That Time I Was (Willingly) on Fox News
On a slow news day in March of 2002, I was the token socialist for a roundtable segment on the “O’Reilly Factor.” I think they destroyed the tape, because I haven’t been able to find it on any transcription service. When Fox News still handled this stuff themselves, they claimed there was 12 hours of missing footage from the day – conveniently including the live show and its late-night re-run.
Anyway, with some help I was able to dig up this transcript. What’s interesting is how much has – and hasn’t – changed. What hasn’t changed is that Bill O’Reilly has always been a full-of-shit asshole. Even when we went to commercial, he continued to be a sanctimonious prick.
What has changed is that nobody could get away with denying the very existence of poverty in America today. And it would be hard to dismissively say “there aren’t a lot of you” socialists.
By the way, one of the funnier things that the transcript misses is my response to the writer from Parade magazine (who was also serving as Treasurer of the Democratic National Committee at the time) encouraging me to join the Dems. I laughed and said something like, “I can’t believe you just invited the socialist to join the Democratic party live on Fox News. The internet is going to go nuts tomorrow.”
Anyway, this was much better than the time that Tucker Carlson libeled me on “Fox and Friends.”
Unresolved Problem
Interview With Andrew Tobias and Shaun Richman
Fox News Network THE O’REILLY FACTOR (20:37)
March 1, 2002 Friday
O’REILLY: Thank you for staying with us. I’m Bill O’Reilly.
In the “Unresolved Problem” segment tonight, the money we earn. “Parade” magazine is out Sunday with its annual money edition, listing the salaries of hundreds of Americans. The average American worker makes $31,000 a year.
But some of us make a lot more than that. 20-year-old Britney Spears, for example, made close to $40 million last year. Shaquille O’Neill is in for $24 million. Regis Philbin, $35 million. Question is, is the income gap unfair?
With us now is Andrew Tobias, who wrote the article for Parade magazine and Shaun Richman, the executive director of the American Socialist Foundation. So you say in your essay, after the article, that it is unfair, that the salaries in America aren’t fair?
ANDREW TOBIAS, PARADE MAG PERSONAL FINANCE EDITOR: Well, life is unfair. But I don’t have a problem with celebrities. You know, no one forces you to buy a CD or go to a movie or watch “Friends” or whatever. And Jennifer Aniston made $15 million, you don’t have to watch her on “Friends.” And you don’t have to buy the products. It’s free to watch NBC. And you don’t have to buy the products that are advertised.
O’REILLY: But what about these CEO weasles?
TOBIAS: But that’s — exactly, that’s the distinction I draw. Because in the celebrities, it’s the free market. In 1980, the average CEO of a very top company made 42 times as much as the average worker. In 2000, it was 531 times as much as the average worker. And if that’s what you have to pay in a free market to get really good talent…
O’REILLY: I don’t think so.
TOBIAS: But here’s the thing. And I quoted Fortune, so I didn’t put it on me because some people think I’m not far enough to the right. Fortune had a cover story called “The Great CEO Pay Heist.” And they said it’s highway robbery and everybody…
O’REILLY: It is.
TOBIAS: And what it is — and the reason it’s not a free market. I mean, some of course, many executives are worth exactly what they’re paid. And good for them. But at a lot of these huge pay packages are done, there’s this kind of club between I’m a director and you’re a company, you’re a director on my compensation committee. The consultants are all in it together. And if “Fortune” is screaming about it, and saying that it’s highway robbery…
O’REILLY: Yes, I mean look, a guy like Ken Lay making what, $50 million a year or whatever he’s making, he doesn’t know what’s going on? I mean, come on.
Now Mr. Richman, you’re a socialist, right?
SHAUN RICHMAN, AMERICAN SOCIALIST FOUNDATION: Yes.
O’REILLY: OK, and there aren’t too many of you in this country. We’re a capitalistic country, but what is the basic unfairness of somebody like Shaquille O’Neill making $25 million, if he’s worth that kind of money for the free enterprise that he works for?
RICHMAN: I’m not sure — well, I think that it’s certainly fair. If there’s going to be that much money in the system, labor’s entitled to what it produces. So I actually think in the current system, Shaquille O’Neill deserves that money a lot more than whoever owns the team and the people in the back office.
The problem is, again, with the income gap. The top fifth of people in this country, top fifth income earners, own four-fifths of the wealth. And it’s just not a sustainable system. And poverty is actually much worse than you described.
You konw, the average income is $30,000. The median income is much lower. You know, 20 percent of the kids in this country are living in poverty. 60 percent of all people will live in poverty for one year of their life.
O’REILLY: Not in the United States.
RICHMAN: In the United States.
O’REILLY: No, that’s bogus. I mean, that’s a socialist stat. You can believe it if you want to, but it’s not true.
RICHMAN: It comes from Cornell University.
O’REILLY: Well, what more do I have to say? It comes from Cornell University. But what I’m saying to you is, look, in the socialist system, you want to redistribute income. You want to take income from the big companies and give it to people, right?
RICHMAN: Yes.
O’REILLY: But you can’t give stuff to people. I mean, that never works or the Soviet Union would be still here. Wouldn’t it?
RICHMAN: It works in many countries in Europe.
O’REILLY: Like where?
RICHMAN: Like France, for example.
O’REILLY: France doesn’t take it from you. They basically say we’ll give you cradle to grave entitlementments. They don’t send you a check.
RICHMAN: They do, in fact, have family allowances.
O’REILLY: For certain welfare families, but we have that here as well.
RICHMAN: It’s actually, these are universal systems. I’m not as familiar with the various different…
O’REILLY: All right, so you believe…
RICHMAN: These are universal programs.
O’REILLY: …you should give people money, just because they’re in your country? Give them money?
RICHMAN: I think you give people money for having families.
O’REILLY: For having kids?
RICHMAN: For having kids.
O’REILLY: Just give them money for having kids?
RICHMAN: Yes…
O’REILLY: Mr. Tobias, you don’t agree with that, do you?
RICHMAN: We’re certainly not talking $35 million.
TOBIAS: I would like to see, Shaun, whose opinions I respect, I’d like to see him join the Democratic party, where we really do care about the little guy in a more practical way, because this stuff is not likely to happen.
O’REILLY: No, it’s never going to happen.
TOBIAS: But the earned income credit, that the Democrats are for, and the minimum wage and all kinds of the things that our friends in the other party are for, that’s, I think, a very practical way to get at some of this. I’m for the progressive income tax.
O’REILLY: OK, I’m not for that.
TOBIAS: I know.
O’REILLY: But look, I’m paid 50 cents on the dollar. And I make a lot of money, OK?
TOBIAS: Right.
O’REILLY: But I don’t make what it’s printed in the papers. That’s not even close. Are you sure that these salaries are right, that your Parade magazine?
TOBIAS: We low-balled yours.
O’REILLY: What?
TOBIAS: We low-balled yours.
O’REILLY: I’m not even in there. But are you sure they’re right?
TOBIAS: No, I mean, I didn’t do the salaries. But most of them are right. And some of them, for the really high dollar people, it’s hard to figure out what to include.
O’REILLY: OK, but here’s the deal. And you ought to know this, too, Shaun, is that for many years, I didn’t make any money. OK? And I lived in my younger time in a very frugal environment. OK? So I don’t believe that the government has the right, now that I’m successful, due to hard work and some luck, to come into my house and take my money and give it to other people, and they don’t even know what these people are going to do with it. That’s wrong, morally wrong.
TOBIAS: Well, but you know, it’s a balance, isn’t it? I’m sure you wouldn’t know. Or you would correct me if I’m wrong, that everybody should just pay a flat $3,000 a year. You and the poorest people and everybody, you would say, even with a flat tax, obviously…
O’REILLY: You pay more. I don’t mind paying what I pay, 50 percent, if it weren’t wasted. It is.
TOBIAS: Well, wait a second. So you’re saying that you — the progressive income tax is OK, as long as it’s spent well? All right.
O’REILLY: As long — that’s right, as long as it’s responsible, because at war, you wouldn’t need that much money. You could have a fair progressive tax that wouldn’t take as much as it does. But I’m not moaning about it. I just see the corruption in the system.
But you, you want to take my money. You want to come into my house, all right, after I worked hard all these years and did a lot more than you’ll ever do, in the sense that I got shot at, I had to move around. I mean, I went through a lot of abuse.
And so do these athletes. OK? They train themselves, they make a big score, but they blow out their bodies and all that. You want to take our money and give it to somebody who you don’t even know. Doesn’t that bother you?
RICHMAN: Are you living in poverty as a result of this 50 percent?
O’REILLY: Am I living in poverty? No, but what right do you or anybody else have, even in France, to take other peoples’ money and give it to somebody you don’t know? What right do you have, morally?
RICHMAN: It’s a basic system of fairness. Now when you weren’t making that money…
O’REILLY: Yes.
RICHMAN: When you were living in dire straits, wouldn’t it have been nicer to have a system where…
O’REILLY: No, I wouldn’t have taken a dime.
RICHMAN: You wouldn’t have taken a dime?
O’REILLY: No. Absolutely not.
RICHMAN: You would have died of tuberculosis?
O’REILLY: That’s right. And I wouldn’t have kids unless I could support them. That’s right, because I don’t believe in taking other peoples’ stuff and giving it to me. I won’t even take Social Security when I’m older. I’ll give it back or I’ll give it to charity. You see? That’s where you guys are wrong. You’re taking stuff, you’re making value judgments. You’re giving it to other people and you don’t know what those other people are going to do. That’s wrong. Am I wrong?
TOBIAS: No, I — if I dreamed of being on your show, I wouldn’t have expected to be in this nice position. I happen to think that while Shaun’s instincts are great, he’s too far to the left. I happen to have respect for you and a lot of what you’re saying.
O’REILLY: Think about it, though.
TOBIAS: But to the extent, and I’m not saying you’re the Republican leadership, but I think that there is a balance here.
O’REILLY: It has to be done fairly. It has to be done fairly.
TOBIAS: I totally agree with you. I totally agree.
O’REILLY: Not taking it. All right, gentlemen, thanks very much. Always fun to read that Parade piece.
TOBIAS: Thank you.
O’REILLY: Mel Gibson when we come back in a moment.
Next Stop
I was on the 1 train today, riding from Whitehall (South Ferry) to SoHo. There were a bunch of high-acheiving high school nerds trading notes on AP courses and SAT prep. As the train pulled out of the Rector St. station, one of them misheard the conductor’s garbled “Next Stop!” announcement and gasped, “Wait, is that open now?”
Confusion, as every part of this conversation was initially misunderstood by each other:
Kid 2: “What, no. Chambers is open.”
Kid 1: “No, that other stop that’s always under construction.”
Kid 3: “I sincerely hope not. We’re late enough.”
Kid 4: “I hear that station’s gonna be closed for, like, three years.”
Kid 3: “That station has been closed for, like, 20 years. Like, after 20 years, does anyone even want to go to Cortlandt Street anymore?”
Cortlandt St. – for those of you not from around here – has been greyed out and listed as “TEMPORARILY CLOSED” on subway maps since October of 2001. It was obliterated when the Towers fell. There are now mostly-functional semi-adult human beings currently earning college level credits who have never known it as anything but an urban wreck, a permanent construction zone, a ghost train station.
Recipe: Maple Clam Chowder
The Cost, not the Cure
Chris Brooks has an excellent piece in the new issue of New Labor Forum that grapples with the question of whether unions should cede exclusive representation if the country goes “right-to-work.” As the title of his article, “The Cure Worse than the Disease: Expelling Freeloaders in an Open-Shop State,” suggests, he’s against it:
Ceding exclusive representation to “kick out the scabs,” as Richman would have it, might be okay for a high-functioning local with high union density, but a union with 60 percent membership is likely to create an entrenched, adversarial minority. A union representing Geoghegan’s “40 percent, or 30, or fewer” can easily succumb to being nothing more than a marginal minority. So long as unions are treated as third-party vendors of services, as Fisk and Sachs describe them, then it will be easy for yellow unions to provide the same insurance, professional development, and discounted movie tickets at a lower cost.
Members-only unionism might be a solution to the free-rider problem that unions face in an open-shop environment, but it is not a solution for the internal divisions between workers that unions must overcome if the labor movement is to grow. The labor movement is at its strongest when it is capable of fighting for all workers as a class, living up to the old refrain “an injury to one is an injury to all.” By advocating for members- only unionism, labor activists run the risk of unwittingly weakening the labor movement by narrowing the scope of union solidarity to a smaller grouping of dues-paying members and setting the stage for yellow unions to pit workers against one another and create further divisions. If the source of a union’s power is the ability of workers to take collective action on the job, then the Tennessee experience high- lights the struggles that confront an increasingly divided and weakened labor movement.
Brooks draws on his own dispiriting experience with multiple (right-wing, boss-friendly) competing unions in the school systems in Tennessee, and engages with some of my writing on the question. I feel like my thinking on the matter gets a bit lost in translation, but it’s my own fault. I’ve been too cute with the subject, dealing with it in asides that mostly avoid firmly advocating anything at all.
Partly that’s because I think the union shop is worth defending right now. While I’m playing with thoughts of what we should do if we lose it, I don’t want to appear as if I’m rooting for the loss of agency fee and the chaos that should follow it (Even though I tend to agree with Brooks that “The United States is likely to be an entirely open- shop country in the near future.”).
I do think unionists need to study our history and other countries’ labor movements. We should realize that our combination of exclusive representation at the enterprise level, the union shop and the duty of fair representation is historically and globally bizarre and the product of a series of accidents – not a strategically pursued model. It works when all of the pieces are in play. But if you knock anyone of them out, as “right-to-work” destroyers seek to do, then the whole system becomes unworkable. That unworkability is initially and acutely felt by the unions, which makes it incumbent on us to spread the pain and blow the whole system up if the union-busters win a national “right-to-work.”
One day, when I’m not promoting Labor’s Bill of Rights, I’ll deal with this subject at length. I’ve got 10,000 semi-abandoned words just dealing with how the current U.S. labor framework accidentally fell together waiting to be dusted off. In the meantime, I did want to quickly respond to Chris Brooks’ very good piece.
First of all, he’s right that when I write about this, I’m thinking of a high-functioning private sector contract. What I’ve studied most are the unions of the NYC hotel industry in the 1920’s and 30’s who competed for strike leadership every few years and drove the industry so batty that they eventually voluntarily recognized a merged union in 1939 to buy themselves some peace. I don’t think that the public sector in the south is the place to start an experiment like this.
But, I’ve also been very clear that if unions cede exclusive representation that other organizations will step into the space they’ve ceded and that those are likely to be company unions and right-wing outfits at first. My first piece for In These Times was actually on this subject. I was responding to a piece by Moshe Marvit that advocated organizing new “members only” bargaining units to side-step the rigged NLRB election process and win a union for the workers who want them. I thought it’s a fine idea but that we should all be clear that that would inevitably lead to multiple competing unions:
If labor cedes exclusivity, we can expect more independents like ACE to fill the void. We should also expect the Horseshoers and Hod Carriers and the whole cottage industry of corrupt unions that were long ago thrown out of the AFL-CIO for unprincipled raiding to troll around for disgruntled dues payers. And nobody should be surprised if Koch brothers-funded, States Policy Network affiliates like Michigan’s Mackinac Center shop around the legal and member benefits services of new, explicitly anti-union “unions.”
But the hope here is that eventually other real unions rise up to challenge each other for shop floor leadership in terms of who can pick the right issues, the best fights and lead the best protest actions. Here is where my point gets a bit muddled in Brooks’ re-telling:
Shaun Richman imagines a future in which employers bargain multiple contracts with separate unions representing different workers in the same workforce, creating the conditions for union competition and employer “chaos.”
I’ll be clear here: in a model of multiple unions competing in a workplace, the best case scenario is one contract for the unit. More likely is that this is a contract-less labor world where unions demand to bargain over changes in working conditions on a rolling basis. Now, I’m assuming here that the Unfair Labor Practice protections of the National Labor Relations Act remain in place (And that is a fairly major assumption in a right-to-work world where unions lose perhaps half of their membership and power in a few short years). That would mean that employers still have a duty to bargain “in good faith” with a union that demands it, and that an employer cannot discriminatorily apply work rules on the basis of union membership.
So, if one union raises an issue – a wage increase, a work quota reduction, etc. – and wins it, that settlement would have to be applied to all workers in the bargaining unit. And if a different union regards that settlement as a sell-out and continues to agitate and organize around it and somehow wins a better settlement, that would have to replace the old settlement as the new work rule for the entire unit.
In this scenario, I imagine that most unions will still see it as advantageous to seek a signed collective bargaining agreement, and that some employers might view signing one with a strong workplace leader as temporarily advantageous for getting a degree of peace. If they sign a deal, they’ll find ways to not negotiate with other unions during the terms of the agreement while the other unions spend the meantime shitting all over the deal to jockey for workplace leadership in the next round of bargaining.
With me so far? I feel like I’m writing the labor law equivalent of a sci-fi spec script.
Here, I think, is where the potential for chaos comes in to play. Those other unions? The ones that hate the contract and are organizing against it? Does the “no-strike” provision of the contract apply to them? Why? They’re not members of the union that signed it. That union made a promise to keep its own members from striking, with the enforcement mechanism being that any member who is a party to the agreement has signed off on the non-grievability of terminating someone who strikes during the term of the agreement. I think this would be the effective end of “no-strike” agreements, which have been one of the greatest inhibitors to labor militancy in the last half century.
The other major potential gain here is also where I think this experiment is more likely to get carried out: in new organizing. The loss of agency fee really ought to make unions ask themselves why they are losing elections at the NLRB to vie for the obligations of representing all of the workers in a bargaining unit with no promise of compensation for the political costs and the loss of resources. Back to that first In These Times piece:
Charles J. Morris, in his 2005 book The Blue Eagle at Work, reminds us that in its first few years, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) used to certify minority unions as the bargaining agent for that union’s members only, and that such a mechanism still exists (although the modern Board has dodged efforts to get a ruling to respond to Morris’ assertion).
The employers’ preference to deal with somewhere between zero and one unions has been enshrined in the legal preference for exclusive representation. As well, the civil rights thrust of the duty of fair representation make going back to members only certifications a steep hill to climb (made steeper still by the current occupant of the White House). But the loss of the union shop is an opening for unions to argue that the trade-offs are unjust and unsustainable and that the law should return to what we needed it to be in 1935: a guarantee that anywhere a group of workers have joined together as a union, the employer must deal with them as a union.
We don’t know where our breakthrough opportunities are going to arise. How we respond to and exploit anti-union legal pushes is within our control and where some potential for good change occurs. We’re not talking about “curing” an unjust “right-to-work” push; we’re talking about how to make the open shop onslaught cost the bosses in ways they never anticipated.