Wall Street sharks circle the UAW
by JOHN R. MacARTHUR
Providence Journal
April 15, 2009
John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine
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.
Today, Barack Obama consorts with the hedge fund/banking crowd that gave so much money to his "transformative" campaign, while he makes believe that he cares about unions. So beholden is the president to finance that he fires the General Motors CEO, Rick Wagoner, and puts in charge a banker who knows how to break up businesses, not build them - Steven Rattner. It doesn't cost Obama anything politically because the industrial lobby hardly counts anymore, especially compared with a Wal-Mart/retail lobby that loves "free trade" for its Chinese imports made by 50-cent-an-hour labor.
But the UAW's critics needn't worry. Whether Obama eases GM into Chapter 11 bankruptcy - that wonderful system of corporate protectionism - no doubt favored by Austen Goolsbee and Lawrence Summers, or whether he forces the UAW to destroy itself with givebacks, we're headed for the end of the line for middle-class unionism.
Please read the complete article at:
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_rick15_04-15-09_DJDVGHK_v17.3e650b1.html
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