Union demise...

I've been entertaining myself lately by listening/watching the Campaign for America's Future present its "Take Back America" event.

In keeping with tradition, they have once again laid out for all to see the absolute lack of new ideas to solve America's problems. The usual gaggle of talking heads featured speaker after speaker regurgitating the same old mantra about the virtues of union labor, socialized medicine, multiculturalism, and our failed foreign policies.

One thought stuck in my head, after hearing the 17th speaker blather on about the imminent resurgence of organized labor in America.

Let us look at some labor unions, and where they are today.

Steel worker unions: the American steel industry is virtually extinct. While plenty of blame exists to cover both the union and the owners, I think high labor costs must have contributed to the decisions of owners not to invest in new plants and equipment.

UAW: Ford and GM are at junk bond status, and the market shares of each have been decreasing for decades. What once were global industry leaders are quickly becoming historical footnotes.

NEA: The public schools are in shambles. In an effort to meet the standards of the NCLB act, schools are going to lower their standards even more than they previously had, so that the school can achieve the illusion of academic achievement. Teachers unions seem much more focused on innoculating their members from quality evaluation and free market competition than in actually educating the children in the schools.

Straight out of the communist playbook, and the Communist Goals of 1963 which state:

• 36) Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

Now, I am not suggesting that once upon a time, labor unions were important and that corporate executives were taking advantage of employees in an extremely egregious manner.

However, I am saying that in 2005, the actual utility of labor unions to the modern American worker has been reduced to essentially nothing.

So long as the Democrat party ties its future to the promition of labor unions, both will edge closer to irrelevance, especially as the only viable alternative seems to be exporting manufacturing businesses to third world countries where slave laborers are exploitable.

As usual, a leftist idea has been turned on its head and has had the exact opposite of its stated intent. Instead of benefiting the American worker and ending the exploitation of workers, the American worker now finds himself with few useful skills, limited job opportunities outside the union, and the transferrence of slave labor from within the United States to outside the reach of the Constitution and the authority of the US government.