Almost certainly, an article posted on March 3 to the website of the New Labor Forum – a publication of the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Murray Institute – was intended to slam the Freedom Foundation in general and CEO Tom McCabe in particular.
Funny thing was, by actually getting most of the details right instead of making up lies the way other labor shills do, author Max Fraser – inadvertently, perhaps – produced something he and his intended audience undoubtedly consider stinging criticism while we take it as genuine praise.
Then again, we’ve always had the truth on our side.
Headlined, “Organized Money: What is Corporate America Thinking – Freedom’s Janus Face,” the piece positions McCabe as the face of the nation’s burgeoning anti-government employee union movement. For Fraser, it may be a face that belongs on a wanted poster, but for those of us who’ve spent years exposing the many excesses of public-sector unions, there’s no higher compliment than to have our fearless leader recognized as the driving force behind Janus and all the tough breaks our adversaries seem to confront with almost daily regularity.
It may give Fraser cold chills to concede that, “(M)en like (CEO Tom) McCabe, and the deep-pocketed donors behind organizations like the Freedom Foundation … may end up determining the fate of the American labor movement for decades to come,” but those words are music to our ears.
Likewise, Fraser’s description of how McCabe gravitated to the Freedom Foundation from the Building Industry Association of Washington, checked off all the positive boxes:
“The Freedom Foundation had been a reliable if low-profile lobby group pushing tax-and-spending cuts and other conservative legislative reforms in the state since the early 1990s. But when McCabe was brought in to run it in 2013, he quickly sharpened the organization’s attention on a familiar antagonist from his years at the BIAW: The ‘union political machine’ that had long been the primary obstacle to realizing his deregulatory, free-market agenda.”
Terms like “deregulation” and “free markets” may be obscenities to the leaders of SEIU, AFSCME, the Teamsters, teachers’ unions and all the other obstacles to limited, accountable government in this country, but they form the basis for all we do at the Freedom Foundation and we’re delighted when our adversaries acknowledge what we stand for.
Pity they aren’t as forthcoming about their own objectives.
