Pat Quinn and his Marxist guru Dr. Quentin Young* - Shanghai Pat is sporting his SEIU Purple Tie - wears it alot.
That purple tie and the color purple here in Illinois is the icon of the next layoff for a skilled tradesman, cop, nurse, firefighter, Chicago sanitation worker ( Garbage Collection Grid), Water Reclamation District employee ( think Rahm's looming Tax Water Park, kids) all thanks in large part to the influence of SEIU on Illinois' political/journalistic/academic culture.
When all the taxes have been sucked dry, it's lay-off time! We have larded the government work rolls and the pension debt at the say-so of SEIU.
Yesterday, I wrote about the Vanishing American Middle Class. This morning I read Marathon Pundit by Morton Grove's on the scene pundit-blogger John Ruberry.
Rubes is a guy who is like so many Americans; he has a good memory and is not much for the Memes.
When The Catholic School Girls Against the War tossed fake blood on worshippers at Holy Name Cathedral he too remembered that International Solidarity Movement ( Hamas Activists)leader Kevin Clark not only goaded the goofy kids taken away in hand cuffs after their assault, but had also encouraged American-born Rachel Corrie to place herself in front of an Israeli Bulldozer and become an International martyr for the Left. Kevin Clark is a Gay Liberation activist as well and all purpose goader who manages to avoid arrest.
More so, John Ruberry also recognizes that activists like the shameless Clark work and play together, while the lazy Chicago media actively ignores their complicity in every confrontational demonstration and manage to spark police bashing universally.
Hamas, or the Palestinian Blockade, or George Bush Hate Fests, or anti-Catholic Gay Rights shout-downs, Condoms for Kindergartners, or Big Box SEIU Tax Raises, Kevin Clark, Andy Thayer and SEIU's Joe Isobaker are in the thick of the goading, shouting, liquid tossings, or press opportunities.
The Middle Class, in particular families supported by members of the Skilled Trades and Industrial unions, has been chipped away to near invisibility by SEIU and their lesser lights. SEIU is the monster PAC that masquerades as a labor union.
SEIU became legitimatized under the leadership of oafish John Sweeney in the 1970's, along with Teachers Unions, AFSCME, and radicalized under the great Mandarin of "Labor" Andy Stern.
SEIU is the most dynamic of organizing machines. They amass numbers - members, dues, and votes. Their members stay in low paying jobs for their entire lives as members of SEIU - janitors, nursing home bed-pan tossers, some nurses & etc.
SEIU members depend upon the threats of the leaders over cowardly, or cynical legislators, City council members, or any one who can raise tax revenue. That is collective bargaining SEIU fashion.
The Democratic Party and the Skilled Trades found it convenient to play-ball with SEIU, in this our post-Shakman Progressive world. SEIU feeds platitudes to lazy ink-slingers and copy for the morning reads.
Pipe-fitters, Insulators, Operating Engineers, Iron Workers, Electricians, Carpenters and Industrial workers have allowed the bullhorns of SEIU and its armies of XXXXL Purple T-shirt clad mobilized forces to intimidate legislators and keep American Labor in the news. In fact so effective was the Marxist Andy Stern in leading labor that BIG LABOR became synonymous with SEIU. SEIU is the voice of the National Democratic Party on Health Care, Gay Marriage, Abortion and Redistribution of wealth. SEIU organizes. SEIU is Occupy Wall Street as it was Occupy Madison and get Walker.
Click my post title and read John Ruberry and take a gander at the great photos take by a real journalist. You won't find this coverage of OWS kiddies in the Tribune or the Sun Times.
Thanks Rubes!
*
The primary figure who delivered Obama to the single-payer camp was Quentin Young, an 86-year-old retired physician who was a longtime friend and neighbor of Obama in Chicago. Young joined the Young Communist League as a teenager in the late 1930s. From the mid-1940s through the mid-1970s, he was closely associated with the Communist Party. In October 1968 he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was probing the extent of his knowledge about the riots that had erupted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago two months earlier. The Committee accused Young of belonging to the Bethune Club, an organization for communist doctors; the group was named after Norman Bethune, a communist physician who devoted his services to the totalitarian regime of Mao Zedong.
Dr. Young was active in the radical movements of the Sixties and Seventies and led a small delegation to Communist North Vietnam in 1972. In the late 1970s, Young became associated with a Marxist organization known as the New American Movement, which was initially convened by Michael Lerner, an America-hating radical who counseled young people to explore the use of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs as portals to a greater comprehension of socialist principles.
In 1980 Young founded the Health and Medicine Policy Research Group, a single-payer lobby group whose Board of Directors he chairs to this day. In 1982 Young helped establish the Democratic Socialists of America, which, as the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International, asserts that "many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed." In 1987 Young co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), a single-payer advocacy organization where he currently serves as national coordinator. In PNHP’s view, government-run healthcare "should be financed by truly progressive taxation."
In 1995 Young attended the now-famous meeting at the Hyde Park home of former Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, where Barack Obama was first introduced to influential locals as the hand-picked successor to Alice Palmer, a pro-Soviet radical who planned to vacate her Illinois State Senate seat in pursuit of a higher elected office. Young quickly became a friend and political ally of Obama, teaching the latter about the merits of single-payer healthcare. In a 2009 interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Young reminisced about the germination of his ideological kinship with the young Obama:
"Barack Obama, in those early days [as a state senator] -- influenced, I hope, by me and others -- categorically said single payer was the best way, and he would inaugurate it if he could get the support, meaning [Democratic] majorities in both houses, which he’s got, and the presidency, which he’s got. And he said that on more than one occasion…."
Another noteworthy influence on Obama’s views vis à vis healthcare has been Dr. Peter Orris, who co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program with Quentin Young. The son of a Communist Party member, Orris in the 1960s was a leader of Harvard University’s campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the New Leftist organization that aspired to overthrow America’s democratic institutions and remake the nation’s government in a Marxist image. He later joined the Communist Party (CP) for more than two decades, before ultimately shifting his allegiance to the CP splinter group, Committees of Correspondence, where he remains a prominent figure to this day.