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…)

On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!
Plunge right through that line!
Run the bill clear through that crowd,
Get out of debt this time! (U rah rah!)

On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!
Or it’s Cloward-Piven time.
Fight! Fellows! – fight, fight, fight!
Or it‘ll be our behinds!

I imagine you are aware of all those greedy capitalists in Moscow, Wisconsin, demonstrating so they can keep working in collusion, to siphon public money for their power hungry interests and their own bank accounts.

Sorry for the bad typing; make that government workers, in Madison. “Kill the bill!” they shout and likely spit when they do.  The name of it is the Budget Repair Bill, but much of the Marxstream media call it Gov. Scott Walker’s “anti-union bill.”

Fightin' Bob La Follette, progressive to the ends of his hair

I live forty-some miles northwest of Mad City, in the town where the nation’s first Progressive Party presidential candidate, Robert La Follette married his leftist, feminist wife, in 1881. Yeah, 1881. Politically precocious, we are, here in Badgerland. “Fighting Bob” learned his social justice from U. of W. president, John Bascom, who came from Massachusetts’ Andover Seminary (essentially of the same United Church of Christ denomination as the so reverent Jeremiah Wright).   Those Congregationalists stem from the Puritans, whom, as the name implies, had a soft spot for utopianism and legalistic perfectibility.

Progressivism, but also unvarnished Marxism made inroads very early here in Wisconsin, including within the state and region’s labor movement.  In 1904, the University of Wisconsin became the home of John R. Commons, one of the first progressive incrementalists, a label which tends to cover radical interests of unknown lengths.  He was called the spiritual father of Social Security and he specialized in union studies.  He was also one of America’s progressive eugenicists.

Barry Obama’s hero, Harold Washington was not America’s fist socialist, big city mayor.  That distinction goes to Emil Seidel, elected as Milwaukee’s Marxist boss in 1910, the same year that Victor Luitpold Berger was elected America’s first socialist representative in Congress.

Socialsts tried and convicted, 1919

It was Berger that gave union leader Eugene Debs a copy of Das Kapital and won him over to Marxism.  Debs became the Socalist Party’s candidate for president in 1912, with Mayor Seidel his VP candidate.  However, their Socialist Party of America chose not to run their own candidate for president in 1924, eagerly backing La Follette, instead, much as confessed socialists backed Obama, in 2008.

The Department of Justice was on to Berger and he was tried and in 1919, convicted of rather tenuous charges under the Espionage Act of that time.  Four others were also convicted for their own doings.  Yet, Berger continued to be a political celebrity in Wisconsin.

Those names are just the tip of the top of the iceberg. Extensive information on the Wisconsin front on the Marxist war against American freedoms is available in numerous books and at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, where they have a curious pride in their collection.  Compiled, it is enough to satisfy the appetite of one much more skeptical than our state’s own Sen. Joe McCarthy. (more…)

Now that the election is over and we’ve seen in stark light the rebuke that Obama has received, many are wondering if he’ll moderate his far left agenda. But a few movements in the Labor Dept. will disabuse anyone of the notion that Obama intends to drop his left-wing agenda.

Leave it to an Obama appointee to the National Labor Rights Board (NLRB) to want to push votes to install unions in the workplace on an accelerated schedule. I guess all the payoffs and special favors that Obama and his cohorts have given to labor unions in these two of the longest years any president ever had have not been enough.

On Oct. 21, NLRB Member Mark Gaston Pearce said that the time period between filing and the holding of elections for new union representation in a company should be “as brief as possible.”

Of course, this shortened election period is nothing but a sop to Big Labor and intended to hurt businesses that might try to put up a fight against the encroachment of unions.

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Stern’s New Big Labor Same as the Old Big Labor

For the past four years, the highest profile Big Labor Boss was Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Andy Stern.  Stern has deliberately parlayed his controlling style as that of a New Labor Boss, and he has painstakingly worked on the SEIU “purple brand.”  And yet, Stern and the SEIU union have failed to live up to the New Labor Boss identity that he claimed in his New York Times Magazine and CNN/Fortune Magazine articles.

Stern tried to separate himself from the herd of “old-styled” labor bosses in several ways, most noticeably with his dress.  He conscientiously wore his beloved SEIU purple with its slight pinkish hue.  Apparently, Stern is trying to replicate for his union what brown does for UPS.

Stern’s limitless purple attire led some to refer to him as the Lavender Labor Leader.  And recently, SEIU’s Anna Burger looked very chic in her purple suit as Congressman Patrick McHenry (R-NC) grilled her about SEIU’s relationship with ACORN.

Whatever color of scarves, suits, or hats Andy Stern decides to wear, you cannot deny his influence with the White House, U.S. Congressional King Pins, the Democrat National Committee, and ACORN among others.  But, has Stern’s smash-mouth organizing and relationship to ACORN begun to turn SEIU’s purple into black and blue? You bet it has!

Clearly, ACORN’s partnerships with SEIU and other Big Labor outfits has begun to drag down SEIU’s image.  SEIU has decided, now that ACORN is damaged goods, to cut ties for now.  But, that will be very difficult because ACORN and ACORN’s training programs are totally interwoven into the purple fabric that makes up SEIU.  

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