Sherry Chandler

The Myths and Harsh Effects of Bush’s Economic Class War

The recession of 2001 never ended.

At least not for ordinary Americans.

Ordinary Americans found that their income was declining. From 2001 to 2007, median family income declined - depending on where you get your figures from - by somewhere between $500 and $1,000. Median individual income went down by at least $1,000.

The yearly average number of new private sector jobs created from 2001-2008 was just

369,000, not even keeping up with the growth in population. It should be compared to the average number of new private sector jobs created from ‘92 to 2,000: 1,760,000 per year.

The number of people in manufacturing jobs decreased by over 3 million.

The number who got health care at work went down, from 64.2 million to 59.7 million. The number of people without health care went up from 38.4 to 46.9 million.

The number of people in poverty increased from 31.6 million to 36.5 million.

The value of America’s businesses, at least as measured by the stock market, did not go up. An astonishing thing in what was called a boom. Meantime, the cost of living went up.

Home heating oil went up about 150 percent. Gas at the pump at least doubled. The cost of health insurance went up about 50 percent. The cost of college went up about 30 percent. Now food is going up. How can the myth and the reality be so different?

This video is up in several places (Suburban Guerilla, TalkLeft) but I’m putting it here because I think it’s well worth watching. It is about an hour long. It shows Hillary Clinton at her best. You may not agree with everything she says (for example, I agree with Barack Obama and others that a gas-tax holiday probably isn’t going to do us much good), but she takes definite stands and puts forward detailed plans.

Indianapolis Star

Also worth your attention, this post from Melissa McEwan at Shakesville:

So, yesterday, I wrote a post about attending a Hillary Clinton event, in which I passingly mentioned that the guy who introduced her referred to her testicular fortitude.

This morning, Shaker Reb emailed me a link to MSNBC’s coverage, in which that’s the lead. In fact, you have to read seven paragraphs before you get to anything of substance at all about the event, which gets two paragraphs, before three more about her “referring in passing” to her interview with Bill O’Reilly.

Now, Clinton spent over an hour talking about and answering questions about policy in amazing detail—and, throughout, she spoke the language of the labor movement specifically and progressives generally; there was no rightwing framing, no triangulation. She was impressively blunt about the Republicans playing class warfare and about her determination to raise taxes on corporations and the rich, and she was much more explicitly anti-corporate in some of her statements than I expected. At one point, I leaned over to KenBlogz to whisper, “This woman is a communist!” All of which is arguably actual news, given her reputation. (Although I suppose it isn’t news to the media which has been dutifully not reporting it.)

Yet MSNBC reports on “testicular fortitude” (sorry—who’s playing the gender card?!) and her interview with Bill O’Reilly (you don’t think that has anything to do with ginning up some of that outrage on display when she met with Scaife, do you?).

Update: And also this Eric Boehlart article that Melissa has links to:

Here’s another first: the press’s unique push to get a competitive White House hopeful to drop out of the race. It’s unprecedented.

Looking back through modern U.S. campaigns, there’s simply no media model for so many members of the press to try to drive a competitive candidate from the field while the primary season is still unfolding.

Until this election cycle, journalists simply did not consider it to be their job to tell a contender when he or she should stop campaigning. That was always dictated by how much money the campaign still had in the bank, how many votes the candidate was still getting, and what very senior members of the candidate’s own party were advising

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