Had King Electrical Services owner John King been shot by, say, a Tea Partyer, there'd be no end to the public pontificating from Washington's politicians and media commentators about their rhetoric or protests inciting violence.
It's quite a different story for the Lambertville, Mich., contractor who woke up in the dead of night a week ago found a silhouetted figure on his driveway spraying "SCAB" on the side of his vehicle. The figure fired a gun at him before fleeing.
King runs a small business employing 40 people at high wages with good benefits. His success at a time when unionized contractors are failing made him the target of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), which has unsuccessfully sought to unionize his workers.
Now it's come down to guns, and Washington's chattering classes are strangely silent.
[So too is the mainstream media. This incident screams out for attention. Indeed, it has everything that news organizations normally drool over: violence, danger, social alarm, political controversy. Yet a scan of media reports of this crime shows no one reporting it besides Fox News and conservative bloggers. An attempted murder by a union thug can't get even a mention on the nightly news? The deliberate silence of the networks, newspapers and online magazines illustrates just how deep in the liberal tank the MSM is.Absolutely incredible.]
The attack on King is emblematic of the sad fact that the leading perpetrators of political violence today are U.S. labor unions.
They've grown more violent in their rhetoric as their political power grows and their appeal to workers diminishes.
According to the National Institute for Labor Relations Research, a right-to-work think tank in Washington, there have been 4,400 incidents of union violence in the last 20 years.
The Teamsters are the leading perpetrators, with 454 incidents. But IBEW, which some suspect in the King incident, is in the top 10, having engaged in 125 incidents.
All told, there have been 11,600 incidents of union violence against workers, management and the public since 1975.
At the same time as the attack against King, IBEW has also engaged in a violent strike against Verizon in New York. Union strikers have been accused of cutting phone lines, firing BB guns at nonunion workers, and picketing customers. Internet videos show them using foul language and goon tactics.
One of IBEW's thugs put his own daughter in the path of a truck as a means of getting more money from his employer.
IBEW tactics have been so objectionable a federal judge ordered them this week to refrain from hurling and/or spreading feces in their strike, as if they should need to be told...
(Investor's Business Daily Editorial, August 17)
