James A. McClure

The new right-to-work law in Michigan has been great political theater and may signal an interesting trend for government, politics and the American labor movement.

President Obama’s election in 2008 was hailed as a victory for organized labor. His administration is the most blatantly pro-union in recent history. Yet unions have been decisively defeated in Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan. More setbacks for unions appear likely as the economic gap widens between right-to-work and compulsory-union states, and as local taxpayers confront the unsustainable costs of public employee unions.

The union response has been traditional picket-line theater with chanting mobs and thuggish threats of blood and civil war: predictable and so 20^th-century. The argument that workers will not join unions unless required by law is an admission of weakness. The invocation of union history and the 40-hour week, etc., makes me wonder whether unions have worked themselves out of a job and what they’ve done for their members lately.

State right-to-work laws are significant because our federal system often makes states the bellwether of change. States are leading on issues such as gay marriage and legalized marijuana, and if this trend continues our dysfunctional national government will eventually follow. Limitations on union power may be on the same trajectory.

I’m no fan of unions, but I’d hate to see them disappear because they play a useful role in the private economy as a check on management stupidity. Unions win about half of certification elections, and the threat of unionization is a potent force in keeping employers honest. But they’re a drag on the economy when they kill jobs, block free-trade agreements and bankrupt cities.

Unions are overdue for reform and have an opportunity to re-invent themselves if they choose. There is no reason why unions cannot thrive in a right-to-work environment if they are accountable to their members and make a persuasive case for voluntary payment of union dues. That would be a big change, however: Unions operate like Third-World governments with far less transparency and accountability than corporations, and their leaders are more accustomed to coercion than persuasion.

Unions won’t reform on their own, of course. Union monopolies finance the Democratic Party, and elected officials will use their considerable power to maintain the status quo. One of the ironies of progressive politics is that folks who are pro-choice on abortion are required to be anti-choice when it comes to joining a union or selecting a public school. That makes no more sense than the conservative coupling of economic freedom with Christian Sharia law.

It’s going to be interesting to see what happens.

If a tree falls in the forest and the news media ignore it, does it make a sound?

What constitutes news, and how that drives daily editorial decisions, is the subject of philosophic rumination in schools of journalism and daily argument in newsrooms. The foundation of news coverage is the public interest and the right of citizens to know what affects them. This principle is enshrined in countless newspaper mission statements, and even in the code of ethics of the Public Relations Society of America.

Freedom of information is fragile. Repressive governments routinely shut down independent news outlets, reporters are an endangered species in a growing number of countries and some governments are seeking to censor the Internet. One of the pillars of American democracy is the skeptical zeal of journalists and their traditional adversarial relationship with government.

That’s why it’s distressing to see news media in the U.S. squandering their freedom through politically motivated self-censorship. The most flagrant example is the lack of coverage of the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed our ambassador and several others. I’ve come to accept biased and slanted news coverage, but this is more serious: a conscious decision to ignore the questions surrounding a significant incident and effectively suppress the story.

Even if you ignore the political overtones, there is much to question. Instead of issuing the customary noncommittal statement while the facts were being sorted out, the Obama administration immediately blamed the embassy attack on an obscure Internet video. Even though the remarks of the President and other officials were carefully worded enough to avoid outright lies, it appears that their objective was to advance a narrative that is proving to be false.

The major news media accepted that explanation, and the story would have disappeared had it not been for the persistence of Fox News and Republican members of Congress. It’s now apparent that the Libya attack was premeditated, that the U.S. was aware of the danger, and that security and rescue efforts were bungled.

As the facts emerge, the major national media are beginning to give the story minimal, reluctant coverage, perhaps shamed by competition from Fox News. Contrast this with the intense media coverage of the Valerie Plame CIA leak scandal in 2003, when TV crews camped on the front lawns of Bush administration officials. The only explanation for this uncharacteristic lack of curiosity is that the news media are declining to cover the story because it might jeopardize President Obama’s re-election campaign.

One result of the unprecedented romance between this president and most of the news media is the Pravda-like docility of the White House press corps. President Obama has held fewer news conferences than his predecessors, and it has become customary for the Prez to bypass Washington reporters in favor of journalism-free entertainment programs. If Presidents Clinton or Bush had tried this, the press corps would be out for blood.

Even in this environment, the lack of media interest in the Benghazi incident crosses a new line: subordination of the public interest to political advocacy.

The good news is that freedom of information in the United States is self-correcting. If President Obama is re-elected the ideological corruption of the news media will continue, but not for long. Sixty percent of the respondents in a recent Gallup poll now distrust the “mainstream” news media, and the three major networks are losing their audience to Fox News and an army of bloggers. Sooner or later, economics will force the media to return to honest journalism or go out of business.

If Governor Romney is elected, the White House press corps will awake from their slumber and the news media will immediately revert to their traditional adversarial role… just as the Founding Fathers envisioned.

When radical Muslims commit acts of terrorism or mayhem, we are assured that the Jihadists do not represent the billions of moderate, law-abiding Muslims around the world. I am sure these folks exist, but can’t help wondering why we hear so little from them when their religion is used as an excuse for violence.

Although the Islamic Society of North America held a news conference condemning the attacks on U.S. embassies in the Middle East, most of the Muslim authorities interviewed by the news media have been quick to explain why Muslims’ feelings are hurt but tepid in their condemnation of the violence. We also have seen little or no reaction from mainstream Muslim clerics around the world, or from the leaders of moderate Muslim nations like Turkey and Indonesia. The U.N. has been pretty quiet, too.

I would like to believe that the majority of Muslims are as peaceable as your average Methodist, but I have to wonder why they allow the Jihadists to represent their religion.

Christians have been pretty quiet, too. Everyone agrees that the Koran-burning Rev. Terry Jones and the sinister folks who produced an obscure YouTube film have a right to free speech. But I have yet to hear any condemnation of these wingnuts from the National Council of Churches, or from leading Evangelicals such as Rev. Franklin Graham or Mike Huckabee. Their silence plays into the hands of the Jihadists who want their followers to believe that all Americans go around trashing Muhammad.

We also need to clarify that the right to free speech does not confer immunity from its consequences. No one wants the government to go after whoever produced the film, and the government’s request to YouTube to “review” the offending video is a little creepy. But I’ll bet a lawyer for the families of the murdered diplomats would have no trouble convincing a court that these folks have blood on their hands.

Finally, I’m getting a little tired of hearing that we should be sensitive toward Muslims’ fragile religious feelings because they tend to kill people when they get riled up. Perhaps it’s time to communicate that Americans are just as passionate about our flag as Muslims are about their Prophet. And we have cruise missiles.

We’re hearing a lot of complaints from the punditry about class warfare in the current presidential campaign. Get used to it. We’ll be seeing a lot more class warfare in the next few years.

John Edwards started it in 2004 with his “two Americas” speech that demonized the wealthy, and President Obama made it his signature issue with a boost from the Occupy movement. But conflict between rich and poor is mostly political fiction.

The real class divide is between people who work for the government and those who do not. Government employees have evolved into a privileged class thanks to powerful unions, irresponsible public officials and the good intentions of voters. Public employees, once underpaid, have become significantly more prosperous than their counterparts in the private economy.

Now the cumulative impact of public employee pension and benefit largess is forcing cities to reduce services to pay their retirees. Some have been forced into bankruptcy, and this may spread to states like California and Illinois.

At the same time, the recession wiped out millions of private-sector jobs while the vast majority of public employees kept theirs. Diminished retirement savings are forcing more private-sector employees to defer retirement while state and local government employees continue to retire early with defined-benefit pensions.

The public-private divide is becoming a dominant force in politics, with public employee unions supporting the Democratic party and business interests aligned with the Republicans. A Wall Street Journal column characterized this as a fundamental conflict between two economies.

The Obama administration sharpened the class divide by devoting most of the 2009 federal stimulus to state and local government jobs rather than infrastructure projects that would have increased private sector employment. Some politicians are calling for a second stimulus to re-hire government employees who were laid off when the first stimulus ran out.

The public-private disparity is erupting into conflict as voters push back in places like Wisconsin and California. Unions are compromising in a few cases but largely resist any attempt to ask their members to share the community’s sacrifice. The high esteem in which teachers, firefighters and police officers are held may erode as the intransigence of their unions drives cities into bankruptcy and blocks school reform.

Whooping up the voters to increase taxes on the wealthy may score a few political points. The more potent pocketbook issue is how much voters are willing to sacrifice to support government employees who are wealthier and more secure than they are.