Fox Spends Labor Day Attacking Working People
Most people celebrate working people on Labor Day. But not the extremists on Fox News. There, hate-mongering never takes a day off.
Here are a few ugly examples of Fox from our friends at Media Matters for America:
- Tucker Carlson attacks autoworkers.
- Glenn Beck assails an 80-year-old labor activist because she spoke at a high school.
- Stuart Varney criticizes a union-backed Securities and Exchange Commission rule that would allow more shareholders of public companies to use proxy votes to nominate board members.
Clearly Fox opposes opening up the election process to shareholders who have a financial stake in a company because it would mean less chance for corporate greed and mismanagement.
Meanwhile, the anti-worker crowd doesn’t like being called out by Media Matters. So what do they do—they resort to thuggish suggestions of violence, saying Media Matters employees should be “curb-stomped.”
More here.
Tell the President: Stand up for Autoworkers
The UAW is calling on all working people to stand up for active and retired U.S. autoworkers. The Obama administration has established tight deadlines for the restructuring of Chrysler and General Motors (GM). For the federal government to provide additional assistance to the automakers, the restructuring of Chrysler must be completed by the end of April, and the General Motors restructuring must be completed by the end of May.
The Chrysler and GM workers need President Obama and his auto task force to stand up for the interests of workers and retirees in these restructuring negotiations.
You can call President Obama at 202-456-1414, or send him an e-mail at: www.whitehouse.gov/contact. The UAW urges allies to tell him that workers and retirees must be treated in a fair and equitable manner in any restructuring plans.
Contracts Can’t Be Broken—Unless They Involve Union Workers
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Contracts can’t be broken. We learned that lesson well over the past few days when AIG honchos swore that despite being bailed out by $173 billion in taxpayer funds, they couldn’t break the sacrosanct contractual bond that guaranteed billions in bonuses to the same top executives who brought the insurance giant to its knees.
But we also were taught another lesson in these months of financial chaos: Contacts can’t be changed—unless they involve unionized autoworkers.
Tim Rutten at the Los Angeles Times really hits the mark today when he writes:
What we’re essentially being asked to believe is that employment contracts involving hardworking men and women on Detroit’s assembly lines are somehow less legally binding—less “sacred” in the current rhetorical argot—than those protecting a bunch of cowboy securities traders living in Connecticut. [snip]
For years, the smart guys on Wall Street have convinced a growing number of Americans that organized labor is an impediment to economic progress, an unacceptable “cost” in a globalized system of production, a quaint social fossil from the era of mills and smokestacks. If there’s a lesson to be gleaned from the current crisis, however, it’s that when the chips are down, organized labor is a far more responsible social actor than the snatch-and-run characters who fancy themselves financiers.
