How do unions benefit?

So the Comrade's supposed big speech is scheduled for tonight. Yawn. I don't expect any surprises and apparently no one else does either, not even the dems. On top of that, everyone knows the speech is just a big political game to try to dump the blame for this economy on Congress.

Are there any voters out there who aren't aware of this? I mean, who does the Comrade think he's fooling?

Well, maybe the unions? Are union members that stupid? Or is it just their leaders? Power-mad, greedy thugs?

I've said before, I've been in two unions due to "closed shop" laws in Illinois. That is, if you don't join the union, you don't work. I haven't really said which unions they were. I'll say it now, it was SEIU before the communists took over and then later, the Teamsters.

I didn't quite see any advantages from membership in either one. The Teamsters was the worst though. Very high dues withheld from our checks, and our steward was intimidated by the "guys downtown" and wouldn't even ask them any questions. Apart from taking our money every month. the Teamsters had absolutely no impact whatsoever on that job, conditions, days off or anything. But our management bosses were scared poopless of them, too.

So I'm just thinking, what are union members getting out of the Comrade's regime? Are they working? Maybe for six months, 12 months -- for as long as the first stimulus lasted. But now even the US Post Office -- employing the largest aggregate union in the country apart from public school teachers -- even the Post Office is facing serious cut-backs. There's even talks of shutting it down all together.

When I was in the SEIU, leadership tried to donate a whole bunch of money to the dem candidate running for president that year -- and he had promised a "guaranteed income" for everyone. That is, every American would be guaranteed X-amount of income if they worked or not, or whatever their situation might be. The SEIU leadership wanted to support this guy's campaign. But there was such a rage about that... "You mean I gotta work my ass off 40 hours a week plus any overtime I can get and these lazy assholes just sit back and collect?" I think in the end, the SEIU didn't donate any money to anyone that year. As I said, it was before the communists took it over.

During the Reagan presidency, I knew several -- actually dozens -- of union members who became very staunch Republicans. Just like the "solid South," which heretofore had been solidly democrat in protest of Lincoln and abolition.

So union leadership doesn't always reflect the values and beliefs of the people they represent. I'm sure not every SEIU member is a marxist, as that organization's leadership is.

And the Teamsters? Having heard snippets of Jimmy Hoffa Jr's tirade against the Tea Party, I'd guess Hoffa is about as brutal, thuggish and corrupt as his old man. And he'll probably end up buried under a stadium in the Meadowlands, too. Or whatever. Wonder how many Teamsters are also Tea Party? Something to think about, Junior.

Much more recently, as a journalist, I watched the demise of an industry partially due to union pressures. The industry was automating. The union represented only maybe a quarter of the people employed in businesses nationwide, and then usually only in the larger businesses. As technologies changed and the industry shrunk just due to those developments (consumers could do their own work, rather than go to one of these businesses to have it done), the unions started screaming and hollering, demanding better pay, blah-blah-blah. The industry union got so small that it's now joined itself to either the Teamsters of the AFL. I forget which.

One company was the largest in this industry in the world. The union began ranting and raving, lying and trying to generate all kinds of bad publicity, lobbying for things Card-Check (that's the first time I ever heard of it, in the 1990s), and also trying to organize its union internationally. The union apparently believed this huge, huge company was the place to start. Many of its facilities were already organized and the company had always got along pretty well with its unions. Until the harrassment started.

So this biggest company in the world started selling off and shutting down its plants all over the world. It took its remaining capital and restructured itself into a succesful business in a different industry. And there's about 30,000 one-time employees who don't work for them anymore. The unions were just too much trouble to deal with. So the corporation cut and run while it still had something left to start over somewhere else.

Anyways, now I'm rambling. But I just hope the union membership takes a step back and thinks about all this before they get on the bus, drink the Kool-Aid, and start beating up bankers or Tea Party members or whatever Junior and Trumpka wants them to do. The membership are Americans, too, after all. Once a free and proud people. Are they still?

Save the Republic.