From the diaries by Erick

Union bosses have the federal government all sewn up. They’ve got a lock on the White House, they’ve got a lock on the Senate, as well as the House of Representatives. So, what’s the problem?

Immediately following the election, the President-Elect appointed the AFL-CIO’s Ellen Moran to be White House Communications Director (she has since moved on to the census-controlling Commerce Department), SEIU’s Patrick Gaspard to be White House Director of Political Affairs, SEIU’s Anna Burger and AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka to his “Economic Recovery Advisory Board,” and SEIU’s Dennis Rivera is currently running the White House’s war on health care. On the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, the newly-annointed President appointed hard-core union radical Wilma Liebman to the Chairmanship of the National Labor Relations Board. Since then, the Administration has appointed dozens (or more) of hard core unionists to various posts in the government and given union bosses some key wins early on like the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and union-only Project Labor Agreements. [For a broader list of union wishes fulfilled go here.]

So, why are union bosses getting antsy and feeling that they’re being shoved to the side?

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Arlen Specter is, admittedly, the most unprincipled opportunist in Washington, but something sure seems fishy.

Back in April after switching parties, Arlen Specter said, “I will not be an automatic 60th vote and I would illustrate that by my position on employees’ choice, also known as card check. I think it is a bad deal and I am opposed to it and would not vote to invoke cloture.” He was pretty adamant about it.

Well, Specter goes to the lefty blogger confab in Pittsburgh on August 14th and is asked, “Is it fair to say that on the climate legislation, on Employees Free Choice, on the public option health care plan, these are all areas where you would be voting with the majority for cloture?”

Specter’s response? “Yes.”

Guess what. Three days after Specter’s yes, Obama decides to raise money for Specter.

Sure, Obama had already said he’d campaign for Specter, but had actually done not one thing to help Specter. Heck, Obama did absolutely nothing to keep Sestak out of the primary, something Obama could have done.

But Specter goes on record saying he will now vote for cloture on stuff four months ago he adamantly was opposed to and now Obama says he’ll raise money for Specter, as will Joe Biden.

The question is: which came first? Did Specter saying ‘yes’ persuade Obama or did Obama persuade Specter?

The buzz in Pennsylvania last week was that Obama would not be helping Specter despite promises to do so. Now Obama is all in.

Unless you think the news is wholly coincidental, we must now consider the need to spell Arlen Specter’s last name with a dollar sign instead of an “S”.

It sure looks like Presidential bribe to get a filibuster proof Senate.

I wrote the other day about Sen. Ben Cardin’s (D-MD) townhall in Maryland. Senator Cardin, you will recall, had his townhall co-sponsored with the SEIU and ACORN.

Additionally, his office sent an email to the AFL-CIO, which then forwarded it out, asking Obamacare supporters to attend the event in order to fill the seats and keep out pro-America supporters¹.

The whole thing was another example of leftist astroturf being masqueraded before a willing media as authentic grassroots, complete with a certificate of authenticity signed by George Soros.

Check out this article showing just how planned the astroturf is. The article came out on the 4th of August.

Organized labor plans two mass mobilizations in August — and beyond — on health care and on the Employee Free Choice Act, interviews at the AFL-CIO Executive Council show. . . . The health care mobilization already started, and was going even as the council met. Unions arranged for 50,000 phone calls to be funneled to Congress on the issue on July 28. And on July 27, the Alliance of Retired Americans, the AFL-CIO’s affiliate for union and other retirees, arranged two conference calls, of 100 people each, to talk health care campaign strategy, Alliance President Barbara Easterling added.

And the Employee Free Choice Act mobilization aims at the fact that Democrats now lack the 60 votes needed to shut off a planned GOP-led filibuster against the bill.

What? How can that be authentic?

The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind — AFL-CIO workers wear t-shirts made in China, not Brooks Brothers suits. Therefore, they are authentic.

Let’s also note the part about the Employee Free Choice Act — the pressure for it, like healthcare, is union generated, union powered, and union fake. The only thing authentic about it is the passion the unions have for pushing the fake pressure campaigns before they go bankrupt under the weight of their own union contracts.

In Pennsylvania, the unions are rallying to support card check, or what they like to refer to as the “Employee Free Choice Act.”

Some local business leaders are going to be rallying with them. The news media there notes

Business leaders will gather in Hanover Township, Lehigh County, this afternoon in support of the Employee Free Choice Act.

The roundtable will be held at 5 o’clock this afternoon at Airport Pizza, 3360 Airport Road, and attendees will express support for federal legislation pending before Congress that will give workers the freedom to form unions and hold corporations accountable. U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., has indicated he wants to hear feedback on the act, and the business owners intend to let him know they support it and he should too, according to a news release.

One of the most vocal local business leaders is a guy with the delightfully adult film-ish name of Erv Fetherman. Mr. Fetherman is cited in the Express-Times as the owner of some business called the “Mail Room,” which is a unionized company already.

They probably could not, in a mainstream news outlet, write about Mr. Fetherman’s other business.

Well, at least I assume Erv Fetherman who owns the Mail Room is the same Erv Fetherman that owns “Erv’s Girls” some 39 feet away from the Mail Room (and yes, it is the Mail Room, not the Male Room).

Erv’s Girls — no word on if it is unionized — claims to be a BYOB strip club where you can’t touch the ladies, but couples are always welcome. If it is the same Erv Fetherman, he’s also been arrested for selling drugs to his strippers.

Perhaps the union representatives should find more upstanding businessmen to support their efforts to destroy private enterprise.

Let’s be clear. Barack Obama has an agenda. He wants to tax our energy and put the government in control of our health care. Given all the damage that Obama wants to do to our economy through these, card check just isn’t that high on his priority list. MSNBC has it:

*** Card check’s death? Did the legislative battle over the Employee Free Choice Act (a.k.a. “card check”) end before it truly began? GOP Sen. Arlen Specter’s decision yesterday to oppose the bill, even though he voted for cloture on the measure in ’07, dealt a blow to organized labor, denying them the 60 votes they need to end debate — even if Al Franken ends up joining the Senate. We can tell you this: The White House appears to be happy (but very quietly so) to have this debate out of the way. No doubt they were for it. But it was always more of a Biden cause than a Barack cause. At this point in time, with everything else on their plate, sticking a finger in business’ eye wasn’t something the White House was looking forward to. Would Obama have signed it? Yes. But he doesn’t have to worry about it now, at least maybe not until 2011.

There has been much conversation as of late surrounding the issue of who gets to fight the Employee Free Choice Act, EFCA and how they get to do it. That’s right, people are talking about how to fight it and who gets to play with whom rather than actually doing something to combat the bill.

There are several efforts underway, from grassroots organizing to federal campaigns. The Coalition for a Democratic Workplace (CDW), a group led by the U.S. Chamber and other business interests and trade associations are raising money, running ads and lobbying against EFCA at the federal level.

Another effort ran by the Alliance for Worker Freedom (AWF), an organization created by Grover Norquist in 2003 to combat anti-worker legislation, is working to pass anti-EFCA resolutions in state legislative bodies.

Most certainly the folks over at the Center for Union Facts are cooking something up as well.

However, much attention has focused on a new organization called Save Our Secret Ballot (SOS Ballot). Their goal is to place on the ballot state constitutional amendments that require secret ballot voting on all public elections.

All of these efforts are meant to compliment each other and create publicity against EFCA and drive up the pressure on federal congressmen.

So why is everyone acting like a stubborn only child on the playground and not playing nice with others.

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