Part IV Leo Gerard, the Radical USW President Who Bought the Presidency

March 7, 2012

 

 

By Sara Noble

 

 

 These set pieces of Marxist agitprop, the defacing and destruction of private property, the daily videos of street actions and hooliganism, all will have the effect of turning away most of the independent voters and all but the most progressive voters from the Democratic ticket in November 2012.  Not the “businesses as usual” way to win an election, unless the President has already forsaken re-election as his chosen path to continue to Occupy the White House. ~ Lee DeCovnick, American Thinker

 

 

Leo Gerard, an OWS planner and instigator, who was one of the architects of President Obama’s 2004 rise to the top, is quite well off financially. He makes $188,000 a year plus benefits and expenses, though that was hardly an easy figure to find since Solis eliminated union transparency (which included salaries).

 

 

In 2008, before the curtain was lowered on union salaries/transactions, he made $165,000+, benefits of $41,076, expense account of $7,789, his union comrades made –

 

 

SEIU President, Andrew L Stern – $249,080 AFSCME President, Gerald McEntee – $370,016 Teamsters President, James P Hoffa  – $287,949 AFT President, Edwin D Hill  – $282,782 IBEW President, Edwin D Hill – $282,782 UAW President, Ron Gettelfinger – $157,117

 

 

(Source: 2008 LM-2 financial reports posted on the U.S. Department of Labor Web Site)

Obviously, in four years, they have gotten raises, so I ask you, how are they the 99% in any real sense?  Certainly, their salaries put them closer to the top 2 – 5% without counting any investments they likely have. According to Wiki, the top 5% of households, three quarters of whom had two income earners, had incomes of $166,200.

 

 

 

 

 

Gerard is also a member of the AFL-CIO’s executive committee and chairman of its public policy committee. He has won an honorary college degree and attended galas in his honor – he’s quite elite and would undoubtedly never sleep in Zuccotti in a tent.

He has served on the board of the Apollo Alliance (Source: Ulsterman Report).  WND describes Apollo as an organization of radicals including communist Van Jones. Apollo helped write the Obama Stimulus and served on the board of the Economic Policy Institute, a George Soros front.

Gerard heads the tony-sounding Blue-Green alliance <in which he is an investor>, which links labor to wealthy environmentalists who profit from Obama’s largesse with taxpayer dollars.

He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting – the first GLOBAL labor union. They are socialists, communists, and other assorted statists who have gone worldwide (as have the OWS).

Gerard played a significant role in the WTO protests that took place in Seattle in 1999. (Source: Ulsterman Report)

Gerard is a fan of communist, Frances Fox Piven. Piven, a member of the Progressives (commies) for Obama group, is co-author of the Cloward–Piven strategy, which calls for overloading the U.S. economy to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with a national system of “a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty. In other words,  just like the OWS, she wants a salary for everyone regardless of whether they work or not. That’s what Obama’s expanding welfare program is about.

 

Gerard is the appointed adviser to President Obama’s National Commission on Energy Policy and President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. Gerard is not merely “connected” – he appears to in fact be the direct link between labor unions, globalization, radical environmentalism, and the highest levels of American politics.

He IS one of the Obama socialist elite. Socialists are elitists who keep their favored members smaller and more preferential than capitalists. They eliminate the nuisance of having the lower echelon working their way up the economic ladder to prosperity. It’s a class system where everyone is dragged down into poverty except the elite.

 

The United Steel Workers were a visible presence on Wall Street on September 17th of last year, the first day of the occupation and continued to be throughout.

How radical and violent is Leo Gerard?

 

Newsbusters posted the following interview between Schultz and Gerard on 11/16 that gives us a good idea –

GERARD: You’re damn right Wall Street occupiers speak for us. They do in Pittsburgh, they do in Chicago, they do in Oakland, they do in San Francisco, they do all across the country. And I think what we need is, we need more militancy. 

Just in case the Occupy movement fails, or rather when it does, Gerard wants union members to engage in “more militancy.” (see audio clips)

Here’s the clip of Gerard making a pitch for this on Ed Schultz’s radio show Monday and actually making Schultz sound normal in comparison – no small feat –

SCHULTZ: What does that mean, more militancy?

 

GERARD: I think we’ve got to start a resistance movement. If Wall Street occupation doesn’t get the message, I think we’ve got to start blocking bridges and doing that kind of stuff. This doesn’t have to be this way. The economy doesn’t have to be this way. It’s being put this way because the Wall Streeters are getting their way.

 

Gerard then suggested that unions go beyond “blocking bridges.” Occupying cities isn’t enough in the view of this man who began his career in labor activism at age 11 by handing out leaflets before a strike. The Canadian union leader then denounced Americans’ 2008 <Another stupid attempt at some revisionist history> election of Tea Party representatives to the House as “nut jobs,” and called for more force and illegality.–

 

Then we lost the House ’cause the House got blamed for what the Senate didn’t do and now we got a bunch of right-wing nutjobs running the House of Representatives. <Revisionist history> And in the last period of time, what do we got now, almost two years, a year-and-a-half, that the only thing they’ve done is bring forward social bills, they haven’t brought forward one jobs bill, not one jobs bill, Ed, not one jobs bill and that’s what they ran on.

And no wonder people are occupying. We oughta be doing more than occupying parks. We oughta start occupying  bridges. We start oughta occupying the banks places themselves. I mean, I just think that this is nuts.

Yes — “we start oughta occupying the banks places themselves,” along with an exaggerated timeframe since Republicans regained the House and the oft-repeated lie of alleged GOP indifference to jobs legislation. Schultz’s less than hardy endorsement in response –

SCHULTZ: Mr. Gerard, always a pleasure, keep up the fight, always enjoy  visiting with you on the issues of the day and what’s happening. It’s, uh …

 

 

GERARD (sensing Schultz’s lack of enthusiasm): We can never give up, Ed, we can never give up ’cause we’re right.

 

 

SCHULTZ: We are correct on the issues, no doubt. United Steelworkers international president Leo Gerard here on the Ed Schultz radio show, telling the truth again …

 

 

Perhaps after union members are released on bail following their arrests for occupying bridges and banks and, in the process, harming countless working people just trying to do their jobs, they might want to consider occupying the offices of amply compensated union leaders, including Gerard.

(Newsbusters)

 

 

Gerard is dangerous in terms of scheming as well. During an MSNBC interview in mid-December of last year, global union leader Gerard laid out exactly what he demanded the Democratic Party do regarding the payroll tax cut negotiations that ultimately led to a ridiculous 2-month extension of the tax cut.

This was a purely political gesture by the Democrats and Barack Obama that will ultimately cost more over the course of ten years due to an increased fee being placed on nearly all government-backed mortgages. (A fee that interestingly enough, will NOT impact wealthy Americans, but primarily the middle and lower class.)

Prior to Gerard’s remarks, there was rampant speculation Democrats were seeking compromise with Republicans on the payroll tax cut issue. Even the Obama White House was hinting at much the same.

 

 

The very next day after this interview was given, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, indicated he was not willing to vote on the bi-partisan House bill that would have extended the payroll cut for another year. Instead, Reid made a two-month extension proposal, with the costly mortgage fee applied, to which President Obama almost immediately sided with. Thus, the “line in the sand” that Leo Gerard calls for in this interview was effectively put in place. (Source: Ulsterman)

He is proud that the New York Times called him the “No. 1 scourge of free traders.” To help advance the protectionist agenda, President Obama named Gerard to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations.

Like Karl Marx, Gerard has an interest in economics and hoped to become an economics professor but ended up joining the labor movement, probably because he knows nothing of economics. He said that our debt and deficit is not a crisis, we have a “jobs crisis.”

 

 

 Obama is not statist enough –

 

 

Source: Front Page Magazine: Gerard said, “In my own naiveté I was dumb enough to assume that a Democratic Congress and a Democrat in the White House would put us on a different path,” he said. He wants more government spending on green everything for the fantasy jobs it would create.

If Obama won’t move forward with big new spending plans then it’s time to bring out the baseball bats, Gerard said. “We better face up to the fact that we have to hit the streets, kick some ass, and mobilize to do something about it,” he said.

 

 

I’m sick and tired of us whining about what the Democrats didn’t do. The tougher question is what are we doing, and do we have what it takes. Don’t worry about attacking Obama; attack the money! It’s Wall Street and the banks blocking a recovery and shipping our manufacturing abroad.

To Gerard, it is not radical leftist agitation that leads to violence but capitalism itself. Economic “inequality,” he says, “leads to instability and violence.”

And unions are on a holy mission to combat the evils of the market, he argues. “Unions are instruments of social and economic justice, and they’re instruments of democracy.”

 

 

Gerard has close ties to the neo-communist Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and to Canada’s socialist party, the New Democratic Party (NDP).

In 2009 and 2010, Leo Gerard, the globalist, engaged in an aggressively hostile labor strike against Brazilian mining giant Vale, and its then-CEO Roger Agnelli. Within a year of that strike’s conclusion, the Brazilian government ousted Agnelli as Vale CEO, and President Barack Obama was promising billions in U.S. taxpayer-paid aid to the Brazilian government and affiliated corporations. Coincidence?

It appears Leo Gerard set off to break the back of former Vale CEO Roger Agnelli – himself a far stronger proponent of free markets than most of Brazil’s government-controlled CEO’s, and replace him with the far more cooperative and union-friendly Murilo Ferreira.

Regarding Ferreira, Gerard said the following…he’s very accessible and always ready to listen to the concerns of the union.

The one to close the deal was none other than Barack Obama – who in essence, jumped at the demand of union leader Gerard that the American president travel to Brazil post-haste with the promise of U.S. dollars – not only in the form of a multi-billion dollar loan package – but the further promise to purchase billions more of Brazil’s natural resources, all of which will further grow the power and influence of the Brazilian government and its now quickly growing labor unions – headed by none other than Leo Gerard.

 

The Brazil deal is yet another in a long line of examples of how American labor leaders are not in fact opponents of world free trade as they so often indicate – but are rather strong supporters of world trade that they and their unions control. No other president in the history of the United States has given so much of that control to union groups as has Barack Obama.

Don’t miss FrontPage’s other Union Gangsters profiles featuring Craig Becker, Richard Trumka, Stephen Lerner, Andy Stern, Jimmy Hoffa Jr., John Sweeney and Daniel De Leon.

Ulsterman: Leo Gerard also appears to have the use of the United States military at his disposal as well –

Take this recent Fox News headline dated October 14th, 2011 that had many news watchers scratching their collective heads wondering what Barack Obama’s true purpose was:

Obama Sends U.S. Troops to Central Africa to Aid Campaign Against Rebel Group

Why would the Obama administration, at a time when U.S. troops were already engaged in operations in a number of fronts across the globe, be sending yet more troops into the bowels of the African continent? A campaign to aid against rebel groups? Really?

 

Now take this earlier headline from September 2nd, 2011 that when taken alone would appear entirely unrelated, but when you connect the dots of Leo Gerard, the Brazilian mining company Vale, and President Barack Obama’s first-hand participation in that scenario, the story takes on an entirely new meaning:

Vale now active in Southern, Central and West Africa

 

And within that September 2nd article the following excerpt:

JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – In June, Brazilian diversified mining major Vale, the world’s second-biggest mining company by market capitalisation, reaffirmed that it is set to make major investments in Africa by 2016.

…Our current investment proposal in Africa is to expend more than $12-billion over the next five years, subject to board approval,” Vale Zambia exploration manager Ian Hart told the recent first Zambian International Mining and Energy Conference and Exhibition, in Lusaka.

Billions in direct investment by a company whose labor union is controlled by Leo Gerard – who clearly has his sites set upon further labor union development upon the African continent, and is utilizing the presence of American military to assist him in doing so. Having established a dominant labor union presence in North America, and Western Europe, Gerard is now clearly working to do the same in South America and Africa (and quite likely the Middle East) and appears to have at his disposal the power and influence of the executive branch of the United States government – having purchased that power and influence via the 2008 presidential election.

 

Following the 2008 presidential election, Gerard then set out to effectively take control of the world’s second largest mining company, Vale and its subsequent influence upon the Brazilian government, and then use that company and its influence globally to initiate a program of labor union expansion throughout the world – in essence, a powerful vehicle of global socialization of which figures like Barack Obama and George Soros are mere parts of the whole…Read here for more proof: PumasUnleashed

Now we hear talk about unionizing the military, an absurd notion, but where do you think that is coming from?

Mondragon is discussed in the following propaganda video. Mondragon, a cooperative begun in Spain, believes in wage regulation, progressive taxes, and the are economically socialist. Mondragon cooperatives control the education, business, and technology. When you hear about Obamacare’s healthcare cooperatives, think Mondragon. This is being painted as a democracy but it is actually socialism.

 

One of the MoveOn members I met when I went undercover is an owner of a food coop and he is very rich. These people end up being more corrupt than any corporation because all the power is the elite’s hands.

 

 

Gerard is vehemently opposed to the free market and wants government control of enterprise. He’s not against corporations, just those based on free market principles. He is opposed to all capitalism and paints all capitalism with the same paintbrush.