I was reading my union newsletter today. Apparently a big benefit of my union dues is that I get a newsletter so I decided to read it. Without going into any details today, it made some charges against a certain business and went on and on about how much money it is losing and how much stock value has been lost. As I read it, the numbers didn’t make any sense to me at all so I game home, Googled the article and found out what the real numbers were. They didn’t even come close to the numbers the union newsletter put together. To reconcile these discrepancies, I propose the following solutions.
a) The said company is lying to the SEC in it’s public filings and the union has the real numbers.
b) The SEC is involved in a coverup to discredit the union.
c) The union is hoping it’s members don’t know what Google is or how to use it and has chosen to make up numbers to inflame it’s members.
d) They think we are morons (or as a friend of mine once blogged, “what a maroon”)
I go with option c or d but I’ll keep an open mind towards the first two options. The result is I have a really hard time believing anything else that the union writes on any other topic. It is kind of a microsm of Michael Moore or George W. Bush or Ralph Nader or…. (choose whoever you think is America’s greatest problem). By overstating and altering certain truths, they undermine totally their other legitimate statements. It really isn’t that common, we saw it during the recent Canadian federal election and we have seen it before and will see it again. Bonhoeffer talked about honesty and legitimacy in No Rusty Swords and I really agree with him. I have stopped respecting cliches and rhetoric based on lies so long ago.
