Richard Trumka, that fearless leader of the AFL-CIO, is a strange bird indeed. He uses the lexicon of Marx and Lenin, has a mustache that looks like it’s glued on, and emanates a rage previously reserved for Alec Baldwin voicemails. As a union man, he’s accustomed to living off the public dole, and since Obama assumed the presidency, has enjoyed seeing billions of taxpayer dollars used to prop up union causes and industries (like the very Detroit automakers unions previously destroyed).

And although the money Obama threw at Detroit will result in a $23.6 billion loss for the American people, Trumka is unrepentant because it keeps his union operational and other Leninist outposts going strong as well.

Here’s the problem – Trumka is a taker. Take, take, take, take, and after taking, all he can do is demand more. (He’s like a kid whose parents never taught the meaning of “no.”) Thus it comes as no surprise he now stands in “solidarity” with the hippies and freaks that constitute #OccupyWallStreet, which is another group of takers. Rather than work they take over public parks, march in the streets, throw rocks through windows, all while moaning that the rich won’t hand over more of their money to the unwashed masses.

To date, the occupy movements have been marred by death, sexual assaults, kidnappings, drug use, attacks on policemen, masturbation in front of children, destruction of property, defecation in the streets, and a couple of bullets fired at the White House (all harmlessly enough I’m sure).  And through it all, these takers have been backed by unions who are best served by dividing one portion of Americans against another using the tired rhetoric of workers v. the rich or the 99% v. the 1% or the proletariat v. the bourgeoisie.

Of course Trumka isn’t without his supporters. President Obama lets him travel for free on taxpayer funded government jets in September and that freak of nature Michael Moore joins Trumka in outrage over the fact that the police in various cities are finally cracking down on occupiers.

Trumka’s latest stunt is to call for occupiers to fill up bridges in cities around the nation today at 4 pm. As part of “National Occupy Bridge Day,” the plan is to shut down traffic on bridges leading in and out of major U.S. cities in order to get Obama’s jobs bill passed. I wonder how creating a public nuisance certain to outrage people driving home from their jobs is going to raise support for legislation designed to dump more money into the pockets of union thugs and hippies like those in #OccupyWallStreet?

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The United Steelworkers (USW) Marxist president Leo Gerard believes if Big Labor can’t get what it wants through the ballot box it’s time to start cracking skulls.

The Canadian-born Gerard loves a brawl. In 1999 he helped the violent anarchists protesting in Seattle block access to the World Trade Organization meetings. USW sent 1,400 goons to shut the talks down. Gerard’s agitation helped to push Algoma Steel of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, into bankruptcy in the 1990s.

As the USW president since 2001, Gerard wholeheartedly supports the labor-backed Occupy Wall Street movement and wants it to become even more violent.

“You’re damn right Wall Street occupiers speak for us,” he recently told left-wing radio host Ed Schultz. “They do in Pittsburgh, they do in Chicago, they do in Oakland, they do in San Francisco, they do all across the country. And I think what we need is, we need more militancy.”

But occupying cities isn’t enough in the view of this man who began his career in labor activism at age 11 by handing out leaflets before a strike.

Gerard explained that the left needs to start a “resistance” movement. “If Wall Street occupation doesn’t get the message, I think we’ve got to start blocking bridges and doing that kind of stuff,” he said.

“And no wonder people are occupying. We ought to be doing more than occupying parks. We ought to start occupying bridges. We ought to start occupying the banks, places themselves.”

Gerard is a member of the AFL-CIO’s executive committee and chairman of its public policy committee.

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The city of Cincinnati is broke.

Their 2011 budget includes a $55 million deficit. Part of the problem is that Cincinnati public employees enjoy some of the most generous perks in the state.

The City Council-approved contracts include benefits that, among other things, permit manyworkers to draw 13 sick days a year, grant three weeks’ worth of compensatory time to public safety employees for holidays whether they work them or not, and entitle veteran police officers to nearly 10½ weeks of various leaves annually.

That’s bad enough, but here’s what makes it even worse. These employees can save up all those days and cash them in when they retire or leave for another job. It isn’t rare for these payouts to be over six figures.

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If there’s one thing about the Marxists controlling today’s unions, it is that they are predictable. If you watch them long enough, the pattern is always the same: Demand the extreme with something attainable in mind as the fallback position.

In labor relations, the making of outrageous demands is a classic negotiating tactic at the bargaining table because union negotiators know company negotiators will only agree to what they are willing to based on business economics. In politics, however, the union tactic is an absolute winner because their prey (politicians, many of whom are bought by unions anyway) always fall for it and, besides, it’s only the taxpayers who are stuck with the tab. One thing though, whether at the bargaining table or in politics, unions always reveal their hidden agenda—eventually.

In the case of the #OccupyWallStreet, union bosses were eager to capitalize on a slick ad campaign and some miscreant professional protesters to create a “movement” to aid their own sagging fortunes. Despite the multiple rapes, the assaults and drug dealing, open sex, public masturbation,  anti-American rants, and violence, from the beginning, unions were eager to jump on board with the Neo-Communist squatters, their anti-Semites and their useful idiots in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. Since then, unions have paid for protesters, water, food, legal fees, advertising and, in West Virginia, the AFL-CIO has even offered its property to use as a new “occupy” site.

Despite their more ambitious young allies who have called for the seizing private property and the “de-privatization of everything,” however, unions have known that their movement wouldn’t lead to a fully Marxist nation (yet) and, as a result, have had a more attainable goal in mind from the beginning. In addition, with winter approaching, union bosses know they need to being this movement to a close sometime soon and, up until now, they haven’t formally issued their real demands. (more…)

Richard Trumka is a thug’s thug, and a crafty one at that.

The AFL-CIO boss believes the end justifies the means. Breaking the law is acceptable if it advances the cause. Unions should “forget about the law; this is about more than that,” he said at the “Future of Unions” roundtable in Detroit on April 7th.

Like many union leaders, occasionally the slippery Trumka pretends to like capitalism. He supports vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, not because he actually believes in them but because his members work in industries that depend on their enforcement. Turning a blind eye to the manufacture of counterfeit machine parts could put union members out of work.

But unlike most high-profile leftists, Trumka doesn’t even make an effort to conceal his radicalism. “Being called a socialist is a step up for me,” he told Bloomberg News in June. In 1994, Trumka proudly accepted the Eugene Debs Award named after the five-time presidential candidate and labor organizer who founded the Socialist Party of America.

As an AFL-CIO executive, Trumka helped to create “Union Summer,” a program for training young people as organizers and political activists. Participants were made to recite a pledge called “Working Class Commitment” that included the Marxist idea “that we [union workers] produce the world’s wealth … [and] will end all oppression.”

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One of the boldest labor thugs in America today is Stephen Lerner, a crafty economic terrorist who manages to sound like a folksy self-improvement seminar leader while he explicitly calls for the overthrow of capitalism.

“People are ready to move,” said Lerner, an organizer with the radical Service Employees International Union (SEIU). “We have solutions. We just have to build it bigger and larger,” he said during a panel discussion Oct. 3 at the Take Back the American Dream conference in Washington, D.C.

If we are really serious about movement building then we think one part is we have to act heroically, that we have to inspire people by our actions and we have to be willing to take incredible personal and collective risks, that that’s the time and there’s moments where history shifts and we’re going to decide if it shifts. That’s where I think we are and it’s a wonderful place to be because for the last couple of years it’s been shifting the other way.

An SEIU board member, Lerner is one of the architects of a subversive plan that aims to destroy the nation’s financial system through intimidation, mass protests, and the mob violence that accompanies it. As part of it, Lerner targeted JPMorgan Chase for attack earlier this year because the bank would be “a really good company to hate.”

Lerner told a receptive union audience that it is necessary to demonize people like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in order to generate hatred and envy that will help to foment revolution. “We’ve got to be clear on the human beings who are bad,” he told the SEIU 775 convention in Seattle on Sept. 22. Wealthy corporate leaders must be made into social outcasts, despised even by their children, he said. “How do we make it so politicians don’t even want their money because their money’s toxic, it’s dirty, it’s evil.”

“It’s one thing if we say JPMorgan Chase crashed the economy. It’s another thing if we say Jamie Dimon makes $20 million a year, who is involved in the opera and all these philanthropies, and thinks he’s a nice guy, and he’s destroying our lives.”

Lerner also calls upon state and local governments to stop doing business with banks that refuse to pay their “fair share” in taxes, slash interest rates, and forgive overextended homeowners’ mortgage principal. He urges students and local governments –which employ many public sector union members— not to pay back “[u]nfair [d]ebt” unless interest rates are lowered. Such a loan strike “would threaten CEO bonuses and bottom lines of the banks.”

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In yet another example the Obama Administration’s pandering to its union cronies while thumbing its nose at the other 88% of America that is union free, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis will be headlining (at taxpayer expense) to an AFL-CIO “summit” later this week in Minneapolis. The subject of the conference? How to unionize young people (and others).

Targeting younger workers has been part of the AFL-CIO’s strategy since Richard Trumka took over the reins of the AFL-CIO in 2009. Elizabeth Shuler, the AFL-CIO’s Secretary Treasurer, has been spearheading the effort and is hosting the “Next Up: Young Workers Summit” in Minneapolis later this week.

The summit was announced back in March on the Communist-run People’s World website:

The AFL-CIO’s new young workers advisory council is taking charge of the movement to invigorate the labor movement – and make its leadership more youthful – says Liz Shuler, the federation’s secretary-treasurer.

One key step, she said, will be a second “Next Up” summit for young workers and activists, to be held in Minneapolis-St. Paul from Sept. 28-Oct. 2.

Shuler has led the effort to make labor’s leadership younger and look more like its members.  The first summit, in D.C. last year, drew approximately 300 delegates from around the country.  Shuler hopes for 800 this time. (more…)

REP. CHARLES RANGEL:  Hiya boys and girls.  It’s me again, your Uncle Chollie in Washington.  I help your Uncle Sam take care of you and your mom, and your dad, too, if he hasn’t run off yet.

I’m here to introduce someone special, a person who can calm the raging Maxine Waters with a look, sell solar panels below cost and still make a profit, and cause the stock market to plummet with a single word.

C’mon, kids, give it up for the President of the United States, Baraaccck Obama!

FADE TO:

A Command and Control bunker deep beneath the White House.  Wearing a headset, the President is sitting at a console facing three large-screen HD monitors showing complementary views of a tactical assault in progress.   He is issuing orders.

At a break in the action, the CIC swivels to face the camera, covers his mike, and whispers:

Hey kids.  Good to see you again.   Hold on a sec; I’m just finishing up a mission here.

He turns back to direct the closing moments of the operation:

Zulu 1: secure perimeter.  Henderson: white SUV fleeing site.  Task Predator to take it out.  Bravo 1: Standoff See-Through Infrared shows targets at top of stairwell. Body signatures confirmed.  Authorization granted. [pause] Roger that.  Well done.  Bring me back some ears. (more…)

Last night the President started his reelection campaign for real by setting up the Republican Party to take a fall.  Today he takes that act on the road.

Allow me to put the entire speech into two sentences, “Hey Republicans,  Pass my bill or its your fault the American people are out of work. If you do not pass it, I will demonize you on my way to winning reelection.” It’s  interesting that Obama started and ended his speech, saying that his proposal was not political.  Understand that everything he said between those two declarations was 100% political.

This was not the new creative approach we were promised a month ago, before his vacation. There was nothing new in his plan. In fact halfway through I felt we were no longer watching live TV and  someone slipped a DVD of Barack Obama’s Greatest Hits into my player.  Obama is fully aware that the bulk of his plan will be thrown into the dustbin.  There is no way way it gets passed by either the House or the Senate, but he will use its failure to campaign against his chosen 2012 opponent  the Republican Party, more specially that horrible tea party who stubbornly prevents the GOP from agreeing with the president about anything.

By my count, Seventeen times during the speech, the President urged congress to pass this bill now. The problem is there is no bill…nothing in writing, no details and we have to wait two weeks to find out how the $450 Billion dollar stimulus plan is going to be paid for.

It’s like a realtor saying buy this house now, without a title or appraisal report, heck without even letting you inside. But there is the realtor holding the contract in his hand telling you to sign the contract to buy the house immediately, even before you arrange for financing. Would you buy that house? Or would you tell the realtor that he is crazier than a loon?  But that was the deal the President offered the American people last night.

Below is the text of the President’s speech as delivered, as is the tradition of this site, the President’s words are in black, my comments are in red.

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Good news! We’re all one step closer to being able to call socialism by its name! According to a Bloomberg report, AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka “said he’d like to see the U.S. become more like a European nation that provides pensions and health care for all its citizens. He said he is accustomed to criticism and doesn’t mind if conservatives call that socialism.”

Trumka added that “Being called a socialist is a step up for me.”*

Glad we’ve cleared that up!

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The White House visitor logs reveal a lot of things.  For example, there are a heckuva lot of people that like to bowl at the White House lanes.  Also, Richard Trumka had an Oval Office meeting with the president on October 4^th, two days after the unions’ “One Nation Working Together” event.  Who knew a representative of the middle class was such a “high roller,” as my grandfather used to say?

The logs also reveal three “POTUS” meetings with Organizing for America, the community organizing arm of the Democratic National Committee.  OFA of course had previously been Obama for America, the president’s campaign committee.

Two of the meetings are listed as “OFA TAPING” in the logs.  Several new media and video people are listed as participants.

A DC Insider with White House experience told me this is not unusual. My source said it’s often easier to bring film crews into the White House complex, as opposed to having the president go to them.  While I don’t think the White House should be used for such purposes, it makes sense from a logistical and security perspective, I suppose.

But a December 15 meeting, listed as “OFA VOLUNTEER MEETING” caught my eye.

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My name is Philip Christofanelli. I was a student in the University of Missouri’s “Introduction to Labor Studies” course.  The class was taught simultaneously by Professor Don Giljum of University of Missouri-Saint Louis (UMSL) and Professor Judy Ancel of University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) through the use of a live video feed that linked the two classrooms. The class met every other Saturday for seven hours, including breaks. All of the classes were recorded and put on the class website.

Class slide by Prof. Judy Ancel instructing students on how to "re-frame" messages for "State Battles" against right-to-work legislation in Missouri and elsewhere

Since that time, an organization known as Insurgent Visuals has released videos of the class, which have gained considerable media attention.  To be clear, I am not Insurgent Visuals, nor am I associated with them.  I did not edit any videos or put them online. I did, however, download the original videos off of the class website and give them out in their entirety to a number of my friends in order to obtain other opinions on the propriety of what occurred in the class, and of the steps I should take moving forward.

In this post, I will try to describe, with careful attention to context and accuracy, what occurred in these public classrooms over the course of the semester.  I believe that any reasonable person who takes the time to read this post in full will come to the same conclusion that I did: Professors Giljum and Ancel used a public university class to promote their own radical political opinions and organizations, and to train students and union members in negotiating tactics that are apparently illegal, and profoundly unethical.  Their behavior was highly unprofessional and inappropriate, and the University of Missouri should simply admit that fact and take steps to ensure that classes are not taught in that way ever again.

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Useful idiots.  That’s what Vladmir Lenin called western sympathizers of the Soviet cause.  He must have been smiling from his cave in Hell Sunday when he saw the Soviet flag – and Communist Party signs – being carried in honor of May Day.

“Union members, pro-labor groups, and even anarchists” participated, according to Fox41.

A couple of anarchists, dressed as clowns (how fitting), were arrested after they scribbled anti-capitalist slogans on downtown buildings in chalk. Meanwhile, in Berlin, Germany, protesters “threw stones at banks and shops, and in isolated incidents police officers were targeted with bottles and fireworks,” according to published reports.

Chalk, schmalk.  Is that the best these crazies can do?  Put some heart into it!  Make a difference for the cause.  Or are they merely the type of useful idiots that bemused Lenin?

Call me a cynic, but I have a hard time seeing how the average American will sympathize with those who carry the flag of an empire that was bent on destroying the western way of life.  But I suppose that’s a minor detail.

Elsewhere in the United States, AFL-CIO heavy Richard Trumka, began his remarks: “Brothers and Sisters, May Day is our day!”

He, along with other six-figure leaders of the “middle class” rallied their members against government spending reforms.

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From The Washington Times:

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka addressed Communication Workers of America (CWA) union members on a conference call Tuesday evening and relayed his concern about the current battle across the United States over union collective bargaining power, immigration, and education among other issues:

“See, the fact is the fight for workers’ rights and immigrant rights are cut out of the same cloth, because the politicians and their CEO backers are targeting all of us… all working people. They’re targeting immigrants. They’re targeting our collective bargaining rights. They’re targeting professors…trying to silence them if they dare teach something right or a progressive value. They’re going after the poor, trying to take away their voting rights by passing legislation that would say you have to have a driver’s license in order to be able to vote, like the old poll taxes did to us. They’re targeting every progressive group out there to promote their corporate backed political agenda and to continue a power grab.”

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There was a time when Communism was anathema to the U.S. labor movement. However, that ship has long since sailed. In fact, the tide shifted significantly in 1995 when John Sweeney, Richard Trumka and Linda Chavez-Thompson ousted Lane Kirkland and took over the AFL-CIO.

Following their ascension to the leadership of America’s only (until 2005) federation of unions, the AFL-CIO dropped its ban of Communist Party members in 1997. Since that time, Marxism has regained a strong foothold in the American labor movement that really hadn’t been seen since the 1930s. And, as every year passes, the Marxist (and Communist) influence on the labor movement becomes more and more evident.

For example, according to the Texas Communist Party USA’s website:

Real Marxists emphasize the tremendous importance of the union movement, even if some so-called ‘radicals’ seek to discredit it. The CPUSA requires its members to join the union in their workplace, if there is one. Interested activists who cannot join a union can still become part of the union movement through the AFL-CIO’s Working America. No communist ever scabs. In the most recent great union upsurge in America (1935-1947) Communists played an outstanding role.

While many rank and file union members would not view themselves as Socialists, Communists, or even Marxists, the fact is, many of the unions’ leaders throughout the country have wholly embraced Marxist ideology and have taken unions, as a whole, in that direction. (more…)

At least two years after most sentient Americans have known what the ruling class has been perpetrating upon us, S&P has declared that the spending gig is over. But has the machine taken over? Has the destructive pact between the redistribution demagogues, the elites of academia, Hollywood, and the media who spread the propaganda, the crony capitalists who collude with the state, and the takers of society who re-elect their benefactors—overwhelmed us?

Like Hal in this haunting scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, perhaps the machine cannot be turned off.

Stanley Kubrick’ 2001 espouses a fear of technology, a common theme in Hollywood. Yet America’s greatest threat turns out not to be technology, but man’s nature. Control disguised as altruism. Envy & greed disguised as fairness. We knew that self government—a constitutional Republic—was an experiment; even a long shot.

Can America’s only hope, the media-vilified Tea Party, beat the machine?

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Union bosses have been engaging in class warfare for so long now that it’s become standard for the media to echo the meme without challenge. An example of such mainstream Marxism is in today’s Bloomberg piece entitled ‘Runaway CEO Pay’ Could Support 102,000 U.S. Jobs, AFL-CIO Says. Bloomberg’s piece relies heavily on the AFL-CIO’s Executive Pay Watch, which was set up years ago to conduct a haves vs. have nots class warfare campaign to eventually have CEO pay limited by law or regulation. This was something union bosses accomplished to some degree with last year’s “Wall Street Reform.”

However disdainfully un-American it is to argue whether someone makes too much money in what was once the nation known as the land of opportunity, sometimes you have to roll with the pigs in the pigsty to show how stupid their arguments are. So here goes:

Here is the AFL-CIO’s statement:

In 2010, Standard & Poor’s 500 Index company CEOs received, on average, $11.4 million in total compensation. Based on 299 companies’ most recent pay data for 2010, their combined total CEO pay of $3.4 billion could support 102,325 median workers’ jobs.

Using a simple calculator, it is easy to determine that the “workers’ jobs” would pay $33,227 per year (about $16 per hour), not counting union dues, of course.

Given the AFL-CIO’s penchant for pushing an eat the rich ideology, it seemed worthwhile to use the unions’ own logic to run our own set of numbers to determine how many workers’ median jobs one years’ worth of union dues could support.

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The Fraternal Order of Police isn’t happy that their union brethren in California recently passed a resolution in support of cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.  Now sitting on death row for executing Philadelphia policeman Daniel J. Faulkner, Mumia has become a rallying point for the left.

On April 14, FOP National President Chuck Canterbury issued a scathing letter to American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.  In part, it read:

I cannot understand why the CFT, which like us represents rank-and-file employees, would support a murderer.  In fact, Abu-Jamal’s victim was a rank-and-file law enforcement officer and a member of F.O.P. Local Lodge #5 in Philadelphia.  I can only assume that the membership did so out of ignorance of the facts or that they were misled by this killer’s propaganda machine.  I want to set the record straight and would respectively, yet urgently, request that you and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) publicly reject this repugnant resolution.

Not likely.  According to PublicSchoolSpending.com, an AFL-CIO spokesperson said the union had no plans to respond to the FOP letter.  The AFT had no comment as of 12:30 pm ET after repeated attempts.

Maybe Canterbury is beginning to understand just how far-left and radical the AFT is.  How sad for the police officers.

The FOP letter ended ominously:

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When Sarah Palin was telling an audience last month that Republicans have the fighting instinct of sheep she wasn’t talking about Andrew Breitbart. Today in Wisconsin Andrew addressed the thousands of tea party patriots who came out in the cold to hold a rally for freedom, personal responsibility, and fiscal conservatism.

During his introduction of Sarah Palin, Andrew took on the vile Trumpka-Obama leftists who came out to taunt the tea partiers. Andrew told them that they could, “Go to hell! Go to hell!” for having the audacity to lecture the tea party about civility after the death threats and thuggery displayed in Wisconsin last month.
Andrew was in rare form.

More… Invisible Dude added this:

Andrew would make a good press secretary for President Palin……
just sayin’

Agreed.

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