Republican campaign to destroy unions.

Yesterday's stunt was nothing more than a simple Republican tradition: trying to destroy unions.

During the 1950s, Walter Reuther worked tirelessly to build the United Auto Workers into the strongest union in the US, and he succeeded for a time. Now, the Republicans are deliberately trying to destroy the UAW and with it a heritage of union activism and strength. Their calls for the UAW to slash wages isn't an innocent request to get the companies and the country competitive. If the Republicans cared so much about getting this country on track and preventing this from happening again, they should have told all of the financial firms that their rank-and-file employees had to slash their wages. But they didn't for two reasons:

1. They believe they have the opportunity to crush the unions.
2. They are demonstrating their privilege for business and disaster capitalism.

Following WWII, Republicans and conservatives of all stripes made a concerted effort to destroy unions with stifling federal legislation (eg Taft Hartley), executive action (ie PATCO), and right to work legislation in many Southern states. The Republicans also know that the Employees' Free Choice Act will appear in the next year or so, and they're doing the best they can in the present to erode unions' base of power before an overwhelmingly Democratic presence rears its head. (Thus why a meeting of Wal-Mart managers were informed last spring that a Democratic presidential victory meant unions at their stores.)

See this for exactly what it is: another battle in the Republican campaign to destroy unions--paid for by the RNC, NAM, the Chamber of Commerce, and a laundry list of conservative think tanks, not for profits, and business groups.