By John Ransom
1/17/2012
I’m going to skip the nonsensical projections regarding what the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. would think about today’s topical issues like Occupy Wall Street, so-called income inequality and Tim Tebow.
I can afford to do this because another man named King has already instructed me on his views.
Bob King, head of the United Auto Worker’s Union, got together with 500 of his fellow travelers over the weekend in a vanity-channeling of Dr. King by praising Occupy Wall Street and the UAW’s largest shareholder, Barrack Obama.
In this, King (Bob) seems to be operating out of a liberal playbook that looks to associate Occupy with King (Martin Luther).
It’s called “Occupy the Dream.”
I’m not sure if the irony is intentional or just accidental.
"So much of what he says is the same today, is about the world today," said King on King “We're at very difficult times in the United States of America right now. We're at a time of great injustice and growing injustices. Thank God for the occupy movement and the young kids that are out there."
Bob King has seen the past and tells us that the past is our future.
Our future is one where inequality is everywhere more relentless; where progress on issues, like racial equality is just a chimera, even as an African American sits in the White House.
He has to tell us that, this King named Bob does.
Even more, he needs for us to believe it, because without that belief, he’s a man without a job, as even he admits.
King (V.2.0) has placed a big bet that Americans not as familiar with him as the people he represents have bought into his rhetoric about inequality, especially as it pertains to income. His organization, the UAW, has been losing members, dollars and assets for decades as workers and consumers have repeatedly rejected the union label.
According to Reuters, the UAW has already had to “sell assets and dip into its strike fund to pay for its activities.”
In fact King (Bob) thinks that if he can’t win converts soon, there is no future for his union. "I have said that repeatedly, and I believe it.”
It’s a measure of the UAW’s desperation that King has pinned his hopes on Occupy and Obama, two movements that, like the UAW, seem to be tracking in the wrong direction from Main Street American thought.
“While Occupy Wall Street isn’t necessarily affiliated with a particular party, its anti-big business message may not be resonating with majorities in any party,” wrote Gallup’s Elizabeth Mendes as reported in the Washington Post. “Republicans, independents, and now close to half of Democrats are more concerned about the threat of big government than that coming from big business.”
According to Gallup 64 percent think big government is a bigger threat, and 26 percent think the bigger threat comes from big business.
And why shouldn’t they? Occupy Wall Street is mostly an extension of the extra-legal Big-Government-knows-best philosophy that ignores individual rights, private property rights and redistributes according to its own ideas of who is a have and who is a have-not.
From the New York Post:
Occupy Wall Street protesters announced with great fanfare last month that they moved a homeless family into a “foreclosed” Brooklyn home — even though they knew the house belonged to a struggling single father desperately trying to renegotiate his mortgage, The Post has learned.
Even though the single father is still the rightful owner, that didn’t stop the Occupiers from placing one of their own people into the house:
Meanwhile, the family that OWS claimed to be putting into the vacant house has not yet permanently moved in. And it turns out the family is not a random victim of the foreclosure crisis, but cast for the part, thanks to their connection to the OWS movement.
OWS last week said it has spent $9,500 breaking into the house and setting it up for the homeless Carrasquillo family. A photo of the smiling family covers a window, under the slogan, “A place to call home.”
The head of the family, Alfredo Carrasquillo, 28, is an organizer for VOCAL- NY, a group that works with OWS. His Facebook page shows him in a “99 Percent” T-shirt at an OWS protest in November.
Like King’s UAW, which hasn’t been able to force folks to give them what they aren’t entitled to legally, Occupy is a last-gasp movement that has failed to convince us of either the justice or logic of their cause.
Into this two-ringed circus now steps Ringmaster Obama, who has promised us all a campaign that will pit the UAW and Occupy have-nots against the rest of the country. Presumably, just as he’s done with the UAW, the domestic auto industry, student loans and green company investments, Obama will campaign that government eventually gets to pick the winners and the losers with a kind of group bailout for unions, Occupiers, Democrats and donors.
That’s how the GOP will campaign too.
And if I were a Democrat, here’s where I’d be concerned:
If Obama doesn’t hang you all separately with this strategy he most certainly will hang you all together.
And if Democrats don’t win this campaign, they might never win another.
I say it and I believe it.
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To read another article by John Ransom, click here.
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To read another article about UAW hijinx, click here.
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