A PIMPER'S PARADISE: Obama and the unions...

By William PLEASANT

When Barack Obama promised CHANGE during his 2008 presidential campaign he was definitely not talking about changing the traditional post-war relationship between organized labor and the Democratic Party.

The June 5th Wisconsin gubenatorial recall election should have made this point emphatic to all. Pres. Buckwheat and his DP minions allowed the Republican Party to stomp organized labor's passionate attempt to unseat the reactionary incumbent Gov. Scott Walker and install the liberal Democratic Mayor of Milwaukee Tom Barrett. Despite millions of man-hours spent collecting recall petition signatures and millions more spent on canvassing and get-out-the-vote campaigns, organized labor was undone at the hands of the Republicans, with the tacit assistance of the Obama regime and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

(Walker raised more than $30 million--mostly from out-of-state corporate donors and the Republican National Committee. Barrett's campaign ran on less than $4 million--mostly from unions and small private donors.)

Obama and the DNC offered next to no concrete support to the recall drive (less than $500K), which began over a year ago when Gov. Walker rammed a bill through the Wisconsin legislature that effectively outlawed collective bargaining rights for state employees.

Walker, a wannabe Republican Party bigwig, is actually the cat's paw of the infamous KOCH BROTHER. These are the folks who brought us the maniacally racist TEA PARTY movement. The pedigree of their politics and enormous wealth goes back to the birth of Germany's Third Reich. To call the KOCH BROTHERS fascists would be an understatement. Their ideological vision encompasses no less than the total political annihilation of any social sector--especially organized labor--that can possibly raise opposition to the dictatorship of the rich.

Scott Walker's anti-union antics in Wisconsin were a KOCH-financed experiment to see how much union-busting would be tolerated under the Obama regime. The KOCH BROTHER'S hypothesis was proven: Obama and the Democratic Party establishment did not support organized labor. In short, organized labor and its supporters in the liberal/progressive camps were actually politically disarmed by their material relationship to the Democratic Party.

The same can be said for the Black, Latino, Asian, Native social sectors. They are all political sitting ducks. The KOCH BROTHERS and fellow supporters of a fascistic AMERIKKAN SPRING are licking their chops now, as they prepare for a multi-state coupe de grace to public
sector collective bargaining rights.

Liberal post-recall pundits now scratch their heads and ask: "What if President Obama had campaigned for Tom Barrett? (Though Obama made fund-raising trips to nearby Minneapolis and Chicago last week, the president declined to make even a brief detour to campaign for his fellow Democrat.) The most Obama & Co. had to offer Barrett (i.e., organized labor) was a single TWEET of support on election eve!!!! Vice President Joe Biden didn't even TWEET.

The truth of the matter is that an Obama appearance in Wisconsin would still have been too late and too little. The political substance of Pres. Buckwheat and his party's support for labor had already been exposed over a year ago. When Wisconsin labor unionists occupied the state capitol in protest to Scott Walker's anti-union legislation, the Obama crew went AWOL. Obama and Biden were conspicuous no-shows.

Marxists are not scratching their heads in the wake of the Wisconsin debacle. Organized labor, like other resisting social sectors, has been double teamed by Democrats and Republicans since the 1980s. When then-president Ronald Reagan crushed the Air Traffic Controllers Union, without even a whimper from the Democratic Party, the ideological Right was given the historical high sign that the organized labor sector was political fair game. With military precision, the Right pushed through right-to-work laws and a string of roll-backs of 30 years of worker shop-floor gains.

Purged of its socialist and communist leadership during the 1950s and 60s, and ideologically misled by social democratic opportunists, organized labor ( especially its militants) were grazed silly on the notion that the Democratic Party was the party of labor. Labor's advance was equated with the fortunes of the Democratic Party, which was at least the "lesser-of-two-evils." The organized labor movement's social policy agenda became structurally chained to the Democratic Party. In the name of unity with the only mainstream political institution that would tolerate its social presence, organized labor again and again kow-towed to the whims of the Democratic Party leadership.

In this arrangement, the establishment of an independent, pro-labor party was impossible. That would mean that labor would need go into strategic opposition to the Democratic Party. This is the historical essence of Barack Obama's pimp game against US labor. In short, Obama correctly surmises that it would be absurd to pay for what he and only he can get for free--i.e., the money and slavish support of organized labor's leadership, and the disciplined activism of the rank-n-file.

Obama flashed his rear-end to labor and progressive voters in Wisconsin this week because he knows that come November 2012 they will stampede to the polls on his behalf, come hell or high water. His strategy is highly similar in respect Black and Latino voters.

As far as Obama is concerned, his streetwalkers have already officially lined up to pleasure him. Despite three years of deliberate neglect and disrespect at the hands of the Obama regime, labor unions have rushed to endorse the incumbent, starting a year before his party offers even a crumb of political concession and before the national convention!

National Education Association (NEA) – July 4, 2011

United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) – October 20, 2011

National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) – November 16, 2011

Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) – November 17, 2011

Service Employees International Union (SEIU) – November 19, 2011

American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) – December 6, 2011

Communications Workers of America (CWA) – February 2, 2012

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) – February 7, 2012

International Association of Machinists (IAM) – February 24, 2012

United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry (UA) – March 1, 2012

United Steel Workers (USW) – March 4, 2012

Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) – March 8, 2012

AFL-CIO – March 13, 2012...

This list continues to grow week by week. Meanwhile, rank-n-file labor unionists groan under the political boot of a presidential candidate who promised in 2008 that if “American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I’ll walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America.”

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