Michelle Malkin

The fact-averse radical right waged an effective smear campaign against National Labor Relations Board nominee Craig Becker.

At the forefront of the liars and deceivers was Michelle Malkin.

In true radical right fashion, Malkin took past statements out of context to make the case that Becker is a radical leftist seeking to overthrow democracy in America. If confirmed to the NLRB, Malkin tried to make the case that Americans would be sent to forced labor camps before the end of the year. Only death could save us.

To prove Becker is a left-wing nutcase, Malkin refers to an article he wrote in 1993 for Minnesota Law Review.

According to Malkin and Rupert Murdoc’s Wall Street Journal, Becker’s article proposed doing away with democracy in union elections.

Craig Becker

In a 1993 Minnesota Law Review article, written when Becker was a UCLA professor, according to the WSJ story he “believes elections should be removed from work sites and held on ‘neutral grounds,’ or via mail ballots. Employers should also be barred from ‘placing observers at the polls to challenge ballots.’”

How is barring employers from strong-arming employees to prevent organizing a union anti-democratic? Would the US democracy be better off if a sitting president, their staff and members of congress were allowed to dictate where elections should be held, and if partisan observers were allowed to stand by and watch each ballot cast so that they can challenge it?

That’s what the radical right wants in union elections. They want to allow corporations to strong-arm employees to prevent them from organizing. Becker was arguing that that is wrong and the elections should be more fair – not less.

The WSJ also said that Becker made the “extraordinary” argument that new rules should be made to limit the ability of employers to crush attempts by employees to organize. Becker said that if a corporation puts up anti-union propaganda in the workplace, union representatives should be allowed access to the workplace to do the same in favor of organizing.

Wow, Becker really is radical left-wing nutcase – giving labor unions a level playing field with corporations when employees are considering whether to organize … total wacko.

Then Malkin tried to link Becker to the disgraced former Illinois Governor Rob Blagojevich.

Here’s her logic. The Service Employees International Union allegedly gave money to Blagojevich in return for giving collective bargaining rights to Illinois home health-care workers. Around the same time Becker admits that he provided “advice and counsel to SEIU relating to proposed executive orders and proposed legislation giving home-care workers a right to organize and engage in collective bargaining under state law.”

Oh my gosh, so Becker provided advice to SEIU, a client of his, around the same time that the union allegedly bribed Blagojevich, ergo, Becker must have told SEIU to bribe Blagojevich.

The facts are that nothing the radical right-wing pro-business gustapo have dug up on Becker in any way suggests that he’s some sort of radical union thug seeking to destroy democracy and setup forced labor camps in America.

Becker’s 17-year-old Minnesota Law Review article was the work of a scholar. And the gist of his opinion was to create fairer elections, because the fact is, corporations have undue power over their workers and unions are largely locked out – making it difficult to for employees to even learn about unions, much less organize.

And as for the extraordinarily tenuous connections between Becker, SEIU and Blagojevich – it’s just that – tenuous.

So rather than listen to outright lies being disseminated by the right-wing hit squad, read Becker’s comments to questions posed by Republican Senators on Feb. 3, 2010. Republicans tried desperately to make Becker out to be the subversive radical that they themselves represent – psychologists call that projecting – but it didn’t work. See for yourself.

Obama has said he will appoint Becker during a recess. While the radical right will surely throw a hissy-fit, Bush did this all the time and nary a word from the right could be heard.

Heather Higginbottom Domestic Policy Council

Ben Rhodes National Security Council

Despite the technical glitches, White House staff answers some pretty good questions about everything from No Child Left Behind, Iran sanctions, felon voting rights, Afghanistan, carbon taxing, the bank bailouts and more.

Answering questions: Heather Higginbottom of Domestic Policy Council, Brian Deese, from the National Economic Council and National Security Council Ben Rhodes.

It’s worth watching, so check it out.

In terms of health care, how did we get where we are today? What most people call our “health care system” is anything but a system. It’s a mix of health insurers, hospitals, doctors, employers and their army of lobbyists on the front-line in our nation’s capitol protecting their financial interests.

Opponents of the current effort by Congress to reform health care scream that if it passes the government will takeover the entire health care “system.” If that happens, the free market won’t function properly because the government will strong-arm the industry to artificially reduce costs.

Of course, even a cursory examination of our current health care system reveals that it is not a free market.

First of all, health insurance companies are allowed to collude and fix prices because of an anti-trust exemption dating back to the 1940s.

But the biggest anti-free market component of our health care system is the employer-provided shenanigans.

Employers have been setup as the middleman between customers and the health insurance industry. This separation of customer from service provider has been a great way to hide the real cost of health insurance. Most workers have no idea how much their employer pays for their health insurance premiums. It’s kind of like the hidden payroll taxes, but that’s another story.

You see, health insurance is provided by employers as a benefit. And like all benefits, it costs the company money. Now theoretically, if your company wasn’t paying hundreds of dollars a month for your health insurance premium, you’d make more money or the business would be able to hire more people.

The actual health care cost for the average worker is about $500 a month.

If you really believe in the free market, you’d support eliminating employer-provided health insurance. How much your employer currently pays for your premiums could be added to your paycheck. And then you can go purchase your own health insurance, or just buy health care without insurance.

Of course, for this to work, we’d need to do something about that anti-trust exemption, but it would be a start.

A free market can not work if the consumer doesn’t know what they’re purchasing and how much it costs.

General Electric

If you listen to wind-bags like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity you’d think that America is the greatest country ever formed and anyone who disagrees with them is a commie-terrorist-socialist-bastard. But if you look at where we’ve been, and more importantly, where we’re headed, the United States of America is no longer, if it ever was, the greatest country in the world.

First let’s set aside the rhetoric of the so-called patriots and let’s look at the reality of life in the US.

We once were a powerful industrialized nation that made things. We used to make everything from cars people actually purchased to televisions, radios, fans, suitcases, clothes and whatever else we needed. Now we make bankers, insurance policies and print money when we need more of it. Our manufacturing sector has been thoroughly gutted. We now import just about everything and export jobs to Taiwan, India, China and wherever corporations can find cheap labor. As a result, real wages in America continue to fall and consumer debt has skyrocketed. In August, Americans were shouldering $2.4 trillion in debt, with revolving debt at about $900 billion. Check the Federal Reserve stats on consumer debt

We also should look at education as Paul Krugman did in this column today.

If you had to explain America’s economic success with one word, that word would be “education.” In the 19th century, America led the way in universal basic education. Then, as other nations followed suit, the “high school revolution” of the early 20th century took us to a whole new level. And in the years after World War II, America established a commanding position in higher education.

But that was then. The rise of American education was, overwhelmingly, the rise of public education — and for the past 30 years our political scene has been dominated by the view that any and all government spending is a waste of taxpayer dollars. Education, as one of the largest components of public spending, has inevitably suffered.

Like manufacturing, education in American has been gored, gutted and tossed in the dumpster. Teachers are underpaid, students and parents don’t seem to give a rip, higher education is way too expensive and politicians tell us that all government spending on anything other than military is just wrong. While we’ve yet to truly realize the destruction of creating generations of uneducated citizens, when we do, it will be too late to do anything about it.

We’re seeing some of the impact of poor education with the so-called tea bag protesters who don’t know why they’re mad – they just are. They can’t think critically about any issue because they haven’t been taught the value of critical thought. This is just the beginning. In another 20 years we’re going to have millions of citizens who can barely read and write trying to compete with countries like India, China, France and Germany that actually do believe that education is the key to their nation’s success.

Our priorities are completely out of whack in the US. We’d rather spend more than $1 trillion fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with no clear objective in mind, than on health care, education and building industries of the future. So what can we do to change this? Unfortunately, the answer is not much. Our political system has been hijacked by defense contractors, ideologues and corporations. Everything that we do has to involve the “profit motive,” which is another way of saying, corporations need to make money off of education, war, health care and anything else the government does. And if you think we should just elect people to Congress who can change this – we can’t. At least 90 percent of all House of Representative seats are not competitive because of elaborate gerrymandering and the high cost of running a campaign.

The only way to change the direction of this country from continuing down the rabbit hole is for a complete overhaul of our political process and political parties. And the only way for that to happen is through an outright rebellion by the people. Our only hope is to organize. We need to make use of technology to communicate and coordinate a takeover of the government and put the power in the hands of people. Anything short of a true revolution will not result in any meaningful change.

Eugene Victor Debs Union Leader 1897

The “pure and simple” trades union of the past does not answer the requirements of today. …

The attempt of each trade to maintain its own independence separately and apart from others results in increasing jurisdictional entanglements, fruitful of dissension, strife and ultimate disruption. …

The members of a trades union should be taught … that the labor movement means more, infinitely more, than a paltry increase in wages and the strike necessary to secure it; that while it engage to do all that possibly can be done to better the working conditions of its members, its higher object is to overthrow the capitalist system of private ownership of the tools of labor, abolish wage-slavery and achieve the freedom of the whole working class and, in fact, of all mankind. …

Source: Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” page 339.