In the weeks leading up to passage of the statist self-aggrandizement imprecisely called “financial reform,” the Obama Administration’s Big Labor masters concocted an anachronistic public relations campaign called “The Showdown on Wall Street.”
This Showdown consisted of hundreds of mumbling half-wits, bused in from the outer boroughs, shuffling through six blocks of office building lobbies in lower Manhattan. Pushing them along was a brain trust of Big Labor bosses and radical poseurs. As one press release boasted:
The Showdown on Wall Street is co-sponsored by the AFL- CIO and National People’s Action and includes the follow- ing New York City Community Organizations: Brooklyn Congregations United from the PICO National Network, Community Voices Heard, Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, The Good Old Lower East Side, People United for Sustainable Housing, Make the Road New York, NYCAHN/VOCAL, The Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, Syracuse United Neighbors and endorsed by The Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project.
You’re no doubt familiar with the AFL-CIO, which is managing to squeeze a few last dollars from dying industries across the land. According to Richard Trumka, who currently presides over this group: “America is about more than making easy money and looking out for number one. Our lives and our livelihoods are all bound together. And we are all pay- ing the price for those who knew no limits on their greed.” By implication, Trumka is a better man because he knows the limits on his.
Evidently, some things never change: The top of each Ivy League class goes to work for Goldman Sachs; the middle heads to grad school; the bottom writes speeches for labor bosses.
You may not be familiar with the cosponsoring organization, National People’s Action. Here’s some unreconstructed agitprop from its web site:
“National People’s Action (NPA) is a Network of community power organizations from across the country that work to advance a national economic and racial justice agenda. . . . All people, regardless of race, class, gender, and national origin must be ensured a high quality of life.”
NPA was started in the early 1970s by Gale Cincotta and Shel Trapp. They are generally credited with writing the first draft of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). So, there’s some irony in the group’s recent kvetching. The housing bubble that crashed in 2007–8 was an unintended (I imagine) consequence of the “economic justice” that Cincotta and Trapp sought in the CRA.
Of course, irony is lost on most of the “community organizers” and other dolts drawn to the economic and social justice industries. That may be a feature rather than a bug, though. It’s easier to control the narrative when you attract the dumbest, most gullible people.
