Democrats once themselves as the party of the working guy; pro-union, pro-American manufacturing, pro-infrastructure and anti-communist, but today’s Democratic Party looks nothing like the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy.
In the age of Donald Trump Democrats have become, not the party of the American working man, but the party of free stuff and illegal aliens.
President Joe Biden has opened the southern border to at least a million illegal aliens in the eight long months he’s been in office. And leading Democrats, such as Senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio have called for the abolition of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency – which would in effect open America’s borders to the entire world.
Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders has long-advocated debt-free college and the Democrats’ most influential members of Congress, such as New York Democratic-Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have made free college and Medicare for all, including illegal aliens, hallmarks of their legislative agenda.
The result of these policies is that July 2021 labor statistics revealed some 18.7 million workers are either unemployed, under employed or dropped out of the workforce.
Some 839,000 jobs have been lost in the energy sector and the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline alone cost 11,000 jobs, including 8,000 good paying union jobs.
On the national level Democrats have put stopping “climate change” ahead of jobs for coal miners – once the bedrock of the Democratic Party in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
The Biden administration proved Republicans right when announcing aggressive climate change executive actions in January, with special climate envoy John Kerry using the timeworn line that “the same people can do those [green energy] jobs, but the choice of doing the solar power one now is a better choice.”
The problem is that no one is building new “green energy” facilities in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Southeastern Ohio and Wyoming coal country, leaving union miner and oil worker families little opportunity in their hometowns devastated by Democrat policies.
In almost every sector that has traditionally provided a comfortable middle-class lifestyle to America’s working families employment has plummeted.
In manufacturing, employment is 433,000 below its February 2020 level.
Construction employment is 227,000 below its February 2020 peak.
And the list goes on, with almost every “working guy” sector is still under water or stagnant from the COVID layoffs.
But that shouldn’t really be a surprise, because as our friend Stephen Moore documented in an April 2021 column, to appease Democrat politicians, rank-and-file union workers are being sold out by their bosses:
Last week, the United Mine Workers of America endorsed Biden's Green New Deal. Yes, you read that right. The coal mining union bosses have embraced a proposal that outlaws coal mining.
This is about as dumb as the Pipefitters Union endorsing President Joe Biden. He repaid them with his first act as president: killing the Keystone pipeline. So, now we have the Pipefitters Union against pipelines and the coal miners union against coal.
Did anyone bother actually to ask the rank-and-file members what they thought? Can they get their union dues back?
They should. The livelihoods of more than 50,000 coal miners just got sold down the river by their union bosses.
And for what? So these miners can be given Biden welfare checks or so mining jobs, which typically pay $75,000 a year, can be replaced with solar panel installation? Ask any miner about that trade, as I have, and they will laugh in your face.
UMWA President Benedict Arnold (his real name is Cecil Roberts) conceded that his union members "may lose a few more jobs here." Still, he defended his capitulation to the Biden anti-coal radicals by saying, "We're trying to insert ourselves into this conversation because a lot of coal miners in this country and their families have suffered already some traumatic losses."
So, his solution is to make the trauma a whole lot worse thanks to the Neville Chamberlain appeasement with the green enemy fanatics of the industry.
To compound the problem, Democrats have become the party of the illegal aliens and unlimited immigration that has suppressed the wages and destroyed the quality of life for millions of America’s working families.
As Karen Zeigler and Steven A. Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies noted in a study of the Obama years, “Government data show that since 2000 all of the net gain in the number of working-age (16 to 65) people holding a job has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal).”
This is remarkable, concluded Zeigler and Camarota, “given that native-born Americans accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the total working-age population.”
Now here’s the key takeaway from Zeigler and Camarota’s study: “Though there has been some recovery from the Great Recession, there were still fewer working-age natives holding a job in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000, while the number of immigrants with a job was 5.7 million above the 2000 level.” (Emphasis ours)
Indeed, about the only union that has not fallen all over itself to encourage illegal immigration is the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC), which, knowing what a Joe Biden-inspired million-plus illegal alien surge at the border would look like, fought like hell to get Donald Trump reelected.
And as the final insult to working Americans Joe Biden has announced plans to force all federal workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19, even if they have convalescent immunity.
"It is not the role of the federal government to mandate vaccinations for the employees we represent," the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) said in a statement the day before Biden made his announcement.
“…we support being vaccinated as the most effective path and means to eliminate the COVID-19 virus, but not at the cost of our Constitutional rights that we protect and hold as self-evident," Larry Cosme, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA) said.
And a new survey conducted by an Ohio nurses union suggests a significant number of nurses at one local hospital would rather quit than be required to get their shots. The poll of University of Cincinnati Medical Center nurses found that out of the nurses who responded, 30% said they would quit their job if the hospital finalized the vaccine mandate.
The Ohio Nurses Association conducted the survey. Labor representative Dominic Mendiola said 456 nurses responded, with 136 indicating that a vaccine mandate would prompt them to quit.
Joe Biden and the Democratic Party are not the workingman’s friend. What's more, in today’s American labor movement, it appears the spirit of the great labor leaders of the past who fought Big Business and a hostile government is well and truly dead. We wonder what Samuel Gompers (the first and longest-serving president of the American Federation of Labor) John L. Lewis (early leader of the United Mine Workers and a founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations) Walter Reuther (United Autoworkers President and leading liberal Democrat of the post-WWII era) or Eugene V. Debs (labor leader and Socialist candidate for President) would think about scabs, like UMWA President Cecil Roberts, who sellout their members and endorse the job-killing Green New Deal for a pat on the head and a photo-op at the Biden White House.
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Union leaders endorse Democrats
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