Mary Bottari on Silencing Unions, Margaret Flowers on Undermining Single-Payer

This week on CounterSpin: A 2017 Gallup poll found 61 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, despite the fact that just 11 percent of wage and salary workers are union members—and despite a decades-long, vehement, multi-layered and deep-pocketed campaign to incapacitate unions, and really the ability of workers to organize in any way that truly builds power that could contest that of corporate interests. The ability of workers to build collective power is central in Janus v. AFSCME, a case currently before the Supreme Court. We’ll talk about how efforts to weaken workers’ voice masquerade as efforts to strengthen it, and how we can see through them, with Mary Bottari, deputy director of the Center for Media and Democracy.

Also on the show: Polls show that Americans support universal health coverage; a Harvard-Harris survey from 2017 found 52 percent support for a single-payer system. Like support for unions, this support too has survived concerted, protracted and well-funded efforts to undermine it…the latest coming from the nominally liberal Center for American Progress, whose “Medicare Extra for All” proposal is being branded “a better single-payer” by the same corporate media that have declared actual single-payer dead in the water—public will be damned—for years. We’ll talk about that with Margaret Flowers, co-director of Popular Resistance and coordinator of the national Health Over Profit for Everyone campaign.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look at coverage of anti-LGBTQ violence.


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