If there were a Saffir-Simpson scale for newscasts, CNNs Lou Dobbs
Tonight would have been downgraded long ago from news to rant.
A September 20 report on the Labor Departments suspension of
policies, like affirmative action paperwork, to aid the Gulf Coast
clean-up effort was an anti-business rant replete with racial
clichs and economic misstatements.
Dobbs has not stopped injecting his opinion on the
suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act, a
[1]
racist wage policy implemented to discourage the hiring of cheap
minority labor from the South. He led into Christine Romanss
report, Some in the Bush administration appear to believe that
paying prevailing wages, maintaining nondiscrimination standards and
documenting workers identities are examples of what they term
bureaucratic inefficiency or red tape.
Actually, paying prevailing wages is a bureaucratic
inefficiency. Because the term is not specifically defined in the
Davis-Bacon Act, prevailing wage is interpreted to mean
union-mandated wage. Artificially high wages raise the cost of
doing business and discriminate against unskilled workers. Yet,
Dobbs ignored this fact in favor of hyping critics of the Bush
administration and the free market: Critics say this adds to the
victimization of workers who have already suffered as a result of
Hurricane Katrina.
Christine Romans opened her report with a similar
sentiment, Critics say the administration is using the hurricane to
dial back worker rights. To buffer that meme, she interviewed Ross
Eisenbrey with the left-leaning, union-funded Economic Policy
Institute. Eisenbrey commented on the relaxing of affirmative action
filing standards, Affirmative action programs are the way you make
sure that people take the requirements seriously that they reach
out into the minority community to hire people who they otherwise
would overlook.
Of course, according to the 2000 census, the minority
population in New Orleans is Caucasian a fact Dobbs and Romans
overlooked. Romans solicited even more criticism from Hilary Shelton
of the NAACP, who claimed: The same people we saw held up in the
Superdome these are the people that are going to be victimized by
this awful move on behalf of our federal government.
Its curious that Dobbs, Romans, and others would flog
such a wage law not just because of the economic consequences of an
artificially high wage, but in light of the racial make-up of New
Orleans. When artificially high wages are implemented, traditionally
impoverished individuals are usually the first to suffer, because
they cannot compete for the higher-paying jobs. Unfortunately, in
the Big Easy most of those individuals are black. To criticize the
administration for opening the labor market up to competition, by
suspending a racist statute, is obtuse on both a racial and an
economic level.
Yet Christine Romans, ignorant of Davis-Bacons past,
closed with this: With the billions of dollars of hurricane relief,
many wonder why contractors and companies need incentives at all to
get that business in the Gulf Coast. Later in the broadcast, Dobbs
agreed, We should point out that many of these firms who will be
doing the hiring are receiving very lucrative, no-bid contracts. The
concern seems to be split as between companies and the people they
employ.
These attacks on big business and free market
principles, like free trade, are part and parcel with the findings
of an August 2005 Business & Media Institute study: [2]Trade
Secrets: Lou Dobbs Tonight Hides Good News Behind Negative View of
Free Market.
