Liberals’ Inequality Narrative Ignores Role of Free Trade Agreements, Unionbusting

[Better Believe It]

Liberals’ Inequality Narrative Ignores Role of Free Trade, Unionbusting
by Roger Bybee
January 27, 2012

.... even many of America’s most liberal mainstream politicians and pundits have narrowed the debate over inequality, perhaps out of a desire to shield President Obama from any pressure coming from his left. The issue of tax inequities has soared in importance, exposing the privileged status enjoyed by CEOs and hedge fund and private equity executives like Mitt Romney. But other crucial dimensions of inequality painfully experienced by ordinary Americans have been crowded out.

Even the supposedly liberal pundits—E.J. Dionne, Howard Fineman, Jonathan Alter, Ezra Klein and Richard Wolffe, among others—are remarkably confined in their discussions of inequality. They almost never refer to the 35-year campaign of union-busting by Corporate America, in which 90 percent of union organizing drives are greeted with high-pressure resistance from management, according to Christopher Martin's 2003 book on media coverage of labor, Framed!.

The crucial fact that 31,358 workers get fired in a typical year while trying to unionize their workplace, according to author Philip Dine, is almost uniformly omitted from liberal pundits' explanations of U.S. inequality. Only in their coverage of public-employee battles in Wisconsin did MSNBC hosts like Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz discuss union-busting and its role in pushing down wages and eliminating workers’ voice on the job.

The other central weapon in the class war against workers—the threat or actual relocation of production to brutal low-wage conditions found in Mexico and China—has been almost entirely absent from the comments of MSNBC hosts and guests.

Read the full article at:

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/12626/liberals_inequality_narrative_leaves_big_holes/

[xchrom]

1. du rec. nt

[Omaha Steve]

2. Ain't it the truth

K&R!

[ProSense]

3. This chart

says it all:

[NAO]

4. Inequality was ENGINEERED and developed over time

Inequality was deliberately engineered into the system. Or, stated differently, the problem is systemic.

Union busting and Free Trade are two of the most powerful inequality generators at the family and nation state level, respectively.

[Edweird]

5. Central Falls R.I.