The Boundless, Preening Asshattery

Of John Stossel.

OK, on the one hand this is kind of unfair. I mean, everybody knows Stossel is the Michael Medved of major network advocacy reporting and that scoring off of him is like beating up on a backwards child that’s been tranked into a coma.

Everyone knows that his “Porn Star Moustache of Quivering, Randite Indignation” schitck has grown so pathologically pro-corporate (best summed up here with this quote:

‘It's that government intervention that really gets to Stossel: "Governments, because they're monopolies, just tend not to do things very well. I thought we learned that watching the fall of the Soviet bloc, but apparently not."

Once, ABC anchor John Miller (7/19/02) asked Stossel a straight-forward question: "Has government ever, in the history of time, done something more effectively than a private outfit?" Stossel's response: "Not to my knowledge."’

that Stossel -- like all fanatically government-loathing wingnuts from any point along the Tom-DeLay-to-Tim McVeigh-spectrum -- will merrily discard whole mountains of inconvenient facts when they don’t fit the monomania of his tantrum du jour.

But on the other hand, Stossel is not merely a fucktard; he is a fucktard who dangerously misleads millions of teevee viewers on a regular basis. So unlike a thousand other shrieking pinheads calling into talk radio or falling off of skinhead tavern barstools across this great land of ours, Stossel collects a very juicy paycheck spreading his depraved world view over our airwaves.

He is a man who carves himself out a fine, fat living heroically and ferociously defending the predations of billion-dollar corporations against unarmed citizens, so I really can’t bring myself to feel too bad in making my small contribution in the direction of moving him towards a more hair-net-and-fry-vat-based career.

So let us consider what lengths Mr. “Give me a break!” went to over the weekend to sandbag limo-liberal Arianna Huffington on a variety of issues as she was beginning her book tour.

(Crooks & Liars has the video here.)

First, I should stipulate that this video was not Ms. Huffington finest hour. She looked weak and unprepared. And, for the record, I think her book – “Right is Wrong” -- looks kinda stupid in that Tom-Friedman-breathlessly- announcing-that-Circles-are-Round brand of stupid.

In other words, nothing that stapling together 20 random Left Blogistan
posts from any time in the last five year -- or 20 random paragraphs from any Harlan Ellison essay from the 1980s -- wouldn’t already have told you more succinctly.

(Brief driftglass aside: And WTF is it with Liberals, Progressives and Democrats suddenly getting all horny to go on these wingnut freak shows anyway? Stossel isn’t a journalist; he’s a stooge who hates anything that stands between the defenseless citizen and the unalloyed wonderfulness that is pure, Darwinian market capitalism.

Why is Huffington dignifying this hack by giving him the time of day, much less and interview?

Ah well; different questions for a different day.

End brief driftglass aside)

Now I have no way of knowing if she came across as weak because she was simply weak, or because (as I’d be willing to wager) Stossel ambushed her with a hail of arbitrary charts and statistic she had never seen before built out of data that Stossel had tortured into making false confessions, and then edited the film to put her in the feeblest possible light.

But Ms. Huffington did not come off well. Her answers came across as uncertain, anecdotal and equivocating: as a media creature she should have known better.

However, having stipulated that, there is also no doubt that Stossel was just as full of shit as a Port-O-Let after a marathon laxative-based-chili-eating-contest.

Which is a polite way of saying he lied, tacked his lies to some foam board to make them look official, and used them to beat up a guest he didn’t agree with.

So in the interest of time, lets look at just one of his assertions -- that we don’t need the government involved in workplace safety -- which he actually gets wrong in two excitingly different ways.

Holding up this chart

(which I have reproduced fairly faithfully here by hand as taking a screen capture of the original was getting to be an apparently insoluble pain in the ass) this is what Stossel says (in the video, at around the 6:20 mark):

“Your faith in OSHA is like a religious belief,” Stossel scoffs. “Look at this chart. This shows workplace injuries since OSHA was passed, yes, have gone down. But look at it before OSHA! Things were getting better anyway! It’s like government gets in front of the parade and pretends it’s leading the parade!”

First, hey dumbass, your own fucking chart does not show “Workplace Injuries”, it shows “Workplace Fatalities”.

So go fire an intern or something.

Second, note the key inferences:

1. OSHA = “the government”.

2. Since “Things were getting better anyway”, before “the government” intruded, the government is just stealing credit for what the Glorious Private Sector was doing anyway.

But let’s look at the whole graph, shall we?

The one Stossel

didn't show you.

Column 1 represents those events that took place before 1936. Events such as:

The establishment of the Evil Gummint Bureau of Mines by Congress in 1911 in response to the atrocious state of mining safety in the United States. At the time, mining was an occupation that had claimed 13,228 lives between 1906-1911.

And (from Wikipedia)

“The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was the largest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York, causing the death of 148 garment workers who either died from the fire or jumped to their deaths.

“It was the worst workplace disaster in New York City until September 11th, 2001. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers in that industry.”

Two of many examples from more that half a century before OSHA where catastrophically bad workplace conditions were not rectified until a pile of dead bodies finally forced the Evil Gummint to intervene.

In 1936 (Column 2), the Evil Federal Gummint again stuck its busybody nose in when it passed the Walsh-Healey Act, which

“passed…as part of the New Deal. [It] is a United States federal law which protects employees of government contractors whose contracts exceed USD 10,000. For these employees, it establishes overtime as hours worked in excess of 8 hours per day or 40 hours per week, sets the minimum wage equal to the prevailing wage in an area, and sets standards for child and convict labor, as well as job sanitation and safety standards.”

Bad Gummint! Bad, Bad Gummint!

Also as part of the Evil New Deal, Evil Organized Labor was given the muscle to collectively bargain virtually for the first time without the threat of being jailed, beaten to a pulp or worse. One of the things they demanded was safer working conditions; demands which would never have been possible or honored if the Evil Gummint hadn’t interceded.


In 1947, President Harry Truman convened the Evil Federal Gummint’s “Special Commission on Safety and Health.”

In 1958 (Column 4), the American Society of Safety Engineers (from whose fine website I am cribbing heavily) “conducted research with the Air Force, which led to advances in fall protection belts and harnesses that were later realized in American National Standards.”

Yes, that’s the Evil Gummint Air Force.

In 1964, the Evil Gummint Space Program also cruelly interfered in the marketplace by applying scientific principles to the field of workplace safety and making Systems Safety Management a field of intense research and application.

1964 (Column 5) was also the year the Evil Gummint revised the now-28-years-old Evil Walsh-Healey Act.

All of which only ever-so-lightly-and-for-demonstration-purpose-only touches on a few of the hundreds of instances in which the Evil Gummint -- in fits and starts, by legislation or by creating high standard procurement markets of its own and often over the howling objections of industry -- drove safety standards forward and fatalities down during most of the 20th Century.

It also demonstrates that there is no way even the briefest, honest reading of the facts could lead an impartial observer to conclude that OSHA somehow appeared unbidden and out of nowhere in 1971, or believe that OSHA was conceived as anything other than the culmination of decades of ever-evolving government regulations.

And given the “Global Resources of ABC” (that can spend several million dollars on enough eye-bleeding graphics to make “Nightline” look less like an embarrassing-irrelevant-dungheap-where-Koppel-used-to-be,

and more like a dungheap moving screamingly fast in some sort of Urgently Purposeful direction) there is no doubt that if Stossel and his flying monkeys had the slightest interest in conducting an honest debate they could have easily put together what it took me about 90 minutes of Googling to accomplish: a reasonably accurate set of graphics and narratives from which one could begin an honest conversation about American labor history vis-à-vis safety and government regulation.

Because sometimes regs are too restrictive. Sometimes they are too prescriptive. Sometimes they do go too far.

But of course that is not the conversation Stossel wants to have.

Instead, Stossel relentlessly preaches the Wingnut Fundamentalist's gospel of absolute certainty that Government is Always Wrong and Corporations are Always Right, and let the inconvenient facts be damned.

In a more genteel age, we used to call what Stossel does "shilling".

Or "whoring".

Or just plain "lying".

But in Age of Dubya, now we call it “journalism”.