While you're at it, check out AFSCME's great website, Stop the Lies (public service workers under attack).
These shameful attacks are dishonest on many levels. They're an effort to strip government workers of decent pay and benefits so billionaires and CEOs can pay fewer taxes -- or get lucrative private contracts to perform those same public services. Often, the attacks are disguised as outrage that government employees don't work hard enough.
The lies about Teamster sanitation workers in New York City are a great example. They were accused of deliberately slowing down snow removal during the Christmas blizzard. Writes Eric Alterman at The Nation:
It was a terrible tabloid tale. While New York City was buried under a blizzard, widows and orphans freezing and starving in their apartments, union fat cats swigged brewskis and chuckled to themselves as sanitation workers conspired to stage a slowdown to gain leverage in their contract negotiations.
Alas, it never happened. The source of all this hysteria was a sketchy story told by Daniel Halloran, a rookie councilman and Tea Party Republican...But the damage is done....
Though Alterman got it, the newspaper owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch did not. His New York Post screamed
“The selfish Sanitation bosses who sabotaged the blizzard cleanup to fire a salvo at City Hall targeted politically connected and well-heeled neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn to get their twisted message across loud and clear...”Investor’s Business Daily, Fox News (also owned by Murdoch), Saturday Night Live and the Washington Times all repeated the lies.
Can it be a coincidence, Alterman writes, that the right-wing media promoted the story at a time when politicians are mounting a massive assault on government workers' pensions and benefits?
We think not.
Writes Alterman,
The assault on public employee unions is the next phase of a forty-year class war in America by the rich against the rest of us. It is of a piece with the steady dismantling of our progressive taxation system and the explosion of economic inequality.
A few more facts are in order:
- Most public pension funds are able to meet their obligations, according to The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
- Some states' pension funds are in real trouble because of the troubled economy, not union workers, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
- Pension funds account for just 3.8 percent of state and local spending and could be covered with an increase of 5 percent, according to Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research.
