Being careful about your facts: Longshoremen and the AFL-CIO

If you google "International Longshoremen quit AFL-CIO,"you will get pages and pages of results about the 40,000-member ILWU leaving the country's largest labor organization as a result of Obamacare.

The only major media outlet you will find trumpeting the story is Fox News, which attributes the break entirely to health care and immigration (it is s brief story and you should read it to discover I am not misleading you):

Union dumps AFL-CIO for its positions on ObamaCare, immigration reform

Breitbart is the source of the story for most small blogs:

In an August 29 letter to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, ILWU President Robert McEllrath cited quite a list of grievances as reasons for the disillusion of their affiliation, but prominent among them was the AFL-CIO’s support of Obamare.

The problem? The hundreds of conservative, Ron Paul, and libertarian sites reporting this story pretty much just follow Breibart's lead, without ever bothering to check out Trumka's original letter.

In that letter, Trumka doesn't even get around to discussing Obamacare or immigration until the last of three pages. The ILWU's main reasons for leaving the AFL-CIO have to do with disputes over contracts, AFL-CIO failures to back ILWU work actions, and actual legal attacks on the ILWU by other AFL-CIO affiliates.

Here's what Labor Notes says, in a far more honest summary of Trumka's letter than Breibart provides:

In an August 29 letter to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, ILWU President Robert McEllrath cited these ongoing juristictional battles as part of the union’s decision to disaffiliate. The skirmishes hit close to home: McEllrath comes out of Vancouver, Washington’s Local 4, where members of rival unions are crossing ILWU picket lines, and debate over the disputes was squelched at this summer’s state labor convention.

The letter also cited the federation’s compromised positions on health care and immigration reform. Invoking the union’s radical and independent history, McEllrath noted the ILWU did not join the AFL-CIO until 1988—after being kicked out of the CIO during the McCarthy era for being “too red.”

In point of fact, to the extent that the ILWU left the AFL-CIO over health care at all, it left because the Longshoremen support an even more radical national single-payer option, and see Obamacare as a sell-out. It is certainly not joining the voices wanting repeal or defunding of Obamacare to return to status quo ante.

The lesson in all this is to be careful crediting stories that report what you already believe or would like to believe without checking the sources. Frankly, you should prefer the original sources over somebody else's analysis of them.

If you are out to build a libertarian movement, or a progressive movement or a Green movement or that matter, you really should try--as much as possible--to get your facts straight.

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?

New Warfare: I started my posts with a discussion.....

.....on Unrestricted warfare . The US Air force Institute for National Security Studies have developed a reasonable systems approach to deter non-state violent actors who they label as NSVA's. It is an exceptionally important report if we want to deter violent extremism and other potential violent actors that could threaten this nation and its security. It is THE report our political officials should be listening to to shape policy so that we do not become excessive in using force against those who do not agree with policy and dispute it with reason and normal non-violent civil disobedience. This report, should be carefully read by everyone really concerned with protecting civil liberties while deterring violent terrorism and I recommend if you are a professional you send your recommendations via e-mail at the link above so that either 1.) additional safeguards to civil liberties are included, or 2.) additional viable strategies can be used. Finally, one can only hope that politici

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