These guys see the glass as half empty.
We Republicans see it as half full, and I think what you’ll hear next
week is talking about that difference. Hannity:
Here’s the point—for the Democrats to do well, they’ve got to make
the case that the war is lost, the surge has failed, and the economy’s in the
tank. And all the evidence is to the
contrary. Did anyone not tell Barack
Obama what’s happening in the country right now?
What’s happening in Iraq? Steele:
They know what’s happening, but they cannot acknowledge it or don’t
want to acknowledge it, because it underlies their argument. You just heard
Hannity throw out a stat: the unemployment rate is lower than the average of the
last 4 decades. Huh? What kind of
a phony, made-up stat is that? Sean, people
compare themselves to how they were doing under the last President, not how
they're doing compared to an average figure over 4 decades. On a statistical
basis, the proper analysis is to look at what unemployment figure a President
inherits, and what he leaves the administration which follows. Bill Clinton inherited
7.3% from Papa Bush. At the end of
Clinton's term, unemployment had fallen to 4.2%.
Clinton knocked it down significantly. In direct
contrast, you have George W. He
inherits 4.2%, and now it's ballooned up to 5.7%.
Under King George, unemployment has increased by a third. That's a record
Hannity's bragging about? And that 5.7% stat
doesn't even count workers who have given up looking for work. It counts as fully
employed those working part time who want to be working full-time. And as you'll hear
in a minute, it doesn't reflect the fact that many who had solid middle class,
often union jobs, have now been forced into far lower-paying service industry
jobs. Finally as far as
how people are feeling, former Republican icon Kevin Phillips has a telling
point to make. He's now become
something of an economic populist. According
to his recent article
in
Harper's Magazine, the federal government has for decades been screwing around
with the way unemployment is calculated.
The purpose is to come up with a lower figure.
Yet
another reason Hannity's phony, four-decade average stat isn't worth the paper
the Republican talking points he got it from, is written on. Phillips
concludes that if the unemployment rate was calculated today the same way it was
25 years ago, today's rate would be between 9 and 12%. No
wonder people are feeling the economy is on the skids. OK,
Hannity also claimed that things are
hunky-dory, because interest rates and inflation are low, and that "we got
out of" the "Clinton/Gore recession" and the negative impact of
9/11. Oh yeah, who is
"we" Sean. Maybe you're doing
fine, Sean, but the "we" that constitutes the vast majority of
Americans, "we" certainly aren't. Recently the Bush
administration released some additional numbers in areas that directly reflect
how people are doing. The stats are in
the areas of median income, the number of medically insured, and poverty. Each stat is
subject to right-wing manipulation to imply things are going well. Let's take a look
at each one and set the record straight. Median income. Median income is
the income level that half the population earns more than, and half the
population earns less than. It now stands at
$50,233. A right-winger may
brag to you, that for three years in a row, the median income of Americans has risen. Sounds terrific,
huh? Not so. That right-winger
would be failing to tell you that even with those three years of gains, the
median household income in our country is still slightly less than it was in
2000. And if you focus
on working age households, the median income here is a whopping $2000 below what
it was when Bush first took office. Nice job, George! Why you bragging,
Hannity? And the worsening
seems to be accelerating. Bush's own Labor
Department recently said
that so-called rank-and-file
employees, who constitute the vast majority of the work force, they earned
3.1% less this July than last July. That's the
"biggest year-over-year decline since November 1990."
And who was
president then? George's Daddy. Does screwing
workers run in the family, perhaps? Yeah, the
right-wing family. So while the
economy has been expanding, what you see
is that Working
households helped bake a bigger economic pie but ended up with thinner slices OK. You want to hear
another right-wing distortion quickly disposed of? Stay tuned! BREAK Here's another
critically important number you can throw in the face of your friendly local
right-winger. It's the number of
uninsured Americans. The Bushians may
brag that the number of Americans who don't have health care insurance went down
over a million in 2007. But you know why
the number went down? Because more
Americans enrolled in government health programs like Medicaid! The number of
people in private health insurance plans declined. So much for
free-market solutions. And, again, as
with unemployment, Bush leaves us worse off than when he took office. There are now over
7 million more
uninsured people than when Bush came to Washington. That's almost
deliberate. Remember when Bush vetoed
a children's health insurance program? It would have given millions more
children health care coverage. You can check out
podcast 107 about that. Would it surprise
you to learn that one of the reddest of states, Bush's home, Texas, has the
worst situation, with almost one-quarter of all residents uninsured? And it also
shouldn't really surprise you, that the two states with the best record, the
lowest rate of uninsured, 8.3%, are those bluest of blue states, Massachusetts
and Hawaii. Right-wingers
should hang their heads in shame. Finally, the last
number. What about
poverty? How's the Bush
administration doing on that front? How do right-wing
policies compare to progressive efforts in this realm? In 2007 the
poverty rate didn't budge. It stayed
the same at 12.5%. When Bush took
office, the poverty rate was 11.3%. Since the
right-wing retook the federal government, 5.7
million more Americans have fallen below the poverty line. Nearly 1 in 5 US
children lives in poverty. In what
is usually called the richest nation on earth.
How scandalous is that? An abomination if
you're a progressive. But completely off
your radar screen if you're a right-winger. The only time
right-wingers think of the poor is when the poor are thrust in their face. Like during
Katrina. Remember Barbara
Bush's memorable comment: audio:
Barbara Bush [S]o many of the people in the
arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, this is, this is working very
well for them. The poor are a
perverse afterthought to the right. The right-wing's
anti-poverty program is stadium relief operations during a hurricane. Now let me debunk
for you one of the right's biggest lies you'll be told, about the supposed
failure of the War on Poverty. In 1964, when
Lyndon Johnson launched the war on poverty, the poverty rate in America was 19%.
It was cut down to 11.1% by 1973. Not only that, but
the lives of untold thousands of infants were saved: Infant
mortality among the poor, which had barely declined between 1950 and 1965, fell
by one-third in the decade after 1965 as a result of the expansion of federal
medical and nutritional programs There was all this
success, despite the fact that the war on poverty was never even fully funded,
because the Vietnam war ate up our national treasure. Any similarities
to the present day are purely coincidental. Poverty hasn't
declined since that time, because the issue of poverty fell off the national
agenda. Coming back to the
present economic situation, make sure you mention to whatever right-winger
you're having the pleasure of conversing with, make sure to mention, that most
experts agree, the 2007 figures you've heard here, won't even be the worst. No. Experts
cautioned that the report…did
not take into account the economic downturn that began late last year, and
therefore it probably presents a rosier picture than the current economic
reality. (source) Here's another: What
makes the news particularly bleak is that last year was probably the best year
of the economic expansion that started at the end of 2001. Surveying the
wreckage since then, it appears all but certain that this year’s census data
will be worse. (source) A record Sean
Hannity no doubt will continue to lie and brag about. Let's move from
statistics to analysis. You may be
wondering, what are the causes of this economic distress, which will likely
deepen? Factors would
include a weak
labor movement, globalization, technological change and a slowdown in
educational attainment. The right-wing is
on the wrong side of all of them. But
no time to discuss these all here right now. I want to focus
here on labor. Worker
productivity is a measure of goods or services produced per unit of labor. In other words,
how much bang for every buck paid to a worker, is the company getting? Check this
out: From the end of
World War II until the early 70's, productivity and the minimum wage rose
together. As the companies
did better, workers were paid more. But since the
mid-70's, which would be mostly rule by right-wing economically-oriented policy,
productivity continued to rise, but the minimum wage and average worker wages
fell. Because the labor
movement was crippled by an assault from the right. Why? To produce
the result the right wants: You have more
product being produced by more poorly paid workers.
So domestic corporate profits more than tripled. Robert
Greenstein is the Executive Director of the Center for Budget and Policy
Priorities. His conclusion
is: Never before on record has poverty been higher and median
income for working-age households lower at the end of a multi-year economic
expansion than at the beginning. The new data add to the mounting evidence that
the gains from the 2001-2007 expansion were concentrated among high-income
Americans. I'll say. Here are two of my
favorite killer stats: Since Reagan took
office, the share of income earned by the richest 1% of Americans has more than doubled. And at the very
very top, you now see a situation where the 400
richest American families have more wealth, than the bottom 57 million families. 400 have more than
57,000,000. So what can be
done? Stick around to
hear some progressive solutions. BREAK
You want
solutions, I got solutions. A progressive
agenda to make sure economic growth benefits all Americans would include goals
such as: --strengthening
labor unions --increasing the
minimum wage --increasing
investment in public education, --guaranteeing
affordable health care --making the tax
system more progressive I'm going to focus
for a minute on labor unions and the minimum wage.
They are key to understanding why gains in productivity by workers
haven't been matched by gains in income of workers. The entire purpose
of the minimum wage law passed under FDR was to set wages at the minimum
standard of living necessary for health, efficiency and general well-being of
workers A reasonable goal.
So of course right-wingers oppose minimum wage laws. When Democrats
re-took control of Congress in 2006, they said one of their goals in the first
100 days was to increase the minimum wage. Republicans
had refused to raise it for 10 years. Democrats
succeeded. So just recently
the second stage of the minimum wage increase
passed by Democrats in 2007 took effect. The best way to
stimulate the economy is to put money into the hands of those who will spend it
in ways that do stimulate
the economy. Minimum
wage workers don’t put raises into predatory lending, commodity speculation or
offshore tax havens. They recycle their needed raises back into local businesses
and the economy through increased spending. Huge majorities of
Americans have consistently supported
increases in the minimum wage. Yet right-wingers
have opposed the minimum wage from the git-go. Listen to these
two short clips of Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaking
to the 1936 Democratic Convention: audio:
FDR The
royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the
business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was
nobody's business. They granted that the Government could protect the citizen in
his right to vote, but they denied that the Government could do anything to
protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live. Well, progressives
like FDR and you and I take the opposite view. audio:
FDR Today
we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair.
If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he
must have equal opportunity in the market place. For more of this
speech, it's quite, quite breathtaking, see podcast 110. Rhetoric like
this, plus actions to match, are why present-day right-wingers like Rush
Limbaugh so hate FDR: audio:
Rush Limbaugh Roosevelt
is dead. His policies may live on,
but we're in the process of doing something about that as well. Don't you find it
obscene? Hannity is about
to sign a contract
under which he'll make in one a year what the average American worker would take
10 lifetimes to earn. Limbaugh already
has a contract that is twice as rich as that! Yet they want
their taxes reduced. And oppose
increases in the minimum wage. As to unions,
right-wing policy is vehemently anti-union.
A multi-billion
dollar industry has developed to fight unionization. That's because
stronger unions would be able to win higher wages and allow the benefits of an
expanding economy to be shared more fairly. On the
strengthening unions and fighting poverty fronts, you should know that the
differences between Obama and McCain exemplify the progressive vs. right-wing split. Here
are the facts: McCain
doesn't even have poverty listed as an issue on his website. Obama
does, and among the many things he proposes
are two perfectly related to what we've discussed: More
progressive taxation -- by expanding the
Earned Income Tax Credit and increasing taxes on those making more than $250,000
a year. And, raising the
minimum wage: to $9.50 an hour by 2011, automatically indexed to inflation.
Right-wingers will be apoplectic. We progressives
can push Obama towards a living
wage level. As far as strengthening labor,
Obama is a co-sponsor of labor's most important present goal, the Employee Free
Choice Act. It allows card
certification for establishing a union. Obama
also supports legislation which would reverse some of the anti-union actions of
Bush's National Labor Relations Board. And Obama isn't
going to staff the Department of Labor with anti-labor officials. There's more on
Obama's website. Hey,
you know how progressive I am. Obama
may not yet be anywhere near progressive enough, but he's clearly on our side of
the ledger. Grass roots progressive
agititation can and will be used to push him further.
Like LBJ was pushed. And FDR
for that matter. But
Obama has to be elected first. So
won't you please let me close on this cautionary note. Remember
FDR said that right-wingers have "granted
that the Government could protect the citizen in his right to vote"? Right-winger's
publicly state that, but behind the scenes, they work for the opposite result. Listen to Paul
Weyrich, a longtime Republican strategy guru.
He was speaking to Christian activists many years ago: audio:
Weyrich Now
many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome — good
government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote.
Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the
beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage
in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down. Remember,
right-wing uber-icon Ronald Reagan opposed
the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Nowadays,
Republicans use more hidden means to suppress the vote.
Like vote caging, purging of voter rolls, and electronic voting machine
fraud. They use these methods to
suppress the voting ability of those groups who traditionally favor Democrats,
especially minorities. Check out podcasts
64 and 99 about these right-wing efforts. So our task as
progressives in this '08 election certainly includes being fully armed with
Blast The Right and other ammo to take on the right-wing in debate. And it must also
include safeguarding the vote. You can check out blackboxvoting.org
for how to do so. They have a voter
protection toolkit you can download. You can also
contact your local Democratic Party or Obama campaign office and ask how you can
help with the vote. You may be asked
to be a poll watcher on election day. You
get the idea. The right can and
will do anything to prevent a progressive win this November. You and I have to
make sure they fail.
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