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Democrats in Congress, including Obama who has explicitly embraced a plan to pay off Big Labor by enacting the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that takes away the right to secret ballot in the decision to unionize. It is incredibly anti-American and a virtual invitation to intimidation of American workers by unions. Glad to see it getting a small part of the attention and derision it deserves.

(H/T Hot Air)

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An Old Liberal Takes On Modern Progressives & The Employee Free Choice Act

The Employee Free Choice Act is an Orwellian attack on democracy in America. In direct contradiction to its name, the Act would strip American workers of their freedom to choose whether to unionize. The Act takes away the right of employees to decide whether to unionize by secret ballot and replaces it with a system quite literally built to allow for worker intimidation by Unions. It is being pushed by Democrats as a massive pay off Big Labour and has, not surprisingly, the strong support of the One.

Whatever the Democratic Party may once have been, with their embrace of this Act and their embrace of high fuel prices as a way to "save the planet," it should be blatantly obvious to all but the most rigid ideolouge that the Democratic Party is not the party of the "working man" today. The situation is such that the father of America's progressives, George McGovern, has written against the Employee Free Choice Act in today's WSJ.
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This from George McGovern:

As a congressman, senator and one-time Democratic nominee for the presidency, I've participated in my share of vigorous public debates over issues of great consequence. And the public has been free to accept or reject the decisions I made when they walked into a ballot booth, drew the curtain and cast their vote. I didn't always win, but I always respected the process.

Voting is an immense privilege.

That is why I am concerned about a new development that could deny this freedom to many Americans. As a longtime friend of labor unions, I must raise my voice against pending legislation I see as a disturbing and undemocratic overreach not in the interest of either management or labor.

The legislation is called the Employee Free Choice Act, and I am sad to say it runs counter to ideals that were once at the core of the labor movement. Instead of providing a voice for the unheard, EFCA risks silencing those who would speak.

The key provision of EFCA is a change in the mechanism by which unions are formed and recognized. Instead of a private election with a secret ballot overseen by an impartial federal board, union organizers would simply need to gather signatures from more than 50% of the employees in a workplace or bargaining unit, a system known as "card-check." There are many documented cases where workers have been pressured, harassed, tricked and intimidated into signing cards that have led to mandatory payment of dues.

Under EFCA, workers could lose the freedom to express their will in private, the right to make a decision without anyone peering over their shoulder, free from fear of reprisal.

. . . To my friends supporting EFCA I say this: We cannot be a party that strips working Americans of the right to a secret-ballot election. We are the party that has always defended the rights of the working class. To fail to ensure the right to vote free of intimidation and coercion from all sides would be a betrayal of what we have always championed.

Some of the most respected Democratic members of Congress -- including Reps. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, George Miller and Pete Stark of California, and Barney Frank of Massachusetts -- have advised that workers in developing countries such as Mexico insist on the secret ballot when voting as to whether or not their workplaces should have a union. We should have no less for employees in our country.

I worry that there has been too little discussion about EFCA's true ramifications, and I think much of the congressional support is based on a desire to give our friends among union leaders what they want. . . .

Read the entire article. It truly is a mark of just how rotted the modern left is that, as McGovern noted above, they will demand secret ballots for union workers in foreign countries yet act willing to strip workers of the right in America. This goes hand in glove with my post of yesterday on how the post modern far left of today has more in common with Josef Stalin than John Locke.

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Another Obama Dichotomy

There are enough dichotomous issues about Obama to fill a laundry list, with the most discordant being Obama’s claim to be a post racial candidate while adopting as a preacher and mentor for twenty years the lunatic racist Rev. Wright. Then there is Obama’s claim to be able to heal the bi-partisan divide of the country while never having once in his career attempted to reach across the aisle on an issue of bi-partisan controversy. And there is Obama’s claim that he will clean Washington of special interests even as he panders shamelessly to Democratic special interests for their support. In that latter category today, there is news that Obama has agreed to work for release of the Teamsters Labor Union from federal oversight for corruption and ties to organized crime - an oversight the Justice Dept. has refused to end - thus earning the Teamsters' support.

Obama’s claim that he will clean Washington of special interests is hypocrisy writ on a grand scale. He has pandered to most Democratic special interests during his term as Senator, there being priot to today two particularly egregious examples. There was his recent support for the tort bar over our national security on the issue of immunity from prosecution for the telecom industry. And there was his vote to pay off Big Labor with the jaw droppingly anti-democratic and Orwellian-named Employee Free Choice Act. Add to that a third example. In order to gain the support of the Teamsters – a union whose history is rife with corruption and Mafia influence – Obama has agreed to seek the end of federal oversight of the Teamsters instituted in 1992 to try and clean up the union. This today from the WSJ:

Sen. Barack Obama won the endorsement of the Teamsters earlier this year after privately telling the union he supported ending the strict federal oversight imposed to root out corruption, according to officials from the union and the Obama campaign.

It's an unusual stance for a presidential candidate. Policy makers have largely treated monitoring of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters as a legal matter left to the Justice Department since an independent review board was set up in 1992 to eliminate mob influence in the union.

Sen. Obama's rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton, has declined to take a stance on Teamsters oversight. During his eight years in office, President Bill Clinton took no action to end the special board. Democratic presidential nominees in 2000 and 2004 -- Al Gore and John Kerry -- didn't address the issue, according to Teamsters officials.

Neither Sen. Obama nor Teamsters President James P. Hoffa has spoken publicly about easing up federal oversight, a top priority for Mr. Hoffa since he became union president in 1999. On the campaign trail, Mr. Hoffa stresses Sen. Obama's criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement as the big factor in winning the 1.4-million member union's support.

But John Coli, vice president for the Teamsters central region, who brokered the Teamsters endorsement, said Sen. Obama was "pretty definitive that the time had come to start the beginning of the end" of the three-member independent review board that investigates suspect activity in the union. Mr. Coli said that Sen. Obama conveyed that view in a series of phone conversations and meetings with Teamsters officials last year.

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor confirmed the candidate's position in a statement to The Wall Street Journal, saying that Sen. Obama believes that the board "has run its course," because "organized crime influence in the union has drastically declined." Mr. Vietor said Sen. Obama took that position last year.

. . . And, board members say, it would be extraordinary for a president to try to alter the oversight. "Presidents very rarely try to tell the Justice Department what is the right thing to do in matters of judicial administration," said William Webster, a member of the board since 1992 and a former director of both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Teamsters' backing has been particularly important for Sen. Obama, who is struggling to win over the white working-class voters who dominate the union's core membership of truckers and warehouse and port workers.

Read the entire article. And Obama is going to clean up special interests? The divide between Obama’s words and his deeds is not merely a gap, it is an immense canyon. Is there anything that this man has said that is backed by his deeds?

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