Partisan blogger Nick (8/6/09) has republished a new email campaign from American Rights at Work that reviews how, "just before Bear Stearns went under, CNBC's Jim Cramer had strong advice for his Mad Money viewers: buy Bear Stearns stock, and fast!"

Of course, "then the company imploded and thousands of ordinary people saw their retirement savings vanish. Oops." Nick continues:

Now Cramer is telling his viewers the Employee Free Choice Act will hurt the U.S. economy.

Cramer was wrong then, he's wrong now! But this time we know exactly what will happen if viewers listen: Millions will lose out financially.

Jim Cramer is claiming that the Employee Free Choice Act will stall the U.S. economy, even though numerous economists (including Nobel Prize winners!) and institutional investors who manage $757 billion in assets recognize that the bill is critical to rebuilding the broken economy.

Discussing on Joe Scarborough's MSNBC show the act he calls "a 'sword of Damocles' hanging over our economy," Cramer "and other guests claimed they couldn't identify a single successful unionized company."

But American Rights at Work happens to know that "GE owns both MSNBC and Jim Cramer's own employer, CNBC. And guess what? GE’s employees are represented by unions"--and General Electric "earned more than $18 billion in profits in 2008!"

Take action by letting CNBC know that "Jim Cramer needs to stop parroting the talking points of the same greedy CEOs who got us into this economic crisis."

Also read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "For Media, 'Card Check' Promise Is One to Break: Corporate Outlets Suddenly Discover 'Workers Rights'" (February 2009) by Janine Jackson.

A new FAIR action alert is targeting CNN host Lou Dobbs for peddling anti-union propaganda about the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), after Dobbs falsely suggested on his show (Lou Dobbs Tonight, 2/4/09) that the proposed new labor law would "end a secret ballot." In fact, the EFCA would not take away workers' rights to have a secret vote if they choose to; it would take away employers' ability to force workers to have such a vote.

(Click here to watch Dobbs' misleading report about EFCA.)

You can take action by emailing Dobbs at lou.dobbs@turner.com.

Please copy and paste your letter to the CNN host in the comments section below.

Today New York Times business columnist David Leonhardt (12/10/08) weighs in on the $73-an-hour autoworker. His verdict is somewhat mixed—the Big Three do have to pay the so-called legacy costs that are part of this calculation, but it's misleading to conflate that with current earnings of autoworkers:

So what is the reality behind the number? Detroit's defenders are right that the number is basically wrong. Big Three workers aren't making anything close to $73 an hour (which would translate to about $150,000 a year).

And he adds a little media criticism:

The Big Three built up a huge pool of retirees long before Honda and Toyota opened plants in this country. You’d never know this by looking at the graphic behind Wolf Blitzer on CNN last week, contrasting the “$73/hour” pay of Detroit’s workers with the “up to $48/hour” pay of workers at the Japanese companies.

One of Leonhardt's main points, though, is that the chatter about union wages is mostly irrelevant to the bigger problems of the Big Three (emphasis added):

So here's a little experiment. Imagine that a Congressional bailout effectively pays for $10 an hour of the retiree benefits. That’s roughly the gap between the Big Three's retiree costs and those of the Japanese-owned plants in this country. Imagine, also, that the U.A.W. agrees to reduce pay and benefits for current workers to $45 an hour--the same as at Honda and Toyota.

Do you know how much that would reduce the cost of producing a Big Three vehicle? Only about $800. That’s because labor costs, for all the attention they have been receiving, make up only about 10 percent of the cost of making a vehicle. An extra $800 per vehicle would certainly help Detroit, but the Big Three already often sell their cars for about $2,500 less than equivalent cars from Japanese companies, analysts at the International Motor Vehicle Program say.

Today's Washington Post (12/9/08) features an article on the possibilities for Employee Free Choice Act-- a measure that would recognize card-check unionization drives. EFCA has been pushed by labor groups and their allies, and the Post envisions the real battle is to come--hence the headline, "Battle Deepens Over Union Organizing: Labor May Be Key Issue for New Congress."

But in the Post, it's not much of a battle at all--judging, at least, by whom the paper decides to quote. Three critics of the measure are cited: Rick Berman of the Center for Union Facts, Katie Packer of the Workforce Fairness Institute and Republican political strategist Mark McKinnon. Weighing in for other side is one source--Greg Denier of the labor group Change to Win--who is quoted in the second-to-last paragraph of the story.

FAIR has a new Action Alert up about ABC's gross exaggeration of auto worker compensation. Feel free to post messages sent to ABC here--or any responses you get from the network.

The media trope that presidents-elect ought to break progressive campaign promises really displays the anti-democratic and pro-corporate biases of the press at their most glaring. Who cares what you told the voters? Here's what the interests that really matter want you to do.

The latest instance in this sad series is a USA Today editorial (12/2/08), which eagerly spots a silver lining in the economic crisis:

During his campaign...Obama endorsed a number of smaller bore ideas more for the sake of their political appeal than for their economic usefulness. The financial crisis gives the incoming president a compelling rationale to make a few modest course corrections.

The paper then offers three of its own "modest" proposals for how Obama should best rewrite his platform in a more big business-friendly direction. One is to drop the idea of a windfall profits tax on the oil industry, arguing that "windfall profits taxes...aren't a very reliable or stable source of revenue." Since windfall profits are by definition sudden and unexpected, that seems like a rather peculiar objection--like saying that receiving emergency aid isn't something you can count on every year.

Another way that USA Today hopes that Obama will betray the people who voted for him is by dropping the idea of renegotiating NAFTA. "Outside of a handful of heavily unionized states where the trade pact with Canada and Mexico has become a scapegoat for job losses, NAFTA is not seen as such a bad thing," the editorial claims--which ignores not only national polling but the fact that the entire country expressed its opinion by voting by a substantial margin for a candidate who promised to reopen the deal in no uncertain terms.

USA Today went on to assert that "the addition of 18 million jobs in the decade following [NAFTA's] enactment suggests that it produced more winners than losers." Actually, since the total U.S. population grew by an estimated 35 million between 1994 and 2004, adding 18 million new jobs is not particularly impressive. A more relevant statistic is that the U.S. trade deficit grew from $150 billion in 1994 to $650 billion in 2004, suggesting that U.S. trade policies during this period resulted in the transfer of trillions of dollars of wealth overseas.

Finally, echoing other corporate media pleas for Obama to abandon his progressive campaign pledges, USA Today singles out Obama's long-standing support of card-check union certification as a promise to break, saying, "It is hard to see how ending the secret ballot would do much besides initiating campaigns of subtle, and not so subtle, intimidation as workers contemplate their decisions."

The argument turns reality on its head: The current system, which treats worker organization as a matter to be contested with the employer rather than decided on by the workers themselves, allows those employers to intimidate workers in ways that are not subtle at all--a study by CEPR (1/07) based on NRLB data concluded that as many as one in five union organizers are illegally fired during the course of a typical union certification campaign.

The paper concludes that "pushing this idea through Congress would position Obama less as an agent of change and more as a pal of Big Labor." It's corporate media's Orwellian notion of change in action: Changing the Bush administration's hostile attitude toward labor--big or otherwise--would not be change; continuing that attitude would be change.

Today's column by Robert Samuelson (Washington Post, 12/1/08) is a classic of the "why the president-elect must break progressive campaign promises" genre. Usually, of course, the new president should keep such promises:

Obama won the election, and in normal times, his campaign agenda ought to be front and center. But these are not normal times, and what's most important now--as he repeatedly emphasizes--is to prevent the recession from feeding on itself.

And you do that, inevitably, by making sure not to do anything that makes corporations nervous.

Any program to refashion the energy and healthcare sectors--to take two obvious candidates--would be complicated and contentious. Some producers and consumers would win; others would lose. Proposals would create massive uncertainties for businesses and raise the probability of higher costs.

Also on Samuelson's not-to-do list is "speedy action...to support labor unions."

Samuelson ends with a strange claim: "In the long run, we need to discipline our appetite for healthcare.... [but] Obama's first job is to avert an economic freefall." Yeah, that's our problem--we're just gluttons for medicine.

This news comes from an AFL-CIO blog (via Adam Serwer at TAPPED):

This report likely won’t be on CNN's Headline News, but after five years, former workers at CNN have finally gained justice. In a decision made public today, an administrative law judge ordered the network to rehire 110 workers who were fired because they were union members. CNN also was ordered to recognize the workers' unions, National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians-CWA (NABET-CWA) locals 31 and 11.

Judge Arthur Amchan found that CNN violated the rights of more than 250 employees at the network’s bureaus in Washington, D.C., and New York City when it ended its subcontract with Team Video Services (TVS), whose employees were represented by NABET-CWA. He also ruled that CNN discriminated against TVS employees who wanted to continue working at CNN's bureaus to avoid having to recognize and bargain with the union.

In "Clout Has Plunged for Automakers and Union, Too," the New York Times' Micheline Maynard makes this curious observation:

[GM CEO Rick ] Wagoner and Ron Gettelfinger, head of the U.A.W., appeared on local TV in Detroit this week, but no Detroit representatives landed spots on the Sunday morning talk shows out of Washington. Senator Levin was their primary spokesman on NBC's Meet the Press and Face the Nation on CBS.

While it might be odd for a CEO like Wagoner to have trouble getting on the TV talkshow circuit, the lack of a labor spokesperson on the Sunday shows is pretty much par for the course. It would have actually been really odd for a labor leader to be invited on a network chat show. From Extra!’s survey of Sunday morning guests in 1995-96 and 1999:

Except for presidential candidate Ralph Nader, not a single one of the 364 guests invited during the 19 months studied was an environmentalist or consumer advocate. John Sweeney and Thomas Donahue, candidates for the presidency of the AFL-CIO, were the only guests who were labor leaders. Instead of worker representatives, the shows invited the CEO of United Airlines, the CEO of Continental Airlines, a Goldman Sachs analyst, retired basketball stars and political satirists.

Or as MSNBC host Chris Matthews once put it:

I watch Sunday television.... I never see a really good articulate labor leader on television. What happened to the George Meanys and the Walter Reuthers we grew up with? Where are the strong, articulate voices of the working person, the working family out there? That voice that you're talking about, who worries about trade policy, who worries about tax policy, who worries about being trained for the job, where are those voices on Sunday?

And:

They don't have speakers. I'm telling you, I can't think right now of a labor leader that could match wits with a Dick Cheney on television. They don't want to get out there and debate like they used to.... Who are the great spokesmen against this administration's trade policies or this administration's tax policies? Who are they?

Of course, the idea that labor leaders--even those with Cheney-like wit--don't want to be on TV is strange. It's more likely that they're not being asked.