Huzzahs to Gerald for doing the exhausting but essential work of debunking the lies about the Employee Free Choice Act being pushed by corporate front groups.
Still, it's worth stepping back for a moment to remind ourselves that the card check smear attacks are really about something much larger:
Preserving the wealth of corporations and those who run them.
Don't get me wrong: The folks in the corner offices at Wal-Mart and elsewhere are concerned about the Employee Free Choice Act. But they're also concerned about tighter regulation, the capital gains tax rate and international trade agreements.
It just so happens to be more palatable, in an electoral context, for them to complain about card check than to howl for lower taxes for millionaires or rail against environmental standards in trade accords.
(And it's always easier to attack pols who care about the interests of the bottom 95% of wage earners when you can find a way to wrap your message in faux-populism.)
The reasons the attacks are so strident is pretty obvious: For most of the last eight years, corporations have had more or less carte blanche in Washington. If we wind up with a Democratic president and large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, those days will have come to a decisive end.
Naturally corporate interests aren't going to relinquish power without a lot of kicking, screaming, whining and flailing.
And that's what we've been seeing: The smears now on the air are the first few kicks and screams.
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