"Advocates of freedom may be tempted to uncork the champagne after the United Food and Commercial Workers union became the third major union to ditch the AFL-CIO in recent days, after the AFL-CIO’s annual convention in Chicago. Not so fast!" wrote Stefan Gleason, vice-president of the Orwellian "National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation," a group that provides anti-union dough and advice.  The reason for his caution -- presumably only bad champagne will be uncorked -- is that labor unions continue to exist at all.  That's something that irks this particular Fan o'Freedom Fries because union dues are "compulsory," a fab word choice because it implies it's coercive, bad, and nasty, kinda like Bush's famous "permission slip" metaphor used to defend why he didn't bother to build a meaningful United Nations consensus for the War On Iraq.  This position makes sense if you believe the right to organize and bargain with your employer for better pay and working conditions -- the struggle against exploitation --  is the real freedom hating position.  Man it must've taken the boys in the righty doublethink tanks more than a few Starbucks laden nights to craft that slippery screed.

The exploitation cheerleaders are at it again and this time throwing $2 million behind their effort to undermine labor organization and fight da damn dirty bastards trying to get living wages for workers.  That's right, in the same article Gleason helpfully offers a pitch for his own group by lauding his own efforts at union busting.  "[T]he National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation recently announced...," well he announced it anyway, "...it will raise and spend upwards of $2 million by the end of this year to provide free legal assistance to employees seeking to leave their unions."  Golly, Batman, that's awfully nice of him.   Listen carefully and you can almost hear all the top-hat monopoly guys in Big Business^TM writing this guy hate mail, or at least enclosing a hefty check.  Talk about putting the syc in sycophant.

Stand still these days and you'll be overwhelmed by the tidal wave of anti-unionism, which is particuarly stupid given that the history of labor hasn't exactly been the history of accommodating employers gleefully handing over fantabulous wages and bennies for a hard day's work.  Lest we forget, the first Columbine Massacre didn't happen at school, it happened at a Colorado coal mine in 1927.  And they used machine guns to shoot the workers.  (Thankfully today's conservatives haven't gotten around to studying that tactic.  Yet, anyway.)

It's also stupid because a whole lot of people on the exploitation bandwagon -- besides the monopoly guys and jerks at the neocon thoughtcrime institutes -- are the ones being exploited.  You'd think that type of self-destruction would be prevented by something in the brain, something that said, hey, man, don't drink that Kool-Aid, it just don't smell right, but alas no.  They're just acting out (and voting) their identities, especially the part that watches too much "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" and buys that Power Ball ticket every week at the Econo-Mart with the $40 tank of gasoline.  They're planning ahead for the days in which they're rolling in the green and lighting cigars with $1,000 bills off their $100 million windfall.  When that day comes, oh boy, they sure don't want anybody telling them what to do.  The damn dirty bennie-grabbing bastards.