Obama "Pledges" Labor Support

Really?

Uh, huh - really:

President Barack Obama vowed Wednesday to keep fighting for union-friendly legislation, as he urged labor leaders to go to the polls for Democrats in the upcoming elections.

“You have to remind them for the next three months this election's a choice,” he told the AFL-CIO Executive Council at the Washington Convention Center. “You've got these folks who drove America's economy into a ditch. And for the last 20 months, we put on our boots and we got into the mud.”

Obama pointed out that his administration has “consistently” carried out policies to strengthen workers’ salaries and benefits. He passed the Fair Pay Act to end wage disparities between men and women doing the same jobs, extended unemployment benefits and reversed Bush-era executive orders designed to bust up organized labor.

“And we are going to keep on fighting to pass the Employee Free Choice Act,” said Obama, as union leaders gave him a standing ovation for his commitment to a controversial “card check” bill that would make it easier to create unions in non-union workplaces. Acknowledging that pushing the legislation through the Senate will “continue to be tough,” the president again pledged to “keep on pushing.”

Let's see the way President Obama has supported labor.

He devised the Race to the Top program to fire unionized teachers, close schools and re-open them as non-unionized charter schools run by for-profit corporations.

He refused to raise taxes on people making over $500,000 a year to pay for his health care "reform" bill. Instead he insisted there be a 40% excise tax on people with employer-provided health care plans - a scheme that will hit many union workers in the years to come and will cause their employers to scale back their health care plans or drop them altogether.

He insisted the UAW take 50% pay cuts at GM factories, creating a two-tiered pay system wherein old workers make $28 an hour, newly hired workers make $14 an hour. Even though GM was willing to pay newly hired workers more, perhaps as much as $18 an hour.

Meanwhile in the financial bailout of Wall Street, his secretary of the treasury, Timmeh Geithner, made sure AIG's counterparties got 100 cents to the dollar for the crap on their books that was actually worth maybe 15 cents and didn't do anything to take back the bonus money AIG paid out to its executive staff with taxpayers money.

And Rahm Emanuel is telling business leaders behind the scenes that Obama isn't anti-business and they should know that because he has been willing to go right at the teachers unions to gut their power and render them useless.

As for card check, Obama hasn't lifted a finger to get that passed, doesn't seem to actually care whether it is passed or not and only talks up labor issues when it gets around election time.

So I understand that the Republican alternative is very anti-working class and anti-middle class as well as anti-union.

But it's not as if the Obama administration has been all that union or worker-friendly either.

And when he says that he has looked out for union workers, well, that's just a joke.