by Ben Shapiro
Huey Long, the wildly popular and corrupt governor and senator from Louisiana, preached something similar from his pulpit. A stem-winding speaker, Long thought that fortunes should be capped. His program was simple: Soak the rich. Bully them. Destroy them. “[T]he rich people of this country—and by rich people I mean the super-rich—will not allow us to solve the problems, or rather the one little problem that is afflicting this country, because in order to cure all of our woes it is necessary to scale down the big fortunes, that we may scatter the wealth to be shared by all of the people.”26 Because, as we know, when you scatter the wealth around, everybody’s better off.
No wonder the economy stagnated during the FDR years. Anybody with money was probably scared to go outside with a fat wallet, lest a politician or union thug grab it and pummel them senseless.
But FDR’s class warfare truly opened the door to American class bullying. Every Democratic president since has cited FDR as a transformative figure; the unions are still living off the class warfare regime FDR created; the activation of the dissatisfied poor against capitalism started with FDR.
And Obama has certainly studied his FDR.
UNION BULLYING
If Obama learned one thing from FDR, it was that every socialist needs his foot soldiers.
And what better place to get them than the unions?
FDR created the massive union infrastructure that would pave the way for nearly a century of Democratic political dominance; Obama inherited that infrastructure. During the 2008 election cycle, unions spent in excess of $200 million to help get Obama elected.27 They did that because Obama wasn’t just a friend of the unions—he was a former union lackey. In 2007, Obama admitted as much to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). He told them, “I’ve got a history with this union. When I was a young organizer, I had just moved to Chicago. I started with working with SEIU Local 880, home health care workers, to make sure that they were registered to vote.”28 To be more honest, Obama had done more than simply help register people to vote. He’d worked with the SEIU’s race-baiting love baby, ACORN. And the SEIU helped him right back in 2008, sending out one hundred thousand volunteers to work the pavement for him and dropping $60 million to back his play.29
It wasn’t just the SEIU. He told the AFL-CIO, “I know the AFL-CIO is tired of playing defense. We’re ready to play some offense.”30 They dropped some $50 million. The National Education Association backed him to the tune of $50 million, too.
Obama made sure that his own personal Bonus Marchers got their bonuses. His stimulus package was heavily geared toward the unions. One Department of Labor grant handed $7.4 million to the SEIU for “green jobs” training programs. As Van Jones, Obama’s “green jobs czar” admitted, there were no such things as “green jobs.”31 More than $115 billion of the stimulus package went to education—which meant, in essence, that it went to teachers’ unions.
Obama stacked the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees business relations with unions, with union cronies. That meant that cases of union intimidation went unprosecuted. In one particular case, pro-union employees physically threatened anti-union employees in advance of a union election. The NLRB ruled that was no problem at all.32 Obama also pursued the notorious card-check legislation, which would allow union thugs to intimidate employees into voting to unionize.33
Obama’s biggest union giveaway of all, though, was Obamacare. It’s incredible that the media never got curious about union support for Obamacare. After all, unions have the best health-care plans on the planet—those Cadillac health-care plans in which union members essentially get to walk into the Mayo Clinic, slap down twenty dollars, and get diagnosed for a serious case of the cooties. So why would they support government intervention in health care?
The answer is obvious: today’s unions are for the most part government sector unions, staffed by government employees who bargain collectively with politicians. The more government employees, the more union members. Observers expect more than 20 million additional government workers to join the union rolls under Obamacare.34 The vast majority of the cash that these unions receive comes through forced dues—the ultimate form of bullying, in which union members don’t get a say in how much they wish to send to their unions or how the dollars are spent.
In any case, the unions didn’t really have to worry about losing those Cadillac plans anyway. As it turns out, Obama handed out waivers to the unions like Pacman Jones making it rain at a strip club. Meanwhile, everyday Americans watched their ability to choose their own health care get washed down the union toilet.
While Obama stacked legislation with union giveaways at the expense of the American people, that’s not truly bullying—it’s legislation approved by a majority of Congress, which at least in theory represents the people of the United States. Where things truly get ugly is in the thug tactics used by the Obama administration to target individuals who get in the way of the union agenda.
Take, for example, the auto bailouts.
President Obama got a nice big chunk of cash from the United Auto Workers during his 2008 run. When Chrysler found itself in financial ruins, Obama did the only logical thing: he decided to turn over the company to the UAW to pay them back for all their support. In order to make that happen, he shafted longtime investors in the company, including pensioners; secured creditors received just 29 cents on the dollar, while unsecured creditors—namely, the UAW—got 55 percent of the company. It was the same deal at GM, where the UAW owned $20 billion of GM’s debt but somehow ended up owning 17.5 percent of the company and $9 billion in cash. Meanwhile, bondholders got shortchanged dramatically.35
This deal was pure bullying. Obama wanted a payoff for his cronies, so he rammed it down the throat of the bondholders. While the unions insisted all the bondholders were rich fat cats—which, by the way, wouldn’t make this tactic any less thuggish—the truth was different. The bondholders included people like the family of Vicki Denton, a woman killed in a Dodge crash, who was owed some $2.2 million by Chrysler. Now the family got nothing.36
Unions have nothing to fear in pursuing their thuggery—politicians like Obama are always willing to bail them out. No wonder they strike against the public interest. Historically, some police and firefighters unions have actually committed arson during strikes in order to pressure the cities with which they bargain.37 Literally thousands of violent incidents by union members have been reported over the past few decades. The concept of knee-capping didn’t come from nowhere.
The unions are so used to bullying their opponents at this point that they simply don’t know what to do when people fight back. In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker moved to curb collective bargaining for unions, since they’d bankrupted the state. The unions responded by occupying the state capitol, camping inside the building,38 screaming and chanting in absolutely frightening fashion. Jesse Jackson, drawn to the bevy of orgasmic reporters like a moth to the flame, showed up to threaten violence: “So they’re going to escalate the protests—you will either have collective bargaining through a vehicle called collective bargaining or you’re going to have it through the streets. People here will fight back because they think their cause is moral and they have nowhere else to go.”39
Normally, Jackson’s threats are empty when they don’t rhyme. This time, they didn’t rhyme . . . but the threats weren’t empty. One union member was arrested after threatening to shoot Walker. Ironically enough, he worked at a prison, so at least his workday didn’t change all that much.40 Dan Kapanke, a Wisconsin state senator who stood with Walker, got an email from a delightful probable union member, suggesting a playdate: “I will have your decapitated head on a pike in the Madison town square. This is your last warning.”41 Other emails were just as delightful: “Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your families will also be killed.”42 At least the assassination threat was polite. So polite, in fact, that the author of that missive ended up being treated leniently, bec
ause, as case management said, “she never intended to truly threaten or disturb anyone.”43 When I don’t want to threaten or disturb anyone, I have a weird habit of not threatening or disturbing anyone. When union thugs want to avoid threats and disturbances, they send emails threatening to murder people. But they use the word “please,” to tip off caseworkers that they’re not serious about it.
Unbelievably enough, even people who had nothing to do with the Walker fight received such nonthreats from the unions. One of Wisconsin’s biggest chain stores received a nonthreat from the unions if its management decided to stay neutral.44 Which union sent the nonthreat? The police union. But according to liberals, being threatened by the police counts as something bad only if you’re a black man driving 115 through a residential neighborhood. If you own a shop and don’t actively oppose Scott Walker, you deserve whatever you get.
Teachers unions began protesting outside the capitol, busing in their students to help them. The teachers obtained fake signed notes from doctors so that they could ditch school.45
President Obama didn’t think any of this was good. He thought it was downright fantastic. He called in Wisconsin reporters for an exclusive interview, in which he sided with the unions.46
Obama’s Democratic Party friends in the Wisconsin state senate decided to help out, too, in the bullying. They fled to the state of Illinois in an attempt to forestall a quorum in the legislature. They stayed there for weeks.
This wasn’t democracy or republicanism. This was fascistic bullying on a scale rarely seen in America.
In the end, the unions lost. Walker passed his bill, and when the unions recalled him, he won reelection in a landslide. But that wasn’t about to stop the unions. They merely decided that they needed an army of their own. A bigger, better, stronger army. Of vagrants, homeless people, unemployed college students, ex-hippies, and the celebrities who love them.
They needed a better class of thugs.
The first indicator that the union bullying machine was about to become a permanent feature of the political landscape occurred in May 2010. On a Sunday, Nina Easton of Fortune reported, five hundred “screaming, placard-waving strangers” showed up on the front lawn of Easton’s next-door neighbor, Greg Baer, deputy general counsel of Bank of America. “Waving signs denouncing bank ‘greed,’ ” wrote Easton, “hordes of invaders poured out of 14 school buses, up Baer’s steps, and onto his front porch. As bullhorns rattled with stories of debtor calls and foreclosed homes, Baer’s teenage son Jack—alone in the house—locked himself in the bathroom. ‘When are they going to leave?’ Jack pleaded when I called to check on him.” Baer called the police. Nothing happened. “Intimidation was the whole point of this exercise, and it worked—even on the police,” Easton wrote. “A trio of officers who belatedly answered our calls confessed a fear that arrests might ‘incite’ these trespassers.”47
All this was a great start for the unions—frightening children, staking out the front lawns of executives. The only thing missing was an enormous replica guillotine. But in order to really threaten the status quo, the unions needed a front group. If they did it themselves, there would be consequences. If they could get a dissolute group of rabble together to bother, threaten, and assault everyday Americans, they could achieve their goals.
They needed Occupy.
OCCUPY THE WHITE HOUSE
President Obama wasn’t elected on a platform of class warfare. In the last weeks of the campaign, in fact, Obama lost ground to John McCain based on charges that he was too liberal economically. The Joe the Plumber incident clearly hurt him.
President Obama needed a groundswell in order to make FDR-like transformative change.
What he got, unfortunately for him, was the Tea Party. As President Obama forged forward with his program of crony bailouts and wild, uncontrolled spending, Rick Santelli of CNBC took to the airwaves. “Government is promoting bad behavior,” he shouted to the traders standing behind him at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. “Do we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages? This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage? President Obama, are you listening? How about we all stop paying our mortgages! It’s a moral hazard.” He then called on Americans to begin a second Tea Party.
All across America, citizens concerned about government spending and the destruction of constitutional principles answered the call. Thousands turned out at rallies to protest President Obama’s massive expansion of the state.
This was not what Obama had in mind.
Obama responded by turning to his media cronies to demonize the Tea Party as enemies of the people. When the Tea Party tried to push Republicans to implement spending cuts before automatically raising the debt ceiling, the media went clinically insane. “Never negotiate with terrorists,” wrote Joe Nocera in the New York Times. “It only encourages them. . . . Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.”48 This was shades of Father Coughlin.
But Obama had many Father Coughlin stand-ins on whom he could rely. Steven Rattner, his former car czar, took to the MSNBC airwaves to explain that Tea Partiers were waging a “form of economic terrorism”; they had, he said, “strapped [themselves] with dynamite standing in the middle of Times Square at rush hour, and saying ‘either you do it my way, or we’re going to blow you up.’ ”49 The Obama administration couldn’t label real terrorists terrorists—the war on terrorism became an overseas contingency operation. But when it came to people who thought the government should spend less—then it was shoot to kill.
Joe Klein of Time pulled the same nonsense. “Osama bin Laden, if he were still alive, could not have come up with a more clever strategy for strangling our nation,” Klein fumed.50 William Yeomans of Politico echoed the same message: “It has become commonplace to call the tea party faction in the House ‘hostage takers.’ But they have now become full-blown terrorists. They have joined the villains of American history who have been sufficiently craven to inflict massive harm on innocent victims to achieve their political goals.”51 Yup—Hitler and that random guy in the flag T-shirt. They’re one and the same.
Scapegoating and bullying the Tea Party has remained a mainstay of the Obama administration all the way to the present. In May 2012, Joe Biden announced that all the failures of the Obama economic plan should be dumped at the feet of those Gadsden-flag-carrying morons: “Imagine where we’d be if the Tea Party hadn’t taken control of the House of Representatives,” he said. “They have one overwhelming goal: prevent President Obama from a second term, with no—apparently no care of the consequences to the economy.”52
Obama failed in his effort to shut up the Tea Party. So he, along with his union cronies, decided that they needed a Tea Party of their own. Not a group of patriotic Americans who would gather peacefully, clean up their own trash, and sing American songs while wearing red, white, and blue.
Rather, they needed a large group of smelly, violent, stupid people who could take over large swaths of public land and create a media center. The media’s job in all of this would be to cover the Obama shock troops as a grassroots phenomenon, an unorganized and unled movement of the people.
They would call this movement Occupy Wall Street.
Now, occupying Wall Street didn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense from any rational perspective. Wall Street is a series of private firms bent on making profit for their investors. No amount of public outcry could have any real effect on private businesses—it could just serve to intimidate them into silence. If the Occupiers had truly cared about bank bailouts and crony capitalism, they would have shown up in Washington, D.C., to occupy outside the White House and Congress.
But, of cou
rse, Occupy Wall Street wasn’t about folks who cared about the bailouts. It was about anticapitalism.
Naturally, Obama’s other shock troops—the unions—showed up in force for Occupy. “We’re in it for the long haul,” said George Aldro, a member of the UAW. “We are here to support this movement against Wall Street’s greed,” shouted Victor Rivera, a vice president for the 1199 SEIU. “We support the idea that the rich should pay their fair share.” Unions donated cash, blankets, office space, and food to the protesters.53 Former SEIU head Stephen Lerner got together with other extremists at New York University in March to discuss the real Occupy agenda: “The Abolition of Capitalism.” He suggested that Occupiers take over foreclosed homes, take over shareholder meetings, and shut down places of work.54
They also helped “train” Occupiers—which really meant organizing them and giving them the ability to continue breaking the law. The SEIU actually advertised on its website for a “Lead Internal Organizer,” who would earn $65,000 to “train and lead members in non-violent civil disobedience, such as occupying state buildings and banks, and peaceful resistance . . . plan and execute strategic direct action field plans including banner drops, bank takeovers, and capitol occupations with membership, other local unions, and coalition partners.”55
So, who showed up to Occupy? When I visited Occupy Los Angeles, it was clearly a group of homeless people, extreme anarchists, and anticapitalists—many of whom were anti-Semitic—and some students with nothing better to do. These were not peaceful, decent citizens simply attempting to express their outrage over excessive government relationships with Wall Street. These were incompetent would-be violent revolutionaries.