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Townhall...
Big
Labor: The Real Hostage Takers
By Brett McMahon
7/30/2011
It
took an amazing amount of gall,
guile, or both for a former Ted Kennedy political staffer to decry
supposed Tea
Party “terrorist tactics” in seeking to rein in the debt drowning our
nation.
“It
has become commonplace to call the
tea party faction in the House ‘hostage takers,’” William Yeomans
wrote. “But
they have now become full-blown terrorists.”
Forget,
for a moment, the lack of
violence—verbal or physical—coming from Tea Partiers, which would
constitute
terrorism. Forget, also, that grassroots pressure on politicians to
control
profligate spending (sure to be followed by tax hikes) is neither an
act of
hostage takers or terrorists.
Instead,
consider for now the actions
of President Obama and his key backers from Big Labor. As John Mariotti
described this week, the “president’s job killers” include a host of
minions
enacting harmful regulation and:
It
should be no surprise to anyone
reading it why the US has a jobs problem. It is governed by an
anti-business
president, and no matter how many nice speeches he makes about jobs for
Americans, his minions are behind the scenes doing the dirty work,
killing
American jobs and companies everyday—and no one seems to be able to
stop them.
For
its part, Big Labor—the sine qua
non of the Obama administration—has held up vital trade deals that
would give a
boost to domestic manufacturers, small and large. It continues to
demand
job-killing card check, first by legislation and now by regulation. Big
Labor
was, as many will remember, the cornerstone of power for Yeomans’
former
employer, Kennedy—making his terrorist allegations all the more
shocking.
Perhaps
most strange of all is that an
anti-business agenda, propelled in part by the various and sundry
anti-corporate Left—but primarily by organized labor—represents such a
small
portion of actual working Americans.
Most
are familiar with labor’s decline
and that it now represents only about 7 percent of private sector
workers. What
many haven’t recognized is that only 1.3 percent—a rounding error (or
economic
error)—of private sector workers in Right To Work states are members of
a
union. Yet it is organized labor’s lobbyists that relentlessly pressure
senators from those states to bend to the will of a small special
interest.
It
is time to recognize that if there
is a supposed “hostage taker” or “terrorist” in American politics it is
the
constituency of Big Labor bosses. And it is time to remember that
America does
not negotiate with terrorists.
Read
it at Townhall
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