Lately, Obama’s buddy AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka has been out front a lot shilling for Obama and Democrats during this election season. Yesterday, CNBC even made him a guest host during Closing Bell.
So a lot of media attention is being showered on Trumka. But neither CNBC, NBC, or anyone else in the “mainstream” news media is paying much attention to his violent and corrupt background. And that even though violence he encouraged, heck practically ordered, endangered mine workers and killed one.
Consider a multi-state coal miners strike organized by the UMW back in 1993. As union president, Trumka ordered more than 17,000 workers to walk off their jobs. He was determined, among other things, to ensure that nobody would find work in a mine without paying dues or agency fees to the union. He explicitly told strikers to "kick the shit out of" employees and mine operators resisting union demands. UMW enforcers obliged him. They vandalized homes, fires shots at a mine office, and cut power to another mine, temporarily trapping 93 miners underground. Worse yet, a union goon on July 22, 1993 murdered heavy equipment operator Eddie York, a nonunion contractor, shooting him in the back of the head in his pickup truck as he drove past strikers at a Logan County, West Virginia work site; a bunch of goons then proceeded to pelt York's would-be rescuers with rocks. Rather than apologize, Trumka offered the following rationalization: "I'm saying if you strike a match and put your finger in, common sense tells you you're going to burn your finger." In other words, Eddie York had it coming.
And it just wouldn’t be right for a union goon like Trumka to not be involved in a little corruption, too:
Trumka's closet skeletons extend to corruption, specifically, a pair of money-laundering schemes, among a half-dozen totaling $885,000 that helped re-elect Teamsters General President Ron Carey in 1996 over his close rival, James P. Hoffa. That election eventually was invalidated, paving the way for Hoffa's current presidency. The Teamsters had been under federal oversight since 1989, the result of an out-of-court settlement of the Justice Department's civil RICO suit against the scandal-ridden union. In his report disqualifying Carey from office, the union's special election officer, Kenneth Conboy, concluded that Trumka had laundered $150,000 from the union through the AFL-CIO to a political advocacy group, Citizen Action, which in turn routed $100,000 of the money to the Carey campaign. Conboy also concluded Trumka had participated in another illegal arrangement in which he either contributed or solicited $50,000 in order to bankroll the Carey campaign.
Congress took an interest in the Teamsters election campaign. Trumka wasn't very talkative. Though not subpoenaed to testify before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce at an April 30, 1998 hearing, he indicated beforehand that he would have taken the Fifth Amendment had he been called.
Yet Trumka’s is one of Obama’s prime front men in his effort to hold on to power. Is it not newsworthy that Obama chooses a man with such a background?
The same news media that ignored Obama’s radical background back in 2008 thinks not. Why am I not surprised.
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