Opportunity Missed: How The Tea Party Beat Big Labor To The Punch

Big Labor has once again missed a major opportunity to further its cause. While Rahm Emmanuel's "Never let a crisis go to waste" quote made most of us cringe, there is a grain of truth to be found in his statement.

With the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression ravaging our country coupled with high unemployment and corporations laying off employees and gutting their benefits, there is an unrivaled amount of anger in the American population. Who would channel this anger towards corporate greed and lukewarm politicians?

Not the Labor Movement.

As we have all seen over the past year, this populist anger has been hijacked by the tea party, and used for the political gain of it's mainstream political leaders(Dick Armey, anyone?). Instead of seeing labor unions mobilize their members at town halls, and in the halls of Congress, we've seen the populist high ground purposely misdirected into no man's land by the extreme fringes of the right wing.

How did this happen?

I am in the crowd that believes that spending money on PACs is a complete waste of resources. If the labor movement were more involved with actually mobilizing its membership and the working public to take action instead of relying on lobbyists in failed attempts to enact political change, it might have been able to direct this anger in the right direction: the corporate plutocracy that enslaves the working class.

We have to do better.