Koch $$ Funds Chorus of Lies on Social Security
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There’s a cacophony of misinformation from Fox News, right-wing think tanks and extreme conservative politicians about Social Security. “Privatize it,” they yell. “It’s going broke,” they scream. “Raise the retirement age,” they bellow.
But who is conducting this dissonant symphony? The latest installment of Koch Brothers Exposed from the Brave New Foundation says the baton is being wielded by the David and Charles Koch, the right-wing extremist billionaire brothers who are out to dismantle Social Security, overturn financial regulations, corporate rules, environmental standards, workers’ rights and just about any “evil on the radical right agenda.
When it comes to the attacks on Social Security, “The Koch Brothers Echo Chamber” video shows how $28.4 million of Koch money to think tanks like the Cato Institute ($13.6 million), the Heritage Foundation ($3.4 million) and a host of others has helped produce more than 300 “scholarly” position papers on dismantling Social Security and a choir of economists and political scientists all singing from the same hymnal.
Chance Encounter Takes Shuler to Fox News
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Opportunity can strike at the strangest of times and places. For AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler, who believes in getting the union movement’s message out to audiences that normally don’t hear it, that opportunity came on a recent flight from Washington, D.C., to Detroit when Republican pollster/strategist and Fox News regular Frank Luntz sat right down in the middle seat next to her.
Because of that encounter, Shuler will be talking about teachers, firefighters, baggage handlers, nurses and other workers and their unions with Luntz on Sunday on Fox News prime time at 9 p.m. EDT.
Just minutes before the plane’s doors closed, Luntz, who had been bumped from his first-class seat, came down the aisle and pointed to the dreaded middle seat, says Shuler.
I thought, “I know this guy.” And after he got settled, we introduced ourselves and I said, “I’m Liz and I work for the AFL-CIO.” When he asked me what I did for the AFL-CIO and I told him I was the secretary-treasurer, he was kind of taken aback.
Fox Lies on Workers’ Right Poll
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There were some burning trousers at Fox News this morning.
In a segment of “Fox & Friends,” the faux news network apparently didn’t like the results of a USA Today/Gallup poll that showed that 61 percent of Americans oppose measures like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) that eliminate the right of public workers to bargaining for good jobs. The poll found just 31 percent agreed with Walker.
But, as Think Progress’ Zaid Jilani points out today, Fox, “with incredible brazenness” simply reversed the numbers.
During the discussion, Fox host Brian Kilmeade asked pro-labor guest Robert Zimmerman if President Obama was taking a “big risk” by opposing Walker’s law. Zimmerman responded by saying that Obama was speaking “for the mainstream of our country, and the mainstream of Republican governors who are not siding with Governor Walker.” Kilmeade responded by saying, “I think Gallup, a relatively mainstream poll, has a differing view. And here’s the question that was posed. Do you favor or disfavor of taking away collective bargaining when it comes to salaries for government workers. 66 percent in favor, 33 percent opposed, 9 percent up in the air.
Not only that, but “Fox & Friends” had prepared and showed a huge graphic with the reversed numbers. At the tail end of the show, Fox did issue a correction. Wow. How ethical.
For more on the Faux News faux paw from Media Matters, click here.
Trumka: Nation’s Future ‘Begins and Ends’ with Jobs
The debate about America’s future “begins and ends concretely with the question of jobs,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said this morning in a speech outlining a working families’ vision for the nation.
In the address at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Trumka urged President Obama to make next week’s State of the Union address a “call to action, a call to invest in our future, to create jobs, to be the country we can and must be.”
We have just been through one lost decade—when America’s standard of living fell, when our wealth shrank, when millions lost their homes, when young people could not find work America cannot afford another lost decade.
Click here for the full video from the address.
Joined by a New York City firefighter veteran of the 9/11 World Trade Center bombing and an Ohio child care worker who will lose her freedom to have a union if Gov. John Kasich (R) has his way, Trumka said Stan Trojanowski and Ella Hopkins are examples of “American heroes”–
the hard-working everyday champions who make America great, and their lives illuminate the choices facing our nation as we enter a fourth year of economic crisis. The choice between coming together as a nation or turning on each other….Working people know we can build that future only if we act together to put America back to work—to educate our children, to build a clean energy future, to build a 21st century America.
E-Mails Show Fox Driving Radical Right Agenda
Reports that a Fox News editor directed his staff to use a politically charged phrase recommended by a Republican pollster to misrepresent the Democrats’ health care reform plan is proof that Fox is driving a radical right-wing political agenda, says Ethan Rome, executive director of Health Care for America Now (HCAN).
In a statement released today, Rome says:
At a time when right-wing extremists were trying to make the case that the health care reform bill was a government takeover plot, Fox News incorporated politically charged language into its day-to-day reporting to mislead its audience into thinking the public option was something that it wasn’t.
Fox News’ policy is to drive a political agenda and systematically influence its audience’s views.
HCAN is a grassroots coalition that includes the AFL-CIO and several affiliated unions.
AFSCME Counters Right Wing Attack on Workers with ‘Stop the Lies’ Campaign
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AFSCME is launching an aggressive new “Stop the Lies” campaign to fight back against lies about public workers by radical talking heads like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, John Stossel and right wing politicians.
The campaign will use social media, videos, paid advertising and ground events across the country to get the truth heard amidst the din from Fox News, loudmouthed television and radio talkers and their orchestrated attacks blaming public employees for the financial crises cities and states are facing. http://www.afscme.org/index.cfmSays AFSCME President Gerald McEntee:
Public service workers have become the scapegoats for the far right. We’re not going to sit around and let corporate CEOs define the debate. After all, it was their greed and incompetence that drove this country’s economy into the ditch. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
CNN Ignores Facts, Scapegoats Teachers
CNN aired a segment today scapegoating America’s teachers for the failure of young black males to graduate from high school.
The CNN talking heads even went so far as to say that public school teachers don’t care about students. In the rush to put the blame on teachers, they ignored the findings of the very study they supposedly reported on. In the forward to the study on black male graduation rates by the Schott Foundation, Geoffrey Canada, the head of the Harlem Children’s Zone, says we need better schools but we also need to
address the problems outside the classroom that derail the educational achievement of too many black boys. We also need to strengthen communities so boys have a safe, enriching environment in which they can learn and develop, where college and success is just in the air as it is in middle-class communities.
So why didn’t CNN ask their “education contributor”—a charter school principal—about that statement? Or is it easier just to spout a simplistic, unbalanced, “Blame the Teachers,” mantra and ignore the facts?
What do you think? We especially want to hear from teachers, the warriors on the frontlines of our public schools.
Fox Admits It: Union Members’ Work Is ‘Awesome’
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Looks like we got the attention of Stuart Varney at Fox News. After we challenged as grossly false his assault on the ability of union workers to produce high-tech products, Fox this morning ran a list of the “awesome” things unions build.
The talking heads there then tried to backtrack on their attacks on union members, denying they said union workers were not highly skilled—but that they think that unions bog down corporations with too many rules.
Rules like safety and health to ensure workers stay safe—and alive—on the job. And getting paid for overtime. And then there’s the weekend….
Watch Fox backtrack here.
Thanks to the unions who sent us some of the other highly-skilled jobs their members perform every day, adding to the top-notch list the Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) originally helped us put together.
Extremist Media Steps Up Attacks on Workers, Unions
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In their attack on the union movement, extremist reactionary media outlets increasingly are depicting unions and workers as thugs, Communists and destroyers of free enterprise. Media Matters has compiled these recent attacks and we’re cross-posting some of the watchdog group’s findings here. We urge all unionists to take a minute from pinko thuggery to check it out.
The Blame Game: Conservative Media Try to Pin Problems on Unions
Beck says unions have “raped” police and firefighters. On the August 4 edition of his radio program, Glenn Beck said of unions: “Look what they’ve done to the police and firemen. They’ve raped these guys. Along with politicians. Along with politicians—raped them. The bravest among us.” Beck went on to ask, “What, do you think the politicians are not in bed with the unions?”
