| One of the hallmarks of modern life is a constant sense of astonishment over the disconnected-but-seamless rhetoric from the cynical far-right.
It's the same story on the Employee Free Choice Act.
The Big Business, anti-union contingent avoids a real discussion of the act by spewing a verbal loop of nonsense that the bill somehow restricts the rights of workers to the secret ballot.
Remember, this is Republican opposite land, where everything means the opposite of what they say it does. Of course, the bill does nothing to the secret ballot. Nothing at all. Yet the far-right has been able to spread this message throughout the media simply by endlessly repeating it. Check out this Web page from MediaMatters. It's insane.
And then yesterday a Politico reporter offered us all a glimpse into the ridiculously well-funded Republican machine that manufacturers this baloney.
The (anti-)ECFA campaign began in earnest in 2005, when Mike Murphy and John McLaughlin began polling aspects of the bill and settled on the worker sign-up provision as the most vulnerable.
"We developed a framing that it was really a privacy issue," said Murphy, describing what became a campaign against taking away a "secret ballot" for workers.
But such deceitful tactics have a fatal flaw. Eventually, we get wise to the deceit. That's what happened in the last election. That's what's happening now. The far-right is spending millions pushing their anti-hope, anti-change message. (Remember: they like the economy like this and won't stop, even when the rest of us live in tarpaper shacks and pay for the privilege of working.)
And yet the popularity of the Employee Free Choice Act is rising. Every week more legislators sign on as co-sponsors. The Employee Free Choice Act will allow us to get economy get back in balance. |
