No Straight Talk from McCain
From the AFL-CIO Now Blog
Another day, another lie from the McCain campaign. Or, as the mainstream media would put it, another “distortion.”
But this time, the mainstream media, in the form of CNN, is part of perpetuating the lie.
In a speech yesterday, Sen. John McCain falsely asserted Sen. Barack Obama planned to take away workers’ right to vote by secret ballot when deciding whether to join a union. CNN’s “Fact Check” then went on to assert McCain was correct.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Obama supports the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation that would restore workers’ freedom to form unions. The Employee Free Choice Act will not take away the secret ballot election process. Instead, it would add another option: majority sign-up (card-check). Workers thinking about whether to join a union could pick either option. The ballot process, overseen by the federal labor board, gives employers lots of time to harass and intimidate workers. Under majority sign-up, if 51 percent of workers sign up to join a union, they have one.
McCain’s comments are the latest in seemingly desperate attempts to win the election. McCain was against tax cuts for the wealthy. Now he supports Bush’s tax giveaway to the rich. McCain was once a campaign finance reformer and now is a candidate whose campaign is run by lobbyists. McCain flip-flopped from opposing torture to voting to allow water boarding.
McCain pushes his health care plan as benefiting the middle class, when analyses of his plan have found it could push 20 million of us out of our employer-based health care coverage while cutting Medicare and Medicaid by $1.3 trillion.
And although McCain says he supports military veterans, his claim of a “perfect voting record” on veterans’ issues is contradicted by the Disabled American Veterans, which gives McCain only a 20 percent rating, and the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, which gives McCain a “D”—a sorry distinction the group granted to only four other senators. In contrast, the IAVA gives Obama a “B,” and the DAV gives him an 89 percent rating.
So much for straight talk.
