Big Labor, Big Auto, Big Government

Yesterday’s E&E News PM had an item, “LOBBYING: UAW joins labor-enviro alliance”, reading in pertinent part:

The United Auto Workers has announced that it will join the BlueGreen Alliance, a partnership of labor and environment groups pushing for policies that create green jobs….

The BlueGreen Alliance was formed in 2006 by the Sierra Club and the United Steelworkers. The group also includes the Communications Workers of America, Natural Resources Defense Council, Service Employees International Union, Laborers’ International Union of North America, Utility Workers Union of America, American Federation of Teachers, Amalgamated Transit Union and Sheet Metal Workers’ International Association.

Yes. Events in the early days of the Obama administration indicated it was only a matter of time before the UAW would join this enterprise seeking massive further expansion of the state. As I detail in Chapter 7 of Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America, “Obama’s “Baptists and Bootleggers”: Unions and Greens Selling Out America”, “Team Obama is teaming with big business, unions, and green pressure groups in an unholy alliance to advance an agenda relieving you of your wealth and freedoms, to their enrichment, in a collaboration designed to move decisions from individual producers and consumers to the Federal government. As part of this perverse game, the Left pulls for ‘green’ energy production and then blocks that very same production on environmental grounds or until it can use such projects to enrich favored unions and companies.”

Oddly, these groups are pushing for cap-and-trade, in addition to other mandates designed to make the price of energy “necessarily skyrocket”, as Obama so delicately put it.

This in turn prompted the Wall Street Journal to note that ” In addition to all the other economic harm, a cap-and-trade tax will make foreign companies more competitive while eroding market share for U.S. businesses. . . .The most harm will accrue to the very U.S. manufacturing and heavy-industry jobs that Democrats and unions claim to want to keep. . . . [Cap-and-trade] would be the greatest outsourcing boon in history.”

Which all only makes sense when you recall that the issue is not the issue. “Global warming” and “cap-and-trade” — now “clean energy” and “green jobs” after a poll done by Stanley Greenberg suggested this re-branding — is simply the latest vehicle to ride to Big Left’s desired state.

As I write in Power Grab.:

David Foster, spokesman for the “Blue-Green Alliance,” a labor greenie group, admitted how it is a union priority to use “the environment” as a way to organize society and divvy the spoils. “It is an economic restructuring bill for the global economy. We should not pretend that it isn’t.” No objections here. Possibly they hope to replicate the most recent success of intrusive government mandates making organized labor a partner of America’s automobile manufacturing industry, culminating in the federal takeover. Regardless, we see both labor and the greens echo the claim by Americans for Prosperity’s Phil Kerpen that the agenda creates “political jobs, designed to funnel vast sums of taxpayer money to left-wing labor unions, environmental groups, and social justice community organizers.” If nothing else, we know that an inarguable result of Obama’s general agenda as well as specific environmental “salvation” is a massive increase in the size of the state. And the Blue-Green Alliance spent more than a million dollars last year lobbying for the agenda. It even teamed up with Gore’s campaign for a national bus tour pushing their agenda.” (citations omitted)

The question is whether they can wholly pull this off as a matter of law before Obama’s avowed model, European social democracy, collapses. A hint of what the answer to this question will be will be on display in early November.