Prometheus 6   

Class war successes to match iraq war successes

Another Battle for Bush
By BOB HERBERT

There are two things I hope will emerge from the capture of Saddam. Like so many others, I hope the effort in Iraq becomes much more widely shared, internationalized, which would be good not just for Iraq and the U.S. but for the short– and long–term stability of the entire planet.

My second hope is that the Bush administration will begin to apply the kind of focus, energy and resources that it used in Iraq to the economic difficulties of ordinary working families here in America.

If you just went by recent headlines, you'd have the impression that the U.S. economy is as bright as the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center. The G.D.P. is surging. The stock market, retail sales and corporate profits are up. So is productivity.

The front–page headline in The Daily News on Thursday said, "Santa Comes Early to Wall Street." It was accompanied by a photo of Philip Purcell, the chairman and C.E.O. of Morgan Stanley, who was described by The News as "the first titan to cash in at the end of a banner year."

The article cited several executives who were expected to receive year–end bonuses in the $12 million to $17 million range.

The Bush crowd will tell you that these economic goodies are bound to trickle down. Jobs will become plentiful. Pay envelopes will fatten. Nirvana is just around the corner.

The problem with this scenario is that there are no facts to back it up. The closer you look at employment in this country, the more convinced you become that the condition of the ordinary worker is deteriorating, not improving.

The problem is that we are not creating many jobs, and the quality of those we are creating is, for the most part, not good. Job growth at the moment is about 80,000 per month, which is not even enough to cover the new workers entering the job market.

And when the Economic Policy Institute compared the average wage of industries that are creating jobs with those that are losing jobs, analysts found a big discrepancy. The jobs lost paid about $17 an hour, compared with $14.50 an hour for those being created.