A week or so ago, the Teamsters Local 601 held a meeting for the employees of the company which employs me. The reason for the meeting was so that the employees could introduce suggestions for the union to bargain for during the upcoming contract negotiations.
Out of over 500 employees covered by the union, only around 20 people showed up. The next day at work, one of the women who attended was complaining about how hardly anyone cares enough to get involved in their union meetings.
I couldn’t let that comment slip by, so I said, “Welcome to my world. Now you know how I feel. It infuriates me because people are too lazy, or just don’t care enough to read the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or any of the writings of the founders.
“Some people don’t want to be confused with facts that contradict their preconceived opinions and prejudice.” – Geoff Metcalf
Headlines are screaming about the all too public dust up between the Obama White House and Fox News. Fox has obviously gotten under the too thin skin of the administration and the president seems both willing and enthused to accept poor counsel from the Rahm Emanuel ‘Chicago style’ wing of advisers.
Even the New York Times begrudgingly admits the White House “by deploying official resources against a troublesome media organization, seems to have brought a knife to a gunfight.”
What if we applied corporate standards to the “science” that is driving global warming policy?
Imagine the reaction if investment companies provided only rosy stock and economic data to prospective investors; manufacturers withheld chemical spill statistics from government regulators; or medical device and pharmaceutical companies doctored data on patients injured by their products.
Media frenzies, congressional hearings, regulatory investigations, fines and jail sentences would come faster than you can say Henry Waxman. If those same standards were applied to global warming alarmists, many of them would be fined, dismissed and imprisoned, sanity might prevail, and the House-Senate cap-and-tax freight train would come to a screeching halt.
About a year ago, I published an article [1] that blamed the government-sponsored speculation by the so-called under-served borrowers for the housing market crash. A reader signed as John questioned its plausibility and wrote:
“This article lacks validity. Author suggests that the poor caused the crash, which is totally absurd.”
Unfortunately, the claim that in an industrial or post-industrial society the primary source of the wealth of the rich is the exploitation of the poor has been a common myth for some 160 years now.
