Posted on 09/05/2010 10:42:17 PM PDT by Nachum
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
The list, ping
Let me know if you would like to be on or off the ping list
Let me guess, Labor day isn’t on the Islamic calenders?
obama is a muslim MF....
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, 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.
When one has been a long time buddy of the bombers in the Weather Underground (which does not mean the web site) this kind of thing must seem almost yawnworthy.
If it were, it would move around the (solar) year.
Rather than organizing mass picketing to defend the 1,500 Pittston strikers and spreading the struggle across the coalfields, Trumka ordered miners to carry out civil disobedience stunts, such as sitting in front of the mine entrances until state troopers hauled them off to jail and appealing to Pittston shareholders at corporate meetings.
While he cowered before the coal operators and the government, Trumka used threats and physical attacks against his opponents, above all the Workers League, the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party, which was fighting to mobilize all miners in a national strike to defend the Pittston strikers.
Behind the scenes, Trumka conspired with the first Bush administration and Democrats like West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller to crush the wildcat and impose a sellout on the Pittston miners. Once again, the crushing of the miners’ rebellion was used to launch a corporate-government counteroffensive against the miners, culminating in the murder of West Virginia coal miner John McCoy in January 1990.
Trumka responded with indifference and contempt, not only refusing to call a traditional memorial day to honor the fallen miner, but deciding to boycott the funeral, which was attended by thousands of miners. The UMW did nothing to demand the arrest of the killers—who are free to this day—and even cut off strike benefits to McCoy’s widow and children.
Summing up this treatment by the UMW president, McCoy’s sister, Donna Carter, said, “By doing absolutely nothing now—and from the day John got killed, Trumka did absolutely nothing—he shares as much of the responsibility as the man who shot the gun.”
Is there no honor among thieves?
In an August interview with Politico, Trumka criticized labor leaders, saying they hadn’t been nearly aggressive enough with Democrats on the issue. Trumka refused to let the mistake be repeated. He put Democrats who blocked EFCA on notice when the AFL-CIO backed a primary challenger, Lt. Governor Bill Halter, D-Arkansas, against the incumbent Senator Blanche Lincoln. And whatever the results of the Arkansas primary, Lincoln has moved substantially to the left following the challenge, penning strong financial reform legislation cracking down on derivatives, the financial instruments that sunk AIG. Labor, in short, has already helped secure better financial reform by refusing to play nice.
Even after he left the Union to go to the AFL-CIO, Trumka incited violence in the UMWA
* When Trumka and UMWA President Cecil Roberts came to Bentleyville, Pennsylvania in April 1998, fifty rank-and-file union members gathered outside the hall where they spoke to protest their leaders’ policies. “Within minutes,” wrote leftwing journalist Paul Scherrer, “a group of UMWA officials and their supporters attacked the protesting miners, ripping leaflets and protest signs from their hands. Several miners were punched, knocked to the ground and kicked repeatedly. [Richard] Cicci was hit with a piece of lumber and suffered a large gash on his head.” “Richard Trumka,” reported Scherrer, “refused to answer questions about the assault.” In other words, by his silence he gave tacit assent to such violence.
David Horowitz’s Discover The Networks, a website every American should have bookmarked as a ready reference of all left-wingers, has an incredible amount of information on Trumka, including this about a money laundering scheme that involved some of the most prominent Marxist-democrats in America:
One condition of the AFL-CIO merger of 1955 was that outright Communists be purged from CIO unions. The AFL-CIO in 1957 instituted a rule that required any union official invoking his Fifth Amendment right (to avoid incriminating himself before a congressional committee) to be removed from his position. But when Richard Trumka twice invoked his Fifth Amendment right in a case involving a corruption and money-laundering scandal during the late 1990s, the response by AFL-CIO President John Sweeney was to purge the rule instead of the rule-breaker Trumka.
This case involved the Teamsters Union, whose President Ron Carey faced likely defeat in his 1996 run for re-election. According to congressional testimony, Carey agreed to raise $1 million for the Democratic National Committee if $100,000 could be provided to him immediately to finance his re-election campaign. In this shell game, as witnesses explained it, the Teamsters Union paid $150,000 to the AFL-CIO, the same amount which its Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka immediately thereafter gave from AFL-CIO accounts to the leftwing political group Citizen Action, which within days provided $100,000 to the Carey campaign.
Among those named by witnesses and investigators as involved in this scheme to illegally fund and influence a union election were Richard Trumka, Ron Carey, Andrew Stern, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee, Bill Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, and Clinton-Gore fundraiser Terry McAuliffe.
Discoerthenetworks.com
This chap must be quite powerful for people to have put up with this much treachery.
The “Union Summer” indoctrination materials endorsed by Trumka use explicit class warfare rhetoric. Young participants are told to recite a pledge called “Working Class Commitment” that includes the Marxist dogma “that we produce the world’s wealth, that we belong to the only class with a future, that our class will end all oppression.”
Unlike their more moderate predecessors, Trumka and his fellow AFL-CIO bosses see free market capitalism not as essential to worker prosperity but as something to be despised and destroyed. “Union Summer” seeks to spread ideological hatred of capitalism, as well as love for “progressive” government, throughout the union movement. The ultimate aim is not to boost members’ wages, but to radically transform society.
Shortly after coming to power, Trumka, Sweeney and Chavez-Thompson rescinded a founding AFL-CIO rule that banned Communist Party members and loyalists from leadership positions within the Federation and its unions. The “New Voice” triumvirate welcomed Communist Party delegates to positions of power in the Federation. And the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) declared itself “in complete accord” with the troika’s new AFL-CIO program. “The radical shift in both leadership and policy is a very positive, even historic change,” wrote CPUSA National Chairman Gus Hall in 1996 about the Trumka/Sweeney/Chavez-Thompson takeover.
In February 2009, President Barack Obama named Trumka to his Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
Discoverthenetworks.com
He has visited the Obama White House 30 times since becoming AFL-CIO Chief Thug - more than any other single person during the same period of time.
The second most frequent visitor was the head of the SEIU until he resigned his position (22 visits at last count).
3.17.10
With a health care reform proposal being patched together for final consideration in the House of Representatives, gripes over a key element of the legislation could trip up the delicate process.
On Wednesday, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was called into an unplanned meeting at the White House to discuss late-stage negotiations on a proposed tax on high-end insurance plans. According to sources familiar with what transpired, congressional leaders had begun discussions earlier in the day (perhaps last night) about accelerating the tax’s impact in order to produce more savings under the president’s revised health care bill.
Under the president’s plan, those families with health care plans over $27,500 and individuals with plans over $10,200 would be taxed starting in 2018. That tax would be indexed to the Consumer Price Index plus one percent, which would provide some additional comfort to those with high-end policies — specifically for labor workers who had bargained for these plans.
The plan, however, got tripped up after congressional negotiators received poorer-than-expected feedback from the Congressional Budget Office, a senior Democratic hill aide confirmed. And as a compromise, on Wednesday, they began discussing indexing the tax simply to the Consumer Price Index.
“What the White House is putting out is not any big major changes to the deal,” said a source briefed on the matter. “What they are talking about is the way things are right now the tax was indexed to CPI+1 and they want to change it to CPI general inflation.”
Trumka, who has fought tirelessly against an excise tax, was summoned to the White House to discuss the matter late in the afternoon. Whether the adjustment was agreed to or was enough to endanger the powerful union’s support for health care legislation is not yet known.
hmm, wonder what could happen to get trumka thrown under the bus too?
1993 United Mine Workers Strike
As head of the United Mine Workers, Trumka ordered a nationwide strike against Peabody Coal in 1993. On July 22, a non-union worker, Eddie York, was shot in the back of the head and killed as he attempted to pass striking coal workers. Picketers continued to throw rocks after York was shot, preventing his would be rescuers from assisting him.
Trumka and other United Mine Workers officials settled a wrongful death lawsuit with Mr. York’s widow out of court in 1997.
They would have probably seen him more often...face to face.
But then again...no telling how many times Obama gave them instructions via text messages.
Really I see the AFL-CEO..and SEIU heads...telling OBAMA how to sit, and speak now.
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