PrintSeptember 5, 2008
Democrats and Community Disorganizing
In response to Rudy Giuliani's and Sarah Palin's convention jibes at The O's experiences as a community organizer, the Obama campaign is issuing statements of outrage, reminding us all that Barack Obama was ministering to South Chicago residents whose lives had been devastated by the recent closing of nearby steel mills which had been the economic engine driving that community.
What the O's minions are failing to take into consideration is that much of the economic hardship brought upon his unfortunate constituents was the consequence of actions by two other major Democrat Party constituencies, Big Labor and environmentalists, both over-empowered by an over-regulating federal government.
Yes, culpable steel industry executives were too slow to recognize the new foreign competition that was developing and adapt accordingly, but it was the greedy unions, the hyper-vigilant EPA and the U.S. Labor Department's newly released pit bull, OSHA, hungry for regulatory red meat, which made the needed adaptation impossible to attain.
Too-high wages with too-cushy benefits, too-extreme environmental demands and harassing over-regulation by big government drove the steel industry from America and straight into the hands of growing Asian economies, leaving those unfortunates in South Chicago to wonder just what the hell had happened to their high-paying jobs and the rosy retirements their union-backed, Democratic political machine had promised them.
Under an Obama administration, a similar fate awaits larger segments of America, fired by the same union-driven, high wage, protectionist policies and environmental extremism of those earlier times. Democrats, socialists, Marxists and union leaders (yes I know those terms are redundant) never seem to grasp the truth of hoary aphorisms such as, "Don't bite the hand that feeds you," or "Don't kill the golden goose," and "Don't foul your own nest."
