Another great piece by John Hayward at Human Events:
Sarah Palin? was swift to denounce what she called the “thuggery” of union boss James Hoffa, but she didn’t settle for a sound bite. She wrote a long and impassioned appeal to her “union brothers and sisters” and posted it on her Facebook pagein the wee hours of Tuesday morning.
Palin gets Hoffa’s ugly rhetoric, and President Obama’s absolutely appalling silence, out of the way in her first two paragraphs:
In my speech on Saturday in Iowa, I said: “Between bailouts for Wall Street cronies and stimulus projects for union bosses’ security and ‘green energy’ giveaways, [Barack Obama] took care of his friends. And now they’re on course to raise a billion dollars for his re-election bid so that they can do it all over again.” This was shamefully on display yesterday at President Obama’s taxpayer-funded campaign rally in Detroit. In introducing the President, Teamsters President James Hoffa represented precisely what I was talking about as he declared war on concerned independent Americans and on the freshman members we sent to Congress last November by saying, “Let’s take these son-of-a-bitches out!”
What I say now, I say as a proud former union member and the wife, daughter, and sister of union members. So, as a former card-carrying IBEW sister married to a proud former Laborers, IBEW, and later USW member, please hear me out. What I have to say is for the hard working, patriotic, selfless union brothers and sisters in Michigan and throughout our country: Please don’t be taken in by union bosses’ thuggery like Jim Hoffa represented yesterday. Union bosses like this do not have your best interests at heart. What they care about is their own power and re-electing their friend Barack Obama so he will take care of them to the detriment of everyone else.
The moral and practical failures of crony capitalism have always been a strong theme for Palin. She uses that theme to do much more than just criticize Hoffa for the ugly rhetoric Obama is clearly so comfortable with:
To see where this leads, look at what’s happening to the working class in our industrialized cities. These cities are going to hell in a hand basket thanks to corruption, crony capitalism, and the union bosses’ greed. The union bosses derive their power from your union dues and their promise to deliver your votes to whichever politician they’re in bed with. They get their power from you, and yet their actions ultimately hurt you. They’re chasing American industry offshore by making outrageous, economically illogical demands that they know will never work. And now that they’ve chased jobs out of union states, they’re trying to chase them out of right-to-work states like South Carolina, so eventually the jobs will leave America altogether. But these union bosses will still figure out a way to keep their gig, and so will their politically aligned corporate friends. As long as these big corporations have a good crony capitalist in the White House, they can rely on DC to bail them out until the whole system goes bankrupt, which, I am afraid, is not very far off. When big government, big business, and big union bosses collude together, they get government to maximize their own interests against those of the rest of the country.
When someone like Hoffa talks about “bringing jobs back” from overseas, he’s talking about using government force to create an economic situation that will benefit his group, which is essentially a mega-corporation that profits by selling labor to other corporations. Hoffa’s brand of unionism can’t hold labor markets through competition, because union bosses have so dramatically inflated the cost of the labor they sell. Instead, they use government power to create monopolies, and punish businesses who try to escape from them… which is precisely the kind of thing anti-business liberals howl about, when Big Business does it.
Be sure to read Hayward’s entire article here. It’s excellent.
(h/t Josh Painter)
