No matter what e-mails say, professors at Michigan universities should stand firm on their beliefs
What John Beck (see quote below) doesn’t understand is that there doesn’t need to be a smoking gun for the far right wingtards to manufacture a nontroversy about, there doesn’t even have to be a warm gun, or even a popgun for that matter… This is a fishing expedition, and if they can’t dredge up anything useful now they will try to build it into something useful later.
Meanwhile, a professor at Michigan State University—which, along with WSU and U-M, were targets of the FOIA request—says he has every intention on complying with the law. “I can tell you there is no smoking gun here,” said John Beck, director of the Labor Education Program at MSU.
While there’s no doubt that the Mackinac Center is working on behalf of its anti-union, right-wing benefactors to intimidate college professors sympathetic to union actions in Wisconsin, Beck and others clearly appear to be up for this fight.
And that’s a good thing. As destructive as I believe many right-wing beliefs and policies are, conservatives have been at least been brazen in their willingness to put up a political fight. No matter how many times the press and others point to their obvious obsequiousness to corporate interests, the GOP just keeps rolling along shamelessly and without relent. And of course, an increasingly spineless and silent left has done little to blunt the charge.
Reckless Wall Street gambling, tax cuts for the rich, Middle Eastern wars of aggression — they’ve helped bankrupt this country. But the GOP spin doctors don’t care. No matter what objective reality says, they keep on insisting that our economic straits are all the faults of the unions, the poor, the “liberals”—and they keep getting away with it.