If you’re like me, you never heard of this evil event that was reported in an Los Angeles Times editorial below. It has been hidden from you, just as the truth about so much history has been hidden by the teachers and historians who were supposed to teach the truth, but instead have fed us on propaganda and lies.
As terrible, and as evil, as the following event was, which has been deliberately omitted from virtually everyone’s history books, it represents only one of many evil and ugly incidents in the history of labor unions.
The blast that rocked labor: The bombing of the Times Building 100 years ago set off a chain of events that devastated America’s unions.
by Lew Irwin
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Page A27, Los Angeles TimesShortly after 1 A.M. on Oct. 1, 1910, 100 years ago Friday, a time bomb constructed of 16 sticks of 80% dynamite connected to a cheap windup alarm clock exploded in an alley next to the Los Angeles Times. It detonated with such violence that for blocks around, people ran panic-stricken into the streets, believing that an intense earthquake had hit the city.
The explosion destroyed the Times building, taking the lives of 20 employees, including the night editor and the principle telegraph operator, and maiming dozens of others. Two other time bombs – intended to kill Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, the publisher of the newspaper, and Felix J. Zeehandelaar, the head of a Los Angeles business organization – were discovered later that morning hidden in the bushes next to their homes. Their mechanisms had jammed.
Eventually two brothers, J.B. McNamara, who planted the bombs, and J.J. McNamara, an official of the International Assn. of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers union who ordered the attacks, were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned.
In it’s day, The Times bombing was equivalent to the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center. It was called “the crime of the century,” and it remains the deadliest crime to go to trial in California history. It would lead to investigations, arrests and trials of union leaders across the country who, it turned out, funded hundreds of terrorist bombings at mostly nonunion construction projects between 1907 and 1911. They included officials of the California Building Trades Council in San Fransisco, the ironworkers union and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters in Indianapolis, the Machinists Union in Syracuse, N.Y., and the Building Trades Council in Detroit. Hirelings of the union involved in executing the bombings were also brought to trial – 46 members of the ironworkers union alone. In addition to the McNamaras, who were sentenced in 1911, 39 men were convicted and sent to prison in 1912; five others received suspended sentences.
The testimony during their trials and their convictions devastated the American labor movement, virtually paralyzing it until the New Deal. […]
The terrorism that gripped America 100 years ago is barely mentioned in California history books today…. The bombing is now regarded as an embarrassment to organized labor, which has never gotten around to an unequivocal denunciation of it.
A 1996 history of the Ironworkers Union says that … “The international officers stretched the limits of zeal in a righteous cause.” […]
Former President Theodore Roosevelt reacted against those “foolish sentimentalists” who urged that the McNamaras be regarded with sympathy because they were struggling in a war on behalf of their class, pointed out that all of their victims had been “laboring people.” “Murder,” Roosevelt said succinctly, “is murder.”
“Bomb.” “Violence.” “Murder.” “The equivalent to the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center.” The “the crime of the century.” “The deadliest crime to go to trial in California history” to this very day. Labor unions. All of those words and phrases go hand in hand together.
A century of evil. That’s the legacy of labor unions.
Interestingly, the article points out that the American labor movement was virtually paralyzed until the New Deal. So let’s pick up with the New Deal. From “Why Did FDR’s New Deal Harm Blacks?“:
By giving labor unions the monopoly power to exclusively represent employees in a workplace, the Wagner Act had the effect of excluding blacks, since the dominant unions discriminated against blacks. The Wagner Act had originally been drafted with a provision prohibiting racial discrimination. But the American Federation of Labor successfully lobbied against it, and it was dropped. AFL unions used their new power, granted by the Wagner Act, to exclude blacks on a large scale. Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Marcus Garvey were all critical of compulsory unionism.
From violent terrorist bomber murders who committed the crime of the century equivalent of the 9/11 terrorist attack to racists who hurt poor blacks.
Thirty years later, the unions got a second chance. And they were still genuinely evil.
Let’s also point out that while labor unions were being violent racists in America, they were in the process of being the source of the greatest evil in human history in Europe. It was the labor unions that formed the core of Lenin’s violent communist movement. The Marxists started out in 1898 by forming the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Just as labor unions formed the core of Hitler’s National Socialist German WORKERS Party.
“A Socialist Workers’ Government has achieved a workers revolution in Germany without resorting to, tho in some respects it approximates, Communism. Adolf Hitler has done it by wiping out all class privileges and class distinction, but the economics foundation of property rights and private capital has been left almost intact – for the present time.”
“The Third Reich, under Hitler, has wiped out corporate trade-unionism by forcing all workers to join one great government union, the National Socialist Union of Employers and Workers…”
While American labor unions were basking in the light of FDR’s pork barrel political favoritism and doing everything they could to keep poor blacks down, their European counterparts were at work preparing to set the world on fire.
So far, I can’t say I’d be proud to be a member of a labor union.
AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka recently appeared before an audience of fellow socialist travelers and said:
“…we need to fundamentally restructure our economy and re-establish popular control over the private corporations which have distorted our economy and hijacked our government. That’s a long-term job, but one we should start now.
I Hate the Media points out the scary parallels to the ugly history of the past:
“Re-establish”? Wouldn’t that imply that there had once been popular control over private corporations?
Richard. Mr. Trumka. Sir. Pardon our impertinence, but we believe that what you’re talking about here is National Socialism.
As in Adolf Trumka.
Meanwhile, while AFL-CIO head Trumka was flirting with National Socialism, recently retired SEIU president Andy Stern was kissing up to socialism’s more famous sister, communism, saying:
“Workers of the world unite – it’s not just a slogan anymore. It’s the way we’re gonna have to do our work.”
But let’s get back to Richard Trumka.
Of course, Richard Trumka isn’t just our next budding fuhrer; he’s an incredibly violent and evil man. Here’s the short version of one story about Trumka:
On the orders of the United Mine Workers (UMW), 16,000 miners went on strike in 1993. One subcontractor, Eddie York (who was not a UMW member), decided it was important to support his wife and three children and crossed picket lines to get to his job. He was shot in the head as he left the job site to go home. UMW President Richard Trumka (now Secretary-Treasurer at the AFL-CIO) told The Washington Times that “if you strike a match and put your finger in, common sense tells you you’re going to burn your finger.” UMW strike captain Jerry Dale Lowe was found guilty of weapons charges and conspiracy in York’s death, and York’s widow Wanda sued the union for her husband’s wrongful death. The UMW fought the lawsuit for four years, but settled with Wanda York only two days after federal prosecutors announced that they would share evidence from the criminal trial with York’s attorneys.
The short version doesn’t include the fact that Richad Trumka’s union thugs – in addition to shooting a good family man in the head and murdering him – threw rocks at the rescue workers who showed up to try to save Eddie York’s life as he lay dying.
As head of the United Mine Workers, Trumka ordered a nationwide strike against Peabody Coal in 1993. On July 22, a non-union worker, Eddie York, was shot in the back of the head and killed as he attempted to pass striking coal workers. Picketers continued to throw rocks after York was shot, preventing his would be rescuers from assisting him.[14]. Trumka and other United Mine Workers officials settled a wrongful death lawsuit with Mr. York’s widow out of court in 1997.
And it was following that vicious display of supremely ugly violence that Richard Trumka delivered his “he got just what he deserved” remark.
The executive summary of a 31-page report titled, “Freedom From Union Violence” states that:
The National Institute for Labor Relations Research (NILRR) has recorded 8,799 incidents of violence from news reports since 1975.
And that report was dated 1998, meaning that we’ve very likely witnessed a lot of violence since.
That report is filled with separate accounts of violence.
I could go on and on and on reporting incidents of union violence. But I want an article, not a 10-part collection of books.
So let’s move on to the newest form of labor union violence: economic violence.
How does an unfunded gap of $3.23 TRILLION in public sector union pensions sound to you?
From The Hill:
Businesses and unions planning to meet on possible $3 trillion pension disaster
By Jay Heflin – 09/05/10 09:04 PM ETLabor groups will be invited to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to talk about an alarming shortfall in state employee pension plans that some believe could lead to a new government bailout.
Randy Johnson, the Chamber’s senior vice president for Labor, Immigration and Employee Benefits, told The Hill the total shortfall for state pension funds could run as high as $3 trillion.
That doesn’t count the private sector unions, which are so deep in unfunded pension debt it’s unreal. SEIU’s unfunded liabilities represent more than 80% of the union’s total assets, for just one example. And that is just part of a bailout movement that could – gulp – top $100 trillion.
And when the system can’t pay the unions, there will be blood. We’ll see the kind of violence and outright anarchy that has been gripping Europe in recent months. Only we’ve got a lot more guns in America.
Labor unions have destroyed every single industry they have ever been allowed to contaminate. From manufacturing (airline, auto, steel, textile, etc.) to teaching. And Superman aint coming, because labor unions are the strength-sapping, lethal Kryptonite.
Labor unions have represented genuine evil for more than a century. And if we don’t vote out the Democrats who use public money to keep their voter-turnout apparatus going in a sick game of political patronage, they will murder this country.
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