« Previous Post | Main | Next Post »

At home and abroad (we will manipulate our country's battles)

by Mark Gisleson

The U.S.

Steve Perry's on vacation this week from his editing duties at City Pages, so expect a lot of links to go with our otherwise always fair and balanced reporting.

The nature of the American class system has been on prominent display these last few days. Oh, no one saying anything along those exact lines, but take these Washington Posts op-ed pieces by Beth Shulman and Richard Morin and read them back to back and you'll see what I mean.

Shulman:

Fully 30 million Americans -- one in four US workers -- earn $8.70 an hour or less, a rate that works out to $18,100 a year, which is the current official poverty level in the United States for a family of four. These low-wage jobs usually lack health care, child care, pensions and vacation benefits. Their working conditions are often grueling, dangerous, even humiliating....

Morin:

"Directors who take action in the interest of stakeholders are ostracized to some degree, and that's closely related to what happens to whistle-blowers," Westphal said....Snubbed board members are significantly less likely to take subsequent actions to reduce the power of the executives they oversee -- as if they've learned their lesson.

Both Shulman and Morin jump start their pieces by cutting right to the chase. Shulman doesn't bother doing the math for minimum wage workers because everyone knows they're not making it, and Morin doesn't bother citing the case for CEOs being overpaid, because that goes without saying. Shulman goes on to address the four myths of the minimum wage:

Myth #1: Low-wage work is merely a temporary step on the ladder to a better job.

Myth #2: Training and new skills solve the problem.

Myth #3: Globalization stops us from doing anything about this problem.

Myth #4: Low-wage jobs are merely the result of an efficient market.

If you're unsure as to why any of these fall into the "lies" category Bush Wars readers have grown so familiar with, be sure to read Shulman's excellent and succinct debunkings of all four myths. Morin also deals with myths. He doesn't call them that, but still he does a good job of showing why CEO compensation is a rigged game just as much as the one played by Congress each time they keep the minimum wage pegged so far below the poverty level.

I'll resist the urge to fulminate about class war in Steve's space (I can always resurrect Career News if I want to do that), but I do feel obligated to point out that these articles are not typical of WaPo editorial fodder. For that, check out this someone-had-to-do-it anti-Bustamante, pro-Schwarzenegger essay from a Mexican-American.

* *

Iraq

The Chicago Tribune, one of the great old-time Republican newspapers has, by and large, not been terribly amused by this Bush's presidency. Gulf War II is not popular with them, and this Gary Marx article does a compelling job of showing the effects of the occupation on Iraqis and American troops.

Ezhar Mahmood Ridha and her sister-in-law were on their way to a wake when they met their deaths at the hands of US soldiers.

As their broken-down car stood stranded on a dusty overpass, a guerrilla fighter nearby detonated a huge explosive device at a passing US military convoy. As the soldiers turned and fired, the car carrying the assailant sped away, according to witnesses and US military officials.

The Americans hit the only object left on the overpass: Ridha's blue 1982 Mitsubishi sedan.

Bullets ripped through Ridha's body. She slumped over in the back seat, eyes frozen, as her 6-month-old baby slipped from her arms, witnesses said. Ridha's sister-in-law was hit in the stomach.

Aussie Vietnam War vet Brian Cloughley takes a much harder look at our troops in this must-read CounterPunch article.

"It happened at 9.30 at night . . . long before the start of curfew at 11 pm. The Americans had set up roadblocks in the Tunisia quarter of Baghdad, where the abd al-Kerim [family] lives. The family pulled up to the roadblock sensibly, slowly and carefully, so as not to alarm the Americans. But then pandemonium broke out. American soldiers were shooting in every direction. They just turned on the abd al-Kerims' car and sprayed it with bullets." It was reported that "They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop."

--

"Three soldiers surrounded me. I got down on my knees, hands in the air, holding my badge. One of them kicked me in the back and I fell to the ground. Another one kicked me twice in the face. They put their boots on my head and pressed it into the ground . . . I kept saying "police, police". I don't speak English but it's the same word in Arabic . . ." Sergeant Muhsen was not a combatant. One wonders if the soldiers who killed the two policemen and beat up Sergeant Muhsen had been issued, as required by the US Army's own manual, "a basic language translation card" indicating that "police" means "police". And did they give the police a chance to surrender before killing them?

Am I engaging in gross manipulation of this weblog's readers with these last couple sets of quotes? Of course I am. That's what I do: argue my point and try to advance my views. Steve's the journalist here — I'm strictly marketing. That's why I find these articles so fascinating. Journalists on the ground are starting to do some marketing of their own, and that's not good for the Bush neocons. It's easy to dismiss the rantings of a partisan like myself. It's harder but still fairly easy to dismiss the left wing press, people like Steve Perry and even Brian Cloughley (we'll take a look at how the Right works hard to keep sites like CounterPunch marginalized in some future post). It's much, much harder when the facts are coming from a mainstream reporter like Gary Marx. Expect Fox News to ignore this one, or make fun of Marx's name, but don't expect any kind of response from the "fair and balanced" folks.

Posted by Steve Perry at August 18, 2003 11:36 AM

« Poll finds that Bill O'Reilly is an asshole | Main | Non-Regnery bestsellers »