Unions (Not the Tea Party) Now AstroTurfing, MSM Silent

It was April 15, 2009 when Speaker Pelosi pronounced the Tea Party protests as fake, using the term AstroTurf (as in phony grass roots).

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The entire MSM covered that story and many worked overtime to brand the Tea Partiers as “AstroTurf” in an effort to discredit a genuine, homegrown movement the likes of which has not been seen in this country in decades.

Despite the fact that tens of thousands of people were part of hundreds of protest events held around the country on Tax Day 2009, NBC’s Chuck Todd appeared on the Today Show telling Matt Lauer the Tea Party movement was one that “hasn’t really caught on”:

On August 4, of last year, while on MSNBC’s Hardball, Senator Barbara Boxer joined in the discredit chorus, telling Chris Matthews that the protesters were “too well dressed” and too well organized to be legitimate:

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As the town hall meetings during the summer recess of ’09 found more and more opposition, the charges of “AstroTurfing” grew louder and were accompanied by warnings that they could turn violent. In August, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann speculated that there was no spontaneity and brought on Melissa Harris-Lacewell from Princeton University to explain that normal people were being riled up by the GOP and “corporate interests.”

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Of course Rachel Maddow wasn’t going to let Keith and Chris have all the fun; last October she actually featured a segment called “The Roots of Astroturfing”:

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While Ms. Maddow was quick to point out that the multi-millionaire David Koch had chosen to use his own money to help fund like-minded individuals in their efforts to protest the direction our country was headed, she completely neglected to mention or draw a parallel to the tens of millions of dollars spent by George Soros to fund the liberal learning Center for American Progress, Moveon.org and their assorted activities.

So it should be no surprise to anyone when the labor unions openly admit to AstroTurfing by hiring people to stand in picket lines and protest something while paying less than a union worker would earn, the silence from the media is deafening.

Light the Irony Lamp and let it shine brightly on this one.

Let me repeat that… The folks standing on picket lines and protesting and chanting at union events? They are temp workers hired by the unions. Are you like me? Didn’t you expect those passionate souls demanding better wages, health care and pensions for workers to be union workers? Newsflash, they are not.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the powerful unions who pressure and demand that companies pay a “living wage” to it’s members are only offering minimum wage or barely above it to those who stand, march, and demand what they are not getting.

If the protests are so important, why are the actual union members NOT interested in doing the actual work?

“For a lot of our members, it’s really difficult to have them come out, either because of parking or something else,” explains Vincente Garcia, a union representative who is supervising the picketing.

PARKING IS THE REASON YOU ARE NOT PROTESTING???

It kinda makes you wonder about the SEIU-organized 20 busloads of 700+ protesters who were brought to the homes of banking and insurance company executives to intimidate their families under the guise of protesting what they considered to be bad company policies… or ACORN’s mob of angry people outside the homes of AIG execs. Was any of that real, or was it all paid work being done on behalf of someone’s political agenda?

Where is the MSM on this topic? Shouldn’t they be asking Speaker Pelosi how she feels about these Union-paid day laborers? Are they grass roots? Don’t they deserve the same pay and benefits that the rank and file membership receives?

Isn’t this kind of outsourcing of work to non-union people who are paid a substantially lower wage, exactly the kind of action that is demonized when companies do it by hiring workers in Third World nations to do what American workers refuse to do for low pay? Not according to Mr. Garcia who is quoted further in the Wall Street Journal WSJ; the union’s Mr. Garcia sees no conflict in a union that insists on union labor hiring nonunion people to protest the hiring of nonunion labor.

He says the pickets are not only about “union issues” but also about fair wages and benefits for American workers. By hiring the unemployed, “we are also giving back to the community a bit,” he says.

“Giving back to the community a bit?” That sounds just like the manufacturing executive who rationalizes paying Chinese workers 1/10th of what an American worker would make because he is paying them more than they would normally earn in the rice paddies.

If the union rank and file cannot or will not protest, is there really an honest issue here that needs to be addressed? Since the media is not covering this issue, I guess we’ll never know.