I mean, how did he know?!
As the Michigan House debated a right-to-work measure today, a member of that august body warned of–or perhaps threatened–violence. “We’re going to pass something that will undo 100 years of labor relations and there will be blood, there will be repercussions,” WWJ-AM quotes Rep. Doug Geiss, a Detroit-area Democrat, as saying. “We will re-live the battle of the overpass.”
The station offers a refresher in labor history: “The battle of the overpass was a bloody fracas in 1937 between union organizers and Ford Motor Co. security guards. [United Auto Workers organizer] Walter Reuther was famously thrown down a flight of stairs and another union organizer was left with a broken back.”
So far this time there are no reports of violence or threats by management (unless you count Geiss, who is after all supposed to represent taxpayers, as part of “management” vis-à-vis government employees). But union leaders have echoed the violent rhetoric. WWJ quotes Terry O’Sullivan of the Labor International Union of North America, as saying at a rally, in reference to elected officials who support the right to work: “We are going to take you on and take you out.”
At least he didn’t say he was “targeting” victory or anything like that. Liberals hate violent language.
What they don’t hate is this:
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“This is just the first round of a battle that’s going to divide this state. We’re going to have a civil war,” Hoffa said on CNN’s “Newsroom.”
The Obama administration came to the defense of democracy:
“The president believes in debate that’s civil,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said today. “I haven’t seen those comments and I’m not sure that they mean what some would interpret them to mean. I just haven’t seen them.”
This regime was aware enough of a YouTube video making the Prophet out to be a pedophile to blame an entire failed Mideast policy on it, yet hadn’t heard—and then excused—a call for spilled blood?
Yup.
“President Barack Obama launched an assault Monday on Michigan’s proposed ‘right to work’ legislation.” [...] “These so-called ‘right to work’ laws, they don’t have to do with economics; they have everything to do with politics.”
…
Obama went on to laud Big Labor: “You only have to look to Michigan–where workers were instrumental in reviving the auto industry–to see how unions have helped build not just a stronger middle class but a stronger America.”
You mean Amerika, Mr. President:
MLive.com, a Michigan news site, reports that union thugs “tore down a large tent maintained by American’s [sic] For Prosperity Michigan, which reserved the space to support the right-to-work legislation”:
“We had been contacted by that group that they had three or four people that were actually trapped underneath the tent,” said Lt. Mike Shaw. “Two of them were in wheelchairs and there was also a propane tank in there. So we had to send troopers out, and naturally, the crowd was not too receptive.”
Well, if the El Presidente is against it (confession: I almost wrote “Der Führer”), and the rank-and-file are against it, it couldn’t have passed, right?
And the House just voted 58-52 for the bill affecting private workers.
So when Gov. Snyder signs the bills, as he’s promised he will do, workers in the public and private sectors will no longer have to pay to join a union unless they want to.
It will be the 24th “right-to-work” state.
So, the two elected bodies of the Michigan legislature passed the bill; the elected Governor of the state will sign the bill; Michigan will join almost half the rest of the country in such legislation… and Obama denounces it?
Isn’t this the same process that reelected him—by a lesser percentage, I might note?
Maybe this is why Aggie and I are so dispirited. In the rest of the country, people who share our politics still have a voice in their state and local elected bodies. Here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, those bodies are cold and stiff.