E.J. Dionne The Washington Post

September 6, 2010

E.J. Dionne
The Washington Post
1150 15th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20017

RE: “I Dreamt I Saw Joe Hill” and why your almost lachrymose column about the never existed Wonder World of unions in today’s Miami Herald was straight from Central Casting.

Mr. Dionne,

Other than raising the minimum wage as a way to increase employment and why the Davis-Bacon Act is, despite the fact that it was the most racist law ever passed by Congress in the 20th century, still good for the “working man” you hit all the major notes of Workers of the World Unite.

Whenever I read a modern American Liberal talking about the glory days of the Wobblies and other similar banal tripe it is a chalk bet [“chalk bet”? – Send a SASE] that he doesn’t which end of the shovel is the business end. Further, it is a lock that he never paid union dues to anything but SAG, AFTRA, the Writers’ Guild, or Local 12 of the Amalgamated Tree Huggers and Manatee Suffrage Supporters.

Let the record show that I paid dues to two unions – Retail Clerks and the Teamsters – and that I negotiated with another – the UMW – for several years. [On several occasions I paid my Teamster dues to the Local President, Anthony Provenzano, AKA “Tony Pro”, but that’s a story for a different time.]

You say, in a way that only mush brained modern American Liberals can ???, that the “extraordinary prosperity” of post World War 2 America was due “significantly” to “union contracts…that spread the wealth around”.

I’ll say this for you.

You’ve got your shibboleth wrapped head so far up your ass that you could give yourself a pneumonectomy.

I’ll focus on one.

Before wealth can be “spread around” it must first be “created”.

Since there is no record anywhere or anytime of any country taxing itself into prosperity when Lord Barack the Beneficent told Joe the Plumber, an authentic American Blue Collar hero, that that’s what he was going to do he was/is as much an economic tomnoddy as you. It will be of no use passing a new stimulus bill without passing a law that repeals all the rules governing gravity. The key part of that law is where it says that “rocks are hard…and objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s center…”

His concern with cutting the economic pie more “fairly” forgets, in typical modern American Liberal fashion, that you must first bake a bigger “pie”.

Speaking of unions….

Detroit was the paradigmatic template of union towns.

What the Hell happened?




Kevin Smith



PS – My lunch used to be at 1:00 AM at the Tunnel Diner in Jersey City, NJ. The way to get an extra slice of meat loaf on my plate was to be particularly sweaty and dirty. Since you grew up in a “union town” where was your Tunnel Diner? Just one more question. I’ve written to Michael Moore and Oliver Stone about it. Alas, neither has answered. If you know would you please tell me? Did Hugo Chavez, the noted Venezuelan Labor leader and resident thug, have an uncle, the late lamented Labor leader and lover of California lettuce, named Cesar Chavez?