Some thoughts on the link between the president and big labor by Michelle Malkin

[leroy]

All:_______________

Please take the time to read this column. It is very enlightning.

Link here: Michelle Malkin » Big Labor’s legacy of violence.

Text here:

Michelle Malkin

Big Labor’s legacy of violence

By Michelle Malkin • September 3, 2010 09:31 AM

Thugs-in-chief

My syndicated column today takes on the rise of President Obama’s best new Big Labor buddy, Richard Trumka — whose looming presence on the political scene I first flagged in April. As we noted last week, he’s got a combined $88 million war chest with his labor alliance and a Marxist get-out-the-vote force behind him. When they are through, they’ll make the SEIU Purple Army’s political expenditures (and its thuggery) look like a pittance.

On a related note, the NLRB (with SEIU attorney Craig Becker recess-appointed onto the catbird’s seat) is set to launch an assault on workers’ rights to a secret ballot to remove an unwanted union. See here. Card check through the back door. Who needs the legislative front door?

And yesterday on Megyn Kelly’s show, I noted that union members can opt out of having their hard-earned dues used for political purposes. Several readers e-mailed that they had never heard of the process by which this was possible and wanted to know how they could do it. Here are your rights as a union worker. Here is a backgrounder on the permissible use of forced dues. Here’s my 1999 column on how public school teachers in Washington state challenged their union over their political dues power grab. Free speech not only means the freedom to voice your political views, but also the freedom from being forced to pay for someone else’s. U.S. Supreme Court precedent established by the D.C.-based National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation guarantees the right to full financial disclosure from a union and a right to challenge the figures in court if they disagree. Spread the word.

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Big Labor’s legacy of violence

by Michelle Malkin

Creators Syndicate

Copyright 2010

To mark Labor Day 2010, President Obama will join hands with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in Milwaukee and pose as champions of the working class. Bad move. Trumka’s organizing record is a shameful reminder of the union movement’s violent and corrupt foundations.

The new Obama/AFL-CIO power alliance — underwritten with $40 million in hard-earned worker dues — is a midterm shotgun marriage of Beltway brass knuckles and Big Labor brawn. Trumka warmed up his rhetorical muscles this past week with full-frontal attacks on former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. He indignantly accused her of “getting close to calling for violence†and suggested that her criticism of Tea Party-bashing labor bosses amounted to “terrorizing†workers.

Trumka and Obama will cast Big Labor as an unassailable force for good in American history. But when it comes to terrorizing workers, Trumka knows whereof he speaks.

Meet Eddie York. He was a workingman whose story will never scroll across Obama’s teleprompter. A nonunion contractor who operated heavy equipment, York was shot to death during a strike called by the United Mine Workers 17 years ago. Workmates who tried to come to his rescue were beaten in an ensuing melee. The head of the UMW spearheading the wave of strikes at that time? Richard Trumka. Responding to concerns about violence, he shrugged to the Virginian-Pilot in September 1993: “I’m saying if you strike a match and you put your finger in it, you’re likely to get burned.†Incendiary rhetoric, anyone?

A federal jury convicted one of Trumka’s UMW captains on conspiracy and weapons charges in York’s death. According to the Washington, D.C.-based National Legal and Policy Center, which tracks Big Labor abuse, Trumka’s legal team quickly settled a $27 million wrongful death suit filed by York’s widow just days after a judge admitted evidence in the criminal trial. An investigative report by Reader’s Digest disclosed that Trumka “did not publicly discipline or reprimand a single striker present when York was killed. In fact, all eight were helped out financially by the local.â€

In Illinois, Trumka told UMW members to “kick the s**t out of every last†worker who crossed his picket lines, according to the Nashville (Ill.) News. And as the National Right to Work Foundation (pdf), the leading anti-forced unionism organization in the country, pointed out, other UMW coalfield strikes resulted in what one judge determined were “violent activities … organized, orchestrated and encouraged by the leadership of this union.â€

Trumka washed off the figurative bloodstains and moved up the ranks. As AFL-CIO secretary, he notoriously refused to testify in a sordid 1999 embezzlement trial involving his labor boss brethren at the Teamsters Union. No surprise. Thugs of a feather: Trumka’s violence-promoting record echoes the riotous Teamsters strikes dating back to the 1950s, when the union organized taxicab companies to target workers with gas bombs, bottles and fists.

And now, Trumka is spearheading a Democratic Party get-out-the-vote campaign by far-left groups — publicized in the revolutionary Marxist People’s World — to “energize an army of tens of thousands who will return to their neighborhoods, churches, schools and voting booths to prevent a Republican takeover of Congress in November and begin building a new permanent coalition to fight for a progressive agenda.â€

Take those as literal fighting words. The bloody consequences of compulsory unionism cannot be ignored.

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Related Labor Day weekend reading: Compulsory Unionism as a Fraternal Conceit? Free Choice for Workers: A History of the Right to Work Movement by Harry G. Hutchison, UC Davis Law Journal.

Posted in: SEIU,Unions

Regular View

© 2004-2010 – Michelle Malkin LLC ‒ all rights reserved

Take the time to go to the article and read the comments section. Union membership is at about 7% or so when you dont count GOVERNMENT UNIONS. That brings the membership up to about 13%. Folks need to think about why this is going on and exactly who these union leaders are.

Interesting read.

Leroy

[StPatrick]

Folks need to think about why this is going on and exactly who these union leaders are.

Leroy

Why? Unfettered access to unearned power over regular working men and women, through a continuous process of violence, intimidation, and corruption. Disguise those actions with talk about how you're "a regular Joe", then beat, maim, and intimidate your oppenents until you achieve absolute victory, even if the regular Joes all lose their jobs as you bankrupt their employers. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Who? Name a national labor leader that hasn't sacrificed the jobs, health, or dignity of his members in order to consolidate power. I'm sure there's one somewhere, but I haven't found him yet.

[Guest 6.8 AR]

People need to understand that it's not necessarily the union that's good or bad.

For the most part, the union membership has very little to do with the actions

of its leaders. Some of them can't even vote their leaders out. Mine just had a

vote on that very subject. It came out right for us.

It took time to corrupt union leadership, just like it took time to corrupt companies.

Poltitcians use both, corrupt them until there is nothing left useable and then

moves on to bigger fish to corrupt. It is all about power, power over anything

that will submit. Unions explain this to their membership by saying how some new

bill will benefit them without disclosing what any consequences are. That's the

part that fills union coffers and the employees lose the jobs somewhere down

the road.

I don't know the entire history of the SEIU, but they seem to be a newer union

that was set up with the mind to organize for the sake of political power. The

Rathke brothers were and are radicals from the 60's that used their marxist

teachings to organize for their marxist goals, not to benefit any employee, other

than by Marx's political doctrine. That isn't the way most of the other unions

came about, to the best of my knowledge.

The founder of the AFL was very anti-socialism and spoke of it. He lost the argument

through political corruption and criminal activity.

Nowadays, you can't find very many unions that aren't infected with the marxist virus

and the money from dues benefit very few, like union leadership and politicians for

the very purpose of maintaining that power. The effectiveness of unions, from what

I have seen is at the bottom several rungs of leadership and that is only to keep

some management from abusing some workers. They have no other function, since

the money went elsewhere.

The Rathke brothers are prime examples of communist "useful idiots" and are criminals

by their own actions:theft, bribery and extortion are their tools. Trumka, the leader of

all is a communist and lets his feelings know on the subject freely, and is paid by every

union member. I don't remember voting for him.

The first thing I learned about unions was when I was a kid reading an article in Reader's

Digest about the corruption of the Central States pension fund(I think the name's right)

where the money went somewhere else and not to the benefit of the people it was

supposed to. That was the Teamsters. There have been many examples since then.

The democrats have co-opted unions with their progressives that took over the party

probably a hundred years ago. There are corrupt people leading most unions, some

merely by association with the AFL/CIO and others directly, like the Rathke brothers

and Andy Stern. They are criminals by their actions and are directed by their political

ideology. Please don't confuse them with the ones that pay these criminal their pay,

because most of them don't have a clue where their money goes.

I know.

Get rid of the correct politicians and the corrupt union leaders and you would see a

huge difference in the way businesses and workers treat each other. There's a lot more

to it than just that, but things would change to everyone's benefit.

Quit voting for democrats!

[Guest Drewsett]

It is all about power, power over anything

that will submit. Unions explain this to their membership by saying how some new

bill will benefit them without disclosing what any consequences are. That's the

part that fills union coffers and the employees lose the jobs somewhere down

the road.

The problem with unions is the problem with most people here in the United States today...when given the option, people will vote themselves perks, and damn the constitutionality or the consequences. People feel "entitled" to "their share". It sickens me to see it in non-union settings just as much as it sickens me to see it in union settings, the only difference is that the unions are more effective at money-grabbing because they are a large voting bloc that the leaders can use to be "kingmakers" or on the other hand to destroy a political career.

Alexis de Tocqueville said it best (see the quote in my profile).

[Guest 6.8 AR]

That's a good point. It's everywhere.