What happens when you look at the facts involved with Issue 2 instead of basing your decision on the emotional hysteria coming from unions bent solely on preserving their power? You find out that the need for reform is real, and that Ohio NEEDS Issue 2.
That what the newspapers from Ohio’s three largest cities found out when the looked past the rhetoric, and focused on the facts. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Columbus Dispatch, and the Cincinnati Enquirer all agree. Ohioans should vote YES on Issue 2. And what they say pretty much mirrors what we have been telling you.
Ohio law must not impede reform, and it won’t if it creates a level playing field for public-sector workers and their employers.
Right now, that field is tipped in favor of the unions. Recognizing that reality does not mean we oppose public-employee unions or that we do not appreciate what their members do and the sacrifices some already have made…
In schools, the emphasis has to be on the progress of children, not the comfort of adults. In city halls and county offices, the impact on those who pay the bills — and the sheer magnitude of those bills — must be paramount.
Rules that made sense in 1983 do not make sense anymore. Ohio needs a fresh start…
When they mark their ballots, Ohioans cannot worry about what is best for any political party or interest group — on either side of this debate. They need to consider what’s best for the future of their children, their communities, their state.
The mainstream media’s most insidious and deceptive trick is to present something outrageously false using a matter-of-fact tone and approach. The dark art of glossing over the truth as though the falsehood being spread is simply established fact is a ploy propagandists have used since time began.
NBC’s Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Domenico Montanaro, and Brooke Brower slipped a matter-of-fact WHOPPER into the top story of today’s ”First Read.” The whopper is so subtle and devious I almost missed it.
COLUMBUS, OH — The best — and most meaningful — statewide race of 2011 wasn’t in West Virginia (where Democrats narrowly won the gubernatorial contest). Or in Louisiana (where Gov. Bobby Jindal cruised to re-election). And it won’t be in Kentucky (where Democrats are poised for a blowout gubernatorial win). Or in Mississippi (where Republicans are expected to hold the governor’s mansion). Rather, the 2011 race with the biggest political implications is taking place here in the Buckeye State, where voters two weeks from today will decide the fate of Gov. John Kasich’s (R) law curbing collective-bargaining rights for public-sector workers. It will test, once again, organized labor’s strength in the Midwest (after its mixed results in Wisconsin). It will gauge Kasich’s popularity (or unpopularity). It will serve as a trial run of sorts for next year’s presidential contest in this traditional battleground state. And it’s the same fight we’ve seen across the country — about how governments balance their budgets and about the role of the government worker.
To be clear, I’m not talking about the usual-usual bias at work here, where you have leftists disguised as objective journalists gaming the system by telling us which upcoming election is “the most important” and will be a “trial run for next year’s presidential race.” Obviously, what they’re doing here is what the MSM always does — laying the groundwork to craft a narrative in advance. Their hope is that the left will prevail (in this case, that the immoral practice of collective bargaining will be saved) so they can then run around MSNBC and NBC spinning this into a victory for Obama. But like I said, that’s the usual-usual coming from the MSM these days, especially NBC and Chuck Todd.
No, what I’m talking about is ”First Read”’s attempt to memory-hole the absolute beating Big Labor took in Wisconsin with this stinking load of matter-of-fact crap:
Schultz made a recent visit to Columbus, Ohio in which he had Congressman Tim Ryan (whom I had interviewed hours prior about Senate Bill 5’s alleged confiscation of safety equipment) and Senator Sherrod Brown on the show against a backdrop of union firefighters to whom, during commercial breaks, Schultz yelled that SB 5 “makes me believe Jimmy Hoffa even more that they are sons of bitches!” Throughout the broadcast Schultz and his guests parroted the manufactured mantra that the bill takes away safety equipment, perhaps almost enough times to make it true.
Admittedly breaking the SEIU’s first rule of Project Mayhem, I subsequently interviewed Schultz on camera and asked him to respond to the fact that the bill gives bargaining rights on safety equipment — which the Democrats’ earlier bill didn’t, citing the exact section number — to which he offered a Pulitzer Prize-warranting response: “That’s not what the firefighters are telling me.”
Well Ed, that may not be what the firefighters are telling you the bill says, but it is what the bill is telling me the bill says. When I later asked the author of SB 5, State Senator Shannon Jones, to respond to Schultz’s talking points, she clarified the provision in depth, noting to Schultz that “reading is fundamental.”
Ten months ago, the Detroit Fox affiliate exposed a handful of Chrysler auto workers who were spending their lunch breaks drinking booze and getting high. Working on an anonymous tip from an employee inside the Jefferson North plant, WJBK’s Rob Wolchek discovered more than a dozen employees over a ten day period punched out to get pickled.
Less than two months before the story broke, Barack Obama traveled to the very plant busted in the “Problem Solvers” investigation to tout his economic policies. To add insult to injury, Chrysler received $14 billion in taxpayer-funded TARP and bail outs from January to June 2009, paying back little more than half and sticking hardworking American taxpayers with the difference.
Chrysler cited two policies in their Standards of Conduct guide that “might apply” to the above situation:
Use, possession, distribution, sale or offering for sale, or being under the influence of alcohol or drugs (other than use or possession of narcotics in medicines prescribed by the employee’s physician), on Corporation property, or while operating a Corporation owned motor vehicle, or while engaged in Corporate business.
Unacceptable conduct due to alcohol or drug abuse (other than use or possession of narcotics in medicines prescribed by the employee’s physician), or conduct that indicates a potential for impaired or unsafe job performance due to drug or alcohol abuse.
The hangout? A private parking lot owned by the local United Auto Workers Local 372 (the link was dead when I clicked it).
The Detroit Free Press‘ account of this story had more than 350 comments at the time of this posting, many of them defensive of the employees spending their lunch breaks drinking and smoking and hostile toward the news media for just doing their job.
Ancel, the other instructor, said in an interview that she works on annual contracts and that the university has not taken any action against her. She also released a statement in which she explained the context behind some of the quotes shown in the video.
For example, she noted that one of her quotes in the Breitbart video is: “violence is a tactic and it’s to be used when it’s the appropriate tactic.” Here is what she said really happened: “After students had watched a film on the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike and the assassination of Martin Luther King, they were discussing nonviolence. I said, ‘One guy in the film … said ‘violence is a tactic, and it’s to be used when it’s the appropriate tactic.’ ” In this instance, she said, “Breitbart’s editing has literally put words in my mouth that were not mine, and they never were mine.”
That is demonstrably false and misleading and was addressed in a subsequent post at Big Government by Insurgent Visuals after an additional careful review of the film in question.
If James O’Keefe and I were to release a video catching disguised al-Qaeda members casually joking about blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge, the mainstream media would likely be most interested to know who pays our salaries.
Upon the release of our ACORN videos which featured federally-funded ACORN employees aiding a “pimp” and a “prostitute” in setting up a brothel for 14-year-old El Salvadoran sex slaves, the MSM shifted the narrative towards James and Hannah, whether they were lying about their budgets, if Fox News hired them, and whether they were actually dressed as pimps and prostitute while entering the ACORN offices.
Predictably, the MSM has sounded the same recycled narrative in the midst of our more recent release of “Teachers Unions Gone Wild,” evidencing tenured teachers calling black students the “N” word without proper reprimand, teachers using a taxpayer-funded New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) conference to rally for “slander” against New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and union leaders sharing anecdotes about rigged elections and voter fraud, among other things. Rather than investigate the findings of our investigation, the media has found it more pressing to investigate us.
It’s embarrassing enough that we mere twenty-somethings manage to scoop seasoned, established mainstream journalists on outing corruption, fraud, and waste in government. So it is ironic that mainstream journalists feel compelled to embarrass themselves further by dismissing the juicy meat of our exposés to cover our material with awkwardly petty and irrelevant lines of questioning. They are like high school cheerleaders envious over the new girl who just started dating the captain of the football team. Like, do you have a rich family? Are you like, just a poseur or something? (more…)
And so we begin to hear some feedback from the liberal side, including direct comments from one prominent member of the “Cry Wolf” project. On the Inside Higher Ed website Friday, founder and editor Scott Jaschik addresses Big Journalism’s Academia-Gate series in his post, “Who Is Crying Wolf?”
Some prominent liberal academics are soliciting short essays from faculty members and graduate students to document a pattern in American history of major social advances being opposed by conservatives who “cry wolf” about the impact of proposed reforms. The campaign — known as the “Cry Wolf Project” — hasn’t been officially announced. But conservative bloggers obtained some of the solicitations of essays and published them this week, along with considerable criticism.
A series of posts on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism Web site have called the program “Academia-Gate” and suggested that the effort is inappropriately political. The creators of Cry Wolf, meanwhile, say that what they are doing is awfully similar to the ways that right-leaning scholars have used academic work to advance their causes over the years.
Jaschik acquaints readers with the members of the “Cry Wolf” project coordinators and the details of the request for proposals. He then goes on to cite from a couple of BigJournalism’s posts in the series:
One post on Big Journalism noted that those involved in the project are sympathetic to organized labor, and that many influential academics are serving on the advisory board. “This is what our higher education system has become – a publicly funded amplifier of progressive ideology,” says the post by Patrick Courrielche. “If this Cry Wolf program were just limited to a few faculty members at a limited number of universities, it would be of little concern. But the project reaches into some of the most prestigious public and private schools of higher learning in the U.S., including MIT, Yale, Harvard, USC, Columbia, Rutgers, UC Santa Barbara, University of Pennsylvania, and President Obama’s alma mater — Occidental College.”
Liberty Chick, the blogger who started calling Cry Wolf “Academia-Gate,” described her concerns this way: “What’s far more dangerous is that the ideological academic, in his capacity as a professor, actually possesses the power to control. The power to influence students’ minds, to mold the students’ way of thinking to embrace their own power-hungry desires and believe in it as ’social justice’ — this is a frightening weapon. Via union solidarity, this weapon is shared with the mobilizers, the janitors and cafeteria workers who agitate the students with various demands against the university after ideologically minded professors have indoctrinated them to hear every grievance as a call for ’social justice.’
After a week-long series of Big Journalism articles delving into the funding, agenda and dubious academic credentials behind the now-infamous “Cry Wolf Project,” the program’s co-chair, Prof. Peter Dreier has finally emerged from his bunker at Occidental College to respond to the controversy.
After first quoting heavily from the Soros-funded talking points supplied by our pals, the Senior Fellows over at Media Matters, Scott Jaschik at InsideHigherEd.com, quotes Dreier as follows:
Dreier, one of the organizers of Cry Wolf, said in an interview Thursday that the furor over the project was unfair. “This is legitimate work,” he said, and the essays will be scrutinized for accuracy. The end result will simply be better organized resources that might be consulted by the public, op-ed writers or others. He also said that he didn’t view this effort as either replacing traditional scholarship or doing anything that conservative groups don’t already do. He added that the pattern of “the world is going to end” reactions to “progressive efforts” is a legitimate issue for scholars to raise and explore.
Why are the conservatives so critical? Said Dreier: “That’s what they are paid to do.”
CWP’s solicitation for policy briefs designed to constructpolitically driven narratives is a confession of academic malpractice. As Kurt Schlichter has pointed out, its participants’ intentions are unethical, insubordinate, and potentially illegal.
The CWP email shows its players to be intolerant of varying viewpoints in the pursuit of their ideological ends. The fact that they are offering colleagues and grad students money to predetermine outcomes proves their intent: to tell partisan political stories:
ACORN’s radical allies are now attempting to rewrite history to cast the organized crime syndicate as victim instead of as the prolific victimizer that it has been ever since it was created in 1970. ACORN online campaign director Nathan Henderson-James served notice in February that a propaganda effort was about to begin.
“[T]here will be a fight over the narrative of ACORN’s demise,” he wrote to members of Townhouse, a discussion forum run by Matt Stoller, senior policy adviser to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.). The other side wants “a narrative about the corruption of popular organizations and how they are simply vehicles for the personal enrichment and power fantasies of their top staff members while pushing public policies that destroy middle America.”
Such a narrative must be fought, Henderson-James argued, because it “gives people pushing a pro-corporate agenda a way to tar progressives and even non-progressive Democrats running for office with the ACORN brush.”
The effort was already underway when Henderson-James reached out to the leftist community. After ACORN’s national board expelled ACORN founder Wade Rathke for engineering an eight-year cover-up of a million dollar embezzlement, Rathke wrote a combination political memoir/manifesto called Citizen Wealth. More recently, Seeds of Change, an institutional hagiography of ACORN by true believer John Atlas was published.
And now comes the “Cry Wolf” Project, a push to encourage academics to help spread more lies about the corrupt group. (more…)
Over at the website Minding the Campus, Prof. KC Johnson takes a look at the academic astroturf project called “Cry Wolf” that Big Journalism has been breaking all week. The reviews are not good for Prof. Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College:
A newly announced project called “Crying Wolf,” organized out of the Center on Policy Initiatives, seems blithely unconcerned with any requirements associated with academic freedom… project coordinators Peter Dreier (a distinguished professor of politics at Occidental College), Nelson Lichtenstein (a historian of 20th century U.S. history at UC Santa Barbara who directs the university’s Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy), and Donald Cohen, CPI executive director, are recruiting professors and graduate students (in “history, sociology, economics, political science, planning, public health, and public policy”) to perform “paid academic research” that can “serve in the battle with conservative ideas.”
The initiative is open about its biases: it intends to “construct a counter narrative” against what it describes as conservative opinions about taxation and regulation policy.
The co-chair of the ‘Cry Wolf” project, Professor Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College, is a sort of email buddy of mine. If by “email buddy” I mean someone who once sent me a snide one-line missive with a link to an alternative weekly paper political cartoon depicting me in a negative light.
I’ll show you that email shortly but first background on why Professor Dreier is in my life:
In late September of 2009 two weeks into the beginning of the explosive James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles ACORN video scandal, an academic study critical of media coverage of ACORN came out from Peter Dreier and Christopher Martin, professor of journalism, University of Northern Iowa, Department of Communication Studies. The study, “Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, or,What the News Got Wrong,” was billed as “[a]n independent study by two prominent academics” that purported to have “found repetition of unverified allegations and distortions was the rule in national reporting of a purported ‘voter fraud’ scandal involving the community organizing group ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) during the 2008 presidential campaign.”
Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College
When I first saw the study’s press release, I naively reached out to Professor Martin to offer him and Dreier a place at our new website Big Government to act as ongoing ombudsmen of our ACORN story. We were cognizant that a left-leaning media would likely come to ACORN’s defense, so why not provide a platform for two professors claiming the media had wronged ACORN in its previous coverage of the organization to show that we were doing everything in our power to play the story fair? Recall, we proactively offered unedited transcripts and audio of O’Keefe and Giles work to show that the edited videos did not take things out of context.
After conferring with his colleague, Professor Martin declined my offer: (more…)
A fixed fight: The Influence of Labor Unions in Academe. Part One is here.
In the academic world, employees are very often public employees. This means that they are also very often union employees. At all levels. This includes everyone from janitors, to dormitory housekeepers, cafeteria workers, clerical staff, and computer techs, to even the graduate assistants and professors. While the salary gap between a cafeteria worker and a senior professor may be huge, the solidarity of the unions is a powerful magnet that creates an unbreakable bond amongst them.
Unions are fond of bashing capitalism with seething rhetoric, decrying the economic system as irredeemably corrupted by greed and racism and classism. But the ideology they themselves embrace is itself driven by the same ugly characteristics they profess to detest. Except in their case, power is the motivating force, the passion that drives them.
The burning desire for the power to control your life is the tie that binds the union service worker to the academic intellectual. It is this common fabric that connects the union janitor more closely to the ideological academic intellectual than to his working-class counterparts beyond campus.
What’s far more dangerous is that the ideological academic, in his capacity as a professor, actually possesses the power to control. The power to influence students’ minds, to mold the students’ way of thinking to embrace their own power-hungry desires and believe in it as “social justice” – this is a frightening weapon. Via union solidarity, this weapon is shared with the mobilizers, the janitors and cafeteria workers who agitate the students with various demands against the university after ideologically minded professors have indoctrinated them to hear every grievance as a call for “social justice.”
Critical Mass, a blog devoted to what’s wrong with American academe, has weighed in on the emerging scandal we here at Big Journalism are calling “Academia-Gate” — the “Cry Wolf” request for proposals devoted to pre-empting and discrediting conservative political positions in the sheep’s clothing of disinterested academic “scholarship,” spearheaded by leftist professor Peter Dreier at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
It’s not a pretty sight:
On the one hand, there are no surprises–there has been a decades-long academic tradition, at this point, of discounting the notion that disinterested research is even possible, and of selling the idea that the proper response to this is to shape one’s scholarship self-consciously, as a means of ensuring that it assists and justifies the kinds of social justice one would like to see in the world. On the other hand, this activist line of thought has historically had only one line of defense–and that is that it is conducted with impeccable scholarly integrity, is entirely above-board vis a vis research ethics, and is unimpeachable from within the standards of professional conduct. In other words, the ethical standards that accompany interested scholarship are, in theory, terrifically strict. That’s how such scholarship can continue to call itself scholarship, and escape being dismissed as propaganda. It’s a shaky edifice, but it’s an edifice all the same, and it has succeeded. Arguably, though, the Cry Wolf project undermines that entire edifice, as it explicitly supports the arguments of those who would say that large swathes of academia are little more than publicly funded mechanisms for disseminating and producing an ideologically-driven world view.
The “Cry Wolf” leader Professor Peter Dreier has a clear right to solicit all the biased, agenda-driven, fraudulent “research” he desires under the First Amendment of the Constitution he and his pals have so little regard for. But his antics may not pass muster under another set of guidelines that he – and his institution – operate under.
Occidental College, Professor Dreier’s employer, expressly promises the students, whose parents fork over a cool $55,655 a year for the privilege of attending, that they will not be subject to any political litmus test as they participate in the school’s academics between bong hits and sessions of binge drinking:
Students are entitled to an atmosphere conducive to learning and to even-handed treatment in all aspects of the teacher-student relationship. Faculty members may not refuse to enroll or teach students because of their beliefs or the possible uses to which they may put the knowledge to be gained in a course. The student should not be forced by the authority inherent in the instructional role to make particular personal choices as to political action or his or her own part in society. Evaluation of students and the award of credit must be based on academic performance professionally judged and not on matters irrelevant to that performance, whether personality, sex, race, religion, degree of political activism, or personal beliefs. (Occidental College Faculty Handbook, p. 2)
Of course, here a professor – in his capacity as an Occidental professor while using his Occidental email account – is expressly soliciting research work to support his personal political beliefs. Sure, he’s not technically granting or denying credit based on his students’ political views. He’s just exercising some of the informal “authority inherent in the instructional role.” And it’s abundantly clear – even if he doesn’t say it outright – that a student who disagrees with Professor Dreier’s politics best keep on walking. (more…)
Yesterday’s story on the “Cry Wolf” project has exposed a dangerous pretense that has been prevalent, yet well disguised, for some time in our institutions of higher learning. It’s an important post. A small committee of professors and academic professionals, normally held in high regard, have blatantly betrayed the trust of the public and quite possibly smeared the reputations of all colleges and universities nationwide. By soliciting “paid activists” to create research papers that are intentionally designed to silence opposing viewpoints, they have undermined the political system and manipulated the governmental policy making process. And in the meantime, they’ve also implicated all of academia in the manufacturing of their propaganda.
It is an abuse of their power, and an abuse of the institutions they represent. It is appalling and repellent. Perhaps even against their employers’ rules or the industry’s ethical code. Consider it an ominous warning — this will have a dire impact on our political and economic system in the future, if we remain apathetic in the face of such a rhetorical and intellectual assault.
In fact, both the rhetoric and the intentions demonstrated in Peter Dreier’s email are a classic example of much of what is wrong with today’s educational institutions: hypocrisy, bias, recklessness, and a blatant disregard for differing beliefs and viewpoints.
As Americans, we place an enormous amount of pride in the quality of our nation’s system of higher education. In our country, colleges and universities have long been the bastions of research, the sources to which we turn for information that is expertly developed; for data that is honestly mined, analyzed, reviewed and responsibly published by noted researchers so that individuals, business people and policy makers can make well-informed decisions.
On my Twitter account, I follow a few hundred mainstream media-types (keep the enemy closer, right?), and unless I've missed it (and I hope I have), not a single one has spoken out in defense of Roland Martin. Not one. How scary is that. The politically correct Groupthink...
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