Hightower: BUSH PLAYS GAMES WITH LAYOFFS

[Guest guest]

>

>

> BUSH PLAYS GAMES WITH LAYOFFS

>

> 8/13/2003

>

> I recently talked with a hospital worker who said she was living on a

> " fixed income " these days and she's looking for whoever fixed it!

>

> Well, one who's not doing the job of fixing our ailing economy is our

> beloved George W. His idea of helping America's hard-hit working families

> is to give yet another trillion-dollar tax giveaway to the richest people

> in the country. They'll use it to create jobs, he says with that

> self-satisfied smirk of his.

>

> But that's what he said about his first trillion dollar giveaway to the

> same rich people two years ago. Since then, the U.S. has lost more than

two

> million jobs.

>

> In just the past few months, there have been mass layoffs by such giants

as

> AOL Time Warner, Boeing, Dow Jones, Goodyear, Kodak, McDonald's, Merrill

> Lynch, J.C. Penney, Sara Lee and Verizon and more to come.

>

> These are bad numbers politically as well as economically. Such mass

> layoffs are especially embarrassing, because... well they get noticed by

> the public. When so many workers are given pink slips at once, it gets in

> the news and the labor department, which tracks this data, reports that

> there were more than 2,000 mass layoffs last year. Ouch.

>

> What to do, what to do? I know, shouted some eager Bushite: Let's just

stop

> reporting these numbers! Ahhh, the cleverness, the simplicity, the

> manipulativeness. Clean.

>

> So that's what the Bushites did. Last Christmas Eve, while the media was

> off having egg nog and dreaming of sugar plum fairies, Bush's labor

> department quietly slipped out a four-sentence press release announcing

> that its Mass Layoff Statistics Program was " discontinued. " The

statistical

> grinches claimed they had to do this because there just wasn't any money

> for tracking and reporting such information.

>

> This is Jim Hightower saying... The only little glitch in this

> out-of-sight, out-of-mind scheme is that layoffs aren't statistics they're

> people, families, communities. We still see you George... the problem is

> too big and too ugly to hide.

>

>

> ----------

> Press Release from the United Steelworkers of America, January 27, 2003

> " Hiring in Nation Hits Worse Slump in Nearly 20 Years, " New York Times,

> February 6, 2003

>

> http://www.jimhightower.com/air/read.asp?id=11164

>