Union Gangsters: Andy Stern
By Matthew Vadum
Andy Stern is one of the most outspoken, cocksure neo-communists of the American labor movement.
“We like to say: We use the power of persuasion first,” Stern said, channeling Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky. “If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.”
Stern quotes Karl Marx in television appearances. In 2007 the wannabe Bolshevik told Bill Moyers that his Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was expanding to Australia, Switzerland, England, South America, and Africa.
We’ve been working with unions around the world. And what we’re working towards is building a global organization. Because “workers of the world unite,” it’s not just a slogan anymore. It’s the way we’re going to have to do our work.Stern loves government slush funds that advantage the Left. He enthusiastically supports President Obama’s so-called jobs bill that would provide $15 billion for ACORN and its 20-odd new front groups, other radical left-wing groups, and state and local governments.
He also seems blissfully, willfully ignorant of the many misguided government policies and programs that helped to cause the current financial crisis. To him everything is the fault of investors.
“People burnt this economy to the ground with irresponsible speculative behavior,” Stern said in January 2010 at a labor forum sponsored by the left-wing Center for American Progress Action Fund. “And I would just say for the record that if American justice is really equal for everyone there are a lot of people that deserve to be called into account for what’s taken place up to now.”
As punishment, he supports enacting a stock market-killing tax on financial transactions that backers say could net $1.7 trillion over 10 years. The tax is being aggressively promoted by fellow neo-communist Heather Booth, the founder of the Alinskyite training school called the Midwest Academy. (Booth recently led Marxists in a stirring recitation of “Solidarity Forever” at a conference in Washington, D.C.)
Stern is also well-practiced in the dark art of Alinskyite vilification. At the 2010 forum he excoriated lawmakers for not passing the then-stalled Obamacare bill. Stern called senators who refused to approve the legislation “terrorists.”
“We should send the national security people over and explain to them why we don’t negotiate with terrorists,” he said. “There are a lot of terrorists in the Senate who think we’re supposed to negotiate with them when they have their particular needs that they want met.”
Under Stern’s leadership, SEIU became the fastest-growing union in America. His brutal, in-your-face tactics apparently helped to add a million dues-paying members to the rolls, bringing its total membership to 2.2 million.
Stern’s radicalism and love of thuggery permeates virtually every aspect of SEIU, which he led as president from 1996 to 2010 before leaving under an ethical cloud two years before his term of office was to expire.
With Stern at the helm, SEIU harassed and harangued companies into signing agreements to make the union the representative of their employees. Companies that dared to resist were subjected to “corporate campaigns” that included picket lines, boycotts, and actions calculated to generate negative publicity for employers.
The racketeers of SEIU use an intimidation manual to guide their vicious attacks against targeted companies. As labor watchdog F. Vincent Vernuccio reported,
The new union tactic is to use pressure on corporate boardrooms as a means of organizing entire companies nationwide rather than recruiting workers on a site-by-site basis; in short, to organize employers rather than employees. To create this pressure, unions attempt to push businesses to the edge of bankruptcy, with little regard for the welfare of employer and employee. They attempt to strong-arm businesses into agreeing to take away the secret ballot for employees in union-organizing elections via card check. They also try to force employers to restrict their own speech on union issues so that workers will not get both sides of the story on unionization. Among the SEIU’s demands is that employers agree to bargain only with it, to the exclusion of all other unions, regardless of what workers want.Long before Stern took over the union, he helped SEIU members sabotage corporations that refused to play ball. He worked with economic terrorist Stephen Lerner on the union’s “Justice for Janitors” campaign. With the approval of union leadership, Stern and his comrades employed New Left tactics from the 1960s, blocking access to city streets, invading private meetings, advancing shareholder resolutions, and urging workers to swamp authorities with health and safety code complaints against their own employers.
Stern’s SEIU also led the way in bloodying Tea Party supporters at the anti-Obamacare town hall meetings of 2009. After President Obama, a master of Chicago thug politics, implored his supporters to “punch back twice as hard” against his enemies, SEIU obliged. In a widely reported incident, outside a town hall meeting union goons roughed up Kenneth Gladney, a diminutive black man selling Gadsden (“Don’t Tread on Me”) flags. One of his attackers called Gladney a “n**ger.”
Like members of ACORN, the union’s close ally, SEIU members are known for disrupting hospitals. One assaulted a cameraman at a hospital in California last year. SEIU goons are also known for surrounding the homes of corporate executives in order to intimidate companies.
But Stern doesn’t just work on the outside applying pressure.
Stern has visited the Obama White House a reported 50 times – 24 times in 2009 alone, while refusing to register as a lobbyist. SEIU views President Obama as an investment. The union went into debt in order to spend an incredible $85 million to promote Obama’s candidacy. The purple-shirted people beaters’ union even produced a movie called Labor Day to take credit for Obama’s election.
Obama rewarded Stern by naming him to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse.
After leaving SEIU, Stern joined the board of a big pharmaceuticals company, SIGA Technologies. SIGA CEO Eric Rose practically admitted that Stern’s role in helping to ram Obamacare through Congress landed him the position. “His insight, experience, and leadership, particularly his understanding of how our federal government works, will complement the skill sets of our existing board members,” Rose said.
Stern also accepted a plum post as “senior research fellow” at Georgetown University’s Georgetown Public Policy Institute.
After a lifetime of undermining the businesses that generate wealth for America, now Stern can concentrate on poisoning the minds of the young.
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Americans need to know that ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer. These radical leftists who use the brutal, in-your-face, pressure tactics of Saul Alinsky want to destroy America as we know it and will use any means to do it.
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