Union-Backed Occupiers on the March

From today's Front Page Magazine:

Union-Backed Occupiers on the March

By Matthew Vadum

The sudden eviction of Occupy Wall Street squatters from lower Manhattan hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm of organized labor for their increasingly violent anarchist and neo-communist brethren.


The occupiers now say they plan to shut down Wall Street on Nov. 17 and occupy the New York subway. One Occupy Wall Street supporter was captured on video saying radicals plan to “burn New York City to the ground.” The movement that has spread across America is what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke, a former SEIU boss, calls an “anti-banking jihad.”


After New York police unexpectedly swooped down on the occupants of Zuccotti Park early in the morning of Nov. 15, organized labor leaders formally reaffirmed their support for the Occupy Wall Street movement.


“You can draw a direct line from the Wisconsin protests in the winter to Occupy Wall Street to the overwhelming rejection of an anti-union ballot question in Ohio,” said Teamsters president James P. Hoffa. “Occupy Wall Street is bringing new energy to a fight that labor has been engaged in from the beginning: The fight for an economy that works for everybody, not just the 1 percent.”


The Teamsters union “wholly supports and endorses Occupy Wall Street and opposes any effort to unreasonably restrict, contain or stop this lawful protest,” the union’s general executive board said in an official resolution.


Art handlers who belong to the Teamsters joined with occupiers to protest Sotheby’s in New York a few weeks ago. “The Sotheby’s economy is destroying the lives of too many Americans,” said art handler and Teamsters Local 814 member Sim Jones. The auction house, which the Left now considers to be a playground of the decadent so-called 1 percent, had locked out some of the workers as part of a labor dispute.


Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has been in the vanguard of the Left’s economic terrorism campaign. SEIU board member Stephen Lerner has been leading an effort to physically intimidate corporate executives in their homes.


Not surprisingly, SEIU is still a gung-ho supporter of the occupiers. After Zuccotti Park was cleared, president Mary Kay Henry regurgitated the Left’s talking points. Henry praised what she called the “brave students, unemployed Americans, families and others” participating in the various occupations that have spread to scores of large U.S. cities.


On Nov. 17 SEIU members plan to march “arm in arm with unemployed workers, community members, allied groups and Occupy protesters in support of a great American idea: our nation and our economy should work for everyone, not just the richest 1%.”


New protests will help promote Big Labor’s agenda. SEIU plans to join “a National Day of Action for the 99% protesting the failure of politicians in Congress to pass a jobs bill that would have put people back to work fixing thousands of bridges, roads and schools.”

Union Gangsters: Jimmy Hoffa Jr.

From today's Front Page Magazine:

Union Gangsters: Jimmy Hoffa Jr.

By Matthew Vadum

Few union gangsters have the exquisitely barbaric pedigree of International Brotherhood of Teamsters president James P. Hoffa.


And few labor unions can match the Teamsters, the million-plus member union of truckers and blue-collar workers, for its legendary connections to organized crime, corruption, and violence. For decades the word Teamster was essentially a synonym for gangster.


Hoffa is the son of James R. Hoffa, the relentlessly corrupt, larger-than-life Teamsters president who worked closely with figures from the crime underworld. In July 1975 the elder Hoffa disappeared mysteriously outside a suburban Detroit restaurant at which he was planning to meet with two mobsters. His body has never been found.


Historian Thaddeus Russell likened the elder Hoffa to General George S. Patton. “He exalted bravery and despised frailty, and presented himself as the toughest, strongest, and most ruthless fighter in the union,” Russell wrote. Hoffa also once proudly proclaimed his potential to be “the meanest bastard that God ever created.”


Like his foul-mouthed, publicity-loving father, the younger Hoffa doesn’t mince words.


Like most union leaders, Hoffa blames “Wall Street’s greed, stupidity and fraud” for the nation’s economic problems, ignoring the role that Big Government meddling in the economy played in inflating the mortgage market bubble. He supports Occupy Wall Street and acknowledges that Teamsters “all over the country are participating in Occupy Wall Street events.”


When introducing President Obama at a Labor Day rally this year, Hoffa launched an attack, bellowing, “We got to keep an eye on the battle that we face: The war on workers. And you see it everywhere, it is the Tea Party.”


Well-practiced in the art of Saul Alinsky-style vilification, Hoffa told the crowd, “Let’s take these son [sic] of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong.” Not surprisingly, President Obama, who encourages his supporters to find opponents and “argue with them and get in their face,” never distanced himself from Hoffa’s demonization of a large chunk of the U.S. population.