The president, you may remember, gave a speech this past January in the wake of the shooting of Rep. -Gabrielle Giffords on how “only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation.” Some consider the speech to be the finest of his presidency, though history is likely to be less kind to it now that we know the president was completely insincere.
Early last week, just before President Barack Obama took the stage, Teamsters president James P. Hoffa told an assembled union crowd, “We’ve got a bunch of people there that don’t want the president to succeed, and they are called the Tea Party. . . . Let’s take these son of a bitches out, and give America back to America where we belong.”
Hoffa, of course, owes his current position as a powerful union leader to a family legacy of crime and corruption. It may not have been a literal call to violence, but when your name is “Jimmy Hoffa,” you don’t deserve much in the way of the benefit of the doubt. Especially given that the American left almost gleefully—and wrongly—accused the Tea Party of pulling the trigger in the Giffords shooting. The White House declined to comment on whether Hoffa’s remarks were appropriate.
But, believe it or not, that wasn’t the most offensive thing that the White House did last week to suck up to organized labor. Last Thursday, a group of longshoremen in Washington state broke into a port. That’s when things got really ugly according to the Associated Press: “Hundreds of longshoremen stormed the Port of Longview early Thursday, overpowered and held security guards, damaged railroad cars, and dumped grain that is the center of a labor dispute, said Longview Police Chief Jim Duscha. Six guards were held hostage for a couple of hours.”
Like most union disputes, getting to the bottom of International Longshore and Warehouse Union’s (ILWU) grievance is as byzantine a process as programming Satan’s own VCR. Basically, the port had an agreement with the ILWU, but a shipping consortium had recently built new facilities at the port. The shipping company was under the impression that the newly signed lease freed them from having to hire exclusively ILWU workers, and hired another union that negotiated more favorable terms.
It’s not clear whether ILWU has a case, and, if it does, whether the port or the shipping company is to blame for violating the contract. And the shipping company went off and hired union workers, anyway. It does seem clear that this is a matter for the courts to decide, and there’s utterly no justification for violence. There’s a reason it’s called “collective bargaining,” not “collective hostage-taking.”
That was last Thursday. As you might recall, something else of significance happened that day—the president gave his long-awaited speech rolling out a $450 billion jobs package to a joint session of Congress. Shortly before the president’s speech, the White House sent out an email announcing the official guests of the president that would be sitting in the first lady’s box.
Among the names was one Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO. Note that the ILWU is an AFL-CIO affiliate. Not that it’s likely Trumka was troubled by the ILWU’s conduct—after all, Trumka once shrugged off the murder of a worker in the middle of a mine dispute, saying, “If you strike a match and you put your finger in it, you’re likely to get burned.” Trumka’s union then fought the wrongful death lawsuit brought by the victim’s wife and children for years.
So just hours after AFL-CIO workers were literally taking hostages, Trumka was being honored by the White House. Of course, Trumka figuratively took the Obama White House hostage a longtime before the air in the port of Longview was thick with the heady smell of pepper spray. The AFL-CIO has spent more than $100 million electing Obama and Democrats in the last two election cycles.
Obama may have refused to comment on union rhetoric last week, but the message came through loud and clear: Write enough campaign checks, and unions can talk—and act—as violently as they want to.
The Rest of the ‘Kelo’ Story
The case of Kelo v. City of New London has reached its absurd end. Readers will recall the essentials of the 2005 Supreme Court decision: In 2000, the city of New London, Conn., embarked on a massive redevelopment plan for the town’s Fort Trumbull area. The redevelopment was spurred by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which indicated it was going to build a $300 million research facility adjacent to Fort Trumbull. Eager to capitalize on the new Pfizer facility, the city invoked eminent domain to seize several middle-class homes in the development zone, including Susette Kelo’s house. In their place, the city planned to allow a developer to build a mixed-use residential neighborhood with expensive housing, hotels, bistros, and—this was the key—$1.2 million in new tax revenue. Mrs. Kelo, relying on the text of the Fifth Amendment, which allows such “takings” not for the convenience of developers but for a “public use,” sued to stop the seizure; the Supreme Court—relying in part on those tax revenues—found in favor of the city.
Since then, the City of New London has been on an epic losing streak. The Kelo decision came near the height of the housing bubble and by the time the loose ends were tied up, the homeowners displaced, their houses bulldozed, the bubble had burst. The city’s chosen developer, Corcoran Jennison, was unable to get financing despite the sweetest of all sweetheart deals—a 99-year lease on the land which required them to pay the city $1 per year. The developer changed its plans over and over, turning its proposed luxury condos first into apartments, and then into FHA housing. None of which mattered. There was no money; there is no project. Nothing is being built.
In October 2009 matters got worse when Pfizer merged with pharmaceutical giant Wyeth. As part of the reorganization, they closed all operations in New London and moved them to nearby Groton. Now the entire rationale for the redevelopment was gone. For years, the Fort Trumbull site has sat vacant. No houses. No new “urban village.” No jobs. No tax revenues.
But Hurricane Irene changed all that. Last week the local paper reported that the city had finally found a use for the blighted land it now owns: In the aftermath of the storm, the town informed residents that their tree branches and other vegetative debris could be dumped on the vacant lots of Fort Trumbull. Justice Stevens, who wrote the majority opinion (with Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer), should be ashamed.
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IKEA’s Stasi Sofas
Though famously Swedish, big blue IKEA furniture stores are increasingly a part of the American consumer landscape. They may deal in thinly veneered particle board, but the stuff is well designed and affordable if you’re willing to tolerate an hour spent dropping an Allen wrench, cursing under your breath, and getting in heated arguments with your spouse over divergent interpretations of the hieroglyphic assembly instructions.
But cheap or not, The Scrapbook is reconsidering purchasing anything there ever again, no matter how much we enjoy the tasty cafeteria meatballs. Ron Radosh, one of the country’s premier anti-Communist historians (not to mention a valued Weekly Standard contributor), explains some rather shocking new details that have come to light:
It appears that the Swedish retail firm IKEA, that thousands of Americans go to in malls throughout our country to purchase cheap and poorly made but sometimes workable furniture, had a very special arrangement with the Stasi, East Germany’s notorious secret police. IKEA actually used political prisoners as slave labor to make its furniture, in particular, sofas manufactured in one plant that was conveniently situated next to a prison!
We wonder what this particular model of sofa was called—the IKEA Güläg? At a minimum, IKEA should issue a public apology for their despicable corporate behavior and attempt to make amends to the political prisoners they exploited. Until they do, we’re all too happy to put down the Allen wrench and let Craigslist meet our cheap furniture needs.
Happy Anniversary!
The Scrapbook takes pleasure in congratulating our friends at the New Criterion on the 30th anniversary of the journal’s founding in 1982. We look forward to celebrating the 30th anniversary of this 30th anniversary in 2041, and beyond.
When Hilton Kramer and Samuel Lipman set out to found a monthly journal of culture and the arts—in conscious imitation of T. S. Eliot’s Criterion of the interwar period—they intended to have the same effect in our time as Eliot had in his: to clarify first principles of cultural criticism, to resist the critical fashions of the moment, and to raise the standard of distinction in the fine arts and humanities. This put the New Criterion fiercely at odds with the reigning orthodoxies in the academy, in journalism, and even in politics, where the canons of Western civilization were under siege.
Since then, in lively and trenchant prose, many battles have been fought and won; but the struggle is far from over—and The Weekly Standard and the New Criterion remain comrades in arms. This month, under editor Roger Kimball, they have published a special double issue in honor of the anniversary, and it contains all the ingredients that have made the New Criterion required reading and a genuine force in the culture: James Piereson on higher education, David Yezzi on poetry, Kimball on G. K. Chesterton, Michael J. Lewis on the commemoration of 9/11, and much more.