If you have visited the Air America web site to play their stream any time in the past few months, it was clear that Air America had no concern about being perceived as being a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Labor movement – running high gloss ads for the teamsters and UAW.
Today, the Air America player served up an advertisement for the Nissan Altima. Nissan is a Japanese car company and the Altima is built in non-UAW plants in Smyrna Tennessee and Canton, Mississippi. The UAW has tried to become the labor union for this plant and has given up trying. Are Air America’s ads not under their editorial control? Have they decided there is no future being aligned with so-called “American” car companies? Or is this a back door hint that the so called “card check” change coming to the way labor unions are organized means the UAW is coming after Nissan again?
Another curious thing about the deliberately misnamed “Free Choice” act is that probably the most liberal senator of our era – 1972 Presidential candidate George McGovern is being featured on ads opposing the Employee Free Choice Act which replaces an election process with a private ballot with overt pressure from co-workers, who in many cases are working in jobs where one “accident” by a co-worker can quickly cause injury or death.
We live in strange times. Be sure to keep a diary.