Wall Street Sharks Circle the UAW

[Truth2Tell]

From: Providence Journal

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_rick15_04-15-09_DJDVGHK_v17.3e650b1.html

01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, April 15, 2009

JOHN R. MacARTHUR

NEW YORK

BARACK OBAMA’S commitment to helping labor has always been suspect, but handing over the American car business to the investment banker Steven Rattner might well turn the president into the last great union buster.

To be sure, we’re already long past the point where industrial unions have any real clout in our so-called service economy — this thanks to “free trade” (that is, guaranteed cheap labor in foreign locales and low import tariffs on foreign-made goods) and Bill Clinton’s alliance with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Franklin Roosevelt’s old party of labor is now almost entirely the party of Wall Street and only a severe depression might alter this political reality. When Obama sent economist Austen Goolsbee to reassure the Canadian government that the candidate’s criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement during the Ohio primary didn’t mean anything, he meant it.

But this isn’t to say there aren’t a few remaining pockets of working-class resistance to the money power that Wall Street and the DLC would like to crush. And right now, Rattner and the Treasury Department task force’s biggest target is not the overpaid executive staff at General Motors, but the United Auto Workers union, the country’s best and traditionally most honest mass labor organization.

Just wait a few weeks, and the demands for concessions from the allegedly overpaid and cosseted UAW members will rise to levels of shrillness far greater than the very brief — and ineffective — outcry over the AIG bonuses.

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_rick15_04-15-09_DJDVGHK_v17.3e650b1.html">Continued...