Labor Unions: A Century Of Genuine Evil

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 Times

Shortly 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.

From a 1935 German magazine:

“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 ET

Labor 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.

LA Times Suppresses Damaging Obama-Khalidi-Ayers Video

From Little Green Footballs:

Contact the LA Times and Demand the Rashid Khalidi Video

Politics | Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 9:24:57 am PST

We’re calling on LGF readers to contact the Los Angeles Times and their advertisers to demand that the Times release the videotape they are concealing, showing Barack Obama at a party with radical Palestinian activists, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn, being praised by former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi.

They’re stonewalling, and giving people who contact them the runaround.

Please note: the existence of the tape is not in doubt; Peter Wallsten of the Los Angeles Times explicitly wrote that the Times had a copy of the tape, in an article about Obama’s ties to Rashid Khalidi: Allies of Palestinians see a friend in Barack Obama.

At Khalidi’s going-away party in 2003, the scholar lavished praise on Obama, telling the mostly Palestinian American crowd that the state senator deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat. “You will not have a better senator under any circumstances,” Khalidi said.

The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times.

The Los Angeles Times is hiding a potentially explosive video of a presidential candidate, during the final days of an election.

This is brazen, unethical media malfeasance.

Don’t let them get away with it.

Contact the Los Angeles Times.

Contact their advertisers.

If the media were fair, if they were unbiased, objective, and frankly, if they were honest, the Democratic Party would either look much different, or it would have gone the way of the Dodo bird.  As it is, the media has become the propaganda wing of the DNC, and they are biased to the core even as they falsely represent themselves as “objective journalists.”

Journalism has become a disgrace, and the entire industry would be ashamed of themselves if they still retained a functioning moral compass.

I found the following means of leaving a complaint at the doorstep of the LA Times:

Editorial Contacts
Readers’ Representative:
Questions or concerns about The Times’
journalistic standards and practices

(877) 554-4000

Don’t let them get away with this.  Let them know that YOU know that they are a disgrace.  There is no way in hell the LA Times would sit on damning video if it would have hurt John McCain instead of Barack Obama.

LA Times Proves It’s Blatant Bias For Democrats

Had a very interesting story come out Friday, July 25th.

There’s little “apparently” about it: The National Enquirer has run stories that John Edwards had a “love child” with a woman named Rielle Hunter. The story begins:

Vice Presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards was caught visiting his mistress and secret love child at 2:40 this morning in a Los Angeles hotel by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.

The married ex-senator from North Carolina – whose wife Elizabeth continues to battle cancer — met with his mistress, blonde divorcée Rielle Hunter, at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night, July 21 – and the NATIONAL ENQUIRER was there! He didn’t leave until early the next morning.

Rielle had driven to Los Angeles from Santa Barbara with a male friend for the rendezvous with Edwards. The former senator attended a press event Monday afternoon with L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on the topic of how to combat homelessness.

But a months-long NATIONAL ENQUIRER investigation had yielded information that Rielle and Edwards, 54, had arranged to secretly meet afterward and for the ex-senator to spend some time with both his mistress and the love child who he refuses to publicly acknowledge as his own.

And the details are pretty well confirmed by FoxNews.

John Edwards was in Los Angeles to do one of his poverty events, and the Enquirer discovered that Rielle Hunter had a room at the Beverly Hilton. Believing that John Edwards – whom their sources claimed was the father of Hunter’s child in December 2007 story – would show up, an Enquirer team obtained a room and laid in wait for the former Senator.

Sure enough he showed up. And when the Enquirer reporters began to photograph him and ask him questions at 2:40 A.M., Edwards – who did not have a room at the hotel he was in at nearly 3 A.M. – ran into a bathroom and called security.

So let’s just come out and acknowledge the plain fact: John Edwards is a philandering lech who had a long-time sexual affair even as his wife is possibly dying of cancer.

Okay. For many who have long-since come to believe that John Edwards was a scumbag par excellance, this isn’t so much news as it is confirmation of what they already thought.

Here’s where the story really gets interesting. The Los Angeles Times is caught red-handed trying to suppress the story:

LAT Gags Blogs: In a move that has apparently stirred up some internal discontent, the Los Angeles Times has banned its bloggers, including political bloggers, from mentioning the Edwards/Rielle Hunter story. Even bloggers who want to mention the story in order to make a skeptical we-don’t-trust-the-Enquirer point are forbidden from doing so. Kausfiles has obtained a copy of the email Times bloggers received from editor Tony Pierce. [I’ve excised the recipient list and omitted Pierce’s email address]:

From: “Pierce, Tony”

Date: July 24, 2008 10:54:41 AM PDT

To: [XXX]

Subject: john edwards

Hey bloggers,

There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.

If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don’t hesitate to ask

Keep rockin,

Tony

That will certainly calm paranoia about the Mainstream Media (MSM) suppressing the Edwards scandal. …

P.S.: Is the Times’ edict a) part of a double-standard that favors Democrats (and disfavors Republicans like Rep. Vito Fossella and John McCain)? Or does it b) simply reflect an outmoded Gatekeeper Model of journalism in which not informing readers of certain sensitive allegations is as important as informing them–as if readers are too simple-minded to weigh charges that are not proven, as if they aren’t going to find out about such controversies anyway? I’d say it’s a mixture of both (a) and (b). This was a sensational scandal the LAT and other MSM papers passionately did not want to uncover when Edwards was a formal candidate, and now that the Enquirer seems to have done the job for them it looks like they want everyone to shut up while they fail to uncover it again. …

P.P.S.: The Times apparently failed to get word of the ban to one of its bloggers in time to prevent her from shocking readers by saying she hoped the allegations against Edwards weren’t true. … 2:55 A.M. link

Another link to the cover-up story.

There are so many reasons to know that the media is WAY, WAY, WAAAAAYYY in the tank for Democrats.

You can add that to the massive media entourage – including all three elite network anchors – that accompanied Barack Obama on his foreign trip.

You remember the “wide-stance” airport bathroom arrest of Republican Senator Larry Craig? The media were all over that story after it surfaced, and had been trying to get dirt on him for months. Though he ultimately refused to resign, the constant media attention destroyed his career, and he is not running for re-election.

You remember the media frenzy over the Repulbican Representative Mark Foley scandal in Florida? It may have been the straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back moment for Republicans in the 2006 elections. The media couldn’t get enough of that one. And as much as they covered the scandal, they misrepresented it to make it sound worse than it actually was. One had to work to learn the truth that the media didn’t reveal: that Foley was not molesting boys, but rather forming friendships with congressional pages, and then contacting them with sexual advances AFTER they were of legal age. He did not solicit sex with any active page.  He has never been arrested for his conduct since his resignation.

Neither of these men had anywhere NEAR the public profile of two-time Democratic candidate for president and 2004 vice-presidential candidate Edwards.  But it didn’t matter to a media that was out to destroy Republicans and influence elections.  The media ignored the Edwards “love-child” story for months and months when they went after Republicans with zeal.

Now, I don’t mind one bit that the media exposed guys like Craig and Foley. What they did – legal or not – was wrong, and they should have been exposed.

What bothers me is the constant double-standard of a media that represents itself as being objective while it is clearly in the tank for liberals and Democrats.

On story after story, issue after issue, the media reveals its bias. It reveals it in the stories it covers, the stories that it refuses to cover, the people it interviews or refuses to interview for a given story, and the angle or topic of a story that is covered versus other possible angles. They do it all the time, unrelentingly.

Many liberals believe as they do because they have been made stupid by a media that routinely distorts the truth and misrepresents the facts. They cannot understand reality because they are constantly presented with a lie.

As much of a story as two-time Democrat candidate for president John Edward’s infidelity is, the real story is the bias of the media in refusing to fairly and objectively cover a story that would negatively effect Democrats.