By Michael Kaufman

Where are all the liberal and left-wing media I keep hearing people complain about? I’ve even seen bumper stickers lately that say, “I don’t believe the liberal media.” One of my neighbors has one of those. Sometimes when I walk the dog I can hear Rush Limbaugh’s voice blaring from his radio when I go past his house.

I know they don’t like MSNBC but I have some news for them. MSNBC is owned by GE and there is only so much “liberalness” the corporate heads of GE will tolerate. They fired Phil Donohue a while back and they’d can Keith Olbermann in a heartbeat if he didn’t have the best rated program on their network. Both Donohue and Olbermann were among the very few employed by the entire US corporate media to raise their voices against the war in Iraq from the start. All the rest of the newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations fell into place, lockstep as it were.

There are still folks around here who think the Times Herald-Record falls into the “liberal media” category. Uh, has anybody seen Beth Quinn’s byline in the paper lately? Did you happen to read the lead editorial in today’s (Wednesday, November 10, 2010) paper? It is titled “End the free ride on health insurance” and it raises a familiar theme: Public employees, including those who work for local governments and school districts, have not been hit as hard by the rising cost of healthcare insurance as have people who work in the private sector. Citing data obtained by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the editorial suggests that if these people “contributed in the same way [as private-sector workers], state taxpayers would reap large benefits, now and in the future.”

These “savings,” estimated at $1 billion a year in New York State, would start as soon as the employees “began contributing.” In the future, “the savings would escalate as the cost of healthcare increases.” According to the editorial, the only people opposed to such a change would be “those employees who have enjoyed the benefits of free health coverage while they worked and when they retired. They can be counted on to use their considerable clout to fight this through their friends in Albany.”

What the editorial does not say and what an editorial in a truly liberal or left-wing media outlet might, is the following: “Free health coverage through the life span is now recognized as a right in civilized countries throughout the world. Despite restrictive labor laws that limit their rights, unions representing teachers and public employees have won better healthcare and retirement benefits for their members than those offered by employers in the overwhelmingly non-unionized private sector. Private-sector employees would do well to follow their example.”

Instead, over the last few years, including those before Rupert Murdoch bought the paper the Record has been running exposes of public workers who put in ridiculous overtime hours to pad their salaries and benefits packages at the expense of taxpayers. We might read of a toll taker whose modest salary balloons into six figures or of a teacher or cop who has figured out a way to retire at a young age with oodles of vacation pay and paid sick time coming to them in addition to the healthcare and pension benefits. 

But where were the Record and the rest of the so-called liberal media when this news was announced last month by the Social Security Administration?  Every 34th wage earner in America in 2008 went all of 2009 without earning a single dollar. Total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined….but at the very top, salaries grew more than fivefold.

“Not a single news organization reported this data when it was released October 15,” said David Cay Johnston, former tax reporter for The New York Times and author of the recently published, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With The Bill, about hidden subsidies, rigged markets, and “corporate socialism.”

“To give this some perspective,” says Johnston, “from 1992 to 2000 the number of people earning any wages grew by 21 million, but nine years later just 2.8 million more people had any work. These wage data….tell us only about the number of people who earned wages and how much. They tell us nothing about whether these individuals were underemployed, had to work more than one job, earned fringe benefits, or were employed at a level commensurate with their abilities.

“But they do give us a stunning picture of what’s happening at the very top of the compensation ladder in America.” According to Johnston, “The average wage in this top category increased from $91.2 million in 2008 to an astonishing $518.8 million in 2009. That’s nearly $10 million in weekly pay!” Further, “These 74 people made as much as the 19 million lowest-paid people in America, who constitute one in every eight workers.”

Johnston says the story the numbers tell is one of a strengthening economic base with income growing fastest at the bottom until, in 1981, “we made an abrupt change in tax and economic policy. Since then the base has fared poorly while huge economic gains piled up at the very top, along with much lower tax burdens.”

I would love to see an editorial in the Record about the savings and benefits that would be derived if these fat cats were made to pay their fair share in taxes.  I’m not holding my breath.

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

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