RUSH: Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO. I remember this guy when I lived in Pittsburgh. He was with the coal minors union, I believe, so he’s moved on up, now head of the whole AFL-CIO. This goes back to what we were talking about in the first hour of this program about greed. Frankly, you know, I’m fed up with being called greedy because I’m a capitalist. Corporations, people that earn profit, that’s supposedly greed. The greed in this country exists where? In Washington and at every union. We had a story on our Morning Update today. Temple University hospital, they wanted to get rid of a perk that they can’t afford anymore. Union nurses, union people that work at the hospital, their kids got free tuition to Temple University. There was one other perk that they wanted to give back, I forget what it was. The hospital said, ‘Look, we’d rather put this $5.6 million into patient care.’ And the union said, screw you.
The hospital wanted a provision in the new contract that said union members could not defame the hospital. So, in other words, the union was asked, ‘Please don’t run around and publicly humiliate us and criticize us — we’re paying you.’ The union wouldn’t go for that and they wouldn’t go for losing the free tuition. No union is giving up anything. None of these labor unions are, airlines the exception. Be they in the health care industry or wherever, nobody. So I put them right there at the top of the pillars of greed, right along with government. Listen to Trumka last night. He gave a speech at Harvard at the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government.
TRUMKA: Our politics have been dominated by greed and the force of money for over a generation. Now amid the wreckage that came from that experiment, we hear the voices of hatred, of 
racism, of homophobia. At the moment of economic pain and anger, political intellectuals face a great choice: whether to be servants or critics of economic privilege. And I think that’s a very important point to make here at Harvard. See, the economic elites at JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs and the other big Wall Street banks are happy to hire intellectual servants wherever they can find them.
RUSH: So you see my point. The elites at JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, yeah, they’re happy to hire intellectual servants wherever they can find them. He went on to talk about all of this being caused by voices on the radio. I read the whole speech. So this is a great illustration here of Trumka, Reaganism, the last 25 years, led to all of this. Nothing could be further from the truth. Remember, where do unions publish their op-eds? In the newspaper of the Communist Party USA. So at the moment of economic pain and anger, political intellectuals face a great choice: whether to be servants or critics of economic privilege? I don’t even know what that means. The AFL-CIO, by the way, had thrown the communists out of the union but Trumka bought ’em back in. He’s now regularly featured in articles in the Communist Party USA. And he’s up there speaking at Harvard.
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Last night David Corn of Mother Jones magazine was on MSNBC. He got a question about the anger in America over mandates and other things in the health care bill, and this is what he said.
CORN: The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank here, said that America is no longer a free nation, it’s a mostly free nation. They rate countries every year and they dropped America. So now we’re living in a not-so-free United States, according to the Heritage Foundation. So people are picking up on this, and their paranoia is really, you know, kicking in. There was a lot of anticipation about what the health care would do, but no one is even waiting to see that. They’re already, you know, acting as if it is the worst-case scenario. First we have Obama, the foreigner, the guy wasn’t born here, coming in and basically taking over the government, creating a regime, as Rush Limbaugh calls it, and now he’s imposing socialism. Anybody who lives in a socialist country, whether it’s Europe or anyplace else, would be laughing at this as the notion of socialism.
RUSH: You ought to be applauding this, Corn, it is socialism. It is the kind of destruction you people at The Nation have been angling for for I don’t know how long, as long as I’ve been reading The Nation. Of course the editor of the nation, Hurricane Katrina vanden Heuvel does think we have a center-right media. (laughing) I read that piece to you yesterday.