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Labor Day Redux: Union Thugs Respond

Union thug Richard Trumka and his buddy Barack
I’ve come under some fire from a few union lackeys over my Labor Day post — teamsters who have contacted me to tell me how misguided my closing lines actually are. You see, in describing unions as having a long history of hatred and violence toward non-union members like me, I’m accused of being “unfair.”

Well, I wonder.

Via Michelle Malkin, who has been indefatigable on this subject:

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.”

In Illinois, Trumka told UMW members to “kick the shit 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.”

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.”

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

Also, according to the FBI, “four of the last eight Teamsters presidents have been criminally indicted and since FY 2001, racketeering investigations have yielded more than 2,000 indictments and awarded more than $3 billion in fines and restitution. In past union elections, Hoffa’s team was caught laundering union funds for electioneering and for campaign polling on dues-payers’ dime.”

(Link)

And here’s more:

AFSCME, UFCW, and SEIU corner Republican Congressman and shout: “Fuck you!” “Shame!”

Union thugs in front of Verizon Vice President Bill Foshay’s private home yelling: “We’re here to fight, Bill!”

Union thug to Jewish guy: “Bad Jew!”

Union thug to Fox News reporter: “I hate you because it makes me feel good.”

Union thug in Ohio: “The tea party is a bunch of dick-sucking corporate butt-lickers who want to crush the working people of this country…. You’re fucking hypocrites.”

And in Denver, racist SEIU supporters taunt gay black entrepreneur Leland Robinson, who had the nerve to (correctly) criticize teacher’s unions at a Capitol rally: “Get behind that fence where you belong! Do you have any children? That you claim?”




Yes, poor misunderstood teamsters indeed.



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Labor Day, Labor Unions, And The REAL Story

For over 100 years now in the United States, the first Monday in September has been called Labor Day. The original Labor Day, however, was celebrated on a Tuesday (September 5, 1882) in New York City. It was organized by the Central Labor Union, and it wasn’t until 1884 that the first Monday in September was selected as the official day of Labor Day — or, as it was then called, “the workingmen’s holiday.”

On its website, the U.S. Department of Labor says this about Labor Day:

It is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers…. The vital force of labor added materially to the highest standard of living and the greatest production the world has ever known and has brought us closer to the realization of our traditional ideals of economic and political democracy.

But did you know that none of this is accurate?

The fact is, there’s one and only one way to increase employee pay while simultaneously shortening employee hours — and that one way has nothing at all to do with labor unions.

It’s through advances in technology:

By replacing bare hands with shovels, by replacing shovels with tractors, by replacing tractors with new inventions, and so on — that is the only way to ease the plight of the worker.

As the economist Joseph Schumpeter put it, technological advances are what in turn enable businesses to produce ever more with ever less, and this is the only thing that advances standards of living, including worker wages and worker hours.

Technology, which capital investment fosters, is and always has been the one and only way to raise the standard of living — for everyone:

[P]retty much all of the gains from the Industrial Revolution went to unskilled labor: rents barely changed, therefore the gains from industrialization were not absorbed by landowners; interest rates barely changed, therefore the gains from industrialization were not absorbed by capitalists; wages — particularly unskilled wages — exploded. The idea that collective bargaining was necessary to prevent worker exploitation is a historical myth (Professor Art Carden, “Labor Day And Freedom,” 2008).

It is for this reason that the capitalists are the people whom we should truly celebrate on Labor Day — not the union thugs with their hatred and their long history of violence toward anyone like me who are not and never will be a union member.

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Labor Unions And Their Communist Allies

As I’ve long said: labor unions and communism go together like white wine and fish.

Anonymous photo journalist Zombie recently confirmed that.

The following photos were captured by Zombie on May 5, 2011, at the May Day rally in downtown Los Angeles. This event was co-sponsored by the SEIU — a gigantic socialist labor organization that Barack Obama is famously fond of:

Barack Obama:

Everybody: There’s not a presidential candidate, a gubernatorial candidate, a congressional candidate, who won’t tell ya, that they’re pro-union, when they’re looking for their endorsements. They’ll all say, ‘Oh we love SEIU.’ But the question you gotta ask yourself is, do they have it in their gut, do they have a track record of standing alongside you on picket lines? Do they have a track record of going after the companies that aren’t letting you organize? Do they have a track record of voting the right way? But also helping you organize to build more and more power?

And some of you know I come from an organizing background, so — I’ve been working with the SEIU before I was elected to anything. When I was a community organizer, SEIU Local 880 and myself we organized people, to make sure that healthcare workers had basic rights; we organized voter registration drives, that’s how we built political power on the South Side of Chicago….and now the time has come for us to do it all across this country, and then we’ll paint the nation purple, with SEIU!

I would not be a United States Senator had it not been for the support of your brothers and sisters in Illinois. Those folks, they supported me early, they supported me often. I’ve got my purple windbreaker from my campaign in 2004.

And so, we’ve just got, what, four more days? Four more days of knocking on some doors. Four more days of working the precinct. Four more days of making sure all your co-workers are caucusing. SEIU, I am glad you are with me, let’s together change the country! SEIU! SEIU! SEIU! SEIU! SEIU!”

Here are Zombie’s unforgettable photos:

Note the red flag this SEIU communist is carrying

Douche


Please read Zombie’s full post here.

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Mayhem In Madison; Death Threats Against Republicans: “Hope you have a good time in hell”

Pandemonium erupts in Madison, Wisconsin, as pro-union protesters converge upon the Capitol to protest the passage of Governor Scott Walker’s so-called union-bargaining bill.

The following is an unedited email, presumably written by a union thug — judging, at least, by the lingo — and published on the website of 620 WTMJ radio, Madison. The letter is relatively short, and if you can stomach it, read every word, typos and all:

Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your familes will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks. Please explain to them that this is because if we get rid of you and your families then it will save the rights of 300,000 people and also be able to close the deficit that you have created. I hope you have a good time in hell. Read below for more information on possible scenarios in which you will die.

WE want to make this perfectly clear. Because of your actions today and in the past couple of weeks I and the group of people that are working with me have decided that we’ve had enough. We feel that you and the people that support the dictator have to die. We have tried many other ways of dealing with your corruption but you have taken things too far and we will not stand for it any longer. So, this is how it’s going to happen: I as well as many others know where you and your family live, it’s a matter of public records. We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head. However, we decided that we wouldn’t leave it there. We also have decided that this may not be enough to send the
message to you since you are so “high” on Koch and have decided that you are now going to single handedly make this a dictatorship instead of a demorcratic process. So we have also built several bombs that we have placed in various locations around the areas in which we know that you frequent. This includes, your house, your car, the state capitol, and well I won’t
tell you all of them because that’s just no fun. Since we know that you are not smart enough to figure out why this is happening to you we have decided to make it perfectly clear to you. If you and your goonies feel that it’s necessary to strip the rights of 300,000 people and ruin their lives, making them unable to feed, clothe, and provide the necessities to their families and themselves then We Will “get rid of” (in which I mean kill) you. Please understand that this does not include the heroic Rep. Senator that risked everything to go aganist what you and your goonies wanted him to do. We feel that it’s worth our lives to do this, because we would be saving the lives
of 300,000 people. Please make your peace with God as soon as possible and say goodbye to your loved ones we will not wait any longer. YOU WILL DIE!!!!

Reply Reply to all Forward

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Unhinged Mob Of Pro-Union Peaceniks Go Beserk In Madison; Shout “Fuck-You” At Republican Senator Glenn Grothman

The mob captured in the following video calls to mind Massachusetts Congressman Michael Capuano’s recent instructions to unions: “Time to get a little bloody.”

Watch:

If you don’t have the time or the stomach to watch, here are some of the highpoints:

“Shame! Shame! Shame!”

“Fuck you! Fuck you!”

All the while clubbing that cheesy tribal drum, backing Grothman up to the side of a building, harassing him across the lawn, cornering him.

Grothman was eventually rescued by Democratic Senator Brett Hulsey.

Barack Obama, whose Organizing For America helped organize this protest, has yet to comment, despite his recent platitudinous appeals to “make all our children proud and improve the national tone.” AFL-CIO union boss Richard Trumka has been likewise silent.

It all just depends upon whose ox is being gored, I guess.



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Labor Unions

The first unions in the United States were formed in the late 18th century, and they’ve always been socialist at their core, explicitly or implicitly.

The principle that most people — union people in particular — do not understand about wages is this:

Wages are determined by worker productivity. Worker productivity is determined by the availability of capital goods(tools) to the worker to help him in his production. The availability of capital goods is determined by the prospect of profiting from such an investment. And the appropriate mix of investment in capital goods results from freedom in the marketplace. Thus anyone concerned with the welfare of workers should be the greatest advocate of free markets (source).

Contrary to what they’ve informed you, labor unions aren’t responsible for the increase in wages and living standards in this country. Advances in technology are.

“Historically, real wages (wages adjusted for the effects of inflation) rose at about 2 percent per year before the advent of unions, and at a similar rate afterward” (Morgan Reynolds, Power and Privilege: Labor Unions in America, 1984).

Quoting Thomas Dilorezo:

If labor unions were responsible for the historical rise in wages, then the solution to world poverty would be self-evident: unionize all the poorest nations on earth. [And yet] private-sector unions reached their peak in terms of membership in the 1950s, when they accounted for about a third of the workforce. Today, they represent barely 10 percent of the private-sector workforce. All during this time of declining union memberships, influence, and power, wages and living standards have risen substantially. All of the ‘declining industries’ in America from the 1970s on tended to be the highly unionized ones, whereas the growing industries, especially in the high-technology fields, are almost exclusively nonunion. At best, unions can improve the standards of living of some of their members, but only at the expense of other, nonunion workers, consumers, and others. When unions use their power to go on strike, or threaten to strike, and succeed in increasing their members’ wages above what they could earn on the free market, they inevitably cause some union members to lose their jobs.

What is the reason for this? The answer is deceptively simple: When wages rise, it makes labor more costly; therefore, to keep turning a profit, employers simply cannot employ as many workers.

In the well-spoken words of economist Jim Cox:

Unions are a matter of pitting one group of workers against other workers; it is not a worker versus manager phenomenon. Successful unions are those which are able to exclude workers, and the unions most able to exclude workers are those composed of skilled workers. Skilled workers are more difficult to replace than unskilled workers and thus are better able to succeed in a strike. As Milton Friedman has stated, “unions don’t cause high wages, high wages cause unions.”

When unions strike they are not merely refusing to work but are preventing any labor from being offered to the employer. Those workers who do cross a union picket line are called “scabs,” thereby illustrating the lack of working class solidarity and clarifying the fact that the issue is one group of workers against other workers. When unions are successful they raise the wages of their membership but do so only at the expense of reducing the number of workers employed by the firm. Those workers unable to find employment in the unionized sector must seek work in the nonunionized sector, thereby depressing the wages for the nonunion workers. Unions do not raise wages, they increase wages for one group of (unionized) workers at the expense of lowering wages for the remaining (nonunionized) workers.

The long and undistinguished history of labor unions is a history of protectionism and violence. And that trend continues to this day — in the following, for instance:

And from the New Hampshire Journal: “Time to get bloody”

A Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts is raising the stakes in the nation’s fight over the future of public employee unions, saying emails aren’t enough to show support and that it is time to “get a little bloody.”

“I’m proud to be here with people who understand that it’s more than just sending an email to get you going. Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary,” Rep. Mike Capuano (D-Ma.) told a crowd in Boston on Tuesday rallying in solidarity for Wisconsin union members. …

This is not Capuano’s first brush with violent rhetoric. Last month Capuano said, “Politicians, I think are too bland today. I don’t know what they believe in. Nothing wrong with throwing a coffee cup at someone if you’re doing it for human rights.”