From Investors.com:

Is there any low to which the SEIU won’t stoop? Now it’s interrupting blood donations in a strike against the American Red Cross. The Boy Scouts and Baptist churches are also on unions’ enemies list.

Demanding higher wages and better benefits, the Service Employees International Union on Wednesday launched a three-day strike against the Red Cross’ blood donation operations. The job action comes as the nonprofit, in a realistic response to the weak economy, is cutting salaries, ending bonuses and reducing pensions.

SEIU thinks its members should not only be exempt from the Red Cross’ efforts to live within its means, but actually get a raise.

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In December 1908, the President of Haiti, Nord Alexis, attempted one last, desperate, act before leaving office; spiriting his family away to the safety of Jamaica, then New Orleans, to escape the rising tumult in the Haitian capital of  Port-au-Prince.  I give thanks that he was successful, for Nord Alexis was my ancestor.  His foresight, in getting his family out of Haiti and into the U.S., made my life, with the freedom, opportunity, and prosperity that only America can offer, possible.   My story is just one of many strange incidents connecting Haiti and the United States over the past hundred years.  With the devastation wreaked by the recent earthquake, it is clear that a new chapter in Haitian-U.S. relations is about to be written.

Americans should be proud of our quick response to the devastating earthquake that has wiped out virtually all services, businesses, schools, and institutions in Port-au-Prince.   Our President, Barack Obama, has moved government resources and emergency management experts to the area without hesitation, debate or delay.

Within hours, the US Air Force had reestablished air control and the long line of aid and assistance began to flow.   The Army’s 82, All-American Division,  is already on the ground helping to reassert law and order, as well as assist in the difficult job of distribution of relief aid.   Each day more planes arrive in Haiti, with even more assistance.

More impressively, American citizens and private companies have already raised millions in relief with more on the way.   Dozens of organizations such as the American Red Cross, Catholic Relief Services,  and Salvation Army, have already mobilized their resources and are on the ground providing relief efforts in a hundred different ways.

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As one Change to Win labor union blocks a Red Cross blood delivery today, what will a health care system taken hostage by labor unions look like tomorrow?

As Change to Win’s Anna Burger is leading her coalition of unions to lobby all around the country “until every man, woman and child has quality, affordable care they can count on,” one of her unions is busy blocking the delivery of a Red Cross blood donation to a hospital and picketing private companies’ blood drives.

The Red Cross, which has union workers in various locations who are covered both by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and SEIU, says union leaders are trying to disrupt the Red Cross Blood Services operations by going on strike.

That’s right.  At a time of year when blood donations are at their lowest levels and are the most urgently needed, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, SEIU’s sister union and member of Burger’s Change to Win labor coalition, took advantage of the opportunity to go on strike on December 4th against the American Red Cross Blood Services Penn-Jersey Region.  Local 929  initiated the strike at midnight just as their contract expired.  Hours later, the Red Cross was forced to take legal action when some strikers illegally blocked one blood delivery in particular

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You gotta hand it to most politicians: only seven Senators stuck by ACORN and the White House is doing its best to bail on the group caught on tape helping James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles in their (thankfully fake) effort to set up prostitution rings involving children.

Pols know when to let a disaster occur without getting themselves mussed. But not so with the hard-charging, uber-wealthy lefty funder who has been enabling ACORN’s seedy action for decades. Drummond Pike, longtime head of the Tides funding mechanism, has come out swinging at Fox News for attacking ACORN. In fact, he goes so far as to claim:

I wonder how many nonprofit organizations — even big, well-heeled ones like the Nature Conservancy or the Red Cross — could withstand the kind of media assault and unscrupulous tactics deployed by Fox? I doubt many could.

One wonders what Mr. Pike knows about the Red Cross that we do not. We have generally been under the impression they work to alleviate suffering, rather than foster it.

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