The tardy Walt Disney, who in congressional testimony accused the Screen Actors Guild of being a communist front, must have rolled in his grave when the CEO of Walt Disney Co. Robert Iger reportedly blurted out:[expletive] you” to Tom Borelli, director of the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research, during Disney’s annual shareholder meeting on Tuesday.
Mr. Borelli says he had just finished informing shareholders from the podium about Mr. Iger’s refusal to sell DVDs or distribution rights to the “Path to 9/11” miniseries, and when he returned to his seat, he tried to shake the hand of Disney’s CEO.
Then some unpleasant words were said. At this point, Mr. Borelli claims he stepped back from the microphone and quoted Mr. Iger word for word, prompting a “gasp” among the gathered shareholders.
“So much for Disney’s family-friendly reputation,” it now says in a statement issued by a conservative think tank and a Washington-based research foundation that supports a robust national defense.
A two-part miniseries based on the federal 9/11 commission’s report, “The Path to 9/11” received seven Emmy nominations after airing to vast audiences in 2006 on Disney’s ABC television station.
The advisory panel suggests that Iger, who has been described as a longtime donor to “liberal politicians,” finds the miniseries too embarrassing for officials who served in the Clinton administration.
DO YOU STILL HAVE DEPRESSION?
On Thursday morning, in testimony before a House subcommittee, noted economist Peter Morici will say that the United States is “plagued by the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression and perhaps the most complex and intractable set of economic challenges in peacetime history of the United States.” our nation.”
He will also warn members of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade that without more effective responses, the current recession “may now turn into a depression.”
“The evidence grows daily that the United States is in the worst economic crisis of our time, and this crisis’s final place in the history of economic disasters has yet to be determined,” Mr. Morici said in a prepared statement.
Professor RH Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland says the country needs more effective stimulus packages and programs than policymakers have already planned “to avoid a total meltdown.”
Thumbs down
Jay Timmons, vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), tells senators he has union roots, but that’s enough.
“I have never met a man for whom I have greater respect and admiration than my grandfather, who was a proud union member at the local paper mill in southern Ohio where I grew up. Most of my extended family and many of my friends had union cards,” Mr. Timmons tells Capitol Hill in the letter.
However, “at the beginning of the last century, pay was unfair, working conditions were unhealthy, and workers had no right to complain or bargain.”
Today, the need to form unions “has declined significantly as employers – especially manufacturers – support positive relationships with employees and understand that these relationships should be conducted in a spirit of mutual respect and honesty.”
Mr. Timmons’ letter follows the recent introduction of the Employee Freedom of Choice Act, which he calls “one of the most immediate threats to economic growth and job retention and creation,” including prohibiting workers from using secret ballots to decide whether to join a union.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“I lived through the years 1964, 1974 and 1992. In 1964 we were beaten so badly that people were talking about the future of this party. By 1966, Lyndon Johnson had already gone so far to the left that he had spilled the Democratic Party and we had won 47 seats in the House of Representatives and several governorships and the Senate. Since 1968, an openly liberal has not been elected in 40 years. In ’74 to ’76 we had Watergate and a major recession and then Reagan. The Battle for the Ford Nomination During this period, only 17 percent of the country identified as Republican, and yet four years later, Reagan won a landslide victory and Carter collapsed in the face of a bad economy. In 1992, Bush, after rejecting fiscal conservatives by raising taxes, lost a three-way race, and two years later we won the House for the first time in 40 years and kept it. I know how quickly a country can change.”
– Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, reminding Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift that the country’s political landscape can change in the blink of an eye
