Sunday, January 12, 2014

To Err Is Human, But To Really Screw Up, You Need The Corporate Media

It is well known in Fitzwalkerstan that the Teapublicans that are in charge of the state legislature don't write their own laws.  Instead, they rely on their wealthy campaign donors to write the bills for them.

This has been shown to be the sad state of affairs many times.  G-Tac wrote the mining bill.  Chris Abele and his fellow plutocrats at the Greater Milwaukee Committee hired a silk stocking law firm to write the bill consolidating power in Milwaukee County into Abele's particularly inept hands.

Most recently, it was reported that the sleazy Rep. Joel Kleefisch is pushing a bill written by the even sleazier Michael Eisenga to help Eisenga get out of paying a decent amount of child support.

In order to take the heat of their bought and paid for legislators, the corporate media did what it always does in these situations - they tried to distract the people by yelling "Squirrel!"

To be more specific, Adam Tobias of Wisconsin Reporter, a Koch Industry subsidiary, wrote a piece of propaganda claiming that Big Labor wrote the living wage resolution for Milwaukee County Supervisor David Bowen.
Tobias' proof is that SEIU had supported Bowen in his last election and some hearsay:

County Supervisor David Bowen wrote the legislation in collaboration with the Service Employees International Union.

Bowen, endorsed by the SEIU Wisconsin State Council in his 2012 election, worked with labor union representatives on about 15 drafts and met with them several times in his office at the county courthouse, County Supervisor James “Luigi” Schmitt confirmed.

“SEIU, they’ve been lockstep with it,” Schmitt told Wisconsin Reporter.
As one might expect, Tobias' reporting leaves a lot to be desired. And the greatest things desired would be accuracy and honesty.

I contacted Supervisor Bowen after seeing this and asked him if the SEIU had written the resolution. He was quite clear in saying they did not. He said that they did ask to have some input on it, as did about fifteen other groups, including other unions.

He also told me that the person Tobias had specifically referred to wasn't even part of SEIU.  Obviously, Tobias was just making things up by the time he wrote the article.

So why didn't Tobias include some information and then made up other things?

He wasn't completely honest because that would not fit into the corporate agenda of smearing the unions and keeping workers from making a living wage.  Why, if people were allowed to make a living wage, they just might be able to make enough money that they didn't need to work two or three jobs and would be able to see just how much the corporate special interests have been ripping them off.

And who knows where it would go from there! People might be able to make educated choices at the election booth and vote the corporate sponsored Teapublicans out.  They might unionize at the job site and start demanding things like respect and safety.  Then there might be a push for women's rights, voters' rights and who knows what!

Anyway, I digress.

The point is that the corporate shills being funded by the corporate special interests are trying to detract from how badly their puppets like Joel Kleefisch are failing in the public relations department.  And since there is no way to justify this level of greed and corruption, they try to conflate a situation to distract people from what is really going on.

But then there is more.  There is always more.

The granddaddy of all corporate media, Faux News, picked up the propaganda piece.  Unsurprisingly, they did a copy and paste job without a trace of fact checking...not that they would have reported the truth even if they had been aware of it.  But then, for some bizarre reason, they decided to go with this picture and even odder yet, this caption:

Click on image to embiggen
Well, they are still failing geography, but at least they dropped the palm trees.  Or do you suppose they all just died from being uprooted and transplanted 70 miles to the east?

And wait, I thought the capitol of Fitzwalkerstan was in Walkersha...

Really, it is beyond me how anyone can believe these corporate puppets, much less cite them as credible sources.

A tip of the crown to blue cheddar for pointing it out to me.

1 comment:

  1. If you would like, I can show you the emails that prove Mr. Bowen was lying to you.

    ReplyDelete