A Teamster posted images of a fund raising letter they received from President Sean O’Brien on r/Union (warning: reddit link).
In the letter, Sean O’Brien claims that Trump is creating a new ‘Worker First’ republican party, and implores the reader to donate as much as they can to the Teamster ‘TEAM Fund’, which will be used to:
- Support Trump’s ‘Pro-Worker’ initiatives, like ‘strategic’ tariffs
- Financially back incumbent ‘pro-worker’ republican candidates for the House and Senate
- Identify pro-labor legislatures in key states and support their campaigns
Sean then introduces the next part of the letter; a message from Josh Hawley, a Christian Nationalist and Trump loyalist state senator who fist pumped the Jan 6th rioters in support.
In the letter Hawley claims Trump has eliminated the “country club elites and business tycoons” from the republican party, as well as ending the “Woke DEI agenda”.
If there was ever any doubt about O’Brien, he’s certainly showing his true colors now, bending the knee to the fascists in power and even going so far as to fund raise for them.
The letter itself:
Republican strategists figured out neither party is the worker’s party, so in order to be the party workers vote for, you just have to say you’re the party for workers the most.
And since Democrats barely know how to interact with the public, it works.
This goes back to how Nixon exploited the Hard Hat Riot. Working class union men started to resent leftist anti-war college students due to their negative stance on veterans. The Hard Hats were motivated by a simplistic patriotism for veterans, since many of them had family in the armed forces.
Republicans saw an opportunity to exploit that cultural difference, and began to pretend to care about unions while shitting on the new left to sway the more conservative unions to switching.
Democrats enabled this shift by being neoliberal corporatists with a pinch of welfare. Corporate lobby money is too good to resist for them.
The new flavor is to appeal to racist protectionism and the conservative culture war to win over conservative unions.
60% of Teamster membership voted for Trump in the last election, making them the most susceptible to being tempted and destroyed by republicans in sheep’s clothing. O’Brien is only too willing to facilitate that destruction, and ultimately will dance to whatever tune will keep him elected, which in this case is appealing to the conservative values of 60% of his base. Slugs voting for Salt.
they’re feckless, but honestly: who has a solution to this problem? It’s gish governance - they trot out a new, more horrible, more inconceivable lie every day so there’s never a pushback on the madness because every day is a new emergency.
sure, if we had checks and balances this could be fought, but the gop is literally bought and sold.